"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it"
About this Quote
War is easiest to sell when it feels like someone else started it; it is hardest to stop when everyone has already paid for it. Tocqueville’s line is a coolly engineered paradox: democracies, supposedly volatile and crowd-driven, are in fact institutionally slow to ignite and socially stubborn to extinguish. The sentence works because it captures a two-stage trap built into popular government.
To begin a war, a democratic public needs more than a ruler’s ambition. It needs a story that can survive scrutiny, competing interests, and the friction of elections. Consent has to be manufactured across factions, and Tocqueville is shrewd about how reluctant majorities can be when costs are visible and benefits are abstract.
To end a war, the same mechanisms that protect against rashness become shackles. Once casualties, taxes, and national pride are on the ledger, quitting reads like admitting the whole investment was foolish. Leaders fear the voter’s verdict; voters fear the humiliation of “wasted” sacrifice. The subtext is not that democracies are pacifist, but that they are reputation-obsessed: they can be pushed into war by outrage, then held there by the dread of looking weak.
Context matters. Tocqueville, watching early American democracy and writing in the shadow of revolutionary Europe and Napoleonic militarism, is diagnosing a new political creature: a state whose legitimacy comes from the people, and whose wars therefore implicate the people. The cynicism is gentle but real: in democracies, war doesn’t just mobilize armies; it mobilizes egos, and egos don’t demobilize on schedule.
To begin a war, a democratic public needs more than a ruler’s ambition. It needs a story that can survive scrutiny, competing interests, and the friction of elections. Consent has to be manufactured across factions, and Tocqueville is shrewd about how reluctant majorities can be when costs are visible and benefits are abstract.
To end a war, the same mechanisms that protect against rashness become shackles. Once casualties, taxes, and national pride are on the ledger, quitting reads like admitting the whole investment was foolish. Leaders fear the voter’s verdict; voters fear the humiliation of “wasted” sacrifice. The subtext is not that democracies are pacifist, but that they are reputation-obsessed: they can be pushed into war by outrage, then held there by the dread of looking weak.
Context matters. Tocqueville, watching early American democracy and writing in the shadow of revolutionary Europe and Napoleonic militarism, is diagnosing a new political creature: a state whose legitimacy comes from the people, and whose wars therefore implicate the people. The cynicism is gentle but real: in democracies, war doesn’t just mobilize armies; it mobilizes egos, and egos don’t demobilize on schedule.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by Alexis
Add to List
