Democracy in America

By Alexis De Tocqueville, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone.
 
When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America—only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840—was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226924564

Alexis De Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was born in Verneuil, France. A historian and political scientist, he came to the United States in 1831 to report on the prison system. His experiences would later become the basis for his classic study Democracy in America.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637

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© 2000 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, 1805–1859.

[DE LA DÉMOCRATIE EN AMÉRIQUE. ENGLISH]

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA / TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN

INTRODUCTION BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD AND DELBA WINTHROP.

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INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

ISBN 0-226-80532-8 (HARDCOVER)

1. UNITED STATES—POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT. 2. UNITED STATES—SOCIAL CONDITIONS. 3. DEMOCRACY—UNITED STATES. I. MANSFIELD, HARVEY CLAFLIN, 1932– II. WINTHROP, DELBA. III. TITLE.

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Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville

TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

HARVEY C. MANSFIELD AND DELBA WINTHROP

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO AND LONDON

CONTENTS

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

SUGGESTED READINGS

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

Volume One

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

1 External Configuration of North America

2 On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans

Reasons for Some Singularities That the Laws and Customs of the Anglo-Americans Present

3 Social State of the Anglo-Americans

That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans Is Its Being Essentially Democratic

Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans

4 On the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America

5 Necessity of Studying What Takes Place in the Particular States before Speaking of the Government of the Union

On the Township System in America

Size of the Township

Powers of the Township in New England

On Township Existence

On the Spirit of the Township in New England

On the County in New England

On Administration in New England

General Ideas about Administration in the United States

On the State

Legislative Power of the State

On the Executive Power of the State

On the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization in the United States

6 On Judicial Power in the United States and Its Action on Political Society

Other Powers Granted to American Judges

7 On Political Judgment in the United States

8 On the Federal Constitution

History of the Federal Constitution

Summary Picture of the Federal Constitution

Prerogatives of the Federal Government

Federal Powers

Legislative Powers

Another Difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives

On the Executive Power

How the Position of the President of the United States Differs from That of a Constitutional King in France

Accidental Causes That Can Increase the Influence of the Executive Power

Why the President of the United States Does Not Need to Have a Majority in the Houses in Order to Direct Affairs

On the Election of the President

Mode of Election

Crisis of the Election

On the Reelection of the President

On the Federal Courts

Manner of Settling the Competence of the Federal Courts

Different Cases of Jurisdiction

Manner of Proceeding of Federal Courts

Elevated Rank Held by the Supreme Court among the Great Powers of the State

How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the Constitutions of the States

What Distinguishes the Federal Constitution of the United States of America from All Other Federal Constitutions

On the Advantages of the Federal System Generally, and Its Special Utility for America

What Keeps the Federal System from Being within Reach of All Peoples, and What Has Permitted the Anglo-Americans to Adopt It

PART TWO

1 How One Can Say Strictly That in the United States the People Govern

2 On Parties in the United States

On the Remains of the Aristocratic Party in the United States

3 On Freedom of the Press in the United States

4 On Political Association in the United States

5 On the Government of Democracy in America

On Universal Suffrage

On the Choices of the People and the Instincts of American Democracy in Its Choices

On the Causes That Can in Part Correct These Instincts of Democracy

Influence That American Democracy Exerts on Electoral Laws

On Public Officials under the Empire of American Democracy

On the Arbitrariness of Magistrates under the Empire of American Democracy

Administrative Instability in the United States

On Public Costs under the Empire of American Democracy

On the Instincts of American Democracy in Fixing the Salaries of Officials

Difficulty of Discerning the Causes That Incline the American Government to Economy

Can the Public Expenditures of the United States Be Compared to Those of France?

On the Corruption and Vices of Those Who Govern in Democracy; On the Effects on Public Morality That Result

Of What Efforts Democracy Is Capable

On the Power That American Democracy Generally Exercises over Itself

The Manner in Which American Democracy Conducts External Affairs of State

6 What Are the Real Advantages That American Society Derives from the Government of Democracy

On the General Tendency of the Laws under the Empire of American Democracy, and on the Instinct of Those Who Apply Them

On Public Spirit in the United States

On the Idea of Rights in the United States

On Respect for the Law in the United States

Activity Reigning in All Parts of the Body Politic of the United States; Influence That It Exerts on Society

7 On the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects

How the Omnipotence of the Majority in America Increases the Legislative and Administrative Instability That Is Natural to Democracies

Tyranny of the Majority

Effects of the Omnipotence of the Majority on the Arbitrariness of American Officials

On the Power That the Majority in America Exercises over Thought

Effects of the Tyranny of the Majority on the National Character of the Americans; On the Spirit of a Court in the United States

That the Greatest Danger of the American Republics Comes from the Omnipotence of the Majority

8 On What Tempers the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States

Absence of Administrative Centralization

On the Spirit of the Lawyer in the United States and How It Serves as a Counterweight to Democracy

On the Jury in the United States Considered as a Political Institution

9 On the Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States

On the Accidental or Providential Causes Contributing to the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States

On the Influence of the Laws on the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States

On the Influence of Mores on the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States

On Religion Considered as a Political Institution; How It Serves Powerfully the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic among the Americans

Indirect Influence That Religious Beliefs Exert on Political Society in the United States

On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America

How the Enlightenment, the Habits, and the Practical Experience of the Americans Contribute to the Success of Democratic Institutions

That the Laws Serve to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States More than Physical Causes, and Mores More than Laws

Would Laws and Mores Suffice to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere than in America?

Importance of What Precedes in Relation to Europe

10 Some Considerations on the Present State and the Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States

Present State and Probable Future of the Indian Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed by the Union

Position That the Black Race Occupies in the United States; Dangers Incurred by Whites from Its Presence

What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last? What Dangers Threaten It?

On Republican Institutions in the United States; What Are Their Chances of Longevity?

Some Considerations on the Causes of the Commercial Greatness of the United States

Conclusion

Volume Two

NOTICE

PART ONE

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

1 On the Philosophic Method of the Americans

2 On the Principal Source of Beliefs among Democratic Peoples

3 Why the Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas than Their English Fathers

4 Why the Americans Have Never Been as Passionate as the French for General Ideas in Political Matters

5 How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts

6 On the Progress of Catholicism in the United States

7 What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean toward Pantheism

8 How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man

9 How the Example of the Americans Does Not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and Taste for the Sciences, Literature, and the Arts

10 Why the Americans Apply Themselves to the Practice of the Sciences Rather than to the Theory

11 In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts

12 Why the Americans at the Same Time Raise Such Little and Such Great Monuments

13 The Literary Face of Democratic Centuries

14 On the Literary Industry

15 Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Particularly Useful in Democratic Societies

16 How American Democracy Has Modified the English Language

17 On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations

18 Why American Writers and Orators Are Often Bombastic

19 Some Observations on the Theater of Democratic Peoples

20 On Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries

21 On Parliamentary Eloquence in the United States

PART TWO

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE SENTIMENTS OF THE AMERICANS

