Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
(Vol 1, Arthur Goldhammer tr. Library
of America)
(Vol 2., Henry Reeve, tr.)
Given how much has changed in the
world – not least in France and America – since Alexis de Tocqueville published
his first volume of Democracy in America about 190 years ago, it is
remarkable how fascinating, relevant, and instructive it remains. Volume One is
his description of what he saw in America, the character of its laws and
citizens, their unique history, and their way of thinking. Volume Two uses
America as an occasional example, but it is of broader application and
noticeably more judgmental.
When Tocqueville wrote, both emancipation and the 4th amendment were 30 years in the future of the United States. The national government’s authority over interstate commerce had been proclaimed, but its effects had not yet begun to be felt. Women did not vote and the Senate was elected by state legislatures. In Europe, the Napoleonic wars were still alive in the memory of living adults. States which had been reconstituted at the Congress of Vienna were struggling for coherence. Although the ancient regime was gone forever, France had just lost its first republic and was again under a monarchy. Empires were ascendant (Britain) or in decline (Tukey). Freedom for Greece had recently seized many imaginations.
For the young Tocqueville, though, America was the cynosure for the future. As a young – very young – French aristocrat, he had secured permission to travel in this country which he did for a year and a half in the 1820s. He traveled in every section and made lasting friendships with many Americans, prominent and otherwise. He collected copies of statutes, ordinances, and state constitutions and then returned home to publish a profoundly detailed meditation on democracy. It’s hard to believe that he published Volume One when he was no more than 30 or 31 years old.
In scholarship, energy, and intellect, Tocqueville resembles James Madison, another precocious young man of wide reading and understanding about history and uses of government. But Tocqueville’s purposes, if not his occasionally ardent tone, are different. Democracy in America –- which not incidentally is expressly directed to a European audience – has a twofold objective.
First, Tocqueville says he will forecast to his reader the future of democracy in general, based on the short experiment furnished by the new United States. It is not a prediction of what will be, but what can be, if the lures of equality are avoided. More of this in a moment. His second purpose is much more far reaching. He harbors, he says, “a kind of religious dread” of this gradual development of social equality in the Christian world. But since it is inevitable and comes by “Divine decree,” to attempt to check it would be “to resist the will of God.” This is “the great political problem of the time.” And so with a tincture of regret he concludes that the first duty of all contemporary leaders
“is to educate the democracy; to warm its faith, if that be possible; to purify its morals; to direct its energies; to substitute a knowledge of business for its inexperience, and an acquaintance with its true interests for its blind propensities; to adapt its government to time and place, ad to modify it in compliance with the occurrences and the actors of the age.”
Because we can conclude that Tocqueville has actually fulfilled his mission, we can see why Russell Kirk wrote that he was “the best friend democracy ever has had, and democracy’s most candid and judicious critic.” Note that Kirk does not say that Tocqueville was America’s best friend; his emphasis is on the Frenchman’s role as critic.
Weakness of Democracy.
Reviewing the weaknesses of democracy, Tocqueville is not hesitant. Democracy is more inevitable than wonderful. It is often an ineffective instrument, for example in the conduct of foreign policy and in its enactment of transient legislation. It is subject to the very real dangers of majoritarianism. (Tocqueville’s examples of the latter are uncomfortably like what can be seen in the contemporary American academy.) But democracy’s virtue is really what Tocqueville calls its “secret tendency” to turn even the private vices of elected officials to the common prosperity – because they have an idea of re-election. The “true” advantages of democracy are not the arts and the elevation of the human mind (which can be expected to suffer) but rather the production of comfort and the private benefits which are the by-product of American democracy’s energy and restless activity.
Nor does he blink the disadvantages. The boundlessness of the land presses men on and on, seeking a greater fortune, “but happiness they cannot attain.” It is no more than a game which is only pursued for the excitement of chance.
Exceptionalism.
