ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (his family name was Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel) was born on 29 July 1805 in Paris, and died on 16 April 1859 in Cannes. In a short and not wholly happy life, he wrote two of the most important works to grace the discipline that has since come to be labeled political sociology. When he wrote them, Auguste Comte had barely coined the barbarous but indispensable word “sociology”; nonetheless, Tocqueville was aware that he was engaged in something novel and was not embarrassed to claim that the novelty of American political experience demanded a new political science. What Tocqueville wrote might also be described as “philosophical history”; it was not a philosophical analysis of the concept of democracy, nor a simple narrative of the origins of American political institutions, but a form of political theory that used historical evidence to teach general lessons about the prospects for politics in the present.
In spite of the novelty of Tocqueville’s own work, the genre went back at least as far as Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, and Tocqueville’s work stands comparison with anything in the genre. Democracy in America was an immediate success in England, France, and the United States; The Old Regime and the Revolution was an equally immediate success in France when it appeared in 1856. Under the Third Republic, it was rather soon submerged beneath more patriotic, more populist, and, in due course, more Marxist accounts of the origins of the Revolution. So far as French intellectual life is concerned, Tocqueville’s virtues were “rediscovered” by Raymond Aron some forty-odd years ago—an episode that left Americans remarking that they had never lost sight of them—but he has, so to speak, come fully into his own in his native country only during the past twenty years as the liberal interpretations of the French Revolution offered by François Furet and Pierre Rosanvallon have gained ground and Marxist interpretations have lost credibility1
As we shall see, both Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution were written for French readers rather than British and American ones. Democracy in America might have had any number of subtitles along the lines of “and why equality is consistent with liberty in America and probably not in France.” It remains true, however, that Democracy in America has until recent years fallen into the hands of the British and the Americans, and that even The Old Regime and the Revolution was for many years more highly regarded by American political sociologists as a contribution to the theory of revolution than by French historians as a contribution to the history of the Great French Revolution.
We must begin by placing the author in his times and among his family. Eleven years before Alexis’s birth, Tocqueville’s father, Hervé, had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Revolution. Hervé had recently married the granddaughter of Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the statesman and lawyer who defended Louis XVI at his trial; during the Terror, the revolutionaries duly took their revenge on Malesherbes, his family, and his friends. Before the Revolution, Malesherbes had enabled the Encyclopédistes to publish their work, but past services to the Enlightenment counted for nothing in the Terror. In December 1793, Hervé and his new wife, together with his in-laws and many friends of the family, were taken up and imprisoned. Malesherbes was executed along with Louise’s father and other members of the family; Hervé and Louise might have met the same fate if the Terror had not ended with the fall of Robespierre and their release from jail. Hervé was twenty-one; when he emerged from prison, his hair was white, while Louise was permanently neurasthenic and a lifelong sufferer from migraines. At the outset of the Revolution, Hervé had been mildly liberal and reformist, hoping that the Revolution of 1789 would install a constitutional monarchy along the lines of the government established in Britain by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was the hope of many English admirers of the Revolution at the time. It had never occurred to him that reform involved breaking with the monarchy; after their encounter with the Terror, Hervé de Tocqueville and his family remained staunch royalists. The impact of his father’s sufferings on the future author of Democracy in America has always puzzled commentators. The younger Tocqueville was not a simple royalist, nor a wholehearted democrat. He was an aristocratic liberal. What he felt was an attachment to the prerevolutionary monarchy along with an affection for the democracy he saw in America.
This might or might not have been an entirely coherent political attitude, but it certainly set him at odds with the bourgeois “July Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe and with the bourgeois republic of February 1848. His dislike of the July Monarchy was a family characteristic. There is no evidence that Hervé conspired against the First Empire or plotted with the exiled court of Louis XVIII; nonetheless, he was known to be devoted to the Bourbon monarchy. The defeat of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration allowed Hervé to claim his due as a loyal servant of the exiled monarchy, and he duly served as prefect of several departments, including the Oise, Moselle, and Somme, and finally Seine-et-Oise, where he enjoyed the life of a courtier-administrator and happily attended Charles X at Versailles and Saint-Cloud. He gave up the post when he became a member of the House of Peers in 1828, and left politics for good in 1830 when Louis-Philippe was installed during the July Revolution.
Hervé died at the age of eighty-four in 1856, only three years before his youngest son. His wife had died twenty years before him, in 1836; she was only fifty-four years old, and her youngest son described her as having died “after twenty years of misery.”2 The frailty and melancholy that were so marked in Alexis were probably inherited from her. Hervé was politically clumsy, and his career was marred at least as much by his own impulsiveness as by the ill will of his rivals and superiors, but he was a robust and self-confident figure. His wife did not share his vigor and self-confidence, but she shared his politics, taking if anything a more intensely royalist and Catholic stand than he.
Alexis was the third son; his relations with his older brothers were not always smooth. Indeed, the oldest of them, Hyppolite, born in 1797, irritated him intensely both because of his political antics and because of a certain silliness that infected all his activities; Edouard, born in 1800, had more of Alexis’s sobriety and melancholy, and they generally got on well. The one occasion for prolonged coldness in their relations was the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent accession of Louis Bonaparte, subsequently Napoléon III. Edouard and his wife were, in Tocqueville’s eyes, much too frightened by the 1848 Revolution itself, and then consumed by the fear of socialism that led so many of the French middle class to hail Louis Bonaparte as their savior and to ignore the criminality and corruption of his government. This seems a harsh view, especially in light of Tocqueville’s own Souvenirs, elegant and vivid as they are; they too might be described as irrationally fearful and exaggerated. Still, Tocqueville was clear that it was Louis Bonaparte who was to be blamed for extinguishing French liberties and that cooperation with him was impossible after his coup d’état in December 1851. When Edouard stood for the Assembly in 1852, there was a good deal of tension between them. It did not last, although Tocqueville’s most recent biographer suggests that the “fact that Edouard was so roundly defeated by the official candidate probably helped smooth over this difference of opinion.”3
Tocqueville’s boyhood and youth were apparently happy. He was at first educated by the Abbé Lesueur, a fiercely illiberal nonjuring priest who had been Hervé’s tutor twenty years before and who then went on to play the same role to all three boys. He was fonder of Alexis than of his brothers, and was thought by many observers to have been especially indulgent to Alexis. The latter’s intellectual success, both as a student at the lycée, and in later life, suggests the Abbé’s benevolence could hardly have done him much harm. Tocqueville was a passionate young man; his family suppressed scandalous details, but he fell violently in love with socially unsuitable young women and had to be persuaded by his friends that marriage to them would be a mistake. Acquiescence in their good advice was evidently reluctant. When he became famous after the publication of the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, he celebrated by marrying Mary Mottley, a middle-class Englishwoman some six to nine years older than himself, and an entirely unsuitable match from which his family had been trying to dissuade him for years.
It was not a wholly happy marriage, but it was, after its fashion, a wholly successful one. Husband and wife were passionately attached to each other, and if he occasionally threw plates at her when exasperated by the slow pace at which she ate her dinner, she did not let it disturb her. The story goes that when this happened, she responded only by asking the servant for another slice of paté. The two unhappinesses of their life together were their failure to have children—he was tubercular, and that may have made him sterile—and their failure to see eye to eye on religion. Mary Mottley had, of course, been brought up as an Anglican, but she converted to Catholicism before marriage and became extremely devout. Tocqueville appears to have lost his faith in his teens; he read the philosophes and found his belief damaged beyond repair. He retained something of the philosophes’ deism, and a belief in the immortality of the soul, but he could no longer accept the claims of the Catholic Church nor believe in the literal truth of Christianity. This was for him an extremely serious matter. Not only did it mean that he was forced to be less than frank with his much loved “bébé,” the Abbé Lesueur, it cast a somewhat odd light on his claims about the role of religion in sustaining liberty and the rule of law in the United States.
