Democracy In America Summary

In 1831 French sociologist and political theorist Alexis De Tocqueville and a lawyer he befriended named Gustave de Beaumont, spent nine months traveling around America studying its prisons and came back with a full report on the cultural, political and psychological life in America. While Beaumont wrote about the penitentiary system, Tocqueville focused more in the cultural and political life in America. He wrote two essays and published them in a book called Democracy in America. He discussed the possible threats to democracy and the possible dangers of democracy. He believed that religion and equality were the greatest ideas and they were the most advanced in the United States and that's why democracy worked so well in America. Tocqueville

“Religion itself dominates less a revealed doctrine than a commonly held opinion. I do, therefore, realize that, among Americans, political laws are such that the majority exercises sovereign power over society” (Page 501, Chapter 2, Democracy in America, Tocqueville). In this quote Tocqueville explains how Americans try to find answers to their everyday lives and challenges they encounter in religion. They need something to rely on when everything in their lives turns out wrong, and religion is usually their

His definition of individualism was that people are happiest when they ignore the outside world and they stay in their bubble of friends, family and domestic life. He compares egoism to individualism saying that: “Egoism is a preversity as old as the world and is scarcely peculiar to one form of society more than another. Individualism is democratic origin and threatens to grow as conditions become equal” (Page 588, Chapter 2, Democracy in America, Tocqueville). He is saying that egoism is only a few steps away from individualism and that a democracy causes men to focus more on themselves since everyone is already equal socially they want to be different within