Michael Barone
THE JOURNEY OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
On the eleventh of May, 1831, two young French aristocrats, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, arrived from France in Newport, Rhode Island, after sailing for thirty-eight days. They were lawyers with a commission to study American prisons, which they did. But Tocqueville, who was only twenty-five when he landed, did much more. During the course of his 288 days of travels in the young republic, he made the observations and accumulated the material that he fashioned into the two volumes of his Democracy in America, which the eminent political scientist and Tocqueville translator Harvey Mansfield has called “the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”
Tocqueville conversed with President Andrew Jackson at a reception in the White House and sat next to former President John Quincy Adams at a dinner in Boston. He was escorted around Washington by Joel Poinsett, the Charleston-born botanist and future secretary of war, and by Edward Everett, the Boston-born lawyer and future secretary of state. He met ninety-five-year-old Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Sam Houston, the future first president of the Republic of Texas. He attended town meetings in New England and observed slave markets in the South. He visited Indian villages in the Michigan Territory, voyaged on steamboats that blew up shortly after he disembarked, and traveled by stagecoach through Columbia, South Carolina.
Tocqueville was an aristocrat whose family suffered during the French Revolution. His great-grandfather Malesherbes, a distinguished philosopher and lawyer, who was defense counsel in the trial of King Louis XVI, was guillotined months after his client; his father escaped the guillotine only because of the fall of Robespierre three days before he was to be guillotined, and when he left prison at age twenty-two his hair had turned completely white. As a child he met the restored King Louis XVIII after the downfall of Napoleon, and while he and his family thrived under Louis, his brother Charles X, and the new bourgeois King Louis Philippe, the specter of the bloodshed and tumult of the revolution—and the threat of another revolution—was always in their thoughts.
DEMOCRACY: THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
Tocqueville knew before his arrival that America was different: a democracy, the word he used in his title. The young republic had evolved in important respects from the days of the Founders. Eighteenth-century America was still a deferential society, and at the time of the Constitution most states allowed only those with a certain amount of property to vote. It was considered dangerous to allow those without property, without a stake in society, to be in a position to determine the course of government. However, in those first decades of the republic, as historian Gordon Wood has written, “American society became less deferential and more democratic.” Tocqueville was struck by the fact that former president Adams was treated as just another guest at dinner and not as a monarch.
By the 1830s, almost all the states had extended the franchise to all white adult males. Some still resisted, as John Randolph of Roanoke did at Virginia’s Constitutional Convention, decrying “the all-prevailing principle that Numbers, and Numbers alone are to regulate all things in political society” and the prospect that government “was to divorce property from power.” But Randolph’s was a minority view in Virginia, as elsewhere. Universal suffrage did not seem dangerous to most legislators in a nation where the large majority of people were farmers who owned their own land and were therefore property holders. On the other hand, for French aristocrats of Tocqueville’s time, with their still-vibrant dread of the French Revolution, democracy seemed very dangerous indeed. Tocqueville disagreed, recognizing democracy’s dangers but also its opportunities and reasons for hope—and also seeing democracy as the irresistible wave of the future.
THE POWER OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT
One danger Tocqueville perceived in democracy was what he called “individualism,” the tendency of citizens, lacking the relations between aristocrats and their inferiors to bind them together, to isolate themselves and withdraw from society. Democracy, he wrote, “threatens to confine [the citizen] wholly in the solitude of his own heart.” But the America he observed avoided this danger, he believed, because of two important factors. “The Americans have combated the individualism to which equality gives birth with freedom, and they have defeated it.”
One factor was the nature and role of government—specifically, local governments. At the time of his visit, Americans seldom came into contact with the federal government, with the single exception of the post office. But they were of necessity in constant contact with local governments—the New England towns and townships, Southern counties—and, being affected by their decisions, took advantage of the opportunity to participate in its activities. “Thus by charging citizens with the administration of small affairs, much more than by leaving the government of great ones to them,” he writes, “one interests them in the public good and makes them see the need they constantly have for one another in order to produce it. . . . Local freedoms . . . constantly bring men closer to one another.”
What Tocqueville expresses is an appreciation of the conservative principle that Catholic philosophers refer to as subsidiarity. Instead of having a central government superintend local affairs, as was the case in France—where that system long predated the French Revolution, as Tocqueville documented in his later book The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution—democracy in America tended to reserve control of all matters that could be handled at that level to local governments, chosen by people who would remain close to their representatives. The Constitution limited the powers of the federal government and reserved other matters to the state governments; state governments in turn delegated to local governments matters that could be addressed locally.
