Alexis de Tocqueville on the danger of avoiding revolution
Men will stop thinking
Alexis de Tocqueville was a mostly successful French politician, though he ended his career out of politics and out of favor, but one who was both a political philosopher and a sociologist as well. His most read book today, Democracy in America, was based on nine months he and a friend and political ally spent in America in 1831 and 1832. Written in great part to use the American experience to say something about France, one of its purposes was to reconcile the aristocracy, from which he came, to liberal democracy. His thoughts on revolution appear in the chapter titled “Why great revolutions will become rare.”
He describes his time as one “that has seen the most rapid changes work on the minds of men.”
As I examine the needs and the natural instincts of democratic peoples more closely, I am persuaded that, if equality is ever established in a general and permanent manner in the world, great intellectual and political revolutions will become more difficult and rarer than one supposes.
Because men in democracies always appear excited, uncertain, breathless, ready to change will and place, one fancies that they are suddenly going to abolish their laws, to adopt new beliefs, and to take up new mores. One does not consider that if equality brings men to change, it suggests interests and tastes to them that need stability to be satisfied; it pushes them and at the same time it stops them, it spurs them and attaches them to the earth; it inflames their desires and limits their strength. . . .
Dare I say it in the midst of the ruins that surround me? What I dread most for the generations to come are not revolutions.
If citizens continue to confine themselves more and more narrowly in the circle of small domestic interests, there to become agitated without rest, one can apprehend that in the end they will become almost inaccessible to those great and powerful public emotions that trouble peoples, but [also] develop and renew them.
When I see property become so mobile and the love of property so anxious and so ardent, I cannot prevent myself from fearing that men will arrive at the point of looking on every new theory as a peril, every innovation as a distressing trouble, every social progress as a first step toward a revolution, and that they will altogether refuse to move for fear that they will be carried away.
I tremble, I confess, that they will finally allow themselves to be so much possessed by a relaxed love of present enjoyments that interest in their own future and that of their descendants will disappear, and they will rather follow the course of their destiny weakly than make a sudden and energetic effort when needed to redress it.
People believe that the new societies are going to change face daily, and I am afraid that in the end they will be too unchangeably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores, so that the human race will stop and limit itself; that the mind will fold and refold itself around itself eternally without producing new ideas, that man will exhaust himself in small, solitary, sterile motions, and that, while constantly moving, humanity will no longer advance.
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