WHAT SORT OF DESPOTISM DEMOCRATIC NATIONS HAVE TO FEAR

tl;dr

 

DEMOCRATIC NATIONS MUST FEAR CAPITALISM

 

It's supposed to taste like a **** taco

 

Link? Source?

 

you are right I can't provide a link, thus it was false, thus I must have read it.

 

I'm confused by this. I just want to ensure that copy and pasted articles are sourced so that the site doesn't get in trouble with any authors.

 

Democracy in America
By Alexis de Tocqueville

Translated by Henry Reeve
Published by Sever and Francis, 1863

 

crap I thought you were quoting me and asking for proof that in fact tl;dr


my bad

 

Well, I can't see de Tocqueville getting too upset at not being credited. But if he does, hold onto your brain.

 

If the title is in all caps, it's much scarier!

 

I wonder what good ol' Alexis would think of modern-day capitalism.

In the early 19th century, when he wrote, the beginning of the market economy (and the fact that we were still an agricultural nation) ensured a degree of equality among people (in economic terms, and excepting slaves of course). He thought the equality in property was what prevented the United States from becoming an aristocratic hierarchy like most of the nations in Europe.

Do we still have that?

 

NO I WAS LITERALLY TALKING ABOUT CAPITALISM -- AS IN POSTING IN ALL CAPS.

 

I know, I've read it. I'm wondering, considering what he thought was the good thing about capitalism in the early 19th century, what he would think of modern-day capitalism.

He visited the U.S. in the early 1830s.

 

Liberalism protects society from the social darwinism of capitalism. Learn some history or something.

The problem is that you're all slogans, no answers. You're bereft of the creativity you claim that liberalism removes. No answers to the crumbling infrastructure of this country, no answers to the state of education in this country, no answers to the state of the uninsured and under insured in this country, no answers for the environment, no answers for the decline of the inner cities, etc. but you want everyone to think you have something important to say.

 

That's the reason you posted this thread. It was so you could make comments like this. Why go to the trouble to copy and paste de Tocqueville? I know the gentleman has been dead a long time, but he doesn't deserve to be used like this so you can flame "Liberalism" and the "culture wussifying... nanny state." Give the dead guy a break.

 

This must be the single most ignorant statement I have ever read. The latifundia alone pretty much destroyed the small farmer and created a subclass of slaves that toiled endlessly and sometimes to the death. Cato the Elder himself was the first (and probably not the last, especially considering contemporary figures in American economics) shrewd businessman to note that making slaves suffer was an economically profitable venture and that led to thousands of deaths. That it started in the Republic is a valid point, but the continuation and escalation of these policies during the Empire shows that emperors could (and did) indeed make everyone suffer. Range was limited? Christ, but then again, that's what you get from quoting sources from 1853.

hahahahah

wow. Even the most idealistic person these days couldn't make this statement with a straight face.

Tocqueville is so trusting of gouvernment but he seems to have a bit of a cynical side when it comes to individuals. Probably still warped up in Machiavellian fever. Can you even espouse the "Prince" without being seen as an amoral jackass these days?

Once again, the "Prince" all over. Be mean to be nice. We're turning men into passive babies! We must allow them to grow! PEOPLE ARE TOO HAPPY, CRACK OUT THE WHIPS!

Of course, conservatism, in an ironic twinge, tends towards economic laissez-faire and social nanny. I have never figured out for the life of me how people can claim, with a straight face, that man should be allowed to run economy on his own, a subject of objective numbers and statistics that works more efficiently in larger scales, but that the gouvernment should regulate every instance of our private lives, a subjective series of cases that is almost impossible to objectify. Oh abortion is morally wrong, we have to regulate each case! But leave money to us, we can handle that. I hope you're one of those libertarian anarcho-primitives OddsOn, because I truly dislike hypocrites.

Hmm

 

De Tocqueville does warn against the danger of a paternalistic state which can be considered Liberal as we understand it now but he also warns about the danger of inequality in terms of wealth.

[rquoter]We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.
[/rquoter]

At the same time he warns about the dangers of a consumerist society that is essential for Capitalism.
[rquoter]I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.[/rquoter]

De Tocqueville here is pointing out the danger of a consumerist society where individuals are primarily driven by their own desires and their own circle of friends and acquaintances. What he is warning about here would be some of the very things that modern Conservatism has championed. Capitalism and a focus on the individual rather than the society as a whole.

Overall though what De Tocqueville is talking about is the fragile nature of republican democracy as a viable system.
[rquoter]A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master. [/rquoter]

As he notes a democractic system is one that depends on moderation and moving too much towards what we consider Liberalism or Capitalism are threats to it.

I think though taking De Tocqueville as a damning criticism of modern Liberalism, Conservatism or Capitalism is somewhat off base. There are certainly things that are part of those systems that he was warning against but at the sametime those terms either didn't exist in De Tocqueville's time or had different meanings.