Modern Europe: Reason, Identity and Power in Contemporary Europe

Liberalism and Nationalism Alexis de Tocqueville

Friday, 31st May 2010

In 1789, the French Revolution was influenced by three key-notions: Liberty, equality, fraternity and in 1792, the first French Republic was proclaimed. Forty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville examined the democracy in America in comparison to that of France with an eye towards the historical development of each country. His interest in the democracy in America was led by the notion of equality of rights among equality of conditions. In my opinion, it is difficult to compare such different histories: the French Revolution and that of the United States of America. The difference, in respect to de Tocqueville’s thinking, is that the USA was a country born with democracy as its system of government, whereas in France the people had to learn how to manage the change from a aristocratic state to a social democratic state through the exercise of their newly won rights. Alexis de Tocqueville described the perceived equality of conditions as a major advantage for the American state; every citizen held rights and had access to formal education as well as the processes of political power. There existed in 1830s in America a vertical social mobility that did not exist in contemporary France, despite both countries adopting liberal democratic systems of governance. This led de Tocqueville to state “At any time, the servant can become the master and aspires to it.”1 According to the contemporary idea of the Law of Nature, men are not inherently inferior to each other, but rather become inferior through the socioeconomic relationship of subordination. De Tocqueville saw American politics as dominated by the middle class where all the people were roughly equal. He saw that this broad equality held risks for the liberal democratic system in the US. First, although they did hold significant amounts of personal property, most of the