The Destruction Of Democracy In America, By Alexis De Tocqueville

From its beginnings, the United States was involved in an internal struggle between two factions, in order to impose themselves within collective thought, social Darwinism which promoted Anglo-Saxon superiority over the rest of the planet's cultures, and democracy. Both ideas, contrasting by their ideological contents, were fused in a specific way of thinking that is proper to the United States values. If democracy guaranteed the equality of all men, Darwinism and its influence within science appealed to differences as impregnable criteria. The quantification of behavior was one of the mechanisms responsible for accepting inequality between men as natural, which paradoxically implied the crisis in the meaning of American democracy. As the social sciences embraced the empiricist quantitative methodology, morality was considered a prejudice characteristic of subjectivity. …show more content…
Alexis de Tocqueville considered that American democracy engendered a double danger. On the one hand, it laid the foundations for the destruction of the aristocratic order by manipulating the possibilities of all citizens, but at the same time, it had what it called the dictatorship of the majorities. Tocqueville was critical of the relentless pursuit of profit or wealth accumulation and the cult of individuality that were already beginning to diagram American society. I believe that this is one of the most primary elements that were present within Tocqueville works, and implemented later on by Robert Reich in his literary work “Broken