Tocqueville effect
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable, become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested. The very redress of grievances throws new light on those which are left untouched, and adds fresh poignancy to their smart : if the pain be less, the patient's sensibility is greater. Never had the feudal system seemed so hateful to the French as at the moment of its proximate destruction. The arbitrary measures of Louis XVI — insignificant as they were — seemed harder to bear than all the despotism of Louis XIV." --The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) by Alexis de Tocqueville |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Tocqueville effect is the phenomenon that, as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on". For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.
The effect suggests a link between social equality or concessions by the regime and unintended consequences. According to the Tocqueville effect, a revolution is likely to occur after an improvement in social conditions in contrast to Marx's theory of progressive immiseration of the proletariat (deterioration of conditions).
The effect was given the title Tocqueville's law by Raymond Aron in In Defense of Decadent Europe (1977) referring to the phenomenon whereby "evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable, become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested," described by Alexis de Tocqueville in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).
Origin
Alexis de Tocqueville described the phenomenon in his book Democracy in America (1840):
"The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on."
The reform and revolution paradox was explained in his next book, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856):
"The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform."
Dutch translation
From Langs de afgrond p. 268:
"onrecht wordt des te heviger gevoeld naarmate het afneemt."
See also