Unlike John Stuart Mill, his greatest student and interpreter, who had been brought up agnostic and who thought Christianity doomed to disappear in a more rational and more secular age, Tocqueville lamented his own loss of faith and thought the loss of Christian conviction was fraught with danger for society generally. These were anxieties he could not share with Mary. As a matter of kindness to her and duty to his society, he attended church regularly, and on his deathbed took the last rites. But his anxieties and interior disbelief he shared only with others, such as Madame Swetchine, a Russian emigrée some twenty years older than himself who was fascinated by mysticism and was able to speculate as he did on the inscrutability of divine purposes. It was not only Mary to whom he could not be entirely frank. One effect of the French Revolution was to persuade the nobility that they had been wrong to encourage the skeptics of the Enlightenment and that their fashionable agnosticism had been one of the causes of their undoing in the Revolution. After the Restoration, a devout Catholicism was the invariable accompaniment of loyalty to the throne. Tocqueville had no intention of challenging these loyalties, and therefore had to keep silent about the extent of his disbelief in their metaphysical foundations.
He frequently said that he loathed philosophical speculation, and it is certainly true that Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution eschew overt discussion of such issues as the plausibility or implausibility of the doctrine of the rights of man. They are the works of a moralist, but not of a moral philosopher. Nevertheless, his most notable quality was, by his own account and in the view of all observers, a constant restlessness of mind. It was a quality that did his political career no good. One of the most important qualities in a politician—especially a politician in the highly personal and strikingly corrupt political system of 1830–48 France—is the ability to suffer fools gracefully. Tocqueville lacked that ability to an almost pathological degree. He was not a snob, but he had a very acute sense of what it was about the manners and social style of the aristocracy that set them apart from the commercial middle class. Fawning, pandering, even passing the time of day with people he regarded as culturally, intellectually, and politically null was beyond him. He wanted to get on with the next matter that preoccupied his restless intelligence, and they knew it and resented it.
The outline of his career is briefly told. He began his career as a junior magistrate at Versailles; it was here that he made friends with Gustave de Beaumont, his companion on the great journey to America and a lifelong friend and ally. He had studied law in Paris in the mid-1820s, and was appointed to the post of juge auditeur in April 1827. The main interest of this position for the development of the ideas of the future author of Democracy in America is that it reinforced Tocqueville’s belief in the centrality of legal institutions and of attitudes toward the law in shaping the politics of modern societies. One of the many ways in which, he later thought, the old regime in France had weakened its own position was by its centralization of the legal system on Paris and its erosion of the common law in France. The other interesting feature of the post was that it provided the ostensible reason for the visit to America that Tocqueville and Beaumont made in 1831—to investigate the prison system of the United States, a task that the two colleagues in fact fulfilled so well that their report, the Système pénitentiaire, became a considerable resource for French prison reformers years after both of them had left government service.
Tocqueville’s time at Versailles was not disagreeable, even though it took him some time to make friends with his colleagues. Among other things, it left him time to attend Guizot’s lectures on the history of civilization, delivered between 1828 and 1830, and his notes suggest that Guizot’s conception of the purpose and method of this broad-gauge account of a whole culture rubbed off on him not only when he set out to write the history of the Revolution and its antecedents, but equally when he set out to characterize the democratic culture of the United States. The fall of Charles X and the installation of Louis-Philippe brought his career as an aspirant judge and administrator to an end. He was happy enough to see the back of Charles X, whose attempt to govern extralegally had brought its just reward; but he was loyal to the Bourbons, did not think much of Louis-Philippe, and was suspect to the new regime. He bit the bullet and swore loyalty to the new king, as all his fellow magistrates were required to do, but remained an object of some suspicion to his superiors. When he and Beaumont applied for leave to visit America, permission was a long time coming, and they were told to make the trip at their own expense.
Still, on 2 April 1831, they set sail from Le Havre, arriving in New York on 11 May. We shall look at their journey in a little more detail below. When they returned, early in 1832, neither took up his former employment. Beaumont was dismissed in May 1832 after refusing to serve as prosecutor in a political case, and Tocqueville resigned in protest. Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France was written nonetheless; it was largely the product of Beaumont’s pen, with Tocqueville supplying notes and criticism. It secured the Montyon Prize in 1833, which did something to pay the costs of the journey to America, and it secured Beaumont’s election to the Academy of Moral and Political Science in 1841. It is scarcely discussed in the literature on Tocqueville, and to a modern eye may be interesting for its unflinching acceptance of the harshness of the American prison systems it describes rather than any more elaborate reason.4
The publication of the Système pénitentiaire was followed two years later by that of volume one of Democracy in America, and Tocqueville was instantly famous. He wanted to capitalize on his fame by entering politics, though he detested most of the things that a successful political career would involve. In 1837, he stood for the Chamber of Deputies and lost; in 1839, he was elected for his home district of Valognes, and was to be safely reelected until the July Monarchy was overthrown by the revolution of February 1848. He was also, and in many ways more happily, engaged in local politics from 1842, serving on the local council of the district of La Manche and acting for a time as its president. He was a modestly successful oppositional figure; though he admired Guizot as a historian, he loathed him as a politician. Tocqueville was more successful as a journalist in the pages of Le Commerce than as a deputy. He cast longing eyes at the English scene, where progressive conservatism of the type he espoused was successfully practiced by Sir Robert Peel, and felt acutely the contrast with France.
The year 1848 brought out something less than the best in Tocqueville. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting a new constitution after the fall of Louis-Philippe and Guizot, but he was not much in sympathy with even the modest reformism of the revolutionaries. Where John Stuart Mill defended the revolution against Lord Brougham, and for the rest of his life stood by the very mild socialism briefly aspired to by Louis Blanc, Tocqueville saw red revolution, expropriation, and bankruptcy in every proposal. The not very remote cause of the 1848 revolutions all over Europe was failed harvests and economic crises, and many workers in both the towns and the countryside were close to starvation. Tocqueville was a rigid adherent of the classical orthodoxies in economic matters, much closer to Nassau Senior than to Mill, and therefore convinced that governmental intervention to relieve mass distress would always do more harm than good. The Parisian workers rose against such brutal policies in June 1848, and Tocqueville’s friends shot them down.
The results were not what he had hoped for. General Cavaignac, who had led the forces of law and order in the June Days, lost in the presidential elections of December 1848 to the adventurer, Louis Bonaparte. For a few months of 1849, Tocqueville was sufficiently reconciled to the new prince-president to serve as his foreign minister, but when the Barrot government was dismissed in October of that year, Tocqueville left office more or less willingly and was careful to do nothing that suggested he wished for reinstatement. The coup d’état of 2 December 1851, in which Louis Bonaparte seized power, was the final straw. Tocqueville, along with many members of the Legislative Assembly, was arrested and held for several days—and then released rather apologetically. Apologies made no difference. He withdrew absolutely from politics and occupied himself with writing L’ancien régime et la révolution, the book in which he settled accounts with the tendency of French republics to turn into caesarist despotisms. It is a poignant contrast between nineteenth- and twentieth-century despotisms that the Emperor Napoleon III neither prevented the publication of a work that the meanest intelligence could see was a roman à clef as well as a work of disinterested history, nor took any steps against its author. By the time the book was published, Tocqueville was unwell; so was Mary, and their lives were increasingly dominated by illness. Although he hoped to continue the story of the Revolution to the accession of the first Bonaparte, he could not, and died in April 1859 with his second masterpiece unfinished. Mary survived him by five unhappy and tedious years.
