Joseph McKeen
Center for the Common Good

Mark Bellis
Class of 2010

Posted April 12, 2010

From
Democracy in America
Volumes I and II
by Alexis de Tocqueville

Princes had so to speak made violence material; democratic republics in our day have rendered it just as intellectual as the human will it wants to constrain.  Under the absolute government of one alone despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.

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