ore likely to speak of authoritarianism, despotism, or arbitrary government as a "threat" to democracy than as an "alternative," since alternative implies some degree of acceptability.) De Tocqueville is certainly aware of despotism as an alternative to democracy. But in reading Democracy in America, we will find that it is not the alternative he has primarily in mind. Indeed, he finds democracy and despotism to have far more in common with each other than with a third alternative, the alternative which he most often compares to democracy. Moreover, he argues that democracy far more likely to shift into despotism than it is to shift into this third alternative.
The third alternative, and the one to which de Tocqueville is chiefly concerned to compare and contrast democracy, is aristocracy. As a comparison to democracy, indeed as a starting point by which to identify and draw out the characteristics of democracy, de Tocqueville considered it vastly more important than despotism. In the index to Democracy in America, only three lines are devoted to "despotism," while fifty-four lines are devoted to "aristocracies" and "aristocracy." Whereas despotism was, to de Tocqueville, a rather close cousin to democracy in many respects (for reasons which we will examine below), he viewed aristocracy as a fundamentally different basis for society.
To a present-day American, aristocracy is a term to which we are likely to have almost no clear concept attached. We may know that the term means "rule by the few," but we also sense that "the few," in the sense of an aristocracy, does not mean simply authoritarian government by a Central Committee or military junta; we regard such government as merely a variant form of authoritarianism--or in de Tocqueville's terminology, despotism. Whatever connotations we have for "aristocracy" are associated almost entirely with the rather distant past. No modern nation proclaims itself to have an ari...