Cheryl B. Welch, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 35, Number 1, Fall 2007.
Republished with permission.
A companion he is. He offers readers his friendship, and increasing numbers have taken him up. Cheryl B. Welch calls the “revival of interest” in Tocqueville’s writings “one of the most surprising intellectual turns of the twentieth century” (1), and it must have been when it began, shortly after the Second World War in the United States, later elsewhere. In the first half of the century Tocqueville resembled the brilliant but eccentric elderly uncle at the family dinner—sometimes fascinating, sometimes tedious, but always living in the past, specifically, in the previous century, when liberal democracy advanced with confidence, its continued progress assured. Nod politely at the kindly old gent, give him a bit of your time; after some decent interval, hand him off to your brother-in-law. The new tyrannies of the twentieth century mocked the liberalism of the nineteenth; the founder of one coined the ominous neologism, ‘totalitarian,’ to describe this enterprise. In ‘geopolitical terms (another neologism for the times), Tocqueville also seemed to have been mistaken. He had expected America and Russia to divide the world, but Germany had proved the real problem, twice (thrice if you were French). No surprise, really: wasn’t Tocqueville’s prediction founded on rather vague, unscientific thinking to begin with? Marxism, race theory, or positivism, themselves products of German scientific rigor, although contradicting each other, at least offered more precision than these French-all-too-French ruminations, combining memorable aperçus with glittering generalities.
Yet then, there it was. By mid-century, the American republic and the Russian despotism did each hold the destinies of half the world in its hands. The unscientific French statesman and man of letters, a titled aristocrat no less, had surpassed the empirical, scientific projectors in the practice of their own professed specialty: accurate prediction. Historians, political scientists, sociologists took notice, began to pay him the highest compliment they knew, namely, calling him one of them. And if the Cold War seemed unwinnable, at least it need not prove futile, so even political liberalism might have a chance on the road to some accommodation between it and state socialism—say, ‘social democracy.’
If he could return to life, the companionable, well-brought-up Tocqueville would likely have taken his newfound popularity very much in stride, welcoming even the most implausible claims to some distant relation, then drawing even his not-very-similar semblables closer to him in thought and sentiment. Politicians and philosophers both appreciate friends, each in their own way; if Tocqueville is both, a political philosopher, then doubly so for him.
Professor Welch has assembled a motley but stimulating group of Tocqueville friends and (intellectual) family relations as contributors to this volume—not only historians, political scientists, and sociologists but literary scholars and translators, and even a specimen of that rare bird, the independent scholar, which Tocqueville also was, in a sense. She arranges the essays into, roughly, five groups of topics: Tocqueville the sociologist; Tocqueville the political philosopher; Tocqueville the literary and scholarly craftsman; Tocqueville the political scientist; and, finally, Tocqueville the literary politician, with his ups and downs in reputation in his native France and America, the future possible homeland, so to speak, of at least half the world. She assures readers that she is no Straussian, and I believe her, inasmuch as she puts the essays on Tocqueville the political philosopher second, not third in order—although a suspicious mind might wonder if Tocqueville the literary and scholarly craftsman might be hiding something. Because Tocqueville put his scholarly talents to the political work of persuading his contemporaries, the centrality of these articles in this volume points to Tocqueville the politician, the one who assured his friend Louis de Kergolay that he suffered from no “reckless enthusiasm for the intellectual life,” but “have always placed action above everything else” (quoted, 170).
Sociologist Seymour Drescher and sociologist/political theorist/historian Jon Elster lead off with accounts of Tocqueville as a social scientist—specifically, a political sociologist. Drescher considers Tocqueville as seen in the titles of his best-known books, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution: a comparativist. He who knows only France cannot understand the French Revolution, Tocqueville said; therefore, one must journey to America, and also study not only France’s regime-of-the-moment but the regime that antedated all the others, in both instances “viewing from without what one wishes to understand within” (21). Nor did Tocqueville confine himself to the study of two or three countries. “His interest extended across most of the globe: from Russia to Ireland; in the Pacific, from Australia to New Zealand; in Asia, from China to the Ottoman empire; in North Africa, from Egypt to Algeria; in the Western hemisphere, from Canada to South America” (22). Throughout these places he located a common thread. The regimes of aristocracy (seen in its most extreme form in the villages of India) and despotism (from Napoleonic France to the “imbecile and barbarous government” of China) stultified societies (24). Indian decentralization made it vulnerable to British conquest while the caste system in its villages prevented the reward of natural merit. Only a measure of equality can elicit the best in a society as a whole.
Over his relatively short literary career of some twenty years Tocqueville changed his mind about the home of democracy. He began to see that the slave-based aristocracy of the American South might persist, and that the aristocracy of England acted in and among a strong and pious middle class. By the time he wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution in the 1850s, Great Britain, with its dynamic commercial and industrial economy, its political stability with substantial popular self-government, and its world-encompassing empire—all products of a successful transition from an ancient aristocracy to modern social equality—had become his model for sound politics in modernity. And politics was the key: Britain’s “rulers [had] avoided the generic aristocratic tendency to become a ‘caste’ because of the continuous political interaction inherent in its parliamentary and municipal systems” (38). The French aristocrats, by contrast, “had ossified into a caste” because they had taken the poisoned bait of the monarchy, trading political engagement in exchange for exemptions from national taxation and local responsibility (39). They became not an aristo-cracy—a ruling body—but a mere nobility, a social body. But independence from political life has nothing to do with liberty. As Tocqueville observes, “There is nothing less independent than a free citizens” (39); in that sense he was no ‘independent scholar’ at all. Only comparative study, getting the French ‘outside’ themselves, might bring “the rebirth of liberty in France” (42).
