Democracy in the World-Tocqueville Reconsidered: Introduction

With the publication of its first issue of the new millennium, the Journal of Democracy also celebrates its tenth anniversary. The decade of our existence has been an extraordinary one for the progress of democracy. It witnessed the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa. More countries are free, and a greater percentage of the world’s population than ever before lives in free countries (those that may be considered liberal democracies); the numbers are even higher if one also counts electoral democracies—countries that, although they may inadequately protect civil liberties or adhere to the rule of law, at least choose their rulers in reasonably competitive, free, and fair elections. It is true that the democratic euphoria of the early 1990s, tempered by sobering experience, has given way to a more realistic appreciation of the difficulty of building and consolidating new democracies. Yet democratic progress continues. In 1999 alone, two key regional powers, Nigeria and Indonesia, completed transitions from authoritarian to elected government. Most important of all, no powerful new ideological competitor has emerged to challenge democracy’s unparalleled global legitimacy.

Our special tenth anniversary issue on “Democracy in the World,” however, is not devoted to an analysis of the progress of the last ten years or to speculations about the course of the next ten. We have sought instead to encourage a deeper level of reflection by drawing upon one of the most penetrating, prescient, and comprehensive books on democracy ever written—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It is this classic work that provides both the inspiration and the organizing framework for our appraisal of the state of democracy in the world at the turn of the millennium.

Writing in the 1830s after extensive travels in the United States, Tocqueville acknowledged that “in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.” America was at the forefront of a “great democratic revolution” that had been proceeding for at least 700 years and that was, in Tocqueville’s view, destined to bring to Europe “an almost complete equality of condition” like that which already reigned in the New World. His goal was to portray the effects of democratic social conditions not only on politics but also “on civil society, on habits, ideas, and mores.” He did not conclude that Europe would—or should—seek to copy American political institutions but insisted that the study of America would yield instruction from which Europeans could profit.

When Tocqueville speaks of the “great democratic revolution,” he is referring to the march of social equality, not to the spread of free political institutions (though he recognizes a link between the two and sometimes uses the word “democracy” in a political sense to describe American self-government). Democracy in the sense of equal social conditions is the opposite not of despotism but of aristocracy. In fact, Tocqueville argues that equal social conditions are liable to lead to either of two opposing political outcomes: “the sovereignty of all” or “the absolute power of one man.” It is, in fact, the nurturing of free and participatory political institutions that he sees as the key to resisting the despotic tendencies latent in the principle of equality. As Francis Fukuyama points out in the opening essay of this issue, Tocqueville’s notion of the inevitable advancement of equality resembles the contemporary concept of modernization. It is a historical process that tends to undermine all traditional (i.e, aristocratic) political orders but does not necessarily culminate in democratic self-government.

Today the democratic revolution about which Tocqueville wrote has spread beyond the United States and Europe to every corner of the globe. Virtually everywhere, aristocracy has been overthrown in principle, if not entirely in practice. At the same time, democratic political institutions (though they often function problematically) have been adopted in more than half the world’s states. They now can be found on every continent, in nations both...