1 Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom

2 On Individualism in Democratic Countries

3 How Individualism Is Greater at the End of a Democratic Revolution than in Any Other Period

4 How the Americans Combat Individualism with Free Institutions

5 On the Use That the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life

6 On the Relation between Associations and Newspapers

7 Relations between Civil Associations and Political Associations

8 How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood

9 How the Americans Apply the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood in the Matter of Religion

10 On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America

11 On the Particular Effects That the Love of Material Enjoyments Produces in Democratic Centuries

12 Why Certain Americans Display Such an Exalted Spiritualism

13 Why the Americans Show Themselves So Restive in the Midst of Their Well-Being

14 How the Taste for Material Enjoyments among Americans Is United with Love of Freedom and with Care for Public Affairs

15 How Religious Beliefs at Times Turn the Souls of the Americans toward Immaterial Enjoyments

16 How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being

17 How in Times of Equality and Doubt It Is Important to Move Back the Object of Human Actions

18 Why among the Americans All Honest Professions Are Reputed Honorable

19 What Makes Almost All Americans Incline toward Industrial Professions

20 How Aristocracy Could Issue from Industry

PART THREE

INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON MORES PROPERLY SO-CALLED

1 How Mores Become Milder as Conditions Are Equalized

2 How Democracy Renders the Habitual Relations of the Americans Simpler and Easier

3 Why the Americans Have So Little Oversensitivity in Their Country and Show Themselves to Be So Oversensitive in Ours

4 Consequences of the Preceding Three Chapters

5 How Democracy Modifies the Relations of Servant and Master

6 How Democratic Institutions and Mores Tend to Raise the Price and Shorten the Duration of Leases

7 Influence of Democracy on Wages

8 Influence of Democracy on the Family

9 Education of Girls in the United States

10 How the Girl Is Found beneath the Features of the Wife

11 How Equality of Conditions Contributes to Maintaining Good Mores in America

12 How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman

13 How Equality Naturally Divides the Americans into a Multitude of Particular Little Societies

14 Some Reflections on American Manners

15 On the Gravity of the Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Their Often Doing Ill-Considered Things

16 Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Restive and More Quarrelsome than That of the English

17 How the Aspect of Society in the United States Is at Once Agitated and Monotonous

18 On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies

19 Why One Finds So Many Ambitious Men in the United States and So Few Great Ambitions

20 On the Industry in Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Nations

21 Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare

22 Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies Naturally [Desire] War

23 Which Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary Class in Democratic Armies

24 What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker than Other Armies When Entering into a Campaign and More Formidable When War Is Prolonged

25 On Discipline in Democratic Armies

26 Some Considerations on War in Democratic Societies

PART FOUR

ON THE INFLUENCE THAT DEMOCRATIC IDEAS AND SENTIMENTS EXERT ON POLITICAL SOCIETY

1 Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions

2 That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples in the Matter of Government Are Naturally Favorable to the Concentration of Powers

3 That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are in Accord with Their Ideas to Bring Them to Concentrate Power

4 On Some Particular and Accidental Causes That Serve to Bring a Democratic People to Centralize Power or Turn It Away from That

5 That among European Nations of Our Day Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stable

6 What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear

7 Continuation of the Preceding Chapters

8 General View of the Subject

AT’s NOTES

END NOTES

FOOTNOTES TO AT’s NOTES

SOURCES CITED BY TOCQUEVILLE

INDEX

Map of the United States appearing in the first edition of Democracy in America (1835). Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

Democracy in America is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America. Tocqueville connects the two subjects in his Introduction, and in his title, by observing that America is the land of democracy. It is the country where democracy is least hindered and most perfected, where democracy is at its most characteristic and at its best. Today that claim might be contested, but it is at least arguable. If the twentieth century has been an American century, it is because the work of America—not altogether unsuccessful—has been to keep democracy strong where it is alive and to promote it where it is weak or nonexistent. Somehow, after 165 years, democracy is still in America.

Tocqueville went to America, he said, to see what a great republic was like, and what struck him most was its equality of conditions, its democracy. Long ago began a democratic revolution, and it continues today, gathering speed as resistance to it declines. He sets forth the point of departure in Puritan America and the origin of self-government in the towns of New England. He analyzes the federal constitution that was meant to facilitate democratic self-government and keep it moderate. He shows that the people are sovereign, whether through the Constitution or despite it, and he warns of the tyranny of the majority. In the very long last chapter of the first volume he examines aspects of American democracy peculiar to America, especially the juxtaposition of the three races there, and he speculates about what these portend for America’s future.

In the second volume Tocqueville turns the argument from the natural rise of democracy in America to the influence of democracy on America, beginning with its intellectual movements. Americans have a philosopher unknown to them—Descartes—whose precepts they follow and whose books they never read. Descartes endorses their reliance on their own judgment, which tells them they can do without his help. Americans suffer, consequently, from individualism, a lamentable condition—which Tocqueville was the first to depict—in which democratic men and women are thrown on their own resources and consequently come to feel themselves overpowered by impersonal, external forces. But individualism is not the fated consequence of democracy: there are remedies against it, above all the capability of Americans to associate with one another voluntarily in accordance with their own will and reason instead of relying on a centralized, schoolmaster government to take care of them. Tocqueville dubs this government an immense being and says that it brings on a mild despotism, which he describes with uncomfortably accurate foresight. To these few highlights one might easily add others, but let these suffice for a welcome to this marvelous work.

Tocqueville’s book has acquired the authority of a classic. It is cited with approval by politicians—by all American presidents since Eisenhower—as well as by professors in many fields.¹ Universal accord in its praise suggests that it has something for everyone. But it also suggests that readers tolerate, or perhaps simply overlook, the less welcome passages that their political and scholarly opponents are citing. It is quite striking that both Left and Right appeal to Democracy in America for support of their contrary policies. Tocqueville seems to have achieved the goal, expressed at the end of his Introduction, of standing above the parties of the day. Yet his widespread appeal should not mask the controversial and unsettling character of the work.

When Tocqueville wrote his book, it was to speak reprovingly, and sometimes severely, to the partisans of his day for and against democracy. Although the Old Regime has now faded into unremembered history and everyone has followed Tocqueville’s advice to accept democracy, partisans remain within it, and they still divide over whether to restrain democracy or push it further. Tocqueville has something dismaying, but instructive, to say to both parties. He knows the extent of democracy in America because he sees better than we the resistances to it in America. He came to America to examine democracy up close and to be sure of what he thought he might find. Unlike other visitors he knew that America was not merely derivative of Europe. It was not behind but ahead of Europe and in that sense exceptional. Tocqueville takes the measure of America’s boast, repeated on the first page of The Federalist, to set an example for all mankind. He makes his ambition the study of America’s ambition, in both cases an ambition that leaves others free. It is open to any country to surpass America if it can, and it is possible that some writer, some day, will write a better book on democracy in America than this one.

Before we survey the marvels of Democracy in America and the difficulties of interpreting what it means, let us look at Tocqueville the man to see from whence he came, the conditions of life imposed on him, and the influences he chose to accept.

