TOCQUEVILLE CULTURAL COMPARISON ON SLAVERY

Tocqueville Cultural Comparison on Slavery

Tocqueville Cultural Comparison on slavery

Introduction

Alexis de Tocqueville was a gentleman-scholar who emerged as one of the world's great prophets. More than a century and a half ago, when most people were ruled by kings, he declared that the future belonged to democracy. He explained what was needed for democracy to work and how it could help protect human liberty. At the same time, he warned that a welfare state could seduce people into servitude. He saw why socialism must lead to slavery.

History

Alexis de Tocqueville was born this date in 1805. He was a French journalist and abolitionist writer. He was born in Paris to Herve-Bonaventure Clerel de Tocqueville and Louise Le Peletier de Rosanbo. His older brothers were named Hippolyte and Edouard. Tocqueville came from an aristocratic background. He had a private tutor, the abbe Lesueur, until high school, and then attended high school and college in Metz. He studied law in Paris and worked as a substitute judge in Versailles before coming to America in 1831, when he was 25 years old.

Slavery

Not that the inhabitants of the South regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the planter; on this point many of them agree with their Northern countrymen, in freely admitting that slavery is prejudicial to their interests; but they are convinced that the removal of this evil would imperil their own existence. The instruction which is now diffused in the South has convinced the inhabitants that slavery is injurious to the slave-owner, but it has also shown them, more clearly than before, that it is almost an impossibility to get rid of it. Hence arises a singular contrast: the more the utility of slavery is contested, the more firmly is it established in the laws; and while its principle is gradually abolished in the North, that selfsame principle gives rise to more and more rigorous consequences in the South(Mohler, 1925).

He wrote "Democracy in America," a two-volume study of the American people and their political institutions. This book gave a throat-clearing viewpoint of the American institution of slavery. His views were written at the height of America's slave-trade movement and its influence in all aspects of American life, and is still frequently quoted by journalists, politicians, and historians. He spent almost a year writing the first two volumes of De la Démocratie en Amérique. He worked in ...