Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Some of these blemishes can be put down to unavoidable ignorance (Tocqueville was well aware that he had not been able to investigate everything in ten months) but more was caused by his neurotic refusal to plan his book carefully. As he plunged deeper and deeper into his work he wrote more and more by whim, and revised scantly. By late winter he had finished the first volume, and still thought he might publish it on its own.14 But he had barely begun to expound what most concerned him, so making a brief but heart-felt excuse (‘above all institutions and beyond all technicalities presides a sovereign power, that of the people, which destroys or modifies them as it pleases’)15 he started his book all over again, as it were, devoting nine chapters specifically to popular sovereignty and its consequences. These chapters, loosely connected by theme, are nevertheless almost independent essays. One of them, chapter 5 (‘Democratic Government in America’) is itself broken up into fifteen mini-essays on such topics as universal suffrage and the payment of public officials. They are fascinating in detail, but the general effect is somewhat higgledy-piggledy. Perhaps it should be borne in mind that Tocqueville was still a fairly inexperienced author. It was Beaumont who had built the main frame of the Système pénitentiaire, and Tocqueville’s contributions, mainly in the form of notes, however much they enriched the text, had seriously damaged Beaumont’s simple, shapely design.

  A deeper truth is that De la démocratie en Amérique is the last of its author’s American notebooks. Tocqueville there continues the reflections and debates which had preoccupied him increasingly during his tour. Had he so chosen he could have written an excellently tidy textbook on US government, or he could have written up his notes into a wonderful travel book. But what he wanted to do was to settle his own opinion on a dozen or more matters which were, to him, of the greatest importance; he wanted to find out what he really thought of democracy and America, and to persuade as many readers as possible to agree with him. Not surprisingly, then, the book which he produced was sui generis: that is a great part of its attraction; but if it has to be categorized, it must be called a political tract. It may have taken Tocqueville hundreds of pages and years of reflection to hammer out his message, but a message he had. It is this which earns him the name of prophet, not his lucky or unlucky guesses at the future.

  To expound that message – which contained both analysis and a programme of action – was the purpose of these early chapters of volume 2, the nuclear core of Tocqueville’s achievement. It is difficult to summarize them coherently because of the way in which they were compiled. Just as Tocqueville assessed the penitentiary system in terms of its record in America and its possibilities for France, so here he discusses American democracy in itself and in its possible applications. But whereas, thanks to Beaumont, in the Système pénitentiaire coherent investigation was reflected in the coherent structure of the book, in the Démocratie Tocqueville keeps switching from the pros to the cons and back again and thereby disconcerts his readers, because he states every point so emphatically and never tries to harmonize his discourse. Sometimes (especially when presenting the cons) he is carried away into overstatement. This is particularly apparent when he deals with what, to start with, he calls the omnipotence of the majority in America. The history of the French Revolution and its climax in the Jacobin dictatorship explains why he was so concerned with the threat of legislative tyranny, because it was through the Convention, the revolutionary assembly, that the Jacobins came to power and exercised their dictatorship. Legislative tyranny seemed a real threat, and had been a French preoccupation as far back as 1799 and the Brumaire coup d’état, if not earlier. It was inevitable that Tocqueville should discuss it. But a majority in an assembly is not the same thing as a majority of voters at an election, let alone a permanent majority of the citizen body. Unhappily Tocqueville soon lost sight of these distinctions, if he ever saw them, and from writing of the omnipotence of ‘the majority’ he moves to the possibility of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ in the United States without drawing breath and then slides into talking as if it were an established and permanent fact.16 He makes several ringing liberal assertions (‘It seems to me that omnipotence is in itself something bad and dangerous ... only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power’), but he also lets fall the famous but preposterous aphorism, ‘I know no country where in general there prevails less independence of mind and true freedom of debate than in America.’17 However often this statement has been quoted by persons anxious to denounce American social conformity, it is absurd, as a comparison of the polemics of the Age of Jackson with the ice age of Metternich or with the press laws of Louis-Philippe quickly makes clear; and the whole drift of this and other passages is repeatedly contradicted by Tocqueville himself, most explicitly towards the end of the book, where he casually shrugs off any great anxiety about majority rule:

  That which is called the Republic in the United States is the peaceful rule of the majority. The majority, once it has had time to discover and organize itself, is the one source of power. But it is not all-powerful. Above it, in the moral universe, stand humanity, justice and reason; in the political world, vested interests. The majority accepts these two restraints, and if it should ever happen to breach them, it is because it has passions, like those of any one man, and because, like him, it can do wrong while knowing the right.18

