Status Updates From Nền dân trị Mỹ

Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans.
T marvels how Americans don't face the classism of aristocracy (frequent sale of inherited land & assumption of new professions keeps ppl from amassing inordinate wealth over others) yet also don't succumb to despotic governance & illiberty w/o aristocratic powers to oppose such.
"Their circumstances, origin, intelligence & morals establish & maintain their freedom."-54, parap

Origin of the Anglo-Americans.
Tocqueville sees the founding colonies of the US as independent political regions that benefitted from notions of democracy coming from England, notions of independence and laws coming from novel ("Enlightment" in modern parlance) ideas, and shared Christian belief & practice (while admitting some sects were hostile to others).
"Liberty regards religion as its companion..." -p. 44

Exterior Form of N.A.
"The famous republics of antiquity never gave examples of more unshaken courage, more haughty spirit, or more intractable love of independence than were hidden in former times among the wild forests of the New World. The Europeans produced no great impression when they landed upon the shores of North America... What influence could they possess over such men as I have described?" - p. 23

Author's Introduction.

"Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people." - p. 3

Critics note T, despite floating the MS river to N.O., seems never to have visited a plantation to see chattel slavery. I'll be interested to see how he describes the potential for African-Americans later.

This is reading for work!

In "Author's Introduction":
"Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people....It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us....It seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, ancient, most permanent tendency in human history." Paraphrase, p. 3

Tocqueville's critiques "provide a permanent and it must be said a fruitful and useful counter-current to the natural tendencies of an egalitarian society in which the principle of vox populi vox dei must always be in some risk of overstepping its proper bounds in the realm of politics and economics to invade the realms of our private tastes, our religious convictions, and our hopes for human progress."-p.xlvi, Intro

T thought Americans would not be [future] revolutionaries. "Revolutions may take place either to reduce the inequalities of wealth, power and social status between the lower classes and the ruling class or else to reinforce those inequalities and make them harder to remove.... The first is the classic example of a populist uprising, the latter and oligarchical coup to forestall any such uprising." -p.xliii, Intro

"The three large themes that might be extracted from the second volume of the Democracy are obvious enough. The first is the quality of intellectual and cultural life in an egalitarian society; the second the stability or proneness to revolutionary upheaval of such societies; and the third, T's final and most distinctive thoughts on democratic despotism, or what one might term quiet totalitarianism." -p.xli, Intro

"...between the first and second volumes, there is something of a transition from the fear that each individual will find himself impotent in face of a spontaneous consensus and the fear that a popular leader might arise who uses the overwhelming support of the masses at his back to govern like a despot even if he observes the constitutional properties." -p.xxxi, Alan Ryan's Intro

"To the extent that a one sentence summary of so complex a work makes any sense at all, we may borrow from Tocqueville: a tendency to equality of condition is operating in the world, one so irresistible that we must ascribe it to divine influence; we can see what this process entails for America, where it has gone further than anywhere else, and we must ask what it means for Europe." -p. xxxi, Alan Ryan's Intro

Modern readers should remember 3 subtle things about Tocqueville's journey. 1) How very thoroughly T saw North America through French eyes, not English.... 2) T's picture of the character of the Americans is colored by his sense of the contrast b/w the English national character and the French.... 3) T's interest in the half-castes he encountered in the near mid-West and on the Canadian border. -paraphrase, "Intro"

"It was impossible for a Frenchman of any political stripe. Not to wonder whether a republic on the scale of a modern nation-state could be sustained, whether there was something about the Protestant origins of the New England colonists that made them peculiarly apt for Democratic citizenship, and thus not to wonder whether America was the place where French aspirations might be fulfilled." -p.xxii, Alan Ryan's Intro