From The U.s. "democracy" To The French Revolution

This dissertation attempts to explore the issue of democracy dilemma by examining Alexis de Tocqueville's works on American democracy and French revolution. To Tocqueville, democracy is too irreversible a trend to resist, but democracy doesn't necessarily lead to freedom. On the contrary, it also faces certain risks, and the worst of which is despotism. In order to remind the people of his own country and elsewhere what they should do to avoid tyranny and degeneracy while retaining democracy, Tocqueville painted vividly a Jekyll-Hyde portrait of democracy. Today, Tocqueville has been seen as a great prophet of democratic despotism, and some of his ideas have been widely accepted and experimented in many parts of the world.The dissertation is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter I traces Tocqueville's family and educational backgrounds that had a significant impact on the rest of his life. Tocqueville's first important work, Democracy in America, is analyzed in the following two chapters. Chapter II looks into the democracy experiment in America. According to Tocqueville, environment, laws and moeurs are all what make American Democracy work. But among the three laws contribute more to the maintenance of American democracy than the physical circumstances of the country, whereas moeurs contribute even more than the laws. Chapter III discusses the ideal democracy, both its advantages and defects. Tocqueville believes that the most dangerous risk of democracy is democratic despotism, being expressed in the forms of the despotism of majority, administrative despotism, military despotism and gentle tutorial despotism. Actually people would have to choose between despotism with equality and freedom with equality. According to him the only antidote to despotism is freedom: the freedom of a citizen as well as the freedom of an individual. Chapter IV & V deal with Tocqueville's other two important works, namely Souvenir & The Old Regime and French Revolution. In Souvenir, which is examined in Chapter IV, Tocqueville shows that entrenched in an endless revolution, the democracy in French encountered much more difficulties than the democracy in America. Chapter V focuses on FrenchRevolution-------the origin of democracy in French. Tocqueville argues that from thevery beginning the French people pursued equality at the price of freedom which, instead of bring them the true liberal democracy, leaded the country into the chaos of despotism and revolution. Chapter VI summarizes the fate of both Tocqueville as a...