Docility and Democracy

Abstract

Abstract I began chapter one by describing a problem: the disparity between what democracy seems to require and what modern citizens seem able to give. I then suggested that this disparity has preoccupied philosophers since (at least) the early nineteenth century. In fact, the broader question is one of the oldest in the history of political thought: will citizens prove virtuous enough to preserve the institutions that guard their freedom? This question took on new implications in the early nineteenth century, with the emergence of democracy on a national scale. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most influential early writers on this subject, helped bring these implications into clearer focus. Writing about American democracy as it existed in the 1820s, he expressed the very concerns that would soon thereafter become Emerson’s and Mill’s. Tocqueville’s anxieties about the modern citizen—and, by extension, about modern democracy—were centered on two related themes, both of which resonate in recent political commentaries. First, he observed that Americans were inclined toward “individualism,” by which he meant withdrawal from public life and general apathy about things political.