America, he says, simply has to be seen to be believed. Everyone is involved in a stunning tumult of public affairs; political agitation is only an episode of a much wider universal activity fortified by unbounded economic optimism. Obviously there were several other democratic examples (Switzerland, etc.), but America displays countless novelties, including the “momentous” difference that the United States alone permits the federal government to execute its own enactment and that “the subjects of the Union are not states but private citizens
Lay of the Land; Culture.
The Land and Its Natives. Tocqueville’s awe at North America’s physical immensity is always present and a regular backdrop to many of his most acute observations. As he sees it, it is the broad American territory, bestowed by God, which is the key to remaining free and equal. He marvels at the landscape, embraces it lovingly, and yet betrays a sense of indecision as well. On one page he tells of finding an abandoned cabin on a wooded isle on an upstate New York lake, once again overtaken by the forest. “[A]nd when I was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, I exclaimed with melancholy, “Are ruins, then, already here?’
“In what part of our human condition can be found anything at all similar to that which is occurring under our eyes in North America? . . . . Everything is extraordinary . . . . , the social condition of the inhabitants, as well as the laws; but the soil upon which these institutions are founded is more extraordinary than all the rest. . . . [When] North America was discovered, [it was] as if it had been kept in reserve by the Deity, and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge. [¶] That continent still presents, as it did in primeval times, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. In this state, it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of the most potent secrets of the natural world, who is united to his fellow-men, and instructed by the experience of fifty centuries. At this very time thirteen millions of civilized Europeans are peaceably spreading over those fertile plains . . . . Three or four thousand soldiers drive the wandering races of the aborigines before them; these are followed by the pioneers, who pierce the woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the courses of inland streams, and make ready the triumphant procession of civilization across the waste. . . . .[¶] . . . . [T]he European leaves his cottage of the transatlantic shores; and the American, who is born on that very coast, plunges in his turn into the wilds of central America. . . . Millions of men are marching at once towards the same horizon; their language, their religion, their manners differ, their object is the same. The gifts of fortune are promised in the West, and to the West they bend their course.”[1]
In his opening chapters, Tocqueville comments briefly, but trenchantly, on the American Indians who inhabited the land before European settlement. He calls them “children of the woods.” “There was nothing coarse in their demeanor; they practiced an habitual reserve, and a kind of aristocratic politeness.” And yet, he says in sadness,
“[t]heir implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores . . . . They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them.”
Civilization will not come easily to nomadic men who live by the hunt, particularly when they regard labor as disgraceful.
But he is equally scornful of the comforting and ultimately elusive English legalisms by which the Indian was repeatedly victimized. In fact, although the tone of Democracy in America is uniformly measured and thoughtful, Tocqueville permits himself one sarcastic note when he deals with the intractable Indian/European confrontation. He says that once even one or two settlers’ cabins have been established in the wilderness, even miles apart, the game will soon leave and the Indians begin to starve.
“Properly speaking, therefore, it is not the Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery!”
Anglo-Americans. This is but a prelude to Tocqueville’s point that America’s customs and laws are the direct result of what he calls the original “angle-Americans” whose experience is central to his analysis. The earnest New England community, composed chiefly of educated middle class emigrants, was from the beginning a democracy “more perfect than any which antiquity had dreamt of.” The mother country was not displeased with the success of the venture, but in the case of the New England states, it did not even legally recognize them as colonies until 30-40 years after their founding.
To Tocqueville, this was of the utmost significance. For a generation, these more or less socially-equal New Englanders were on their own in the wilderness during which they enacted laws and exercised their rights of sovereignty based almost exclusively on Biblical references. In short, the laws of a “rude and half-civilized people [were] thus applied to an enlightened and moral community.” And thenceforth in America religion became the road to knowledge; “the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.”
Laws, Etc. It is of surpassing importance to Tocqueville that the rigorous American community standards were originally enacted by the township, which had been organized before the county, “the county before the State, the State before the Union.” He is struck by the pervasiveness of local independence in all parts of the Union and how such local administration is enforceable by the local judiciary.
