Democracy In America

Democracy in America

By: Alexis De Tocqueville

Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville is a book about how the American States and the federal government would grow politically and socially under the umbrella of democracy.

Alexis De Tocqueville sees the United States as a unique entity because of how and why it started as well as its geographical location. Alexis De Tocqueville explains that the foundations of the democratic process in America are completely different from anywhere else on the globe.

The people who came to America were the oppressed and unhappy in England and all were trying to find a place where they could start anew and create a political structure that would facilitate an individual freedom unlike anything that they had previously experienced in Europe.

Alexis De Tocqueville believed that the nature of democracy in the New World rested within the fact that all of the emigrants were basically from the same social strata, resulting in the first new country where there was no preliminary basis for an aristocracy. He saw that even the soil of America was opposed to the structure of an aristocracy.

There were also outside influences lending unvoiced support for the creation of this new democracy. Being an ocean apart from its mother country, which at this time did not have the financial reserves to oversee its colonies, let the Americans govern themselves. If they had not had this sovereignty at the beginning America they might have become something completely different than it is today, but that was not the case, so these emigrants now had a fertile place to plant their ideas of a country founded upon the many ideas of the Enlightenment.

Another large influence was the lack of neighbors. America had no worries of guarding and protecting its borders because there was not anyone there who could pose a threat. They could put all of their energies toward the creation of their democracy. This democratic nation was to have no aristocracy and only one major division between its people, the North and the South. De Tocqueville saw two very different attitudes in these regions. The North and the South had conflicting views as to how they were going to advance themselves in the economic and political arenas. But the introduction of slavery into labor was the major conflict