decades of revolutionary conflict, many liberal thinkers, particularly those influenced by the Utilitarian principles of possessive individualism and rational action, proposed that a just social order would be best achieved from below, by unleashing enlightened self-interest. Good government would empower citizens and entrepreneurs to remake society through a thriving market economy, protection of property rights, and voluntary collective action. The triumph of the Russian Revolution in 1917 that enthroned a communist dictatorship committed to abolishing property and overcoming the market further hardened the position of many twentieth-century liberals against all forms of collectivism and state control of the economy.
What liberal thinkers of many stripes shared was a distinctive conception of social order. Rather than thinking that cooperation was only possible where a strong state regulated human conduct and imposed equality, liberal thinkers focused instead on (a) spontaneous and unplanned coordination that emerged from the daily interactions of rational, self-interested people, and (b) contracts through which people agreed to jointly regulate their actions. The best ways to foster this kind of social order were through those institutions that enabled people to define and act upon their subjective interests. The two great institutions that might yield this social order were free-market economies and representative government. Democracy and the market thus became the two great pillars of liberal social thought. Liberal social order thrived, as evidenced by the success of the Industrial Revolution and the gradual extension of civil rights and the franchise to widening circles of citizens. Nevertheless, by end of the 19th century confidence in democracy and the market as agents of equality and progress waned. The great crises of the early twentieth century – the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression – further eroded liberalism. By mid-century, critics of liberalism proposed that capitalism could only survive through radical reforms that overcame classical liberalism.
We represent these broad theoretical trends with works from four key theorists who, combined, give a good sense of debates around freedom and democracy that characterize the late 19th century and early 20th century. All four thinkers were influenced by their encounter with America. The first is a set of excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) taken from his masterful Democracy in America (1835). This work presents Antebellum America in a comparative frame with France and highlights some core questions around social mores, equality and the nature of democratic institutions. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was an essayist, fiction author and social thinker who is commonly considered the first female sociologist. Like Tocqueville, she wrote on America from an outsider’s point of view after traveling through the country. Her travels sparked two books, Society in America (1837, excerpted here) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a prominent American social worker, activist and co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House, a famous immigrant support organization. Addams was a prolific author and pamphleteer; the work we excerpt here first published as an article in the American Journal of Sociology (1896), is a discussion of how housekeepers, as a profession, had failed to modernize at the expense of poor women and their families. Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was an Austo-Hungarian intellectual and political leader who thought deeply about economic structure and the unique ways that markets simultaneously shape and are embedded within social life. Escaping fascism at home, he formulated his critical view on failures of free markets to achieve social justice and general welfare in British and then American exile. His most famous book, which we excerpt here, is The Great Transformation (1944) where he lays out the history and consequences of market development in Europe and calls for political restraints on market action.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville is the most important sociological thinker in the liberal tradition. For contemporary sociologists and political scientists, Tocqueville looms large because he had a profound influence on the development of historical and comparative social sciences and on the analysis of the role of social institutions in the political life of a nation (Swedberg 2009).
Tocqueville was the son of an old aristocratic family, but he lived in an age of upheaval, in a world being transformed by the Industrial Revolution and shaken by democratic movements. Tocqueville was not an academic. He studied law and began his political career in 1830, serving as a parliamentary deputy. As parliamentarian and later as a government minister, Tocqueville earned a reputation as a principled liberal and a cautious reformer. He lent his voice to various causes, including the abolition of slavery, the promotion of free trade, and indirect rule that would have preserved local autonomy in an Algeria recently colonized by France.
Along with his life-long friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866), Tocqueville was offered a government commission to tour the United States and draft a report on the state of prisons in the young republic. The journey radically expanded Tocqueville’s intellectual horizons. The two budding statesmen travelled across antebellum America and explored its political institutions, cultural values and social relations. Given their status and diplomatic credentials, they went where they liked and were able to meet many of the republic’s leading figures, including John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster. However, they also tried to get to know the common people of America. They attended religious revivals, political rallies, town meetings, and a Fourth of July parade. They travelled on stagecoaches and steamboats and slept in mansions and log cabins.
The most important result of this trip was Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. In the work, Tocqueville proclaimed that democracy was an irresistible force in modern times and that political and social equality – by which he meant the end of aristocratic privilege and democratic citizenship – were the great issues of the age. Tocqueville tried to convince skeptical conservatives that deliberate institutional reform could make productive democratic politics possible without descending into mob rule or warfare between the social classes.
Tocqueville saw much to admire in the institutions and practices of the American republic, but he was no apologist for its failings. Slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, and widespread bigotry violated the libertarian principles of the republic. He feared that the economics and politics of slavery would eventually divide the republic between North and South. Tocqueville was worried that economic growth might dangerously increase material inequality among (white) Americans, threatening the egalitarianism that was the ideological foundation of their system of government. In time, Tocqueville feared, the gap between the haves-and-have-nots might tempt Americans to adopt administrative centralization, thereby trading their liberties for dependence on the state. The brilliance and originality of the book made Tocqueville famous. It became a sensation in France and remains a foundational work of political sociology today.
Tocqueville was fascinated by the tension that inevitably arises between the necessity for stable social order and the demand for democratic equality. Tocqueville argued that periods of sustained economic growth and social progress have a paradoxical tendency to increase political discontent by creating unrealistic hopes for further progress. This crisis of rising expectations can become acute for the population of a country when, after a sustained period of improving conditions, a sudden reversal is experienced that discredits a polity in spite of its objective achievements.
In understanding the structural and constitutional vulnerability that puts states at risk, Tocqueville thought that we should analyze “antecedent facts, the nature of institutions, turn of mind and the state of mores [that] are the materials from which chance composes those impromptu events that surprise and terrify us” (Tocqueville 1987: 62). In colorful terms, he was laying out the foundations of what we would now call a social-scientific approach to comparative and historical inquiry. Some of the clearest statements of Tocqueville’s social theory are contained in his masterpiece, Democracy in America, which is excerpted in this volume. Provocatively, Tocqueville’s analysis identified the strength of the American republic in what Europeans would regard as its apparent weaknesses: its limited scope of government, decentralization, egalitarianism, weak state capacity, and reliance on voluntary groups. For Tocqueville, the genius of the American system obtained in