  His overall picture of American democracy is warmly enthusiastic as well as penetratingly intelligent; in view of what he says about the American jury, American religion, American lawyers, American education, American local government and political parties, among other things, it is impossible (I would have supposed) to fancy that he really thought such a mature free people, with centuries of experience behind it (as he loved to emphasize) was in danger of tyranny of any kind.* Rather, he saw some form of democracy à l’américaine as the only alternative to dictatorship (‘the yoke of a single man’) and the only means of preserving liberty.19 Although he puts the case for pursuing democracy in France very cautiously, it is because, as when he was recommending the penitentiary system, he wants to persuade his readers, not dazzle them. Well aware of the enormous obstacles in his path, he did not want to add to them by incurring charges of exaggeration or Utopian impracticability. He had a Utopia in mind for all that (he had decided that it was a practical one) and it looked a lot like the United States. A democracy would never do for those who wanted epic glory:

  But if it seems useful to you to direct the intellectual and moral activity of men towards the material necessities of life, and to use them to produce well-being; if reason strikes you as more profitable to men than genius; if your object is not to generate heroic virtues but peaceful habits; if you prefer to witness vices rather than crimes, and fewer great deeds in return for fewer outrages; if, rather than moving in a brilliant society, you are content to live in a prosperous one; if, finally, the chief object of government is not, in your opinion, to raise a whole nation to its greatest strength and glory, but to procure for each of the individuals who make it up the greatest possible well-being and the least distress; then equalize status and build a democratic government.20

  Why, then, does Tocqueville also devote many pages to what appears to be anxious denigration of American democracy? A close examination of his text provides the answer. The passages in praise of America are packed with information and concrete detail; they are persuasive because of their practicality and knowledge. The passages denouncing tyranny of the majority and similar bugbears are written in a very different mode. They profess to be concerned with ‘democracy’ in the abstract (notoriously, Tocqueville never satisfactorily defines this term)21 and with ‘Europe’; but France is the real preoccupation, and Tocqueville’s eloquence is at the service less of political science than of political rhetoric, as he tries to manipulate the views of those whom he expected to be his most important readers.

  We have seen that after his return from America, and particularl
y after his resignation from the parquet, Tocqueville relapsed into a sort of legitimism. Even the Système pénitentiaire was consistent with this: prison reform was not a party issue, and had been taken up by the Bourbons during the Restoration. Not that Tocqueville had rediscovered his loyalty to the fallen dynasty: he wanted stable government in France, and efforts to bring about a third Restoration could only be disruptive. Perhaps he can best be described as a fellow traveller of legitimism. Loyalty to his family and friends was certainly a motive, and good manners may have been another: living as he did among legitimists he may well have felt constrained to support their protests when they were justified. And in 1834 he was so disgusted with the July Monarchy that he said that Louis-Philippe would make himself a worse tyrant than Napoleon if he got the chance (perhaps he was influenced by the fact that many former imperialists, starting with Talleyrand, had enlisted in the new regime).22 He could reasonably claim to have re-established his credentials: he had a right to a hearing, the more so as there were many liberal legitimists who vainly hoped to combine free institutions with rule by the elder line of Bourbons. Much of what Tocqueville wrote was directed at their prejudices and anxieties. By taking them seriously he could hope that his radical new views would be taken seriously too.*

  Once accepted, this hypothesis explains much else – for example, the fact that his pages on the dangers of democracy are reference-free. He did not need to define his terms carefully because his legitimist readers would share his own sense of their meaning. He could and did denounce what today is called dictatorship without ever specifying Napoleon Bonaparte (nor did he mention Charles X and his failed coup d’état in July 1830). Tocqueville was no doubt well aware of the survival of popular Bonapartism and its tactical alliance with republicanism, but Napoleon and Napoleon II were both dead and Napoleon III (then just Prince Louis Napoleon, an exile) did not seem to be much of a threat. Even so, tact was necessary (not least for fear of offending the Left). Tocqueville merely hints at his disdain for conspirators, whether legitimist or republican, contrasting their violent activities with the peaceful campaigns of American political parties, although, at the climax of his argument, he denounces as blind those who suppose that the monarchy of Henri IV and Louis XIV can be restored.23 In fact, Tocqueville was so anxious to persuade this sect among his readers that he went a long way towards under-cutting his message, by what he did not say, by what he said, and by the way in which he arranged it. Perhaps he hoped that liberal or republican readers would be so impressed by his depiction of democracy in America, and by the way he used it as a corrective to the errors of France, that they would overlook his elaborately expressed doubts – as indeed they did.