The neo-Marxist scholar Jon Elster concerns himself not so much with the lessons Tocqueville draws from his comparative studies as with his account of historical causation. Elster particularly wants to determine the points at which revolution becomes first possible, then probable, then inevitable; revolution’s “preconditions,” “precipitants,” and “triggers,” respectively correspond to Aristotle’s material, formal, and efficient causes, with the final cause having disappeared. Unlike Drescher, Elster cares little for the ‘teleological’ dimension of Tocqueville’s enterprise.
Elster astutely describes the “social psychology” of the French Revolution, as Tocqueville understood it. The aristocracy succumbed to inter-class hostility from two directions. The tax exemptions aroused envy and resentment in the bourgeoisie, who seldom dealt with the aristocrats but ‘looked up’ to them from afar. At the same time, the aristocrats’ “withdrawal” from local administration without a simultaneous withdrawal from the countryside they administered—their political irresponsibility coupled with daily contact with ‘their’ peasants—infuriated those peasants, made them want to physically destroy a class that had descended to parasitism (56).
Elster finds this account of the revolution impressive. He finds Tocqueville’s explanation of the aristocrats’ withdrawal from politics less persuasive; rather than a deliberate attempt by French monarchs to divide and thereby rule the social classes (a claim he judges “far-fetched and undocumented”), he takes the aristocratic exemptions as entirely a capitulation by the king to aristocratic demands—a power play that redounded unintentionally to the loss of aristocratic power and the final ruin of that class, an example of the cunning of history. Elster’s Marxist-historicist tendency also comes out in his discussion of the ‘Tocqueville paradox’: that improved ‘objective’ economic conditions may result in more intense discontent, and hence make revolution more likely. He objects that Tocqueville inconsistently appeals to two kinds of explanations of the paradox. The “synchronic” evidence of the paradox comes from Germany and from France itself; regions where aristocrats continued to perform their administrative responsibilities while peasants enjoyed low levels of personal freedom and suffered high taxes remained more stable than regions in which peasant freedoms were more considerable and taxes were low, but the aristocrats did not really rule (58). The “diachronic” claim holds that “revolutions often occur as one goes from the worse to the better rather than the other way around” (58). But of course it may be that Tocqueville is not a historicist, and therefore does not much care if an explanation is synchronic or diachronic, words that do not appear in his writings.
The next pair of essays, written by political philosophy scholars Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Delba Winthrop, and Pierre Manent, point to Tocqueville not as a sociologist but as a philosophic political scientist—that is, as one who thinks about knowledge in its relation to political life. Mansfield and Winthrop explicate Tocqueville’s assertion that a new political science is needed for a world altogether new. Tocqueville does not follow this “striking statement” with a direct account of political science old or new, leaving the new science “implicit and scattered”—”for good reason” (81). They set out to recover that science, the reason for it, and the reason for Tocqueville’s obliquity in presenting it.
Tocqueville mixes the political science of Aristotle with that of Publius, ‘ancient’ with ‘modern.’ Like Aristotle, he writes as a teacher of democracy, “judge and trainer”; “the political scientist must be occupied with the character of human souls” (83). But (following Madison) he regards the regimes Aristotle called democracies to have been aristocracies, reduces Aristotle’s six regimes to two (following Machiavelli), and “values souls as a liberal would, in contrast to Aristotle” (83). Like Publius, “he regards America as the most modern regime, the arena in which the happiness and liberty of mankind are at stake in a new experiment” (82). But he inclines to see Publius’ sharp distinction between democracy and republicanism as overdrawn; “in America, the power of the people overcomes the republican restraints of representative government owed to modern political science” (82). Modern political science attempted to solve the problem of religious warfare by abandoning political attempts to improve souls and instead centering the attention of political men on issues of “legitimacy”—the origins of society in a social contract, for example. Tocqueville replies that the moderns have succeeded in neglecting the soul without finding a solid foundation for political legitimacy, either. He therefore turns instead not to modern political theory—even to American theory, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—but to American political science, which he discovers as decidedly soulful. “He prefers liberalism in practice to liberalism in theory because liberalism in practice is liberalism with soul” (84).
In theory, liberal egalitarianism denigrates human pride. It tends toward pantheism, which dissolves all individual distinctions into cosmic mush, or historicism, which dissolves the efforts of statesmen into sweeping “general causes” (85). “In the practice of democracy, however, democratic citizens show their pride” (85), especially their politicians, often heard to insist vehemently on the greatness not so much of themselves as on that of the people whose votes they want. “The image [of democracy] is there to be seen, but in [Tocqueville’s] political science it is embedded in fact rather than abstracted in a theory. Democracy for him is in America, and America is not merely an example of democracy outside his political science” (85-86).
Even in their Christianity Americans exhibit pride. The human quest for immortality—the noble form of what puling mediocrities today call ‘self-assertion’—manifests human pride, “resemb[ling] what Plato calls thumos, the willingness to risk one’s life in order to protect it, the combination of self-disgust and self-elevation” (86). But unlike the regimes of classical antiquity, in America this very pride sets its own limits, conduces to moderation, precisely because it so thoroughly binds itself to religious teachings, “authoritative ideas” about God, the soul, and human duties (87). The pride of the Christian and the humility of the Christian both limit the sway of modern politics, especially as seen in its characteristic institutional device, the modern state; Christian pride and humility also limit the intellectual sway of materialism, which beckons souls to tyranny as surely as any politically empowered religiosity ever did. The Christianity of the Gospels is “the right kind of religion” (87). The wrong kind of religion is “the religion of Mohammed,” whose doctrine “included political maxims, which involve the church with the state, and scientific theories that interfere with freedom of mind” (87). Tocqueville was quite likely to have known that Islam was Napoleon’s favorite religion. Its “armed prophet” was also much esteemed by Machiavelli, and so while adopting Machiavelli’s simplified, dual regime theory with one hand, Tocqueville restores a moral compass to politics that Machiavelli despised.
