Tocqueville begins his book by describing the change in social conditions taking place. He observed that over the previous seven hundred years the social and economic conditions of men had become more equal. The aristocracy, Tocqueville believed, was gradually disappearing as the modern world experienced the beneficial effects of equality. Tocqueville traced the development of equality to a number of factors, such as granting all men permission to enter the clergy, widespread economic opportunity resulting from the growth of trade and commerce, the royal sale of titles of nobility as a monarchical fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture.[5]
Tocqueville described this revolution as a "providential fact"[5] of an "irresistible revolution," leading some to criticize the determinism found in the book. However, based on Tocqueville's correspondences with friends and colleagues, Marvin Zetterbaum, Professor Emeritus at University of California Davis, concludes that the Frenchman never accepted democracy as determined or inevitable. He did, however, consider equality more just and therefore found himself among its partisans.[6]
Given the social state that was emerging, Tocqueville believed that a "new political science" would be needed, in order to:
[I]nstruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its motives, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true instincts for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.[7]
The remainder of the book can be interpreted as an attempt to accomplish this goal, thereby giving advice to those people who would experience this change in social states.
Tocqueville's message is somewhat beyond the American democracy itself, which was rather an illustration to his philosophical claim that democracy is an effect of industrialization. This explains why Tocqueville does not unambiguously define democracy and even ignores the intents of the Founding Fathers of the United States regarding the American political system:
To pursue the central idea of his study—a democratic revolution caused by industrialization, as exemplified by America—Tocqueville persistently refers to democracy. This is in fact very different from what the Founding Fathers of the United States meant. Moreover, Tocqueville himself is not quite consistent in using the word 'democracy', applying it alternately to representative government, universal suffrage or majority-based governance:
The American institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives directly, and for the most part annually, in order to ensure their dependence. The people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society. In the United States the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all the countries in which the people is supreme. Democracy in America, Book 2, Ch I, 1st and 2nd paragraph
Such an ambiguous understanding of democracy in a study of great impact on political thought could not help leaving traces. We suppose that it was Tocqueville’s work and not least its title that strongly associated the notion of democracy with the American system and, ultimately, with representative government and universal suffrage. The recent 'Tocqueville renaissance', which enforces the democratic image of the United States and, correspondingly, of other Western countries, also speaks for the role of Tocqueville’s work.
— Andranik Tangian (2020) Analytical Theory of Democracy, pp. 193-194[8]
