I have been rereading Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterful Democracy in America. This book, written in the first half of the nineteenth century by a French aristocrat for his countrymen, remains standard reading for American college students and even some of their professors. In a way it is too bad that we tend to read it [...]
It seems to be a tendency of literary critics to attach to the opinions of contemporary writers a significance unjustified with regard to the effect of such opinions upon current social movements. A Voltaire, an Adam Smith, even a Dickens’ Oliver Twist may change the world, but not so the works of the usual writer [...]
One of the most delightful things about foreigners and their problems is that it lets us indulge in ignorance, condescension and cheap politics all at once. Besides being good old-fashioned fun, these are the three major principles on which the West now reclines. Take the Turkish riots. To spoil the plot, kids, this mirrors the [...]
The theme of this “historical meditation” is the crisis and decline of civilization in the West during the twentieth century. That perspective is the product both of an individual temperament and also of a historical consciousness. One hundred, or even fifty, years hence neither the temperament nor the perspective may matter very much. But I [...]
“If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule of the mob. For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob is a body of a thousand men in which [...]
Radical egalitarianism in a democracy leads to mob rule, which leads to tyranny. So it happened in Ancient Athens, and so might it happen in America today. Most Americans take for granted that democracy is an absolute good. If it can be said of an idea or a program that it promotes equality, Americans, whatever [...]
An excerpt from Democracy in America. I had remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of [...]
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville noticed, is an overwhelmingly middle-class country. To be middle class, of [...]
A review of Lord Percy of Newcastle’s, The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government (London, 1954). In 1957, Kirk published a list of “must-read” books to understand modern (meaning, as it had developed or been rediscovered in the 1950s) conservatism. His list would not surprise most readers of The Imaginative Conservative, [...]
Among my many failings as a teacher is my refusal to indulge students’ persistent use of the word “democracy” to mean “all good things.” Particularly when I am teaching about constitutionalism and what a constitution is supposed to do, the constant refrain is that a constitution must establish, protect, further, or just “be” democratic. And [...]
Chilton Williamson, Jr. is a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction who has worked as an editor for St. Martin’s Press, National Review, and, since 1989, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute. His most recent book is After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy(ISI, 2012), which John Willson, professor [...]
N.B. This is a piece I wrote in the early 1990s. I had forgotten completely about it until I came across it by accident today (Wednesday, August 22). It was my first attempt at a dissertation proposal, and I wrote it for one of my favorite graduate school professors, Dr. Russell Hanson. He probably doesn’t remember me, [...]
We are taught that the change from monarchy to democracy is progress; that is, a change from servitude to liberty. Yet no monarchy in Western history ever taxed its subjects as heavily as every modern democracy taxes its citizens. But we are taught that this condition is liberty, because “we” are—freely—taxing “ourselves.” The individual, as [...]
The Framers’ temperament was indebted far more to the inherited culture of the “old constitutional morality” than to Enlightenment fads for remaking the world. While many did indeed believe that their success or failure would affect other nations and future generations, their enthusiasm was constrained by the enduring classical and Christian tradition. On December 4, [...]