Democracy in America by de Tocqueville Alexis

Author:de Tocqueville, Alexis [de Tocqueville, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

ON REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES; WHAT ARE THEIR CHANCES OF LONGEVITY?

The Union is only an accident.—Republican institutions have more of a future.—The republic is, for the present, the natural state of the Anglo-Americans.—Why.—In order to destroy it, one would have to change all the laws and modify all mores at the same time. Difficulties that the Americans meet with in creating an aristocracy.

The dismemberment of the Union, by introducing war within the states today confederated, and with it permanent armies, dictatorship and taxes, could in the long term compromise the fate of republican institutions there.

One must nevertheless not confuse the future of the republic with that of the Union.

The Union is an accident that will last only as long as circumstances favor it, but a republic seems to me to be the natural state of the Americans; and only the continuous action of contrary causes, acting always in the same direction, could substitute monarchy for it.

The Union exists principally in the law that created it. A single revolution, a change in public opinion can break it apart forever. The republic has more profound roots.

What one understands by republic in the United States is the slow and tranquil action of society on itself. It is a regular state really founded on the enlightened will of the people. It is a conciliating government, in which resolutions ripen for a long time, are discussed slowly and executed only when mature.

Republicans in the United States prize mores, respect beliefs, recognize rights. They profess the opinion that a people ought to be moral, religious, and moderate to the degree it is free. What one calls a republic in the United States is the tranquil reign of the majority. The majority, after it has had the time to recognize itself and to certify its existence, is the common source of powers. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights. The majority recognizes these two barriers, and if it happens to cross them, it is because it has passions, like each man, and because like him, it can do evil while discerning the good.

But we in Europe have made strange discoveries.

A republic, according to some among us, is not the reign of the majority, as has been believed until now, it is the reign of those who are strongly for the majority. It is not the people who direct these sorts of governments, but those who know the greatest good of the people: a happy distinction that permits one to act in the name of nations without consulting them and to claim their recognition while riding roughshod over them. A republican government is, furthermore, the only one in which one must recognize the right to do everything, and which can scorn what men have respected up to the present, from the highest laws of morality to the vulgar rules of common sense.

Until our time, it had been thought that despotism was odious, whatever its forms were.

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