was in turn utterly damning in his attitude toward those of his fellow countrymen who had not bothered themselves with doing anything other than observing America from a lofty and disdainful distance. In a letter to the Abbé Lesueur, for example, he warned that his compatriot, a man called Scherer, “will paint you an unfavourable picture of America: the fact is that he has made the most stupid journey in the world. He came here without any other end than to stroll about, knowing nothing about either the language or the customs of the country.”48 He later repeated the advice to his mother, condemning what was probably the same person for deriving all he knew of the country from a “particular class of Frenchmen whom he saw exclusively.”49 Moreover, all of this accords with Gustave de Beaumont’s own description of Tocqueville as a traveler. Contrasting his friend with those visitors to North America “who passed through, seeing nothing and looking for nothing, not even wild ducks,” he remarked that, for Tocqueville, “everything was subject to observation.”50
Accordingly, a reading of Tocqueville’s diaries, notebooks, and letters reveals a mind, not closed to new experiences, but overwhelmed by the novelty and importance of what he was seeing. For example, having told us that the penitentiary system was a pretext for his visit to America, a letter to Kergorlay continues as follows: “In that country, in which I encountered a thousand things beyond my expectation, I perceived several things about questions that I had often put to myself. I discovered facts that seemed useful to know. I did not go there with the idea of writing a book, but the idea for a book came to me there.”
Nor is it easy to unravel the complex relationship between Tocqueville’s impressions of America and his thoughts on the future of European civilization. Even his earliest reviewers realized that this was not merely a book about America, and the fact that it is not so explains why we continue to read it for instruction and enlightenment (unlike the vast
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majority of nineteenth-century accounts of America that, if read at all, are done so for entertainment and amusement alone). Again, a letter to Kergorlay clarifies his intentions:
Although I rarely spoke of France in this book, I did not write a page without thinking of her and without always having her, so to speak, before my eyes. And above all what I tried to highlight in the United States and to make understood was less a complete picture of this foreign country but the contrasts and resemblances with our own. It was always, either through opposition or analogy with the one, that I endeavoured to present a fair and, above all, interesting idea of the other. In my opinion, the permanent return that I made, without making it known, to France was one of the main causes of the success of the book.51
But this does not reduce the journey itself to insignificance. A letter to his father reported that since their arrival, Tocqueville and Beaumont had had, “in truth, only one idea … this idea is to understand the country through which we are travelling.”52 He similarly told his brother: “In my opinion, one must be truly blind to want to compare this country to Europe and to impose on one what works in the other. I believed this before I left France; I believe it more and more in examining the country in the midst of which I now live.”53
Moreover, Tocqueville was under no illusions as to the limits of his knowledge and acquaintance with the United States. Writing from Washington, D.C., as his time in America reached its end, he confided in separate letters to his father and to his brother Édouard that he had only a “superficial” knowledge of the South and that a minimum stay of two years was required to prepare a “complete and accurate picture” of the whole country. To attempt to take in the whole, he continued, would be madness, because he had simply not seen enough. In any case,
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such a work would be as “boring as it was instructive.” Nevertheless, Tocqueville recorded, his time had been spent usefully and he had collected many documents and spoken with many people. Furthermore, he felt that he knew more about America than was generally known in France and some of what he knew might be of “great interest.” “I believe,” Tocqueville wrote modestly, “that if, upon my return I have the leisure, I might write something passable on the United States.”54 Less than four years later, the first volume of Democracy in America was published to instant acclaim.
Furthermore, the Nolla critical edition of Democracy in America provides an unprecedented insight into how Tocqueville’s text was written and how its content evolved over time. Tocqueville began with the notebooks and letters he had written while in America. He worked his way through the extensive collection of printed material he had accumulated. He continued to communicate and interrogate his American acquaintances by mail. To help him to complete his research, he employed two young Americans, Francis Lippitt and Theodore Sedgwick, as his assistants. The manuscript was passed on to his family, to Gustave de Beaumont, and to Louis de Kergorlay, and in turn received extensive, expert comment. Certain sections were read out to close friends. Given this thoroughness, it is difficult to know what to make of the charge that Tocqueville was not sufficiently inquisitive and was unscientific in his use of contemporary sources. That aside, we know that his long reflection upon his investigation of America convinced Tocqueville that “[a] new political science is needed for a world entirely new.”55 Later Tocqueville was to sketch out in greater detail what he took the “science of politics” to be, distinguishing it in the process from the “art of government.”56
Why was a new science of politics required? For the simple reason, as Tocqueville pointed out in his own introduction, that “a great democratic revolution is taking place,” and this was a revolution where “the generating fact from which each particular fact seemed to derive” was
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revealed in American society. The corollary to this, as James T. Schleifer has observed, is that Tocqueville discounted “the traditional inclination to draw lessons about democracy from ancient and Renaissance texts.”57 The entire book, Tocqueville confided, was written “under the impression of a sort of religious terror” produced “by the sight of this irresistible revolution that has marched for so many centuries over all obstacles.”58 To wish to stop it was to act against God himself. The best we could do was to accommodate ourselves to the social state that Providence wished to impose upon us.
There is much that might be said about the merits and character of this avowedly new political science. To what extent was it genuinely new and innovative? Was it to be value free? Did it possess predictive power? To what extent was it philosophically and empirically flawed? Whatever the answer to these questions, there can be no doubt that Tocqueville did not imagine that his new political science amounted (as Sheldon Wolin has recently suggested)59 to a form of political impressionism. The guiding assumption was that, sooner or later, Europe would also arrive at something near to the equality of conditions. This did not mean that Europe would be obliged to draw the same political conclusions from this social state as had been done in America or that democracy would produce only one form of government. It had therefore been no part of Tocqueville’s purpose to write a “panegyric” on America or to advocate “any particular form of government in general.” Rather, his hypothesis was that, beyond a legitimate curiosity, one could “find lessons there from which we would be able to profit.”60
This was achieved with a level of methodological self-awareness and sophistication that was unusual for the age and certainly unusual for the subject matter. In both the printed text and his notes, Tocqueville acknowledged that nothing would be easier than to criticize his book. It would be sufficient, he acknowledged, only “to contrast an isolated
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fact to the whole of the facts,” “a detached idea to the whole of the ideas.” Yet, he remained adamant that he had “never yielded, except unknowingly, to the need to adapt facts to ideas, instead of subjecting ideas to facts.”61 To this disclaimer, he added a clear statement of his methodology.
