Tocqueville’s America

Though his trip to Maryland and his meeting with Carroll proved a highlight of his travels, Tocqueville and his best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, traveled throughout much of the eastern United States, May 1831- February 1832.^[1] Everywhere they went, they interviewed Americans: black, white, Indian, male, female, rich, poor. It was, even by the standards of modern transportation, an impressive journey. Additionally, Tocqueville and Beaumont took copious notes about every aspect of American society. They had assured the French king that they were coming to America to study her prison system (then, regarded as the most humane in the world). In reality, though, they were studying democracy, democratic institutions, and, especially, the soul of it all, equality. It must be additionally noted that Tocqueville was only 2 months shy of his 26th birthday, when he landed in America, May 1831. Beaumont was three years older than Tocqueville.

Upon returning to France in 1832, Tocqueville compiled his notes into the two volumes, now known to us as Democracy in America. Volume 1 was published in 1835. Volume 2 in 1840. To this day, though America has changed in size, shape, demographics, and technology, Democracy in America remains the single finest description of the American experiment.

Nothing, Tocqueville wrote, introducing his work to the world, struck him and Beaumont more than the pervasiveness of the idea of equality in the United States.

Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions. I discovered without difficulty the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the march of society; it gives a certain direction to the public mind, a certain turn to the laws; to those governing, new maxims, and particular habits to the governed. Soon I recognized that this same fact extends its influence far beyond political mores and laws, and that it has no less dominion over civil society, than over government: it creates opinions, gives birth to sentiments, suggests customs and modifies all that it does not produce (4).^[2]

Thus, the only counterpart in the history of the world to democracy and equality (Tocqueville often and confusingly used these two works as synonyms) was the Christian religion. Only religion had played such a powerful role in and on men’s minds, shaping, molding, and delimiting culture, economics, law, and society. Now, however, the idea of equality was everywhere in America rising, itself a sort of religion to replace Christianity.

Such feelings, though, were not confined to America, but rather were birthed there and made diffused through the rest of the western world. “A great democratic revolution is taking place among us; everyone sees it, but not everyone judges it in the same way,” Tocqueville continued. “Some consider it as something new and, taking it for an accident, they hope still to be able to stop it; while others judge it irresistible, because it seems to them the most continuous, oldest and most permanent fact known in history” (6). All democratic and equalitarian impulses “are progress toward universal leveling” (9).

Though God’s will is His own, Tocqueville believed, His will moved the world toward democracy. “It isn’t necessary for God himself to speak in order for us to discover sure signs of his will; it is enough to examine the regular march of nature and the continuous tendency of events; I know, without the Creator raising his voice, that the stars in space follow the curves traced by his fingers” (14) Yet, one can be certain of God’s introduction of democratic thought and feelings and manners.

Everywhere you saw the various incidents in the lives of peoples turn to the profit of democracy; all men aided it by their efforts: those who had in view contributing to its success and those who did not think of serving it; those who fought for it and even those who declared themselves its enemies; all were pushed pell-mell along the same path, and all worked in common, some despite themselves, others without their knowledge, blind instruments in the hands of God (10)

In some mysterious way, every act of free will on the part of man has only served God’s interest and moved the world according to His will.

Yet, everywhere, man sees the results of his choices and God’s will.

Poetry, eloquence, memory, mental graces, fires of the imagination, depth of thought, all these gifts that heaven distributes at random, profited democracy, and even when they were in the possession of democracy’s adversaries, they still served its cause by putting into relief the natural grandeur of man; so democracy’s conquests spread with those of civilization and enlightenment, and literature was an arsenal open to all, where the weak and the poor came each day to find arms (9).

As to why Tocqueville has been called upon to express the will of God is as perplexing to the author as it is to his readers.

The entire book that you are about to read has been written under the impression of a sort of religious terror produced in the soul of the author by the sight of this irresistible revolution that has marched for so many centuries over all obstacles, and that we still see today advancing amid the ruins that it has made (14).

In writing the two volumes of Democracy of America, Tocqueville believed he, himself, was doing God’s will. By making His will known—as Tocqueville understood it—God was offering the peoples and nations of the world a choice. They could either choose to progress democratically, or they could fight Him, His nature, and His will. If they chose to progress, they could choose two paths. One path of equality will lead toward mediocrity, in which all follow the lowest common denominator and level things toward a thin gruel. Or, the peoples of the world could choose the path of a leavening equality, one the recognized superior spirits and talents and allow them, through justice, to flourish in community.

Yet, it is not enough for one man, no matter how brilliant and convicted, to shout about the coming of democracy. Rather, men must create a “new political science,” for the world’s forthcoming democracy—while in the works for hundreds of years—needs a means to promote the good. After all, at this point, much remains unknown.

The result was that the democratic revolution took place in the material aspect of society without happening in the laws, ideas, habits and mores, the change that would have been necessary to make this revolution useful. We therefore have democracy, minus what must attenuate its vices and bring out its natural advantages; and seeing already the evils that it brings, we are still unaware of the good that it can give (18–19).

This, Tocqueville thought, men understand and develop.

Tocqueville breaks his own introduction to volume one of Democracy of America into two distinct parts. The first part explains that democracy has taken the place of Christianity—or, is on the verge of doing so—as a messianic ideology that permeates and re-creates all that it touches. Nothing, it seems, can be immune from its influence and pervasion. Following closely from this, Tocqueville writes the second part of the introduction as an exploration of what a “new political science” would need to take into account. As he explains:

To instruct democracy, to revive its beliefs if possible, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of public affairs for its inexperience, knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to times and places; to modify it according to circumstances and men; such is the first of duties imposed today on those who lead society. A new political science is needed for a world entirely new (16).

It would be easy, Tocqueville warns, to focus on a particular moment, event, or person, mistaking it for the whole. A new political science, however, must account for both the immediate and the universal, the moment and the eternal.

Failing to understand the choice that God has given us with democracy—that is, a science to guide, attenuate, and hone democracy—the baser instincts will rise to the fore. “So democracy has been abandoned to its wild instincts; it has grown up like those children, deprived of paternal care, who raise themselves in the streets of our cities, and who know society only by its vices and miseries. We still seemed unaware of its existence, when it took hold of power without warning” (18).

As such, democracy, thus far, has grown wild and licentious, on the verge of untamable. Though this process is stoppable and alterable, it will take some doing to make it work. As of the 1830s, Tocqueville fears, the material changes of democracy had far outpaced any of the spiritual restrains, customs, traditions, norms, and mores that make a thing good and acceptable, especially when dealing with a way of life. Many critics, understandably, thus, see only the ills that democracy brings, failing to note its higher qualities. Habits, especially, have shown throughout history, the propensity to limit the ills of a thing, to make it acceptable to a population and to the stability of society.

Here, Tocqueville first argues for the sanctity (or the necessity of the sanctity) of voluntary and natural associations in rising democracies, especially with the loss of formal and landed aristocracy. “Instructed in their true interests, the people would understand that, in order to take advantage of the good things of society, you must submit to its burdens,” Tocqueville claims. “The free association of citizens would then be able to replace the individual power of the nobles, and the State would be sheltered from tyranny and from license” (20). This will prove as true in France as it does in America. The circumstances are different in the two societies, but not unrelatable, one to the other. In France, the people had thrown off the tyranny of monarchy, but they had replaced it only with quiescence, not with confidence. “The prestige of royal power has vanished, without being replaced by the majesty of laws; today the people scorn authority, but they fear it, and fear extracts more from them than respect and love formerly yielded,” he proclaims. Therefore, “society is tranquil, not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but on the contrary because it believes itself weak and frail; it is afraid of dying by making an effort” (22).

France, consequently, suffers from bizarre and manifest disorders.

Hindered in its march or abandoned without support to its disorderly passions, democracy in France has overturned everything that it met on its way, weakening what it did not destroy. You did not see it take hold of society little by little in order to establish its dominion peacefully; it has not ceased to march amid the disorders and the agitation of battle. Animated by the heat of the struggle, pushed beyond the natural limits of his opinion by the opinions and excesses of his adversaries, each person loses sight of the very object of his pursuits and uses a language that corresponds badly to his true sentiments and to his secret instincts. From that results the strange confusion that we are forced to witness. I search my memory in vain; I find nothing that deserves to excite more distress and more pity than what is happening before our eyes; it seems that today we have broken the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs; the sympathy that has been observed in all times between the sentiments and the ideas of men seems to be destroyed, and you would say that all the laws of moral analogy are abolished (24).

Yet, Tocqueville reminds the reader, no one should despair at this disorder, but it is merely a misunderstanding and poor management of God’s gifts and God’s demands. Afterall, God had previously introduced equality in the world, but, then, He did so only through the Christian religion. Now, however, God is introducing equality into the material and the political realms.

America, counter France, was chosen (by the Divine) to demonstrate to the world that equality could work in religion, in material progress, and in political society.

Past centuries saw base and venal souls advocate slavery, while independent spirits and generous hearts struggled without hope to save human liberty. But today you often meet men naturally noble and proud whose opinions are in direct opposition to their tastes, and who speak in praise of the servility and baseness that they have never known for themselves. There are others, in contrast, who speak of liberty as if they could feel what is holy and great in it and who loudly claim on behalf of humanity rights that they have always disregarded (25).

Even in America, there is confusion, especially regarding equality and democracy.

I notice virtuous and peaceful men placed naturally by their pure morals, tranquil habits, prosperity and enlightenment at the head of the populations that surround them. Full of a sincere love of country, they are ready to make great sacrifices for it. Civilization, however, often finds them to be adversaries; they confuse its abuses with its benefits, and in their minds the idea of evil is indissolubly united with the idea of the new [and they seem to want to establish a monstrous bond between virtue, misery and ignorance so that all three may be struck with the same blow] (25).

Yet again, Tocqueville reminds his audience, God chose America to bear witness to His emerging truths.

Will I think that the Creator made man in order to leave him to struggle endlessly amid the intellectual miseries that surround us? I cannot believe it; God is preparing for European societies a future more settled and more calm; I do not know his plans, but I will not cease to believe in them because I cannot fathom them, and I will prefer to doubt my knowledge than his justice (26).

Tocqueville finds evidence in his claims—beyond mere assertion—in the history of America. As early as the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, colonists had gone alone into the wilderness, creating their own communities in relative freedom and isolation, not controlled by the habits of the mother country. “There”—that is, in North America—“it was able to grow in liberty and, moving ahead with mores, to develop peacefully in the laws” (27). In experience, the Americans discovered that democratic governments could take shape in a variety of ways and forms, recognizing that though God was absolute, His will could be satisfied in many different ways and modes of life and government.

Powerfully, Tocqueville concludes his introduction by admitting that he saw more in America than merely America. “I admit that in America I saw more than America. I sought there an image of democracy itself, its tendencies, its character, its prejudices, its passions; I wanted to know democracy, if only to know at least what we must hope or fear from it” (28).

America, it seems, was not just a place of the past. It was the future made manifest in the present. Just as the continent of Europe was entering upon its phase of unrelenting monarchical absolutism at the very beginnings of the seventeenth century, the American experiment of democratic and free colonization—opposite in almost every respect to the currents of Europe—was beginning. “And at that time these same principles”—such as natural law, natural rights, and natural liberty—“unknown or scorned by European nations, were proclaimed in the wilderness of the New World and became the future creed [a political catechism] of a great people,” Tocqueville marveled. The American colonies, though deeply Protestant, had more in common with medieval liberty than with the European modernity of the day.

Though diverse, the American colonists had more in common with one another than not. Overwhelmingly Protestant, they also spoke the same language, and “the bond of language is perhaps the strongest and most durable that can unite men,” Tocqueville claimed (49). Further, the colonists all came from the Reformational troubles of Europe, and they “were all children of the same people” (49). Finally, the wilderness of North America homogenized the colonists, and “their political education was shaped in this rude school, and you saw more notions of rights, more principles of true liberty spread among them than among most of the peoples of Europe” (49).

Equally important, the American colonies—both North and South—proved that colonization could happen successfully even when haphazardly planned, or, even, when there had been a complete lack of planning. Drawing upon the work of Adam Smith, Tocqueville continued, the imperial pursuit of mineral wealth had led to nothing but societal catastrophe. “At this time, Europe was still singularly preoccupied with the idea that mines of gold and silver constituted the wealth of peoples,” Tocqueville claimed. “This destructive idea has done more to impoverish the European nations that embraced it and, in America, has destroyed more men than war and all bad laws put together” (51).

Each colony, even those founded in slavery, had within it, a seed of true and pure democracy.

All the new European colonies contained, if not the development, at least the germ, of a complete democracy. Two causes led to this result. [Among the emigrants, unlike in the old societies of Europe, neither conquerors nor conquered were seen.] It can be said in general, that, at their departure from the mother country, the emigrants had no idea whatsoever of any kind of superiority 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 that are known among men. It happened, however, that on several occasions great lords went to America following political or religious quarrels. Laws were made in order to establish a hierarchy of ranks there, but it was soon noticed that the American soil absolutely rejected territorial aristocracy (50).

Because America’s origins were so recent and so open, Tocqueville gushed (yes, gushed!), the scholar could actually witness the beginnings and the middle of a country’s life, akin to witnessing the birth and middle age of a human being. America, by its very nature, offered the most “bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world” had failed to reveal (51).

Still, one had to take into account the differences of the northern and the southern colonies. The latter, encumbered by the horrific system of slavery, would suffer deeply. Slavery “dishonors work; into society, it introduces idleness, along with ignorance and pride, poverty and luxury,” Tocqueville argued. “It enervates the forces of the mind and puts human activity to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English character, explains the mores and the social state [{the character}] of the South” (52).

In contrast, the New England societies were dynamos, setting not only North America, but the world, ablaze with her ideas and her verve. “The principles of New England first spread into neighboring states; then, one by one, they reached the most distant states and finished, if I can express myself in this way, by penetrating the entire confederation. Now they exercise their influence beyond its limits, over the entire American world,” Tocqueville explained. “The civilization of New England has been like those fires kindled on the hilltops that, after spreading warmth around them, light the farthest bounds of the horizon with their brightness” (52–53).

New England’s success came from its ability to integrate—to the point of completeness and inseparability—the love of religion, properly understood, and the love of liberty. Indeed, for the Pilgrim and the Puritan, its Calvinism was as much a series of theological tenets as well as political theories and practices. “The founders of New England were at the very same time ardent sectarians and impassioned innovators,” Tocqueville asserted. “Restrained by the tightest bonds of certain religious beliefs, they were free of all political prejudices. [{Religion led them to enlightenment; the observance of divine laws brought them to liberty}]” (69). Further,

In the moral world, therefore, everything is classified, coordinated, foreseen, decided in advance. In the political world, everything is agitated, contested, uncertain; in the one, passive though voluntary obedience; in the other, independence, scorn for experience and jealousy of all authority. Far from harming each other, these two tendencies, apparently so opposed, move in harmony and seem to offer mutual support. Religion sees in civil liberty a noble exercise of the faculties of man; in the political world, a field offered by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence. Free and powerful in its sphere, satisfied with the place reserved for it, religion knows that its dominion is that much better established because it rules only by its own strength and dominates hearts without other support. Liberty sees in religion the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its early years, the divine source of its rights. Liberty considers religion as the safeguard of mores, mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration (70).

Tocqueville cautioned one must always take into account the contradictions inherent with any system. Democracy is no exception to the unevenness of human history and experience, and the rich, he feared, obtained more justice in America than the poor.

Despite these flaws, America remained the best-case study for the greatest successes of democracy, whatever its failings.