Tocqueville worried less about a recrudescence of religious fanaticism than the existing threat of attempted “rational control” of human beings in various forms of benevolent despotism—democratic, administrative, mild—all of them kindly destroyers of man’s self-government because they lead men gently, unawares, without “any sense of being commanded” (89). the immense tutelary power of the state takes away the trouble of thinking and the pain of living, thus re-inventing God as a true anti-Christ—impersonal, unloving, but never punishing, lulling us into dreamless narcolepsy. “Tocqueville’s religion endorses the separation of church and state” the liberals’ institutional response to religious excesses, but “more, it grounds the proud freedom that makes self-government possible” (90). The Christian looks at the modern state and says: I may be a sinner, but I am better than that. Nor does this religion need to be Christian: “Its function, which is not quite the Gospel message, is to protect freedom by allowing the right amount of pride” (91); other religions might learn to do that, too.
“While religion protects pride, it supports politics even more” by deflecting politics from too much insistence on modern liberalism’s central concern, physical self-preservation, and toward the spiritual and the spirited. This again plays up the enterprising and confident Christianity that evangelizes and affirms high hopes for the future as distinguished from the cloistered Christianity of patience and piety.
Democracy needs a political science sympathetic to such religion because the political science finds in the Bios ti of democracy, its way of life, much “to produce weak, soft, timid individuals who cannot see how they can manage,” and so look to the tutelary state for help and guidance (93). Here Tocqueville commends the main institutional benefit of the regime of democracy as seen in America, the local self-government produced by the art or science of association. “For Tocqueville, the desire to associate is not a mere consequence of one’s interest but also a part of one’s nature, though in one’s nature it comes second to one’s interest” (93)—a combination of Aristotle and Publius, indeed. In American human association, like Christianity, also ascends to the level of proper, even noble pride. The American “feels himself glorified in his country’s glory; his interest is not cold and indifferent but rises to patriotic passion” (93). Participation in the larges civic associations, political parties, not unlike church membership, teaches pride by moderating it, habituating party members to prudence (what do we need to do to win this election?) and cooperation (how can I help?).
The politeia or formal structure of the American regime supports the politeuma—the people and their representatives—in making the democratic way of life decent. The American federal form combines centralized government with decentralized administration, the latter ensuring active citizen participation. “In America, a plethora of elections keeps citizens active and prevents the rule of a centralized bureaucracy” (95); unlike Europe, America shows how freedom and order can go together. The New England township shows this spirit of freedom in action, enabling Tocqueville to “explain how authority in a democracy becomes legitimate,” thus answering the question the moderns ask. The citizen of a township “obeys society not because he is inferior to anyone but because he knows that society is useful to him, and that obedience is necessary to society” (96). Why is this not merely a reflection of the theories of Hobbes and Locke? Because the lesson the citizen learns from participating in local self-government comes “from social experience rather than individual imagination”—that is, from envisioning a previous ‘state of nature.’ Citizenship “mixes rights and duties rather than distinguishing them, establishes the authority of ‘selectmen’ rather than a sovereign representative, and results in patriotic strength and independence among the citizens rather than fear and subjection. Here is freedom from the ground up, making weak individuals strong by advancing beyond individual interest to the exercise of pride and ambition when put to work among one’s neighbors. (96) In this regime, democracy’s small-souled ‘mass man’ becomes a capable, self-governing citizen. Tocqueville’s political science discovers and encourages this human type. “Tocqueville can be said to have desired to restore politics, and therewith greatness, to the political science of liberalism” (96). He does so by locating human greatness in our capacity for self-rule, as individual souls and as members of a ruling body or political community, rather than in the sheer size of majority-rule modern republics, impressive apparently but dangerous morally and politically.
Self-government enables citizens to secure their rights by “obey[ing] without being submissive and command[ing] without being arrogant” (97). That is, self-government makes the theoretical rights of the Declaration of Independence real in practice as well as in speech and reason, exemplifying Aristotle’s understanding of politics as ruling and being ruled in turn. The three innovations of Tocqueville’s new political science for a world altogether new each shows how this can be possible. His concept of “the social state” seems to combine the modern desire to reduce society to pre-political elements with Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of regimes, inasmuch as the two kinds of social state are characterized by the political terms ‘democratic’ and ‘aristocratic.’ “America has a ‘point of departure’—the Puritans—rather than a deliberate founding. A founding is imposed, but a social state causes the society without ruling over it. That is why an aristocracy, which is the rule of a part imposing itself on the whole is less of a social state than is a democracy.” (98) To this, Aristotle might reply: A democratic public opinion does in fact reflect the imposition of a part, albeit the majority, over the whole, and as for the Puritans, their founding had already occurred, in England, and their presence in America meant that they had lost a regime struggle there. Tocqueville might not altogether disagree with that. Be that as it may, the principal point is that “democracy” in America refers primarily to a social condition of rough equality; the political regime of republicanism makes that society decent, a defender of what Tocqueville calls the natural greatness of man.
