Alexis de Tocqueville

In fact, five years would elapse between the appearance of the two parts of Democracy in America. Part II, again in two volumes, would only be published in 1840. In those years, Tocqueville read very widely and deeply in many fields, above all the history of political thought. He had his favorites. He wrote a friend that there were three men he lived with every day: Montesquieu; Jean­-Jacques Rousseau; and Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century philosopher and subtle dissector of the human soul and heart.

     Finally, Part II appeared. A guide to the work can be found in a note Tocqueville wrote to himself during its composition:

Point out — to myself as well — that I was led in the second work to take up once again some of the subjects already touched on in the first, or to modify some opinions expressed therein. Necessary result of such a large work done in two stages. The first book more American than democratic. This one more democratic than American.

In fact, Tocqueville does deal with many of the same ideas and themes found in Part I. But now the treatment is more general, more abstract. Developments in Europe are drawn in more and more; the author tries harder to peer into the future, to discern dangers and cause for hope. As we shall see, one particular, overwhelming threat begins to take shape before his eyes. And throughout the emphasis is on the kind of human being democracy will produce.

     In Part I, Tocqueville had concentrated on the political institutions of democratic society, and the causes that produced and conditioned them. Here his field is as wide as the culture itself. He ranges from science and literature to domestic life to personal demeanor. His tracings of cause and effect, if sometimes strained, are usually fascinating. Americans, he finds, have a strong preference for practical, as against theoretical ideas and sciences — altogether natural, given the never-ending bustle of a society where everyone feels he can get ahead. Even literature becomes a trade, and there is little of the aristocratic fastidiousness of taste. In one major area of life — affecting everyone — however, democracy has brought about a vast improvement. That is the family.

     In aristocratic societies, children tend to view their parents — especially the father — with awe, even with fear. Their conduct is based on a rigid formalism and readiness to obey. Among the children, the first-born son has pride of place, since he will usually inherit everything and will eventually take his father’s place as the chief custodian of the family name and traditions. As democratic conditions and the democratic mentality begin to penetrate into the life of the family, however, stiff formality towards the parents is replaced by the bonds of natural affection, and, since the first­born son no longer has a privileged position, jealousy and rancor among the children gives way to love.

     What Tocqueville is describing here is what social historians have called the bourgeois or middle-class family, built on the natural ties of love and the commitment of the family members to each other. With time, this ideal has penetrated into all social classes — most Americans would find it hard even to imagine another kind of family-life. Tocqueville, himself raised in an aristocratic environment, found it totally appealing. In his chapter on “The Influence of Democracy on the Family,” there is none of his habitual ambi­valence, of his balancing of gains against losses.

Such is the charm of these democratic manners that even the partisans of aristocracy are attracted to it, and after having experienced it for some time, they are by no means tempted to revert to the respectful and frigid observances of aristocratic families.

     But Tocqueville’s ultimate purpose is not simply to analyze the mores of a democratic society, as fascinating as that may be. His design is to show how they bear upon the great political issue of the coming age — the menace of despotism. The way is paved for despotism by a new and peculiar feeling which gains ground in democratic society — individualism.

     Today the term “individual­ism” generally has favorable overtones, especially in the United States. When it was first coined, however, in France in the early nineteenth century, it was used in a pejorative sense. Both conservative and socialist writers — enemies of the new liberal and capitalist order based on recognition of individual rights — used the term to designate a self-seeking attitude riding roughshod over the claims of brotherhood and the rights of society. It suggested an exclusive concentration on one’s personal affairs, to the exclusion of the good of society. Tocqueville’s usage is derived from this earlier, negative meaning.

     In Part I, Tocqueville had referred to individualism as “the rust of society.” It was a problem that continued to engage him. In the summer of 1838, he was at the family’s old castle in Normandy, pondering the sequel to the first part of Democracy in America. He also pondered the character of the local people he came into contact with. He wrote his friend Royer-Collard:

I am attached to this population, without, all the same, concealing its faults, which are great. These people here are honest, intelligent, religious enough, passably moral, very steady. But they have scarcely any disinterestedness.

