Tocqueville Research On Democratic Thought

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a famous French political thinker in nineteenth century. On the basis of inheriting the western democratic political thought in modern times, and combining with his background of the times, Tocqueville put forward his own democratic thought. The predictability and profundity of Tocqueville's democratic thought have become a hot topic of later scholars. Now,democracy is sweeping the world totally and almost all countries are proud of themselves as democratic countries. However, with the development of modern democracy, a lot of inevitable democracy issues often occur. How to solve these problems properly,to a certain extent,we need to draw lessons from the traditional democratic thought. Since modern times,Tocqueville is a first thinker who had a comprehensive study about democracy, so his democratic thought is became our first selection. He foresees the event that a democratic age will arrive overwhelmingly, but at same time, when seeing the benefits of democracy, he points out the drawbacks of democracy. Tocqueville argues that democracy may threaten the development of freedom in many aspects. According to China's actual situation,we can find a truth that due to the collapse of Chinese feudal dictatorial rule,people are more eager to get democracy and liberty, but it's not necessary that democracy plays a good role in the process of modernization in China. Therefore, some people agree with democracy strongly, while the others react adversely to this opinion. Tocqueville tried to find an essence of democracy, and removed the two extreme evaluations. In order to provide theoretic value and practical value for our democratic and politic construction, this paper tries to restore the real look of Tocqueville's democratic thought by combining his historic background, and take the essence.The introductory part mainly expounds the reasons and significance, objective analysis of the current domestic and international research status about Tocqueville's thought, and illustrates specific writing ideas, writing methods, originality and shortcoming of the paper. Firstly, the first chapter attempts to analyze the background of Tocqueville and his democratic thought. It focuses on the background of Tocqueville's democratic thought, the life of Tocqueville, theoretic sources, and the development of his democratic thought. Secondly, the second chapter discusses the main contents of Tocqueville's democratic thought. The author tries to find out what democracy is in Tocqueville's view, focuses on explaining the relationship between democracy, equality and liberty to find the problems of democracy. In addition,through the description of the relationship between democracy and democratic revolution, it finally concludes that democracy is the inevitable trend of history.Thirdly, the third chapter mainly makes comments on Tocqueville's democratic thought. We can get a more accurate understanding of Tocqueville's democratic thought by comparing Mill and Tocqueville's democratic thought, Marx and Tocqueville's democratic thought. Furthermore, through a historic analysis of Tocqueville's democratic thought,it finds the limitations, and digs out the contemporary value of Tocqueville's democratic thought.