Revolution and the Republic
Page 39
itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions’.155 What was
more, America appeared to have achieved this ‘great social revolution’ with ‘ease and
simplicity’. There, democracy seemed to have ‘nearly reached its natural limits’.156
Tocqueville quickly added that he did not believe that it would necessarily be the case
149 Guizot, De la Démocratie en France (Brussels, 1849), 8.
150 Ibid. 115.
151 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, in Œuvres complètes (1951), i/1. 1–14.
152 See James T. Schleiffer, The Making of Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’ (Chapel Hill, NC,
1980).
153 De la Démocratie, i/1. 11.
154 See Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, Md., 1996).
155 De la Démocratie, i/1. 12.
156 For three recent commentaries see Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford, 2001); Sheldon
Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ,
2001); and Lucien Jaume, Tocqueville: Les Sources aristocratiques de la liberté (2008).
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
181
that France would draw the same political conclusions from the equality of condi-
tions. However, as the ‘generating cause’ operating in both countries was the same,
he did consider that in the American example there could be found ‘instruction
from which we might profit’. ‘A new science of politics’, he proclaimed, ‘is needed for
a new world.’157
Yet the essential problem that Tocqueville believed was now confronting France
was not one that he had been the first to disclose.158 In the introduction to De la
Démocratie en Amérique, Tocqueville painted a vivid picture of the condition of
France. Distinctions of rank were disappearing. Property was divided and power
was shared by the many. The spell of royalty had been broken. The individual
powers which were able to struggle against tyranny had been destroyed. Govern-
ment alone had inherited all the privileges formerly possessed by families, guilds,
and individuals. The oppressive and conservative power of a small number had been
succeeded by the weakness of the whole community. ‘We have’, he concluded,
‘abandoned what advantages the old state of affairs afforded, without receiving
anything of use from our present condition; we have destroyed an aristocracy but,
having stopped complacently among the ruins of the former edifice, we seem to want
to remain there forever.’159 There was little here with which the Doctrinaires and
many royalists would have disagreed. The mark of Tocqueville’s originality was that
he provided a new response, if not a new diagnosis, and one that was far more open to
the possibilities offered by democracy.160
Prosper de Barante,161 for example, had already provided a lucid account of the
crushing of the communes in France by centralized, monarchical power. The conse-
quence of this had been both the loss of local liberties and the moral and intellectual
impoverishment of the country. The ‘free and regular management of local affairs’, he
argued, gave citizens strength and wisdom, destroyed ‘isolation’ and ‘apathy’, taught
them to know and love public order, and, just as importantly, not ‘to tremble docilely’
before men of power.162 Restoring that system to vigour, he argued, would rest upon
‘two elements’: ‘the spirit of association between citizens, which is the spirit of the
communes, and the employment of social superiors for the general interest, which is
the sole just and reasonable principle of aristocracy’.163 It was when writers like
Barante (not to mention Royer-Collard and Guizot and less-known writers such as
Charles Cottu and Vincent de Vaublanc) came to reflect upon the practicalities of this
strategy that they hit upon a major problem. In France, not only did such an
aristocracy scarcely exist but its claims to superiority and to embody the general
interest were not recognized by the population at large: hence the repeated calls for
a new aristocracy and for one that would readily accept its social responsibilities.
157 De la Démocratie, i/1. 11.
158 See Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a
Levelled Society? (Cambridge, 2008).
159 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, i/1. 8–9.
160 Although Tocqueville was not an ‘epigone’ of the Doctrinaires, we know that he attended
Guizot’s lectures between 1828 and 1830: Mélonio, Tocqueville et les Français (1993), 23.
161 Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie (1821).
162 Ibid. 18–19.
163 Ibid. 22.
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Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
Barante, in particular, tended to look somewhat longingly across the Channel to
an England which, in contrast to France, appeared to ‘administer itself ’.164 On this
view, England alone appeared to have preserved and widened its aristocracy and
this, combined with a decentralization of administration that effectively consigned
the running of English society to this aristocratic class, had served both to enhance
England’s wealth and energy and to protect its political life and liberties. The
question was not only whether the English system of ‘self-government’ could be
transposed on to France (which even most French liberals doubted) but whether
this was an accurate picture of English society or of the position and character of its
aristocracy. Tocqueville’s conclusions about democracy in America rested upon a
significant revision of this picture.