Tocqueville’s journey to America was definitively described and analyzed almost sixty years ago by G. W. Pierson in a book of immense charm and good humor.5 The book is not uncritical, however. The subtext of the account, friendly toward Tocqueville as it is, is that Tocqueville went to America to prove a thesis. Pierson quotes a jibe against Tocqueville by one of his French critics: il a commencé à penser avant d’avoir rien appris. He had thought it all out before he had learned anything about it. The question is what assumptions he brought with him to America. There seem to have been several, though their sources are not always easy to uncover, and some of Tocqueville’s most interesting views were original with him. In particular, the thought that John Stuart Mill took from Tocqueville and made the centerpiece of the argument of On Liberty seems to have been freshly minted. This was the thought that the “tyranny of the majority” to be feared under democracy was not to be understood in the terms that Madison had feared it—lower-class exploitation of the propertied classes in the form of projects for the cancellation of debts, artificially low interest rates, and the like, nor even in the form in which Jefferson, who coined the phrase, had understood it—a proneness to religious intolerance and a violent and coercive invasion of private life. For Tocqueville, the new form of tyranny was especially insidious because it was not violent and coercive, but subtly invasive, causing each of us to side with the majority against himself or herself. This is the theme that increasingly permeates the second volume of Democracy, and it has had an impressive afterlife in twentieth-century commentators.6
For the most part, Tocqueville’s views were those one might expect in a liberal of French rather than British upbringing.7 On the whole, the British and the Americans had found it easy to think of governments as institutions to protect the natural rights of their citizens, and thought that the great desideratum was a form of constitution that prevented governments from violating these rights and forced them to protect them. The ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution that form the Bill of Rights give a clear idea of what these fundamental rights were supposed to be, and the whole arrangement of the Constitution rests on a theory about the importance of the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances in making sure that governments did not violate the subjects’ rights. The British constitution was more elusive and harder to describe, but it was not unreasonable to think that it too displayed the virtues of the separation of powers and allowed for an intricate system of checks and balances. Tocqueville moved in a different universe.
He was more nearly a disciple of Montesquieu and Guizot. That is, he emphasized social as much as—or even rather than—political checks and balances; it was the way ideas and aspirations were diffused among the different social and economic groupings that explained what political and economic aims they would pursue and what institutions they would establish and operate, and with what success. Although Montesquieu was the most famous exponent of the doctrine of the separation of powers, in which he located the success of the British form of government in maintaining liberty, the thrust of his work was toward emphasizing the social underpinnings of the formal institutions of government. In this, Tocqueville followed him, so much so that he pays rather little attention to the formal separation of powers that is, to a British eye, so striking a feature of the American political system, and much more to the question of what social groups might or might not sustain an antimajoritarian outlook. Tocqueville was not trapped by his intellectual borrowings. In particular, it took a decided leap of the imagination to decide that what was practiced in America was a successful form of democracy. The thought that federalism was the key to practicing republicanism or democracy in a large nation state was not original with him; both Montesquieu and Rousseau had thought as much, and it was a key element in the argument of the Federalist. Until the U.S. Constitution was in place, this had been very much a theoretical suggestion, and it took some boldness on Tocqueville’s part to announce to a European audience that it worked so well in practice. To the extent that Tocqueville stood by this view, it gave Europeans some grounds for optimism. The conventional, Montesquieuian view of democracy had been that it was a form of government possible only in small city-states, whose inhabitants could be made to live austere and virtuous—that is to say, public-spirited—lives in which the pursuit of private gain would be subordinated to the military and political well-being of the polity in which they lived. It was taken for granted that this was not a live option for more than a very few eighteenth-century European states. Even Rousseau, who sometimes thought that Geneva came as close to emulating these ancient ideals as it was possible to come, hardly suggested that democracy was a live option. He thought an elective aristocracy much more plausible as a form of republican government, and would have been astonished by Tocqueville’s claim that in America the people really ruled.
The French Revolution seemed to many commentators to prove Montesquieu’s point. It had been impossible to re-create the Roman citizen by dressing the modern Parisian in a toga; the violence and disorder of the Terror was testimony to the inaptness of the ideal as well as to the degree of disillusion its failure had provoked. The success of the federal republic might suggest that the device of federation could secure republican institutions in the absence of such a degree of republican virtue as Montesquieu had suggested a republic required. Perhaps America had shown that modern inventiveness was up to the task of proving Montesquieu wrong, or at any rate incomplete. Perhaps it showed that the demand for political equality was so irresistible that whatever the French Revolution suggested, the future lay either with a liberal regime built on the assent of the masses or an illiberal regime built on their deluded or coerced support.
From the same sources, Tocqueville would have gained another insight to take with him and to bring back modified in some respects and confirmed in others. The British and American conception of equality before the law was only one of many conceptions of equality; it, indeed, was perhaps the only conception of equality that was consistent with preserving the social pluralism on which Montesquieu had thought that ordered liberty must depend. Equality of condition, that is, an equality of social standing and economic position, was inimical to freedom. The image it conjured up was that of oriental despotism, in which all were equal before and beneath the sultan’s throne. The English had contrived to control the danger of despotism inherent in monarchy without falling into the chaos that attended ancient attempts at popular self-government, but this was the work of an essentially aristocratic form of government and depended on the population at large recognizing that social inequality was the price of liberty and willingly paying that price. The American experiment posed an intriguing question—how, in light of Montesquieu’s assumptions about what preserved liberty and what threatened it, had the United States contrived to preserve its citizens’ liberty while at the same time achieving a greater equality of condition than any nation in Europe? Was this achievement stable, or merely a passing but unstable balancing of two opposing forces, one of which must in due course predominate?
As a liberal and an aristocrat, moreover, Tocqueville was deeply concerned with other issues implied by these large questions. Could a country long cherish liberty without an aristocracy, or was there a crucial difference between a country like France, which had achieved liberty by violently revolting against its aristocracy, and a country like America, which had achieved liberty by taking its ingredients from England and finding that they grew even better in transatlantic earth? Few of these were questions Tocqueville thought he had answered before he saw America. Nor, as a matter of fact, did he take all his ideas to America and bring them back intact. The astonished tone of much of volume one of Democracy is more than a literary artifice. Nor did the thoughts he brought back from America remain unchanged after his return. Sophisticated recent commentators have analyzed the impact of political events in France on Tocqueville’s original ideas and have shown how his increasing disillusionment with French politics in the late 1830s, as well as the reflections provoked by his visits to Britain and his correspondence with British economists and political commentators, was reflected in the increasingly apprehensive tone of the discussion of the culture of democracy in the second volume of Democracy.8
Democracy marked a decisive break with a genre of travel writing that was popular at the time and for a good many years afterward. It also reinforced one preexisting feature of such writing. English writers had already begun to produce unkind accounts of their stays in America, even though the most famous had not yet appeared when Tocqueville and Beaumont arrived in New York in the spring of 1831. The most notorious member of the genre was Mrs. Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, published the following year, 1832, and perhaps the best-selling contribution, Charles Dickens’s American Notes of 1842. But one of the most unlovable had just come out; this was Captain Basil Hall’s Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, a work of such mean-spirited and reactionary unkindness toward the very Americans who had made Hall and his family so welcome that American commentators a century later wrote of it with real anger.9 Tocqueville and Beaumont were to write in a wholly different style, not concerned to make fun of the obvious differences between the manners of polished French society and the rough-hewn ways of the American frontier, but to establish what made American society work as it did. In their sympathy toward the Americans, they were, however, following an equally established though different tradition. It was not only that the American colonists, in rebellion against their British rulers, had needed and obtained the assistance of France in securing their independence. There was a French tradition, dating back to the writings of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, that praised the American colonist as a man of purified morals, sharp wit, and democratic instincts who might revive the glories of the ancient republics in the newest of new worlds. Four years before Tocqueville and Beaumont set out on their journey, Chateaubriand’s Voyage d’Amérique of 1827 wove the latest variation on the theme. It was impossible for a Frenchman of any political stripe not to wonder whether a republic on the scale of a modern nation-state could be sustained, whether there was something about the Protestant origins of the New England colonists that made them peculiarly apt for democratic citizenship, and thus whether America was the place where French aspirations might be fulfilled.