From the beginning, America was possessed of “two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom.” We are, he says, at the same time both “uninstructed” and “learned,” a condition which he calls the product of “easy circumstances.” Even the isolated pioneer in his log cabin is “a highly civilized being who consents, for a time, to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers.” Everyone has a profession, rich men were formerly poor, and science is but another branch of business. The taste for intellectual pleasure does not pass from one generation to the next.
These are the sounds of what is now called American “exceptionalism” for which on virtually every page Tocqueville states the reasons and the facts.
Civic Institutions. Against this background the author methodically reports on the Americans’ civic institutions. From first describing the colonial governments he leaps immediately to the Constitution (skipping both the Declaration and the Revolution), observing in passing however that the decision to jettison the Articles of Confederation was a “lofty pinnacle of glory,” an unprecedented moment in which the central government
“abdicated, as it were, the empire of the land [and instead turned] a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself . . . and patiently wait[ed] for two years until a remedy was discovered which it voluntarily adopted without having wrung a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.”
As for the Constitution, Tocqueville describes each branch of the federal government, bestowing plenty of frank praise and, where he feels it called for, some sober misgivings as well. (An example of the latter is his view that the president should have been limited to a single term in office since the prospect of re-election necessarily introduces a popular and transient distraction to what should be loftier objectives.)
The Courts. Although Tocqueville repeatedly remarks on America’s “eminently democratic” social manners and laws (e.g. the abolition of primogeniture), he does allow that from beneath the surface “the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.” As an example, he refers to the legal profession and its Anglo-Saxon love of precedent, which he likens to an “occult science.” The conservative impulse is only extended by judges and in a footnote the author warns against there being too many judges:
“When judges are very numerous, many of them must necessarily be incapable of performing their important duties; for a great magistrate is a man of no common powers; and I am inclined to believe that a half-enlightened tribunal is the worst of all instruments for attaining those objects which it is the purpose of courts of justice to accomplish.”
As with several other respects, Tocqueville overlooks the significance of the third federal branch, particularly in decisions like Gibbons v Ogden which led to a very strong central government, as opposed to the one he predicted, “constantly losing strength.”
I remember well from my undergraduate days the attention which was called to Tocqueville’s remark that sooner or later any public question in the United States ends up in a court of law. He is genuinely struck by this aspect of our society, particularly the right of courts to judge the transgressions of the agents of the executive branch on even the most petty matters. But he also remarks upon the conservative impulse which is served by the notions of precedent (“American lawyers investigate what has been done; the French advocate inquires what should have been done”) and particularly the enormous impact of the civil jury system. A jury, he says, is charged with execution of the laws, in effect almost an ad hoc branch of the government. In civil cases, it communicates
“the spirit of the judges to the minds of all the citizens . . . . It imbues all classes with a respect for the thing judged, and with the notion of right. It teaches men to practice equity; every man learns to judge his neighbor as he would himself be judged. The jury . . . invests each citizen with a kind of magistracy; it makes them all feel the duties which they are bound to discharge towards society . . . . By obliging men to turn their attention to affairs which are not exclusively their own, it rubs off that individual egoism which is the rust of society.”
Contemporary Politics. There was no reason for Tocqueville to take sides between Hamilton and Jefferson. His first trip to America was when Andrew Jackson was president, a fact which he uses to record his sour view of Old Hickory. With the founding now past, he remarks, it can be seen that the best men are less often placed in the top ranks of American government. The electorate has become impatient with minor irritations and willing to succumb to a “mountebank who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes.”
In retrospect, however, he says that the Federalists’ custody of the national administration in the beginning of the republic was exceedingly fortunate. “[T]hey resisted the inevitable propensities of their age . . . [and] gave the new republic time to acquire a certain stability . . . .” Beyond that, he also acknowledges the tension between aristocratic and democratic passions which are at the bottom of all parties.
In general, he was an admirer of the implications of the federal system. Comparing the United States to the diffuse pre-Bismarck states of Germany, he says that no nation can be secure and prosperous without a powerful central government. In this he mitigates somewhat his admiration of the robust local government he witnessed in the United States insofar as it gives rise to a danger which in “its vigor, and not its impotence,” will probably be the cause of its ultimate destruction” because such a diffuse government “gradually relaxes the sinews of strength.” If the “directing power” of the Americans (i.e. the people)
“after having established the general principles of government . . . descended to the details of public business; and if, having regulated the great interest of the country, it could penetrate into the privacy of the individual interests, freedom would soon be banished from the New Word.”
