process by which this occurred can be seen by consulting the Tocqueville material held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and assembled by Eduardo Nolla. In brief, if on Tocqueville’s
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part there was no lack of interest in the commercial aspects of American society, as he came to reflect upon what he wanted to say in his own study, they were not integral to the argument that he wished to develop. As Tocqueville made plain in his letter to Beaumont of November 4, 1836, in which he asked his friend specifically for commentary on Chevalier’s rival text, his own study was intended to be an “ouvrage philosophique-politique.”34
It was accordingly in light of the impact of industrialization upon the workings of democracy that, in volume 2 of the Democracy in America, Tocqueville considered the question of “What Makes Nearly All Americans Tend toward Industrial Professions.”35 Recognizing that “no people on earth who has made as rapid progress as the Americans in commerce and industry” and that, although they had “arrived only yesterday,” the Americans had “overturned the whole natural order to their profit,” Tocqueville drew three conclusions of substance and not inconsiderable importance from these “industrial passions”: commercial crises would be endemic to industrial capitalism; industrialization would produce a new kind of capitalist aristocracy; and a version of state capitalism would engender a new form of soft despotism. It was, however, never Tocqueville’s intention to publish a detailed description of America’s transport infrastructure.
The second substantive criticism—and one that might be deemed to be fatal to his entire enterprise—is that Tocqueville overestimated the potential of American democracy to degenerate into the tyranny of the majority. For example, when Tocqueville’s good friend Jean-Jacques Ampère visited America in the early 1850s, he recorded that Americans were almost universally agreed that, on one thing, Tocqueville had been mistaken: the possibility of a tyranny of the majority was unfounded. The most intriguing of Ampère’s encounters, therefore, was with John C. Spencer, author of a preface to the first American edition of Democracy in America. According to Spencer, the ever-changing nature of majority opinion ensured that no “lasting tyranny” could
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be established. Spencer himself attributed Tocqueville’s error to the peculiar political circumstances pertaining during his stay: namely, the support of the overwhelming majority for General Jackson’s populist measures, which might have given the impression that the minority was “crushed” and without the power to protect itself.36
A very similar charge was made by Tocqueville’s American friend Jared Sparks, the man who in 1833 told Tocqueville that in his forthcoming book he anticipated “a more accurate and judicious account of the United States than has yet appeared from the pen of any European traveller”37 and who, after its publication and in the face of objections in America to Tocqueville’s remarks on “the defects of Democratic institutions,” assured his colleague that “all the intelligent persons among us who have read your treatise have applauded its ability and candour.”38 In a letter to another of Tocqueville’s critics, Guillaume-Tell Poussin,39 of February 1841, he wrote:
Your criticisms of M. de Tocqueville’s work also accord for the most part with my own sentiments. Notwithstanding the great ability with which his book is written, the extent of his intelligence, and his profound discussions of many important topics, I am persuaded that his theories, particularly, when applied to the United States, sometimes lead him astray. For instance, in what he says of the tyranny of the majority, I think, he is entirely mistaken. His ideas are not verified by experience. The tyranny of the majority, if exercised at all, must be in the making of laws; and any evil arising from this source operates in precisely the same manner on the majority itself as on the minority. Besides, if the majority passes an oppressive law, or a law which the people generally disapprove, this majority will certainly be changed at the next election, and be composed of different elements. M. de Tocqueville’s theory can only be true where
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the majority is an unchangeable body and where it acts exclusively on the minority, as distinct from itself—a state of things which can never occur where the elections are frequent and every man has a voice in choosing the legislators.40
It should be noted that Ampère himself was not convinced by these criticisms and that, on Tocqueville’s behalf, he provided a response that is not without merit or cogency. That the oppressed could themselves in turn become the oppressors, he countered, was no safeguard for personal liberty. Moreover, the new majority might simply continue to voice many of the “common passions” and “prejudices” of the previous majority, thus continuing the oppression of “a persistent minority.” This was especially true in the states of the South where freedom of expression on the subject of slavery did not exist and where, on this issue, it mattered not whether the Whigs or the Democrats were in power. Moreover, that the excesses of Jacksonian democracy no longer existed did not prove that they had been completely cured and that they could not return. Tocqueville, he consequently affirmed, had been right to diagnose the existence of a “radical infirmity” existing at the heart of American society: “the possible tyranny of number where numbers counted for everything.”41 Nor, it should be added, was it the case that everyone shared the view that Tocqueville had failed to observe America in an accurate and impartial fashion. In a lengthy article written for the North American Review,42 Edward Everett, while not denying that Tocqueville was sometimes “led away by the desire to generalize,” affirmed that Tocqueville’s work was “by far the most philosophical, ingenious and instructive, which has been produced in Europe on the subject of America.”
Be that as it may, it is not easy to dislodge the criticism that errors in central aspects of Tocqueville’s analysis arose because of both the brevity of his stay and the fact that he could not escape his own inherited prejudices. Here let us remember that Tocqueville was an outsider in America not only because he was French and aristocratic but also
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because he was a Catholic.43 In short, on this view, the odds were well and truly stacked against Tocqueville ever producing an account of America that rose above shallow empiricism and vague theoretical generalization. Indeed, this was the view of no less an authority than François Furet, who asserted that “when Tocqueville went to the United States in the spring of 1831, he had already formed his own hypothesis for comparing the French Revolution and the American Republic.”44 Thus forewarned, it might be argued, are we not better placed to make sense of Tocqueville’s well-known remark that “in America I saw more than America,” for was he not really only interested in France all along? Moreover, is this not substantiated by Tocqueville’s statement that “[w]hile I had my eyes fixed on America, I thought about Europe.”45
Is this then not evidence enough to dispel any lingering doubt as to the lack of utility and purpose in Tocqueville’s voyage? First, we would do well to remember James T. Schleifer’s observation that it would have been remarkable had Tocqueville not “reached the shores of America carrying much of the historical and intellectual baggage of early 19th century France.” Could it have been imagined that he would have arrived with a completely empty mind, without “a variety of preconceptions about the fundamental nature and direction of modern society”?46 Next, Tocqueville was only too aware of his own prejudices and of the difficulties involved in freeing himself from them. In his Two Weeks in the Wilderness, we find the following remark: “[A]s for me, in my traveler’s illusions—and what class of men does not have its own—I imagined something entirely different.” America, he had believed, would be bound to exhibit “all the transformations that the social state imposed on man and in which it was possible to see those transformations like a vast chain.” Nothing of this picture, he confirmed, had any truth. Indeed, America was “the least appropriate
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for
