Examples Of Individualism In Richard David Tocqueville

“I have no name, no title” (Shakespeare 4.1.266). With these words, former King Richard II laments his deposition at the hands of Bolingbroke, but his reasoning extends beyond simply his loss of power. In Richard’s world a name means everything, in that it connects an individual to both his ancestors and his descendents. Consequently, when Richard loses his title, he also loses his identity. Likewise, when the aristocracy melts away in the democratic centuries, individuals lose their ties to the past and to the future and become isolated. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville explores the sources and ramifications of this phenomenon, which he calls individualism. However, Tocqueville is not the only thinker to comment on the operations of individualism

For instance, in Richard’s world, a life builds around the connection to one’s ancestors and descendants. In the play, characters repeatedly appeal to their bloodlines for authority and power. Moreover, society expects people to be like their ancestors, even the ones who lived long before they did. For example, Gaunt scolds Richard by comparing him, unfavorably, to his grandfather with the lines, “had thy grandsire with a prophet’s eye / Seen how his son’s son should destroy his sons, / From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame” (Shakespeare 2.1.110-112). With these words, Gaunt blames Richard not only for destroying his own reputation, but also for destroying the reputation of all his descendants. When Bolingbroke strips Richard of his kingship, Richard feels isolated because he lost his connection to his ancestors and descendants, who will no longer hold the same power or title he did. Richard expresses his feeling that he lost his identity when he says “I have no name, no title, / No, not that name was given me at the font, / But ‘tis usurped. Alack the heavy day, / That I have worn so many winters out / And know not now what name to call myself” (Shakespeare 4.1.265-270). Tocqueville argues that, like Richard, many democratic citizens feel the same distance from others and from an identity as a consequence of

According to Tocqueville, the source of individualism in democratic societies is the equality of conditions (Tocqueville 483). As class associations previously found in aristocracies disappear, each citizen isolates himself “from the mass of those like him” and withdraws “to one side with his family and his friends” (Tocqueville 482). After the individual removes himself from those similar to him, he creates “a little society for his own use” and then “willingly abandons society at large” (Tocqueville 482). The individual finds himself stranded, removed from the family lineage that bonded members of different generations in aristocratic times. Likewise, Hobbes also characterizes individualism through his imagined “state of nature,” a world in which men are “so equal in the faculties of body and mind” that they all hope to achieve the same ends (Hobbes 74-75). Therefore, Hobbes and Tocqueville agree that equality is the source of