Alexis de Tocqueville set out to explain what kind of society replaces an aristocracy. His answer was that modern society is defined not by its form of government but by equality of condition — a social state in which inherited rank has lost its authority and people regard one another as fundamentally alike. Everything he thought important followed from that single fact, including the distinctive freedoms of democratic life and its distinctive pathologies.
Raymond Aron placed him beside Montesquieu, Comte and Marx as a founder of sociological thinking, and the description is fair. Tocqueville reasoned comparatively, treated political institutions as expressions of social structure, and produced two concepts — the tyranny of the majority and the art of association — that remain in working use in political sociology.
Life and intellectual formation
Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 into a Norman aristocratic family that the Revolution had nearly destroyed; his parents were imprisoned during the Terror and a great-grandfather was guillotined. He trained in law and served as a junior magistrate, and this inheritance shaped his standpoint: an aristocrat by birth who judged the passing of aristocracy to be irreversible and who therefore asked not how to prevent equality but how to keep it compatible with liberty.
In 1831 he travelled to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont on an official commission to study prisons, and used the nine months to observe American society at large. De la démocratie en Amérique appeared in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840, the first largely political and institutional, the second concerned with manners, opinion, religion and character. He then entered French politics, sat in the Chamber of Deputies, served briefly as foreign minister in 1849, withdrew after Louis Napoleon's coup, and turned to the historical enquiry published in 1856 as L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. He died in 1859.
Equality of condition and the democratic social state
Tocqueville used the word democracy to name a type of society, not only a method of choosing rulers. Where aristocracy rests on fixed, hereditary positions linked by chains of obligation, the democratic social state levels those distinctions; men are no longer bound to one another and no longer accept that anyone is intrinsically their better. Equality is therefore a self-reinforcing tendency that erodes every intermediate authority standing between the individual and the mass.
The consequences he traced are social and psychological rather than merely constitutional. Equality produces restlessness and a never-satisfied appetite for small material improvements, and makes people intensely sensitive to the differences that remain between them. It weakens deference to tradition and to learned authority, so that individuals look for guidance to the opinion of people like themselves. And because each person's judgement carries no more weight than any other's, the aggregate of judgements acquires enormous moral force.
The tyranny of the majority
This is Tocqueville's most cited idea and the most frequently misunderstood. He was not principally worried about a legislative majority passing oppressive laws, though he noted the possibility. His deeper concern was with the majority as a moral power: in a society of equals, the belief that the greater number must be right becomes almost irresistible, and dissent is disciplined not by punishment but by isolation. He knew no country, he argued, with less genuine independence of mind than America, because a public opinion that no one formally enforces encircles thought and makes unpopular views socially unspeakable.
The result is a levelling, homogenising pressure on culture and belief: where aristocracy oppressed bodies, democratic conformism works on minds. Tocqueville identified restraints — federalism and local government, the independent legal profession and the jury, an unforced religion, a free press — but treated none as guaranteed.
Individualism and the tutelary state
Tocqueville gave individualism a specific and unflattering meaning. It is not selfishness, a vice of all ages, but a considered withdrawal: the democratic citizen retreats into the circle of family and friends, leaves the wider society to itself, and comes to believe his destiny is entirely in his own hands. Because equality dissolves the ties of class and locality that once enmeshed people, individualism is a structural product of the democratic condition rather than a moral failing.
Its political danger is that isolated individuals are weak. Having no associational life through which to act together, they turn to the central administration to supply what they can no longer supply themselves, and the state grows by responding. Tocqueville's most prescient passage describes a soft or tutelary despotism: an immense, orderly, provident and mild power that manages the details of life, keeps citizens in perpetual childhood, and is accepted because it is chosen by the very people it enfeebles. This is not the tyranny of a usurper but administrative centralisation legitimated by consent, and he thought it the characteristic modern threat to liberty.
The art of association
His remedy made him the founding figure of civil-society theory. Americans, he observed, formed associations for everything — schools, churches, hospitals, roads, temperance, the diffusion of books — and did so instinctively, forming a committee where a Frenchman would petition the government. Local self-government meant that ordinary people routinely handled public business and thereby learned to handle it.
Association works in two ways. Instrumentally, an organised body of citizens can do what an individual cannot and can resist both majority opinion and state encroachment; the multiplication of such bodies restores the intermediate powers that aristocracy had provided. Educatively — and this mattered more to him — participation transforms the participants. Serving on a township committee teaches that private interest is bound up with the interest of others, converting narrow self-regard into what he called self-interest rightly understood. Associations are in this sense the free schools of democracy.
Revolution and rising expectations
The Old Regime and the Revolution poses a puzzle. The Revolution broke out in the most prosperous part of France, at a time when royal administration had been improving, feudal burdens had been reduced and the economy was expanding. Tocqueville argued that this was not a paradox but the explanation: the Revolution came not from the deepest misery but from improvement that raised expectations faster than it satisfied them. Grievances become intolerable precisely as they become remediable, and the abolition of some abuses makes the remainder look intolerable rather than natural.
His second argument is that the Revolution did not so much destroy the old order as complete it, since centralisation was already the work of the monarchy; the revolutionaries inherited and perfected an administrative machine while eliminating the aristocratic bodies that had obstructed it. The account anticipates later theories of relative deprivation, and gives sociology one of its clearest statements of continuity across revolutionary rupture.
Criticisms
Tocqueville's method is impressionistic by modern standards: he generalised boldly from limited and unsystematically gathered observation, and his America is in places a device for arguing about France. He wrote about a society of small proprietors on the eve of industrial capitalism, and gave little attention to class conflict or the concentration of economic power — where Marx saw exploitation Tocqueville saw levelling. His treatment of slavery and of the destruction of Native American societies is critical but marginal to a central thesis of equality that sits awkwardly beside those facts. Feminist readers note that the associational life he admired was male. And his fear of majority conformism has been judged exaggerated relative to the actual power of organised minorities.
Legacy
The associational argument has had the longest life. It underlies the pluralist tradition in political science, the study of intermediate groups as a barrier to totalitarianism, and above all the social capital literature: Robert Putnam's work on Italian regions and on American civic decline in Bowling Alone is explicitly Tocquevillean in framing participation as the source of trust and effective government. The tutelary-state warning informs critiques of welfare bureaucracy, and his revolution thesis feeds into relative-deprivation theories of collective action. For Indian political sociology the framework travels well: the vitality of voluntary organisations, the pressures of majoritarian opinion on dissent, and the tension between administrative centralisation and local self-government are all recognisable questions.
For the UPSC answer
Tocqueville is best deployed in Politics and Society questions on civil society, democracy and collective action. Open by defining democracy as he did — a social state of equality of condition, not merely a form of government — because that distinction is what separates his analysis from ordinary political science. Pair the two halves of his argument: the pathologies of equality, meaning majority conformism, individualism and the soft tutelary state, against the remedy of voluntary association and local self-government as the school of citizenship. In questions on revolution, cite the rising-expectations argument from The Old Regime alongside relative deprivation, noting that revolutions follow improvement rather than the worst misery. Close with a comparison to Marx — levelling and liberty against exploitation and class — and with the line of descent to Putnam's social capital, which shows the concept still doing work.
References & further reading
- Tocqueville, A. de (2000 [1835–1840]). Democracy in America, trans. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Tocqueville, A. de (1955 [1856]). The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. S. Gilbert. New York: Doubleday.
- Aron, R. (1968). Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Volume One. New York: Basic Books.
- Elster, J. (2009). Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Boesche, R. (1987). The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.