darkness. Rather, the Middle Ages represented a necessary step toward modernity, in the form of aristocracy.
This is the clearest expression of this idea:
Nothing is so difficult to take as the first step out of barbarism. I do not doubt that more effort is required for a savage to discover the art of writing than for a civilized man to penetrate the general laws that regulate the world. Now it is not believable that men could ever conceive the need for such an effort without having it clearly shown to them, or that they would make such an effort without grasping the result in advance. In a society of barbarians equal to each other, since the attention of each man is equally absorbed by the first needs and the most coarse interests of life, the idea of intellectual progress can come to the mind of any one of them only with difficulty, and if by chance it is born, it would soon be as if suffocated amid the nearly instructive [instinctive? (ed.)] thoughts to which the poorly satisfied
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needs of the body always give birth. The savage lacks at the very same time the idea of study and the possibility of devoting himself to it.
Further along the same text, the author explains how it is by losing their liberty that nations become free.128 In this and foremost, Tocqueville was not in tune with the typical Enlightenment position.
His argument was that because democracies instinctively reject everything that comes from aristocratic times, they find themselves at risk of falling into despotism. Tocqueville warns: “They [democracies] will suffer poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not suffer aristocracy.”129
Not by chance, the very idea of an open two-pronged future finds its way into the very last sentence of the book: “The nations of today cannot make conditions among them not be equal; but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or liberty, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or misery.”130
Despite the fact that the future held dark possibilities as well as bright ones, Tocqueville remained an optimist at heart, a son of his own era: “In the middle of this impenetrable obscurity of the future, however, the eye sees some shafts of light.”131
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Tocqueville’s Voyages: To and from America?
S. J. D. GREEN
It seems almost pointless to praise Tocqueville these days. His fame has probably never been greater nor, indeed, his standing higher than now. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, putative statesmen, ambitious journalists, and even eccentric philanthropists vie to associate their names with his cause. During the summer of 1996, both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich cited him in speeches to their respective party conventions.1 Two years later, the television company C-SPAN beamed a reenacted version of his great occidental journey into seventy million domestic households, devoting sixty-five hours of live programming to the description, analysis, and celebration of nine months of nineteenth-century travel.2 All the while, anyone willing to donate $10,000 or more to the charitable conglomeration United Way anywhere in the United States is automatically entitled to membership of the National Alexis de Tocqueville Society: ostensibly in honor of their practical corroboration of “Tocqueville’s most important
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observation … that Americans help … each other in time of need.”3 Not entirely coincidentally, at least four new translations of Democracy in America have been published within the last ten years.4
Of course, Tocqueville was always popular in America. He has been positively fêted there for the last fifty years. Every president since Eisenhower has quoted him to preferred, that is, to generally self-regarding, effect. But this was not true until recently in France. Lauded in his own lifetime, and still an acknowledged prophet down to the end of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville’s francophone reputation faded precipitously during the first third of the twentieth century.5 This was so much so that when Gallimard eventually launched the project for an Oeuvres complètes in 1939, it invited a German Marxian specialist, J. P. Mayer, to act as editor, for there were no suitable French scholars willing to undertake the task.6 For perhaps another generation, what little Gallic kudos Tocqueville still enjoyed was owed mainly to those lasting literary qualities his countrymen acknowledged in the otherwise ephemeral Souvenirs.7 Today, all that is changed. As Françoise Mélonio has recently put it:
Tocqueville is [now] the object of a kind of consensus [associated] with the emergence of a new democratic bible. [The family] château
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is a pilgrimage site for … French presidents and ministers. The highest authorities in the land participate in Tocqueville Prize ceremonies.… He is cited in ministry meetings.8
With renewed fame has come enhanced respect. Tocqueville, the philosopher of liberalism, is now widely admired in his own country. Indeed, through the writings of Pierre Manent especially, he has achieved a certain priority there among the great political scientists of the early nineteenth century.9 More remarkably still, he is now revered by serious indigenous scholars as the principal interpreter of France’s world-historical moment. Turn to Mona Ozouf’s monumental edition of François Furet’s collected writings on La Revolution Française. Consult the index. There you will find the most cited actors and commentators in (or concerning) this great event as: Robespierre, Tocqueville, and Louis XVI, in that order. Napoleon comes a poor fourth.10
Yet to apprehend the true, philosophical significance of Eduardo Nolla’s newly translated critical edition of Democracy in America is, paradoxically, to confront a great thinker still seriously underrated. Worse still, it is to meet a philosopher even now insufficiently appreciated by those very philosophers and scholars of philosophy who should otherwise appreciate him most. It is almost as if two generations of intellectual revisionism have left us reeling—anyway uncomprehending—before a great political metaphysician. Some take an original democratic theorist for a “messy … social scientist.” Others confound a great contemporary historian with an aristocratic itinerant, blind to most of what
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was actually in place in Jacksonian America.11 How could this be? How could Tocqueville be at once so famous yet curiously little known? Similarly, why is he so widely praised yet also unjustly belittled? Is it because he remains, as Russell Baker once shrewdly remarked, “the most widely quoted … of all the great unread writers”?12 Or do even those who take the trouble continue to construe him badly? If so, does Nolla’s edition enable us to read him aright—and judge him properly—for the first time?
There are, I shall suggest here, powerful reasons for thinking that this might be so. True, Tocqueville’s first book brought him instant recognition both in France and beyond. If it did nothing else, Reeve’s virtually simultaneous, though often sloppy, translation saw to that. But it also brought immediate confusion (for which, read multiple interpretation) in both the domestic and the foreign understanding of his work.13 Not all of this can be blamed on Tocqueville’s hapless translator. Some part of the difficulty must also be traced to the author’s elusive, almost aphoristic, prose style. But it owed still more to the detached, seemingly anonymous, method of Democracy’s organization and presentation. For Tocqueville’s “new political science” was, as Harvey Mansfield has wisely observed, a great theoretical departure that barely bothered to explain itself.14 It was also, as Jeremy Jennings notes, a scholarly treatise that
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