Similarities Between Madison And Tocqueville

Modern society considers majority decision to be just. J.J. Rousseau, James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville provide us with different accounts that show under what circumstance that is true and what are some weaknesses of this approach. For Rousseau the goal of a governing body was to manifest the general will. In Rousseau’s eyes for a government to achieve this, the society must be small and homogenous. Using this framework, Madison could not solve the Federalist issue (how to justify a strong central government in a large pluralistic territory). In his Federalist Papers the primary problem of governing becomes the issue of factions and mitigating their harmful effects on majority decision making in a large republic. This is important to

To him, the exercise of sovereignty itself depended on an adequate determination of the general will. This leads us to the question of the proportion of vote necessary to produce just outcome that discovers the general will. Although, the institutional features of Rousseau’s writing are incomplete and often too trivial, his goal was to convert his theoretical work in a law for the common good. His main focus remains on describing voting rules that will in fact identify the general will as opposed to individual will or its sums. Rousseau goes on to define what the general will is. One of the goals was to solve the problem of the “tyranny of the majority.” Rousseau sought to figure out how it was possible for citizens to be “both free and subject to laws to which they have not consented?” Can they “conform to wills which are not [their] own” but still be free? To Rousseau the answer was to frame the laws so that they reflect the “general will” and not the “will of all.” Only and only then the majority rule would in fact be just and not resolve in majority

Rather he noticed an unlikely consensus between the citizens of the United States who rarely ever saw the laws enacted by the majority as arbitrary or unjustly coercive. Unlike Madison, Tocqueville put institutions on the secondary level of importance. He maintained that political institutions usually reflect the social conditions of a society, thus an institutional change could not recast its direction. In Democracy in America he writes that “[he] is convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of customs of the country” (I,