a large number of things that Tocqueville greatly admired in America appear much more clearly in the manuscript.
The practical experience of Americans and their ability to organize themselves in towns and in associations were very highly praised by Tocqueville: “≠In the political world. Equal education. Experience. Usage. Habit.≠”107
“Isn’t doubt the final stage of the common people in everything./
Make it felt the advantages of liberty in associations for the members, and for the purpose of the association.”108
In another note: “≠Americans undertake a multitude of initiatives on the margin of the administration, initiatives that the administration would not even have contemplated accomplishing.≠”109
Something similar happened with the importance of towns: “Without town institutions, a nation can pretend to have a free government, but it does not possess the spirit of liberty,” wrote Tocqueville. But a first version read was more assertive: “≠[W]ithout town institutions, a nation can pretend to have free institutions but it will not have the spirit of liberty.≠”110
The same admiration for American improvement appears in other places:
≠Nothing prevents him from innovating.
Everything leads him to innovate.
He has the energy to innovate.≠111
Equally, Tocqueville probably thought that his wholehearted praise of innovation and entrepreneurship in America were not going to be well received in Europe. To give but one example, he leaves out of the final version the following phrase: “So the idea of the new, ≠which in
[print edition page 24]
the mind of the European is so easily associated with that of the worst, is liked in his to that of the best.≠”112
Tocqueville’s ideas of the American Indians will also be edited in the process of refining his thoughts and presentation for the final version. “Isolated in their own country, the Indians no longer formed anything except a small colony of inconvenient foreigners in the midst of a numerous and dominating people {and they discovered for themselves that they had exchanged the evils of savage life for all the miseries of civilized peoples}.”113
Curiously, and maybe due to the influence of Gustave de Beaumont, the author of Democracy is initially more optimistic about their future: “[{The Indians today share the rights of those who conquered them and one day perhaps will rule over them}].”114
The importance of both liberty and equality for a real and well-organized democracy is also poignantly evident in the manuscript: “≠Political liberty is the great remedy against almost all the evils with which equality threatens men.≠”115
But this is not to despise the effectiveness of equality for the workings of a free democracy. In a thought that he later excised, probably because he found it too favorable to equality, Tocqueville states:
≠I have just pointed out great dangers. I add that they are not inevitable. At the same time that equality suggests the idea and the taste of social omnipotence, it provides the idea and taste of individual independence.≠116
A very similar idea is presented in Tocqueville’s explanation of the object of the book, particularly the second volume of Democracy, which could not be stated as clearly in the printed version as in the preparatory notes:
Danger of democratic peoples without liberty.
Need of liberty greater for these peoples than for all others.
[print edition page 25]
Those who yearn for liberty in democratic centuries must not be enemies of equality but only try to take advantage of it.
That a more centralized government will be needed in those centuries more than in others. This is not only necessary but also desirable.
Means of preventing excessive centralization. Secondary bodies. Aristocratic persons.
If these means do not work, others are to be found, but some must be found in order to protect human dignity.
To find these means, to direct towards them his attention, the most general idea of the book.117
It would be tempting to read Tocqueville’s democratic mystery novel as a modern version of the Enlightenment project of bringing into the light the hidden processes of human behavior and history.
Admittedly, the Middle Ages are frequently represented by Tocqueville, careful reader of Guizot, as a moment of darkness and barbarism.118 “Europe left to itself managed by its own efforts to pierce the shadows of the Middle Ages,”119 he wrote, for instance. In this regard, Tocqueville seems to follow the ideas of his time. Congruently, he also saw the period before the French Revolution as a movement forward characterized by the fact that “the peoples of Europe left the shadows and barbarism in order to advance toward civilization and enlightenment.”120
[print edition page 26]
But Tocqueville’s Democracy is something else than a late product of the century of Enlightenment. It is also much more modern than the Enlightenment endeavor because modernity for Tocqueville, as first introduced by René Descartes and Francis Bacon, was not necessarily and always associated to the light. Individualism,121 obsession with material well-being, and reliance on the state could send human beings back into darkness.122
But today, when all classes are merging together, when the individual disappears more and more in the crowd and is easily lost amid the common obscurity; today, when nothing any longer sustains man above himself, because monarchical honor has nearly lost its dominion without being replaced by virtue, who can say where the exigencies of [absolute] power and the indulgences of weakness would stop?123
Tocqueville foresaw the very possible arrival of a new form of treacherous darkness and obscurity: “So you must not feel reassured by thinking that the barbarians are still far from us; for if there are some peoples who allow light to be wrested from their hands, there are others who trample it underfoot themselves.”124
For Tocqueville, darkness or barbarism, as he likes to say, could exist at the end of the democratic age too.125
[print edition page 27]
In a very Tocquevillian twist of excesses being lessened by more of the thing that produces them, Tocqueville notes that the only way to avoid the problems of modernity is through enlightenment itself: “Pour out enlightenment lavishly in democratic nations in order to elevate the tendencies of the human mind. Democracy without enlightenment and liberty would lead the human species back to barbarism.”126
The despotic form of democracy represents reason gone wrong and giving birth to a soft totalitarian democratic state. Then, it will become apparent that “[t]his time the barbarians will come not out of the frozen North; they are rising from the heart of our fields and from the very midst of our cities.”127
Tocqueville’s ability to foresee modern barbarians at the gates of democracy is also the reason why Democracy in America remains modern while Marx’s works, which should be read as the last manifestation of a kind of unidirectional Enlightenment, have lost most of their appeal.
If for Tocqueville modernity was not necessarily a moment of unrelenting
