SOURCE: "The New Despotism," in The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 229-59.

In this excerpt Boesche discusses Tocqueville's warnings of a "new despotism," potentially originating within American-style democracies, that would enslave the soul and would be brought about by equality, isolation, and abundance.

With a Newtonian view of the political world, Madison and others offered a mechanical notion of political freedom in which free political institutions, once set in motion and properly balanced, continued to function almost by themselves. By contrast, Tocqueville pictured freedom as if he still agreed with Aristotle's theory that said objects stay in motion only if continually propelled by some force external to the object. In a marvelous passage, Montesquieu suggested why freedom is so precarious. "What makes free states last a shorter time than others is that both the misfortunes and the successes they encounter almost always cause...