Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat, born just after the Revolution had guillotined half his family, who sailed to the United States in 1831 on the official errand of studying its prisons. He came back with the greatest book ever written about democracy. Democracy in America treats the levelling of ranks not as a policy to be argued for or against but as a providential fact – a tide eight centuries in the rising, which no throne and no argument would turn back. The only question left was whether equality would be lived in freedom or in servitude.

What kept America free, he thought, was not its Constitution on paper but its habits. In the New England township, ordinary men governed themselves in matters they could see and touch, and so learned liberty the way one learns a language – by using it. Americans formed associations for everything, and every voluntary society was a small school of self-rule. Religion he called the first of their political institutions, because it set limits the majority did not think to cross and gave men a horizon above the counting-house.

Then the two warnings that made him a prophet. A democracy can crush the individual under the tyranny of the majority – not with dungeons but with the unbearable weight of everyone agreeing. And worse, and quieter, it can sink into a soft despotism: an immense tutelary power, mild and provident, that watches over its citizens the way a parent watches over children who are never allowed to grow up. It does not tyrannise; it enervates, softening the will until a nation becomes a flock of timid and industrious animals with the government for its shepherd. Men surrender their freedom not to a monster but to a nursemaid. It is the most chilling page in political thought, and it was written in 1840 about no country in particular.

Late in life, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, he dissected the catastrophe that had ended his family's world and found a bitter law: revolutions break out not when misery is deepest but when a long oppression has begun to lift and hope runs ahead of reform.