And yet the diffusion of administration (as opposed to centralized government, which perpetuates “a drowsy precision”) is a strength which also mitigates against tyranny.[2]
But he was quick to see the errors of John C. Calhoun and the possible structural weaknesses which Calhoun sought to exploit. Hence, he criticizes the aloofness of the New England states at the time of the War of 1812[3] and when he explicitly considers Calhoun’s nullification doctrine, he goes right to the point: if followed to its natural conclusion, it would “destroy the very basis of the Federal Constitution.” He also made the following plausible remark about the Constitution, which had to be corrected by a later Civil War and the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln.
“The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and, in uniting together, they have not forfeited their nationality . . . . If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right off doing so; and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly, either by force or by right.”
Here is a critical reason why he should have paid greater attention to the inherent meaning of the Declaration of Independence, written when a people (“our fathers”) were creating a nation and before there were states.
The Future. Whatever greatness is to be in America’s future, Tocqueville would say is most dependent on first its laws[4] and second its “manners,” both of which he rates of much greater significance than the exceptionalism mentioned above, manners being chief among the three. (Since Democracy in America was published only 15 years after the Missouri Compromise and 25 years before the Civil War, Tocqueville could obviously not anticipate and comment on this most decisive moment of American history apart from the founding itself. But he certainly makes some pregnant comments:
“If all the citizens of the State were aggrieved at the same time and in the same manner by the authority of the Union, the Federal Government would vainly attempt to subdue them individually; they would inevitably unite in a common defense . . . and an organized portion of the territory might then contest the central authority.”
Eventually this happened, of course, but to Tocqueville it was no more than hypothetical.
Slavery. No one can get everything right. Tocqueville’s views on slavery are not particularly prophetic or insightful. Inaccurately he foresaw a successful servile rebellion and although he doesn’t completely ignore the immorality, injustice, and human pain of slavery, his chief criticism is that the servile system is a drag on the country’s natural prosperity. He views the entire system as based on faulty economics.
Politics. Tocqueville’s observations about factionalism can be compared to Madison’s. He distinguishes between “great” political parties, which “cling to principles more than to their consequences,” and parties which are “minor.” The latter, he says, “glow with a factitious zeal; their language is vehement, but their conduct is timid and irresolute. . . . Society is convulsed by great parties, by minor ones it is agitated.”
Factions depend on freedom of association, an American right which is “almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty.”[5] But when the faction is a minority, he says its first mission is to demonstrate numerical strength, “and so to diminish the moral authority of the majority[6]; its second mission is “to stimulate competition, and to discover those arguments which are most fitted to act upon the majority.” This is all to the good he thinks, and (with America’s native prosperity) it mitigates against the potential of violence, which is the direction taken in Europe.
Religion. Tocqueville was among the first of foreign observers to call attention to America’s peculiar interweaving of what he calls the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. He knows that elsewhere, in his native country, for instance, they are often at swords’ points. But in America he finds them “admirably incorporated and combined with one another.” And yet, when he later expands on the religious spirit – which he does at length – he ventures one of his periodic warnings, viz. that without such a spirit in a democracy, society would not escape destruction since moral ties must be strengthened “in proportion as the political tie is relaxed.”
Similarly, Tocqueville is also struck by the unique civic piety in the America of that time. “[P]atriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.” Whatever the denominational religion of any given citizen, it is essentially “republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment” (definitely a Protestant notion). Indeed, within a few pages he acknowledges that more than liberty, it is equality which is the “idol” of Americans.
Equality. The religious implication of the word “idol” is neither accidental nor complimentary. Tocqueville is extremely dubious about equality and approaches it almost as a genetic blemish destined to doom the entire young republic. Although it is the feature which “most sharply distinguishes the American people from all others today,” he says in sadness that it allows everyone to entertain avaricious hopes of material success while simultaneously limiting their individual strength by leading to universal competition. “Freedom” people can enjoy in varying degrees, but to their woe they also insist on perfect equality.
