Almost 200 years ago, a French lawyer, Alexis de Tocqueville went to America to see how a young democracy, the first democratic system in the modern world, worked. He spent nine months in America, visited a lot of places, talked to hundreds of people from different walks of life: politicians, journalists, farmers, businessmen. It took him a few years to write Democracy in America, a two-volume account of his visit to America, a seminal study on society, full of fascinating insights into the American fledgling democracy. With good reason is Tocqueville among the founding fathers of modern sociology and political science!

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a fascinating read in itself, is too huge in its scope to be encapsulated in a short text. Let’s look at one of Tocqueville’s main preoccupations.

Tocqueville was very enthusiastic about a democratic system. However, we was worried that democracy might not be compatible with liberty, the value he cherished the most.

There is a seemingly paradoxical consequence of equality: equality of opportunity may lead to people’s ‘intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune’, and, as Tocqueville points out, ‘when a taste for physical gratifications has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, (…) they lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all’ . While ‘looking after what they call their business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.’ Having reached material standards, people may be focused on preserving them and what they expect of the government is to ‘insure public tranquillity’, which, paradoxically, may lead to resigning from liberty as:

A nation which asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart – the slave of its own well-being, awaiting but the hand that will bind it. ‘ (Tocqueville: 503).

This pre-Orwellian warning is still in the air, more recently voiced by Michel Houellebecq in his Submission (2015).

As for Tocqueville, he was reassured to find three elements that checked, reduced if not eliminated, the threat in American society:

• a large numer of independent associations,
• the press,
• the courts.

What about our times, times of post-truth, fake news and floods of information? To what extent do we protect ourselves from the threats Tocqueville was so worried about?