Letter #267: Roger Boesche (1997)
Occidental College Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas | Tocqueville on the Tyranny of the Majority
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Roger Boesche was the Arthur G. Coons Professor of the History of Ideas at Occidental College, where he started his career and taught for 40 years. Over the years, he impacted many students across many disciplines, from politics and finance to life and liberal arts, from future US President Barack Obama (who has repeatedly cited Roger’s class as his favorite class and credited Roger for piquing his interest in politics—as well as complained about for getting a B in his class) to hedge fund manager Ian McKinnon.
Outside of his work as a Tocqueville scholar and as an Occidental Professor, Roger’s life story is tremendous. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis as a teenager, told multiple times he wouldn’t live past X age (it kept getting pushed back as he defied the odds), became wheelchair bound, had over 10 surgeries, including having his right hip replaced and having his C3 to C7 vertebrae, which shrunk him a whole foot from 6’1” to 5’1”. However, he didn’t let that stop him—not once did he miss a class due to treatment. And he didn’t let it stop him in his personal life either—he traveled with his family to over 120 countries, through mountains, rocky roads, and caves (while being wheelchair bound), and lived to the age of 69.
While I’ve read several of Roger’s books, today I wanted to share the transcript of a short interview he gave regarding how Tocqueville saw a danger of the tyranny of the majority in a democratic society as compared to a more hierarchical society. It’s short, to the point, and just as relevant today as it was in 1997.
I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
Tocqueville wrote in the first volume of Democracy in America: “I know of no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion then in America.”
Now this is a different kind of tyranny of the majority. Instead of a political tyranny that just outvotes a minority continually, which we course have had in the south of this country, this is a tyranny of majority opinion. It's a psychological tyranny. It's a sort of conformity that forces everyone to believe and say the same things.
And the question is: Why did Tocqueville think that there would be a tyranny of the majority in a democracy? When supposedly one has freedom of the press, libraries, access to opinions, and one can speak one's own mind.
And his answer goes something like this: In aristocratic society, the society was certainly hierarchical, hardly democratic, but divided completely into distinct groups: classes, guilds, corporations, provinces, extended families, churches, religions. And each group had its own opinion. A built-in opinion, as it were. And that brought diversity of ideas to an aristocratic society.
But with Democratic societies in the 19th century, all these old groups—guilds, collectives, provinces, families—were dissolving and falling apart. It was good in one sense—it made for more democratic politics, but it was very harmful potentially in another sense, because it released thousands of individuals on their own onto the marketplace, each one selling his or her labor, each one finding his or her ideas.
All these individuals in the marketplace start to read the same things, believe the same things, say the same things. And pretty soon it becomes very difficult to be an individual at variance with the majority.
It's not that we've become more conformist in Democratic America according to Tocqueville, but that we used to conform to the small group—our class, our guild. And now we conform to an overarching public opinion. And to have an opinion at odds with that overarching conformism is to risk being outcast—being cast out from democratic society.
This becomes a tyranny over thought, a tyranny over one's ideas, and one's opinions. That's very different from a political majority that could simply outvote a minority and take away its rights.
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Wrap-up
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