Tocqueville visited America in the spring of 1831, returning to France in
February 1832.165 The first volume of De la Démocratie en Amérique appeared in
1835. In 1833 and again in 1835 he made extended visits to England, travelling
widely (visiting industrial cities such as Birmingham for the first time) and meeting
a variety of influential people in British society.166 As a young man he had shared
the fascination of the liberals for English history (accepting the legitimacy of the
comparison between 1640 and 1789)167 and now found himself in an England still
agitated by the momentous events surrounding the 1832 Reform Act. His accounts
were full of fascinating detail and revealed someone intent on trying to understand a
society in the process of transition. Not the least of his interesting observations was
his reversal of the equation established by Montesquieu to the effect that it was the
spirit of commerce that gave birth to liberty. Tocqueville inverted the formula,
arguing rather that it was ‘liberty which gave birth to commerce’.168 He similarly
established a fundamental distinction between the characters of the English and
French aristocracies on the evidence provided by the meaning of the words
‘gentleman’ and gentilhomme.169 Although having the same origin, the English
version denoted any well-bred person, whatever their birth, whilst the French was
reserved for the nobility by birth. In short, the English aristocracy was open to all
those with the ability to ascend into it and it was this that accounted for its
continued strength and vigour.
Nevertheless, Tocqueville firmly belie
ved that the English aristocracy was ex-
posed to dangers to which it would eventually succumb. When he had arrived in
England, Tocqueville wrote in September 1833, he had seen that the country ‘was
assuredly in a state of revolution, because the aristocratic principle, which is the
dominant principle of its constitution, daily loses its force’.170 This, he argued, had
164 Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie (1821), 72.
165 See André Jardin, Tocqueville (Baltimore, Md., 1998) and Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville:
Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution (London, 2006).
166 Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyages en Angleterre et en Irelande (1967). See Seymour Drescher,
Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
167 Mélonio, Tocqueville et les Français, 25.
168 Tocqueville, Voyages, 203–7.
169 Ibid. 108. Tocqueville was later to rework this observation in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution.
The same distinction had earlier been made by Auguste de Staël: see Lettres sur l’Angleterre, 167–8.
170 Tocqueville, Voyages, 107.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
183
a number of causes but the most important flowed from ‘the general movement
imprinted upon the human spirit’. Democracy, he observed, was like a rising sea.
It withdrew, only to come back with greater strength, always gaining ground.
The immediate future of European society was therefore a democratic one. Of
this, Tocqueville believed, there could be no doubt. Thus, in England the people
were beginning to think that they too should have a share in power and, more
numerous by the day, they were making increasingly strident protests. Every day
a new aristocratic principle came under attack. ‘Thus’, Tocqueville concluded, ‘the
irresistible march of events leads to the gradual development of the democratic
principle.’171
Tocqueville ended his account of his 1833 visit to England with a powerful
metaphorical image. He compared the situation of England with that of the
fishermen of Carrick Horn on the Atlantic coast of Ireland who caught their fish
from a rope bridge suspended over the sea. In all probability they would survive this
hazardous task but if, by chance, they were hit by an unexpected storm or showed a
lack of dexterity, they would fall inevitably into the abyss. ‘At this precise moment’,
Tocqueville wrote, ‘the English people strongly resemble the fishermen of Carrick
Horn.’172 The stark conclusion was that Europe could not look to the aristocratic
principle in the future.
When Tocqueville, with his colleague and friend Gustave de Beaumont, departed
for America, their task was to carry out an inquiry into the American penitentiary
system.173 Yet a letter sent by both of them to Jared Sparks, dated 12 September
1831, made clear that their interests early turned to broader subjects. Listed were a set
of detailed questions concerning practical matters (schools, roads, etc.) relating to
the relationship of local to central government. Three months later, Tocqueville
confided to Sparks that he attached great importance to ‘studying the principles,
forms and means of local government activity, of which for so long in France
we have sensed the need and sought the model’.174 It was by no means obvious,
however, that Tocqueville should turn to America for lessons.175 The early roman-
ticism that had associated the new republic with a simple, virtuous and pastoral life
had quickly dissipated, giving way to a nightmarish vision of brutish ignorance
and squalor. Tocqueville’s analysis, in short, went against the dominant current
of French opinion.176 This is not to say, as was later claimed, that Tocqueville
painted a picture of ‘l’Amérique en sucre’. Even at this stage of his reflections
upon American life, he recognized its deficiencies and saw momentous problems
ahead for the Union. For example, he saw that democracy in America did not
produce good leaders and that those who rose to power were either mediocre or
171 Ibid. 109.
172 Ibid. 119.
173 See Roger Boesche, Tocqueville’s Road Map (Lanham, Md., 2006), 149–68.
174 Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, vii. Correspondance Etrangère d’Alexis de Tocqueville (1986), 29–39.