The visit itself was, as everyone has observed, lopsided in the attention it paid to different parts of the United States. In particular, the travellers saw next to nothing of the real South. They were doubly innocent about it, since they spent little time either there or in Virginia; intending to stay longer in Charleston and then to visit James Madison, living in retirement near Charlottesville, in the end they could not. The result was that they saw next to nothing at first hand of the operations of the slave-based plantation economy of the southern states, and had only a fleeting glimpse of the curious mixture of coarseness and aristocratic refinement that set the South culturally apart from the northern states. Nor did they encounter the Virginian upper class that had led the American Revolution. In consequence, it might plausibly be said that what they got was a view of Yankee America, a society whose puritanism, egalitarianism, and attachment to local democracy were not entirely typical of the whole country. Tocqueville acknowledges in his introductory pages that there were two American types, the New Englander and the Virginian, but goes on to claim that the former dictates the national style.
The journey fell into several distinct phases. From 11 May to 30 June, they were largely in New York and the Hudson Valley; July and August were spent in an extended journey to the then northwestern frontier, that is, as far as Detroit and the Michigan Peninsula, from which they returned to Boston by way of Lower Canada, that is, French-speaking Canada; the fall, from early September to mid-November, was again spent on the East Coast, in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, from where Tocqueville and Beaumont set out for the Mississippi, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and back across the south to Washington. This allowed them a month, from 18 January to 20 February 1832, to see Washington and once again New York.
The journey was full of incident; they had the misfortune to strike the worst winter in memory, and what ought to have been an easy journey down the Ohio River and then down the Mississippi turned into a struggle across frozen ridges, a near escape from death by drowning, and another near escape from death by pneumonia. The Mississippi was frozen all the way north from Memphis. Modern English and American readers should perhaps remember three things about the journey that do not emerge clearly in Democracy itself. The first is how very thoroughly Tocqueville saw North America through French eyes, not English eyes; his letters and diaries reverberate with the sentiments of a man who was acutely aware that the French had decisively lost out to the British on the North American continent only seventy years before. There had been no very obvious reason why the French could not have consolidated their possessions along the St. Lawrence and established themselves all the way down the Mississippi, so checking British expansion. In 1831, the United States was still very sparsely settled anywhere more than two or three hundred miles from the Atlantic seaboard, and Illinois and Kentucky were frontier states. The great flood of immigration that swept across the Mississippi and onto the Great Plains was a dozen or more years off, and Tocqueville can hardly be complained of for looking back to 1763 rather than forward to the results of the Irish Famine and the failed revolutions of 1848.
A second thing is that Tocqueville’s picture of the character of the Americans is colored by his sense of the contrast between the English national character and the French. The bleak, self-controlled determination of the English made them unlovable but highly successful colonizers. The French, by contrast, were more likely to melt into the local landscape, establish themselves in villages that reminded them of home, and struggle no further to impose themselves on the new terrain. One of his simplest arguments against social analyses that overemphasized the importance of the physical environment was to point out the difference between French settlers, who would put up with all sorts of privations rather than leave the places in which they had settled, and English settlers, who would abandon their existing habitations for the least chance of improving their lot. National character mattered a good deal more than American geography. The most striking characteristic of Tocqueville’s intelligence was its ambivalence, and his ability to admire the British without much liking them is one more example of it. He thought his own France needed an imperial project to improve national morale, and approved of the French conquest of Algeria as such a project. In North America, he lamented the failure to secure French Canada and wondered whether there might somewhere be a leader who could inspire the French Canadians to rise up against the British and take their freedom. Since they greatly outnumbered their oppressors, there was every reason why they should do so.
The third thing was Tocqueville’s interest in the half-castes he encountered in the near Midwest and on the Canadian border. These bois-brulés or métis aroused his curiosity for much the same reason that the contrast of French and English national character did. The French had always found it relatively easy to accept people from different cultures; as the jargon of the 1980s had it, they had no fear of the Other. The English were great boundary maintainers; they feared contamination from alien cultures and therefore set up tremendous taboos against sexual relations with Indians and made the social position of “half-breeds” intolerable. The French took it for granted that sexual attraction operated across cultural and linguistic barriers, and were correspondingly more tolerant of the results. Whether any of this was true, generally or locally, it seems impossible to say. Tocqueville remained all his life fascinated by the question of what was or might be inherent in a given racial type as opposed to what was or might be inculcated by education—in the broad sense of education for which the unlovely term “socialization’ was later coined—and he was a good friend of Arthur de Gobineau, sometimes called the father of scientific racism, and a man whose career in the diplomatic service Tocqueville went out of his way to promote. Tocqueville himself was not at all what later generations have meant by a “racist”; his ironical and cautious intelligence was not easily to be pressed into the task of ranking different human groups as inevitably and unchangeably better and worse. Moreover, his indignation at the effects of European colonization on the American Indian peoples, who had been displaced, robbed of their land, corrupted by booze and trinkets, and destroyed by European diseases, was entirely unfeigned. He was simply fascinated by the combined effect of whatever it was that essential human nature contributed and the social and physical environment working on it.
The shortcomings of the journey as a preparation for a synoptic account of the United States are obvious enough, but later writers have often seemed to complain more about Tocqueville not seeing places that had not been built and events that had not occurred, or else about aspects of the journey that reflected Tocqueville’s theoretical convictions rather than his inadequacies as an empirical observer. Industrial America was perhaps slighted and so, for that matter, were the men who ensured that commercial and financial matters were conducted with tolerable efficiency; but one might equally reply that the industrial giant that America would become by the time of the Civil War had scarcely begun to stir. Tocqueville’s interest in economics was always conditioned by his belief that it was the effect of economic life upon les moeurs—that untranslatable term embracing custom, moral attachments, and standards of etiquette and social esteem—that really mattered. In fact, he met numerous people with commercial and financial interests, and was deeply impressed—both favorably and unfavorably—with the commercial spirit of the country; and he observed more than once that Americans were peculiarly receptive to the attractions of commerce and industry. More attention to merchants, bankers, and manufacturers and their opinions would not have made much difference to the book he was going to write. It was the American national psyche that he had come to analyze, not American industrial, agricultural, and financial technique.
The reception of Democracy in America was all that an author could have desired. “I see you have written a masterpiece,” said Tocqueville’s publisher upon the publication of volume one, and readers generally concurred. The second volume was less universally admired, but the two together were agreed by most critics to represent a stunning achievement in explaining to Europeans what the new civilization the other side of the Atlantic was like; critics were also struck by Tocqueville’s insistence that what was happening in America was part of the same process that was making European societies more egalitarian.
