Tocqueville and Technology: Essay Contest

500 words. Win a trip to Tocqueville’s Normandy chateau to explore your ideas further.

Winning entries will win a trip to a weekend of talks and discussions on Tocqueville and Technology at the place where Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America

In 1831, the French government sent Alexis de Tocqueville to the United States on a nine-month assignment to study the prison system. Instead, he rode between Boston, New Orleans, Michigan and the Ohio Valley, meeting everyone from Andrew Jackson to frontier farmers. His notes and impressions would later become Democracy in America – a dispatch from what Tocqueville believed was the future. It also reads, now, as a sharp diagnosis of the interplay between AI and human autonomy.

All around him, Tocqueville observed how the hierarchies of rank and obligation that still dominated in Europe were dissolving and something new was taking their place.

Tocqueville found much to admire in the young country. Federalism pushed decisions down to the level where citizens could actually make them, while a dense web of voluntary associations meant that people solved problems together, rather than waiting for Washington to act. Meanwhile, a vigorous religious culture kept civic life from being swallowed by the state. In other words, people were practicing self-government all the time.

Tocqueville, however, feared what equality might unleash without these defenses. He worried about a world of formally equal but practically isolated individuals, who would retreat into private life. Civil society would give way to a centralizing state. With no aristocracy or established church left to dissent from the majority, public opinion would create a suffocating pressure to conform.

Having lost the old poetry and gods, these democratic peoples would increasingly focus their imagination onto man and the dream of endless progress. As people turned to technology and machines, he foresaw the rise of a new industrial aristocracy, who would control labor and capital in the same way as its predecessor had controlled land.

Now that we have technology that can take over the work of thinking and deciding so smoothly that we barely notice it, Tocqueville’s diagnosis has a new urgency.

The competition

On June 13-14th, Cosmos will be hosting intellectuals, founders, investors, and writers for two days of salons and lectures on Tocqueville at the chateau in Normandy where he wrote Democracy in America.

We’re offering one to two places to the winners of the essay competition, while covering the costs of travel and accommodation in full.

If you want to take part, submit a <500 word essay on one of these prompts by May 4th:

1. Tocqueville warned of a “tutelary power” that would keep citizens in perpetual childhood. How have Tocqueville’s concerns migrated from institutions to algorithms, and does AI fulfill or transform this fear?

2. Tocqueville argued that democratic peoples, having lost the poetry of heroes and gods, would find poetry in technology. Does AI vindicate this account of the democratic soul, or does it reveal its limits?

You can find more detail on the competition, along with the entry form here:

---

Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher-Builders, technologists building AI for human flourishing. We run fellowships, fund AI prototypes, and host seminars with institutions like Oxford, Aspen Institute, and Liberty Fund.