The second innovation of Tocqueville’s political science consists in seeing that individuals in democracies are semblables—equal not only in the sense of having rights but in the sense of being alike in seeing themselves as equals. Democracies frustrate Hegelians because ‘the other’ does not exist in them, insofar as they truly are democratic. Those who try to agitate such societies with stories of racial and class conflict will finally lose; not enough of the citizens will quite believe them because, although such conflicts will exist, they will not often predominate. If at some point they do predominate, the majority will defeat them decisively. Although this seems to mean that “aristocracy and democracy are successive eras in history, not constant possibilities for human beings as Aristotle had argued” (100), Mansfield and Winthrop immediately mention that the few still exist in democracies—the intelligent and the rich, for example. They can make little headway by appealing directly to their own virtues as such. There is not enough ‘fewness’ here for a mixed regime, but there does turn out to be an impressive list of aristocratic features in American democracy, enough to save democracy from its characteristic vices. Christian religion is a precious inheritance from aristocracy; local self-government, juries, a free press, the idea of individual rights “are all said to have been brought from aristocratic England,” as were democratic associations, the legal profession, and the Constitution itself (the latter the work of the Federalist and not the democratic party [100-101]). “Tocqueville does not add up these hidden aristocratic elements in American democracy, perhaps because the sum would seem considerable” (101).
The third innovation, the use of prediction, seizes the minds of democrats while elevating them beyond themselves. I venture to guess that no one who has taught Tocqueville’s book in the years since the Second World War has failed to see, and rather enjoy, the effect on Tocqueville’s prediction of a geopolitical confrontation between the Americans and the Russians on those who read it for the first time. (One often can get this effect by reading the passage aloud in the classroom, because some students dependably neglect to read the day’s assignment beforehand, in the throes no doubt of the persistent busyness of democratic life.). Mansfield and Winthrop appreciate the rhetorical power of Tocqueville’s innovation: “Tocqueville wanted the reactionaries of his day to consider democracy irreversible” (102), a product of the Providence partisans of the Holy Alliance professed to respect. By ascribing democracy’s advance to Providence, Tocqueville at the same time avoids the sinister effects of materialist determinism, vindicating sufficient intellectual and moral ‘room’ for the continuance of the spirit of political liberty his political science defends and exemplifies. “His notion of providence preserves human choice, which means that it preserves politics” (102). Democracy in America comes, ultimately, not from England but from Christianity. “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” Tocqueville writes (quoted 103). It too an individual, albeit a divine individual, to take a general truth that had been insufficiently appreciated and make it generally known, and therefore politically relevant. “The upshot for political scientists is to pay attention to particular facts, not only to general truths, and this lesson is aristocratic in character rather than democratic,” a practice of “immersing oneself in our democratic age and also…rising above it” (103)—in its own way, then, an imitation Christi as well as a philosophic ascent from the cave of public opinion. One might of course wonder at Tocqueville’s understanding of Christianity as aristocratic rather than monarchic. He may mean that the Church is aristocratic, inasmuch as Jesus’ teaching of human equality under God anticipates the European monarchs’ teaching of human equality under themselves—precisely an anti-aristocratic teaching. For this point the reader turns to the second political-philosophic essay in the volume, by Pierre Manent.
In his essay “Tocqueville, Political Philosopher,” Manent points not to Aristotle and Publius but to Aristotle and Montesquieu. His older contemporaries Benjamin Constant and François Guizot each emphasized one feature of Montesquieu—commerce and representative government, respectively—but Tocqueville did not find these adequate (either as descriptions or remedies) for understanding the core of the modern condition: equality of social conditions. In pointing to society, not government (or political-economic life) as modernity’s core, Tocqueville encouraged the invention of sociology. But his sociology does not resemble sociologists as later sociologists developed it. “[T]he overwhelming tendency of sociology itself can fairly be called anti-liberal” (110). If social forces are said to determine politics, and this opinion pervades political life itself, then the politeuma or ruling body of any regime amounts to mere ‘superstructure’—an effect of underlying social causes. “Enveloped in this way by social causes, political liberty loses much of its luster. That is why sociologists are often inclined to be contemptuous of liberalism”; “liberal politics tends to imply a devaluation of the political, which sociology tends to extend and radicalize until liberal politics is destroyed” (110).
By describing modern society as primarily democratic, however, Tocqueville avoids this serious error. “The originality of the definition is immediately apparent: the essential attribute of modern society belongs to the political order or at any rate stems from the language of politics” (111). Society already has politics ‘built into it,’ even as (one might recall) Aristotle’s family has parental, political, and despotic relations built into it. Manent remarks that the already political character of society illuminates Tocqueville’s otherwise dark comment that ancient democracies were really aristocratic. The human type generated by the genuinely democratic or egalitarian way of life “turns his back on grandeur and rejects the very idea of superiority” (114-115). But Athenian democracy ‘shared the ‘agonistic’ inclinations and ideal of ‘honor’ characteristic of the ‘few’ in the strict sense,” the aristocratic men (115). In seeing societies as (effectively) regimes or at least as demi-regimes, Tocqueville went beyond liberalism and “rediscover[ed] the most fundamental intuition of Plato and Aristotle, which he repeats freely (because he had barely read them) but faithfully—namely, that there exists a close correspondence between the order of the city and the order of the soul” (115).