The enthusiasm of John Stuart Mill was one of the major reasons for the book’s success with English-speaking readers. It struck a chord in Mill that it could hardly have done in anyone else. For Mill read Democracy at a point in his life where he had broken with the radicalism of his father and Jeremy Bentham and was looking for a new social and political vision. Mill, in essence, had come to reject the utilitarians’ belief that all social ills could be cured by a Parliament elected by popular vote, together with a rational, disinterested, uncorrupt administration to implement the policies that such a Parliament would enact. Under the impulse of such writers as Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, and reflecting on his own experiences as a young man, Mill had come to think that the limitations of democracy were greater than his father and Bentham had realized. He had accepted even before he read Tocqueville that in the modern world, public opinion was increasingly powerful and that even governments that were not democratic in form would increasingly become so in substance. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mill was not particularly anxious about the possibility that pressures for an expansion of the suffrage or for making government more answerable to the middle and lower-middle classes would result in mob rule or mere chaos. What he feared was that it would result in a dreary, barren, narrowly businesslike society. It was, so to speak, the cultural consequences of universal egalitarianism that he feared. His one complaint against Tocqueville when he read the first volume of Democracy in America was that Tocqueville talked of the effects of “democracy” when he meant only the effects of equality. Democracy considered as a form of government had merits that were detachable from the dangers of generalized egalitarianism.
The surprising thing is less that Mill should have so admired the book than that its continued vitality in the Anglo-American world should have been so great. A few American critics in the nineteenth century complained over the next two decades that Tocqueville made a great show of discovering things that all Americans knew already; others complained that he had ignored the Americans’ own reflections on their political system. For the most part, however, they were quick to recognize that Tocqueville’s English critics, other than Mill, had frequently used him as a weapon against the extension of the franchise to the large majority of the British population that was still unenfranchised, and they therefore applauded the friendliness of his analysis. Whereas British conservatives used his criticisms of America as reasons for not extending the reach of democratic institutions in Britain, Americans used his relatively cheerful assessment of their condition as a prop to national pride and self-confidence.
Of course, later writers expressed the perfectly sensible view that as time went on, the United States had changed rather dramatically—the whole continent had been occupied, there had been a civil war, and the country’s culture had been transformed by vast waves of immigration from Ireland, Germany, eastern and southern Europe, and then from Asia and Spanish America. The anglophone culture of Puritan New England was not just one element in a more kaleidoscopic picture—it was a rather small element.10 Tocqueville was not unaware of the existing influx of immigrants from the heart of Europe, but it was certainly easier to see the United States as a branch of the English project in 1831 than it was seventy-five years after. Odder, however, was the way Democracy became once more a text for our times, both in the aftermath of World War II and again some twenty-five years later. In David Riesman’s classic study of “other-directed man,” The Lonely Crowd, Tocqueville’s fears were brought up to date. Tocqueville had feared that each single individual would be so confined by his domestic affections and attachments that he would have no psychological resources to resist public opinion and the ideas of others, but would regard public opinion as the only test of truth, virtue, and propriety. Riesman, unlike Tocqueville, was not enthusiastic about the kind of inner direction represented by Puritanism; it was too driven, and too repressive for modern tastes. Riesman looked for a more modern sort of autonomy as an ideal—the sort of character who was driven neither by conscience nor by public opinion, who was not driven at all.
The more narrowly political implications of Tocqueville’s work were stressed by Ralf Dahrendorf in the mid-1950s; his anxieties were more directed at his native Germany than at the United States, but the sociological views that he found alarming were American. In those years, many sociologists emphasized the virtues of “consensus” and were anxious to stress the blessings of social and psychological integration. Dahrendorf reached back to Tocqueville’s emphasis on the “antagonism of opinions” as a way of combatting the tyranny of the majority, and reminded American readers that their own tradition had resources that too many modern sociologists had neglected. Tocqueville’s view that men might be lonely in the midst of crowds has worn almost better than his more directly political anxieties. Richard Sennett’s essay The Fall of Public Man makes the point that citizens who do not know how to present themselves in public and who concentrate too narrowly on their domestic concerns will wake up to find that the political system has fallen into the hands of crooks and manipulators and that they are doomed to live under yet another variant of the quiet despotism that Tocqueville feared.
Democracy in America is not an entirely easy book to describe and analyze. A large part of the difficulty stems from Tocqueville’s decision to write two very different books. The first volume is essentially an account of American democracy in operation. It focuses on what everyone would conventionally describe as the features of democratic government—federalism, the respect for rights, the role of lawyers, and the obsession with the rule of law, political parties, and the relations among localities, states, and the federal government. It is very much a sociologist’s and a moralist’s account in that the moralist focuses on the problem of the tyranny of the majority, and the sociologist not only asks about the role of formal institutions in reducing the dangers of majority tyranny but goes on to talk about the role of social equality in promoting political equality, the role of religion, the role of education, and so on. True to the tradition stemming from Montesquieu, Tocqueville touches on the role of the physical environment in sustaining American institutions, while arguing that—to quote the heading of a famous section of chapter 17—“The laws contribute more to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States than the physical circumstances of the country, and the customs more than the laws” (2:319–23).11
In volume two, Tocqueville raises his sights dramatically. Volume two tackles the larger question of the impact of democratic institutions upon a society’s entire culture. American habits and institutions illustrate the theses that Tocqueville puts before the reader, but the focus is—to a much greater extent than in volume one—on the prospects for any modernizing and therefore, in Tocqueville’s eyes, democratizing society. The two volumes also read rather differently. Mill’s reviews pick up the difference in an almost exaggerated form. His first review leaves the author and the reader optimistic about the prospects of a democratic political order, even if Mill suggests few grounds for optimism about the culture of the sort of society that sustains a democratic politics. Until the Civil War changed his mind, Mill copied Tocqueville’s unkind characterization of American men as “dollar hunters” and American women as the breeders of dollar hunters.
Mill’s second review, five years later, was the most conservative essay he ever wrote and came nearer to defending the continued existence of relations of superiority and dependency between landowners and peasants than one would have believed possible in an essay written by Mill. Just as Mill’s essays were visibly written by the same intelligence, the two volumes that provoked him are visibly written by the same man with the same anxieties throughout. Tocqueville’s concern with the tyranny of the majority persists throughout, and volume two ends with a consideration of the kind of despotism to which democracies are prone, an observation that would not have been out of place in volume one. Still, it would not be wrong to suggest, as Mill did, that the first volume is primarily a treatise on politics, and the second primarily a treatise on democratic culture. One can see without straining very hard that a man of Tocqueville’s fastidious, critical, aristocratic temperament might well have felt much less happy about the culture of a bourgeois society than he did about the more narrowly political arrangements in such a society. One can also see that readers who enjoyed the first volume because of its vivid descriptions of American institutions and behavior might feel that the second had lost that liveliness in turning aside from the description of an exotic society to broad questions about issues that prefigure L’ancien régime’s obsession with centralization and the concentration of power in governmental hands.
To the extent that a one-sentence summary of so complex a work makes any sense at all, we may borrow from Tocqueville: a tendency to equality of condition is operating in the world, one so irresistible that we must ascribe it to divine influence; we can see what this process entails for America, where it has gone further than anywhere else, and we must ask what it means for Europe. To set the question in such a light relies, as we have seen, on the Montesquieuian thought that in most societies where equality has existed on a large scale, this has been equality before the throne of a despot. Democracy in America explains why this is not the American condition, and inquires whether such good fortune can be expected to persist. The philosophical cleverness of the work lies in the thought that when “the people” rule, the potentiality for despotism is as great as in other systems of government. James Mill had famously observed that when the people govern themselves, they cannot try to govern themselves against their own interests; Tocqueville pointed out that when the people rule, the position of each person is that he is ruled by all the rest, and that if they form a compact, self-sustaining mass, united in opinion and outlook, they will overbear each of their number quite as effectively as any oriental despot might. There are innumerable variations on this thought spread over the two volumes, but it is perhaps true to say that between the first and second volumes there is something of a transition from the fear that each individual will find himself impotent in face of a spontaneous consensus and the fear that a popular leader might arise who uses the overwhelming support of the masses at his back to govern like a despot even if he observes the constitutional proprieties.
