Democracy in America

Overview

Alexis de Tocqueville was twenty-five and a junior magistrate when he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont obtained leave to study American prisons. They arrived in New York in May 1831, travelled for nine months as far as Michigan and New Orleans, interviewed everyone from Andrew Jackson to Sam Houston, and went home with notebooks that produced a prison report and then this. Volume one appeared in 1835 and made him famous across Europe. Volume two came five years later and sold less, because it is harder and darker.

The two volumes are different books. The first is mostly about institutions and is organised like a report: geography, then local government, then the federal structure, then the press, parties, courts and the effects of majority rule, closing with a long and bleak chapter on the three races of North America. The second is about what democracy does to intellect, feeling and manners, and it proceeds by short chapters on topics like why Americans are restless in the midst of prosperity, why they build so much and leave so much unfinished, and how equality changes the relations between servants and masters, parents and children, men and women.

It is also, quietly, a book about France. Tocqueville’s family had been to the guillotine. He believed the old aristocratic world was gone for good and that the question left was whether equality would end in freedom or in a new despotism. America was the laboratory where the experiment was furthest advanced.

The argument

Start with his central claim: equality of conditions is the generative fact of modern life. It is not a doctrine that Americans hold but a condition they live in, and it produces effects whether anyone wills them or not. A society without fixed ranks is a society where nobody inherits deference, where opinions have no natural authorities, where each person is left with his own judgement and, finding it small, defers instead to the aggregate judgement of everyone else.

From that comes the tyranny of the majority, which Tocqueville describes less as a legal problem than as a moral climate. Constitutional checks can restrain a majority’s power. They cannot restrain its prestige. He claims there is less independence of mind and real freedom of discussion in America than in any other country he knows, because the man who differs from everyone finds himself not imprisoned but alone.

Against this he sets what he calls the art of being free, and it is local. Americans govern themselves in townships, where the stakes are small and the training is real. They serve on juries, which he calls a free school always in session. They form associations for temperance, religion, road building, anything, and in doing so they learn that public problems are theirs. They have lawyers, whose professional habits act as an aristocratic brake, and they have religion, which he says is the first of their political institutions precisely because it stays out of politics and governs private morals instead. And they have a doctrine he calls self-interest rightly understood: not virtue exactly, but the habit of seeing your own good in the common good.

Volume two sharpens the threat. Equality, he argues, breeds individualisme, a word he uses in a new and unfriendly sense: the withdrawal of each person into the small circle of family and friends, leaving public life to someone else. Isolated people are weak, and weak people want a strong administrator. The end point is a centralised power that is gentle, competent and everywhere, which takes over education, charity, industry and eventually the will to act. Citizens keep the vote and lose the capacity to use it. He calls this a new kind of servitude, and says he can find no name in the old political vocabulary for it.

The most uncomfortable pages are in volume one’s last chapter on the three races. Tocqueville predicts that the Indian nations will be destroyed rather than assimilated, describes the removals he watched with cold precision, and argues that slavery has corrupted the South, that abolition will not end racial domination, and that the resulting conflict may break the Union. He was wrong about many things. He was not wrong about that.

How to read it

Do not read it front to back on a first pass. Read the author’s introduction, then in volume one the chapters on townships, on the jury, on the omnipotence of the majority and on the three races. Then read volume two almost entirely, since its chapters are short and it is the part that will surprise you. Part two and part four of volume two are the core.

Keep a pencil for his method. He generalises fearlessly from anecdote, and half the pleasure is deciding which generalisations have held. Some are uncanny: restlessness in prosperity, the shallowness of public language, the appetite for equality over liberty. Some are period pieces.

On translations: Mansfield and Winthrop is the scholar’s choice because it renders his key terms the same way every time, which matters in a book whose argument lives in words like moeurs, lumières and intérêt bien entendu. Goldhammer is the better read. Reeve’s Victorian version is free but he smoothed Tocqueville’s edges, sometimes deliberately.

Two misreadings to avoid. He is not an admirer of America, and he is not a critic of it; he is using it. And “tyranny of the majority” in his hands is not about legislation outvoting minorities. It is about what happens to a mind when it can find no one to disagree with.

Questions it raises

• Is equality really the master fact of modern politics, or did Tocqueville mistake an American condition for a universal law?
• Can the habits of local self-government be built deliberately, or only inherited?
• He thinks religion makes democratic freedom possible. What does his argument require of religion, and can a secular society supply it?
• Does soft despotism describe anything in your own political life, or is it a nineteenth-century aristocrat’s fear of competent administration?
• He calls the jury a school of citizenship. What institutions perform that function now?
• Given what he saw of slavery and removal, can his generally hopeful account of American liberty survive his own evidence?