Misgivings about a uniformity that jeopardized the individual did not end with Constant. Unease beset other 19th-century thinkers, notably Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. Both loom large in the pantheon of liberal thinkers. But if they represent high points of liberalism, they also benchmark a low point in that they feared its dissolution. Both Tocqueville and Mill questioned the ability of the individual to stand up against society—against social homogenization and conformity. These were not just passing observations but structured their entire analyses. With the dwindling of diversity, the fate of the individual became uncertain.
As we approach the 20th century, shadows gather around liberalism. Questions about the vitality of the individual mount. Perhaps the individual lacks the backbone to maintain independence. Perhaps the forces of uniformity—newspapers, public opinion, social codes—overwhelm the individual. Perhaps the motor of history is less the individual than the crowd or the masses. Inasmuch as diversity rests on the well-being of the individual, what is the future of democracy? What prevents democracy from sliding into a popular dictatorship?
Historians have long complained about viewing the past through the lens of the present; this entails distorting the past to fit contemporary imperatives. Such an approach implies that history is a one-way street to the present, as if there were no turns along the way. While this charge is well-taken, an approach of this kind proves almost impossible to avoid. We read and reread the past from the perspective of the present. Yesterday that might be the role of black people in history; today it might be the role of women. Since we live in the here and now, we cannot evade this; nor should we. For instance, many of those who fled Nazism became preoccupied with the demise of democracy. They witnessed and wanted to grasp democracy’s collapse. Diversity or its absence entered the explanation by a side door. To some refugees, the fall of democracy coincided with the rise of the mass man, the antithesis of the individual. Uniformity in life spelled the end of democracy. Twentieth-century scholars turned to 19th-century liberals to figure out what happened to the individual.
Case in point: as mentioned in Chapter One, above, Jacob-Peter Mayer came to England as a German-Jewish refugee from Nazism. On the eve of World War II, he published the first biography of Tocqueville in English with the subtitle “Prophet of a Mass Age.” He wanted to give an honest portrayal of Tocqueville, but also to inquire if the Frenchman anticipated something that upended Mayer’s own life—namely, the breakdown of democracy and the onset of Nazi dictatorship. The man in the street probably views the victory of Nazism as a series of violent acts, symbolized by the conflagration of the Reichstag, the German parliament. This is not accurate. The belief that Hitler came to rule by a “seizure of power” belongs to the “mythology of the Third Reich,” writes the historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr. Rather, the ordinary negotiations of a parliamentary democracy led to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, which opened the door to the Third Reich. “Hitler had not seized power; it had been handed to him.”1 Or, as Benjamin C. Hett puts it in his recent account, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, Hitler “had come to office in a constitutionally legitimate, even democratic way.”2
The electoral strength of his party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis, formed the basis of the negotiations that led to his appointment as chancellor in 1933. The Nazis moved from a fringe outfit with 2 percent of the vote in the mid-1920s to the leading party in the 1930s. In the German elections of 1932, the Nazis had become by far the largest party in the Reichstag. They obtained 230 representatives and 14 million votes, almost twice that of the next most popular party, the social democrats. As an historian of Germany declares, the Nazis attracted “more votes than any party had done before.”3 A University of Chicago political scientist who visited Germany in 1932 noted that, in the weeks prior to the election, “Nazi meetings were unsurpassed in numbers and enthusiasm.” He added that “an observer might have concluded that the Nazis controlled well over fifty per cent of the voters.”4 While the Nazi electoral draw may have peaked in 1932, their stunning electoral victories made Hitler’s appointment as chancellor possible.5
For J.P. Mayer, these were obvious facts. “It was universal suffrage that led National Socialism to victory,” he declared in his Tocqueville book.6 He noted that “whole libraries” exist on Aristotle and Machiavelli, but Tocqueville had been little studied. The rise of fascism made an examination of Tocqueville “doubly urgent.” To Mayer, Tocqueville understood something about “the rising of the masses” and the ease by which a democracy turns into a dictatorship. He understood the forces eroding the individual. Tocqueville put his finger on the weakening of diversity and its implications.
But it was not only Tocqueville who could aid in fathoming the decline of democracy and the emergence of the mass individual. A 19th-century political event could also: the mid-century rise of a French emperor. Louis Napoleon was the nephew of the much more famous Napoleon Bonaparte, who dazzled the world in the final stage of the French Revolution. The nephew, a much smaller figure than the uncle—Victor Hugo dubbed him “Napoleon the Little”—came to rule in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, some fifty years after his uncle. What troubled Mayer—and he was not alone in his concern—was the speed with which a new French republic of 1848 passed into a popular dictatorship by 1851. The bedrock of democracy remained the individual. But what if the individual could be misled? What if individuals formed an unthinking mass? The demise of diversity correlates with the rise of the masses. The success of Louis Napoleon confirmed these suspicions.
The new French republic, which followed the overthrow of the monarchy in 1848, created a government with a presidency elected by universal male suffrage. To general amazement, in the very first presidential election Louis Napoleon, a peripheral figure who had never held a political office, had a somewhat disreputable past, and made vague promises to everyone, overwhelmingly defeated the other candidates. His popularity upset the National Assembly, which passed a law that restricted through residency requirements universal male suffrage. By excluding millions of voters, the assembly hoped to checkmate Louis Napoleon’s future moves.
To no avail. Louis Napoleon possessed an undeniable populist touch that proved decisive. As he toured France he declared, “My sincerest and most devoted friends are not to be found in palaces but in cottages, not in rooms with gilded ceilings but in the workshops and fields.”7 Within three years, Louis Napoleon ended the republic with a coup d’état in which he announced the restoration of universal suffrage that would legitimate his rule with a plebiscite, which it did.8 Even if the plebiscite was manipulated, the coup was nevertheless by most accounts popular. As one historian put it, to the Catholics Louis Napoleon “seemed a champion of the Papacy,” to the socialists “he appealed as a friend of the poor,” to the capitalists “he appeared the bulwark against socialism,” and to the republicans “he seemed the champion of popular sovereignty.”9 Louis Napoleon adroitly played cards that would be played by future dictators. He ruled for twenty years.
Virtually all political commentators of the day, including Karl Marx and Victor Hugo, weighed in on these events. For those who came later, such as J.P. Mayer, the popular coup foreshadowed a singular feature of fascism, its use of elections; it indicated that “the people” had become “the masses,” which could be easily manipulated. Mayer asked in his Tocqueville book whether “an analogy” existed between the “plebiscitary dictatorship” of Louis Napoleon and the “modern dictatorships of Germany and Italy.”10 The inner relationship of diversity and democracy informs these topics. Democracy rests on the resilience and autonomy of the individual. If the individual loses individuality, democracy becomes imperiled.
Before he fled Germany, Mayer edited two contemporary books on the topic of Louis Napoleon’s coming-to-power; one by Karl Marx (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon), the other by the little-known Constantin Frantz (The Mass or the People: Louis Napoleon). The socialist Mayer found that the socialist Marx missed the point. Too much a man of the Enlightenment, Marx did not grasp the historical regression that marked the “democratic basis” of Louis Napoleon. Frantz, on the other hand, apprehended the atomization that led to Louis Napoleon’s democratic dictatorship. For Frantz, “the people” had become “the mass.”11 Mayer returned to these events after he became a refugee. “Louis Napoleon came to power by virtue of the universal suffrage” that European democrats had once considered their own best tool, he declared in 1943. “Quantity—the new democratic mass—had turned into a new quality: the modern dictator.”12
Apprehension that the democratic individual would prove frail colored the thought of an increasing number of liberals in the 19th century, especially Mill and Tocqueville. Benjamin Constant had led the way, and Tocqueville and Mill pursued kindred ideas. The relationship or lack of relationship between the two Frenchmen, Constant and Tocqueville, has long puzzled scholars. Inasmuch as his ideas seem close to Constant’s, how is it that Tocqueville hardly paid heed to his compatriot?13 After all, Constant was not unknown. By the time of his death in 1830, he was widely celebrated. Crowds followed his casket to the Père-Lachaise cemetery. In 1830 Tocqueville was a 25-year-old lawyer, but apparently Constant did not draw his attention.14
The real issue, however, is not how little Constant influenced Tocqueville or, jumping ahead, how much Tocqueville influenced Mill, but rather how a coterie of 19th-century thinkers who were neither conservatives nor socialists moved in the same direction.15 The weakening of diversity and individuality struck them. They registered the impact of a commercial society—call it industrialization or capitalism—on the individual. Unlike Möser and related conservatives, Tocqueville and Mill accepted progress, but worried that modern society undermined individual diversity. This is the key. And unlike contemporary diversity adherents bedazzled by superficial variety, these observers, who are sometimes dubbed aristocratic liberals or neo-republicans, perceived the threat that society posed to the values they cherished.16 Social uniformity endangered robust individuals.
