INTRODUCTION

In the Preface to his analysis of English capitalism, Marx told his German readers, “De te fabula narratur” – the story is told about you. And he added, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” DA is also a book about a foreign country that is held up to native readers as the image of their future. In the Introduction to the work, Tocqueville tells his readers that “There is no doubt in my mind that sooner or later we will come, as the Americans have come, to an almost complete equality of conditions” (DA, p. 14).

Tocqueville believed that his French readers would recoil before this prospect. DA as a whole may be read as an attempt to persuade them that their fears were ungrounded. His rhetorical strategy can be represented as follows. “You, my French readers, claim that democracy is pernicious. To support that claim you point to this or that dangerous effect of democratic customs and institutions. For each of these alleged flaws of democracy, I will show you that it rests on one of the following causal fallacies. You misidentify the causes of the facts you cite; you fail to take a sufficiently long time perspective; you ignore how the flaws of democracy are remedied or offset by democracy itself; or you make a fallacious inference from the effects of a marginal practice to the effects that would arise were the practice to become generalized.