Tocqueville e gli usi politici della tirannia della maggioranza

Increasingly in the Italian political debate is quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, and refers to the theme of \uabtyranny of the majority\ubb treated in famous pages of Democracy in America of 1835. The essay aims to answer the questions: what is the true meaning Tocqueville gives the term \uabtyranny of the majority\ubb? The conception of democracy they have in mind those who recall to Aristocratic Norman is the same as reflected in his work? In fact, the word democracy, in America, means the registration of the desires and needs of the people or the common people while in Europe, outlining the education and high moral and intellectual of the masses in achieving the collective good. Committed intellectuals, who call Tocqueville in support of their argument, tend to juxtapose the \uabtyranny of the majority\ubb \u2013 the theme of Democracy in America of 1835 \u2013 to \uabthe new kind of despotism\ubb which appears instead in Democracy in America in 1840. In reality, these are two very different cases: first, the \uabtyranny of the majority\ubb, is, in fact, in terms of policy), the function\uacing of liberal democracy and the dangers which threaten it-the thesis of Aristotle and the Antiquity philosophers that many (the poor), once in government, threaten the freedom and property of the few (the rich); and the other, the new kind of despotism, is a theme of \uabmetapolitics\ubb: the diagnosis of a new civilization that is required at all, right and left, conservatives and progressives, and foretells, if anything, the perverse effects of the Welfare State. The essay does not enter the merits of the conceptions of the world in con\uacflict but call attention to the need not to use the classics of political thought in the controversies that divide, as a physiological in self-respecting democracy, majority and opposition and above all, wants to be a call for a strict reading of what they \uabhave really said\ubb