ABSTRACT
American freedom did not mean an absence of social obligation or an anarchic vacuum of social order, but a responsible assertion of individual autonomy within a social frame of equal rights and distributed powers. Writing as a Frenchman about an American society that had presumably made freedom into a passion, Tocqueville nevertheless developed a theory of freedom which no American thinker has surpassed. As an heir of the European revolutionary tradition, Tocqueville was committed against arbitrary government by any aristocracy; but he was equally committed against oppressions by the new revolutionary majorities. In the American experience he saw a free people in the flush of their freedom, but he was concerned also about the increasing oppression of the nonconformist creative spirit by an oversimplifying majority given to stereotyped thinking. It is a biting portrait of a mass society in action. Anyone who has studied the history of conformity in America will recognize its considerable measure of truth.