Not every issue could be so delegated, Tocqueville realized. One of the major political events during his visit was the Nullification Crisis, in which the South Carolina legislature, encouraged by Vice President John C. Calhoun, declared that it had the right to nullify a tariff law passed by Congress. President Andrew Jackson reacted furiously, sending federal troops to enforce the law while at the same time moving Congress toward a compromise position on the tariff, thereby addressing some of South Carolina’s grievances. Tocqueville’s visit also coincided with the success of Jackson’s Indian removal policies—the forced movement of the Five Civilized Tribes from the East to what is now Oklahoma over what has come to be called the Trail of Tears. Tocqueville actually witnessed some of the Indians moving west.
These issues foreshadowed crises and illustrated problems that Tocqueville addressed in the last chapters of the first volume of Democracy in America, on the fact that blacks and Indians were not considered citizens in this democratic republic. He foresaw the possibility of the rupture of civil war and the tragic fate of many Native Americans even as he saluted the way that democracy bound citizens together through local government. And perhaps he may even be seen as having pointed to the successes of the civil rights movement when he wrote, “To combat the evils that equality can produce there is only one efficacious remedy: it is political freedom.”
THE POWER OF NONGOVERNMENTAL SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
But the “habits of the heart”—another Tocqueville phrase—fostered by involvement in local government also did something else, and here we encounter the second reason Americans avoided the isolation of what Tocqueville calls “individualism.” Americans were busy starting thousands of voluntary associations, creating civil society—mediating institutions between individuals and government, institutions through which individuals could affect government or could change society without involving government at all.
Tocqueville paints a picture of a busy people. “Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of turmoil,” he writes in Volume 1 of Democracy in America:
A confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ears at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or school. Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government, whereas others gather to proclaim that the men in place are the fathers of their country. Here are others still who, regarding drunkenness as the principle source of the evils of the state, come solemnly to pledge themselves to give an example of temperance.
There is a note of astonishment here, particularly in that last sentence where the wine-drinking French aristocrat contemplates the possibility of the prohibition of alcohol.
Tocqueville arrived in America at a time when voluntary associations were championing causes that ultimately transformed the nation. They were particularly common in New England and upstate New York, which had largely been settled by New England Yankees, and where he spent much of his visit. The Yankee, as Orestes Brownson noted, tends to be “restless in body and mind, always scheming, always in motion, never satisfied with what he has, and always seeking to make the world like himself, or as uneasy as himself.” Tocqueville spent almost half his time in America in Yankee country (New England, upstate New York, the Upper Midwest), and he admired the reformist Yankee impulse as an example of democratic Americans working together in voluntary associations to improve their society. One of these efforts was the temperance movement, which ultimately persuaded the nation to embark for a dozen years on the “noble experiment” of prohibition of alcohol. That experiment failed, but in Tocqueville’s time the temperance movement did vastly reduce alcohol consumption in what one historian called “the alcoholic republic.” Another movement that was soon to begin was the women’s rights movement, which resulted in an amendment to the Constitution granting women the vote; Tocqueville was astonished to note that “women themselves often go to political assemblies and, by listening to political discourses, take a rest from household tedium.”
Another movement that was beginning to gain adherents was abolitionism—the move to abolish slavery—and the corresponding defense of slavery by Southerners. Just a few years before Tocqueville’s journey a state Constitutional Convention in Virginia narrowly rejected a provision to gradually abolish slavery, as all the states to the north had done. It’s tantalizing to contemplate how history would have unfolded if that decision had gone the other way. Even in the North most Americans considered abolitionists fanatics who would disrupt the Union, but the abolitionist cause had great moral power in a nation whose Declaration of Independence had declared, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
There was also a tension between the existence of slavery and the moral equality inherent in the Christianity professed by almost all Americans. “On my arrival in the country,” Tocqueville writes in Volume 1, “it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye.” In France and in other European countries with established churches, Tocqueville notes, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions.” Britain’s North American colonies had different religious traditions, and immigrants to the colonies and to the young republic brought other religions with them. The Founders, understanding this multivarious religious heritage, provided in the Constitution that there be no religious test for federal office and in the Bill of Rights that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This did not mean that there was an absolute separation of church and state—during Tocqueville’s visit Massachusetts still had an established state church—but as Tocqueville noted, “Diminishing the apparent force of a religion . . . came to increase its real power.”