It is true that egoism in this region does not resemble that of Paris, so violent and often so cruel. It is a mild, calm, and tenacious love of private interests, which bit by bit absorbs all other sentiments of the heart and dries up nearly all sources of enthusiasm there. They join to this egoism a certain number of private virtues and domestic qualities which, as a whole, form respectable men and poor citizens.

Royer-Collard’s reply may well have encouraged Tocqueville in placing the theme at the center of Part II of his work:

You are irritated by the country where you live. But your Normans — they are France, they are the world. This prudent and intelligent egoism, it is [the character] of the honest folk of our time, trait for trait.

Here was something else that had accompanied democracy into the world, and in Part II, Tocqueville tries to delineate the features of this new mentality:

Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with selfishness. Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.

     Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from

erroneous judgment. ... Selfishness is a vice as old as the world ... individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.

The underlying cause of this new mentality is the ongoing decay of the social structure of traditional society. In former times, an acknowledged and enforced hierarchy had existed, from the lowest to the highest members of the community. Aristocratic society had also created innumerable smaller groups, which cohered precisely because of the distinctive privileges granted to them. Towns, provinces, social classes, occupational categories, religious bodies — all enjoyed special rights, which created a sense of solidarity among their members, a feeling of identification with the others. Democracy tears the whole fabric of aristocratic society to shreds. It cuts every man off from his ancestors and descendants beyond one or two degrees. Professional, religious, and other corporate bodies vanish, and so do the bonds between a lord and his vassals, between a land-owner and his “people.” Now the individual is regarded as the ultimate social unit, with the total right of self-determination. No longer is he part of any permanent larger group; there is nothing to link him to groups and causes in the wider society. He retires into his own immediate circle — democracy has even made his family environment a greater comfort to him. Why should he ever concern himself with the fate of society?

     Tocqueville thinks individualism can be combated. If local liberties are in place — if citizens enjoy the right to decide on public affairs in their own communities — they will tend to be drawn into a wider concern for society at large. The right of free association should be granted, as it is in the United States — unlike France, for instance, where the authorities restrict it for fear of revolution. Only in association with his fellows will the individual feel strong enough to resist the encroachments of power. And, since they foster associations and combinations of all kinds, newspapers should likewise be to allowed to flourish.

     But the Americans have discovered something even more effective in counteracting individualism — they fight it with the principle of self-interest itself: rightly-understood self-interest.

I do not think, on the whole, that there is more selfishness among us than in America. The only difference is that there it is enlightened, here it is not. Each American knows when to sacrifice some of his private interests to save the rest. The principle of rightly-understood self-interest is as often asserted by the poor man as by the rich. The Americans are fond of explaining almost all their actions by this principle. They show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacri­fice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.

In America, the individual understands that his own interest is bound up with that of his fellows and of society as a whole. He realizes that he will prosper if the laws are upheld and freedom respected — that he will suffer, in the most direct and personal way, from the breakdown of order or despotic government.

The principle of rightly understood self-interest is not a lofty one, but it is clear and sure. As it lies within within the reach of all capacities, everyone can without difficulty learn and retain it. By its admirable conformity to human weaknesses it easily obtains great dominion; nor is that dominion precarious, since the principle checks one personal interest by another, and uses, to direct the passions, the very same instrument that excites them.

     Tocqueville calls enlightened self-interest “the chief remaining security” that democratic people have against themselves. And yet, he does not appear to be so sure. In the very next chapter, he hastens to add that this principle must be understood as applying both to life on earth and — the afterlife. That is, the individual restrains his actions — he obeys the law and he respects the rights of others — not only because he realizes that this serves his enlight­ened, long-range interests here and now, but because of rewards and punishments in the hereafter. This was not, however, how the doctrine of enlightened self­interest had been traditionally understood; thus, Tocqueville seems to be betray­ing a certain lack of confidence in the idea.

     That Tocqueville was uneasy with the claim that self-interest can be turned into a buttress for the free society is shown by the next section. Here the emphasis is on the drive for physical gratification and material possessions, which has become the chief passion of the Americans — a middle-class obsession that has penetrated into all classes. What worries Tocqueville is not that this love of comfort and things will lead people to debauchery and political upheaval. On the contrary: it results in a preference for calmness and tranqui­lity more conducive to acquiring and enjoying. The danger lies elsewhere.

