| Sumario: | Alexis de Tocqueville has been hailed as a thinker of almost superhuman prescience, but much of what he said regarding the future of modern civilization in Democracy in America involved a critical lack of understanding of industrialization and its consequences. De Tocqueville's concept of a modern democracy took as a given the concrete social and economic features of early nineteenth-century democratic societies, including the basic level of education, the unsophisticated technology, and the lack of extensive occupational specialization. Indeed, his notion of democracy was based on a permanent forestalling of modern industrialization and its social consequences. He failed to see that the movement of labor away from agriculture—as was happening in England at the time he was writing—was actually paving the way for the modern industrial economy. The writer considers possible reasons why de Tocqueville's present-day admirers have misunderstood this aspect of his work.
|
|---|