Tocqueville thought that religious belief was more prevalent and stronger in America than in France and that Americans considered “it necessary to the maintenance of republic institutions.” “Religion,” he writes, “which, among Americans, never mixes directly in the government, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it.” Religious belief, he could observe, was the impulse behind the movements for temperance, women’s rights, and abolition of slavery; it was an impulse that gave strength to the observation of limits of the power of the state and of temporary voting majorities. “At the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything,” Tocqueville continues, “religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare anything.” Religion produced movements that could be described as liberal or liberating, but it also fostered a stubborn conservatism that would prevent the excesses and despotism fostered by the antireligious French Revolution.
Religion and law also combined to produce material prosperity. “One is astonished by the growing prosperity of the people,” Tocqueville writes at one point. In the two decades before Tocqueville’s visit, Americans had been building canals, and just before he arrived the first tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad were being laid down. Travel times and transportation costs were being hugely reduced and internal trade hugely increased, while American merchants plied the Atlantic and carried on the China trade and American whaling vessels pursued their prey in the South Pacific. Americans were moving westward in vast numbers, creating new New Englands in the Upper Midwest, new Pennsylvanias a little farther south, new slave plantations in the Mississippi Valley lands from which the Indians were being removed, and new communities of Scots-Irish from the Appalachian Mountains to Tennessee and into the technically foreign land of Texas.
UTOPIA, DYSTOPIA, AND WAR
Tocqueville was eerily prescient. He foresaw the possibility of civil war, but thought the North could not subdue a South bent on independence—that was probably true when he wrote, since the North’s victory depended on the industrialization and vast population growth that occurred between Tocqueville’s time and secession three decades later. Tocqueville mused about the possibility that the world in the twentieth century would be dominated by two great powers, one democratic and one despotic, America and Russia: the Cold War. He also foresaw that a democratic nation could descend into what he called a “soft” despotism. In that respect he anticipated the conservative critique of the growth of the federal government and many of the public policy initiatives of the past hundred years.
Tocqueville’s vivid picture of soft despotism appears almost abruptly, at the end of the second volume of Democracy in America. Up to that point, his depiction of democratic America is not entirely complimentary. He takes it for granted that democratic America cannot produce the high culture or fine arts fostered by aristocratic nations like France—something that was certainly true during the nineteenth century. He says that a democratic society is less likely than an aristocratic to value excellence and more likely to tolerate mediocrity. He thinks that democracy is more benign in America than it would be in France because it is not the product of a violent revolution that leaves classes divided against one another, but rather springs naturally from a society that was never very aristocratic to begin with.
On the whole, though, his account of the American experiment is positive. He sees Americans overcoming the dangers of individualism through involvement in local self-government and by their propensity to create and work in voluntary associations—the little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them. He sees religion—and the non-privileged place of different churches and sects—in America as tending to produce virtuous behavior and place limits on destructive impulses. He sees an America bursting with prosperity, resourceful in commerce, creative in invention, expanding rapidly over a continent even as it sends out ships to all parts of the world—an America where the ordinary person had a higher standard of living than ordinary people anywhere else on the globe, and one that seemed sure to ascend to greater heights.
He also sees a threat. America’s success is the result of things that could in time produce a future much gloomier and could prevent democratic America from achieving its potential. Near the end of the second volume of Democracy in America he presents this ominous vision, and conservative thinkers have thought his words presaged developments in American history running up to and including our own time:
I do not fear that in their chiefs [Americans] will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters. . . . I think therefore that the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing that has preceded it in the world; our contemporaries would not find its image in their memories. I myself seek in vain an expression that exactly reproduces the idea that I form of it for myself and that contains it; the old words despotism and tyranny are not suitable. The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I cannot name it.
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Here Tocqueville foresees a time when the forces he believes have enabled Americans to avoid the perils of individualism will no longer prevail. It is in part a demographic vision: the America in which Tocqueville arrived in 1830 was a country in which more than 90 percent of the people lived on farms. There was no city like Paris, which had 800,000 people and a population density of 59,000 per square mile. America’s largest city, New York, had just 200,000, Philadelphia 130,000, Washington 26,000, Charleston 30,000.
THE OVERTHROW OF A DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE
Over the next century, industrialization and immigration transformed the nation’s demography. By 1912, one hundred years ago, the United States did have enormous cities with, as Tocqueville put it, “an innumerable crowd”: New York had 5 million people, Chicago 2 million, Philadelphia 1.5 million. Vast waves of immigration arrived on American shores, from Ireland and Germany starting in the 1840s, eastern and southern Europe starting in the 1890s, as many as 1,200,000 a year in a nation of 86 million in the single year of 1907. These people worked in garment sweatshops and on auto and steel assembly lines; they owned no property, renting their homes and often not even having bank accounts; they took no part in local government except as voters supporting machine politicians; in some sense they seemed indeed no longer to “have a native country.” Or, as Robert Nisbet puts it, Americans increasingly suffered a “loss of community.” As Robert Putnam recently discovered, to his dismay, the parts of America that have the greatest ethnic and racial diversity are also the parts with the highest degree of lack of trust in others and lack of participation in voluntary associations: Los Angeles today; the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then the most densely populated place in the world, a century ago.