  He knew the risks he ran. At the beginning of his chapter ‘On Democratic Government in the United States’ he remarks: ‘I am entering a war-zone. Every word of this chapter may well upset in various ways the parties which divide my country.’ Nevertheless, ‘I will say all I think’;24 but he was not above using literary guile to make his thoughts acceptable. A man of no party had no choice. But the point nowadays must be to disentangle his message from the envelope in which he delivered it.

  To understand what he seems to have been up to it is enough, perhaps, to draw attention to the twin lines of argument which wind their way through volume 2.

  The first argument is thoroughly concrete, and already familiar. The theme is America. Tocqueville picks his way from topic to topic, assessing the performance of American government as he goes; always intelligent and instructive, he can sometimes astonish by his perceptiveness. Thus, in discussing political parties, he puts his finger on a very important point. In a huge country there will be a tendency for the various regions (Americans would call them sections) to pull apart into separate nations: ‘if civil war comes, it is a conflict between rival peoples rather than between factions.’25 Great national parties, which oppose each other on general principles, resist this tendency. Here Tocqueville seems to be directly prophetic of what was to happen in the United States a generation later, when the breakdown of the Jacksonian party system was to be followed in a few years by war between the United States and the so-called Confederate States. In chapter 3 he makes as trenchant a case for liberty of the press as anyone ever has, and rams it home, for the instruction of the French, with a masterly explanation of how it works in America: ‘It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way of neutralizing the influence of newspapers is to multiply their number.’ He is mystified that no French government has ever grasped the point.26 Chapter 4 is a vindication of freedom of association, again as practised in America. He admits that in theory this freedom might have unfortunate results in a nation unused to liberty,* but it has not yet produced any such results in the United States, because Americans have never known any other system: they brought the right of association with them when they migrated from England; ‘today, the exercise of the right has become one of their habits and customs’ (moeurs).27 And so it goes on. Tocqueville has many reservations, but his drift is indicated in the title that he gives to chapter 6: ‘What are the Real Advantages That American Society Derives from Its Democratic Government’.

  It will be seen that the questions which, so far, Tocqueville discusses are serious and interesting; his answers are sensible to the point of seeming, nowadays, banal. What is disconcerting is that in the same breath, as it were, he also discusses some silly questions. This is the second line of argument.

  The silliness lies rather in Tocqueville’s language and logic than in his underlying intention. He rightly sees that an explicit comparison of France and America would he enlightening, indeed necessary for his purposes, and, through many pages, he undertakes one. And there is nothing foolish in, for example, trying to work out whether American government is more or less expensive than French. Unfortunately he frequently seems to think that his business is to compare ‘democracy’ with ‘aristocracy’, and defines neither term – for if he were to try he would have to decide what sort of a state France was, and since it was not exactly an aristocracy, and was certainly not a democracy, the whole basis for an ideological comparison would break down (it is a great pity that Tocqueville was not prepared to use the word ‘oligarchy’ systematically). It was simpler to ask whether democracies or aristocracies were better at conducting foreign policy, or at controlling corruption, or running national administration. The reasoning tends to grow more and more a priori, less and less empirical. Forgetting such figures as Cardinal de Richelieu, Superintendent Fouquet and Sir Robert Walpole he finds for France and aristocracy in the matter of public honesty: corrupt American politicians are merely vulgar, and they contaminate the morality of the people, whereas ‘there is a certain aristocratic refinement in the depravity of great lords, an air of grandeur which often means that it is not contagious.’28 M. de Talleyrand must have read this passage with gratification – or amusement. Tocqueville also decides that aristocracies conduct foreign policy better than do democracies, or monarchies for that matter: ‘an aristocratic body is a resolute and enlightened statesman who never dies.’ This passage caught the eye of John Quincy Adams, and he wrote a dignified protest to the author: ‘The eighth President of the United States is now quietly in office – The political Doctrines of the several Presidents have been as different as the features of their faces, but the cardinal points of Policy regulating the movements of the Nation in its orbit have been as fixed and steady as those of the Austrian or the Russian Monarchy. I name them because they are the only Governments of Europe, which have for the last half century had any fixity in their systems at all. And even of them, if the reigns of the Emperors Joseph 2, and Paul were taken into the account, their stability would bear no comparison with that of the United States.’29