Since Mayer, scholarship on Tocqueville amounts to a small library. But even though diversity imbues his work, its place in Tocqueville’s writings draws little attention.17 One thing, however, is clear: Tocqueville’s Democracy in America dealt with much more than democracy in America. Contemporary reviewers saw this. “I have one criticism to make,” stated a reviewer in 1840. “The title of the book is misleading. It isn’t really about democracy in America, but about the future of democracy in the world.”18 For Tocqueville, democracy faced perils such as the tyranny of the majority. But undergirding that tyranny was something more troubling: the accelerating uniformity of society that depleted the individual. Tocqueville voiced these concerns in his first impressions of the United States.
In “Two Weeks in the Wilderness,” an essay that he wrote soon after his arrival (and which he did not publish during his lifetime), Tocqueville remarked on the diminished variety in the New World. With chagrin, he admitted he arrived with preconceptions. “I had imagined something quite different.” In Europe sharp contrasts characterized adjacent areas: “I had noticed that in Europe, the more or less remote situation of any provincial region or town, its wealth or poverty, its size, big or small, would exercise great influence upon its inhabitants and would often establish the variations of several centuries between the different parts of the same area.” Here Tocqueville ratified an observation made by Rousseau and others: adjoining domains in Europe often diverged. Tocqueville expected to find this spectrum of regions and customs “all the more so in the New World.” He anticipated finding dramatic differences between bordering regions. But “nothing of that picture has any truth,” he continued. “Of all the countries of the world, America is the least suited to provide the sight which I had come to seek.” He found not differences, but similitude.19
Everywhere he came across the same people, customs, and stores. “The shopkeepers of Buffalo and Detroit are as well stocked as those in New York.” Everywhere he discovered the same network. “In America, much more than in Europe, only one society exists.” The same society extends throughout. “It may be rich or poor, modest or brilliant, engaged in commerce or farming, nevertheless, it consists everywhere of the same elements.” Identical people seem to surface everywhere. “You will come across the man you left on the streets of New York in the middle of almost impenetrable solitudes—same clothes, same spirit, same language, same habits, same pleasures.” The variations found in Europe disappear. As Tocqueville put it, “The plane of a uniform civilization has passed over.”20
His traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, a lawyer and prison reformer, came to the same conclusion. He also imagined profound differences between regions and peoples in the United States and also did not find them. “Everywhere the same men, the same passions, the same mores; everywhere the same enlightenment and the same obscurities.” Beaumont noted the paradox of Americanization, a term not yet in use. “How strange! The American nation recruits from all the peoples of the earth, and none of those display such uniformity of traits and characteristics.”21
These ideas flit throughout Democracy in America, especially the more reflective Volume Two, published five years after the first. Tocqueville observed a new commercial society in the making that rounded off individual edges and idiosyncrasies. He did not label it capitalism or even industrialization, which hardly interested him.22 In the aftermath of Volume One, Tocqueville did visit factories in Manchester and Birmingham, England; and his observations about industrial pollution and degradation compare to those set down by Engels some ten years later in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).23 Tocqueville noticed the dirt, noise, and darkness. The soil has been scratched away; stagnant water collects; fog envelops everything. “Heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools are found here and there among the houses.” But look up and “you will see huge palaces of industry. . . . These vast structures keep air and light out of the human habitations. . . . From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. . . . Here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.”24
By Volume Two, Tocqueville seemed convinced, perhaps reinforced by his visit to industrial England, that as commercial society gained strength the individual lost vitality.25 This impression informs much of Tocqueville’s work: the rise of commercial society based on money and equality undermines the individual.26 Tocqueville saw the advance of democracy and equality as irreversible, but worried about its consequences—uniformity, greyness, and even a new despotism. “Everything was different in earlier societies,” he declared. “Unity and uniformity were nowhere to be found.” Diversity was now ebbing. “Everything is threatening to become so much alike that the peculiar features of each individual will soon be altogether lost in the common physiognomy.”27
Such points lead Tocqueville to some of his most counterintuitive arguments—and the points most neglected by commentators.28 Tocqueville believed that modern democratic societies are static and conservative, not revolutionary and dynamic. Commercial society promotes endless activity, but within narrow channels. Individuals are free and energetic, but similar and weak. His chapter titled “How Society in The United States Seems Both Agitated and Monotonous” captures the contradictory elements; things always move but always in the same way. Tocqueville foregrounds the dwindling of diversity, although “diversity” is not the term he employs. Rather, he notes that uniformity escalates and individuality retreats. “The appearance of American society is agitated, because men and things are constantly changing; and it is monotonous, because all changes are the same.”29
Tocqueville emphasized that this phenomenon was not confined to the United States. “What I say about America applies, moreover, to nearly all men of the present day. Variety is vanishing from the human species. In all corners of the world we find the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.” This is not because “all peoples have more to do with one another and copy each other more faithfully than in the past.” Rather, the dwindling force of “caste, occupation, or family” and the strengthening of industry have led to similarities among people. Without imitating each other, men “are becoming more alike.”30
A later work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, confirms that Tocqueville saw the tide of uniformity as more than American. “How France was the Country Where Men Had Come to Resemble Each Other the Most,” runs the title of one of its chapters. He noted that obvious markers once separated the nobility from the middle class. But now by merely scratching the surface, little separated them. “Deep down” they were increasingly alike. Aristocrat and commoner hardly differed. “They had the same ideas, the same habits, they pursued the same tasks, indulged in the same pleasures, read the same books and spoke the same language.” Tocqueville found similitude across France. “Not only did the provinces increasingly resemble each other,” he noted, but also “men of different social class . . . became ever more alike despite the individual differences of rank.”31
It would be anachronistic to dub these remarks as addressing globalization. Yet it would be obtuse not to admit that Tocqueville is characterizing the homogenizing force of capitalism. In the 1840s and ’50s, a good French liberal with aristocratic leanings and democratic commitments expressed fears of reduced diversity in the world. He did not attack diversity, which he prized, but he indicated the degree to which reality contravened it.
Tocqueville grasped the counterintuitive nature of his argument, as notes to himself show. “I must be careful to avoid the improbable and paradoxical.” The twin movements of individual emancipation and individual conformity seemed as contradictory in the 19th century as they do today in the 21st. As “social equality” makes people independent, freeing them from past obligations and traditions, it should give rise to robust individuals, intellectual anarchy, and revolutions. Tocqueville puzzled over this and concluded that the opposite happens. “After examining things more closely,” Tocqueville finds that “the human mind” becomes “too immobile” and “too stable.” In the commercial society, torpor and routine set in. “This idea is so extraordinary and so novel to the reader that it can only be limned in the background, presented as a kind of hypothesis.”32
But Tocqueville hammers away at the “extraordinary” idea in his text. Despite equality and relentless activity, the denizens of democracy become more alike and more conservative. Tocqueville indicates that this conclusion contradicts the impression of “intellectual anarchy,” which might seem endemic in an egalitarian society: every person is for himself or herself. However, Tocqueville is convinced that this anarchy at best evidences an “era of transition.” The long-range trends suggest stability, not anarchy. I dread, declared Tocqueville, that “man will exhaust his energies in petty, solitary, and sterile changes, and that humanity, though constantly on the move, will cease to advance.”33
The phenomenon seemed so important that Tocqueville devoted another chapter to trying to describe it, “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” The Frenchman admitted he could not find an adequate name for it. “The old words ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ will not do.” Here Tocqueville begins to sound very much like Constant. A new species of despotism, both milder and more extensive than in the past, had appeared. It rests on uniformity—across peoples and government. The democratic sovereign enacts “a fine mesh of uniform, minute and complex rules. . . . He does not break men’s wills but softens, bends, and guides them.”