To physical gratifications the heart, the imagination, and life itself are unreservedly given up, till, in snatching at these lesser gifts, men lose sight of those more precious possessions which constitute the glory and the greatness of mankind. By these means a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.

In the United States the never-ending race for riches and for possessions that will distinguish a man from his neighbors results in a restlessness, sometimes an inner emptiness. Fortunately, however, the Americans are educated and poli­tically sophisticated enough to understand the connection between what they want — wealth — and a free government.

The Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare; they are attached to the one by the other. They by no means think that they are not called on to take part in public affairs. On the contrary, they believe that their chief business is to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions which they have already acquired.

The Americans take an active part in governing themselves — not simply by voting at election time, but by carrying out and scrupulously overseeing the functions of government, especially in their own communities. But what happens if a people is seized by the democratic drive to gain riches, but does not see the connection with good government? Tocqueville is doubtless thinking of France, and other countries in the process of becoming democratized. That he says is the critical moment when they may lose their freedom.

Men who are possessed by the passion for physical gratifica­tion generally find out that the turmoil of freedom disturbs their welfare before they discover how freedom itself serves to promote it. The fear of anarchy perpetually haunts them, and they always ready to fling away their freedom at the first disturbance.

But self-interest, even when enlightened, and thus no threat to freedom, still has its drawbacks: Above all, Tocqueville’s old bete noir, the lowering of aspirations and a brutalization of the personality. The remedy for this is, again, religion. Should the state therefore establish a religion? By no means. The best support that politicians could give to religion, Tocqueville says, is to act as if they believed in it and act morally themselves.

     Tocqueville very briefly touches on a momentous subject: is there a pos­sibility that the new industrial system will generate its own aristocracy in the form of a class of capitalists? Throughout his life, Tocqueville was never particularly interested in economics, business or technology. Indeed, scholars have remarked on how little mention there is even of the railroads in his study of America. Nonetheless, he had picked up various views through casual observation and some reading. On the subject of the division of labor in the factory, he repeats ideas that are at least as old as The Wealth of Nations: production may be increased, but the worker is restricted and narrowed in his mind and character. The new elite of capitalists does not show the solicitude for the workers’ welfare that his own class had often displayed in the past, Tocqueville feels. Still, the capitalists are not attached to the land; they have no permanent body of followers — in this way, they differ decisively from the true aristocratic caste of former centuries, Tocqueville sums up:

I am of the opinion, on the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of harshest that, ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless, the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction: for if ever a perma­nent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrates into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate
by which they will enter.

This, however, is a diversion from Tocqueville’s main argument. It will soon become evident that this is not where he perceives the danger to lie.

     Meanwhile, he returns to the fight against brutish materialism and the seeking after gratifications, and the “individualism” they promote.

     In the chapter titled “Why Democratic Nations Naturally Desire Peace, and Democratic Armies, War,” Tocqueville argues for a surprising remedy to perni­cious individualism. The chapter also illustrates some of the problems with his approach to political science. His proposition that democratic societies favor peace appeals to common sense. The great majority of people are engrossed by the pursuit of their private interests, above all their material interests. War interferes with this, generating uncertainty in economic life and demanding manifold sacrifices. But the proposition that armies in democratic societies desire war is bolstered only by the claim that democracy multiplies the number of individuals who feel they have a right to a commission; since officers’ com­missions are limited in peacetime, there will be a pressure to wage war to increase them. Tocqueville presents no empirical evidence to support his theory, however, and the history of the United States up to his time would appear to disprove it.

     The much more surprising part of Tocqueville’s analysis comes when when he asserts:

I do not wish to speak ill of war. War almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises its character. In some cases, it is the only check on the excessive growth of cer­tain propensities that naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are liable. War has great advantages ...

