Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy In America

Alexis De Tocqueville wrote one of the most relevant texts on modern democratic nations through his analysis of the United States of America, recorded in his book “Democracy in America”. The relevancy in his social and political theory lies in the fact that his analysis of the democratic state, the conditions it arises in and its consequential effects can be seen in political trends that followed after his time and can be observed even today. He certainly was able to accurately predict America’s future as a superpower in the conclusion of the first volume, wherein he states, “They (Americans) were born to rule the sea as the Romans were born to conquer the world.” . However, despite the nature of his reputable political theory, many have justifiably

His disdain for the practice of slavery is quite evident in his chapter “Future Conditions of Three Races” , where he states that slavery “violates every human right” and is attacked by “Christianity as unjust”. His views on slavery however are not only driven by his Christian faith but also his political and economical observation on the fact that the southern states where slavery was not yet abolished, the economy was worse off; that the practice of slavery makes the white man more lazy, because such a man feels he does not need to do the work that can be reserved for a people that “inherently” have a lower social standing, a.k.a blacks. It is clear then that he condemns at least the most explicit expression of racial inequality that existed. More than that, he states that the way that the Americas were colonized by the Spaniards, i.e. on the expense of the blood of the Native Americans, was through “unparalleled atrocities that branded them with indelible shame” . It can be concluded then that Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ does at least display a feeble attempt to state the grievous racial crimes of the American colonisers as they were;

Tocqueville would not argue that different races were biologically different and hence their biological makeup determined their position in society, or that there was in fact an Aryan master race as Gobineau would have argued. He believed that social constructivism led to the positions of different races in the then acknowledged racial hierarchy, that in fact if an external race came to subdue the other, it is automatically deemed superior. His constructivism view on race however, does not rule him out as a racist. His sympathetic views on racism only exist to the extent to which he could claim that “The Indian is already superior to his barbarous parent, but he is still far below his white neighbor.” Despite the fact that he does not believe in an inherent biological reason that forms racial hierarchies, he is deterministic in ways as he suggests that social factors such as an “inequality of intelligence” between different races lead to the formation of socio-economic classes embedded in racial differences. When it comes to the native Indians, he especially shows some hypocritical views by displaying the explicitly barbaric ways of the Spanish inquisition as atrocious, however, at the same time conceiving of the modern, calculating and cruel method of British inquisition of lands through forced