This is not to minimize the crisis of the 1850s. Rather, it is to emphasize the significance of Tocqueville’s abiding insight that American liberty was sustained, in America, as much by what was American as by what was democratic. This mattered more generally because it pointed to how the future of liberty there depended in no small measure on what was permanent, as opposed to purely transitory, in the American “democratic experiment.” That was what Tocqueville had discovered on his voyage to America. He never forgot that lesson, however much he subsequently journeyed (literally and figuratively) beyond America. So it is surely not fanciful to assert that, for Tocqueville, a true apprehension of these
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permanent things will determine liberty’s place in the origins, course, and consequences of those many “democratic experiments” that he anticipated and that have eventuated far beyond America’s shores. If this is true, then we still have much reason to praise him in our own time, after all.
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Democratic Dangers, Democratic Remedies, and the Democratic Character
JAMES T. SCHLEIFER
This essay is a brief reconsideration of the genesis and development of some of the important themes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, especially his description of democratic dangers, democratic remedies, and the democratic character. To reexamine these key ideas, this paper draws largely upon Liberty Fund’s four-volume, bilingual version of his masterpiece, which presents a very broad and extensive selection of materials relating to the writing of Democracy in America, including early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and the autograph working manuscript.1 The Liberty Fund edition also includes editorial notes, a selection of important appendices, excerpts from and/or cross-references to Tocqueville’s travel notebooks, his correspondence, and his printed sources, as well as significant excerpts from the critical commentary of family and friends, written in response to their readings of Tocqueville’s manuscript. In short, the edition re-creates much of Tocqueville’s long process of thinking (and rethinking) and writing (and rewriting), and allows the interested reader to follow along, from 1832 to 1840, as Tocqueville’s ideas developed and as Democracy took shape.
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The Dangers
Tocqueville’s deepest passion was for liberty, which he considered at risk in democratic times. In large part his book is an exploration of democratic dangers (How does equality threaten freedom?) and democratic remedies (How best to protect liberty in the face of advancing equality?).
What were the essential dangers? Tocqueville warned his readers about three in particular: materialism, individualism (or excessive privatism), and consolidated power. We will touch very briefly on the first two and then elaborate on the third.
In democratic times, people were increasingly concerned with their material comfort, and with the order and public tranquility needed to further this ease and prosperity. Their ceaseless striving toward physical well-being narrowed their hearts and minds, and diverted them from public affairs.
Advancing equality also led people toward a growing sense of isolation and noninvolvement; they ended by withdrawing from public life and by focusing almost exclusively on personal and family well-being. By 1840, Tocqueville would name this phenomenon individualism. But the message was clear in the 1835 text and even in the working papers for the first part of his book. One passage from the 1835 Democracy declared:
There are such nations in Europe where the inhabitant considers himself a sort of settler, indifferent to the destiny of the place where he lives. The greatest changes occur in his country without his participation.… Even more, the fortune of his village, the policing of his street, the fate of his church and his presbytery have nothing to do with him; he thinks that all these things are of no concern to him whatsoever.… When nations have reached this point, they must modify their laws and mores or perish, for the source of public virtues has dried up; subjects are still found there, but citizens are seen no more.2
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And in a draft for the 1835 portion, Tocqueville described the moral costs of despotism and lamented men who became
indifferent to their interests and enemies of their own rights. Then they wrongly persuade themselves that by losing in this way all the privileges of civilized man, they escape all his burdens and evade all his duties. So they feel free and count in society like a lackey in the house of his master, and think that they have only to eat the bread that is left for them, without concerning themselves about the cares of the harvest. When a man has reached this point, I will call him, if you want, a peaceful inhabitant, an honest settler, a good family man. I am ready for everything, provided that you do not force me to give him the name of citizen.3
Both materialism and individualism led therefore to the erosion of public participation and the collapse of civic life, diminishing human beings morally. More specifically, materialism and individualism encouraged people to allow the state or the presumed representatives of the people to gather power and take control of society; they opened the door to the third great danger: power consolidated in the hands of some despot or despotic force.
In Democracy, Tocqueville cataloged and carefully examined the variety of possible democratic despotisms that might arise from the consolidated power that threatened to emerge from modern democratic societies. In the 1835 part of his book, he described legislative tyranny (Tocqueville was thinking particularly of the National Convention), executive tyranny, military despotism, or rule by one man (in these cases, he was thinking especially of Napoleon and the worst of the Caesars), and tyranny of the majority (here, the American republic was the dangerous example).4
Still another possible democratic despotism was administrative
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centralization. Tocqueville’s basic views about centralization are familiar and can be summarized in a few sentences. In the 1835 Democracy he made a well-known distinction between governmental and administrative centralization, praising the first as necessary for national strength and condemning the second as enervating politically, socially, and morally. He described the American republic as highly centralized governmentally but remarkably decentralized administratively, a trait that he saw as one of the key reasons for the social and political health and the material prosperity of the United States.
It is important to note that in the 1835 portion of his book, he already recognized that democracy led to centralization and that this tendency was one of the great dangers facing democratic societies. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there are no nations more at risk of falling under the yoke of centralized administration than those whose social state is democratic.”5 In a draft of the 1835 portion he declared: “Moreover we must not be mistaken about this. It is democratic governments that arrive most quickly at administrative centralization while losing their political liberty.”6
By 1840 he even more emphatically warned that democracy tended almost inevitably toward centralization. In one of his most famous and powerful passages, he offered readers a terrible portrait of the new, “soft” democratic despotism of the centralized state.7 We should note, however, that when he sketched this chilling picture, he was thinking primarily of Europe, in general, and of France, in particular. America, with its particular laws, circumstances, and mores, especially its local liberties, federal structure, associational habits, and doctrine of interest well understood, escaped the danger