175 See René Rémond, Les États-Unis devant l’opinion française 1815–1852 (1962) and Philippe Roger,
L’Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français (2003).
176 See my ‘French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War’, in Aurelian Craiutu
and Jeffrey C. Isaacs (eds.), America through European Ideas (Pennsylvania, 2009), 161–84.
184
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
incompetent. Democratic government did not always display ‘soundness of judge-
ment’ and promoted ‘the feeling of envy in the human heart’. The American people
were surrounded by ‘flatterers’. Most importantly, in the long, final chapter of the
first volume of De la Démocratie en Amérique Tocqueville showed a clear awareness
of the unenviable and seemingly ineradicable plight of America’s native and black
populations.
However, Tocqueville believed that in America he had discerned a system of
government and society that, for all its defects, deserved our admiration. What
clearly served to distinguish America from other nations was that ‘the principle of
the sovereignty of the people was neither hidden nor barren’. It was recognized by
the nation’s customs and proclaimed by its laws. It expanded freely to touch all
aspects of life. ‘[T]here’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘society acts by itself and on itself ’.177
The sovereignty of the people was therefore no ‘isolated doctrine’ of little
relevance to either ideas or practices. Thus, in contradiction to European percep-
tions, what was understood by democratic and republican government in Ameri-
ca was the ‘slow and quiet action of society ’, founded upon the ‘enlightened will
of the people’. It was ‘conciliatory’ government, resting upon ‘peaceable’ citizens,
judged to be moderate and responsible, and who sincerely desired ‘the welfare
of their country’. So, Tocqueville recognized, the people in a very real sense were
the ones who ‘reign’. They chose the executive and the legislative power, and
provided the jurors who sat in the courts. More than this, it was ‘evident that
the opinions, prejudices, interests, and even the passions of the people, can find
no lasting obstacles that prevent them from making themselves felt in the daily
direction of society’. It could, then, strictly be said that the ‘people govern in the
United States’.178
The tone in which this was written was one of profound wonder. Tocqueville
seemed at times in awe of the sheer vigour and energy of the American people and
of their democracy. Everything, he proclaimed, is extraordinary in America. He
foresaw the emergence of America as a major commercial power. Likewise, he
seemed charmed by the picture of the democratic individual living in conditions of
equality. The laws generally promoted the welfare of the greatest possible number.
Americans were characterized by public spirit, taking an active and zealous interest
in the a
ffairs of their township and county. The individual rights of citizens were
protected and there was respect for the law. Yet De la Démocratie en Amérique has to
be read as an extended comparison, both implicit and explicit, between democratic
and aristocratic societies. What were missing in the former were precisely the
barriers to tyranny and despotism provided in the latter by the mechanisms of
privilege and patronage. It was thus, with astonishing prescience, that Tocqueville
disclosed the dual character of democracy, that he saw its potential to unleash a new
kind of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority.179
The unlimited power of the majority in America took various forms. It in part
arose from the assumption that the interests of the many were to be preferred to the
177 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, i/1. 56.
178 Ibid. 177.
179 Ibid. 261–4.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
185
interests of the few. It also followed from the belief that the people had the right to
do anything they wished. It manifested itself in a ‘legal despotism’ that favoured
‘the arbitrary power of the magistrate’. Most importantly, it existed as a ‘moral
power’ exercised over opinion. ‘I know of no other country’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘in
which there is such little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in
America.’180 Once decided upon and irrevocably pronounced, the opinion of the
majority induced a submissive silence, friends and opponents uniting in assenting
to its correctness. It was a tyranny, Tocqueville remarked, that left the body alone
and that enslaved the soul. No absolute government, no despotism of the old order,
had had the possibility of such untrammelled power. What was more, this potential
for tyranny arose directly from the condition of democratic equality.
Here lay the greatest danger facing the American republic. Nevertheless, Toc-
queville was confident that the deleterious consequences of the power of the
majority could be alleviated. To an extent this derived from the singular good
fortune enjoyed by the Americans of living upon a ‘boundless continent’ that
afforded them great material prosperity. More important, as Pierre Manent ob-
serves, were the ‘artifices by which democracy arrives at gaining control over