J. L. Talmon coined the expression “totalitarian democracy” to describe the situation of the popular dictator who could govern in the name of the whole people but without concern for the rights of his subjects. Although Tocqueville anticipated nothing worse than what actually came to pass with the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte, first as “prince-president,” then as the self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon III, his picture of what one might call an “unofficial” democratic totalitarianism is one that has chilled many twentieth-century readers.
The analyst of Democracy is inhibited by two opposed features of the work. On the one hand, Tocqueville provides chapter headings that amount to a running summary of the book and make an analysis redundant, while on the other, both volumes are so full of asides, diversions, and changes of tone that one comes to feel that any summary leaves out so much of interest that it traduces the character of the book. As every commentator observes, the introduction is the key to everything that follows; like most introductions, it was written after the rest of the volume that it summarizes, and tells us much about what the author thought he had accomplished: “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed” (1:3). Equality of condition did not mean identity of wealth or occupation or similarity of day-to-day existence; the trapper on the frontier led a very different life from that of the merchant in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York. Nor did it mean that at any given moment incomes were even roughly equal. It was an equality perhaps more obvious to a French aristocrat than to most observers; it was equality of status, a total absence of unearned or inherited deference, a complete unwillingness to acknowledge oneself any man’s social inferior, and it went along with an absence of the old aristocratic urge to incorporate oneself as a landed, or territorial, ruling class. The erosion of accepted differences of status was what Tocqueville thought would spread over Europe as well and what he described as “a providential fact,” adding, “It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress” (1:6).
Readers familiar with Democracy will know that Tocqueville seems to draw back from this in volume two. In chapter 20 of the second book, “How an Aristocracy May be Created by Manufactures” (1:158–61), he follows Adam Smith in suggesting that as the division of labor advances and manufacturing thrives, the individual worker becomes increasingly stunted. A man who spends his working life making heads for pins becomes something less than fully human. Between him and the owner of the business a great gulf opens up. But then Tocqueville begins to vacillate; rich manufacturers do not really form a social class; they have no sense of a common interest and a common purpose, and their fortunes are too evanescent to found a real aristocracy. Still, he concludes, turning round once more, if a new aristocracy arises, that will be its source. He would no doubt have thought “robber baron” an apt term for those who amassed vast fortunes fifty years later.
That Democracy was written for Frenchmen emerges very early on in the introduction, when Tocqueville outlines the reasons why democracy in France has not been accompanied by the rise of liberalism but by a constant tendency to despotism. Essentially, his thought was, and remained, that before the Revolution, the French monarchy had increasingly suppressed all competing sources of authority. This left a sort of vacuum, so that when the Revolution overthrew the monarchy, the new government inherited a society devoid of the checks and balances that would make for liberty. The villain was the centralization of all administrative functions and the consequent weakening of civil society’s capacity for self-help and self-maintenance.
Tocqueville was at least as interested in the cultural tone of an egalitarian society as in its origins. The French experience was not reassuring; whereas noble and serf were separated by a vast gulf, they nonetheless felt nothing degraded in their relationship, but in the modern world, the proximity of social classes to one another creates more envy, more bitterness, and more antagonism. The American experience, in contrast, suggests that democracy in the sense of equality of condition is not always the enemy of liberty. Equality of condition will perhaps inevitably be the enemy of glory, better at reducing misery than at creating public splendor, more apt to give everyone some education than to throw off tremendous flashes of genius; but these may all be acceptable trades.
Because the first volume of Democracy was avowedly devoted to the political institutions of the Americans, it is not surprising to find Tocqueville beginning with a rapid sketch of the origins of New England and an account of its present social condition. Nor is it surprising to find that Tocqueville argues that what allows liberty and equality to coexist in America is the fact that the conception of liberty the Puritans brought with them to America was a distinctively Christian conception, not mere “let alone” nor a liberty that might turn into license, but a capacity to conduct ourselves by a law we freely accept. The fainthearted might worry that an extended quotation from Cotton Mather tells us little about public opinion in 1831, but Tocqueville’s insistence that it is a view that finds its way into the legal system and into the culture of lawyers, judges, and legislators may persuade us that a view that has its roots in a particular religious vision can readily find its way into secular institutions.
On those institutions themselves, Tocqueville’s commentary is a mixture of observations that retain much of their interest, and observations that are now entirely out of date. Among the latter, many of the observations on the U.S. Constitution have been superseded by changes in that document, such as those providing for the direct popular election of senators. His belief that the ties among the states might weaken has been contradicted by the twentieth century’s experience of a greatly increased role for the federal government and a consequent weakening of the role of the states. His belief that the presidency was an office of next to no importance was being falsified as he wrote by the vigor of President Jackson, and is now wholly out of date. Defenders of Tocqueville’s perceptiveness as an observer can reply that he at least noticed that the most likely route by which the presidency would gain in importance would be through the president’s leading role in foreign relations. In the 1830s, there was little else for the president to concern himself with, but this could not and did not last.
Among the discussions that remained relevant even after their obvious institutional relevance had gone, one might cite Tocqueville’s discussion of the New England system of township government and his insistence on the localism of American politics. Changes in institutional arrangements have somehow not made a corresponding difference in citizens’ attitudes; and any foreign observer is still struck by the way voters and politicians alike take next to no notice of the tastes, interests, and beliefs of the rest of the country in asserting the claims of their locality. Such a localism persists in American politics in an age when the federal government has grown to a degree that nothing in Tocqueville’s experience could have suggested. Indeed, Tocqueville thought that the dissolution of the country by each state going its own way was not unlikely; the cementing of national unity by the forces of the railroad, the interstate highway system, and the demands of the modern industrial economy were unpredictable and unpredicted.
To the modern reader, the first volume hinges on the discussion of the power of the majority and the various ways in which it does and does not amount to a tyranny. Tocqueville held a skeptical, or perhaps we should say a “realistic,” view of the relationship between the written Constitution and the actual exercise of power. Madison had caustically described proposals for a Bill of Rights as proposals to erect “parchment barriers” against tyranny. Tocqueville had much of that skepticism. In all societies, there must be some ultimate repository of power. Even if there was a constitution that governed the operations of the political system, there was still a force somewhere that would either reinforce its constraints or override them. In any case, when Tocqueville wrote, part of the federal government was elected by indirect means as a barrier against the direct exercise of the will of the majority, and it was only the federal legislature and executive that had such restraints. State and local government was more simply majoritarian. Since, he thought, internal affairs were almost entirely in the hands of state governments, it was there that he had to look to see the absolute sovereignty of the majority in action. And there he thought he saw it clearly: “The very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority; for there is nothing in democratic states that can resist it. Most of the American constitutions have sought to increase this natural strength of the majority by artificial means” (1:254).
One skeptical view has always been that no matter what the nominal form of government, public opinion dictates how it operates. Tocqueville did not need to argue along those lines, since the various state governments that he considered tied the legislature and the executive very firmly to the expressed wishes of the electorate. Legislatures had extensive powers, and were commonly elected for very short terms, often for no more than a year. The result had to be that there was something close to direct majority rule. Tocqueville had the same doubts that most European observers entertained about the instability of American opinion; a long footnote comments caustically on the way the majority in Pennsylvania first emancipated Negro slaves, then ensured by intimidation that they could not vote or exercise their other civil rights—thus showing that the majority might pass what laws it liked and then violate them too. But this all leads to the central theme: “It is in the examination of the exercise of thought in the United States that we clearly perceive how far the power of the majority surpasses all the powers with which we are acquainted in Europe” (1:263). Because Americans deferred so completely to the majority, it had only to become clear that the majority had formed a view for dissent to cease. Kings threatened their subjects, intimidated them into a desired external compliance, and left their minds free. But, said Tocqueville, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America” (1:263).
