Alexis De Tocqueville Contributions to Sociology

Alexis de Tocqueville is most known for his views on democracy in America, and his work as a political scientist gained him a renowned reputation in France, but few realize his observations of America aided in a sociological perspective of nations suffering under tyranny and the effects of such.

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family in Paris, France- recently rocked by France’s revolutionary upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during the Reign of Terror. After attending college in Metz, Tocqueville studied law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Versailles, where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont. The July Revolution of 1830 that put the citizen king Louis-Philippe of Orléans on the throne was a revolutionary point for Tocqueville. It deepened his conviction that France was moving quickly toward complete social equality. Breaking with the older liberal generation, he no longer compared France with the English constitutional monarchy but compared it with democratic America. Of more personal concern, despite his oath of loyalty to the new monarch, his position had become precarious because of his family ties with the ousted Bourbon king (Drescher) He and Beaumont, seeking to escape from their uncomfortable political situation, asked for and received official permission to study the uncontentious problem of prison reforms in America. They also hoped to return with knowledge of a society that would mark them as especially fit to help mold France’s political future (Drescher)

The travelers returned to France in 1832. They quickly published their report, “On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France,” written largely by Beaumont. Tocqueville set to work on a broader analysis of American culture and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.” As “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era, and he thought that the United States offered the most advanced example of equality in action. He admired American individualism but warned that a society of individuals can easily become atomized and unexpectedly uniform when “every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd.” He felt that a society of individuals lacked the intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to arbitrate relations with the state. The result could be a democratic “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville's relevance to sociology derives from at least three features of his thinking: his enormous interest in social observation in France, in Britain, in Algeria, and in America; his historical approach to understanding society -- the importance of placing contemporary changes into a historical context; and his causal and comparative imagination; his desire to discover the causes of some of the patterns and differences he discerned in comparable societies Tocqueville’s works shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism and equality, and were rediscovered in the 20th century as sociologists debated the causes and cures of tyranny. “Democracy in America” remains widely read and even more widely quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians and anyone seeking to understand the American character. But in the end, it is not a mistake to conclude that Tocqueville brought an important set of ideas to contemporary sociology- the effort to create a scientific understanding of the modern world. All the features identified here, a passion for close observation and description, an interest in the discovery of social causes, an imagination that proceeds through comparison and contrast, and a framework of thought that emphasizes the importance of history -are in fact useful intellectual components for contemporary sociology (Little) He was content to observe the diversity of the social phenomena he discovered and to tease out some possible, historically limited causal theories about how these historically specific phenomena might work. Alexis de Tocqueville theories and observations are as relevant today as when he first published them, and sociologists may continue to apply it to understanding society today.