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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
Democracy in America is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.
Tocqueville went to America, he said, to see what a great republic was like, and what struck him most was its equality of conditions, its democracy.
In the second volume Tocqueville turns the argument from the natural rise of democracy in America to the influence of democracy on America, beginning with its intellectual movements.
his widespread appeal should not mask the controversial and unsettling character of the work.
When Tocqueville wrote his book, it was to speak reprovingly, and sometimes severely, to the partisans of his day for and against democracy.
WHO WAS TOCQUEVILLE?
The irresistible democratic revolution is the theme of Tocqueville’s three great books.
Readers of Democracy in America have always disagreed over how democratic he was both in mind and in heart, but it is fair to say that he directed much of his energy to warning the reactionaries in his country that democracy was irreversible as well as irresistible, and to showing them that it was wrong to hate the consequences of the French Revolution.
for him, the freedom to write and publish was not enough. He also wanted political freedom, and he wanted to taste it for himself by holding office.
He seems to have understood the desire to distinguish oneself as essentially political because the goods of this world, even the intellectual joys of understanding, never give satisfaction or repose.
It cannot be said, however, that Tocqueville was successful as a politician. He woefully lacked the common touch,
Tocqueville gave a speech in 1852 on the nature of political science in which he concluded that political science and the art of governing were “two very distinct things.”
Political science, identified with the art of writing, serves the logic of ideas and gives a taste for “the fine, the delicate, the ingenious, the original,” whereas the world obeys its passions and is led by gross commonplaces.
Tocqueville was always unusually detached for a politician, and unusually engaged for a philosopher.
The reason for Tocqueville’s detachment and for his engagement could be the same: his love of greatness.
in toto.
In America he is, as noted above, quoted with approval by intellectuals and politicians from both the Left and the Right.
On the Left he is the philosopher of community and civic engagement
On the Right he is quoted for his strictures on “Big Government” and his liking for decentralized administration, as well as for celebrating individual energy and opposing egalitarian excess: he is a balanced liberal, defending both freedom and moderation.
Among French liberals of the early nineteenth century, chastened by excesses of the Revolution done in the name of freedom, the two most outstanding were Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) and François Guizot (1787–1874).
Constant and Guizot took up the cause of representative government in France as the positive alternative to the despotisms of the Revolution and of Napoleon.
Constant understands representation as the modern discovery that subordinates politics to the private independence of the complex of individuals and groups in civil society.
For Guizot, however,
representative government seeks and finds the dominant powers in society,
and represent...
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Tocqueville does not put much stock in representative government; his theme is democracy.
For him, representative institutions are democratic; they may have been designed to hold democracy at bay (as was the United States Senate), but in their actual functioning they give expression to democracy.
Tocqueville always understands democracy in contrast to aristocracy.
In this Tocqueville’s political science has the look of Aristotle’s,
presents the typical political and social alternative as between democracy and oligarchy.
But while Aristotle argues that these two regimes offer an open choice ever ...
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Tocqueville describes them as distinct historical epochs: once there was aristocracy, now we have democracy.
By turning to history and away from human nature, Tocqueville joins Constant and Guizot and other nineteenth-century liberals who also described irrevocable historical change in civil society, from ancients to moderns, or from the old regime to the new, to which governments would have to conform.
They not only disagree with Aristotle’s view but they also depart from the position of earlier liberals who began from an abs...
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Tocqueville,
does not build his understanding of democracy on the liberal state of nature first conceived by Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke.
He also was far from developing a “philosophy of history” in the thoroughgoing manner of the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).
From Tocqueville’s viewpoint, even Madison’s liberalism seemed lacking in concrete observation of America, above all of the democratic revolution there.
In Federalist 10, Madison’s most famous statement of his liberalism, he distinguishes a democracy from a republic.
The system of representation was largely unknown to the ancients and was invented by modern political science, says Alexander Hamilton, helpfully, in Federalist 9.
Representation works best, Madison continues, in large, heterogeneous countries with many conflicting interests and sects that make it difficult to form a majority faction,
Tocqueville does not share Madison’s confidence that the problem can be solved. He fears majority tyranny in America and actually see...
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For him, the danger is not so much factious interest or passion as the degradatio...
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Among other liberals of Tocqueville’s time we cannot omit the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873),
These two liberals are together, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, in their appreciation of democracy, which both understand to be here to stay and welcome too.
Yet Tocqueville’s reservations, his criticisms, his forebodings are not shared by Mill,
Mill believes, for example, that the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns of in the first volume of Democracy in America could be avoided
To Tocqueville’s remark that the American people cheerfully exclude the ablest men from government, Mill responds that great talents are not ordinarily needed and that “in a settled state of things, the commanding intellects will always prefer to govern mankind from their closets, by means of literature and science, leaving the mechanical details of government to mechanical minds.”
For Mill, in contrast to Tocqueville, representative government would not be overwhelmed by democracy, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, it did not have to fear democracy.
