itself ’.181 First among these was the federal system of government, which served
to deprive the majority of the ‘most perfect’ instrument of tyranny. Central
government had been able to increase neither its power nor prerogatives. Next
came the absence of a centralized administration, and with that the townships and
municipal bodies which not only checked the ‘tide of popular determination’ but
also gave the people ‘a taste for freedom and the art of being free’. The third
counterweight to democracy came in the shape of judicial power and the character
of the legal profession. In such a society the latter constituted something of a
natural aristocracy and the only one with which, without violence, democracy
could be combined. As a general rule, the members of the legal profession were the
friends of order and the opponents of innovation, and because of this they had a
tendency ‘to neutralize the vices inherent in popular government’. Moreover, in
America, the legal profession had the all-important power of being able to declare
laws to be unconstitutional.
More than this, democracy in America was preserved from the tyranny of the
majority by ‘the manners and customs of the people’. This had many dimensions,
but Tocqueville primarily focused upon the extensive impact of religion upon
American life.182 What Tocqueville perceived clearly were the beneficial conse-
quences of religion as a social force, irrespective of its doctrinal elements. Religion
acted so as to elevate the aspirations of the majority, thereby making them more
aware of the significance of human liberty. Secondly, religion diminished the
element of caprice, of arbitrariness, that could inform the motives of the democratic
majority. ‘[W]hile the law permits Americans to do everything’, Tocqueville
180 Ibid. 266.
181 Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 26.
182 See Agnès Antoine, L’Impensé de la démocratie: Tocqueville, la citoyenneté, et la religion (2003).
186
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
remarked, ‘religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to
dare everything.’183
Tocqueville ended these reflections upon the factors that maintained democracy
in America with a consideration of their relevance to Europe.184 The most impor-
tant dimension of these remarks followed from his conclusion that anyone in
France who wished to revive the monarchies of either Henri IV or Louis XIV
must be afflicted by mental blindness. Given the present condition of society there
was but the choice between ‘democratic liberty or the tyranny of the Caesars’. If this
was our fate, should we not, he asked, incline towards the former rather than
submit to the latter? Again, Tocqueville did not contend that France should copy
the American example but he did believe that, unless France could succeed in
gradually introducing democratic institutions and in securing ‘the peaceable do-
minion of the majority’, then sooner or later it would ‘fall under the unlimited
power of one man’.
To recall: these lines were published in 1835. Five years later, and to much less
acclaim, the second volume of De la Démocratie en Amérique was published.
Increasingly aware of the enthusiasm of Americans for physical well-being, Tocque-
ville now perceived that ‘self-interest rightly understood’ was one of the guiding
principles of American society.185 Individualism––the ‘calm and considered feeling
which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and
withdraw into the circle of his family and friends’––was the chief vice of democratic
man.186 It sapped ‘public virtues’ and in time produced outright ‘selfishness’.
Nevertheless it was through the art of association––‘Americans of all ages, all
conditions, and all persuasions’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘constantly unite’187––that
America had combated individualism. Association, he admitted, did not call forth
heroic virtues but it did serve to form ‘a multitude of citizens who are orderly,
temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves’.188 Underlying this was an
awareness that despotism prospered in a situation characterized by the social
isolation of men.
This is a dimension of Tocqueville’s argument that has tended to be overlooked.
Towards the end of the second volume of De la Démocratie en Amérique Tocque-
ville remarked that ‘the type of oppression with which democratic peoples are
threatened will be different from anything there has been in the world before. Our
contemporaries would find no image of it in their memories.’189 As he could not
name it, Tocqueville continued, he must define it. His description was as follows:
‘In past centuries, there has never been a sovereign so absolute and so powerful that,
without the aid of secondary powers, it undertook to administer every part of a
great empire. There were none who ever tried to subject all their subjects indis-
criminately to the details of a uniform rule.’ Had they done so, ‘inadequate
education, an imperfect administrative machinery, and above all the obstacles raised
by unequal conditions would soon have put an end to such a grandiose design’.190
183 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, i/1. 306.
