than in America. Its nature always tended toward equality. But its art sometimes allowed for liberty. Such artificial freedom was achieved not just, nor even primarily, through the application of rules as in the performance of duties. That was why Tocqueville began his analysis of American liberty in American associations. It was also why the fruits of that association ended, for Tocqueville, not just in reciprocation but in self-knowledge. Recall his understanding of the social function of the jury system. Moreover, liberty, in America, was nurtured both through its own arts, which he called the “legal, constitutional and institutional mechanisms” that make a society, and in habits, by which Tocqueville meant those mores that sustained them. Schleifer lists some of these:
The spirit of industry, the spirit of association, the spirit of religion, political experience, general enlightenment, public and private morality, a sense of justice, respect for the law, public spirit, sensitivity to the rights of others, and a grasp of interest, well-understood.92
All of this made for what Harvey Mansfield has called an “instructional political science.”93 It was concerned, quite specifically, “to instruct democracy … to revive its beliefs, to regulate its movements, to substitute … the science of public affairs for its inexperience (and) knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts.”94 It was forged by means of a treatise conceived less as a compendium of profound abstractions and invariable laws than through a description of contingent truths and admirable practices: put simply, by means of a useful guide, replete with examples. Thus Democracy begins with a historical moment—the American point of departure—and moves on to a continuing model—the New England township.95 And it goes on, and on, in that fashion. Moreover, this is true for the whole book. Time and again, careful perusal of the Nolla edition establishes how concepts, even case studies, apparently new to the second volume, actually appear half and even fully formulated in the notes and drafts deployed for the
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earlier study. In that way, the intellectual unity of the work is demonstrated as never before. These—seeming—distinctions, between the supposedly empirical first and allegedly abstract second volume, similarly between a consideration first of the political then of the social state of the Americans, even between an optimistic departure and a pessimistic arrival, turn out to be more superficial than profound on closer inspection.96
This is not to say that there are no differences between the two Democracies. It is to suggest that such divergences as emerge were cumulative and contingent rather than clear-cut and crucial. Moreover, there may have been important reasons behind such apparent messiness. For if Tocqueville wrote an instructional book—put simply, an exposition to a French audience of how the Americans did so many things so much better—his brother Édouard believed that he also authored something of an insinuating account. Stated in another way, it was a subtle work, one which, in Lucien Jaume’s words, surreptitiously attempted to “guide the reader” toward certain critical conclusions. On the surface, it seemingly left him free to “forge his own opinion,” as if he had “devised that [judgment] all by himself.”97 Underneath, he was actually being persuaded by a gentle but persistent philosopher of one course of action rather than another.98
How did Tocqueville achieve that ulterior end? He did so, at least in part, by posing as a detached arbiter between the aristocratic and the democratic way of doing things. He was a curious arbiter, to be sure: one who, after all, always insisted that the (historic) aristocratic dispensation was dead.99 But he was an insistent one too, one whose genuine ambivalence about our democratic fate—think of Tocqueville on human dignity, sociability, and well-being against individualism,
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materialism, and mediocrity—always pointed toward other, tantalizing, possibilities.100 This element in Tocqueville’s persuasive purposes may have increased in scope as the chapters of his analysis unfolded. For all that, Craiutu’s ingenious division of Democracy into two voyages—one literal, one intellectual—is, perhaps, best resisted.101 It is not as if Tocqueville revealed himself as unconcerned to preserve those (surreptitious) aspects of aristocracy that governed in Jacksonian America. Think of his account of the lawyers in volume 1.102 Nor can his increasing concern for the preservation of the aristocratic sources of liberty in democracies beyond America be unrelated to his all too obviously enraptured description of those extrademocratic bulwarks for liberty—above all else, its Puritan religious heritage—that America had historically enjoyed.103
Still, we might reasonably ask, instruction in what? Similarly, we might profitably demand, insinuation with what end in mind? It seems scarcely sufficient to answer “liberty.” For that simply begs further questions. What kind of liberty? And to what purpose? As Harvey Mansfield observes, Tocqueville acknowledged no notion of a prepolitical state of liberty.104 Yet he also denied the autonomy of politics. For all that, he never reduced the political to the social. And he became a protosociologist only in the very broadest sense. Even in its strange novelty, his was still a political science. And it remained political freedom that he was trying to defend. Still, Tocqueville’s text points to no specific goal. It contains no obvious end state of freedom. Perhaps, in the final analysis, the reader really was left to do his own thinking in this respect. That possibility compels the present author to conclude that in so explicitly
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differentiating human nature, rightly understood, from the merely material sum of things, Tocqueville surely also intended to distinguish what makes a man free from what merely renders us all the same.105
II
But what about Tocqueville after America? Did he change his mind, not just about the future for freedom in America, but also concerning the possibility of liberty, within democracy, tout court? Did he, in other words, make one final—melancholy—moral voyage, after 1848? If so, what are we to make of his lasting intellectual achievement? Many readers have noted a difference in tone between even some of the more pessimistic remarks of volume 2 in Democracy and many, if not most, of the substantive conclusions of L’ancien régime et la révolution.106 Confronted by such evidence, some have concluded that Tocqueville’s rhetorical remarks in the Avant-propos—defending what he then described as an unfashionable cause—cut little conceptual ice.107 There can be no doubt that Tocqueville intended Democracy to be a book for the ages: timely only for its obvious connotations, more genuinely timeless in its deeper significance.108 The suggestion is that experience eventually disillusioned him. The implication is that his teaching was flawed.
We might note in passing that if Tocqueville had particular reasons to be bitter after 1851, other contemporary “aristocratic liberals” passed through a chronologically concurrent path from simple hope to complex anguish.109 John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville’s English champion, struck a notably bullish tone during the early years of Whig government after 1830. Yet On Liberty, his best-known later work, often reads like a nostalgic memoir. Much of it pointed to the possibility of a drearily conformist—read illiberal—future that would have struck
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a definite chord with his recently deceased friend.110 In a different way, Tocqueville’s own observations about America after 1840 often hinted at an increasingly uncertain future—even there—for the ends he had long espoused for the whole world. But then again, he had every reason to be uncertain about America after the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In addition, he was unlucky enough to die before the promulgation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A careful reading of his subsequent writings on America reveals a man properly concerned for the future but not fatalistic about the possibilities of freedom, either there or elsewhere.111
What is less clear is whether anything linked these concerns. He certainly did fear the concentration of power, for which the whole of recent French history—ancien régime as well as the revolutionary era—so powerfully attested.112 But if America was moving in the same