Past rulers abused their power but did not mold daily lives. “When the power of the Caesars was at its height, the various peoples that inhabited the Roman world preserved their diverse customs and mores.” The new sovereigns accelerated the decline of that diversity. The uniformity was both horizontal—between peoples—and vertical—between the state and its peoples. “Little by little,” the democratic state “robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties.” The new Caesar does not tyrannize, but rather “inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals.” Tocqueville pondered how men who had surrendered their independence could choose judicious leaders: “It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.”34 Tocqueville concluded his two volumes on a dark note. He wondered whether equality of conditions will bring about “servitude or liberty, enlightenment or barbarism.”35
“Can you tell me anything of Tocqueville?” asked, in 1835, an appreciative English reader of a French acquaintance.36 This was John Stuart Mill, the great 19th-century English liberal. He had just read the first volume of Democracy in America. He was much taken with the book. His own On Liberty, with its epigraph from Humboldt on individual diversity, lay decades in the future.
Mill and Tocqueville soon met, corresponded, and heaped praise on each other. “There is no living man in Europe whom I esteem more highly or of whose friendship I should be more proud than I am of yours,” declared Mill.37 Mill wrote glowing reviews of Democracy in America. His review of the second volume clocked in at more than eighty pages. The review thrilled Tocqueville. “Of all the articles written on my book, yours is the only one in which the author mastered my thought perfectly and was able to display it to others.” Tocqueville announced he was having the review bound with a copy of his book.38
Scholars argue whether Tocqueville influenced Mill or whether their ideas ran along parallel lines. It seems clear that Tocqueville redoubled Mill’s doubts of democracy. In the aftermath of reading Tocqueville, he focused less on the state as a threat and more on the masses—and the weakening of the individual. In one of his first essays which cites Tocqueville, Mill presented the disjuncture between material and cultural progress as critical. While society advances in wealth, transport, and communication, the individual regresses in force or intensity. “Can it be said that there has been any corresponding quantity of intellectual power or moral energy unfolded among those individuals or classes who have enjoyed superior advantages?” Mill cannot confirm it. In fact, he registers “a very marked decrease of vigor and energy.”
The individual seems to be retreating. “Power passes more and more from individuals . . . to masses.” This means “the weight and importance of an individual, as compared with the mass, sink into greater and greater insignificance.” It also signifies that, for the individual tradesman as well as the individual author, success depends on “puffery,” not substance. In the crowded cities, individual quality makes little impression. Honesty, faithfulness, and prudence will not bring in customers. The tradesman is “driven to cry out on the housetops that his wares are the best of wares, past, present, and to come.” This draws the crowd. For Mill, in a commercial society “any voice, not pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub.” For the author as well, the “arts of attracting public attention” override any other skill.39
In his reviews of Democracy in America Mill picked out themes in Tocqueville’s book that resonated with him. With a somewhat different accent than Tocqueville, Mill stressed the loss of diversity and the decline of the individual. For Mill, Westerners were relinquishing a robust individuality. Uniformity had become the watchword of the age. “When all are in nearly the same pecuniary circumstances,” observed Mill in his 1835 review, “all educated nearly alike, and all employed nearly alike, it is no wonder if all think nearly alike.”40 In his lengthy 1840 review Mill cited verbatim long stretches of Democracy in America. As Mill read Tocqueville, the Frenchman accentuated the shift from an aristocratic to a democratic society that undermines differences.
Diversity devolved into homogeneity. For Mill, this phenomenon was visible in England, where newspapers and railroads flattened out distinctions, “rapidly effacing those local distinctions which rendered one part of our population strangers to another” and turning them into a “homogeneous people.”41 Tocqueville grasped this new reality. “The general character of old society was diversity: unity and uniformity were nowhere to be met with,” stated Mill’s Tocqueville. “In modern society, all things threaten to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will be entirely lost in the uniformity of the general aspect.”42 After fifty pages Mill cites this passage from Tocqueville and declares it would be a good place to “close this article.”
Yet Mill ventures “one criticism” without which Tocqueville’s ideas sometimes have “an air of over-subtlety and false refinement.” Mill’s criticism proves damaging. He suggests the Frenchman has confused politics and economics; he has “confounded the effects of Democracy with the effects of Civilization.” Mill explains that Tocqueville “has bound up in one abstract idea the whole of the tendencies of modern commercial society, and given them one name—Democracy.” He has attributed to democracy the ills of capitalism.
For Mill, “modern commercial society” spells the reign of the middle class. “That class is now the power in society.” Its imperatives inform all of society. “Accordingly, all the intellectual effects which M. de Tocqueville ascribes to Democracy are taking place under the Democracy of the middle class.” This does not suggest that the rich and poor, the peers and proletarians, disappear. England is proof of that. It does indicate that a commercial society reigns supreme and brings in its wake what is essential for Mill, “the growing insignificance of individuals.”43
This topic became Mill’s signature issue, the fate of the individual. Mill returned to it twenty years later in On Liberty (1859). This book is so well-known, cited, and analyzed that it resists fresh interpretation. And that will not be attempted here. Yet nearly all the current appraisals, usually by philosophers and political scientists, focus on its theoretical principles or their consistency.44 How does Mill’s utilitarian ethic or harm principle stand up? How does his argument in On Liberty mesh with that of his System of Logic or Utilitarianism?
Academic thought proceeds by replacing half-truths with half-truths. Philosophers, who miss the point, correct previous philosophers, who missed the point. The commentary on Mill is not wrong, but rarely addresses central issues. Campus theorists stick to their bread and butter—logic, coherence, and evidence—but avoid the heart of the matter, what motivated Mill. “The case I have been trying to make out,” writes a typical philosopher in his book about On Liberty, “is that Mill’s principle of self-protection rests on a division of conduct into actions which either do or do not affect the interests of other persons rather than on what has generally been supposed to have been the division, namely, into conduct having or not having effects on others.”45 The political theorist Alan Ryan in his book on Mill tells us that “the discussion of the famous essay has been confused by a misunderstanding of its purpose.” Ryan clears some brush, then announces, “I can now state what I believe to be the essence of Mill’s argument in Liberty. People have failed to distinguish between acts which really are wrong and those which are foolish and unaesthetic.”46
In this philosophical bluster, little attention—except by biographers, who often have a better sense—is given to what might be called the driving force of On Liberty, its Humboldtian ethos. A recent collection of scholarly work on Mill barely mentions Humboldt.47 But Mill used Humboldt for the epigraph to On Liberty and returns to him in the text. For Mill, the development of the individual was key, as was the danger of the onset of uniformity. Variety in conditions nourished and partly defined the individual; the loss of variety undermined the individual. Many pages in On Liberty pursue this theme. They are hard to avoid, except by contemporary philosophers and political theorists. Indeed, the reviewers of Mill’s own day understood the animus driving On Liberty much better than today’s scholars. After noting that On Liberty is a “melancholy” book, a 19th-century reviewer stated in his second sentence that it “is written in the sincere foreboding that the strong individualities of the old types of English character are in imminent danger of being swallowed up.”48
In his autobiography Mill does not mince words. He offers that On Liberty is “likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written.” This is because the book became a “text-book of single truth” that is increasingly pertinent: “the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character,” and the importance of “giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.”49 This does not seem obscure. Mill yells out his argument: this is my single truth. “Variety” is essential for individual development. Most philosophers miss it.
In Chapter 3 (“On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being”) of On Liberty Mill elaborates on the importance of variety and the dangers to it. He swivels from the previous chapter that discusses what might be called top-down threats to liberty—censorship by state authorities—to bottom-up threats—censorship by social constrictions. The reason for the shift is simple. The argument for freedom of the press against despotic governments has been made often and well. Moreover, at least in England, although the law curtailing press freedom still existed, Mill believed there was “little danger of its being actually put in force.” To that confident declaration Mill added a footnote with a quick qualification. The English government had just brought charges against a publisher, who had put out a pamphlet—Tyrannicide: Is It Justifiable?—that defended an assassination attempt on the French leader, Louis Napoleon. However, Mill notes that the prosecution was dropped, and Mill sees no reason to revise his text.
