sent to him from France during the week after he arrived in New York.37 Aurelian Craiutu, in an important interpretation of this episode, suggests that Tocqueville “adapted creatively” from Guizot’s theory during his time in America. Yet the old master’s account of the triumph of the Third Estate had been concerned more with Europe generally, and France particularly.38 Indeed, he insisted upon a—shall we call it, certain Anglo-Saxon—difference in this broader development. That, he believed, not only survived, but strikingly, indeed contrarily, postdated Tocqueville’s account of America.39 So if Tocqueville was ostensibly “adapting,” he was in reality transforming Guizot’s thoughts in this matter. In other words, his journey
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to America marked a critical intellectual breaking point between the two men.40 What caused it?
It may be, of course, that reading Guizot in situ stimulated such thoughts.41 It may even have been the case that, having come specifically to study one—progressive—American institution, Tocqueville was suitably inspired to learn about others, and that the cumulative effect bore fruit in his truly radical conclusions. The one thing we can say with some degree of certainty is that Tocqueville seems to have been genuinely surprised by much of what he saw in America.42 Professor Schleifer long ago noted just how often Tocqueville recorded a sense of amazement at his discoveries, whether in his notes or in the final published text itself. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these remarks. To the contrary, given what he had previously read and given what he subsequently saw, there is every reason to take him largely at his ingenuous word in this respect. Put another way, Tocqueville’s continued enlightenment by America was the product of time very well spent in America. Whatever he may subsequently have come to insist, the penitentiary project was no mere pretext.43 It produced a major study.44 In constructing it, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled a great deal. As a result, they saw many parts of the country. They never made the mistake—all too common among European travelers to America well into the second half of the twentieth century—of defining the
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United States solely through superficial experience of the Northeastern seaboard and (perhaps) its southern alternative. Few, in fact, seem to have understood quicker the novel historical significance of so much new settlement in and beyond the Mississippi valley: similarly, to have appreciated more fully the novelty of the society that was emerging in the new cities of the Midwest. Here, indeed, was the new epicenter of America, of democracy in America and of the wholly novel society—related only to Europe by language—that was being created there. In our time, it has only moved a bit further west still.45
This is all very well. It still leaves us with a problem. If Tocqueville understood that much, why did he make so little of contemporary American industrial-urbanization? Compare him to Michel Chevalier in this respect and it seems almost as if the aristocrat was stuck in a Jeffersonian dream while the engineer had taken full measure of America’s great leap forward.46 But this is just a superficial impression. Not the least of the great merits of the Nolla edition is that it makes absolutely clear just how inadequate a judgment that is. Tocqueville may not have visited Lowell or spent much time in Pittsburgh.47 He spoke relatively little about the banking crises of the early 1830s in the pages of Democracy in America.48 There is not much concerning the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in his American writings, tout court.49 But as his notebooks make clear, he was fully aware of all these phenomena.50 Professor Jennings offers one very important reason why he
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may have made relatively little use of them in the published text.51 But there might be another. Before he completed Democracy, he had also been to England.
The significance of Tocqueville’s English journey of 1833—its significance, that is, for what would eventually become Democracy in America—is easily overlooked. Indeed, it is all too easily caricatured in much the same way as his American sojourn. His extensive trip across the Channel in 1833 apparently took in not one industrial town.52 This is not proof that he was indifferent to the “great social problems” of his day. To the contrary, the England that Tocqueville visited was a nation in which the “great social problems” of the day issued mainly out of the countryside and largely concerned its rural, agricultural population. He even wrote—actually quite extensively—about them.53 Industrial-urban England remained comparatively peaceful until the economic downturn of 1838.54 Moreover, Tocqueville knew well enough about the phenomena of large, sprawling towns and new factory practices in the northern and midland regions of England.55 This told him something about their development in contemporary America too. That was while they were new in America around 1831–32, they were
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not new to America in the early nineteenth century. Industrial Massachusetts loomed small by comparison with industrial Lancashire at the time.56 Mexico City remained the largest city in North America during the age of Jackson (it still is).57 Industrial activities flowed from “democracy.” Tocqueville knew that much.58 But they were not unique to it. His experience in England told him so: quite definitively.59
I
What was truly novel about America—what differentiated it from the rest of the world—was its equality of conditions. What was—increasingly—remarkable about the American republic was the ordered liberty it still enjoyed. The fundamental problem of democracy, as Tocqueville’s contemporaries understood it, lay in its innate tendency to destroy authority. This was true of all hitherto existing authority, whether of rank, tradition, or even revelation. The modern world had wrought what Tocqueville himself characterized as “a carnage of all authorities … in all hierarchies, in the family, in the political [sphere].”60 Revolutionary France furnished powerful corroboration of that proposition. The superficial evidence of American history pointed to a similar catalog of catastrophic vandalism, ruthlessly pursued down precisely that path. The American nation had rid itself at birth of both monarchical rule and aristocratic right. Its constituent states subsequently spent much of the next generation divesting themselves of established churches. Nineteenth-century property law dissolved traditional family bonds. But above all, equality of conditions destroyed intellectual authority, including the authority of priests, whom no good Protestant acknowledged, or the authority of history, which no
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self-respecting American recognized. The Americans’ peculiar point of departure enabled them not only to ignore the Church but also to forget their own past as well. This was how America had become “one of the countries in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.”61
Yet the expected outcome—perfectly well demonstrated by France’s continuing nightmare of alternating anarchy and tyranny—had not eventuated in America. That Western-most republic was, by now, self-evidently a land of stable government. This was characterized not by “weakness” but by almost “irresistible strength,” its administration served by a lawful people, themselves subject to strict moral codes.62 Indeed, firsthand examination of American society suggested that its fundamental underlying problem was defined not by any tendency toward disorder but rather in a surreptitious slide to “soft despotism.”63 If this was true—if what his eyes revealed to him was indeed so—then all hitherto existing accounts of the fundamental basis of political order were wrong. At the same time, America, for all its inherent propensities to facilitate the consolidation of power, was visibly a land of liberty: blessed by freedom of religion, of the press, even of association. Just as revolution had not entailed social dissolution, so social order did not preclude freedom. All of which meant that neither democracy in general nor this democracy in particular was especially well understood. A “new political science” was going to be needed to understand “a world altogether new.” Democracy in America set out to furnish it.64
That declaration, as Nolla rightly insists, is the