Equality is a “depraved taste . . . which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.” By contrast, he sees the American Revolution, as “the result of a mature and dignified taste for freedom,” which is a different matter. He aims to show that democracy can be managed in such a way as to allow people to continue free.[7] And yet it is startling that the author gives no consideration to the Declaration of Independence, the American nation’s first and most perfect expression of equality.
The Press. In America, it is a principle of the republic that the press, though often in the hands of scoundrels and prevaricators, must remain free. Tocqueville himself betrays a certain Gallic scorn towards its practitioners. He approves press freedom “more from a recollection of the evils it prevents than from a consideration of the advantages it ensures.” But it is “an instrument of liberty.” He does not express the press’s most maddening feature, the unmerited condescension it shows towards its readers, but he does notice the obvious fact, still true today, that three-quarters of what is printed is “filled with advertisements, and the remainder . . . frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes.”
And now Volume Two.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America
(Vol 2., Henry Reeve, tr.)
If there are still thinkers who are disposed and able to write a treatise in two or more volumes and still find a publisher, they are few in number. Surely the demands of commerce (not to mention the modern attention-span) dictate otherwise. This is probably to the advantage of readers like me who, although we know there is no possibility of reading everything worthwhile, still harbor some vague hope. But meantime we have lost the personal idiosyncrasy and leisurely sagacity found in writers like Montaigne or Gibbon. Tocqueville is of that tribe – though somewhat more disciplined (and less lively) than Montaigne.
Five years after Volume One, Tocqueville published this second, complementary volume, of Democracy in America. This effort is somewhat more didactic and occasionally more critical than Volume One, but his style remains amiable and thoughtful. Where it lacks the intimacy and enthusiasm of the personal experiences which defined Volume One, Volume Two benefits from a more mature consideration of the many subjects that cross the author’s mind.
Equality Revisited. Of those subjects, Tocqueville’s chief concern is again the concept of equality in a democracy, this time particularly in respect to contemporary Europe. He is looking, he says, for “lessons from which we might profit.” Hence the attention which he periodically gives to the United States in Volume Two is interesting, but now America is chiefly mentioned in counterpoint. For unlike America, Tocqueville says, equality (though not democracy) had been a fact of European life long before the recent eruption of political liberty. The United States, by contrast, was a land in which freedom had been the unmistakable, undoubted first condition. The manners of its citizens, to borrow Lincoln’s phrase, had been “conceived” in liberty and Americans therefore primed to confront as much as embrace the dangerous passions of equality.
Tocqueville never needs to say outright that he is scornful of equality and centralized government, but as a born aristocrat, he is. (I should add here that his book is necessarily also a sturdy description of aristocracy, including what the author sees as its imminent decline.) Equality, in his view, is like slavery unnatural to civil society. Its chief benefit, as he sees it, is that it places and “obscure notion of . . . political independence in every man’s heart,” but with the perverse effect of diverting men’s’ attention.
“[When] the barriers that once separated citizens are finally knocked down[,] . . . men swoop down upon equality as upon conquered spoils and cling to it. . . . [¶]. . . [Democratic peoples] want equality in liberty, and if they cannot have it, they want it still in slavery. They will suffer poverty, servitude, and barbarity, but they will not suffer aristocracy.”
