Why America worked according to de Tocqueville

First off, I would like to say that although de Tocqueville can be a bit heavy to read, I am really enjoying it. What I love most about his writing is the way he uses his French background to make his examples clear. Last semester the focus of my French 231 class was on comparing French and American society so reading de Tocqueville is very meaningful to me and my knowledge from last semester is making his ideas make a lot more sense.

What I was most struck by in this reading were the reasons he gave for democracy's success in the colonies. I think what he was trying to say was that freedom is what lead to the freedom of America. Officially, the King of England was in charge of the colonies. As de Tocqueville pointed out, the king had no idea what was going on here. Just for a brief example, states were formed backwards from the way they were supposed to. The freedom the settlers had to reject aristocracy in America gave them the foundation to shake off the artistrocracy that controlled them from thousands of miles away.

I remember writing about a similiar idea in an earlier blog post. When we were studying the Declaration to Independence one of our readings made a point of saying the colonies upset about the small (compared to the ones in England) amount of taxes they had to pay so they decided to break away from England (of course it was much more complex than that but that's the idea in a nutshell). They weren't used to be being governed anymore and that's the way they liked it.