The Progressive politicians of that era responded to those conditions, and to their fears that the urban masses would rise in a violent revolution like the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Russian Revolution of 1917, by proclaiming that the Constitution’s old limitations on government were obsolete in a time of immigrant tenements and factory assembly lines. Government needed to regulate and control giant corporations and small employers alike and to provide a safety net for them. The result was the policy changes of the Progressive Era and New Deal. Tocqueville anticipated just this development:
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from every citizen. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.
Tocqueville in these words provides as trenchant a criticism of the welfare state and the regulatory state as any modern conservative thinker—and managed to do so eighty years before the Progressives, a century before the New Deal, 130 years before the Great Society, and 180 years before the administration of the current president. Local self-government has been in large measure elbowed aside by a centralized bureaucratic apparatus, run by alleged experts, justified by the supposed inability of ordinary people to take care of themselves and navigate the shoals and reefs of an advanced industrial society. This soft despotism—a phrase Tocqueville scholars like Paul Rahe have used, though Tocqueville doesn’t use it himself—assumes that people are incompetent children, and in treating them like children encourages them to behave that way.
In an earlier passage Tocqueville proposes the possibility that something far worse could come into existence, a hard despotism or tyranny that might try to seize the operation of every institution of society and abolish freedoms of speech and religion—twentieth-century totalitarianism, in a word. If he can be said to have anticipated Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, he also anticipated Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin. He clearly indicates that soft despotism is preferable, but he goes on to insist that soft despotism will have a negative effect on people’s character, that it will tend to eradicate the virtue that he saw in democratic Americans in the 1830s. He writes:
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.
Consider for a moment Tocqueville’s description of a democratic people as “a herd of timid and industrious animals.” This is the aim, conservatives would argue, of the ideas of progressive education that have dominated American public schools since the 1920s. The “tutelary power” here, to use Tocqueville’s phrase, is a huge cadre of professional educators placed in control of the schools by the state and federal governments, replacing the local authorities who superintended public schools for most of the century after Tocqueville wrote and who tended to require a more rigorous course of study and one which emphasized the special character of American life as described by Tocqueville. The aim of progressive education is not to produce excellence, not to enable people to rise in life, but to teach basic reading and arithmetic and to absorb the discipline of the ringing bells and the time clock enough to enable them to make a living on Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line. There they could make enough money for food, clothing, and shelter and have enough leisure time for radio or movies or television—facilitating their pleasures, as Tocqueville puts it.
Many conservative thinkers have lamented the extent to which American society has come to resemble Tocqueville’s soft despotism—and have lamented even more that American voters seem to have continued to ratify it. In Tocqueville’s words, “citizens leave their dependence for a moment to indicate their master, and then reenter it.” In this conservative view, we are far along the road to soft despotism and there is no turning around.
A CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM
I want to suggest something different, something that is from my point of view a little more optimistic.
First of all, many of the features of America that Tocqueville describes are still part of American life. America still abounds in voluntary associations, for example, and more so than any other nation in the world. There are some indications that the percentage of people involved in such associations is declining, as Robert Putnam suggested in his book Bowling Alone, but there is countervailing evidence as well. The impulse to create and work in voluntary associations is still very much a part of American life. Americans give more money and volunteer more time for charities than any other nation in the world. While it is true that, as American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks has documented, conservatives and religious people tend to give more money to charity than their opposites, many liberals and secular people donate regularly. The American tradition of philanthropy is strong. A century ago, before the income and estate taxes, amassers of great fortunes like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller gave enormous sums to charity and changed American life. Carnegie built thousands of libraries in which millions of Americans received their self-education. Rockefeller created the medical research institutions and the advanced medical schools in which America still leads the world, as well as eradicating nutrition deficiency diseases. Currently we see Bill Gates devoting most of his wealth to his charitable foundation, with some creative programs he hopes will transform the lives of countless people for the better. Our “vast tutelary power” of government does not have a monopoly in these areas.
