Author: James Thompson

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Tyranny of Benevolence

French social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville described what I call the Tyranny of Benevolence in Book IV of his brilliant analysis of America’s society and government. Tocqueville published Democracy in America fifty years after Thomas Jefferson and James Madison launched their party revolution (1790–1796) and forty years after Jefferson won his so-called Revolution of 1800. […]

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