American democracy that Tocqueville discusses Assignment | Online Homework Help
ajority, individualism, excessive love of material well-being) and why this is a danger particular to democratic societies, as opposed to aristocracies. What is one aspect of American institutions that he sees as helping to mitigate the danger you discuss (e.g. religion, associations, newspapers). Conclude by briefly reflecting upon whether you think that this feature of American democracy helping to mitigate a danger to democracy still plays the role in America society that Tocqueville observed in 1831. Draw on Putnam’s analysis of family, schooling, or community in answering this last question.
The two books that are used are Putnam’s Our Kids and Alexis Tocqueville Democracy in America. This is for an English class however. I have both books and can upload pdfs of specific pages that may be helpful. Or I can also gift you the books on amazon if that is possible for you!
My professor said the page numbers for these respectively
for democracy dangers it tends towards:
Majority tyranny : (239-243)
Individualism:(482-486)
Excessive love of material well-being:
(278-279, 419,422, 516-524)
and for what mitigates against these dangers in the U.S.
Associations—civil,
political, and otherwise: (488-500, 515, 180-6)
Religion ::::(278-9, 419, 422, 517-24)
Admin. decentral’n
“Local freedoms” (250-1, 486-8)
See also 82-92.
Also, newspapers (493-5, 181-2)and spirit of the lawyer (251-7)
DEMOCRACY
IN AMERICAa
a. The drafts contain the following note, probably meant to announce the publication
of the book:
Explanatory note about my position and the principal ideas that form the heart of
the work./
In 1831, Messrs. Beaumont and Tocqueville received a mission from the French
government for the purpose of going to the United States to study the penitentiary
system there. They remained nearly one year in the United States. After returning in
1832, they published a work entitled: Of the Penitentiary System in the United States
and Its Application to France. Since then, this work has been translated in its entirety
in the United States and in Germany; a portion has been translated in England. The
French Academy believed that its authors should be awarded the annual grand prize
established for whoever publishes the most useful book.
M. de Tocqueville, one of the authors of the book mentioned above, is about to
publish this coming October a work in two volumes that also has America as the
subject. This book will be entitled Of the Dominion of Democracy in America.
The fact that most struck the author during his stay in the United States was the
fact of equality of conditions. He believed that this primary fact had exercised and
still exercised a prodigious influence on the laws, habits, mores of the Americans and
dominated, so to speak, civil and political society in the United States. This struck
him even more because this same fact of equality of conditions is constantly developing
among all the peoples of Europe in a progressive manner.
So M. de Tocqueville thought that if someone could succeed in specifying in a
very plain and very clear fashion what type of influence this fact, established in America
and half-established in Europe, really exercised on society, what necessary aspect
it gave to laws, what secret instincts to peoples, what cast it imparted to ideas and
mores, a work not only interesting, but also useful would be written; a work, though
serious in form, would nonetheless reach the minds of the greatest number of readers,
because it would in some place necessarily touch on the political passions of the period
and all the material interests that the political passions more or less express.
The result of these reflections has been the work that M. de Tocqueville is about
to publish today and for which he gathered an enormous quantity of materials during
his stay in America (YTC, CVh, 3, pp. 100–101, 99).