Second, in two important respects America has remained an exceptional nation, in ways that Tocqueville was the first to recognize. One is that we are still by and large a religious people and a people who are respectful of the religions of others. To be sure, there is some increase in the percentage of Americans willing to identify themselves as unbelievers. But, if anything, the number of strong believers has been rising, not declining. The second way America has remained an exceptional nation is that we are once again, as we were in Tocqueville’s time but arguably were not in the first half of the twentieth century, a property owners’ democracy. Most Americans in the course of their adult working lives accumulate significant amounts—hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—of property in the form of residential real estate and financial instruments. True, housing values have had a sharp decline, and some of what appeared to be housing wealth has turned out to be a bubble, but by and large the descendants of those unpropertied immigrants and factory workers of one hundred years ago do own property, or soon will, in significant amounts. Religion and property both, as Tocqueville taught, modulate our extreme impulses and make us more likely to work together in government and voluntary associations. They make us less likely to submit to being part of Tocqueville’s “herd of timid and industrious animals.”
Finally, a strong case can be made that American voters have not supinely ratified the creation of soft despotism. They have tended to resist it. When parties in power have tried to expand vastly the size and scope of government, they have been sharply rebuked by the voters. Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and attempted abolition of Congress’s prerogative of declaring war was rebuked by the record majority cast for Warren G. Harding’s “return to normalcy” in 1920. Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and New Dealer governors’ refusal to enforce the law against illegal sit-down strikes was rebuked in the elections of 1938 and subsequent years, which produced anti–New Deal Congresses for the next twenty years. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was soundly rebuked in the elections of 1966 and 1968, and the stagflation that prevailed during Jimmy Carter’s presidency produced a forty-four-state landslide for Ronald Reagan in 1980. The two most recent Democratic presidents, after raising taxes and advancing a national health care plan, were both rebuked sharply by record Republican victories in the off-year elections of 1994 and 2010.
Many conservative thinkers would reply that those victories did not change the trajectory of public policy. Creeping socialism, they argue, has continued to creep. There is much to this, but the argument is overstated. In point of fact, there have been some reversals of policies that advance soft despotism. Tax rates were vastly cut and wartime nationalization of the railroads and shipyards was ended after 1920—and the latter policy was not repeated in World War II. The Republican Congress elected in 1946 rejected New Deal policies for national health insurance, federal aid to education, government-built housing; it ended wartime wage and price controls, and it significantly restricted the powers of labor unions. These public policies were enduring—some for a generation, some to this day—and they led to postwar prosperity when almost everyone expected a return to depression. The elections rejecting the Great Society led over the next twenty years, during administrations of both parties, to deregulation of transportation and communications, which squeezed huge costs out of goods and services and made possible the quarter century of robust growth following the tax and spending cuts that resulted from the 1980 election. The 1990s saw a vast decrease in welfare dependency and crime, resulting almost entirely from the pioneering efforts of reformers in state and local government—like Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani—which were imitated and adapted in other states and cities, and in which the federal government played only a late supporting role. The 2010 elections have not been followed yet by major policy reversals, but it is not difficult to imagine some. The current president’s health-care law, which he expected to be popular, has instead become so unpopular that he barely mentioned it in his State of the Union address during his campaign for reelection.
TOCQUEVILLE’S AMERICA
Tocqueville’s prescience earns the last word for this man of extraordinarily piercing intelligence, an aristocrat who was so alert to the strengths of democracy even while keenly identifying its weakness. To read even a few of his short paragraphs, densely packed with insight, requires concentration and rereading; to read and absorb whole chapters can take an afternoon or an evening; to appreciate the full scope of his achievement in Democracy in America could consume a lifetime. Yet this extraordinary man, one of the great thinkers of the ages, also had a faith in the capacity of ordinary people, given the right circumstances, to govern themselves and contribute to the building of a decent and virtuous society. Those who advocate the course of soft despotism lack this faith; they see ordinary people as incapable of self-governance, in need of a shepherd to guide the herd the right way. Tocqueville sees us ordinary humans as something better. Nobody says it better than Tocqueville himself, and nothing could provide a more fitting conclusion to these reflections than the final passage of Democracy in America:
As for myself, having come to the final stage of my course, to discover from afar, but at once, all the diverse objects that I had contemplated separately in advancing, I feel full of fears and full of hopes. I see great perils that it is possible to ward off; great evils that one can avoid or restrain, and I become more and more firm in the belief that to be honest and prosperous, it is still enough for democratic nations to wish it.
I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries have thought that peoples are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force born of previous events, the race, the soil or the climate.
Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous nations: Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man in powerful and free; so are societies.
Nations of our day cannot have it that conditions within them are not equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads to servitude or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.