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1031 s4s4s4s4s4 c h a p t e r 8a Influence of Democracy on the Family b I have just examined how, among democratic peoples, and in particular among the Americans, equality of conditions modifies the relationshipsof citizens with each other. a. After showing how equality modified the relationships of citizens, I want to penetrate further and show how it acts on the relationships of family members. The father in the aristocratic family is not only the author of the family, he is its political head, the pontiff. . . . Democracy destroys everything political and conventional that there was in his authority, but it does not destroy this authority; it only gives it another character. The magistrate has disappeared, the father remains. The same thing with brothers, the artificial bond that united brothers in the aristocratic family is destroyed. The natural bond becomes stronger. This is applicable to all associations based on natural sentiments. Democracy relaxes social bonds, it tightens natural bonds (YTC, CVf, pp. 41–42). b. On a jacket containing the manuscript of this chapter: This chapter seems to me to contain some good things, but it was done by fits and starts, languidly and slowly. It demands to be reviewed all at once in order for the thought to circulate more easily. Review the rubish carefully./ Development a bit didactic and a bit heavy. If I could delete the aristocratic as much as possible and allow the mind of the reader to re-do what I remove. That would be much better.” Note in the rubish: “The difficulty is that I do not know well what the intimate relationships of father and sons and of brothers among themselves are in America andthat I can hardly speak except about France. I believe these relationships not hostile, but very cold in America” (Rubish, 2). On the family as antidote to the “democratic disease” see F. L. Morton, “Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ” Canadian Journal of Political Science XVII, no. 2 (1984): 309–24; and Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up. Authority, Autonomy and Passion in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 1032 the family I want to penetrate further, and enter the bosom of the family. My goal here is not to look for new truths, but to show how facts already known are related to my subject. Everyone has noticed that in our time new relationships have been established among the different members of the family, that the distancethat formerly separated thefatherfromhissonhasdiminished,andthatpaternal authority has been, if not destroyed, at least altered. Something analogous, but still more striking, is seen in the United States. In America, the family, taking this word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, does not exist.c Some remnants are found only during the first years following the birth of the children. The father then exercises, without opposition , the domestic dictatorship that the weakness of his sons requires and that their interest, as well as his incontestable superiority, justifies.d c. Former beginning of the chapter in the rubish: There is a perpetual reaction of mores on the mind and of the mind on mores. If you carefully studied the private [v: interior and exterior] life of the Americans, you would not fail to discover in a multitude of details the more or less distanteffects of the philosophical method that they have adopted. But such a study would take me too far away. I want to limit myself to providing a small number [of (ed.)] examples. I will show a few links, the detached mind of the reader will grasp the chain. When men have accepted as general principle that it is good to judge everything by yourself, taking the opinion of others as information and not as rule, the relationship of the father with his children, of the master with his servants, andgenerally of the superior with the inferior finds itself changed. [In the margin: Religion is a refuge where the human mind rests. Politics forms an arena in which in the United States the majority, despite its desires , binds it and tires it out by its very inaction.] Nothing is more visible than this in America. In the United States, the family . . . This fragment belongs to the single sheet found in a jacket on which you can read on the cover: “ “It would be good to leave this small chapter after philosophical method in order to show its consequences. I would say...

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