Democracy in America

Character Guide

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Alexis de Tocqueville (The Author/Narrator)

A French aristocrat and magistrate who travels through the United States in the early 1830s to study its prisons and, more broadly, its democratic institutions and social condition.

The Anglo-Americans (Americans)

The English-descended settlers and their descendants who colonized British America, established under conditions of remarkable social equality from the outset.

The Puritans of New England

The earliest emigrants to New England, described as having brought a democratic and republican form of Christianity that shaped the young nation's laws and habits.

The Sovereign Majority (The Majority)

Not a person but the collective political force in American democracy, described as holding 'a prodigious actual authority, and a moral influence which is scarcely less preponderant.'

Southern Landed Proprietors

Large-scale planters in the South-West of the Hudson who imported English aristocratic principles and the law of descent, forming a quasi-aristocratic class without formal privileges.

The American Clergy

Religious leaders described as broadly favoring civil freedom while staying deliberately aloof from party politics and public affairs.

Native American Tribes (Indians (e.g., Cherokees, Creeks))

Southern nations gradually enclosed within shrinking territory by advancing European settlement, some of whom took up agriculture out of necessity.

American Public Officials and Judges

Magistrates and elected functionaries whose independence and conduct are examined as part of the machinery of political jurisdiction and administration.

Glossary

Social condition (état social)

Tocqueville's term for the overall equality or inequality of circumstances, wealth, and status in a society, which he treats as the root cause shaping a nation's laws and customs.

Manners (moeurs)

A broad term Tocqueville uses for the moral, intellectual, and habitual characteristics of a people collectively—more influential, he argues, than laws or geography in sustaining democracy.

Tyranny of the majority

Tocqueville's famous concept describing how, in a democracy, the unlimited power of the majority can suppress minority rights and opinions without needing physical force.

Township (New England town)

The small local self-governing unit Tocqueville sees as the foundational school of American democratic participation and civic habit.

Political jurisdiction

The American practice (impeachment) of using political trials mainly to remove officials from power rather than to inflict criminal punishment, contrasted with harsher European political trials.

Aristocracy (as used by Tocqueville)

A social order based on permanent, hereditary, legally unequal ranks—explicitly contrasted throughout the book with America's democratic social condition.

Anglo-Americans

Tocqueville's standard term for the English-descended inhabitants of the United States, as distinct from other New World populations like the Spanish colonists.

Equality of conditions

The pervasive social leveling—of wealth, status, and opportunity—that Tocqueville identifies as the defining, unstoppable feature of the modern (and specifically American) age.

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