Was everything lost, then? The answer was plainly not. The great American talent was for decentralization and self-help. This meant that for much of the time, Americans did without government entirely and hardly bore upon one another so continually as to exercise very much of a tyranny over one another. Then, too, the legal-mindedness of the country helped. Lawyers had a certain aristocratic tendency that worked in an antimajoritarian direction: “Men who have made a special study of the laws derive from this occupation certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude” (1:273). Tocqueville argued that the tendency of American politics to recruit lawyers to large numbers of official positions beside the more narrowly legal was likely to reinforce their influence over the public mind; the fact that the American legal system inherited the English common law added another, perhaps more double-edged reason for their ascendancy over the layman—not merely was common law arcane, it was also the embodiment of tradition. To the degree that lawyers played a prominent role, one could expect them to resist direct majority rule.
The mitigation of majority tyranny might seem a small, even if an important, part of the maintenance of a liberal democracy. Tocqueville set out the positive supports of democracy under three headings: “I. The peculiar and accidental situation in which Providence has placed the Americans. II. The laws. III. The manners and customs of the people” (1:288). The first embraced what later became a familiar American obsession with the role of the frontier in allowing liberalism to coexist with majority rule. It was not an accident that Tocqueville placed his anxious reflections on the horrors of American slums in a footnote to the discussion of the frontier; in essence, his view was that it was American prosperity that saved the day and that prosperity was a product of the continent’s endlessness. As restless explorers poured out of the East on their way to the frontier, they left a labor shortage that offered immediate prosperity to the incoming immigrant and a safety valve for those who might otherwise form the revolutionary mobs that upper-class French observers had to fear. The laws that he considered most important were the constitutional provisions that made America distinctive. But not only were the manners and customs of the people the most important cause of the success of American democracy, but Tocqueville’s view of them was also somewhat startling. The thought that the Protestantism of the Pilgrim Fathers was a good foundation for democratic politics was not surprising; it is something of a cliché to see the dissenting meeting and the township as cognate institutions. Tocqueville gave the case a particular twist in arguing that Puritanism supported individual independence rather than a taste for equality. He looked, however, to Catholicism as the religion of the future. Partly, this was in the belief that Protestantism was likely to become lukewarm and thus gradually to lose its grip on the American mind. Partly, it was in the belief that the connection between Catholicism and antidemocratic forces in countries such as France was essentially accidental. Where, as in the United States, the church faced nothing like the plebeian anticlericalism it faced in Europe, its emphasis on the equality of all believers and its insistence that the only difference in status that it cared for was the distinction between the priest and the laity made it a force for republican and democratic ideals. To these religiously based forces, one had to add the secular force of the generally high level of practical education and practical intelligence. It was when he had cause to praise the shrewdness, the understanding of political institutions, and the general understanding of the rights and duties of the citizen that Tocqueville’s real affection for the Americans he had met on his journey shone through.
One of the most striking portions of the first volume of Democracy is the last chapter, in which Tocqueville considered the relations between the “three races that inhabit the territory of the United States” (1:331). Tocqueville said rather interestingly that it was an excursion from his main theme—democracy. Yet he could not simply turn his back on the two great horrors of the American scene, black slavery and the gradual extermination of the American Indian. To repeat an earlier observation, we ought not to exaggerate Tocqueville’s humanitarian inclinations, nor ought we to ignore his readiness to see the French conquer and occupy Algeria in the most brutal fashion. He had what is perhaps rarer today, a bleak sense of the moral frailty of most of mankind: “If we reason from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use and when he cannot subdue them he destroys them” (1:332). Tocqueville’s account of the destruction of the Indian population is matched by his account of the horrors of slavery. The Indian is driven out of everywhere he might inhabit; as the European settlements advance, so the game on which the Indian depended disappears, and even where he is not driven out by force, he is driven away by famine. Should the Indian turn to agriculture to support himself, the lands he cultivates become the object of the greed of the European, who then finds one device or another to take them and once more drive the Indian further and further away. This has only one foreseeable terminus: the total destruction of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.
Slavery was a different matter. The black population of the United States was increasing rather than decreasing. But this placed the states that practiced slavery in a dilemma. The slave states were essentially backward and sluggish; the existence of slavery stigmatized hard work and innovation by associating labor with slavery, and innovation with the destruction of a bastard form of aristocratic agriculture. On the other hand, they could not easily abolish slavery; too much of the value of slave owners’ estates was bound up in the value of the slaves, and if emancipated, the slaves would be entirely unfit for membership of a largely white society. Tocqueville put his finger on what has turned out to be the crucial issue: classical slavery involved only the unfreedom of the slave, so that a Greek or Roman slave might well be the equal of his master in intellect, knowledge, and imagination. All he needed was emancipation. Black slaves would remain blacks after they had ceased to be slaves. The white, especially the white English, hostility to the colored races would be as great after emancipation as before. Slavery had to come to an end, since it was an atrocity unimaginable in the enlightened nineteenth century, but however it came to an end, whether by emancipation or by a black uprising, it would be a continuing problem, to which Tocqueville saw no solution.
The discussion of the plight of Indians and blacks was a coda or excursion from the main theme of the first volume of Democracy. Volume two can hardly be called an excursion, since it is rather more in the nature of a distillation of Tocqueville’s thoughts on the cultural consequences of democracy, in which the underlying anxieties about the chances of further revolutionary outbreaks and further despotic episodes keep returning to color the argument. Indeed, one might suppose that in 1833–34, when he was writing the first volume, Tocqueville had it in mind that he would complement his discussion there of the causes that mitigate the tyranny of the majority with the melancholy and eloquent chapter at the end of the second volume, titled “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” (2:316). Nonetheless, if the second volume is not an excursion, it does not so much add to the first volume as deepen some of the insights that Tocqueville sketches there in order to enforce the moral he wanted to draw for European nations contemplating their future.
To this observation there is one large exception, and that is the stress that Tocqueville places on the nature of American family life, on the role of women in American life, and on the good and bad features of what we have come to think of as “middle-class morality.” Tocqueville’s first thought on arriving in New York was that unmarried American women were very much freer than their French counterparts, but that once they married—according to their own inclination—they were removed into a domestic setting in which their only task was to admire their husbands. Since the salon was not an American institution, he did not say this as lamenting the absence of the intellectually sophisticated Parisian drawing rooms, but to observe that American morals were purer than French. Married women were not expected to flirt or to make themselves attractive to men to whom they were not married, and the fact that marriages were founded on mutual affection in the first place made clandestine affairs less attractive. Tocqueville was not sentimental here either, however. He saw that the attractions of the domestic hearth were reinforced by the ferocity of public sentiment against adultery: “In a country in which a woman is always free to exercise her choice and where education has prepared her to choose rightly, public opinion is inexorable to her faults. The rigour of the Americans arises in part from this cause. They consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfil because they knew all those conditions beforehand and were perfectly free not to have contracted them” (2:205–6).