The chapter on individuality takes up not freedom of dissent, but freedom of life, or what might nowadays be called “lifestyle.” The issue is not divergent opinions, but divergent modes of living. This meshes with Mill’s endeavors over the decades. An image of Mill as a fuddy-duddy Victorian liberal misleads. Scholars argue as to whether, as a young fellow, Mill distributed illegal literature on contraception. Yet no doubt exists that everyday politics increasingly informed Mill’s career. At the end of his life, as a member of Parliament, he punched away at numerous unpopular causes. One example: Mill led a campaign against government efforts to ban demonstrations in public parks, including Hyde Park, “a corner of which remains a symbol of free speech to this day,” notes his biographer.50 As a recent appraisal of Mill’s activities puts it, “questions of suffrage, sexual equality, Ireland, Empire, secularism, and land reform” consumed Mill at the end of his life. He did not age quietly. Mill was “more hated at the moment of his death than at any other point in his career.”51
For Mill, then, liberty was more than freedom of dissent and press. That is to say, if it is “useful” to have “different opinions,” it is also useful to have “different experiments” in living. “Free scope should be given to varieties of character.” In short, “individuality should assert itself.” It is here where Mill turns to Humboldt, the “eminent” savant and politician. The true “end of man” consists of the “highest and most harmonious development of his power.” Following Humboldt, this requires “‘freedom, and variety of situations’”; and these combine to give rise to “‘individual vigor and manifold diversity,’ which combine themselves in ‘originality.’”52
All this might seem obvious, but for Mill the obstacles to variety and individuality have gathered momentum. “There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess,” but that era is long past. “Society has now fairly got the better of individuality,” and the danger is not excess, but deficiency. The pressure to conform, what Mill called a “wearing down into uniformity,” has redoubled. Mill registered a standardization in opinion and life. People are more alike.
Using an old trope, Mill juxtaposed a European diversity and a Chinese homogeneity; the former led to progress, the latter to stagnation.53 Mill clarified that Europeans are not superior to the Chinese as a people, but that Europeans do have a “remarkable diversity of character and culture.” Our “individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths.” In my judgment, declares Mill, Europe is “wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development.”
Unlike today’s diversity boosters, Mill saw diversity not simply as choices or inherited characteristics, but as something deeper, modes of living. It is here that Mill returns to Tocqueville and Humboldt. He refers to Tocqueville’s observation about “how much more the Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another than did those even of the last generation.” Mill notes that “the same remark might be made of Englishmen in a far greater degree.” He goes back to Humboldt, who posits that human development, which is another term for rendering “people unlike one another,” requires two conditions: freedom and “variety of situations.” It is the latter which worries Mill: “The second of these two conditions is in this country every day diminishing.”
This reality distressed Mill. “The circumstances” that inform different classes and individuals are converging. “Formerly, different ranks, different neighborhoods, different trades and professions lived in what might be called different worlds.” No longer. Now they live in the same world. “Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them.”
All the great transformations of the age—commerce, manufacturing, communications—conspire to bring about “a general similarity among mankind.” Mill gloomily raises an alarm. “It is not so easy to see” how individuality “can stand its ground.” But, if it is possible, “the time is now,” before complete assimilation has taken place. “If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type,” it will be too late. Mankind will be “unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.” Mill calls for nonconformity, a refusal “to bend the knee to custom.” Indeed, he calls for people to be original, even eccentric. “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded”; today few “dare” to be eccentric.54
The clarion calls for diversity can be found elsewhere in Mill, but they barely elicit a nod from current academics who write on him. They have other fish to fry. But Mill’s contemporaries addressed the issues, which is not to say they agreed with him. Several of his 19th-century critics challenged his belief in the decline of individuality. “Do ordinary Englishmen resemble each other every day more and more closely?” asked a reviewer. “Surely, if any one will run over in his mind the names of ten or twelve of his more immediate friends, he will arrive at the conclusion that they differ from each other as radically as the ash, the oak, the birch, and the elm.”55 The historian Lord Macaulay also thought that Mill missed his target. Macaulay believed boldness and inventiveness defined the times—to a fault. “Every writer seems to aim at doing something odd—at defying all rules and canons of criticism.” To recommend eccentricity was exactly wrong. Mill, he declared, is “really crying ‘Fire!’ in Noah’s flood.”56
An anonymous critic in the British Quarterly Review agreed. He thought it “droll” to argue that the present epoch was witnessing a suppression of individuality. “As we read the present day,” he claimed, eccentricities proliferate. “We can hardly see the ‘green ground’ in Truth’s meadow for the dandelions, thistles, and poppies that have sprung up.” For present-day England, individualism “inflicts far more on society than society inflicts on it.”57 Mill’s On Liberty spurred a full-scale response by James Fitzjames Stephen, jurist and journalist, who pursued these themes. In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity he took exception to Mill’s devotion to variety; nor did he appreciate Mill’s ode to individual originality and eccentricity.
Stephen did not think that eccentricity should be promoted; nor that it should be defined as simply nonconformity. The eccentricity that Mill promotes “is far more often a mark of weakness than a mark of strength.” To be original is not necessarily to be different. “Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people.” Moreover, Stephen protests what he called “the odd manner in which Mr. Mill worships mere variety.” Mill confounds “the proposition that variety is good with the proposition that goodness is various.” He throws up his hands. “The difference between Mr. Mill’s views and mine is that he instinctively assumes that whatever is is wrong. I say, try each case on its own merits.”58
James Stephen came from an illustrious family, and his brother Leslie—writer and father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell—joined in with an essay aptly title “Social Macadamisation,” a reference to the level and graveled roads pioneered by the Scottish engineer, John McAdam. Mill feared “the macadamisation of society” or the “grinding down of the individual,” declared Leslie Stephen. All variety and individuality would be lost. Like his brother, he would have none of it. He also did not like the harping on variety.
Mill supposes, according to this Stephen, that “variety of character” is an absolute good. For Stephen, it is “pretty plain” that this is not tenable. Diversity in itself is not desirable. “A nation in which everybody was sober would be a happier, better, and more progressive, though a less diversified nation, than one of which half the members were sober and the other half habitual drunkards.” If this is diversity, England does not need it. A diversity of opinions might be acceptable, but only as a stage, not as an end. “The doctrine which says that variety of opinions is per se and in the ultimate resort a desirable state of things, is precisely analogous to the doctrine which made every man his own pope.” For Stephen, “within certain limits” a variety of opinions and of character is desirable. But it is not the goal, which is concord. “We require, therefore, so much diversity as is compatible with, and indeed necessary to, harmony, but no more.”59
Mill died in 1873, just as these criticisms by the Stephens appeared. Yet his Autobiography almost responds—or at least responds to earlier criticism he had seen. The autobiography, written and revised over many years, appeared in the year of his death. Mill is unbowed. To his critics he makes a telling point. He distinguishes between long-term and short-term trends. Mill explains that he is characterizing underlying social realities, but realizes they contradict everyday appearances.
It is in his Autobiography that Mill states that On Liberty might be considered a textbook expounding on a “single truth . . . the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character.” He admits that, “to superficial observation,” the present times do not “stand much in need of such a lesson” and do not suffer from “an oppressive yoke of uniformity in opinion and practice.” Mill alludes to the statement made by his critics then and today, that variegated individuals and larger-than-life characters proliferated in 19th-century England.60 If this were true, he writes, then the fears that “we”—his late wife Harriet Taylor and himself—expressed about the eclipse of diversity and individuality would seem “chimerical.”
Yet the critics are looking at “facts” and not “tendencies.” We are living in an unsettled period in which opinions and variety multiply, argues Mill. Old convictions are challenged, but this flux marks an era of transition. It will not last. Appearances blind his critics. In the long run, the deeper forces of a noxious uniformity “stunting and dwarfing human nature” may win out. “It is then that the teachings of the Liberty will have their greatest value.”61 In other words, says Mill, history is on my side. My critics confuse a transient efflorescence of diversity with long-term decline. He might be right.
Mill’s essay “should not be called On Liberty, but rather On Diversity.” He correctly supposes that “the peculiarity and diversity of human nature” sustain humanity. But he proposes an “impossible antidote—he wants individual peculiarity and diversity in European thought without individual peculiarity and diversity in European life.” So commented the 19th-century Russian critic Constantine Leontyev in “The Average European as an Ideal and Instrument of Universal Destruction.”62 Leontyev (1831–1891), who is not well-known, resists classification. He was an aesthete, mystic, and hedonist all rolled into one. One of his current editors calls him a minor philosopher, but a major critic with “an almost demonic clarity.”63 The philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev dubbed him a Renaissance type, “and for that reason he tended to be a reactionary in our own time.”64 Leontyev hated the uniformity of bourgeois life: that comes across loud and clear in his writings. “It is not vice that is to be feared nowadays; it is banality and facelessness that are frightening.”65 Like other conservatives such as Möser, he turns to nature as a counterpoint. “Organic nature thrives on diversity, on antagonisms and struggles” and “not in flat unison.” Nature “loves the exuberance of form and it loves diversity. Our life must be patterned after it.”66
Leontyev was on to something. Perhaps On Liberty should indeed be titled On Diversity. But Leontyev’s comments suggest something else. By mid-century the denunciation of encroaching uniformity passed to outliers—reactionaries, philosophical malcontents, and Russian nationalists, who distrusted Western society. A case in point would be another Russian, coming from the Left, not the Right.
