Soft tyranny is an idea first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1835 work titled Democracy in America. In effect, soft tyranny occurs whenever the social conditions of a particular community hinder any prospect of hope among its members. For Tocqueville, hope is the driving force behind all democratic institutions. As such, whenever this all-encompassing hope is taken away from the people, liberal democracy fails. Examples of this failure can be seen in the Weimar Republic of Germany during the 1930s or in the French Third Republic around 1940. Hope for a better future effectively died in both of the aforementioned situations. As a result, fascist regimes were established to fill the void left by the departure of hope.
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Famous quotes containing the words soft and/or tyranny:
“Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
“This teaching is not practical in the sense in which the New Testament is. It is not always sound sense in practice. The Brahman never proposes courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out. His active faculties are paralyzed by the idea of caste, of impassable limits of destiny and the tyranny of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)