Mike’s Reviews > Democracy in America > Status Update

I think I'll never really get behind Tocqueville, because I disagree with the basic premise of this book - that Americans were basically economically and socially equal. It's just factually wrong.

I guess I'm just not able to latch onto political analysis that so thoroughly denies the realities of class structures. It just seems so far from the truth to me that it doesn't work.

On the whole, this is just way too general. Tocqueville didn't actually spend that long in America, yet he feels confident making huge, sweeping generalizations about the kind of people who live there and how they think and live.

I think my big problem with this is the completely false premise that the people who came to the Americas were basically all economically equal to begin with. It's just not true - there's been slavery and racism against free Black people for a long time, and even among white people, farmers were much poorer than the merchants, who were much poorer than the lawyers and ministers that the Founding Fathers tended to be

Reading this book has made me realize just how pervasive Marxist thinking has become since the mid-19th century. It's just bizarre to read something that doesn't either use or respond to that class analysis.

What if my essay for class about this book just said, "TL;DR"? I'm reading an abridged version (the only one sold by my school's bookstore, btw, this was not by choice), and even then, this is dense. Interesting, but dense.

It's pretty interesting to see political science from so long ago. The worldview that Tocqueville takes on what people want and do is so completely alien to me. That said, that does make this book very difficult to follow.