Like everyone else, it seems, Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer, was in Paris during the revolution of 1848; and like many others, he was shaken to the core by the events. Even before the election of Louis Napoleon and his coup, the ineptitude of the Left, as well as the savagery of the Right, disabused him of hopes for change. “It is the peculiar destiny of the Russians,” he wrote in his brilliant reflections on the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, From the Other Shore, “to see further than their neighbors, to see in darker colors and to express their opinions boldly.”67 And what did he see?
He saw that the liberators were weak, and “the masses” conformist and obedient. The masses are not only “indifferent to individual freedom, to freedom of speech,” they “love authority” and “the arrogant glitter of power.” Herzen admitted that, along with other socialists and liberals, he had been wrong about “the people.” Liberals live “in large towns and small circles” among “books, journals, clubs.” Liberals “did not know the people at all; they studied it with immense profundity from historical sources, antiquities, not in the villages and the market place.”
The reality evaded liberals. “It was easier for liberalism to invent the people than to study it.” If liberals had known the “inner life of France,” they would not have been surprised that the people voted for Louis Napoleon. They would have realized that “the French people have not the faintest notion of freedom, of the Republic, but they have bottomless national pride.”68 To be sure, Herzen did not damn “the people.” They were not ready to govern, and the state, he wrote elsewhere, did not give the people what it needed, education, but what it did not need, universal suffrage.69
Like many other refugees of the 1848 revolution—such as Marx—Herzen ended up in England. He lived in London for twelve years, but never warmed to the English. “Life here,” he wrote to a Russian acquaintance, “is about as boring as that of worms in a cheese. There is not a spark of anything healthy, vigorous or hopeful.”70 He had arrived in England a defeated man; his hopes for a European revolution had been dashed. Moreover, he suffered a series of personal blows of the first magnitude. His mother and one of his sons had drowned in a boating accident. His wife had died in the aftermath of his devastating discovery of her passionate affair with his best friend.71
It would be difficult to imagine two figures more different than John Stuart Mill and Alexander Herzen—at least at first glance: the careful English state employee and the hot-blooded Russian aristocrat. Mill was the son of a state official and former clergyman; Herzen the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner and his German common-law wife. The father bestowed on him the surname Herzen (German Herz = heart) as a token of his affection.72 Herzen impressed virtually everyone by his energy and fire. Jane Carlyle, the wife of Thomas Carlyle, invited him for tea along with other political refugees. There were five us, she reported, speaking four languages, sometimes at the same time. “It was a madhouse!” She judged Herzen brave and fervent—too much so. “His tawny eyes have a hungry animal look that makes me feel as if he might easily spring at me and eat me.”73
Herzen made a few friends during his years in London but seems never to have met Mill. He did encounter Mill’s On Liberty, and it bespeaks something of the Zeitgeist that these two individuals whose intellectual and personal trajectories were so different—just for starters, a sober utilitarianism branded Mill’s thought; and a Romantic Hegelianism, Herzen’s—came to agree. Herzen himself was amazed. He identified Mill as a member of the establishment—“recently a member of the India Board”; and the beneficiary of a position offered by Lord Stanley. This is a man “accustomed to regard the world calmly, like an Englishman.” He is no “angry socialist exile.” Yet he had written a book that “goes far beyond anything I have said.”
Mill came out swinging in defense of “liberty of thought, speech and the person.” Herzen found this “strange,” since Milton had already defended freedom of speech two centuries ago. But the times had changed. Milton defended freedom of speech against the government. “Mill’s enemy is quite different.” Mill was standing up for “liberty not against an educated government but against society, against custom, against the deadening force of indifference, against petty intolerance, against ‘mediocrity.’” Mill was “horrified by the constant deterioration of personalities.” What Tocqueville observed in France, Mill observed in England: the omnipresence of “standard, indistinguishable types.” Individualities get “effaced” and “disappear among the masses.” In Herzen’s paraphrase, “Everything is moving towards mediocrity. . . . Faces are being lost in the crowd.” This mediocrity “hates everything that is sharply defined, original, outstanding.” A “viscous bog” spreads over society that “forestalls the disorderliness of eccentric individuals.” Change takes place, but like fashion, it is monotonous or “senseless.”74 To cite Mill, “We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers . . . for change’s sake, not from any idea of beauty or convenience.”75
Herzen agreed. Mill “was not exaggerating in the least when he talked of the narrowing of men’s minds and energies, of the obliteration of individuality.”76 But he offered a criticism: Mill had no solution. How are we to wake the sleeping individual? asked Herzen. “In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetized by trifles, be inspired, be made discontented with its present life of railways, telegraphs, newspapers, and cheap goods?” Herzen banked on new political upheaval but lacked optimism in its prospects. The English workingman has numbers but not will. “Numbers prove nothing. Two or three Cossacks of the line with two or three garrison soldiers each of them take five hundred convicts from Moscow to Siberia.” But if no upheaval takes place, Mill is on target, concludes Herzen. Rights will exist, but “the ability to make use of these rights and this freedom” will dwindle.77
Many of these 19th-century observers tapped a stereotype of a foreign land to highlight where uniformity dominated and individuality vanished. For Mill, China represented a stagnant society without individuals. For Herzen, it was Holland: “Where are her great statesmen, her great artists, her subtle theologians, her bold mariners?” Instead, she gives the world “drained marshes . . . laundered towns . . . ironed gardens.” The Dutchman works and prospers but “has not the time to look round him, to enjoy some leisure, before he is carried off to ‘God’s acre’ in an elegant, lacquered coffin, while his son is already harnessed to the trade-wheel.”78 For Constantine Leontyev, Switzerland incarnated a dull conformity. He railed against “the lot of industrialized societies” with “pitifully small variations” in which “the characters of individuals would become similar.” Leontyev asked, in 1864, “what is better”: the “spiritually seething period of the Renaissance” or the “meek, prosperous and sedate Switzerland?”79
Was he alluding to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published a few years earlier? He might have been, since Burckhardt was thinking along similar lines. For a literate public, Burckhardt remains the author of just that one book, which has gone through many editions and translations, and is deemed “an historical classic read in all western countries.”80 As one critic recently declared, “The study of the Renaissance can no more forget Burckhardt than biology can leave Darwin behind.”81
But Burckhardt remains a bit of a cipher. His life had none of the “Sturm und Drang” of Herzen—or of Burckhardt’s colleague, Nietzsche. He moved from religion and journalism to art history. He wrote a guide to Italian art, but he published little and kept a low profile, teaching at Basel, Switzerland for nearly fifty years. He even refused offers of more prestigious positions that came his way. Yet his professional and political asceticism can be seen as a protest against a world that had gone amuck, a stance that comes through in his unpublished writing and peeks through his Renaissance book. For this reason, he appealed to refugee scholars, both because he kept his integrity and because he alluded to future political disasters.
J.P. Mayer, who resurrected Tocqueville, also turned to Burckhardt during World War II; to Mayer, both anticipated the rise of popular authoritarian regimes. He classified Burckhardt and Tocqueville as “new liberals.” That is, they were not conventional liberals who believed in automatic progress; nor were they socialists “chasing after a Utopian idea; nor reactionary conservatives trying to put the clock back.” They accepted progress and remained committed to liberty and freedom but feared the onset of uniformity and popular dictatorships. Mayer called the Swiss professor a “lonely prophet” with contemporary relevance, noting the defeat of France by the Nazis that had just occurred. “The French collapse in June 1940,” wrote Mayer in 1941, “is a terrible confirmation of the fears of the Basel prophet.”82 A year earlier another refugee scholar, Albert Salomon, also turned to Burckhardt and found insights into the current disaster. Almost a century ago, announced Salomon in 1940, a scholar “visualized the forthcoming debacle of European civilization . . . This man was Jacob Burckhardt.”83
Although Burckhardt kept his loyalties veiled, they can be glimpsed in the manner he celebrated robust individuality in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In the section titled “The Development of the Individual,” Burckhardt stated that the Italians of the 14th century “knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbors.” Even those outside political power found ways to express their Renaissance individualism. Their “political impotence” did not “hinder the different tendencies and manifestations of private life from thriving in the fullest vigor and variety.”84 As the scholar Lionel Gossman wrote in his Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, the Renaissance book draws a comparison between an exuberant past individualism and the grey uniformity of contemporary Switzerland. Gossman believes that Burckhardt’s “entire historical enterprise was an act of resistance to that modern way of life” he detested. He saw contemporary society as marked by “absolute uniformity” and empty novelty.85
Like Tocqueville and Mill, Burckhardt feared the onset of conformist masses and hollow diversity. He judged that people surrendered individuality for technological accoutrements. Mankind today, Burckhardt wrote to a friend, would willingly “give up their particular literature and culture for express overnight trains.” People “really hate every kind of diversity.”86 Both Mayer and Salomon cite a passage in which Burckhardt declared that “the term liberty sounds beautiful and perfect,” but “I know too much history.” The masses could bring an end to liberty. “There is a popular mass, wherein slumber the seeds of a vast number of splendid characters, but which could be utilized as a mass in the hands of any rogue and would then behave like a wild beast.”87
Burckhardt distrusted elections because, “if they want to be re-elected, the leaders of the people must win over the loudest-mouthed sections of the popular masses.” The rise of Louis Napoleon in France and Bismarck in Germany worried him. Burckhardt’s vision got darker and darker. “I feel it in my bones that something will erupt in the West.” He anticipated stages of “confusion and disorder,” until “by an act of pure violence, a new power emerges which will make damned short shrift of voting rights, popular sovereignty, material welfare, industry, etc.”88 Burckhardt wrote to a friend, “All power now lies with the forces of dissolution and uniformity.”89
In his lectures on history Burckhardt sounded very much like Benjamin Constant. He criticized the short-lived Helvetic Republic that was established when Napoleon invaded Switzerland to set up a centralized government. For Burckhardt, this spelled the end of diversity that characterized Swiss localism. The new Republican leaders aimed to impose uniform regulations on the archaic practices of almost autonomous cantons. As an historian of Switzerland put it, for the Helvetic Republic “diversity embodied the corporatist society of the ancien régime, while uniformity in cultural and political matters was a sign of a truly modern and progressive (i.e. republican) state.”90 Burckhardt would have concurred. He saw Napoleon’s principal representatives as misguided Enlighteners, who aimed to efface the diversity of Swiss society. “From the spirit of the century they had worked up a veritable indignation at everything varied and different.”91
These comments come from Burckhardt’s lectures, which he delivered in the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s, a period that witnessed accelerating industrialization and empire-building. By the last quarter of the century, laments of encroaching uniformity had become common not only among maverick scholars like Burckhardt but also in the new field of sociology. Many of the discipline’s founding texts, such as Ferdinand Tönnies’s Community and Society (1887), Gabriel Tarde’s Laws of Imitation (1890), and Émile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1893), rested on the observation that differences were contracting in modern society.
All these authors were murky—they were, after all, sociologists. Tönnies’s basic concepts of “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft) puzzled readers and translators.92 Nevertheless, the rough argument, which reflected Tönnies’s own alienation from contemporary German society, comes through. Indeed, in his letters he often sounded like Burckhardt, unhappy with all political options. “It seems to me,” he wrote in 1879, “as though the clouds draw closer and closer over our national life. Will the Lord soon take a look and exterminate the scoundrels?” Like Burckhardt, he felt estranged from the university.93 A friend recalled that “uncompromising” and “altogether negative attitude toward the world we live in”; he saw about him “nothing but dissolution and ruin.” He rejected the university and wanted to establish a “free academy” where learning could proceed unhampered by status and restriction.94, *
For Tönnies, the commercial transactions of an industrial society supplant the natural and organic relations of an agrarian community. A romantic note infuses his work. Industrial homogeneity succeeds rural diversity. “Every man . . . becomes in some measure a merchant,” states Tönnies, quoting Adam Smith.95 The merchant is “isolated from all necessary relationships, duties, and prejudices. . . . He is free from the ties of the life of the Gemeinschaft; the freer he is from them, the better for him.” The categories of profit and trade remake the world. The denizen of Gemeinschaft looked inward, but the new trading class looks outward. “It is concerned only with the roads which connect towns and with the means of transit. . . . The whole country is nothing but a market in which to purchase and sell.”96
The other sociological classic, Tarde’s Laws of Imitation, accented quickening uniformity, which Tarde understood through a complex analogy to nature that oscillated between difference and regularity. In nature and history “difference is the cause and the goal, and harmony the means and the effect.”97 The Frenchman Tarde noted that uniformity marks our present society, which is reflected in the military. In the 17th century, the king marveled at the diversity of costumes in his army, but by the following century “a uniform became general,” which persists to the present. “Imagine the effect produced by a return in our day . . . to such an antique medley of military garments! Such diversity of costume would not be tolerated.” As in the military so in life. Tarde concurred with Mill that without diversity “the world would be as monotonous as it is vast.” He noted “the picturesque side of the ‘rich diversity’” of the medieval period, while in the modern era uniformity dominates. He asked, “Is not our present civilization . . . cast in a single, unique mold? Nowadays, have we not to seek the depth of some African desert or Chinese village to avoid seeing the same hats and dresses, the same cigars, the same newspapers?”
Tarde ended his 1890 study of “imitation” on a bleak note, asking whether homogeneity will triumph or dissolve and give rise to a new individuality. “We may wonder,” he declares in his final paragraph, “whether universal similarity under all its present or future forms, in regard to dress, to the alphabet, perhaps to language, to sciences, to law, etc., we may wonder whether it is the consummate fruit of civilization.” Or, he continues, it is possible that civilization may “pause” and give rise to “distinctive traits of our individuality”—an “aesthetic life”—that will be more radical than anything witnessed before. If this is the case, then our present stage is just a “long, obscure, and tortuous transition” from an old to a new diversity.99
The final sociological classic belongs to Durkheim, whose reputation far eclipses that of Tarde and Tönnies. He also mulled on the forces of uniformity but offered a twist that would be rephrased by champions of globalization today. His Division of Labor in Society takes up the implications of increasing specialization. Even the scholar must specialize. “The time has passed” when one could study everything, he declares. Such a broad project appears as dilettantism, something “loose and flabby.” We prefer the man “who has a restricted task, and devotes himself to it.” Specialization in life and work typifies modern society.