WHO WAS TOCQUEVILLE?²

Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805, and died in his fifty-fourth year on April 16, 1859: not a long life, and one often afflicted with ill health. He was born a French aristocrat and lived as one; and he was also a liberal who both rejected the old regime of aristocracy and doubted the revolution that overturned it. An aristocratic liberal he was, and if we knew everything contained in that difficult combination, we could stop here. But since we do not, the formula will serve as a beginning. In thought as in life Tocqueville always held to freedom and to nobility, and his question, his concern was how to keep them together.

Tocqueville was born into a very old Norman family named Clérel; one of his ancestors had fought in the company of William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Through marriage, negotiation and action at law, the Clérels acquired the fief of Tocqueville in Normandy, and in 1661 took that name. Alexis’s grandfather was a chevalier; his father Hervé became a count in 1820. In 1793 Hervé had married the granddaughter of Malesherbes, a great figure late in the Old Regime: botanist, correspondent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both minister and critic of Louis XVI, and courageous defender of the king at his trial in 1792–1793. Malesherbes and Hervé de Tocqueville were imprisoned during the Terror, the former guillotined together with a sister, a daughter, a son-in-law, and a granddaughter and her husband. Hervé was spared and released in 1794, his hair having turned snow white at the age of twenty-two. Hervé became the guardian of the two orphans of Malesherbes’s son-in-law, who was the elder brother of the great writer François-René de Chateaubriand. In his Memoirs Chateaubriand speaks of seeing his nephews growing up with Alexis, future author of Democracy in America. He remarks in one of his epigrams: Alexis de Tocqueville went through civilized America while I visited its forests.³ Here is the hauteur of the aristocrat that Tocqueville could have imitated but did not. If he remained in any powerful sense an aristocrat, it was only after having concluded that all partisan sentiment in favor of aristocracy is now vain and nostalgic. He himself had no children and no particular wish to sustain his own noble family. He once said that he would passionately desire to have children as he could imagine them but had no very keen desire to draw from the great lottery of paternity.⁴ However sharp his sympathetic appreciation for aristocratic society—and it was considerable—this was not a man of aristocratic feeling, ready to make sacrifices as père de famille on behalf of aristocratic illusions.

The irresistible democratic revolution is the theme of Tocqueville’s three great books. It is set forth in his Introduction to Democracy in America (the first volume of which was published in 1835, the second in 1840). It is applied to his own time in his Souvenirs (written in 1851 but not for publication; first published only in 1893), in which he recounts the (ultimately) socialist revolution that he witnessed in 1848. And he uncovers its remote origins in The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856 with a promise he could not fulfill to write further on the events of the Revolution and to provide a judgment on its result.

Unlike other aristocrats of his time, Tocqueville did not despair of democracy. He neither scorned it nor opposed it. On the whole, he approved of it—or at least accepted it with every appearance of willingness. Readers of Democracy in America have always disagreed over how democratic he was both in mind and in heart, but it is fair to say that he directed much of his energy to warning the reactionaries in his country that democracy was irreversible as well as irresistible, and to showing them that it was wrong to hate the consequences of the French Revolution. He believed that the beginnings of democracy antedated the Revolution, and that its worst aspects—which were not violence and disruption—were even initiated by the Old Regime of the monarchy.

So, far from hiding or sulking, like a displaced refugee of the old order, or from reluctantly accepting duties that were pressed upon him, Tocqueville sought out opportunities for engagement in politics. In 1837, when, perhaps, he should have been working without interruption on the second volume of Democracy in America, he ran for the Chamber of Deputies in the regime of Louis-Philippe, and was defeated. In 1839 he ran again and was elected; he was reelected in 1842, and again in 1846. He became a leading figure of the liberal newspaper Le commerce in 1844; then, as the Chamber turned to the Right, he helped create a group called the Young Left. On January 27, 1848, he gave a famous speech in the Chamber warning, with an accuracy that surprised even him, of the wind of revolution that was in the air;⁵ here, in addition to the more general predictions of Democracy in America, was an instance of his uncanny ability to sense the drifts and trends of politics. Later in that year, after the fall of Louis-Philippe’s monarchy, he was elected to the constituent assembly of the Second Republic and served on the committee that prepared its constitution. Then, in 1848, he was elected to the new Assembly and served briefly, honorably, and unsuccessfully as Minister of Foreign Affairs in a cabinet that lasted from June 2 to October 31. By the following spring he had been stricken with the illness, probably tuberculosis, that would eventually claim his life.

Tocqueville did his best to govern, as he said, in a regular, moderate, conservative, and quite constitutional way, but he was in a situation in which everyone wanted to depart from the constitution.⁶ In such a predicament a consistent line of conduct is almost impossible, and in any case the French had put their new republic on borrowed time by electing Louis Napoleon as its president. His coup d’état putting an end to the republic came in December, 1851, at which time Tocqueville, as a protesting deputy, was imprisoned for two days, then released. Suffering under an illiberal regime and from ill health, he was now free to write his book on the Old Regime. Yet for him, the freedom to write and publish was not enough. He also wanted political freedom, and he wanted to taste it for himself by holding office. He seems to have understood the desire to distinguish oneself as essentially political because the goods of this world, even the intellectual joys of understanding, never give satisfaction or repose. Theory itself is a sort of activity fraught with restiveness, and as such not surely superior to action. Writing in 1840 to his older brother Edouard, he explained himself:

What moves the soul is different, but the soul is the same—this restive and insatiable soul that despises all goods of the world and which, nonetheless, incessantly needs to be stirred in order to seize them, so as to escape the grievous numbness that is experienced as soon as it relies for a moment on itself. This is a sad story. It is a little bit the story of all men, but of some more than others, and of myself more than anyone I know.⁷

Tocqueville did not bask in the triumphant success of Democracy in America but went elsewhere in search of new distinction.

It cannot be said, however, that Tocqueville was successful as a politician. He woefully lacked the common touch, as he confessed in his Souvenirs:

Every time that a person does not strike me by something rare in his mind or sentiments, I so to speak do not see him. I have always thought that mediocre men, as well as men of merit, have a nose, a mouth, and eyes, but I have never been able to fix in my memory the particular form of these features in each one of them. I am constantly asking the names of these unknowns whom I see every day, and I constantly forget them; yet I do not despise them, only I consort with them little, I treat them as commonplace. I honor them, for they lead the world, but they bore me profoundly.⁸

This avowal, he further admits, arises not from true modesty but from great pride [grand orgueil].⁹ Yet Tocqueville is not merely being fastidious with his fellow men, his fellow democrats whom he cannot tell apart. Political freedom in republics does more than provide security to multitudes; it clears the way for those few who desire to distinguish themselves and sharpens their hunger for greatness.

So Tocqueville set his hand as well as put his mind to politics, examining the democratic revolution from up close and as it affected him. All the while he was aware that he did not duly appreciate mediocre men: he could not be one of them, and he was unwilling either to know them individually or to master them as a class. In politics he learned about politics and about himself, or better to say, he learned about both together. In addition to his three wonderful books are volumes of letters, especially (but not only) to his friends Gustave de Beaumont and Louis de Kergorlay, which are of surpassing interest to readers of his books. He also wrote reports on slavery, poverty, the colonies, and penitentiaries—his inquiry into the latter being the pretext (as he called it) for the trip to America that led to, or in any case preceded, the writing of Democracy in America.¹⁰ He also wrote diaries of his voyages, including the one to America but also to England, Switzerland, Ireland, and Algeria.