184 Ibid. 326–30.
185 Ibid. i/2. 127–30.
186 Ibid. 105.
187 Ibid. 113.
188 Ibid. 129.
189 Ibid. 324.
190 Ibid. 322.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
187
Despotism in the past, then, ‘was violent but its extent was restricted’. Now,
however, the State possessed the capacity to administer the entire country and,
furthermore, did so in a society characterized by near equality. Therefore, as
Tocqueville wrote, ‘if a despotism should be established among the democratic
nations of our day, it would have different characteristics. It would be more
widespread and milder, and it would degrade men rather than torment them.’191
This ‘immense tutelary power’ would provide for our safety, secure our happiness,
and provide for our needs. Rather than destroy and tyrannize, it would hinder,
restrain, enervate, stifle, and stultify, and so much so that, in the end, each nation
would be ‘no more than a flock of timid and hard-working animals with the
government as its shepherd’.192
Here was a form of despotism that had been unfamiliar to both Montesquieu
and Constant. Moreover, one of the principal sources of this new kind of
despotism had arguably been overlooked by Tocqueville himself in the first
volume of his study of America.193 At its outset, the main thrust of Tocqueville’s
argument had been that the equality of conditions favoured the centralization of
power, and from this much by way of despotism sprang. This, he now saw, was
not the whole picture. ‘In the modern nations of Europe’, Tocqueville wrote in
1840, ‘there is one great cause . . . which constantly contributes to extending the
action of the sovereign and to increasing its prerogatives. . . . This cause is the
development of industry, which is favoured by the progress of equality.’194 By
<
br /> bringing a multitude of people together in the same place, new relations between
men were created: ‘The industrial class, more than other classes, needs to be
regulated, supervised, and restrained, and it naturally follows that the functions of
government grow with it.’195 Not only this, but as nations industrialized they felt
the need for roads, canals, ports, and ‘other semi-public works’. In such circum-
stances, not only did the government become the leading industrialist but it
tended also to be the master of all others. Governments thus came to appropriate
the greater part of the produce of industry and to employ enormous numbers of
people. State control became ever more intrusive and minute and, little by little,
all initiative was taken away from the private individual and handed over to a
government that constantly extended its reach and functions.
We might conclude this discussion of De la Démocratie en Amérique with two
observations from Tocqueville. The first is his comment that, for all the faults of the
system of soft despotism, it was still ‘infinitely preferable to [a constitution] which,
after having concentrated all powers, would hand them over to one irresponsible
man or body of men’.196 The worst of all despotisms remained that of arbitrary and
indiscriminate rule by fear. Second, Tocqueville commented that ‘in the dawning
centuries of democracy, individual independence and local liberties will always be
191 Ibid. 323.
192 Ibid. 325.
193 See Boesche, Tocqueville’s Road Map, 59–84, 189–210.
194 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, i/2. 315.
195 Ibid. 315–16.
196 Ibid. 325.
188
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
a product of art’.197 In short, whether the equality of conditions would lead to
servitude or liberty depended upon the actions of men themselves.
In 1839 Tocqueville entered parliament, where he remained until 1851, sitting
on the centre-left of the parliamentary chamber. In 1841, at the tender age of 36, he
was elected to the Académie Française. That same year, he visited the French colony
of Algeria, and although he criticized military practices, stoutly defended the
French imperial project.198 In 1844–5 he, along with several friends, edited the
daily newspaper, Le Commerce, a short-lived experiment that brought little success
or prestige.199 In political terms he found himself increasingly disenchanted with
the policies pursued by the governments of the July Monarchy, and even less
impressed by what he saw as a decline in the standards of public life.200 Although
opposed to the Revolution of 1848, Tocqueville believed initially that the new
regime would give ‘more liberty to individuals’. He persisted in stating that France
had something to learn from American constitutional forms.201 What followed
dashed these illusions. Having been first removed from government, with the coup
d’état of 2 December 1851 Tocqueville was briefly imprisoned. After this he retired
from public life. In the few years remaining to him Tocqueville wrote, but did not
complete, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution.
A letter written to one of his many American correspondents reveals how quickly
Tocqueville discerned the nature of the regime headed by Louis Napoleon. All of
those, he commented, ‘who have received a liberal education and who have
involved themselves either directly or indirectly in public affairs understand and
clearly see that in the name of the sovereignty of the nation all public liberties have
been destroyed, that the appearance of a popular election has served to establish a
despotism which is more absolute than any of those which have appeared in France
before’.202 Tocqueville did not waiver from this view, although presumably he took
no pleasure in seeing his prediction come true.
The 1850s were bleak years for Tocqueville, his failing health accompanied by
mounting political pessimism. More generally, this decade and the one following
proved to be extremely difficult for those who entertained liberal opinions and for
those who viewed France’s willing embrace of Bonapartist despotism with dismay.
