About Alexis de Tocqueville

From Shepherd of the Hills Gazette:

Before he died in 2016, the historian Ralph Raico—an expert on the history of classical liberalism—donated his personal notes and library to the Mises Institute. Archivists later found among his notes a lengthy essay (or monograph) on the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville.

It is unclear exactly what purpose this monograph was originally intended to serve, but the Mises Institute published the essay as Alexis de Tocqueville in 2017. This short and easy-to-read book has yet to receive the attention it deserves, but in our age of moral panics over both race and disease, Twitter “cancel culture,” and bureaucrats ruling by decree, we can still learn a lot from Tocqueville’s work. Specifically, Tocqueville’s warnings about the dangers posed by the American tendency toward the “tyranny of the majority” are still relevant.

Tocqueville, of course, is remembered today in part because of his book Democracy in America, in which he sought to describe the American “national character”—to the extent it exists. But Tocqueville also remains important because he was a leading figure in French classical liberalism (more accurately called simply “liberalism”), thus placing him in the company of liberal giants like Frederic Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Benajmin Constant. Tocqueville’s application of European liberal ideals to the United States makes him difficult to ignore for anyone seeking to understand how liberalism ought to be understood in the American context today. Tocqueville’s works weren’t just a neutral assessment of American (and French) society. They were designed to investigate how political liberty could be understood and preserved. (Read more.)

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