In recognition of his writings, Tocqueville was made a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1838 and then elected in 1841, when only thirty-six years old, to the Académie française. For twenty years his social life was spent at the Institut de France, which under the Second Empire became a kind of refuge for liberals like himself who were kept out of politics by Louis Napoleon. On entering the Académie française he had the duty of eulogizing the deceased member whose seat he was taking. It was the Comte de Cessac, a minister and admirer of Napoleon I, selfless builder of the very French state that Tocqueville deplored, criticized, and opposed all his life.¹¹ At the Académie des sciences morales et politiques Tocqueville gave a speech in 1852 on the nature of political science in which he concluded that political science and the art of governing were two very distinct things. Political science, identified with the art of writing, serves the logic of ideas and gives a taste for the fine, the delicate, the ingenious, the original, whereas the world obeys its passions and is led by gross commonplaces.¹² Tocqueville admits that France has seen eminent statesmen who wrote beautiful books, but their books were no help to their deeds. Here is a comment, perhaps, on his own experience. But failure in the art of governing cannot be inferred from a short term in a post subject to others and under the ominous presidency of a Napoleon. A writer has his own command, and a powerful one, because political science, Tocqueville asserts, gives birth or form to the general ideas of society out of which emerge particular facts and laws.¹³ For all the opposition between governing and writing, Tocqueville was always unusually detached for a politician, and unusually engaged for a philosopher.

TOCQUEVILLE’S CONTEXT

The reason for Tocqueville’s detachment and for his engagement could be the same: his love of greatness. It was having his eye out for distinctive and remarkable men that kept him from entering wholeheartedly into the concerns of mediocre politicians and even, as he says, from learning to recognize their faces. Yet a certain unphilosophical pride in himself, arising from love of greatness, made politics attractive to him despite the cares and burdens of treating with mediocrity that always attend the desire for outstanding distinction. My imagination easily climbs to the summit of human greatness,¹⁴ he said, not because he could see himself on top of the world but because he was dissatisfied with worldly things, yet uncertain of God. Back and forth he went between disdain for ordinary politics and anguished doubt of the grounds for a life of serenity and contemplation. But to speak negatively in this way may leave the impression that Tocqueville was indecisive, or a victim of superior, contending forces controlling him. Such is not the case. Positively, it was his view that greatness requires attention to politics and elevation above politics. Restiveness (inquiétude) is for him the normal, and perhaps the highest, condition of the human soul. The difficulty is that greatness invites pride of soul, and pride of soul comes from one’s recognition of the perfection of one’s soul. But a perfect soul is not restive. Tocqueville, it seems, can neither claim satisfaction nor abandon pride for the human soul.

Tocqueville saw greatness in the politics of revolution, including the democratic revolution, and though he hated the Terror and the despotism in the French Revolution, he admired the ambitious spirit in the intent of its first makers which made them seek to constitute a new democratic nation from top to bottom. But for Tocqueville greatness is inseparable from freedom (he was never tempted to admire Napoleon). The mere desire for mastery over subjects (or slaves) debases master as well as subject, for when the master denies the humanity common to both, he loses his own and lets himself be ruled by his passions. Unlike Edmund Burke, whom he criticized, Tocqueville did not reject the French Revolution in toto. He approved it in its first phase, when it was devoted to both freedom and equality.¹⁵ Yet the greatness of that democratic revolution has inspired the passion for equality and produced the growing equality of conditions that are hardly welcoming, even profoundly hostile, to human greatness.

Today Tocqueville seems readily accessible to us. His recognition of the democratic revolution and its problems appears right on the mark, and the success of most of his predictions seems uncanny. (He was, however, wrong about a coming war between the races; DA I 2.10.) In America he is, as noted above, quoted with approval by intellectuals and politicians from both the Left and the Right. On the Left he is the philosopher of community and civic engagement who warns against the appearance of an industrial aristocracy and against the bourgeois or commercial passion for material well-being: in sum, he is for democratic citizenship. On the Right he is quoted for his strictures on Big Government and his liking for decentralized administration, as well as for celebrating individual energy and opposing egalitarian excess: he is a balanced liberal, defending both freedom and moderation. For both parties he is welcome in an era when democracy has defeated the totalitarians and is no longer under challenge to its existence, when suspicion of the state is widespread, and when modern progress is no longer taken for granted as good.

In France, Tocqueville came into vogue in the 1970s and is now a strong presence. He benefits from national pride, which, not only in France, has often been less than discerning. Although Democracy in America was a huge success when it first appeared, soon thereafter Tocqueville was allowed to fall into neglect. His books were not read and his style, his importance, and his insight were slighted. After World War II, Marxism, existentialism, and deconstructionism were on stage in France and liberalism was in hiding. But in the last thirty years, through the brave example and teaching of Raymond Aron, French scholars and intellectuals have awakened to their heritage of nineteenth-century liberals, and above all to the discomforting sagacity of Tocqueville, always more sensitive than reassuring. But after much false assurance from ready solutions, the wary observation and cool advice of liberalism can come as a relief.

Among French liberals of the early nineteenth century, chastened by excesses of the Revolution done in the name of freedom, the two most outstanding were Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) and François Guizot (1787–1874). Tocqueville’s originality in his time can be gauged from his differences with them, his contemporary fellow liberals. Constant and Guizot took up the cause of representative government in France as the positive alternative to the despotisms of the Revolution and of Napoleon. They were impressed by the woeful contrast between the French Revolution and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, and they thought it possible to recapture the moderation and open-minded modernity of the English aristocracy, and the usages of the English Parliament, for application in France. They took inspiration from Montesquieu rather than Rousseau while lacking the respect for circumstance in the former and the rhetorical force of the latter.

Constant understands representation as the modern discovery that subordinates politics to the private independence of the complex of individuals and groups in civil society. That is modern freedom, and it is to be opposed to ancient freedom, which is participation in political power. The error in the French Revolution was to confound the two, and thus to transform freedom into despotism. Modern representative government expresses a doubt that government can truly reflect popular will; even when ruling, such government is doubtful of itself. Its essence is to be found not in itself but in the parliamentary opposition to itself. For Guizot, however, a man and a thinker more given to governing, a representative government seeks and finds the dominant powers in society, which after the Revolution are no longer hereditary, and represents them. It gives them the public respect they deserve, and in return they give it the superiority it deserves. Guizot sees representative government to be rationally responsive to society and its capacities, not tyrannizing over them as happened in the Revolution.

Tocqueville does not put much stock in representative government; his theme is democracy. Although he surely discusses representative institutions in Democracy in America, he does not discourse at length, as do Constant and Guizot, on the principle of representation.¹⁶ For him, representative institutions are democratic; they may have been designed to hold democracy at bay (as was the United States Senate), but in their actual functioning they give expression to democracy. At best they may instruct democratic citizens, but they do not serve to check democratic impulses or passions. Tocqueville says quite emphatically, in a chapter entitled How One Can Say Strictly That in the United States the People Govern, that although the form of government is representative, the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the people find no lasting obstacles preventing them from taking effect in the daily direction of society (DA I 2.1).

