Alexis de Tocqueville is invoked in The Bob Zadek Show as a historical authority on American self-government rather than discussed as a biographical or intellectual subject. Across the excerpts, he appears in two distinct contexts: Jonathan Haidt’s account of American “art of association” and its alleged erosion, and Ilya Somin’s discussion of the jury system as a mechanism of popular participation in governance. The sources attribute to Tocqueville both an observation about American civic habits made during his 1831 travels and a view of the jury’s role in governance, but they do not describe his life, his writings, or the substance of his political thought beyond those two points.
Haidt on the art of association
In the September 2018 episode on The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt cited Tocqueville’s travels in the United States in 1831 as evidence of a distinctive American capacity for voluntary association. According to Haidt, Tocqueville “marveled at how good we were at the art of association,” and Haidt rendered Tocqueville’s observation as follows: “When there’s anything to be done,” he said, “in France it would be done by the king or the government, in England it would be done by the aristocracy, but in America, they form a committee, they form an association to put on a play, to build a hospital, to start a library, for everything like the Ben Franklin sort of attitude.” Haidt characterized this “can-do, we can do it ourselves, we don’t need authorities above us” attitude as, in Tocqueville’s view, “the secret of our successful experiment in democracy.” Haidt added that in 1831 it was not at all clear that this experiment would work, but that Tocqueville was very optimistic. [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]
Haidt deployed Tocqueville’s admiration for American associational life as the historical baseline against which he measured contemporary practices. His argument was that preventing children from practicing for freedom until they are 14 or 15, and over-supervising them even then, should be expected to produce college graduates who are less skillful at dealing with people unlike themselves and at solving problems without appeal to authority, and who are more likely to call for the involvement of authority, such as law enforcement or attorneys who will sue for them. In Haidt’s framing, Tocqueville’s observation about the art of association supplies the standard that current child-rearing and campus practices are said to undermine. The excerpt attributes the argument about over-protection and its consequences to Haidt; the Tocqueville material appears within Haidt’s own remarks, not as a separate segment or as a position advanced by Bob Zadek.
Somin on the jury system
Ilya Somin invoked Tocqueville twice in the two 2022 episodes devoted to the National Constitution Center’s “Guardrails of Democracy” project. In both episodes, Somin described the libertarian team’s report as having three sections, the third of which concerns ways to increase people’s opportunities to participate in governance, “particularly by strengthening the jury system, which according to the founding fathers and many others like Alexis de Tocqueville, is a central mechanism by which ordinary people can participate in governance, but which to a large extent has been lost or at least degraded over the last several decades.” The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022) The same formulation appears in the companion episode, where Somin again grouped Tocqueville with the founding fathers as authorities for the jury’s role as a central mechanism of ordinary participation in government. 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022)
In both episodes, the Tocqueville reference functions as supporting authority for a policy proposal rather than as a topic of discussion. Somin did not elaborate on what Tocqueville wrote about juries, when he wrote it, or how his account relates to the founding generation’s views; the excerpts contain only the attribution of the jury-as-participation view to Tocqueville and others. The surrounding discussion in the two episodes concerns the report’s three sections: immediate threats to the integrity of the electoral system, such as President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result; broader empowerment of people to have a meaningful say in the policies they live under, including voting with their feet in the federal system and decision-making in the private sector; and increased opportunities to participate in governance through the jury system. 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022)
Across episodes: no development
Tocqueville appears in three episodes spanning 2018 to 2022 — the Haidt episode on The Coddling of the American Mind and the two Somin episodes on the National Constitution Center’s “Guardrails of Democracy” project — but the excerpts show no development in how he is treated: in each case he is cited briefly as an authority for a claim the guest is making, with no episode responding to or revising an earlier episode’s use of him.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Tocqueville’s nationality, dates of birth or death, or the titles of his works, and they do not describe the content of his writings beyond the two attributed views — the observation about the American art of association and the view of the jury as a mechanism of ordinary participation in governance. Nothing in the excerpts indicates what Tocqueville concluded about the durability of American democracy, how his account of association related to his broader thought, or how the two guests’ uses of him might connect. The excerpts also do not show Bob Zadek offering his own characterization of Tocqueville; in the available material Tocqueville is spoken about only by Haidt and Somin.