Celerity

Rapidity, quickness.

In the chap­ter Unlim­it­ed Pow­er of the Major­i­ty in the Unit­ed States, and its Con­se­quences in Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca, Alex­is de Toc­queville wrote «In Amer­i­ca the author­i­ty exer­cised by the leg­is­la­tures is supreme; noth­ing pre­vents them from accom­plish­ing their wish­es with celer­i­ty and with irre­sistible pow­er, and they are sup­plied with new rep­re­sen­ta­tives every year.»

Toc­queville clear­ly mis­ap­pre­hend­ed the nature of Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment. This whole chap­ter ignores the sys­tems of checks against the pow­er of the major­i­ty and Toc­queville reveals here his prej­u­dice. He did write with some admi­ra­tion about the strengths of Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and accu­rate­ly describe many of its weak­ness­es, but accus­ing Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment of falling prey to the pas­sions of mob rule is just plain off the mark, as it was in the 1830s.

It is quite telling that the chap­ter imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing this one is Mit­i­ga­tions of the Tyran­ny of the Major­i­ty. Well, maybe he did­n’t quite mean what he wrote in this chapter.

Either way, he taught me a word.