Tocqueville always understands democracy in contrast to aristocracy. He constantly compares them not merely as forms of government in a narrow sense but as opposed ways of life. In this Tocqueville’s political science has the look of Aristotle’s, which also considers politics comprehensively in the regime (politeia), and presents the typical political and social alternative as between democracy and oligarchy.¹⁷ But while Aristotle argues that these two regimes offer an open choice ever present to human beings because each is rooted in a constant and fixed human nature, all human beings always being arguably equal and arguably unequal, Tocqueville describes them as distinct historical epochs: once there was aristocracy, now we have democracy.

By turning to history and away from human nature, Tocqueville joins Constant and Guizot and other nineteenth-century liberals who also described irrevocable historical change in civil society, from ancients to moderns, or from the old regime to the new, to which governments would have to conform. They not only disagree with Aristotle’s view but they also depart from the position of earlier liberals who began from an abstract, ahistorical state of nature. The state of nature was thought to reveal the nature of man as he was essentially, stripped of conventional (which means historical) advantages and disadvantages. It was the very contrary of Aristotle’s picture of man as naturally political, but it did at least rely on a fixed human nature. The liberalism of James Madison (1751–1836), for example, whom American readers especially, then and now, would want to compare with Tocqueville, still relies on the rights of man in the state of nature. Tocqueville, however, does not build his understanding of democracy on the liberal state of nature first conceived by Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke. He does not refer to that concept in Democracy in America.¹⁸ He also was far from developing a philosophy of history in the thoroughgoing manner of the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).¹⁹ But his liberalism, while totally lacking in Hegel’s confidence that history was progress in reason, joined in his protest against abstract, state-of-nature liberalism.

From Tocqueville’s viewpoint, even Madison’s liberalism seemed lacking in concrete observation of America, above all of the democratic revolution there. In Federalist 10, Madison’s most famous statement of his liberalism, he distinguishes a democracy from a republic. A democracy is popular government in which the people rule directly, as in ancient cities; and a republic is one in which the people rule indirectly through their representatives, who refine and enlarge their views. The system of representation was largely unknown to the ancients and was invented by modern political science, says Alexander Hamilton, helpfully, in Federalist 9. Representation works best, Madison continues, in large, heterogeneous countries with many conflicting interests and sects that make it difficult to form a majority faction, the bane of popular government.

Tocqueville does not share Madison’s confidence that the problem can be solved. He fears majority tyranny in America and actually sees it at work there in public opinion. For him, the danger is not so much factious interest or passion as the degradation of souls in democracy, a risk to which Madison does not directly refer but which Tocqueville states prominently in his Introduction to Democracy in America. As a sign of his fear, he habitually calls the American government a democratic republic, thus spanning and overriding the distinction that Madison was at pains to establish. A modern republic, Tocqueville means to say, cannot help being a democracy, and a modern democracy necessarily has a hard task in getting equal citizens to accept authority without feeling they have been subjected and degraded. Madison’s reliance on the state of nature was a way of avoiding examination of the human soul, for in that early liberal concept the soul disappears as a whole while being divided into disconnected passions such as fear, vanity, or pity. Tocqueville looks at the whole soul and at all of democracy. He considers individual, society, and government as involved with one another without the simplifying state-of-nature abstraction.

Among other liberals of Tocqueville’s time we cannot omit the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who wrote long reviews saluting the two volumes of Democracy in America as they appeared in 1835 and 1840. After the first of these Tocqueville exclaimed to Mill: "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 the regard of others."²⁰ At Mill’s invitation Tocqueville wrote an essay, Political and Social Condition of France Before and Since 1789, published in The London and Westminster Review in 1836, and he exchanged letters with Mill for the rest of his life. But there remain pronounced differences between Mill and Tocqueville that are evident even in the very favorable reviews Mill wrote of Tocqueville’s book.

These two liberals are together, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, in their appreciation of democracy, which both understand to be here to stay and welcome too. Yet Tocqueville’s reservations, his criticisms, his forebodings are not shared by Mill, who in a letter confessed to Tocqueville with some understatement that his article is a shade or two more favorable to democracy than your book.²¹ Mill believes, for example, that the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns of in the first volume of Democracy in America could be avoided if the people entertained the right idea of democracy.²² To Tocqueville’s remark that the American people cheerfully exclude the ablest men from government, Mill responds that great talents are not ordinarily needed and that in a settled state of things, the commanding intellects will always prefer to govern mankind from their closets, by means of literature and science, leaving the mechanical details of government to mechanical minds.²³ Here is wondrous confidence in the capability of intelligence to run the world, unsurprisingly combined with contempt for the actual operation of self-government, of which Tocqueville made so much. Mill’s partisanship for democracy, warmer than Tocqueville’s, depends on his confidence that the commanding intellects will direct it. They will do that through representative government, keeping the flow of influence moving from the intellects to the people and not in reverse, from the people to the intellects, as Tocqueville saw it. For Mill, in contrast to Tocqueville, representative government would not be overwhelmed by democracy, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, it did not have to fear democracy.

Thus Mill felt free to call for more democracy and to press the case against aristocracy, for he, unlike Tocqueville, regarded aristocracy as a present menace still impeding the progress of civilization. It may be doomed, but only if it is hastened along to extinction. In Mill’s view the best minds could ensure their ascendancy by demanding more democracy, for democracy aided by representation does not threaten to cause debasement of intelligence or cultural deprivation. The people, Mill believed against Tocqueville, will not insist on their sovereignty. At the same time, the commanding intellects will govern or direct but not dominate society, because their intellects keep them impartial. Representative democracy promises in sum that a free society will be without a dominant power, effectively classless. It is a pretty picture, attractive to liberals in Mill’s day and ours, but it is not Tocqueville’s. He did not think that society could exist without a sovereign power or that intellects would be unaffected by democracy (see DA II 1, as a whole). Yet he somehow gives the impression of being as impartial as Mill. He sees democracy and aristocracy as distinct and contrasting social states. Democracy is more just than aristocracy since it relies less on compulsion, but it nonetheless has its own character and its own stamp, he shows, that leave their mark effortlessly by consent and insinuation.

Constant accepted the advent of popular sovereignty in the French Revolution, but he thought it could be restrained. The error of the Revolution, again, was to impose an anachronistic, illiberal democracy, derived from the ancient polis, on modern individuals who need only to be represented, not ruled. But the unintended consequence of this thought is to absolve modern democracy for crimes committed when it forgot itself during the Revolution, and then to imply that it has no ills of its own. It is as if all it needs to resolve its problems is self-doubt supplied by liberal thinkers and expressed through parliamentary opposition. Guizot, too, underestimated the power of modern democracy. He believed (as did Tocqueville) that merit would have its way in modern democracy because individual talent and the social power to which it gives rise cannot be denied. But he failed to see that mediocrity would also have its way in modern democracy. Constant, Guizot, Madison, Mill: all were confident that liberal rationality could contain the sovereign wills that liberalism set loose when it denied any basis to traditional authority. Tocqueville stands out from other nineteenth-century liberals by refusing to accept either a safe distancing of freedom from democracy or an easy convergence of the two.