The three large themes that might be extracted from the second volume of Democracy are obvious enough. The first is the quality of intellectual and cultural life in an egalitarian society; the second, the stability or proneness to revolutionary upheaval of such societies; and the third, Tocqueville’s final and most distinctive thoughts on democratic despotism, or what one might term quiet totalitarianism. Themes such as the place of religion in public life, the effects of centralization, the American enthusiasm for creating and belonging to a multitude of public and political associations, all reappear from the first volume, of course, and generally in such a way that the first volume’s suggestion that the Americans had done well enough to give Europeans some grounds for hope is a good deal undermined. Thus, he says rather fiercely, “I am of the opinion that, in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the products of art; that centralization will be the natural government” (2:296). The thought is a simple one. As rulers and ruled become more similar in their tastes and ideological affections, the sympathy between rulers and ruled becomes stronger. Egalitarians tend almost automatically to prefer uniform solutions to problems; governments always do. When these two tendencies run in harness, the way is paved for a steady increase in the centralization of administration.
Tocqueville’s view of the cultural consequences of egalitarianism come as no surprise to a modern reader, although some of them have been overtaken by unpredictable events. Thus, when he considers intellectual life in America, he observes, as many have done since, that Americans are plainspoken in everyday life but descend into an extraordinary pomposity and rhetorical inflatedness in their public speech. He had earlier complained that Americans tended to address him as if he were a public meeting, but his usual estimate of Americans was highly favorable. Like most people, Americans spoke foolishly on topics they knew nothing about, but unlike most people, they were immensely well informed about their own society. Their readiness to tolerate pomposity and inflation reflected, thought Tocqueville, a need for something to compensate for the pettiness of their usual concerns. Discussing rhetorical inflation in general, Tocqueville worried that American poetry would become empty, bombastic, and sprawling. It is easy to believe that he would have disliked Whitman had he lived long enough to take an interest in his work, and that he would have been confirmed in his view by American landscape painting in the style of Albert Bierstadt.
Tocqueville does not confuse form and substance. When mocking the eloquence of Congress, he observed mildly that Americans “show their long experience of parliamentary life, not by abstaining from making bad speeches, but by courageously submitting to hear them made” (2:92). The more interesting and complicated observation was that intellectual life in general in the United States was marked by a concern for practicality and by a generally high level of matter-of-fact competence, not by the productions of genius, nor by the creation of things that would appeal to refined taste. So fiction would, he thought, turn out to be a trade in which authors would engage in the same frame of mind as the manufacturers of anything else. Science and literary culture otherwise was not a high priority; Americans could leave the English to supply their needs, and if they could, why not do so? The sinister side of this was not the low level of public taste so much as the potential for a kind of intellectual despotism. If there was no general acknowledgment of excellence, there might be a tendency to demand of everyone that they conform their beliefs and the expression of their beliefs to whatever everyone else believed and said. That was consistent with the promotion of a great deal of variety in unimportant matters, and Tocqueville was neither the first nor the last observer of American social and intellectual life to think that it simultaneously displayed great variety and changeability but was, for all that, extremely monotonous.
The Americans struck Tocqueville as an extraordinarily restless people. The question was whether they were also a revolutionary one. The war by which they had secured independence from Britain, he absolutely did not consider to be a revolution. His idea of revolution was the modern, sociological idea—large-scale and sudden social change accompanying political upheaval, not only the unconstitutional transformation of the government narrowly considered. Tocqueville’s reason for thinking that Americans were not going to be revolutionaries is one that Aristotle offered a very long time before, and twentieth-century sociologists discovered all over again a hundred years later. The thought is that revolutions may take place either to reduce the inequalities of wealth, power, and social status between the lower classes and the ruling class or else to reinforce those inequalities and make them harder to remove. The first kind of revolution will be launched from below, and the latter will be launched from above. The first is the classic example of a populist uprising, the latter an oligarchical coup to forestall any such uprising. Americans were almost universally sufficiently well off to feel no need to engage in the first, and were so rarely members of a traditional ruling class that they had no urge to engage in the second. In a society in which most people had something to lose, and in which fortunes once made were not likely to persist for more than one or two generations, the prospects of gaining very much from upheaval were too slight to tempt anyone to engage in revolution to improve his circumstances. The thought that stability requires such a distribution of wealth and income that most people have enough and few have too little or too much is sometimes referred to as aiming at a “lozenge-shaped” distribution; and many people have thought during the past fifty years or so that Western democracies have become increasingly stable because that is the sort of distributive pattern they have achieved. One might admit the skeptical counter that the distribution is shaped less like a lozenge than an eccentric pear, with its top stretched out an immense distance, but the larger point would remain untouched.
Finally, then, Tocqueville’s reconsideration of what sort of despotism a democracy might produce ends in a memorably disturbing paragraph. Tocqueville’s fearful second thoughts about the moral of his American experience led him to think that the “individualism” of Americans would lead not to each individual being able to think for himself or herself and to carve out his or her own view of the world, but to a desperate isolation. “Lost in the crowd” of other individuals, we run the risk of having no resources except domestic ones and of becoming absolutely dependent on government and public opinion for emotional, intellectual, and, finally, economic support. It was this movement toward mass society that posed the greatest threat—not, of course, to Americans in particular, and probably to Americans least of all, but to every egalitarian society. This it was that Mill picked up from Tocqueville and naturalized as the theme of On Liberty. It is this, too, that links Tocqueville and recent writers such as Friedrich von Hayek as critics of the welfare state.
No later writer, however, produced a more plangent account of what was to be feared than did Tocqueville himself. His description of a soft totalitarianism could hardly be bettered:
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. (2:319)
It hardly needs saying that this vision of the dangers of democracy has exercised the imaginations of innumerable critics ever since. It is perhaps worth saying that part of its power springs from the twentieth century’s experience of the totalitarianisms of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia; both of those hideous regimes were avowedly in some sense democratic and egalitarian, even though each of them glorified leaders and leadership all the way through the ranks of the military, the party, and on to the supreme leader at the head of all the rest. Their egalitarian and democratic elements were just those that so alarmed Tocqueville—the resentful insistence that nobody was any better than oneself, the urge to be part of one common popular mass—and as everyone points out, they surpassed anything he feared in their capacity to sustain dictators of the most brutal and ferocious stripe. Twentieth-century Russians and Germans would have had cause for gratitude had they seen nothing worse than Napoleon III. One might think that the fact that the liberal democracies had emerged victorious from their hot wars with Nazism and Fascism and their Cold War with Soviet communism would cast some doubt on Tocqueville’s political sociology, first as suggesting that quiet totalitarianism was not a live option, since whenever it appeared it was violent and bloody, and second as suggesting that liberal democracies had less to fear than he supposed, since they remained so completely different from their major competitors.
This, however, is where what makes Tocqueville hard to describe and to analyze makes him hard to resist. For what survives any amount of criticism is Tocqueville’s critique of the very ordinariness of modern society. His shrewd insights into the factory-like production of modern literature unnerve us; his wistfulness about the capacity of aristocratic societies to pursue grandeur rather than mere comfort embarrasses us. Even when he ends Democracy by trying to rise above the scene he has depicted in order to balance the comfort of the many against the glory of the few, one feels that everyday middle-class existence has been found wanting by a fastidious taste against which there is no appeal. This is not to suggest that we cannot in fact defend ourselves and stand up for the liveliness, variety, and interestingness of the culture of modern democracies. We do not have to be intimidated by Tocqueville’s aristocratic style and sensibilities. Nonetheless, they provide a permanent and, it must be said, a fruitful and useful countercurrent to the natural tendencies of an egalitarian society in which the principle of vox populi vox dei must always be in some risk of overstepping its proper bounds in the realm of politics and economics to invade the realms of our private tastes, our religious convictions, and our hopes for human progress.