On page 209 of Mr. Alexis de Tocqueville’s book, Democracy in America (the first Volume), he said that “I hold it to be sufficiently demonstrated that universal suffrage is by no means a gurantee of the wisdom of the popular choice. Whatever its advantages may be, this is not one of them.”
This passage is a very intriguing one, especially for those who advocate Democratic ideals dearly as a form of idea. My professor in philosophy at the University of the Philippines once said in our class that it is a bad habit to develop faith in ideas of philosophers who were long dead (and perhaps still living). What he was saying then sounds to me in an ironic tone, since he himself is teaching us that time the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, a known existentialist. It must be that Kierkegaard rejects himself being part of the System, i.e. he is not a philosopher belonging to the System. And Kierkegaard is referring to Hegel as the fine example of a philosopher who is included in the System or part of its collaborators. They surely, the colaborators of the System, somehow tries to develop this idea that the function of human being is to trust ideas like those belong to philosophical system. Kierkegaard, in his thoughts, doesn’t want to belong to System because he thinks that its ideas are meant to be object of faith and he wants to let people see that (1) faith should not be to ideas because it guarantees based on approximation and (2) faith should be to something else, which is free from some kind of guarantee where approximation is involved.
Suffrage is a right according to many dictionaries available at www.dictionary.com, and in one it says “a vote cast in deciding a disputed question or in electing a person to office. ” The guarantee that the practice of suffrage, based on its ideal form, tries to provide in an implied manner through its available definitions, is the one that Tocqueville tries to attack in his remarks above. How intriguing!
I have always held as an intuition that, at least in principle, democratic ideals which are according to philosophers who tries to attract human trust towards ideas, seems contestable. Here, I will try to expose them.