PASCAL, MONTESQUIEU, AND ROUSSEAU

From Tocqueville’s fellow liberals, contemporaries with whom he shares an outlook, we turn to the philosophers—all French—whom he chose as daily companions. Writing in 1836 to his friend Louis de Kergorlay, he said: There are three men with whom I live a little every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.²⁴

Besides being French, these are modern philosophers. Tocqueville’s thinking has many points of similarity with that of the ancients; he shares their acute power of observation, their willingness to stop and reflect, their noble simplicity of judgment all the while questioning both nobility and simplicity. But although he does appreciate them as authors, and welcomes the spiritualism and moral elevation of Plato, he does not accept them as authorities or guides for modern times.²⁵ Above all, he does not care for the best regime as they do. He does not, like the ancients, carry every discussion of the usual and the ordinary toward the best. He places democracy on the scale of human imperfection without a glance, it seems, to gauge the distance from utopian perfection. He is, of course, always comparing democracy to aristocracy, and always revealingly. But his aristocracy is the conventional aristocracy of inherited property, not the true natural aristocracy of the wise set forth in the tradition of Socrates. Come to think of it, where is Socrates in Tocqueville? In Democracy in America Socrates appears as a doctrinaire believer in the immortality of the soul, in which guise he serves both the permanent need of human greatness to be attached to an immaterial principle and the historical social state of aristocracy, now obsolete (DA II 1.15). Perhaps the questioning Socrates is also in Tocqueville himself, an ironical friend of democracy, praising virtues of which it is unaware and condemning as faults the excesses of which it is sometimes most proud.

Thus Tocqueville has none of the enthusiasm of modernity in the heyday of its founding ambition. As he does not care for the rule of the wise, so too he does not believe in any scientific, methodological, or institutional substitute for the rule of the wise—the rule of the duly enlightened. Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau are modern philosophers to some extent critical of modernity. They are not captains of the first wave of the modern revolution. Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Rousseau (1712–1778) came after, and Pascal (1623–1662) kept a certain distance. We note the absence of Descartes, the unread, unacknowledged philosopher of the Americans (DA II 1.1), in Tocqueville’s list of daily counselors. The founder of modern rationalism, however wonderfully French, was not to his taste. Tocqueville was convinced that a great revolution in human affairs was leading all men to one regime, democracy, but he was not persuaded that this was simply the regime of reason. Democracy for him is surely not unreason; much can be said on its behalf, and he says it. But he does not claim, as did the French revolutionaries, that it is light after darkness.

Pascal was not a liberal, and it is strange to see plain marks of his influence in the thought of a liberal. Pascal tells of the vanity of human knowledge and of the misery of the human soul, conclusions in which Christianity and his philosophy converge. They are also matters that liberalism, with its faith in applied science and confidence in the self, would generally rather avoid or ignore. But Tocqueville’s liberalism does not put aside yearnings of the soul and does not join in the attempt of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke to contain them and to reduce the complexity of satisfying the soul to the single task of preserving the self. Tocqueville cares little for ancient metaphysics, yet he cares less for its modern substitute, epistemology, which is designed to protect liberalism from dangerous involvement in deep questions.

Thanks in good part to what he learned from Pascal, Tocqueville is a liberal with depth. This does not merely mean, as it might today, that he has picked up some psychology, and been informed of the turmoil at the bottom of the self; for that kind of depth is preparatory to a therapy that renders the soul as harmless as it was before the discovery of unreason in it. Tocqueville’s depth is in his view of the soul’s irremediable restiveness (inquiétude) that he shares with Pascal. The condition of man, said Pascal, is inconstancy, boredom, restiveness.²⁶

In Democracy in America Tocqueville has a chapter on the restiveness of Americans in the midst of their well-being (DA II 2.13). Although they are the most enlightened people on earth, he says, they appear grave and almost sad even in their pleasures. By their very enlightenment they are instructed that all goods are of this world and that many more of them are attainable than was believed in the past. So they pursue them avidly but inconstantly because they know there is always something better in the world than what they have got. Life is too short to enjoy present goods at the expense of future ones; so they keep on pursuing happiness in such manner as to assume they will never reach it. However enlightened, Americans live in a contradiction: they are attached to material goods as if they will never die, yet they are never satisfied with them because they do know they will die. Here is a reasoned critique, based on thoughtful observation, of the liberal doctrines of progress, property, and the right of self-preservation. One commentator has said that the Tocquevillian description of democratic man sometimes appears as a page torn from the Pensées of Pascal.²⁷

What Pascal calls the condition of man Tocqueville displays in democratic man—more politically and against the background of modern enlightenment. In discussing democratic theater and poetry, Tocqueville says that democratic ages are absorbed in the portrayal not of particular individuals or peoples but of the whole human race. Since poets deal with the ideal, democratic poets must perforce envisage the depths of man’s immaterial nature. In man they find infinite greatness and pettiness, for man comes from nothing and returns to God, momentarily wandering on the edge of two abysses (DA II 1.17). All this unmistakably Pascalian language presents a Pascalian thought adapted by Tocqueville. It invokes Pascal’s picture of the nature of man in which he is not so much placed in an ordered whole as swallowed up in the infinite.²⁸ Men know enough of themselves, says Tocqueville, to sustain poetry but not enough to get beyond it. While speaking of democratic man he lapses as it were unconsciously into speaking of man. Democratic man is petty and weak, but he dreams of a destiny that is vast.

Yet when Tocqueville comes to consider Pascal himself by name, the context is aristocracy. Contrasting democratic eagerness to get practical applications of science to the ardent, haughty, and disinterested love of the true characteristic of a few, Tocqueville singles out Pascal to illustrate the latter. Pascal, he says, devoted his soul so entirely to a pure desire to know that he broke the bonds attaching it to his body and died of old age before he was forty (DA II 1.10). It is unclear whether he altogether admires this dramatic example,²⁹ but his words reveal that in his opinion, contrary to Pascal, the love of truth can be haughty as well as disinterested. Somehow human greatness is in the individual, and in that sense proud and aristocratic, as well as in the species democratically. A man such as Pascal is less likely in democracy. Tocqueville was not, like Pascal, an enemy of pride, and so, unlike Pascal, he found human greatness in politics, and under democracy, in political freedom.³⁰ In a letter written in 1857 he discloses that at age sixteen he was seized by an encompassing doubt, which he describes in Pascalian terms as an inner malaise that I have never been able to cure myself of, producing restiveness of mind.³¹ Perhaps it was because, like Pascal, he saw Christian faith as incomprehensible and hostile to human pride, that he was unable to persuade himself to accept it. He was with Pascal except for his passion on behalf of human greatness—but what an exception!

Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, the moderate royalist statesman under the Restoration, wrote to a friend of his concerning Democracy in America that "to find a work to compare it with, you have to go back to Aristotle’s Politics and [Montesquieu’s] Spirit of the Laws."³² Clearly Royer-Collard (also a correspondent of Tocqueville’s) had the comprehensiveness of the book in view when paying this interesting compliment. Like Aristotle and Montesquieu, Tocqueville begins from politics as it is lived and observed. No grand principle is imposed from the outside. Unlike Aristotle, who begins from actual politics but always tends toward something higher, Tocqueville does not discuss the best regime or use it to urge on his readers or, on the contrary, to set a limit on political ambition. (Occasionally he may refer to what God, as opposed to humans, is capable of; DA II 1.3, 4.8.) Yet, like Montesquieu, he also refrains from joining the search for a single legitimate regime that would change the political question from what is best to what is universally attainable. Neither style of abstraction, ancient or modern, appeals to him. So, like Montesquieu, his philosophy is modest and self-effacing, and his comprehensiveness counts against his reputation as a philosopher. No one would deny that title to Aristotle, who combines broad sensitivity with stern judgment, moral and metaphysical, but Montesquieu and Tocqueville hold judgment in abeyance by accepting outstanding facts as given. They have no hankering for the impossible, for the rule of the wise.³³

Tocqueville accepts the providential fact of democracy and he turns to America, thus denying himself the luxuriant cosmopolitanism in which Montesquieu indulged. He cannot adopt the general spirit of a nation, which Montesquieu develops as a whole comprising each nation, composed of mores, manners, and laws.³⁴ For Tocqueville, something similar can be conceived, the social state (état social), but it is a whole connecting particular laws, customs, and mores that refers to the equality or inequality of conditions prevailing in democracy or aristocracy. In our time, when the democratic revolution is underway, democracy is or is becoming the only social state. That is the fact to be accepted, and it reduces both the cosmopolitan variety of regimes to be found in Montesquieu’s work and Aristotle’s several regimes to one possible condition, if not a single government.

What Montesquieu and Tocqueville share is a political science that centers on the facts of human existence rather than on human nature. Tocqueville relies on human nature more than Montesquieu; he invokes it to mark the limits to democracy and aristocracy. He does not refer to it as the cause of those regimes. When he says in the Introduction to Democracy in America that a new political science is needed for a world altogether new, he may have in mind for replacement Montesquieu’s old-world political science, not centered on democracy; but more profoundly he may also mean to supersede, with Montesquieu, Aristotle’s premodern political science. Aristotle’s classification of regimes presupposes that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are always possible because they are based on monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic inclinations of human nature, one of which may become dominant in certain circumstances. Tocqueville, following Montesquieu, particularizes those regimes, taking the circumstances rather than human nature as given, thus setting aside human nature as a permanent potentiality beyond those circumstances. The result is to create what has been called the authority of the present moment.³⁵ Once human nature has been made historical and particular, it can then be made more general, or remade as general, in the general spirit of the nation (Montesquieu) or the social state (Tocqueville). In Tocqueville’s case the new generality has to do with aristocratic or democratic man, and only indirectly with man simply. The democratic social state, generalized from the providential fact of democracy’s advance, has its own logic and a definite coherence enabling it to regain a certain distance from the facts. Thus for Tocqueville democracy is something different from America, as he frequently reminds his readers, even though it is America that reveals the fact of democracy’s arrival.

The combination of particular and general, historical and theoretical, that Tocqueville learned from Montesquieu anticipates the ideal type invented by Max Weber which is a commonplace of social science today. Weber’s name for it is misleading because the very purpose of the notion is to separate ideal from type. When Tocqueville speaks of democracy, he does so without Aristotle’s calm negative judgment. Of course democracy has its disadvantages, but they do not come from its failure to achieve the best regime. They arise because one inconvenience can never be suppressed without another’s cropping up³⁶—because there is no best regime, only democracy and the misnamed aristocracy.

The liberalism of Tocqueville and

Reviews for Democracy in America

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are so many ways to consider this book, I almost don't know where to start. First, one can think of it as a rich portrait of the United States in the 1830s, with a focus on political life but with social, cultural, and economic life examined as well. One can also appreciate this book as a view of the US from the perspective of a foreigner. Tocqueville flatters Americans quite often in this book, but he also makes numerous comparisons to European nations and points out what he sees as the fundamental differences in systems of government. One can also judge how well this work has stood the test of time and to what extent it still describes America today. I would argue that while many would like to say the country Tocqueville depicts is still in existence, he would also find the US much changed. The observances made about wealth, shared power with the people, and vast ambitions are starting to show their age - to the extent that Tocqueville might recognize different forces at work than those he focused on in this work.

[temsmail · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dated, but interesting

[heidilove_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the most important political works of its time, Democracy In America is still referred to today.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book's basis was a nine month visit to America by De Tocqueville in 1831, ostensibly to study America's prison system. It was an interesting time to visit America, half-way between the establishment of the constitution and the Civil War. In the course of the visit he met former president John Quincy Adams, then incumbent Andrew Jackson, Senator Daniel Webster and Sam Houston among others. He traveled the length and breath of a country much smaller than what we see on the map now. Before the Mexican-American War and Western expansion and he visited both North and South: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans.The book is labelled as both American History and Political Science. De Tocqueville said the first volume was more about America, the second about democracy. The introduction by Mansfield and Winthrop, the translators and editors of the edition I read, called it both the best book on America and the best on democracy. That despite it being written by a French aristocrat--at least by birth although the introduction describes him as a democrat and liberal by conviction.De Tocqueville says in his own introduction he did not mean to write a "panegyric" to America. He's critical, at times presciently so, of America and democracy both, and doesn't pull his punches about how slavery and racism might pull apart the country. He doesn't hesitate to call slavery "evil" and his depiction of the plight of Native Americans is both insightful and heartbreaking. Surprisingly so, not what I expected from a Westerner writing in the 19th Century. Yet despite some sharp criticisms--and it being written by an outsider, a foreigner, the book has been embraced and quoted by Americans both from the Left and Right. It's said to be commonly assigned in political science courses and I wish some excerpts had been assigned in mine, instead of the execrable People's History by Zinn. De Tocqueville in the end strikes me as much more credible, still relevant and much more thought-provoking about democracy and its faultlines--especially the "tyranny of the majority."That's not to say this makes for easy reading. At times I considered giving up on it, slapping a two star rating as too tedious to read. Parts are a slog. I suggest anyone tackling this buy a paperback copy they don't feel hesitant to mark up and highlight and that they take it in short doses. This isn't one of those light, entertaining books. This isn't dessert or junk food. It's a meaty dish; one you chew on and parts can be hard to digest. But the man is brilliant. And it's surprising to me how 200 years later so much resonates in this book and is relevant to contemporary America and its politics. Well worth the effort to anyone interested in democracy or America. At least the first volume is, which definitely deserves five stars for amazing. That first volume was a popular bestseller in its day, the second volume less so, and I can understand that. As De Tocqueville noted, the first book is more on America, and is grounded in a lot of telling observations. Not that it's absent in this second book, but the second volume is a lot more theoretical, and I think a lot of its points are better made in the first part. I also admit I'm not inclined to accept one of his major themes in this second volume, that religion is essential to democracy. And he seems very much off the mark in his contention that American democracy doesn't produce great literature or advances in the sciences. Admittedly, in 1835 when this second volume was published, about the only well-known American writers of fiction were James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. I can't say I much agree with his criticisms of individualism either. That's not to say reading both parts wasn't worthwhile, but less essential I feel than the amazing first volume.

