All Posts Tagged With: "Alexis de Tocqueville"

Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect

Paul Rahe argues that American democracy is well down the road to the soft despotism that Tocqueville feared. But the outcome is not inevitable.

24Nov2010 | Ross B. Emmett | 0 comments | Continued

“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”

I took that title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840). Considering what has been happening legislatively (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism. He notes that despotism in a constitutional republic would be [...]

20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”

Considering what has been happening legislatively of late (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism.

2Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 8 comments | Continued

The Shortcomings of Government Charity

Jude Blanchette is a freelance writer living in China. In their book, Myths of Rich and Poor, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm observe, “Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, the pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell.” To be sure, “pessimists” apparently run most [...]

1May2007 | Jude Blanchette | 4 comments | Continued

North Carolina’s Educational Wall of Separation

In a little-seen corridor of the Department of Administration in Raleigh, North Carolina, near the state ethics board and just around the corner from the Office of Historically Underutilized Businesses (no joking), there is an office that represents a unique turn in state law. The compact quarters of the Division of Non-Public Education (DNPE) are [...]

1Jul2005 | Hal Young | 0 comments | Continued

Bad Is Not Good

Youthful exponents of the freedom philosophy sometimes believe that things will get better politically only if they first get worse. As statism brings its inevitable hardships, people will correctly identify the causes of their adversity and demand a rollback of government power. The Russian Revolution, which grew out of a miserable war, seems to support [...]

1Mar2005 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Rome and America: The Ideology of Decline

Writing in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the United States’ commercial success to American merchants’ willingness to face uncertainty and danger. Europeans, he said, wait for good weather and return to port if the ship is damaged; the American “departs while the tempest still roars . . .  while on the go, he repairs his [...]

1May2004 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Alleviating the Organ Shortage

If Tocqueville were touring America today, he would surely cite a non-profit group known as LifeSharers as a superlative example of this penchant to solve problems through voluntary initiative. This group deserves special attention, and your support, because it deals with something as important as life itself. Moreover, it must overcome both law and conventional sentiments to do its good work.

1Dec2003 | Lawrence W. Reed | 3 comments | Continued

Homeland Security Circa AD 285

Alexis de Tocqueville said that nothing is so threatening to individual liberty as extended war. Wars add to the relative power of the central government, and this change in the balance of power is accompanied by the decline of personal freedom. “A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat [...]

1Apr2003 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 3 comments | Continued

Designing Dependence

Government now permeates American life, shaping and determining in countless ways the choices available to us. As Tocqueville feared, the U.S. government has largely succeeded in its efforts to spare us “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” Through Social Security, Medicare, public education, and the rest, the sphere of autonomous [...]

1May2002 | Charlotte A. Twight | 1 comment | Continued

Faith of Our Fathers edited by Mary Sennholz

The Foundation for Economic Education • 1997 • 398 pages • $19.95 paperback Norman S. Ream is a retired minister living in Estes Park, Colorado. Although it cannot be established that Alexis de Tocqueville actually wrote his much quoted words to the effect that “America is great because America is good,” that conclusion seems more [...]

1Oct1997 | Norman S. Ream | 0 comments | Continued

Alexis de Tocqueville: How People Gain Liberty and Lose It

Alexis de Tocqueville was a gentleman-scholar who emerged as one of the world’s great prophets. More than a century and a half ago, when most people were ruled by kings, he declared that the future belonged to democracy. He explained what was needed for democracy to work and how it could help protect human liberty. At the same time, he warned that a welfare state could seduce people into servitude. He saw why socialism must lead to slavery.

1Jul1996 | Jim Powell | 0 comments | Continued

DespotismDemocratic Nations

In his foreword to the 1956 paperbacked edition of The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press) Friedrich A. Hayek quotes briefly from Democracy in America, Part II, Book IV, Chapter VI, and suggests that the chapter be read “in order to realize with what acute insight De Tocqueville was able to foresee [in 1835] [...]

1Jun1956 | Alexis De Tocqueville | 0 comments | Continued

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