Democracy in America - Importance

Importance

Democracy in America was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the other in 1840. It was immediately popular in both Europe and the United States, while also having a profound impact on the French population. By the twentieth century, it had become a classic work of political science, social science, and history. It is a commonly assigned reading for undergraduates of American universities majoring in the political or social sciences, and part of the introductory political theory syllabus at Cambridge, Oxford and other institutions. In the introduction to his translation of the book, Harvey C. Mansfield calls it "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.

Tocqueville's work is often acclaimed for making a number of astute predictions. He anticipates the potential acrimony over the abolition of slavery that would tear apart the United States and lead to the American Civil War as well as the eventual superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, which exploded after World War II and spawned the Cold War. Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy, Tocqueville, some scholars have argued, also correctly predicted that an industrial aristocracy would rise from the ownership of labor. He warned that '...friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times', observing that the route of industry was the gate by which a new found wealthy class might potentially dominate. (However, Tocqueville believed that an industrial aristocracy would differ from the formal aristocracy of the past.) What's more, he foresaw the alienation and isolation that many have come to experience in modern life. On the other hand, Tocqueville proved shortsighted in noting that a democracy's equality of conditions stifles literary development. In spending several chapters lamenting the state of the arts in America he fails to envision the literary Renaissance that would shortly arrive in the form of such major writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. And in dismissing the country's interest in science as limited to pedestrian applications for streamlining the production of material goods he failed to imagine America's burgeoning appetite for pure scientific research and discovery.

According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals. Democracy in America predicted the violence of party spirit and the judgment of the wise subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant.