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Once works of the intellect had become sources of force and wealth, each development of science, each new piece of knowledge, each new idea had to be considered as a seed of power put within reach of the people.
When one runs through the pages of our history, one finds so to speak no great events in seven hundred years that have not turned to the profit of equality.
this is not peculiar to France.
same revolution continuing in all the Christian universe.
The gradual development of equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it has the principal characteristics of one: it is universal, it is enduring, each day it escapes human power; all events, like all men, serve its development.
Where then are we going?
Among no people of Europe has the great social revolution I have just described made more rapid progress than among us; but here it has always proceeded haphazardly.
Never have heads of state thought at all to prepare for it in advance; it is made despite them or without their knowing it.
As a result, the democratic revolution has taken place in the material of society without making the change in laws, ideas, habits, and mores that would have been necessary to make this revolution useful.
It is not the use of power or the habit of obedience that depraves men, but the use of power that they consider illegitimate, and obedience to a power they regard as usurped and oppressive.
I conceive a society, then, which all, regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to without trouble; in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine, and the love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment. Each having rights and being assured of preserving his rights, a manly confidence and a sort of reciprocal condescension between the classes would be established, as far from haughtiness as from baseness.
The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be sheltered from both tyranny and license.
pell-mell
I perceive that we have destroyed the individual entities that were able to struggle separately against tyranny;
but I see that it is government alone that inherits all the prerogatives extracted from families, from corporations, or from men:
The poor man has kept most of the prejudices of his fathers without their beliefs; their ignorance without their virtues; he has taken the doctrine of interest as the rule of his actions without knowing the science of it, and his selfishness is as lacking in enlightenment as was formerly his devotion.
Thus we have abandoned what goods our former state could present without acquiring what useful things the current state could offer; we have destroyed an aristocratic society, and having stopped complacently amid the debris of the former edifice, we seem to want to settle there forever.
Christians among us,
doubtless they are going to be moved to favor human freedom, the source of all moral greatness.
But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning, and it is often brought to reject the equality it loves and to curse freedom as an adversary,
virtue is without genius and genius without honor;
love of order is confused with a taste for tyrants and the holy cult of freedom with contempt for laws;
God prepares a firmer and calmer future for European societies;
There is one country in the world where the great social revolution I am speaking of seems nearly to have attained its natural limits;
It appears to me beyond doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive, like the Americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions.
panegyric;
In the first part of this work I have therefore tried to show the direction that democracy, left in America to its penchants and abandoned almost without restraint to its instincts, has naturally given to the laws, the course it has imposed on the government, and in general, the power it has obtained over affairs.
My goal was, in a second part, to paint the influence that equality of conditions and government by democracy in America exert on civil society, on habits, ideas, and mores;
future.
Summary: purpose of the book: France is at a stage when aristocracy is destroyed yet no new order has taken over. Eventually an equality of conditions will arrive in Europe. Want to examine America to see what properties democracy might evolve into if left to its own and what measures have been used to address its deficiencies.
PART ONE
Chapter 1 EXTERNAL CONFIGURATION OF NORTH AMERICA
The coarseness of men of the people in orderly countries comes not only from the fact that they are ignorant and poor, but from the fact that while being so, they find themselves in daily contact with enlightened and wealthy men.
The sight of their misfortune and weakness, which contrasts every day with the happiness and power of some of those like them, excites anger and fear at the same time in their hearts; the sense of their inferiority and dependence irritates and humiliates them. That internal state of soul is reproduced in their mores as well as in their language; they are at once insolent and base.
This distressing effect of the contrast of conditions is not found in savage life: the Indians, at the same time that they are all ignorant and poor, are all equal and free.
in his modes of acting there reigned an habitual reserve and a sort of aristocratic politeness.
one cannot doubt that another people more civilized, more advanced than it in all things, preceded it in these same regions.
it.
Describe the geography and native people f America.
Chapter 2 ON THE POINT OF DEPARTURE AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THE FUTURE OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS
Peoples always feel [the effects of] their origins. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and served to develop them influence the entire course of the rest of their lives.
If it were possible for us to go back to the elements of societies and to examine the first monuments of their history, I do not doubt that we could discover in them the first cause of prejudices, habits, dominant passions, of all that finally composes what is called national character;
America is the only country where one has been able to witness the natural and tranquil developments of a society, and where it has been possible to specify the influence exerted by the point of departure on the future of states.
All the new European colonies contained, if not the development, at least the seed of a complete democracy.
Two causes led to this result: one can say that in general, on their departure from the mother country, the emigrants had no idea of any superiority whatsoever of some over others. It is hardly the happy and the powerful who go into exile, and poverty as well as misfortune are the best guarantees of equality known among men.
the American soil absolutely repelled territorial aristocracy. They saw that to clear that rebellious land, nothing less than the constant and interested efforts of the property owner himself were necessary. When the ground was prepared, it was found that its profits were not great enough to enrich a master and a tenant farmer at once.
aristocracy takes to the land;
it is landed property transmitted by heredity.
A nation can offer immense fortunes and great miseries; but if these fortunes are not territorial, one sees poor and rich within it; there is, to tell the truth, no aristocracy.
In the great Anglo-American family one can distinguish two principal offshoots that, up to the present, have grown without being entirely confused, one in the South, the other in the North.
It was thus gold seekers who were sent to Virginia,1 people without resources or without [good] conduct, whose restive and turbulent spirits troubled the infancy of the colony2 and rendered its progress uncertain.
Afterwards, the industrialists and farmers arrived, a more moral and tranquil race, but one that was elevated in almost no points above the level of the lower classes of England.
