moderating counter to extreme egalitarianism.” Accordingly, Wills affirms, Tocqueville “parroted” the views of the Federalists in his “scathing” comments on Andrew Jackson and upon populist leaders such as Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. The implication of Wills’s comments is that not only were these views of dubious worth—damned, as they were, by their lofty social origin—but also Tocqueville would have discovered an altogether different America had he chosen occasionally to mix with his social inferiors.
The criticism does not cease there. “In his erratic traversing of the country,” Wills writes, “what Tocqueville did not see is often more interesting than what he did.” Tocqueville, it seems, never visited a New England town meeting. He never saw an American university. He made no efforts to become familiar with American intellectual life. The only state capital he visited was Albany.5 His journey through the South to New Orleans was hasty in the extreme and diminished as a source of potential information by Tocqueville’s debilitating illness.
The conclusion is clear. Tocqueville “would probably not have benefited by a longer stay in America.” His ideas were formed upon the basis of first encounters and rarely changed afterward. He had a propensity to form “instant judgments.” He “concluded things about America because of the prejudices he brought with him from France.” He was not seeking to write “an objective account of what he saw in America.” His pronouncements were made “de haut en bas.” The whole book, like
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Tocqueville’s work in general, was characterized by “the taste for grand simplification.”
The surprise is that these conclusions find an echo in what would normally be regarded among Tocqueville scholars as a friendly source, namely, George Wilson Pierson’s reconstruction of Tocqueville’s stay in America. At the end of his magisterial volume, Pierson devoted a set of four chapters to a consideration of the overall character of Tocqueville’s achievement.6 Let us first be clear that Pierson was of the opinion that Tocqueville drew “some useful conclusions” from his American experiences. In particular, Pierson wrote, Tocqueville saw that “there seemed to exist in the United States certain habits, certain institutional practices, that increased the good effects obtainable from self-government at the same time that they mitigated or even altogether eliminated the dangers inherent in mass control.”7 Second, Pierson acknowledged that Tocqueville “had carried some prejudices to America,” but he countered this by asserting that “the Americans themselves had again and again supplied the corroborating information.” To take but one example, Tocqueville no longer saw the Native American “through the romantic haze of a tale by Chateaubriand, but in terms of personal contact and experience.”8
Yet Pierson did not seek to disguise or hide the “defects” to be found in Democracy in America. Of these, Pierson suggested, the principal deficiency was to be found in Tocqueville’s philosophical method. Tocqueville was “neither a historian nor a scientist but a philosopher, and a philosopher whose concepts and whose habits were not well calculated, if he wanted, rigorously, to find the truth.” It was this, Pierson concluded, that “injected into his classic the strong dose of mortality that it undoubtedly contains.”9 We might further note that Pierson was also of the view that Tocqueville was “unscientific in his use, or rather in his failure to use, contemporary literature” and that he was “not sufficiently inquisitive.”10
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So, too, Tocqueville was guilty of “errors of observation.”11 Here is a shortened version of the lengthy list highlighted by Pierson. Tocqueville misread the American inheritance laws. He neglected American material development, in the process ignoring “the one great factor that was going to transform his chosen civilization almost overnight.” He failed properly to acknowledge the nationalizing influence of American commerce and underestimated the centralizing tendency in American politics. He did not foresee the rise of American cities and therefore did not appreciate the strain that would be placed upon institutions of local self-government. In his appraisal of American institutions, he failed to obtain “sufficient knowledge of their historical background,” and so he was unable correctly to discuss the dispute over slavery and the bitterness between North and South. In the field of politics, he made “two considerable errors of omission”: he failed to notice the growth of a two-party system and he neglected the intermediate unit of American politics, the state, thus closing his eyes to “its significant possibilities as a balancing force and experimental laboratory.” “Both of these mistakes,” Pierson concluded, “can be traced to his visit to Albany and his failures of observation there.”12 More than this, because of his experience with Andrew Jackson, Tocqueville “underestimated the power of the executive branch in American government.” Most alarming of all given its centrality to the argument of the text and its subsequent notoriety, Tocqueville “perhaps overestimated the tendency of democracy, at least as practiced in the United States, to degenerate into tyranny by the majority.”
Having got this far, we might pause to consider the justice and substance of some of the critical remarks cited above. There is, indeed, no shortage of evidence to support the view that Tocqueville quickly made up his mind about what he saw in America. Letters to his two close friends Ernest de Chabrol and Louis de Kergorlay, written shortly after his arrival, gave a strong intimation of what would in due course form the content of his famous book.13 Likewise, Tocqueville’s chosen
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pattern of social interaction was also quickly evident. Once on dry land, Tocqueville and Beaumont soon found themselves the toast of New York society and later found the doors of the Bostonian elite opened to them. A reading of Tocqueville’s notebooks reveals just how much he learned from his eminent acquaintances. It was, for example, Alexander Everett who informed Tocqueville one evening that “[t]he point of departure for a people is of immense importance.”14 It was this idea, as Tocqueville was later to inform readers of Democracy in America, that provided “the key to nearly the whole book.”15
But what of the more serious, and most often repeated, charge that Tocqueville showed no interest in and failed to perceive the growing industrialization of the American economy? This assertion can often figure as part of a broader argument alleging that Tocqueville knew nothing of economics and displayed a near total indifference to the social issues and problems of his day. That this general contention is largely false has been amply shown by the recent work of Michael Drolet and Richard Swedberg,16 but does it hold true for the specifics of Tocqueville’s examination of America? This is the manner in which the evidence has been presented by one of the most perceptive of commentators upon Tocqueville’s work, Seymour Drescher. Tocqueville and Beaumont, he writes,
visited prisons until they felt themselves imprisoned by their own mission. They sacrificed comfort, and almost their lives, to view the American West at first hand. But though they knew of the world famous industrial experiment at Lowell, Massachusetts, they simply
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passed it by. Their one hour in Pittsburgh … was spent catching up on correspondence. They were deeply impressed by Cincinnati’s throbbing industry but spent their extremely rationed time there with its lawyers rather than its industrial classes.17
How, on Tocqueville’s behalf, might we respond?
The failure to visit Lowell was undoubtedly a notable omission. Despite its recent creation, after 1821 it had already achieved notoriety as a purpose-built mill town and regularly received foreign visitors, including some from France. Among these was Michel Chevalier, who devoted considerable space to Lowell and its factory girls in his own account of his journey across America.18 Chevalier also discoursed at some length on the towns of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, both cities evoking his admiration and enthusiasm.19 With regard to Tocqueville’s visit to Pittsburgh, however, Drescher is perhaps unfair. Beaumont and Tocqueville arrived there only after