Any central government which, as long as it has emanated directly from the people – the situation which Europe was only now confronting – is consequently seen to have a utopian duty and right “to take each citizen by the hand and guide him.” Thus, as people defer to state charity and state education, diversity and liberty slowly vanish. Men slowly lose sight of the fact that nations have a variety of interests to conserve and that it is not always best to insist on uniform application of the law to every city, family, and individual.[8
Moreover, equality brings with it a negative effect on religion. It may enlarge men’s general view of both themselves and God’s comprehensive design for them, but otherwise equality “dries up most of poetry’s former sources” and over-simplifies religion – if it does not undermine it altogether – by “distract[ing] attention from secondary agents and focus[ing] it primarily on the sovereign master.” In times of equality is likely to be spurned by them.” In times of equality, any centralized religious authority is likely to be spurned and men will gravitate toward skepticism and even pantheism. Without the morality of religion (aristocracy’s most precious legacy) there can be no freedom
“the only effective way for governments to honor the dogma of the immortality of the soul is to act every day as though they believed in it themselves. And I believe that it is only by conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that they can boast of teaching citizens to know it, love it, and respect it in small ones
Otherwise, “[e]quality places men side by side without a common bond to hold them together.” As a result, he concludes, a step toward equality is a step toward despotism. A society which succumbs to equality’s allures will be degraded unless it is simultaneously fortified by both religion and a rigorous freedom. It would merely be an equality of ignorance.
I have said in respect to Volume One that Tocqueville gives scant attention to the Declaration of Independence and at one point appears to see the American founding in terms more reminiscent of Calhoun – i.e. as an action by the individual states – than as by free and equal individuals. Tocqueville did not live long enough to consider Lincoln’s insistence that equality of creation was the founding “proposition” of America. When Tocqueville dilates on equality, he simply does not understand it on the level that Lincoln did (which Tocqueville might have called at most “a poetic idea”). In his view of America, mixed with the abolition of primogeniture and the subdivision of great estates, mere equality would produce a “low, dark, and airless place.”
And yet this did not happen in America, Tocqueville says, because Americans are already “enlightened” (a word he uses repeatedly). But it is a Lockean enlightenment of self-interest. Americans are never content with their present fortune and constantly work to improve it.[9] Unlike an aristocracy, in a democracy over time there will eventually be fewer wealthy families, but more wealthy individuals. “Natural inequality will soon declare itself, and wealth will shift on its own to the most highly skilled.” The more wealthy, he predicts, will eventually be led to indulge in more refined natural pleasures. This taste will even ultimately filter down to others. This is the voice of a converted aristocrat talking
Another Look at Central Government and Courts. Centralized government in a democracy is the other subject which dominates Volume Two. On this topic, Tocqueville becomes particularly ardent and ultimately despondent – not least because the sovereign in such circumstances can be expected to spread out such a “fine mesh of uniform, minute and complex rules through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd.” It will be a mild, peaceful servitude.
For a reviewer, there are too many observations on this subject of centralized government to take note of. But one or two remarks about the value of courts are worth enlarging on. As arbiters, courts adjudicate disputes in two general areas: first, between private citizens, and second between citizens and their government. It is the second area in which an independent judiciary is essential, even in matters of petty disputes. For example, when a government sets up a special tribunal to decide what it calls “administrative” disputes between itself and its citizens, without being accompanied by an effective appeal process to an independent tribunal, all that has occurred is the placing of “an image of justice” between itself and the individual citizen. Now the reasons for establishing such inferior bodies are all too plain. The subjects which they deal with are, in a word, boring, and the stakes are often de minimis. Judges are not eager to make a career in, say, evaluating the procedural fairness of licensing bodies.[10]
Next, there is a strongly salutary element in the formality of courts as a counterbalance to the effects of equality:
“Men who live in
democratic centuries do not readily comprehend the utility of forms. They
harbor an instinctive distain for them. .
. . Since they ordinarily aspire only to facile and immediate pleasures,
they hasten impetuously after the object of each of their desires. The
slightest delay plunges them into despair. . . .
“Yet the very inconvenience of forms about which men in democracies complain is what makes them so useful for liberty, their principal merit being to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the governing and the governed, showing the former while allowing the latter time to take his bearings. The more active and powerful the sovereign is and the more indolent and debilitated private individuals become, the more necessary forms are. Thus democratic peoples by their very nature have greater need of forms than other peoples, and by their very nature they respect them less.”
Meanwhile, the American tendency to innovate, as Tocqueville sees it, grows directly from the democratic impulse for profit and fame. The advantages are obvious, but the practice leads away from theory, and theory must always be at the center of a great people.