War as a “necessary corrective”? Here a Tocqueville begins to be revealed who is rather different from the saint of ordered liberty so often portrayed. But this Tocqueville is just as real as the other. What could have led the great French liberal to idolize war? The yearning to do great deeds was deeply rooted in Tocqueville’s heart. In 1834 he spent a few weeks in the country, something he had not done since he was a child. He wrote to Kergolay:

I do not know what I will become, but I feel very strongly that it would be easier for me to leave for China, to enlist as a soldier, or to gamble my life in I know not what hazard­ous and poorly conceived venture, than to condemn myself to leading the life of a potato, like the decent people I have just seen.

A few months later he wrote again to Kergolay, in the same vein:

Oh, how I wish that Providence would present me with some opportunity to make use in order to accomplish good and grand things, whatever dangers Providence might attach to them — of this internal flame I feel within me that does not know where to find what feeds it.

Tocqueville never found such an opportunity for heroism. He pursued a rather mediocre political career and wrote great books. But throughout these books — and in his letters — he expresses his profound admiration, even awe, for heroic and, above all, energetic and passionate characters. The spectacle of grandeur in human personality and action evoked is praise. In the Preface to his Old Regime and the Revolution, he confesses that he has made a point of “throwing into relief” virtues such as “a healthy independence, high ambitions, faith in oneself, and in a cause.” Later in that work he speaks with feeling of many of the figures of that earlier time:

This spirit of independence [which] kept alive in many indivi­duals their sense of personality and encouraged them to retain their color and relief. More than this, it fostered a healthy self-respect and often an overmastering desire to make a name for themselves. This is why we find in 18th century France so many outstanding personalities, those men of genius, proud and greatly daring, who made the Revo­lution what it was: at once the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations.

Tocqueville respected and revered men of energy and force to an extent regardless of the good or evil they produced, an attitude sometimes associated with the Italian Renaissance. When Gobineau suggested in a letter that France was a nation in decline, Tocqueville was indignant:

As if, above all, we had not produced a constant stream of great writers during the past three centuries, stirring and moving the spirit of mankind most powerfully — whether in the right or the wrong direction may be arguable, but their power one cannot doubt. ... Strong hatreds, ardent pas­sions, high hopes and powerful convictions are — all — neces­sary to make human minds move. ... Right now nothing is strongly believed, nothing is loved, nothing is hated, and people wish for nothing but a quick profit on the stock exchange.

Notice that Tocqueville contrasts the heroic personality with the kind of man produced by  modern society, relentlessly pursuing wealth and abandoned to individualism. Despite his protestations of impartiality, it is clear enough which human type Tocqueville favored. Early in Part II of Democracy in America he draws a picture of the aristocratic posture in which it is not difficult to see strong traces of his own:

Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and inhuman actions, but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts, and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures even while they indulge in them. The effect is to raise greatly the general pitch of society. In aristocratic ages, vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man.

This aspect of Tocqueville’s thought is obviously linked to many of his ideal­istic concerns — his insistence on the need to arouse pride in modern-day man, for example, and his horror of all theories suggesting that man is a mere pawn in the hands of fate. But it is linked also to his ardor for the imperialism of the European states and his fondness for war.

     Tocqueville was excited by the prospect of Europe’s conquering much of the rest of the world, which he foresaw occurring in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gobineau, who was a student of Oriental history, had written Tocqueville predicting the eventual decline of the West. Tocqueville fired back a reply.

You say that one day we shall resemble your Eastern mobs: perhaps. But before that happens, we shall be their masters. A few million men who, a few centuries ago, lived nearly shirtless in the forests and in the marshes of Europe will, within a hundred years, have transformed the globe and domi­nated the other races. Seldom has Providence shown us an aspect of the future so clearly. The European races are often the greatest rogues, but at least they are rogues to whom God gave will and power and whom he seems to have destined for some time to be at the head of mankind.

Tocqueville favored imperialism for its civilizing work, but even more for the glory it brought the imperial power. He was particularly stirred by the Raj — British dominion over India. In 1857, the Sepoy Rebellion — the mutiny of the native troops in India — broke out, with appalling massacres on both sides. 

     Nassau Senior was a representative of the “Little England,” or anti-imperialist position, which was standard among British liberals. In the summer of 1858, Senior wrote Tocqueville:

The world, I think, is gradually coming over to an opinion which, when I maintained it thirty years ago, was treated as a ridiculous paradox — that India is and always has been a great misfortune to us; and that, if it were possible to get quit of it, we should be richer and stronger.

