Americans together: “Shared ideas. Philosophical and general ideas. That interest well understood is sufficient to lead men to do good. That each man has the ability to govern himself.”28
Note that in these (and other) drafts for the 1835 volumes, long before he began to write the 1840 Democracy, Tocqueville was already using the term interest well understood and developing the idea. The seeds appear in the 1835 text. In his discussion of public spirit in the United States, Tocqueville remarked on a “more rational” love of country that he had witnessed in America and that “arises from enlightenment; it develops with the help of laws; it grows with the exercise of rights; and it ends up merging, in a way, with personal interest. A man understands the influence that the well-being of the country has on his own.” But how did the Americans “unite … individual interest and the interest of the country”? “[H]ow is it,” Tocqueville asked, “that each person [in the New World republic] is involved in the affairs of his town, of his district, of the entire State as his very own?” “Today,” he declared, “civic spirit seems to me inseparable from the exercise of political rights.”29
Tocqueville carried this argument as well into his discussions of the idea of rights and the respect for law in the United States.30 In both cases, the exercise of political rights was the key to linking personal interest and the larger public interest. When he presented the social benefits of the jury in America, he described how the jury spread the idea of rights to all classes, taught responsibility, and increased the enlightenment of the people. Once again, Tocqueville saw an instrument that linked personal and public interest. “By forcing men to get involved in something other than their own affairs, it combats individual egoism, which is like the rust of societies.”31
In his 1840 text, Tocqueville would call the refined and intelligent egoism, the new kind of virtue that he had described in his travel notebooks
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and in the drafts for 1835, the doctrine of interest well understood. For him it served as a major remedy for democratic individualism.32
I have already shown, in several places in this work, how the inhabitants of the United States almost always knew how to combine their own well-being with that of their fellow citizens. What I want to note here is the general theory by the aid of which they succeed in doing so.…
I will not be afraid to say that the doctrine of interest well understood seems to me, of all philosophical theories, the most appropriate to the needs of the men of our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee remaining to them against themselves. So it is principally toward this doctrine that the mind of the moralists of today should turn. Even if they were to judge it as imperfect, it would still have to be adopted as necessary.
I do not believe, everything considered, that there is more egoism among us than in America; the only difference is that there it is enlightened and here it is not. Each American knows how to sacrifice a portion of his particular interests in order to save the rest. We want to keep everything, and often everything escapes us.33
“[The] Americans,” he remarked elsewhere in his text, “have so to speak reduced egoism to a social and philosophical theory.”34 What is important for us to recognize are the American roots of this doctrine of interest well understood, one of the most famous and original elements of Tocqueville’s thinking and writing. But where and how did the Americans learn to combine private and public interest and to understand individual and general interests in such a strikingly new way?
In a brilliant discussion, James Kloppenberg has described the concept of interest well understood, discovered by Tocqueville in America, as an expression of an “ethic of reciprocity” and has argued that reciprocity is fundamental to the healthy habits of liberty that Tocqueville witnessed in the United States, especially the spirit of locality and the
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spirit of association. The ethic of reciprocity casts the idea of interest well understood in a new light.35
Kloppenberg defines this ethic as fruitful interaction among individuals engaged in a shared enterprise, as awareness of and respect for others, and as the “practice of deliberation,” or the experience of expressing, listening to, and respectfully considering the viewpoints and opinions of others in order to arrive at a mutually acceptable and beneficial conclusion. This mutual consideration, shared involvement, and respectful deliberation rested upon a deep sense of “reciprocal obligation.” It described how Americans (at their best) behaved in their towns and associations and defined what Tocqueville meant by the spirit of locality and the spirit of association. Kloppenberg has argued that the ideal of reciprocity was a fundamental characteristic of American mores. Tocqueville also understood reciprocity as a key solution to democratic dangers. “Sentiments and ideas are renewed,” he declared in Democracy, “the heart grows larger and the human mind develops only by the reciprocal action of men on each other.”36
What was the deeper source of such an ethic of reciprocity in America? Kloppenberg has located the source in the American religious heritage and has reminded us once again of Tocqueville’s insistence on the Puritan experience as the essential point of departure for the American republic.37 This argument has been taken up in much greater detail by Barbara Allen in a recent book in which she underscores the importance of the Puritan concept of covenant.38 To “own the covenant” in Puritan terms was to take profound moral and religious responsibility for sustaining the relationship between the individual and the community. Its most immediate and direct expressions were in the Puritan congregation and congregational meeting, but it also shaped the mores of the earliest town meetings that took
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place in the “meetinghouse” (as the church building was called) and that reflected Puritan covenantal theology. According to her analysis, covenant brought forth what Tocqueville described as the American habits of liberty, including such basic political mores as assuming and expressing a voice in communal deliberations, feeling a sense of obligation toward political participation, sharing a commitment to the larger public good, and grasping what Tocqueville labeled as interest well understood.
For the Puritans, covenant, as a social and political concept, defined the relationship between the individual and the church or congregation, and between the individual and the larger society. It required the mutual moral responsibilities of the individual and the group for sustaining the larger community, for balancing the good of the individual and the good of the community, and for avoiding any definitive break in communal bonds. It called for mutual commitment, active participation, and respectful deliberation—the very behavioral characteristics included in Kloppenberg’s ethic of reciprocity.
Tocqueville did not specifically locate the source of the concept of interest well understood in the Puritan religious heritage of the American republic. But a case can be made that the concept of covenant, by shaping the mores of American social and political culture, also produced the social and philosophical theory that Tocqueville found so new and so special in the New World republic and that he called the doctrine of interest well understood. Interest well understood involved the essential covenantal principle: the assumption that the fundamental good of the individual and the good of the community were in fact compatible and even mutually supportive, that private and public interest could be harmonized in surprising ways, given the right religious and moral traditions.
This argument underscores the defining role in American society of religion in general and of the dissenting Protestant and Puritan traditions in particular. It reaffirms the brilliance of Tocqueville’s insights about the centrality of religion in shaping American politics, society, and culture, and about the unique way in which Americans blended the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. If the ultimate root of the doctrine of interest well understood is the Puritan concept of covenant,
