Democracy in America: Chapter 48 Summary & Analysis

Tocqueville argues that, in a country that has existed for centuries with classes and rank-based distinctions, democracy can only be attained through violent revolution, leaving periodic aftershocks. It seems natural that general equality will make people restless and covetous, and thus that democratic ages should continue to be times of constant transformation: yet he argues that this will not happen.

Inequality is always the root of revolution, Tocqueville argues. The vast majority of democratic societies are made up of the middling sort, neither rich nor poor, sufficient in property and desiring to be richer, but lacking any obvious class to fight in order to take its wealth. They are also aware that a revolution may well cause them to lose their coveted property: there’s far more to lose than to gain. Finally, commerce is averse to revolution, making people independent and practical, desirous of freedom rather than radical change.

In democracies, all people strive to improve their fortune, preferring that to political agitation and dismissing violent political passions in exchange for pettier concerns. There will always be some ambitious men eager to make revolution, but they will be hindered by the attitude of their contemporaries. People in democracies may always be in states of agitation, but they direct their energies toward secondary, not fundamental affairs.

Indeed, Americans tend to view revolutionary or other radical theories with far more suspicion than in Europe. While Americans have the opinions and passions of democracy, Europe still has those of revolution. The only way America could ever undergo a revolution would be as a result of its slavery, that is, its fundamental social inequality. Still, it’s not that democracies are absolutely secure from revolutions, but that democracy helps ward them off. 

While Tocqueville has heard that people in democracies are constantly changing their minds, he never observed that in America, where, indeed, it was difficult to convince the majority otherwise once it had settled on an opinion. The human mind there is never at rest, but it strives after new material goals, not new principles. The intellectual anarchy he witnesses in France is not, he thinks, the natural state of democracy, but rather a result of France’s current period of transition.

Indeed, democracies are suspicious of intellectual superiority, making intellectual revolutions unlikely as well. If Martin Luther had had to convince each independent person, rather than have a ready audience of princes and nobles, he might have struggled far more to transform Europe. It’s an uphill battle to get a democratic people excited about any theory without a direct, material consequence in daily life.

Tocqueville returns to the question of the power of public opinion and the tyranny of the majority, which exerts an undue influence on each individual person’s ability to reason for himself and change his own mind. Stability of opinion is the natural result. In fact, Tocqueville dares (because he’s writing in the wake of a revolution himself) to say that he fears revolution in the future far less than intellectual stagnation, the tendency to be suspicious of every new theory and therefore to fail to strive toward a better society.