RICHARD SENNETT ,
409
The fears of mob rule and of mass stupor were not newly born in
Tocqueville's generation, The first has its modern intellectual roots in
the doctrines of Hobbes, the second in the writings of La Boetie on
voluntary servitude. But Tocqueville's generation, barely recovered
from the first great political revolution in the name of equality, on the
verge of an economic revolution that would end more decisively the
ancien regime,
felt each of these fears intensely. People sensed a future
potential degradation of culture but could not find the right words to
explain why. Tocqueville was the first to connect mob rule and mass
stupor to conditions of equality throughout society, beyond the pale of
political conditions or rights.
Tocqueville's arguments about mob rule appear in those famous
chapters of volume one of the
Democracy
on the tyranny of the
majority. Earlier writers who feared a mob thought of a rabble, the
dregs of society, a vulgar majority, sp that the question of tyranny per
se became allied to the question of status. In the case of Montesquieu,
for instance, this image of majority really was an image of a
ju~t
hierarchy upset, with the least worthy, who were the most numerous,
having control over their betters. Tocqueville's arguments about
majority tyranny are more subtle.
He begins with a paradox: he regards as detestable the maxim that
the majority of a people has the right
to
do any and everything it
desires, and yet majority rule is the only feasible modern principle of
legitimate power. To show that this paradox is not a contradiction
Tocqueville advances three explanations. The first is an Enlighten–
ment one. There is a universal society called humanity, and its ruling
principle is justice. Each nation is like a jury called to apply this
universal justice to particular cases; like any jury it can make mistakes.
Thus the right of majority rule is at once legitimate and limited, and
when I refuse to obey an unjust law . . , I appeal solely from the
sovereignty of a particular group of people to the sovereignty of the
human race.
But what are the principles of this universal justice? Tocqueville does
not tell us here.
An answer begins
to
appear in the second of three responses to the
paradox of legitimate but limited majority rule, when he asks, what is a
majority? He says that a collective m,ajority is an "individual" and that
this collective individual has interests and opinions like any person,
equal therefore to those of that collective individual called a minority.