“If the sources of our enlightenment were ever to die out, they would dwindle gradually, like a flame left unattended. If we were to limit ourselves to applications, we might lose sight of principles, and when we had forgotten principles entirely, we would make poor use of the methods derived from them. . . [¶] Hence we must not reassure ourselves with the thought that the barbarians are still far from our gates . . . .”
Women. Toward the end of Volume Two, Tocqueville offers a chapter on the equality of man and woman in America. It is not without interest, but he ends it with a flourish, that the primary responsibility for America’s prosperity and growing power is “the superiority of their women.” There is a certain Gallic charm in the gesture, but in light of what has gone before, no American feminist today would take it as more than lame.
Letters. Of particular interest to me are Tocqueville’s remarks on America’s literary arts. When he wrote and published, the only American writers of note were Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving, neither of whom he mentions. America was still in thrall to writers from the old country, e.g. Walter Scott. But given time, Tocqueville says, America will develop its own character of “industrial” literature. The American reader will require “surprise and novelty, . . . intense and rapid emotions, sudden illuminations and glaring truths.” Their appetite for such productions will make rich men of mediocre authors.
“Form will usually be neglected and occasionally scorned. Style will frequently seem bizarre, incorrect, exaggerated, or flaccid and almost always seem brazen and vehement. . . . An uncultivated, almost savage vigor will dominate thought, whose products will frequently exhibit a very great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will seek to astonish rather than to please and to engage the passions rather than beguile taste.”[11]
On the way to this destination, however, there will be a splendid but fleeting moment when “the literary genius of democracy [will] encounter[] that of aristocracy and the two seem to want to reign in harmony over the human spirit.” (Although we read Tocqueville to learn about democracy, he has much to tell us about aristocracy as well.)
And here the author takes a sharply serious turn. The literature of a democracy is almost the antithesis of the writings of classical times in which a writer’s aspiration was for “ideal beauty.” But the study and understanding of such serious writings – he is not specific about who he means – is entirely too volatile for “a people’s literature.” Thence follows this Platonic passage:
“To insist on teaching only belle-lettres in a society where everyone was habitually driven to increase or maintain his wealth by the most vigorous of means would be to produce very polite and very dangerous citizens. On account of their political and social state they would daily experience needs that their education never taught them how to satisfy, and they would therefore invoke the Greeks and Romans to sow trouble through their industry. ¶ It is obvious that in democratic societies individual interest as well as the security of the state requires that the education of the majority be scientific, commercial, and industrial rather than literary.”[12]
This passage, by the way is given differently in Reeve’s translation[13], and I must say that the two also differ in translation of the neighboring chapter titled “How Democracy Has Changed the Language.” Goldhammer translates a passage thus: “A democratic writer will speak easily of ‘capacities’ in the abstract . . . .”; while Reeve translates it “A French democratic writer will be apt to say capacities in the abstract.” So are we talking about Frenchmen or not? Reeve was evidently sensitive to the choice he made, because he drops a lengthy footnote a moment later to explain that he felt compelled to retain “the phrase of the original” because of a difference in the national characteristics of France and England. I do not have access to the original French, and so I can only suspect that it was Goldhammer who followed Allan Bloom’s caution not to improvise. Meantime, it is at about this point that Tocqueville begins to leave off making remarks about America and to broaden his observations to cover democracies in general. He continues in this vein more or less to the end of the book.
A Lament.
There was a time not long ago when it could reasonably be expected that nearly every college educated American in the humanities had read or at least knew about Tocqueville. I would venture to say that today that is not so.
Today there are places in America (academia, the media) where it would be hard to find anyone who “take[s] pride in the glory of his nation.” Books and novels no longer “assume that women are chaste.” Can it generally be said today of the average college educated American that by and large he or she “boast of [their country’s] success, to which [they] conceive[] [themselves] to have contributed”? Is it true that Americans of both sexes are “persistent” in their insistence that men and women be equal although they proceed on “two permanently different paths.” When Tocqueville wrote, he could assert that Americans were individualists and none would dare to advance the “impious agenda” that “everything is permissible with a view to advance the interests of society.” No longer is it the case in America that on Sunday the nation’s commercial life “seems suspended.” Tocqueville today could not say that he has scarcely met “a plain American citizen who . . . could not point out the exact limit of the several jurisdictions of the Federal Courts and the tribunals of the State.” And is it still true that “[t]he citizen of the United States . . . only claims [the assistance of the social authority] when he is quite unable to shift without it”?
