What does Tocqueville paradox mean?

Tocqueville once wrote in the fourth chapter of the third part of "The Old System and the Great Revolution", "Revolution does not always happen because people's situation is getting worse and worse. The most common situation is that those who have been enduring the most unbearable laws without complaint will throw them away once the pressure of the law is relieved. ..... people patiently endure pain and think it is inevitable. But once someone comes up with the idea of eliminating pain, it becomes unbearable. All the evils that were eliminated at that time seemed to make people more aware of other evils, so people's emotions became stronger: the pain was indeed reduced, but the feeling was more acute. "

This is the famous "Tocqueville Paradox". In fact, Tolstoy's so-called "paradox" is some of his random feelings, which is not very rigorous in logic. Later, some scholars raised his theory to a high level, and then put forward "theories" such as "progress leads to dissatisfaction" and "looseness leads to collapse", which are actually difficult to explain under the banner of Tolstoy, and called them "Tolstoy's law".

Gao Yi, a teacher in the history department of Peking University, once published a monograph on "Tocqueville Paradox" in the fifth issue of World History (20 13), and introduced the origin and development of Tocqueville's statement. Teachers' colleges especially emphasize that Tolstoy, as a historian who became a monk halfway, lacked rigor in logic, so that he overemphasized the importance of psychological factors and even raised psychological factors to the position of decisive factors. However, a close reading of Tolstoy's works reveals that, in his view, the real cause of the Great Revolution was the old government's policy of abolishing political freedom and administrative centralization. This is Tolstoy's original intention.

Therefore, we should pay attention to this when reading Tolstoy's works. This should be the case when reading The Old System and the Great Revolution, and so should On American Democracy.