Nor is the human soul the infinitely malleable or ‘plastic’ thing sociologists and their semblables the anthropologists take it to be. Tocqueville therefore does not encumber himself with the prejudices of ‘value-free’ social science, instead “propos[ing] a very explicit ‘scale of values’ as a guide to human action” (116). That scale, characteristically, centers on the regime question. Insofar as they are democratic, human souls and societies orient themselves toward justice, justice understood as equal rights. Insofar as they are aristocratic, souls and societies orient themselves toward grandeur. “For Tocqueville, as for Aristotle, the perspective of ‘magnanimity'”—grandeur, greatness of soul—”does not coincide with that of ‘justice,’ and sometimes comes into contradiction with it” (117). Human souls and societies alike by their very natures find themselves in conflict, a conflict between reason and spiritedness, ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy.’
Modernity complicates this natural conflict by the invention of the modern state. Monarchy is a regime (in Aristotle, a pair of regimes) in which politics strictly speaking—the condition of ruling and being ruled—exists not among men but in the mind of the monarch, which then commands other men ‘in principle’ with no resistance. In practice monarchy invented the state as an instrument to de-politicize societies, to end the political interplay between aristocrats and democrats by replacing aristocrats with the administrative institutions wielded by the monarch and his bureaucrats. Manent puts it somewhat differently: “Democratic society was indeed the ‘original fact,’ the cause, of the democratic life that Tocqueville describes, but that cause was in turn caused by a political institution to which a representation was attached. The political institution was the sovereign, leveling state, the state that produced the ‘plan of equality’; the representation was the idea of equality as human resemblance, with the passion that accompanied it.” (119) I propose only the slight modification that monarchy was the least ‘political‘ regime, to begin with.
Manent carefully distinguishes equality defined as the original fact of modern society from equality as the generative principle of that society. Social causality for Tocqueville is a fact and condition of modern life, whereas popular sovereignty, the political dimension of that life, consists of a principle. “This second causality is obviously richer and more significant in human terms since it serves to regulate most human actions from within and is inextricably associated with a ‘dogma’—in this instance, an opinion about the human world that possesses incontestable authority” (119). By acknowledging social equality insofar as it is a fact and interrogating it insofar as it is a principle, Tocqueville “reopens the question that our dogmatic passion declared to have been settled in advance. How can we deny the name ‘philosopher’ to the liberal sociologist who leads us out of the social cave?” (120).
The third set of essays show Tocqueville at work in his literary and scholarly craft. Historian James T. Schleifer uses Eduardo Nolla’s critical edition of the Democracy to show how Tocqueville made the book “take shape” (121). In this exercise Schleifer notices something often lost upon the new reader of Tocqueville, overwhelmed with the details. Tocqueville “thought deductively, even syllogistically”; the facts support real arguments, and never get thrown about (122). Such logical rigor underlies the success of Tocquevillian comparativism, and helps him to reject (as his notes show him doing) easy comparisons between modern and ancient conditions. At the same time, Tocqueville emerges clearly as a non-historicist in his rejection of historical relativism. The desire for the arts and sciences, the love of honor, the family, the rule of law, the love of liberty, religiosity: The entirely new world of democracy will not extinguish these perennial human characteristics and practices but will instead channel them “in new ways” (135).
Prolific translator Arthur Goldhammer describes Tocqueville’s literary style as supporting the substance of his thought inasmuch as in both he opposes both the Enlightenment philosophes and their Romanticist rivals. Neither the transparent prose of the Encyclopedists nor the lush and overgrown rhetoric of his uncle Chateaubriand would do, for his purposes. “He wants to influence his contemporaries, and, knowing that many of them will be impatient of any hint of pedantry, he does not wish to burden his prose with exegesis. Often he merely alludes. To the wise, a word is enough…. A certain delicacy is required in dealing with such a text lest subtle references—hints contained in a lexical wisp of syntactic murmur—be obscured. (141) This leads Goldhammer to an extended and exceedingly subtle critique of what he describes as the Straussian mode of translation, which he regards as leadenly literalist. “Slavish imitation, being mechanical, saps the work’s soul” (151). This reader, for one, rather prefers a fair degree of slavishness in translators, inasmuch as fidelity to a text, being accurate, saves the work’s soul—from the translator. The real solution of course is to learn French, read Tocqueville, and then consult the translations.
French literature scholar Laurence Guellec discusses the Recollections, Tocqueville’s memoir of the revolution of 1848 and the short-lived Second Republic, written to show why France had succumbed to yet another monarchy. She adroitly describes how Tocqueville’s language, “the anti-rhetoric of an autobiographical text” (168), reinforces Tocqueville’s critique of the failure of republican rhetoric, including his own, during the political crises of that time.
The rhetorician attempts to marshal men by marshalling words, Tocqueville said, but that is easier said than done. If democrats love generalities, how can a politician address them when specific policies are what the country needs” “Tocqueville rejected ‘Parnassian’ liberalism,” “refus[ing] to fall back haughtily on pure philosophy,” but neither would he “accommodate to the liberalism of compromise represented by Guizot, Remusat, and Cousin” (173). In Tocqueville’s lifetime, literary, scientific, and political discourses had begun to separate from one another, making intelligible talk among practitioners of different ‘disciplines’ or kinds of thought more difficult even as the immense power of the modern project made such talk indispensable to the survival of free societies. “The history of 1848 became the history of a generalized impropriety of public speech—the very same speech that was supposed to have given form and meaning to the constitutional liberty of which Tocqueville saw himself the harbinger” (182). Straining after the grand passions of 1789, the revolutionaries of 1848 sank into self-parody and cliché. “The constitutional monarchy”—the July Monarchy founded in 1830—”had proved incapable of educating citizens and teaching the French the practical art of political deliberation in accordance with the lessons laid down by Democracy in America” (184). This in turn made the attempt at a new republic farcical. In the wake of the failure of political language (really of prudence) literature went off into the passions of Romanticisms—Hugo, Michelet, Sand, “the novelistic apotheosis of Les Miserables, the book of the People” (184). No room for a Tocqueville in either that literature or that politics.
