BF190 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Participatory Democracy, Alexis De Tocqueville
Document Summary
Volume 1 key concerns: tyranny of the majority. Majority never has anything interesting to say so why pay attention to politics: absence of leisure class. Leisure necessary for deep thought/questions of the good life. Leisure/idleness in relation to production viewed as a trick to get out of real work. No one is subjected to a form of pain or hardship that someone else is not. Advantages are immediate and obvious, dangers are slow to arrive and dif cult to detect.