CONCEPT
Tyranny of the Majority
Tocqueville's 1830s diagnosis of the distinctively democratic form of social control — the enforcement of intellectual conformity through the withdrawal of social warmth rather than political coercion, and the intellectual ancestor of Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence.
The tyranny of the majority is Alexis de Tocqueville's name for a form of social control that Noelle-Neumann identified as the direct intellectual ancestor of the spiral of silence theory. Observing American democracy in the 1830s, Tocqueville described a mechanism more subtle and more effective than any political coercion: the enforcement of intellectual conformity through the withdrawal of social warmth. 'The master no longer says: Think as I do or you shall die,' Tocqueville wrote. 'He says: You are free to think differently from me, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.' The punishment is not violence. It is the cold shoulder. And the cold shoulder, for a social animal whose deepest wiring equates social exclusion with death, is sufficient. Noelle-Neumann cited Tocqueville more than any other classical thinker as she developed her empirical apparatus for measuring exactly this mechanism in twentieth-century democratic life.