In the final essay on ‘Tocqueville-at-work,’ independent scholar Robert T. Gannett, Jr., considers the historical research behind The Old Regime and the Revolution. Although he calls his book not a history of the 1789 revolution but a “study” of it, Tocqueville did undertake extensive archival digging before putting pen to paper. Such research documented the long period of gestation that social democratization underwent. Tocqueville emerges as a reverse Burke: Beneath the grand tradition of the old, aristocratic regime the new democracy arose with all the slow, unfolding majesty that the Englishman associated with the days of grandeur. The violent denouement Burke rightly deplored Tocqueville considered accidental, a product of bad choices by the last monarch.
Because statesmanship requires seeing both in the long and the short distances, Tocqueville “went beyond the simple contours of finding and stating historical truth” (197) to identifying tendencies in the course of events that, if shown dramatically to citizen-readers, will alert them to present and future political dangers. “The pervasive hyperactivity of a well-intentioned royal government seeking energetically to preempt all forms of individual initiative by its citizens resonated with Tocqueville’s lifelong theoretical understanding of democracy’s principal threat: soft despotism” (198). Such a warning might serve as a spur to guide citizens not only to a defense of ‘negative freedom’—freedom against state encroachment upon their private affairs—but ‘active liberty’–the freedom to engage in politics. Far from misunderstanding the longue durée as a necessary march to servitude or to freedom, Tocqueville “pursued his archival work with the explicit understanding that free men possessed the ability to shape their destinies” (211). “In The Old Regime, he eschewed both aristocratic history, which privileged the individual actions of a few principal actors, and democratic history, which made great general causes responsible for particular events. Rather he sought to be a historian of a new order, appropriate for the new age of equality, who could comprehend and explain the causes that made possible the “force and independence [of] men united in a social body”…. [A] historian must not just define and interpret the complicated variables affecting the actions of free men. He must also teach them how to be free. (211) Tocqueville sought a new historiography of statesmanship for a world altogether new.
In the fourth group of essays, political scientists Dana Villa, Melvin Richter, Joshua Mitchell, and Cheryl B. Welch address Tocqueville’s political science as it addresses liberty and fraternity (the other elements of the French revolutionary trio), civil society, and religion. Villa emphasizes the political character of civil society for Tocqueville. Unlike previous French liberals, Tocqueville did not regard civil society as an enclave removed from politics but as the primary place where politics takes place, where citizens learn to govern themselves. Too often, the national state stifles political activity; many liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for this by identifying civil society with economic activity or with ‘cultural’ activity (‘the republic of letters’), a ‘sphere’ to be protected from statist intrusions—again, ‘negative liberty.’ Tocqueville trails no one in his disapproval of bureaucratic government, but it is precisely for bureaucracy’s injuries to political life that he detests it most. “If we want to grasp Tocqueville’s idea of civil society, we must conceive it not as a seemingly self-contained realm of mores, habits, and feelings, but rather as a sphere of politically invaluable mediating organizations, a sphere sustained by the ‘free moeurs‘ these organizations help to create and maintain” (224).
Tocqueville identifies three kinds of “associations” that mediate between the individual and the state: permanent, political, and civil. In Europe, permanent associations are the estates of the old regime: aristocratic, bourgeois, peasant. In America, permanent associations of this kind did not exist, at least among the European populations, so the term refers to such “legally established political entities” as townships, cities, and counties where men administer their own public affairs (224). Political associations are political parties and other, typically smaller organizations founded to advance some opinion or policy. Civil associations include commercial and manufacturing companies, churches, and the press—all of which have their own political opinions and interests, which they seldom hesitate to advance. This means that Tocqueville cares “first and foremost” for “the political uses and effects of associational life,” the way they “decentralize administrative and political power” and “enable ordinary citizens to attain a degree of positive political freedom it would otherwise be hard to imagine,” keeping despotism hard and soft “at bay” (225)
Villa’s description of the “permanent” associations of America gives a sense of how Tocqueville found there a way to address Constant’s argument on ‘ancient and modern liberty.’ In his famous 1819 lecture Constant argued that the attempt to introduce the political liberty of the ancient polis into the modern state could lead to nothing but the sort of disaster seen in the French Revolution. At best, moderns must settle for their own form of liberty, the liberty of free social life under a strictly limited modern state, bound by the rule of law. The New England township, “the concrete instantiation of the American principle of popular sovereignty,” amounted to “a Puritan polis” (227)—that is, a piece of the ‘ancient,’ political, self-governing world thriving within the conditions of modernity, protecting modernity from its own statist tendencies by providing a school for citizenship and a stop against both majority tyranny and administrative despotism on any wide scale. To make a man really see the virtue of politics one needs to make him see how his private interests and the general interests of society can coincide, how “to obtain [the] support” of his own interests “he must often lend them his cooperation” (Tocqueville, quoted 230). This is nothing but politics itself, ruling and being ruled in turn, and it can happen regularly for the average citizens only in small associations in which he enjoys real responsibilities. As townships and counties have seen such responsibilities effectively usurped by larger, more bureaucratic governments, political scientists who remain committed to self-governing political life have inclined to concentrate their attention on business/market associations and religious associations as the only refuges from the centralized administration of sovereign states.