[bookconcierge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is not for the faint of heart. But it is amazing that something written so long ago (and by one so young!) could still have the ring of truth to it. I'll admit, our book club voted to read it then mostly complained about its length, so we divided it up and each person was responsible for about 100 pages. Several of us got so interested that we read more than our assignment, but none of us (myself included) actually read the entire book. I'm thinking, now (writing this on Nov 5, 2008) that I should persevere and read it all.

[hamburgerclan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Genius. Sheer genius. It seems like any book about American politics or history that I've read has at least one quote from this book, so I finally figured I should read it. Man, is this ever great. It's fascinating on so many levels. As history, it's primary source observations of a Frenchman who studied the United States in the 1830's. As a book on politics, it describes our government in depth, giving not just the facts of how it operates but also the rationale and history behind it. As a sociological tome, it mirrors the attitudes and behavior of the American people as well as contrasting those to the English and French. As a booster seat, it's nice and thick. It took me weeks to read (over a number of meals), and every day or so I found some tidbit to make me stop and think about the people around me--neighbors, co-workers, fellow church members. It's not a simple read, since Tocqueville, like other 19th century writers, is very lengthy and doesn't limit himself to one field of study. But it is definitely worth making an effort to read. Why I wasn't given this to read in high school, I don't know. Well, it's twenty years late, but I'm gonna put a copy on my shelf.--J.

[angelic55blonde · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a must have/must read for anyone who is interested in American history. Tocqueville gives a great explanation of America and its government. It is sometimes difficult to read because it was written by a Frenchman many, many years ago but that can be overlooked. Of note, many of Tocqueville's predictions about the state of world affairs turned out to be accurate. Overall, it's a must read for anyone.

[jpsnow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alexis de Tocqueville last updated this work in 1848, 15 years after the original publication. He wrote it as a comparative sociological treatise, giving his forecast for the evolution of modern government as a lesson for post-monarchy France. The first book takes us through the political and governmental structure of US law. the detail is sufficient to allow a close look at such things as the local governing units (it is the township in Mass. and the county in Ohio). The second book contains the more philosophical commentary on the cultural and sociological factors -- and where they might lead. The trend toward equality and the natural tendency in turn toward centralization of power is a major theme throughout his work. He does point out a number of mitigating factors against each that should be encouraged. Another central theme is the importance of "mores" in the classical sense defined as the "whole moral and intellectual state of a people." His writing style is wonderful and very organized, with each section summarized with an abstract and each sub-section summarized by a single paragraph or sentence. The entire book is concluded with: "The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness."In laying the foundation, he mentions a number of great "leveling" factors that led to the trend toward equality. The development of trade and technology is shown to have taken the last remnants of nobility by surprise. Inheritance laws drove equality by weakening the preservation of estates. At the same time, the colonial laws in the US were both very democratic and yet often completely intolerant of religious or moral behaviors. The example of adulterous couples being sentenced to being whipped and then married is a sufficient example. He also discusses the relation between democracy and religion, at one point calling Catholicism the ultimate democracy and frequently showing the tolerance and commonality that results from the varied and varying religious sects. "Classical historians taught how to command; those of our own time teach next to nothing but how to obey." (p. 496). He observes that manufacturing leads to an equivalent of aristocracy with craftsmen slipping into the level of nothing, but workers and industrialists becoming a separate class.Regarding American government, he says that as an elected official, the President is a follower of the common will rather than a leader "The two main weapons used by the parties to assure success are newspapers and associations." (p. 179). He describes a constant lawmaking without lasting focus, resulting in a series of ideas half-completed (his example is the prison reform that created new prisons and a whole system more like medieval dungeons than before). Lawyers are America's aristocracy: "So hidden at the bottom of a lawyer's soul, one finds some of the tastes and habits of an aristocracy. They share its instinctive preference for order and its natural love of formalities; like it, they conceive a great distaste for the behavior of the multitude and secretly scorn the government of the people." (p. 264) "A French lawyer is just a man of learning, but an English or an American one is somewhat like the Egyptian priests, being, as they were, the only interpreter of an occult science." (p. 267). Three key factors to the stability of the US democracy are: the federal form giving the power of a great republic and the security of a small one, communal institutions to moderate the despotism of the majority, and the organization of judicial power. Congressman give speeches and muddle on in order to have text and quotes to send home to consituents, often saying things they don't understand themselves, so that "the debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged, rather than march, to the intended goal." Because of the necessity of individualism, democracy tends to make people forget their ancestry and remove themselves from their contemporaries; two methods by which Americans combat the effect of individualism are newspapers and associations (p.508)."As equality spreads and men individually become less strong, they ever increasingly let themselves glide with the stream of the crowd and find it hard to maintain alone an opinion abandoned by the rest." (p. 520). Comparing America to Europe, de Tocqueville observes few truly uneducated and few truly learned. When education is ending in America, it is just beginning for a European. Punishment is less severe but more likely. Impeachment is an administrative matter rather than a judicial one. It is lesser men who pursue politics as the more ambitious turn to industry. The marriage tie is more voluntary and fidelity adhered to, resulting in a more stable social infrastructure. Religion more powerful by being separate from the political. He observes a literary and artistic void due to concentration on industry, lack of leisure class, and lack of education. People learn government through participation and exercise of their rights; are more independent, more inward, but deny anything they cannot understand because they are more likely to have solved everything to get where they are. Democracy came about without an internal revolution, which meant no drastic change and subsequent stabilization. He sees less theoretical research but better application, "These same American who have never discovered a general law of mechanics have changed the face of the world by introducing a new machine for navigation." (p. 463). Women have more time to become individuals before marriage. Americans move around too much to allow manners to be established (because no chance for convention to solidify and no permanent relationship about which to worry). War, including duels, battle, and feuds, are considered worse than bankruptcy. People do not reach for ambitious goals. "... life is spent in coveting small prizes within reach." (p. 629).Regarding democracy itself, "It really is difficult to imagine how people who have entirely given up managing their own affairs could make a wise choice of those who are to do that for them. One should never expect a liberal, energetic, and wise government to originate in the votes of a people of servants." (p. 694). Among his final observations: "In democracies ignorance as much as equality will increase the concentration of power and the subjection of the individual." (p. 676)

[branful · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

need I say Tocquville is a real genius comparable to Karl Marx and E H Carr? Quite good at drawing a grand design and making delicate distinctions. He can be funnier than Carr sometimes.

[librarianbryan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Offers an insightful analysis of our political system in the abstract. Many of the social particulars he writes about have obviously changed with time.

[kamgeb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In a course I took the professor took about this book and it sounded very interesting. But when I finally read the book, it was hard to follow and I realized I liked the professor's explanation of the book better.

[Willibroad · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

the continous dilusion of a great democracy, when women couldn't vote ,black people slaves ,indians wipped out