Conclusion.
To call Democracy in America sociology or even anthropology would be terribly misleading. Those are the artificial disciplines of the 20th century. It is easier to view Tocqueville as an historian, journalist, taxonomist, and thinker. He does occasionally take on the risky role of soothsayer with mixed but sober results. Mainly he is thoughtful and fluent, not abstruse or speculative. He brings refinement and a pleasantly open mind to his observations and never ventures anything so hypothetical as a “state of nature.” At most he says that at an earlier period society had been “debilitated,” that its image was “obscure” and that it was constantly “getting lost among all the various powers that ruled over citizens.”
Today, it is hard for me to believe that anyone could read this work without profit. And yet it is equally hard to envision that large numbers of our contemporaries even with the patience to do so would participate in my astonishment at what Tocqueville did at such a young age, my delight in discovering that I was sharing his own enchantment at the novelties he came across, and my amazement at the depth and wisdom of his observations. He never claimed that he had discovered Utopia or that America would ever become so. But he obviously sensed something new, unpolished, but remarkably exciting. He did not live long enough to read Mark Twain. I wonder if Mark Twain ever read Democracy in America.
[1] I
should note here that I read Volume Two of Democracy in America as
earlier translated by Henty Reeve, as opposed to Arthur Goldhammer’s later
translation of Volume One. In his translator’s note, Goldhammer points out that
he translates “manners” as “mores,” which he says more exactly captures the
French word used by Tocqueville. By this he says that the author means the
practical, experience, habits, an opinions carried forward by each generation.
In this he echoes Burke more than Plato.
[2] It
is not clear to me what Tocqueville means by “Administration.” Apparently he is
making reference to federalism, i.e. state governments – “Congress regulates
the principal measures of the national Government and all the details of the
administration are reserved to the provincial legislatures.” But the states, of
course, do not administer federal laws. See the 10th amendment.
[3] In
1831 that may still have loomed large. In the fullness of time it is
insignificant.
[4]
Except for Americans’ abiding respect for the Constitution, he sees the
mutability of their statutory laws as a threat to future stability.
[5] A
chapter in Volume Two elaborates in fascinating detail on Tocqueville’s views
about freedom of association: “through the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom . .
. Americans learn the art of reducing freedom’s perils.”
[6] It
is the majority which is of interest, not the whole community; when parties
lose an election, he says, “they assert that the true majority abstained from
voting.”
[7] He
also records a view which remains popular with academics even to this date:
that American Protestantism tends toward independence as opposed to
Catholicism, which engenders obedience notwithstanding its recognition of
inequality.
[8] “A
political, industrial, commercial, or even scientific or literary association
is an enlightened and powerful citizen that cannot be made to bow down at will
or subjected to oppression in the shadows, and by defining its rights against
the exigencies of power, it saves common liberties.”
[9] A
distinctive characteristic of democratic times “is a taste for easy success and
instant gratification.” The phrase “instant gratification” is Goldhammer’s;
Reeve has translated it as “present enjoyment.”
[10] But I must say that on more than one
occasion, my experience in taking writ appeals from such bodies is that I am
given little more than a simulacrum of a record. The appeal process can
therefore be completely unsatisfying and I cannot ever be sure that the
government has not unfairly prevailed.
[11] If proof is needed, I
recommend “Gravity’s Rainbow.”
[12]
Dare I say that this strikes close to home.
[13] Tocqueville, who himself
spoke English, chose Henry Reeve as his translator for both Volumes One and
Two. One assumes that Reeve’s efforts were at all times acceptable to him and
that it is not accidental that the Reeve translation has remained the standard
version in English.
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