Melvin Richter also discusses political liberty as an introduction to Tocqueville’s assessment of the threat to it. Political liberty gives the regime of democratic republicanism its “all-pervasive energy and force,” which “can produce miracles beyond the power of even the most astute despot” (248). Tocqueville reverses the typical modern liberal claim; in his estimation political liberty generates economic liberty, not the other way around. Nothing can replace la vie politique, the “sublime taste” of which no man who has not sampled it can comprehend. (It might be noted that Tocqueville’s use of “sublime,” here, exactly follows the meaning it had for Burke: not beautiful, pleasing, easy, but noble, austere, difficult.) Having lost this taste by 1848, thanks to “the systematic corruption of the legislature by Louis Philippe,” the French of his generation lost themselves in “materialism, political apathy, individualism” (249), which carried over into the listless despotism of the Second Empire.
Despotism means government both arbitrary and absolute. Tocqueville classifies modern despotism into five types: legislative despotism, majority tyranny, Caesarism, democratic/administrative/mild despotism, and imperial/military or Bonapartist despotism. To prevent legislative despotism, he advises, citizens should establish a bicameral legislature. To prevent majority tyranny, the tyranny of public opinion over the individual soul, guard a free press, avoid administrative centralization, and mark out such individual legal rights as due process and jury trials. To prevent Caesarism, the unlimited power of one person, now enhanced by the perfection of techniques of centralized administration, protect local self-government.
Democratic despotism is entirely new. Montesquieu had assumed that despotism would rule by intimidation, by manipulating the fear of force. But democratic despotism’s “distinguishing feature would be the removal of any desire by its subjects for either individual autonomy or the wish to participate in deliberating or determining policies affecting the common good of the polity”—the breeding of “industrious herds of sheep subservient to their bureaucratic shepherds” (256). Once established, such despotism can only collapse, eventually, a victim of its own imbecility. The imperial/military despotism that likely follows it excites souls more, inasmuch as a military despot seldom lacks “what we, in the wake of Max Weber, now call Bonaparte’s charisma” (262). This gives the despot a sort of legitimacy, in the sense that he does enjoy the enthusiastic consent of his people, at least initially As Tocqueville said of Napoleon Bonaparte, “The hero concealed the despot” (quoted 263). He predicted that the Second Empire of his lifetime, like the first, “would be destroyed by an unnecessary war of its own making” (267). All of these permutations of despotism themselves reflect the underlying social condition of egalitarianism, and so fall under the overarching category of democratization.
Under such conditions, what happens to religion, that aristocratic thing? Joshua Mitchell writes that Tocqueville anticipated that “religious experience” in democracy would “become tame and self-referential,” but that it would also “make new forms of religious experience possible” (281). The democrat’s search for something stable amidst the energetic clamor of democratic life, combined with his ‘Cartesian’ taste for clarity and simplicity, will produce a turn toward what later writers named ‘Fundamentalism.’ The democrat will also seek “unmediated and direct” religious experiences, without the mediating forms seen in aristocratic regimes; Mitchell finds this in Tocqueville’s chapter on poetry in the Democracy (286). Finally, the replacement of the idea of a hierarchic nature, eventually throwing “the very idea of nature into question,” favors the Protestant doctrine of original sin, which in its more extreme forms “denied that an intact ‘nature’ survived Adams’s fall” (289-290). All of these tendencies together eventually will redound to the injury of Protestantism, however, “because man cannot long endure the isolation it engenders” (292). The soul will return to Roman Catholicism as a needed anchor in such heavy seas. (For an ampler discussion of these matters Mitchell’s readers should consult Peter A. Lawler’s 1993 study, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty.)
In the last of the four essays on Tocqueville’s political science, Cheryl B. Welch sets for herself the challenge of giving a Tocquevillian account of fraternity, a term Tocqueville “deliberately avoided” as an excrescence of the Jacobinism of the first French Revolution and of the communitarianism sentimental Christians and socialists purveyed in his own time. Tocqueville associated political life with regimes, and therefore with real bonds between citizens, bonds stronger than those forged either by fanatical passion or vague fellow-feeling. The regime of democracy means the rule of equals; “Because equality must have some referent, some dimension on which all are equal,” democracy typically looks to “our common membership in the human race,” or, as Tocqueville puts it, “the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same” (305). Christians have not invented this constitution; they have discovered it and proselytized in its favor, freeing each person “to act as an independent moral agent” (305.
But democracies do not embrace the whole of humanity. The nations that find themselves in conditions of democracy, themselves “historical legacies or constructs” and emphatically not natural groupings, thus find themselves both part of and differentiated from the human race. In another regime this distinction might not trouble souls so much. But Tocqueville “was afflicted with permanent double vision” on its account (309). He tended toward exaggeration of the dangers of racial differences, even and especially in democratic America, where natural human sociality gets “denatured by artificial taboos” that are nonetheless popular. He hoped to avoid the malign effects of racial prejudice in the French Empire, particularly in Algeria. But his efforts to find a way to prevent the problem—especially his recommendation of state-enforced racial intermingling—obviously contradicted his intention to defend political liberty. His own visit to Algeria forced him to “abandon the hope of enforced fraternity between the French and the indigenes. But this left him with only two choices: the abandonment of the imperial project or the “long-term domination” of the Algerians by the French (322). For instruction on the latter he looked to his usual model, Britain, and its rule of India. He hoped that firm rule wisely managed might make Arabs see mutual interests with the French, but this again contradicted his longstanding claim “that interest alone cannot generate lasting association” (325). “A theorist who sees the growth of unrepresentative state bureaucracies and the usurpations of military despots as among the greatest threats to a culture of freedom, Tocqueville nevertheless proposes to counter the criminal eruptions of democratic xenophobia, exclusionary racism, and retaliatory nationalism with long periods of unaccountable imperial tutelage,” a likely breeding ground for bureaucratization and demagoguery, two principal evils of democracy that alike threaten republicanism (327).
