Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

Constant, Guizot, Madison, Mill: all were confident that liberal rationality could contain the sovereign wills that liberalism set loose when it denied any basis to traditional authority.

Tocqueville stands out from other nineteenth-century liberals by refusing to accept either a safe distancing of freedom from democracy or an easy convergence of the two.

PASCAL, MONTESQUIEU, AN...

Tocqueville’s thinking has many points of similarity with that of the ancients;

But

he does not accept them as authorities or guides for modern times.

Above all, he does not care for the best regime as they do.

Tocqueville was convinced that a great revolution in human affairs was leading all men to one regime, democracy, but he was not persuaded that this was simply the regime of reason.

Pascal tells of the vanity of human knowledge and of the misery of the human soul, conclusions in which Christianity and his philosophy converge.

Tocqueville’s liberalism does not put aside yearnings of the soul and does not join in the attempt of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke to contain them and to reduce the complexity of satisfying the soul to the single task of preserving the self.

Thanks in good part to what he learned from Pascal, Tocqueville is a liberal with depth.

Tocqueville’s depth is in his view of the soul’s irremediable “restiveness” (inquiétude) that he shares with Pascal. “The condition of man,” said Pascal, is “inconstancy, boredom, restiveness.”

Like Aristotle and Montesquieu, Tocqueville begins from politics as it is lived and observed. No grand principle is imposed from the outside.

Unlike Aristotle, who begins from actual politics but always tends toward something higher, Tocqueville does not discuss the best regime or use it to urge on his readers or, on the contrary, to set a limit on political ambition.

like Montesquieu, he also refrains from joining the search for a single legitimate regime that would change the political question from what is best to what is universally attainable.

Montesquieu and Tocqueville hold judgment in abeyance by accepting outstanding facts as given.

What Montesquieu and Tocqueville share is a political science that centers on the facts of human existence rather than on human nature.

Tocqueville relies on human nature more than Montesquieu; he invokes it to mark the limits to democracy and aristocracy.

Aristotle’s classification of regimes presupposes that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are always possible because they are based on monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic inclinations of human nature, one of which may become dominant in certain circumstances.

Tocqueville, following Montesquieu, particularizes those regimes, taking the circumstances rather than human nature as given,

The liberalism of Tocqueville and Montesquieu does not rest on law or on the sovereignty of the legislator as does that of Hobbes and Locke.

To Montesquieu such reliance can be as hostile to freedom as was the devotion to virtue in ancient cities; both the fearfulness of law and self-sacrifice in virtue are too demanding on men.

So Montesquieu turns to “mildness” (douceur) in mores, which he believes will be secured by the habits of commerce.

for Tocqueville as contrasted with Montesquieu, commerce is a source of honor, not its dissolver, and a counteraction to mildness, not its precipitating cause.

Politically Tocqueville is much closer to Rousseau than to Pascal and Montesquieu,

The two men are in accord over the inevitability of democracy, and on the need for salutary modifications of its extreme principles, but Rousseau gives voice to those principles and Tocqueville does not.

savage.

Tockville and his fellow philosophers

THE WRITING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

penal

The two volumes of Democracy in America were published five years apart, in 1835 and 1840.

The first volume, with its lively picturing of America, was a sensation and made Tocqueville famous;

The second volume with its somber analysis of democracy was received without enthusiasm,

he acknowledged relying on “three most respected commentaries” on American democracy.57 The first of these was of course The Federalist, praised and cited fourteen times in Tocqueville’s text.

The second was James Kent’s Commentaries on American Law in four volumes (1826–1830), the author being a Federalist who had been Chief Justice and Chancellor of the State of New York.

Third was Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, the notable work of a justice on the Supreme ...

TOCQUEVILLE’S POLITICAL SCIENCE

the first volume cite inventions of modern political science already known and applied, such as the advantage of bicameralism, the novelty of American federalism, the neutralizing of press bias

They are items of the kind recommended in The Federalist, designed as brakes on the headlong rush of democracy toward its desires.

Tocqueville gives political science three new features not seen before—the concept of the social state (état social), the notion of those like oneself (semblables), and the practice of making predictions.

America, to which the Puritans came for a reason, is the only nation whose point of departure is clear rather than shrouded in ignorance and fable.

none struck my eye more vividly than the equality of conditions.

same democracy reigning in American societies appeared to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe.

what France was seven hundred years ago:

divided among a few families who possess the land and govern the inhabitants;

then the political power of the clergy comes to be founded and soon spreads.

equality begins to penetrate through the church to the heart of government,

the different relations among men become more complicated and numerous. The need for civil laws makes itself keenly felt. Then jurists are born;

The kings ruin themselves in great undertakings; the nobles exhaust themselves in private wars; the commoners enrich themselves in commerce.

as new routes for coming to power are discovered, the value of birth is seen to decline.

it sometimes happened that the nobles, in order to struggle against royal authority or to take power from their rivals, gave political power to the people.