Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part II, chapter 9: “Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States.” Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Founding a democratic republican regime is one thing. The American Founders had done that. Maintaining it is another, as Benjamin Franklin famously remarked upon emerging from the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and as a sober young American attorney named Abraham Lincoln considered in his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, some two generations later.
Writing a couple of years before Lincoln spoke, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that his fellow European hesitated to found democratic republics because they did not see how such regimes could sustain themselves in Europe, where geopolitical, constitutional, and civil-social circumstances differed substantially from those prevailing in North America. By then, Tocqueville remarked, Americans faced no formidable enemies, needed to fight no major wars, and consequently afforded no opportunities for some native Napoleon to hunger for military glory and move against republicanism. The American capital was no Paris, no Rome; a centralized government can fall prey to mobs, with ‘the democracy’ threatening the government—whether monarchic, as Parisians had seen in 1789 and would see again in 1848, or republican, as the Romans had seen in the military coup of Julius Caesar. And North America is much bigger than Europe; on such a large continent, “nature itself works for the people,” giving them an outlet for their restless ambitions. Dissatisfied with your lot in life? If you’re an American, go West, young man; set yourself up as a farmer, there’s no future in revolution.
Europeans enjoyed none of these advantages. Politically, they enabled the American Founders to constitute their national government as a federation, not as a centralized state. America’s strong township institutions, established long before the founding, had taught the people “the art of being free,” habits of mind and heart consistent with self-government from the village to the nation. Americans had anchored their civil and criminal courts in the counties, close to the people, who could be confident that they would be judged by their peers. And in democratic America, everyone was your peer.
Most important, American hearts were animated by the principles of a “democratic and republican religion”; as he had earlier maintained, the first movement toward equality of condition was Christianity itself, teaching human equality before God. At the same time, American minds were enlightened by an education that was eminently practical, with the ‘Three Rs’ enabling citizens to read their Bibles for moral guidance, to read their newspapers for political information and for expressing their own opinions, and to calculate sums in business.
In all, “American legislators had come, not without success, to oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy; to the continuous movements of the political world, the immobility of religious morality; the experience of the people, to its political ignorance, and its habit of business, to the enthusiasm of its desires.” It was true that American confronted one potentially ruinous dilemma absent from Europe: race-based slavery, the theme of the final section of Tocqueville’s first volume—one distinct from the problem of the overall civil-social equality, the democracy, in America. Europeans, however, faced the reverse problem: no slavery, but no obvious solution to the questions raised by democracy.
On that front, Europeans enjoyed none of the advantages Americans possessed. Democracy was advancing in their societies as aristocracies weakened. But democracy, social and civic equality, need not issue in republicanism, in the protection of natural and civil rights. Napoleon had demonstrated this, only a quarter-century before Tocqueville ventured to the United States. “The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem of our time.” Indeed, “the question I have raised,” the question of what regime democracy will have, “interests not only the United States, but the entire world; not one nation, but all men.”
Why? Under the civil-social condition of democracy, with no aristocrats standing between the people and the centralized state, one could see not only an absolute monarchy along the lines of Louis XIV’s France, but a new form of absolutism, a new despotism “with features unknown to our fathers.” The old absolutist monarchies retained a still-formidable aristocratic class. Firstborn sons inherited the estate, ruling but also protecting the peasants who worked their land, as their ancestors had done or centuries. Second-born sons entered the clerical aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church, exerting influence on peasants, monarchs, and their fellow aristocrats alike. Under the old regime, wealthy merchants in townships and cities also commanded their own sources of revenue and manpower, independent of monarchs and aristocrats alike. Even under the rule of the Bourbons, then, there was “a love of freedom in souls,” among honor-loving monarchs, aristocrats, and merchants, all jealous of their prerogatives and capable of defending them. They ruled peasants and urban workers who understood that they, too, could one day see the face of God.
But in the ever-advancing European civil-social democracy of Tocqueville’s century, the Enlightenment philosophes and their intellectual heirs had undermined faith in God; “nothing above man any longer sustains man.” And democratic men find themselves in a leveled society in which all classes mix together, as “the individual disappears more and more into the crowd,” readily “lost in the mist of the common obscurity,” and therefore no longer held responsible for his actions.” (In America, not long afterwards, Edgar Allan Poe would write his satirical short story, “The Man of the Crowd.”)
“When each citizen, being equally powerless, equally poor, equally isolated, can only oppose his individual weakness to the organized force of the government,” a regime of despotism would take on the harshness of late Roman imperialism, “those frightful centuries of Roman tyranny, when mores were corrupt, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, and freedom, chased out of the laws, no longer knew where to take refuge to find an asylum; when nothing any longer stood guarantee for citizens and citizens no longer stood guarantee for themselves,” where “one would see men make sport of human nature.”
In the event, many Europeans would come under tyrannies even worse than those Tocqueville foresaw, regimes in which making sport of human nature meant hunting it down in death camps and world wars, resulting in tens of millions dead, killed by regimes where the modern state, armed with technologies permitting surveillance of its subjects, ended civil and political liberty for those who survived the onslaught, spurring the invention of a new word, ‘totalitarianism.’
“Is this not worth thinking about? If men had to arrive, in effect, at the point where it would be necessary to make them all free or all slaves, all equal in rights or all deprived of rights; if those who governed societies were reduced to this alternative of gradually raising the crowd up to themselves or of letting all citizens fall below the level of humanity, would this not be enough to overcome many doubts, to reassure consciences well, and to prepare each to make great sacrifice readily?” For “if one does not in time succeed in founding the peaceful empire of the greatest number among us, democratic republics instead of democratic despotisms, “we shall arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of one alone.”
Against atheist ideologies, Tocqueville therefore called upon Europeans to renew their respect for Christianity. Against overbearing military and political ambition, he commended a spirit of peaceful commerce, of the ‘bourgeois’ life detested by aristocrats and socialists alike. Against the “sentiments of envy” he opposed the idea of individual and civil rights. Against government centralization, he urged praised federalism and the practical experience that local self-government provides to citizens. Against the threat of foreign wars, a strong executive, a constitutional monarch empowered to defend the realm could meet the threats without extinguishing civil and political liberty. And against the alienation of his fellow aristocrats, many of them resentful of the rise of democracy, Tocqueville warned against futile dreams of reinstituting feudalism, urging them rather to guide democracy, advise the new citizens, moderating their passions by teaching them how better to govern—as Tocqueville himself did in writing Democracy in America.
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