Politics
1805 to 1859, France
Democracy, equality, and the new dangers to liberty.
Start learning Alexis →Tocqueville’s founding insight: that the relentless, centuries-long advance of equality of conditions is the master fact of modern history - a providential force reshaping every part of life, which we can neither stop n…
Tocqueville’s most famous warning: that in a democracy the gravest threat to liberty is not a tyrant but the majority itself - its unlimited legal power and, more insidiously, the crushing weight of its opinion, which c…
Tocqueville’s great discovery in America: that the secret of free, vigorous democracy is the endless web of voluntary associations and local self-government through which equal citizens join to act together - the school…
Tocqueville’s darkest and most prophetic warning: that democratic equality breeds a new kind of solitude he named individualism , and that from it can grow a new kind of tyranny - mild, benevolent, and total - in which…
Tocqueville’s last great work turned from America to the French Revolution, and to the deepest tension in his thought: that a people may passionately love equality while caring little for liberty - and that the Revoluti…
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