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Unprophetic Tocqueville: How Democracy in America Got the Modern World Completely Wrong.

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...

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Published in:Independent Review Vol. 12; no. 2; pp. 165 - 179
Main Author: Choi, Daniel
Format: Article
Published: Independent Institute Fall 2007
Subjects:
De la démocratie en Amérique [Treatise]: Tocqueville, Alexis de
Democracy
Political science
United States
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Unprophetic Tocqueville: How Democracy in America Got the Modern World Completely Wrong.
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        De la démocratie en Amérique [Treatise]: Tocqueville, Alexis de
        Democracy
        Political science
        United States
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          United States
          De la démocratie en Amérique [Treatise]: Tocqueville, Alexis de
          Democracy
          Political science
      keyword: Tocqueville, Alexis de -- Work -- De la démocratie en Amérique
      ab: 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.
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