Thursday, February 25, 2010

Tocqueville at the Summit

The day after we discussed Tocqueville's analysis of the tyranny of the majority, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) mentioned it during the health care summit:
So this is the only place, the Senate, where the rights to the minority are protected and sometimes, as Senator Byrd has said, the minority can be right. I remember reading Alexis de Tocqueville's books, which most of us have read, and he said in his "American Democracy" that the greatest threat to the American democracy would be the tyranny of the majority.
Thought question: did this comment reflect what Tocqueville actually wrote? Do you think that anybody in the room had read Democracy in America?

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