ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, JOHN STUART MILL AND THOMAS CARLYLE ON DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine and compare the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle on modern democracy. Throughout their works, Tocqueville, Mill and Carlyle showed a profound engagement with the phenomenon of democracy in their era. It was the crux around which their wider reflections on the period revolved. Tocqueville, Mill and Carlyle located democracy’s causes deep in history. They defined its contours broadly and contextualized it within ancient and modern notions of democracy. Each approached democracy with a significant degree of scepticism and outlined its negative consequences for their contemporaries. But, Tocqueville, Mill and Carlyle also offered solutions to the problems they saw in the modern democratic world, many of which were novel. The present thesis suggests that in these areas there exists a profound similarity between the ideas of Tocqueville, Mill and Carlyle. It has become commonplace to compare the thought of Tocqueville and Mill. Equally, it has become just as commonplace to draw a sharp division between the ideas of Tocqueville and Mill, on the one hand, and Carlyle, on the other. However, the similarities between their respective conceptions of democracy, its causes, problems and the solutions these men offered suggest that such a division could be arbitrary and, consequently, allow us to reassess the intellectual relationship of these three men