Most Striking and Dominant Characteristic of American Culture

To Americans of the late twentieth century, dictatorship or one-man rule in some form is the and alternate(a) to democracy with which we are familiar--and an alternative which is rejected by almost all Americans of whatever policy-making stripe. (Indeed, we are distant more likely to speak of authoritarianism, despotism, or arbitrary presidency as a "threat" to democracy than as an "alternative," since alternative implies some degree of acceptability.) De Tocqueville is certainly aware of despotism as an alternative to democracy. But in reading Democracy in America, we will find that it is not the alternative he has chiefly in mind. Indeed, he finds democracy and despotism to have far-off more in common with each other than with a third alternative, the alternative which he most often compares to democracy. Moreover, he argues that democracy far more likely to shift into despotism than it is to shift into this third alternative.

The third alternative, and the one to which de Tocqueville is chiefly concerned to compare and contrast democracy, is noblesse. As a comparison to democracy, thusly as a starting train by which to get word and draw out the characteristics of democracy, de Tocqueville considered it vastly more important than despotism. In the index to Democracy in America,

The root difference, then, between the aristocrat and the democrat is that the former is born(p) to power, and the latter to the rule of necessity. The aristocrat is, from earliest childhood, surrounded by servants whom he can command to tend to his wants. If his wants are not fulfilled--if he is disobeyed--he responds with anger and punishment; thus he learns to be short-tempered and demanding.

What, then, is (or was) aristocracy, and wherefore did de Tocqueville view it as the natural point of contrast for the comprehensive kindly system that he set as American democracy? We may start with the item that Alexis de Tocqueville was himself an aristocrat, identified as such by his very name. "De" is the cut equivalent of our word "of," so his name might be "translated" as Alexis of Tocqueville.

The implication of the name is that his ancestors had at one cartridge holder been the feudal lords of some place in France called Tocqueville.

When wealth is better by heredity in the same families, one finds galore(postnominal) people in the enjoyment of the creature comforts of life without their evolution an exclusive taste for them ... The rich in aristocratic societies, having ne'er experienced a lot different from their own, have no fear of changing it; they can hardly imagine anything different. The comforts of life are by no means the labor union of their existence; they are just a way of living. They shoot them as part of existence and enjoy them without thinking of them ... That is why aristocrats often show a haughty contempt for the corporal comforts they are actually enjoying and show singular powers of endurance when ultimately deprived of them (pp. 530-31).

Moreover, de Tocqueville makes it indirectly clear that his conception of aristocracy has effects that reach across the whole range of social and cultural life; the social significance of aristocracy seems for him to fall far beyond their mere wealth or political power. He does not say this explicitly, because a
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