Tocqueville's Political Participation, Ideological Research

In the 19^th century Europe was a mixture of democracy and tyranny, freedom and despotism, reform and revolution. According to Tocqueville, with the drastic change of European society, the notion of equality was increasingly accepted by the masses and democracy became the prominent trend of social development. Meanwhile, the feudal aristocracy possessing privileges was gradually fading out of history. Combing the background of Tocqueville's era, this paper expounds his thought of political participation with the purpose of revealing the realistic meaning of this theory in modern society. Due to rapid development of democracy, the awareness of individual independence has been constantly improved, but the blind pursuit of equality has caused almost every person to be weak and atom-like ones. In addition, the flooding of individualism and materialism gradually destroys public virtues and leads individuals farther and farther away from public political life. In this way despotism comes into being. In fact, the main function of political participation lies in effectively preventing the birth of despotism in everyday political life by enhancing the awareness as a citizen and stimulating their spirits of political participation. How can we effectively guarantee the political participation of citizens? In my view, we should cultivate citizens'awareness of participation from aspects of education, religion, law, civic society and so on. To be specific, political education is considered the foundation of cultivating public spirits, and religion helps form the atmosphere of citizens participating political activities, and legal system can provide institutional guarantee for the orderly political participation of citizens. To some extent, civic society can be regarded as the combination of the three aspects above-mentioned, for it can promise citizens'political participation by means of constraining public power. Under the guidance of the principle"correctly-understood interest", political participation is carried out on the basis of balance and harmony between individual interest and public interest. Down-to-up political participation should start with town life and local autonomy and take political association and newspaper establishment as the main form so as to cultivate the public spirit of civic society and to avoid the apparition of new-typed despotism. Tocqueville's thought of political participation focuses on how to effectively carry out political participation in order to avoid despotism in democratic era and to realize political freedom at last. In a word, Tocqueville's thought of political participation mainly refers to guaranteeing political freedom through town autonomy. At last, this paper discusses the important value and realistic enlightenment of this thought, concentrating on the practical significance of thoughts of political situation, religious belief and political freedom in the construction of democracy in contemporary China. Obviously, China is entering the era of democratization, just as Tocqueville said. Moreover, social modernization has to deal with social problems caused by democratization, such as materialism, individualism and breakdown of public morals, all of which urge us to review Tocqueville's thought so as to solve them. We surely can not copy his political thoughts, but at least we can learn some experience from our in-depth study on his thought of political participation and advance more smoothly.