On this, as a supplement to Welch’s sharp-eyed account it might be worthwhile to consider Tocqueville’s geopolitical concerns. French imperialism did not exist in a vacuum; British imperialism might not only provide a source of tips in ruling an empire but also loom as a rival to France. So might other European empires. It might not be an “inability” to “envision voluntary divestment” of imperial rule that held Tocqueville back but real concerns about the results of doing so (324). Americans with their slaves were not the only ones with a wolf by the ears, and the wolves were not only (or, in the case of the Europeans) the principal wolves to be feared. All modern states of the nineteenth century (including the United States, as its citizens marched from one coast to the other, over, around, and through the Amerindians) had to operate in a world of modern empires, and as it happened that turned out to be a dangerous world, if not yet in that century, for Europeans.
The Companion‘s final pair of essays, by French literature professor Françoise Melonio and historian Olivier Zunz, trace the reception of Tocqueville’s books in Europe and the United States, respectively. Melonio links Tocqueville to the line of French moralists beginning with Pascal; Tocqueville deliberately adapts classical and Christian imagery and insights to the new regime of democracy in order “to clear a path for the future legislator—the future French legislator—whose mission is to bring the Revolution to an end and establish a well-regulated democracy” (339). The “entirety of [his] work” reflects “on the management of the democratic transition” (345). Once the Third Republic had established itself the French turned away from Tocqueville. Only the debacle of the 1940s brought them back, led by Raymond Aron. (One might, incidentally, wonder why de Gaulle, who saved French republicanism twice, avoided any serious reference to Tocqueville. Melonio, who does not ask this, nonetheless may provide a clue: Tocqueville thought that “the kings of France had sought only to divide their subjects in order to reign more absolutely, “thereby planting “the seed of the enduring French taste for servitude” [344]. De Gaulle wanted a republic that could defend itself, and therefore a republic with a strong executive, not a dominant parliament. Tocqueville’s critique of monarchy, however accurate, would not have proved a useful text in the Gaullist founding.)
Tocqueville took up the French moralists’ theme of homo viator, man the voyager, the being that lives in perpetual exodus toward or away from the Promised Land. Melonio rightly observes that Tocqueville writes most extensively about the contemporary voyage or crossing to the new world of democracy. But in saying that he “offered a secularized, historicized version” of this story, “because for him the theme of homo viator characterized not so much human experience in general as the historical situation of democratic man” (347), she overlooks the striking passage from chapter 17 of the Democracy‘s second volume, “On some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations”: “Man comes from nothing, traverses time, and is going to disappear forever into the bosom of God….” (Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000], 462). She sees that for Tocqueville as for the earlier moralists—and not so much for the pre-Christian Aristotle, one might add—human happiness seems profoundly elusive, anxiety and restlessness chronic. Human beings oscillate between grandeur and misery for this “political Pascal” (348), and Tocqueville hopes to find “the kind of grandeur and happiness that is appropriate” to man in the very act of guiding his fellow men, and especially his fellow citizens, through the wilderness of regime change (348, emphasis added). Although she initially seems to deny that Tocqueville regards human nature as fixed, Melonio soon affirms that the very sublimity (and thus disquietude) of humanity constitutes “the fixed foundation of man’s nature” (Tocqueville, quoted 348-349). Tocqueville “looks beyond all social regimes to their ‘fixed foundation’ in human nature”: “democracy is the regime in which that nature reveals itself in its purest form” (349).
The legislator navigates high seas. He can steer the vessel but not construct it, nor control the ocean. Good steerage requires prudence, which Tocqueville “recovered” from Aristotle (349). Indeed, “for Tocqueville the quality common to all great writers is common sense,” “the art of engaging in conversation with the commonplaces of one’s time” (350). He offers “nothing to encourage romantic effusions of sensibility or imagination,” but rather sought “to tame democratic man” (354). His “literary eloquence, his classical rhetoric, was intended to serve deliberative democracy, the only defense against despotism” (354). The best answer to Enlightenment materialism and rationalism consisted not in Romantic appeals to thumos but to the balance, the moderation, the sanity of the Biblical and classical wellsprings of the West—not because they were traditional but because they were true. In the first half of the twentieth century, these wellsprings dried up.
Olivier Zunz reports the course of Tocqueville’s reception in America in the final essay. Jacksonian Democrats dismissed Tocqueville’s critique of majority tyranny, while New England Whigs found his praise of township government notably insightful, although Whig economist and tariff enthusiast Henry Carey “faulted Tocqueville for attributing [Americans’ well-being] to the democratic principle rather than to Whig economics” (370). The Democracy found more serious readers during the Civil War, which (as Zunz puts it with nice understatement) “highlighted” Tocqueville’s warnings about potential tensions between equality and liberty (374). The young Henry Adams “learned to think de Tocqueville my model” during the war (378). But Americans began to forget him around the same time the French did, and “the Progressives had little use for his work” (379). No surprise, there: the Progressives’ historicist optimism encouraged them to suppose that democracy’s problems would all work out, and that Tocqueville’s warning about administrative despotism would prove senseless.
Tocqueville speaks to Americans and Europeans today because the two great alternatives, democratic republicanism and democratic despotism, ‘America’ and ‘Russia, remain before us. This Companion to the writings of our longtime companion serves him well, and with him, us.
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