Tocqueville did not directly contradict his old friend’s views. But in a letter he had written earlier to another English correspondent, Lady Teresa Lewis, he was adamant. It made no difference if India cost the British much more than gained from it. That was not the point. The writer who had traced the settlement of America by a free people found it possible to say:

There has never been anything under the sun as extraordinary as the conquest — and, above all, the government — of India by the English, anything which from every corner of the globe more attracts the imagination of men to that small island of whose very name the Greeks were unaware. Do you believe, Madame, that a people can, after having filled this immense space in the imagination of the human species, withdraw from it with impunity?

     Tocqueville was a practical, not just a theoretical, proponent of of imperialism. As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he concerned himself with the “pacification” of France’s latest colony, Algeria, and even visited that country to see for himself how the war and colonization were going. He urged massive French settlement, entailing widespread expropriation of the native inhabitants. In Algeria the French could, he thought, play the same role the English had played in North America. Nowhere does he display the kind of sympathy for the native Arabs that he had shown for the American Indians. The French generals Bugeaud and Moriciere, whose brutality in crushing the Algerians became notorious, found a champion in Tocqueville.

     In his speeches in the Chamber, he demonstrated that he was not averse to risking war on a much greater scale. In 1840, France came into conflict with England and other powers over affairs between Egypt and the Turkish Empire. Tocqueville proclaimed that, sooner than make concessions and lose face, France should threaten to make war. This annoyed and provoked his English friends, especially John Stuart Mill and Nassau Senior. As good classical liberals, they could not comprehend how Tocqueville could suggest war — with all its at­tendant horrors — for such a trivial reason. Mill pointed out that true national greatness consisted in “love of liberty, of progress, even of material prosper­ity.” Nassau Senior wrote, chiding his friend:

The speech which you addressed to the French Chamber would have been utterly ruinous to any English statesman. What! (it would have been said). To think of going to war merely to prevent our being excluded from taking part in the affairs of Syria or Egypt? Or to show that we were not unable to go to war? In the English [Parliament] we should consider such proposals as scarcely deserving a serious answer. The passage which you struck out of the address —  namely, that if you were attacked you would resist, forms the ground­work of all English feeling on peace and war.

Tocqueville was not moved by the chastisements of his friends. It is not that he was unaware of the grave dangers to liberty that arise from war. In one of his notebooks he had written:

In order to make war, it is necessary to create a very ener­getic and almost tyrannical central power. It is necessary to permit it many acts of violence and arbitrariness. War can result in delivering over to this power the liberty of a nation.

This was no mere fleeting thought; it found its way into Part II of Democracy in America:

The democratic tendency that leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the right of private persons is much more rapid and constant among those nations that are exposed by their position to great and frequent wars than among all others.

Thus, despite this great — possibly mortal — threat to freedom, Tocqueville believed that imperialism and war should be pursued by statesmen. What can explain this? As we have seen, Tocqueville scorned the small-minded preference for pleasure over greatness of character and achievement. War is the least self-indulgent, the least hedonistic of activities — at least as waged by modern armies, which are seldom out for plunder or booty. Thus, it goes against the current of modern society, since it represents the ultimate in self-sacrifice. At the same time, it nurtures parts of the personality — like a feeling of comrade­ship and a sense of honor — that also raise the individual above himself. These are “necessary correctives” in democratic society. As he says in Part II:

What is to be dreaded most is that in the midst of the small, incessant occupations of private life, ambition should lose its vigor and its greatness; that the passions of man should abate, but at the same time be lowered; so that the march of society should every day become more tranquil and less aspiring.

I think that the leaders of modern society would be wrong to seek to lull the community by a state of too uniform and too peaceful happiness, and that it is well to expose it from time to time to matters of difficulty and danger in order to raise ambition and give it a field of action.

Tocqueville was committed to energy, passion, and grandeur as values independent of liberty, and he believed deeply that sometimes liberty had to be risked for the sake of his aesthetic ideal of human personality.