SOCI 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Alexis De Tocqueville, Meddle
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●Concepts
○Government
■You have a central government of some kind that deals with the general
interest
■Governments usually want to meddle with local affairs
●Administrative centralization, most advanced in France
●Danger in france is that the king spent his whole reign trying to
take power away from every local government and authority in
France
○Got away with it because French were so used to being
subjects and not citizens
○Produces people who don’t fight for freedom
■Tocqueville believes that bureaucracies keep people from taking initiative
and works against practicing for freedom, because people get stuck in the
habit of waiting for someone to tell them what to do
■America is a country of citizens that take matters into their own hands
●People together struggling to change their political condition
○“Culture” = “mores”
■Religion
●Tocqueville was a devout inner catholic, believed in the inner
principles that is inside you that makes you moral
○Believed religion is a vital power for a lot of what we strive
for; “natural” to the human heart as hope
○Every individual must strive for his or her freedom
■Protestants have an advantage over the catholics
because they all fight for their freedom which is
important to their religion
●Americans have no official church because they want to have their
own religions
●Religion has helped to protect freedom
○Women are the protectors of religion
■Get their children to go to church, get them to read
the bible, etc -> transmit culture
●Tocqueville believes that religion is going down, less and less
people go to church
○*christianity* is the protector of individual freedom
○If it continues to weaken, it will weaken freedom
■Mores
●P.287, 308, 315
●Tocqueville thinks you can’t just build freedom by setting
associations in place. People have to believe in freedom
○If people have the inner connection to freedom, that is the
most important.
○Mores is at the heart of how Americans are free and remain
free