Durkheim introduces two categories, mechanical and organic solidarity, to apprehend the core of past and present society. The terms are somewhat confusing—and virtually reverse Tönnies’s vocabulary—but do capture a central element of an industrial world. “Organic” solidarity distinguishes advanced societies. In a pre-industrial society the individual acquired food and shelter on his own, and with that autonomy the relationship to others became external or mechanical. In industrial societies we do not bake our own bread or sew our own clothes. We specialize—and increasingly rely on others. With specialization our relationship to others is indispensable. For Durkheim, “organic” alludes to the fact that our specialized organs—the eye or ear—cannot function in isolation. As we become more and more specialized, the links to society become more and more biological or “organic.”100
What does this mean for diversity or the development of the individual? On one hand, the reality of homogeneity cannot be denied. Echoing Tarde—and Rousseau and Tocqueville—Durkheim asked, “Are not the differences which separate a Frenchman from an Englishman or a German less today than heretofore?” The French sociologist declares that “in almost all European societies, law, morality, customs, even fundamental political institutions are nearly identical.” This can be observed not only across countries but also within countries. Differences between provinces and regions decline. “We no longer find today the same contrasts that we used to find.” Social life “no longer varies so much from one province to another.” In France “it is nearly the same in all regions.”101
Yet Durkheim flips the switch here. Homogenization increases, but so does individuality, which might be treated as a form of specialization. As differences between countries and regions decline, individuality increases. The relationship is inverse. The particularities of the region, group, or tribe retreat as individuality advances. “There is now less distance than heretofore between the Frenchman and the Englishman, generally speaking, but that does not stop the contemporary Frenchmen from differing among themselves more than the Frenchmen of yesteryear.” The same configuration exists within the country. Distinctions between regions of France diminish, but individuality grows. “There are no longer as many differences as there are great regions, but there are almost as many as there are individuals.” The modern division of labor fuels this diversity, believes Durkheim. Though jobs look more and more alike, their specialization engenders differences. Homogeneity coexists with cultivated diversity.102
This is almost the argument today of those like economist Tyler Cowen who celebrate the global market. Global homogenization is set against the opposite, global heterogeneity. They are “two sides of the same coin,” as Cowen writes in Creative Destruction. Critics have failed to distinguish two types of diversity that move in opposite directions. Globalization “tends to favor diversity within society, but to disfavor diversity across societies.” This means that “different regions may look more similar than in times past,” but individuals in those regions “have a more diverse menu of choice for their cultural consumption.” Mass marketing and niche marketing complement each other. “In some ways the world was very diverse in 1450, but not in a way that most individuals could benefit from.” Today it is the opposite. “Only in a world of globalized culture can I collect nineteenth-century Japanese prints, listen to the music of Pygmy tribes, read the Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul, and enjoy the humor of Canadian Jim Carrey, while my neighbors pursue different paths of their own choosing.”103
There is undoubtedly a truth to this, but a question leaps out for both Durkheim and others who present these arguments: does specialization and increased “menu of choice” constitute enhanced individuality? It is at least as convincing to suggest the opposite; they connote an attenuated individual. Already Adam Smith expressed fear that specialization would maim, not enhance, the individual. He worried that “the progress of the division of labor” led most people to do only a few tasks each, and that “dexterity” in one specialized trade over a lifetime “corrupts” the mind, leading to a “drowsy stupidity.”104 (Note to followers of Ayn Rand: for this reason Smith supported state education.) Undoubtedly the menu of choices has increased, which Cowen celebrates: “We can go anywhere and see Javanese puppet theater, look at French Impressionist pictures, eat sushi, and hear Afro-Cuban music.” As positive as this scenario may be, its vision of the individual does not extend beyond that as a consumer. Humboldt would be aghast. As the individual dwindles, purchasing options widen.
The consumption angle does not appear in Durkheim, but he did wrestle with the antinomies of individualism; and, as with many fin-de-siècle social thinkers, a certain darkness imbues his work. On one hand, the division of labor gives rise to the modern individual—on the other, it leads to breakdown. Besides The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim’s most famous work is Suicide, where he employed the term “anomie,” which refers to the dissolution of norms.105 Suicide can be clumped with a number of somber works that appeared towards the end of the century, such as Henry Morselli’s Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (1879) and Thomas G. Masaryk’s Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization (1881).106 These books established a relationship between industrial civilization and suicide.107
Durkheim recognized that the division of labor engendered social disorganization—and suicide.108 But something else reared up at the end of the century that illuminated dwindling diversity and its dangers: the emergence of the mass man in the guise of popular anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism upset many, including Durkheim. The Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish French army captain was framed in 1894 for treason, ripped France apart for a decade. Rabbi Moses Durkheim’s son became a famous sociologist; but the son dropped his first name, David, for his middle name, Émile, and preferred that his last get pronounced in a French manner with a short ‘e’—Durkhem—rather than the more German and Jewish “Durkhime.”109 Professor Durkhem kept a very low, perhaps nonexistent, Jewish profile. But the Dreyfus Affair ensnared him and caused a small blip in his worldview. In the few writings that he devoted to the Affair, he struggled to fathom what he called the “state of social malaise,” this “public madness.” When Dreyfus was found guilty by a military court, Durkheim noted, “There was a fervent joy in the streets. People celebrated. . . . People finally knew whom to blame for the economic troubles and the moral distress through which they lived. Evil came from the Jews.”110
With limited success Durkheim struggled to reconcile the antipodes of his own theories. On one hand, the advanced division of labor led to a “diversity of situations and constantly changing circumstances” that allowed a new kind of individual to flourish. On the other, these same conditions destabilized society. “There remains nothing that men may love and honor in common.” He noted that the Jewish faith in France was no “less ardent” 20 or 30 years ago, while anti-Semitism had increased, which reflects “the serious moral disturbance from which we suffer.”111 Yet Durkheim did not offer much insight into why these disturbances gathered strength.
The ineptness of the opposition to anti-Semitism troubled Durkheim. He wrote to a friend in 1898 that he just “spent the saddest winter; all these deplorable events, the impression they give of our moral isolation, the disgusting spectacle of so much cowardice.” This got the “better of my courage.”112 However, he rallied and called for intellectuals, who in their commitment to justice and rights must resist the “enthusiasms of the crowd” which celebrates the condemnation of Dreyfus. “May the common danger we confront at least help us by shaking us out of our torpor and giving us again the taste for action!”113 He wanted to keep his intellectual protesters together beyond the Dreyfus Affair. We must not “disband,” he wrote to a friend, “but must draw the consequences of the crisis and do whatever possible to prevent its return. Otherwise, it will reproduce itself in another form.” After some renewed personal attacks by anti-Semites, he wrote to an acquaintance that he was “becoming discouraged,” but “at bottom I am an optimist.”114
Perhaps too much so. The crisis did return—in other decades and forms, as Burckhardt and others anticipated. The years that Durkheim cemented his reputation as a rationalist sociologist who banked on progress saw a new kind of sociological literature appear that foregrounded the opposite, regression—or the underside of industrialization and democracy. Amid the Dreyfus Affair, Gustav Le Bon published Psychology of Crowds, which has been called “the first best-seller of social science since Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.”115 In overheated rhetoric, he announced the “advent to power of the masses.” The old ideas are “tottering and disappearing”; the old pillars of society are “giving way one by one,” but one thing is gaining power: the masses. Scarcely a century ago, the opinion of the masses “did not count at all.” Today it is the opposite: “The destinies of nations are elaborated in the heart of the masses, and no longer in the council of princes.”116
Psychology of Crowds belonged to a series of works from the end of the century that underscored the emergence of the crowd, the mob, or the masses. Tarde also wrote a book on crowds. But most of the authors owed nothing to Mill or Tocqueville. They were not liberals, but illiberals and reactionaries. They regretted democratic society. Le Bon was an anti-Dreyfusard—and a colonialist, racist, and misogynist. Mussolini thought highly of him.117 Nevertheless, the new illiberal literature on the crowd suggested that the fears of Tocqueville and Mill were not misplaced.
This is what J.P. Mayer understood when, in the wake of Nazism, he returned to Tocqueville as a prophet of the masses. He was not alone. Virtually at the same time, another left-leaning German-Jewish refugee visited the issue. At one time the star of Emil Lederer shined brightly. But “he has more or less been forgotten,” an Israeli sociologist recently commented, adding that “the time for a renewal of interest in this great social scientist” has come.118 Lederer found refuge in the United States, co-founded the “University in Exile” at the New School, and became the first dean of its graduate faculty. One year after his death in 1939, his final work, The State of the Masses, was published. As a student of his wrote in a foreword, the manuscript was “written after Czechoslovakia had been wiped off the map of Europe but before the German army and secret police invaded Poland.”119 In other words, at the same moment that Mayer reexamined the place of the masses, so did Lederer.
Lederer noted that socialists had long been wrong about the masses in two regards. Because of Le Bon and his ilk, socialists believed that the “masses (as we now know them) are only an invention of reactionary thinkers.” In addition, the socialists imagined that the masses would “follow their own interests” toward a rational and egalitarian society. In both respects socialists were wrong. The masses do exist, and they do not necessarily follow their own interests, Lederer declared. Because socialists never understood these phenomena, the “fascist reality was the great surprise.” In the same way, liberals do not understand fascism. They stress “the terror, the suppression of free press and speech,” and ask, “How this can be possible?” Yet Lederer, like J.P. Mayer, notes that “the suppression of free speech and thinking” is only “the last step.” The people have already been atomized, ground down, and turned into a mass.120
Lederer had identified this process decades earlier in an analysis of World War I, written during the war’s first months. He glimpsed in the conflict an intensification of “depersonalization and mechanization” that had been unfolding for decades. These realities affected all sides—Germans, Russians, French, English. “National differences of social and economic structure have become irrelevant.” What is happening is an “historical mass homogenization of people,” he declared in 1915.121 In other words, the eclipse of real diversity opened the way for a dangerous mass politics. Welcome to the future.
