Summary Of Alex De Tocqueville's Tyranny Of The Majority

I was recently watching a television show where two characters had opposing ideas about what to get a colleague who was in the hospital, to decide what the office gift should be they presented their idea and asked “all in favor” and the office members raised there hands and unanimously voted for a gift basket rather than a sleeping bag filled with canned goods. This, although comical, is exactly what Alex de Tocqueville was talking about when he wrote Tyranny of the Majority. His theories and observations are still relevant today present not only in silly TV shows but in governments around the world, especially the United States. Tocqueville starts his argument is that the Constitution of the United States is written to give power to the majority of the population, the majority being an entity by its self not many individuals. America has worked with the same constitution for many years making minimal changes and none that would alter, fundamentally how the government as a whole functions, so if this observation was true before it will certainly have stood the test of time along with the document it is in reference to. In the corse of this argument Tocqueville notes the american legislator and sometime even judicial figures are voted in by the majority. This aside from minor interruptions like the …show more content…
He warned the government would need to “represent the majority without necessarily being a slave” to it, that the president would need some power aside from majority backing to and that the judicial branch would need to be separate from the other two branches to create a government without fearing the majority. Which I would say has manifested its self in that the legislator nor the executive is pushed by “daily passions” of constituents given the two party system there is no clear sway on daily