Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s most famous warning: that in a democracy the gravest threat to liberty is not a tyrant but the <em>majority itself</em> - its unlimited legal power and, more insidiously, the crushing weight of its opinion, which can enslave the mind while leaving the body free.
We are used to thinking of tyranny as the work of a tyrant - a single cruel ruler, or a narrow class, oppressing the people. Tocqueville’s most famous and unsettling insight is that democracy creates a new kind of tyranny, one without a tyrant: the tyranny of the majority. In a democracy, the majority rules; and Tocqueville saw that a majority can oppress the minority and the individual as surely as any despot - indeed, in some ways more surely, because its power seems legitimate, carries the authority of “the people,” and faces no obvious external check.
The danger, he argued, is built into the democratic principle itself. Democracy rests on the idea that the will of the majority should govern. But what limits the majority? In an aristocracy or monarchy there were rival powers - nobles, churches, ancient rights, the king himself - that could resist whoever held authority. In a democracy, the majority claims to be the people, to speak with the people’s voice, and so to be entitled to do as it likes. And a power that believes itself entitled to do as it likes, that recognises nothing above it, is on the road to tyranny - whether that power is one man or many. Tocqueville’s warning is that the very thing that makes democracy legitimate - the rule of the majority - is also the thing that, unchecked, can make it oppressive.
Tocqueville distinguished two forms of majority tyranny, and the second - subtler, deeper, and more disturbing - is what makes his analysis immortal. The first form is the tyranny of majority power: the danger that an unchecked legislative majority will pass laws oppressing the minority, trampling rights, abusing its legal omnipotence. This is real, and Tocqueville treats it. But the second form is the tyranny of majority opinion - and here he saw something genuinely new in the history of oppression.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Tocqueville’s idea of the “tyranny of the majority.” Explain in your own words its two forms - the unlimited power of the majority and the crushing weight of its opinion - and why he thought the second was the more insidious threat to liberty.
Leads to John Stuart Mill.
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