An American also glimpsed something of the same sort during World War I. This was a young writer, Randolph Bourne, who was visiting Germany the day the war broke out. As German reservists paraded down Berlin’s Unter den Linden, Bourne feared the worst for Europe. “This civilization that I have been admiring so much seems so palpably about to be torn to shreds,” he lamented.122 Bourne “rued how rapidly the fever for war had eroded civility and cultural tolerance,” summarizes an historian.123 He hurried back to the States, where he wrote a series of essays that damned the warmongers and championed American diversity.
The American contribution to diversity overlapped with the European but addressed a reality unique to the United States, namely the millions of immigrants that poured into North America. These circumstances defined American diversity. Between 1901 and 1910 almost one million immigrants entered each year. For politicians and citizens, the issue was how or even why to transform this varied population into one nation. The prevailing goal often appealed to the metaphor of the melting pot, popularized by Israel Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot. This theatrical celebration of melding all peoples into similar Americans opened in 1908 with President Theodor Roosevelt, who apparently loved it, in attendance.124 For Bourne, however, the war demonstrated “the failure of the ‘melting pot.’” The time had come, he declared, “to assert a higher ideal than the ‘melting pot’” of narrow Americanization. He rejected the idea of a homogeneous America for a “cosmopolitan federation” where “heterogeneous peoples” live harmoniously together.125
Bourne was not alone in the early decades of the 20th century in defending diversity against a repressive American homogeneity; other critics such as Horace Kallen and Alain Locke joined him. Not only did their lives intersect, these three writers could serve as an advertisement for the diversity they celebrated. Bourne came from an old American Puritan family; at birth, forceps mangled him, and a spinal disease struck him as an infant. These misfortunes left him disfigured. He bore “a crooked back and an unsightly face,” he wrote in the essay “The Handicapped”; “no one but the deformed man can realize just what the mere fact of sitting a foot lower than the normal means.”126
Kallen came from Silesia, Austria—now Poland—to the United States; his father was an Orthodox rabbi, but Kallen rebelled and frequently fled his home. He described his father as “among the last of the old school of Jews who would make absolutely no concession to their environment.”127 Locke was a gay African American from a Philadelphia family of educators. His parents called him “Allan,” but he changed it to “Alain,” which he thought more stylish.128
Both Kallen and Locke studied at Harvard during philosopher William James’s tenure; Bourne became entranced with James as a student of John Dewey at Columbia. Herein lies part of the American diversity story: American pragmatism and pluralism laid a foundation for challenging total philosophies that were pitched in one register. James defended what might be called the anarchism of pluralism against the law-and-order of monism. “An antiauthoritarian principle” marked James’s pluralism, Locke observed.129 Its “radical protest” attracted him.130 “The world is a pluralism,” James wrote in the preface to The Will to Believe. It consists of “real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes,” all of which escape philosophical monism.131
One of James’s essays, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” collected quotations of poets, dreamers, and loafers who reveled in a natural world to which absolutist philosophers and “highly educated classes (so called)” seem immune. “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities.” What is the point of this collection of quotations? asks James in conclusion. “It absolutely forbids us” to damn lives other than our own. “It commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways.” More generally, awareness of the world of these dreamers means, “Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” He adds, “Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations.”132
This indelible pluralism pervades James’s writings. Indeed, the title of his most famous work is Varieties of Religious Experience.133 Elsewhere, in a review of a book by Benjamin Paul Blood, an obscure New York State philosopher, he seconds the author: “Variety, not uniformity, is more likely the key to progress.”134 The political and cultural conclusions, if they are not front and center, peek out. Even in this review James endorses what he calls a “a sort of ‘left-wing’ voice of defiance . . . what to my ear has a radically pluralistic sound.”135 Kallen, in a collection of James’s writings that he edited, cites a letter in which the philosopher declares that he is always for the “underdogs.” James stated, “I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual. . . . The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed.”136 In A Pluralistic Universe James explains that part of the world always eludes the rational monist. “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. . . . The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than an empire or a kingdom.”137
Inspired by William James, Bourne, Kallen, and Locke proposed “cultural pluralism” as the response to American immigrant diversity—and to some extent racial diversity.138 Bourne’s idea of a “cosmopolitan federation” of nationalities seems directly borrowed from James.139 Kallen claimed the phrase “cultural pluralism” emerged out of conversations with Locke when they both studied philosophy at Harvard.140 In a 1915 essay, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” Kallen lambasted those who wanted to turn everyone into identical Americans. “What troubles them is difference.” The point, for Kallen, is to build on difference. Each nationality would retain “its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own individual and inevitable esthetic and intellectual forms.” In this essay Kallen declares, “Men can change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent; they cannot change their grandfathers.”141 In the book that included this essay, Kallen announced his “standpoint . . . as Cultural Pluralism.” For Kallen, democracy involves “not the elimination of differences, but the perfection and conservation of differences. It aims . . . not at uniformity, but at variety.”142
“Culture and the Ku Klux Klan” runs the title of the volume’s preface. For Kallen, the Ku Klux Klan incarnated the opposition to American pluralism, which is founded upon “variation of racial groups and individual character; upon spontaneous differences of social heritage, institutional habit, mental attitude and emotional tone.” The strength of the United States lies in its “manyness, variety, differentiation.” Kallen closed his preface with a call to arms. “The alternative before Americans is Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism.”143
Both Kallen and Locke had long careers ahead of them. Kallen taught at the New School for decades and identified as a liberal Zionist. Locke taught for almost as long at Howard University and wrote often about race. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called him “the veritable ‘dean’ of the fabled Harlem Renaissance.”144 In his thirties Locke joined the Bahá’í faith. Though he died in 1954, his ashes were not buried until 2014, beneath a tombstone that included two phrases, “Herald of the Harlem Renaissance” and “Exponent of Cultural Pluralism,” alongside symbols suggesting his sexual and religious identities.145
The influenza epidemic at the end of World War I cut down the ailing Bourne; he died at age 32. His brief life has led to debates about what his future contributions might have been. In his final writings he wrestled with new issues and formulations. Not simply the war, but popular support for it disillusioned Bourne. “The mass of the people” succumb to the “irresistible forces for uniformity.” Bourne bemoaned the emergence of a “herd-feeling” he saw all around him. Even the beliefs of the socialists, “millions strong, did not insulate them against that electric thrill of panic and patriotism.”146 For some critics, Bourne glimpsed the future, the emergence of “the technocratic state and a mass man.”147
At one point Kallen’s cry—Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism—seemed dated.148 John Higham’s comprehensive history of Americanization, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, which was published first in 1955, cautiously concluded that the days of illiberal populism and the Ku Klux Klan were over—over, but perhaps not out. The new prosperity, with its promise of two chickens in every pot and two cars in every garage, sapped the animus of the American homogenizers.149 Even into the 1990s a scholar opined that the era of Americanization had ended. “The historian can only express astonishment at the alteration of national ethos,” declared Brandeis University professor Stephen J. Whitfield in 1996. “Diversity has ceased to be something to be feared and has become something to be celebrated. The ideal of heterogeneity has displaced homogeneity.” He observed that “almost no monoculturalists remain standing.”150 But times change—and regress. The monoculturalists are back. They are more than standing; they are commanding. The backlash against immigrant diversity runs deep and wide—in the United States and elsewhere.
Yet the salience of cultural pluralism à la Kallen should not obscure its limits. It mainly addresses group diversity and assumes individual diversity. Men cannot change their grandfathers, declared Kallen, who continued, “Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to be. . . . The selfhood which is inalienable in them . . . is ancestrally determined.”151 Or as he wrote elsewhere, “An Irishman is always an Irishman, a Jew always a Jew. . . . Irishman and Jew are facts in nature.”152 But this biological notion of group identity has proved both dangerous and misleading. Kallen himself departed from the Jewish orthodoxy of his father; and his children and grandchildren did even more so.153 The issue in these pages, however, is less group diversity than individual diversity. Can the former wax and the latter wane? Can we have more groups and fewer individuals? More “diversity” and at the same time more homogeneity? To these questions the American pluralists had little to offer.
* If these sentiments evoke the Basel scholar, Tönnies was in fact only one degree separated from him. At age 27, Tönnies spent time in the Swiss Alps courting a 21-year-old with whom he had fallen in love and who was half in love with Burckhardt’s colleague Nietzsche. Everyone from Nietzsche to Freud seems to have been enchanted by the Russian Lou-Andreas Salomé. So was Tönnies. “She is a phenomenon that must be seen from close up to be believed. . . . She is a genius,” Tönnies reported to a friend.98