the art and habits of liberty were, for Tocqueville, intimately intertwined. Lawmakers practicing the art of liberty can establish laws and institutions that counteract the worst dangers of democracy. But according to Tocqueville, it is the habits of liberty that give real life to those laws and institutions and that make them more than empty legal and institutional structures. For example, the spirit of locality makes town government come alive, the spirit of association prompts individuals to gather together to address and solve problems, and long practical political experience makes the conceptual intricacies of American federalism possible.
From another perspective, the core of Tocqueville’s program of remedies is civic involvement or public participation; his solutions—by art and by habits—to democratic dangers were related to his concept of citizenship and public life. For Tocqueville, citizenship assumed such basic liberties as the rights to vote; to participate in local self-government; to write, speak, and associate; and to trial by jury. These freedoms, essentially political and civil rights, are related to the art of liberty and make public participation possible.
But the most essential dimension of citizenship for Tocqueville is actual public participation. Ongoing, habitual involvement in public affairs, particularly at the local level, fosters practical political experience and knowledge, a concept of the larger public good, respect for the rights of others, and a comprehension of interest well understood. Note that these elements of genuine citizenship are related to mores and to the habits of liberty.
Activity in the American town served for Tocqueville as a particularly powerful example of citizenship. In the drafts and working manuscript of the 1835 Democracy, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of public life in the town. “The town puts liberty and government within the grasp of the people; it gives them an education.… A town system is made only with the support of mores, laws, circumstances and
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time. Town liberty is the most difficult to suppress, the most difficult to create. It is in the town that nearly all the strength of free peoples resides.”19 Again later: “Town institutions not only give the art of using great political liberty, but they bring about the true taste for liberty. Without them, the taste for political liberty comes over peoples like childish desires or the hotheadedness of a young man that the first obstacle extinguishes and calms.”20
Civic involvement, especially in the localities, helps therefore to overcome the major dangers of modern democratic society. Involvement on the local level limits any tendency toward the consolidation of power, especially in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy; it supports the scattering of power in the society. Participation in public life brings people out of their own private or narrow spheres of interest, and it teaches them to care about the wider public good, about something other than material goals.
This brief consideration of the art and habits of liberty and of the necessary framework for citizenship should remind us that Tocqueville spoke not only for liberty in the abstract but also for liberties, for the specific list of political and civil rights noted above. Individual liberties protected the individual in the face of all the possible democratic despotisms, especially the majority, the mass, the state, or society as a whole. Liberties made individual independence possible and supported genuine civic participation and true public life.21 As Tocqueville wrote in the 1840 Democracy:
[It] is above all in the democratic times in which we find ourselves that the true friends of liberty and of human grandeur must, constantly, stand up and be ready to prevent the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general execution of its designs. In those times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, or individual rights of so little importance that you can surrender to arbitrariness
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with impunity.… [To] violate [the particular right of an individual] today is to corrupt the national mores profoundly and to put the entire society at risk.22
He summarized:
The political world is changing; from now on we must seek new remedies for new evils. To fix for the social power extensive, but visible and immobile limits; to give to individuals certain rights and to guarantee to them the uncontested enjoyment of these rights; to preserve for the individual the little of independence, of strength, and of originality that remain to him; to raise him up beside society and sustain him in the face of it: such seems to me to be the first goal of the legislator in the age we are entering.23
For Tocqueville, particular liberties made liberty real.
Among all of these remedies of art and habits proposed by Tocqueville, let us focus now on one of the most well known, the doctrine of interest well understood. Tocqueville’s concept of interest well understood developed gradually from 1831, when he was in America, to the late 1830s, when he was completing the 1840 Democracy.24 But the idea clearly emerged from what he had learned as he traveled in the United States.
Very quickly Tocqueville discovered what he would call the bedrock principle of American society, “[the] maxim that the individual is the best as well as the only judge of his particular interest.… This doctrine is universally accepted in the United States.” It served as the foundation of town liberty, but it also exercised a general influence over “even the ordinary acts of life.”25 Even more striking was the way that Americans blended private and public interest. As early as May 1831, Tocqueville realized that what he was seeing in the New World put some familiar theories in doubt.
In his travel notebooks he wrote:
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The principle of the ancient republics was the sacrifice of particular interest to the general good. In this sense, you can say that they were virtuous. The principle of this one appears to me to be to make particular interest part of the general interest. A kind of refined and intelligent egoism seems the pivot on which the whole machine turns. These people do not trouble themselves to find out if public virtue is good, but they claim to prove that it is useful. If this last point is true, as I think it is in part, this society can pass for enlightened, but not virtuous. But to what degree can the two principles of individual good and general good in fact be merged? To what point will a conscience that you could call a conscience of reflection and calculation be able to control the political passions that have not yet arisen, but which will not fail to arise? That is what the future alone will show us.26
By the time he was drafting the 1835 Democracy, he realized that the American example required a revision or recasting of Montesquieu:
Of virtue in republics—The Americans are not a virtuous people and yet they are free. This does not absolutely prove that virtue, as Montesquieu thought, is not essential to the existence of republics. The idea of Montesquieu must not be taken in a narrow sense. What this great man meant is that republics could subsist only by the action of society over itself. What he means by virtue is the moral power that each individual exercises over himself and that prevents him from violating the rights of others.
When this triumph of man over temptation is the result of the weakness of the temptation or of a calculation of personal interest, it does not constitute virtue in the eyes of the moralist; but it is included in the idea of Montesquieu who spoke of the effect much more than of the cause. In America it is not virtue that is great, it is temptation that is small, which comes to the same thing. It is not disinterestedness that is great, it is interest that is well understood, which again comes back to almost the same thing. So Montesquieu was right although he spoke about ancient virtue, and what he says of the Greeks and Romans is still applicable to the Americans.27
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In