Tocqueville’s own political evolution was symptomatic of this. At this point we
will leave aside his justly famous analysis of the nature of French society and
197 Tocqueville, De la Démocratie, 303.
198 See Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy, Tocqueville and Moderation (1968), 151–95,
and Jennifer Pitts (ed.), Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore. Md.,
2003).
199 The prospectus published by the new editors indicated that they would support ‘political liberty
and equality before the law’ as well as constitutional government: see ‘[Manifeste pour la nouvelle équipe]
du Commerce’, Œuvres complètes, iii/2. Écrits et discours politiques (1985), 122–5.
200 See Alexis de Tocqueville, Souvenirs (1999).
201 Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, iii/3. Écrits et discours politiques (1990), 55–166. In a letter to
George Bancroft, dated 15 June 1849, Tocqueville explained that he had accepted a ministerial
position because he sought to ‘re-establish order’ and to strengthen ‘the moderate and constitutional
republic’: Œuvres complètes, vii. Correspondance étrangère d’Alexis de Tocqueville: Amérique, Europe
continentale (1986), 125–6.
202 Ibid. 144.
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
189
government prior to the Revolution of 1789, but we should note that it was in this
text that Tocqueville gave his clearest statement of what he understood by liberty.
Freedom, he wrote, ‘is the pleasure of being able to speak, act and breathe without
constraint, under the government of God and the laws alone’. Next, liberty was to
be valued only as an end in itself. ‘Whoever seeks for anything from freedom but
itself’, Tocqueville observed, ‘is made for slavery.’203 Nor was liberty to be confused
with what Tocqueville termed ‘a narrow individualism’. This he described as ‘the
desire to enrich oneself at any price, the preference for business, the love of profit,
the search for material pleasure and comfort’.204 Under the ancien régime, he
observed, there existed ‘an unusual kind of freedom’. People managed to keep
‘their soul free in the midst of the most extreme subjection’. France had not yet
become ‘the deaf place where we live today’.205 Only liberty, he concluded, could
bring citizens out of their isolation; only freedom could ‘substitute higher and
stronger passions for the love of well-being’.206
Tocqueville’s fascination with America did not diminish.207 He was, he told
one of his American correspondents, ‘half Yankee’. Nevertheless, as his numerous
letters reveal, he came to have serious doubts about the society he had once so
strongly praised and recommended. Writing a week after the proclamation of the
Second Empire, Tocqueville wrote to Jared Sparks that America had nothing to
fear but its own excesses––the abuse of democracy, the spirit of adventure and
conquest, an exaggerated pride in its strength, the impetuosity of youth––and he
therefore strongly recommended the virtu
es of moderation. But in subsequent
years he saw mounting levels of political corruption, increasing mob violence
and lawlessness, the first signs of a reckless imperialism, and declining morals
and customs. In part he attributed these regrettable developments to the
growing levels of immigration from outside the English race and thus to the
relative decline of those whom he always regarded as the ‘Anglo-Americans’.
He also started to appreciate that American capitalism, with its adventurous,
gambler spirit, was underpinning the foundations of American democracy.
Driven forward by men with ‘the instincts of a savage’, he could not imagine
where it might lead if such people were to gain the upper hand in public affairs. All
those institutions and practices that had characterized American democracy, the
artifices that had sustained and nourished it, appeared to be losing their force.
The election to the presidency of James Buchanan in 1856 only confirmed this
impression. What Tocqueville now perceived was that, in all probability, slavery
was to be extended to new states as America moved westwards. The entire prospect
filled him with horror and despair. Such a development would be ‘a crime against
humanity’. He saw too that the future of the Union could no longer be taken for
granted. Writing in 1856, Tocqueville announced sadly that America risked
203 Tocqueville, Œuvres complètes, ii/1. L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1952), 217.
204 Ibid. 74.
205 Ibid. 168–77.
206 Ibid. 75.
207 See Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings (eds.), Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and
Other Writings (Cambridge, 2009).
190
Commerce, Usurpation, and Democracy
disappointing the hopes of millions of people for a better future, because it offered
in reality the disquieting spectacle of an unstable regime led by incompetent and
dishonest leaders, relying on corrupt institutions, and incapable of controlling the
spirit of excess. ‘Viewed from this side of the ocean’, he told Theodore Sedgwick in
1856, ‘you have become the puer robustus of Hobbes.’208 The country Tocqueville
had once seen as a stable and mature democracy, he now regarded as a child who
responded only to the blandishments of the stick and the carrot.
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