without customs,” which ignored the wisdom of others and of the past, were carving out institutions, as they were roads, in the forests where they had just arrived, sure in the knowledge that they faced neither obstacles nor limits. With time, their job done, they would uproot themselves again, pushing headlong ever westward toward yet more virgin soil and new challenges. Phrased in the terminology of Tocqueville’s published text, this sense of constant movement reappeared in his conclusion that “there is something precipitous, I could almost say revolutionary, in the progress society makes in America.”80
The mistake is to believe (primarily on the basis of the letters written to Chabrol and Kergorlay in June 1831) that Tocqueville quickly settled his mind on what he had seen of American society. This was not the case because it is clear that his journey across the continent forced him to rethink his impressions and conclusions on an almost daily basis. To his father, in early June, he wrote that he could not tell him what most struck him about America, “a whole volume would be necessary to tell you; and, in any case, I would perhaps not think the same tomorrow.”81 In September, writing from Boston, he told his
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mother that “[e]verything I see, everything that I hear, everything that I see from a distance, forms a confused mass in my brain which I will perhaps never have the time nor the strength to unravel. It would be an immense undertaking to present a picture of a society that is as large and as lacking in homogeneity as this one.”82 A month later, this time writing from Hartford, he reaffirmed the observation earlier passed on to his father. “I will know what I think of America only when I am no longer here,” he wrote: “One has to give up any idea of studying things deeply when one sees so many things, when one impression drives out the one that preceded it; at best there remain a few general ideas, a few general conclusions, which much later can enable you to understand details when one has the time to study them.”83 From Philadelphia in November, he told his mother that the clearest outcome of his trip would be that, upon leaving America, he would be in a position to understand the documents that he had collected but not yet studied. “For the rest,” he continued, “on this country I have only disordered and disconnected notes, disjointed ideas to which only I hold the key, isolated facts which recall a mass of others.” The only general ideas he had expressed on America, he confided, were to be found in letters to his family and a few friends in France, and these were written in haste, on a steamboat or in a corner, with his knees serving as a desk. Would he ever write a book on this country? he asked himself. In truth, he did not know. “It seems to me,” he concluded, “that I have a few good ideas, but I still do not know how to arrange them.”84
How these various ideas emerged is captured vividly in Tocqueville’s letters and notebooks. To his father, he explained that, despite his mental confusion, two ideas had already come to him. The first was that the American people were the happiest in the world. The second was that America owed its prosperity less to its own virtues and even less to a form of government that was superior to all others than to the particular circumstances in which it found itself. This in turn told him that political institutions were neither good nor bad in themselves and that everything depended upon the physical conditions and social
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state of the people where they applied. What might work in America, might not work in France and vice versa.85 An altogether different set of conclusions was listed in a note titled “First Impressions,” dated May 15, 1831. The Americans were a prey to national pride and small-town pettiness. They seemed a religious people, but how far religion regulated their conduct was unclear. The whole of society seemed to be composed of one enormous middle class. Elegant manners and polite refinement were lacking, but all Americans, “right down to the simple shop assistant,” seemed to have had a good education and to possess sober manners. Betraying what was to be one of his abiding preoccupations, Tocqueville also commented upon the way women dressed and the causes of chaste morals.
By dint of considerable effort and imaginative intuition, Tocqueville came, in fits and starts, to make sense of these confused and diverse impressions. Yet, as George Wilson Pierson observed long ago, their very tone “prophesized the book that one day would result.”86 Tocqueville showed himself not to be interested in individuals. There were no descriptions of domestic interiors. His subject from the beginning was “the real character of the American people,” and with that came necessarily a fascination with the patterns of behavior and institutions of a democratic society.
What Tocqueville came to observe and to learn from his journey through America has best been summarized by James T. Schleifer.87 Tocqueville, he contends, learned first of all of the equality of conditions in all its assorted forms. He came to appreciate the pace of change and mobility of American society. He discovered some of the key mechanisms for moderating democracy. These included the federal system and the independence of the judiciary. He noticed the importance of administrative decentralization. He understood the significance of the habit of association. Perhaps most important, he saw the centrality to American mores of the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood
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and of religion as a guarantor of liberty and democracy. To his obvious delight, he discovered fresh ways of thinking about Catholicism and saw that it might be on the new continent that it would achieve its most authentic expression.
In highlighting these and other themes, Schleifer has also drawn our attention to the language used by Tocqueville to indicate moments of surprise in his journey. He specifically refers us to the numerous occasions when Tocqueville admits that he found something to be “striking.” The best example of this occurs in the very first sentence of the published text, where Tocqueville states: “Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”88 By extending this analysis of the actual words used by Tocqueville in his account, we gain a further insight into the importance of Tocqueville’s journey and the manner in which it shaped the content of his argument about America. If, for example, we limit ourselves only to chapters 9 and 10 of part 2 of volume 1, we read such phrases as: “I sometimes encountered in the United States,” “While I was in America,” “I saw Americans associating,” “I encountered wealthy inhabitants of New England,” and “As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts”; “I saw with my own eyes”; “During my stay in America I did not encounter a single man, priest or layman, who did not come to accord on this point”; “I remember when traveling through the forests”; “I learned with surprise that”; “I discovered that”; “I heard them”; “I wondered how it could happen that”; “I lived much with the people of the United States”; “I met men in New England”; “What I have seen among the Anglo-Americans brings me to believe that.” Many more similar phrases and expressions can be found that testify to the impact upon Tocqueville of his voyage, but to confirm the point we might care to consider the following short paragraph:
Thus I found in the United States the restlessness of heart that is natural to men when, all conditions being more or less nearly equal, each sees the same chances to rise. There I encountered the democratic sentiment of envy expressed in a thousand different ways. I observed
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that the people often showed, in the conduct of affairs, a great blend of presumption and ignorance, and I concluded that in America, as among us, men were subject to the same imperfections and exposed to the same miseries.89
With the emphases added, we see clearly how Tocqueville combined a series of observations and reflections drawn directly from experience in order to reach a substantive conclusion.
In closing, I wish to make the suggestion that it is in the final two chapters of volume 1 of Democracy in America that the impact of Tocqueville’s journey appears in its most unmediated form. As Eduardo
