Alexis de Tocqueville

In the “Author’s Introduction” to the volumes that appeared in 1835, Tocqueville sketches the aim, approach and major themes that will dominate the whole work. Equality of condition was the fact that most impressed him in the United States, he says,

I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less effect on civil society than on the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to new sentiments, founds novel customs, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.

One might say that, just as some observers go to California, and feel they are witnessing what America will be like in the near future, so Tocqueville felt in regard to America and his native Europe.

I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, and I thought that I discerned there something analogous to the spectacle which the New World presented to me. I observed that equality of condition, though it has not there reached the extreme limit which it seems to have attained in the United States, is constantly approaching it; and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising in power in Europe.

As he was later to tell John Stuart Mill, “America was only the frame — my picture was democracy.”

     According to Tocqueville, the eager student of Guizot, the democratic revolution has been underway for centuries. He takes the reader back 700 years, to the 11th century. Then, all power, over the land as well as its inhabitants, lay with a small number of noble families. It was the height of inequality. Since that time, every development has diminished the great and raised up the lowly. Peace and commerce, as well as war and conquest fostered greater equality. The kings of France themselves, Tocqueville points out, “have always been the most active and the most constant of levelers.” Everything seemed to be converging on the same goal — equality of status, or, as Tocqueville puts it here, “democracy.”

The various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy: all men have aided it by their exertions; both those who have intentionally labored in its cause and those who have served it unwittingly; ... some unknowingly and some despite themselves, all have been blind instruments in the hands of God. The gradual development of the principle of equality is, therefore, a providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: It is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. ... The whole book that is here offered to the public has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe produced in the author’s mind by the view of that irresistible revolution ...

Tocqueville makes clear that his aim in writing Democracy in America is not a purely abstract or scholarly one. For him, as always, analysis and understanding are the prelude to political action.

The Christian nations of our day seem to me to present a most alarming spectacle; the movement which impels them is already so strong that it cannot be stopped, but it is not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided. Their fate is still in their own hands; but very soon they may lose control. The first of the duties that are at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate democracy, to reawaken, if possible, its religious beliefs; to purify its morals; to mold its actions; to substitute a knowledge of statecraft for its inexperience, and an awareness of its true interest for its blind instincts, to adapt its government to time and polace, and to modify it according to men and to conditions. A new science of politics is needed for a new world.

This new science of politics is all the more urgently required in view of a menace Tocqueville already sees as besetting democracy. Here he announces one of the great themes of his work: the vast increase of state-power in modern society:

[In the Old Regime] the power of a few of his subjects was an insurmountable barrier to the tyranny of the prince; and the monarch, who felt the almost divine character which he enjoyed in the eyes of the multitude, derived a motive for the just use of his power from the respect which he inspired. ...Custom and usage, moreover, had established certain limits to oppression and founded a sort of law in the very midst of violence. ... But [today] it is the government alone that has inherited all the privileges of which families, guilds, and individuals have been deprived. To the power of a small number of persons, which, if it was sometimes oppressive was often conservative, has succeeded the weakness of the whole community.

What is to be done? Another of the great themes enters. Religion, Tocqueville asserts, is by its nature one of the chief allies of freedom, but because of historical accident it has been unable to play its assigned role. Religion has been opposed to liberty:

Christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of God, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law. But by a strange coincidence of events, religion has been for a time entangled with those institutions which democracy destroys; and it is not infrequently brought to reject the equality which it loves, and to curse as a foe that cause of liberty whose efforts it might hallow by its alliance.

By the “strange” events that pitted religion against liberty, Tocqueville has in mind the interconnections between the church and the aristocracy, the united front of Throne and Altar, and the hostility toward religious faith on the part of many of the liberal writers of the Enlightenment. If history had made many religious persons suspicious of liberalism, it had had a reciprocal effect on many liberals:

By the side of these religious men I discern others whose thoughts are turned to earth rather than to heaven. These are the partisans of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but more especially as the root of all solid advantages; and they sincerely desire to secure its authority, and to impart its blessings to mankind. It is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. But they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries and they inquire no further. Some of them attack it openly, and the rest are afraid to defend it.

     Tocqueville suggests that the confusion about religion and freedom is linked to a deeper malaise in contemporary society — a shattering of the foundations of all lawful order or concept of good and evil.

... Has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are not in their proper relationships ... where the love of order is confused with a taste for oppression, and the holy cult of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?

Quickly, however, Tocqueville’s practical sense comes to the rescue, and he puts aside these dark thoughts.

I cannot believe that the Creator made man to leave him in any endless struggle with the intellectual wretchedness that surrounds us. God destines a calmer and a more certain future to the communities of Europe.

He feels that what the future may hold for Europe is, to some degree, prefigured in America. From the 17th century on, this land had been peopled by emigrants who did not have to contend with any hindrance to the democratic principle, which has been able, therefore, to flourish in perfect freedom and imprint itself on all aspects of social life. The Europeans have much to learn from the American experience.

It appears to me beyond a doubt that, sooner or later, we shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of condition, But ... I am far from supposing that they have chosen the only form of government which a democracy may adopt. But as the generating cause of laws and manners in the two countries is the same, it is of immense interest for us to know what it has produced in each of them.

Tocqueville claims to be writing free of prejudice either for or against demo­cracy.

I have not even pretended to judge whether the social revolu­tion, which I believe to be irresistible, is advantageous or prejudicial to mankind. I have acknowledged this revolu­tion as a fact already accomplished, or on the eve of its accomplishment; and I have selected the nation, from among those which have undergone it, in which its development has been the most peaceful and the most complete, in order to discern its natural consequences and to find out, if possible, the means of rendering it profitable to mankind.

Tocqueville frequently insisted on his impartiality as between the two systems. In 1837, he wrote to Henry Reeve, his English translator:

People ascribe to me alternately aristocratic and democratic prejudice. If I had been born in another period, or in another country, I might have had either one or the other. But my birth, as it happened, made it easy for me to guard against both. I came into the world at the end of a long revolution, which, after destroying ancient institutions, created none that could last. When I entered life, aristo­cracy was dead and democracy was yet unborn. My instinct therefore could not lead me blindly to the one or the other.

That, Tocqueville actually did succeed in the virtually impossible task of shedding the values of his family and upbringing, however, is doubtful, as we shall see.

     Tocqueville believed that the political institutions of a people are produced by three great causes: their physical circumstances, their laws, and “habits and moeurs“ — a word that can be translated “mores,” and suggests customs, values, a way of life. Of these three main factors, the last, he thought, was most important. This division into three factors determines the structure of all of Part I of Democracy in America.