at the same time of giving birth to pity, admiration, contempt, terror. I have only to consider myself.
—Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Voyages are about change. We change as we journey and encounter new places, ideas, and people; the place to which we journey changes as it moves from an abstraction to a reality and as we explore, understand, and live within it; upon our return, we find our homeland changed, for we perceive that homeland through changed eyes. Nothing is the same.
Voyages and the changes they bring are the theme of the present volume.
On April 2, 1831, twenty-six-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville set sail for America, accompanied by his friend Gustave de Beaumont. The official purpose of their voyage, which lasted nine months, was to undertake a comparative study of the U.S. penitentiary system; although the penitentiary report was published in 1833, Tocqueville confessed in an 1835 letter to his friend Louis de Kergorlay that it had merely been “a
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pretext” for their journey.1 The political situation in France had made it expedient for the two magistrates to remove themselves from the country, and they were also interested in studying the American republic, quickly forming—somewhere in the journey’s early phases—plans to write a book together about the United States. With this project in mind, Tocqueville kept notebooks of his observations and thoughts, as well as notes about his various conversations and interviews with Americans. His letters to his friends and family in France also contain his reflections on his voyage and on the various aspects of American life—point of departure, religion, equality of condition, tyranny of the majority, etc.—which would emerge eventually as key themes of Democracy in America.
Having traveled throughout much of the United States in nine months, the two Frenchmen returned to France in March 1832. Soon after, Tocqueville settled into an apartment in Paris and began first working on the penitentiary report with Beaumont. Although that report was published with both American voyagers listed as authors, the idea of a larger, joint project on America was eventually abandoned; Democracy in America was written by Tocqueville, while Beaumont penned a novel about American mores entitled Marie. Following the publication of the penitentiary report and after a brief trip to England in the late summer and early autumn of 1833, Tocqueville began outlining and eventually writing the first two volumes of Democracy in America. By early 1834, his outlines had become a full draft, which he felt comfortable sending to select family and friends, to get their comments and criticisms. He took their oral and written feedback into consideration, editing, changing, and redrafting—sometimes extensively—portions of the text. By the autumn of 1834, Tocqueville had completed the final
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versions of those two volumes, which would be published in January 1835. The last two volumes followed a similar process of outlines, drafts, redrafts, criticisms, and final drafting before their 1840 publication.
The recently translated historical-critical edition of Democracy in America is, in part, an effort to shed light on Tocqueville’s process in composing Democracy in America. In creating the historical-critical edition, Eduardo Nolla painstakingly worked through the major French editions, comparing them to each other and to the manuscript. He then selected among Tocqueville’s textual fragments—Tocqueville’s notes and queries to himself, as well as passages and ideas he contemplated including in the final version but ultimately rejected—and incorporated these into the main text. Finally, Nolla added a series of notes to this enlarged text, consisting primarily of marginalia, draft variants, selections from Tocqueville’s travel notes, as well as criticisms from the family members and friends who read the draft manuscript.
The historical-critical edition thus gives the reader unprecedented access to the development of Tocqueville’s thought. We witness the text emerging out of his voyage to the United States, and we discover the many things he learned by direct observation of democracy as enacted in nineteenth-century America. The essays in the first part of this volume particularly explore the “voyage” of writing and how Tocqueville’s distinctive ideas developed and found expression during the composition of Democracy in America, while the essays in the second part explore the “voyage” of Tocquevillian ideas beyond a nineteenth-century Franco-American context.
Early chapters by James Schleifer and Jeremy Jennings particularly touch on the question of what Tocqueville learned in the United States. Jennings reminds us that the travel notebooks and drafts allow readers to glimpse, for the first time, how Tocqueville distilled the sundry impressions of his American voyage into the key themes of Democracy in America, especially the significance and extent of equality of conditions; the unceasing movement and rapid pace of change throughout American society; the importance of mores, self-interest, and religion; and the various mechanisms and “habits” for moderating democracy and preserving liberty in an age of equality. Jennings also uses the new material presented in the historical-critical edition to rebut the charge that Tocqueville had made up his mind about America before
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he arrived, arguing that “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.”2
Schleifer’s chapter, too, helps us see how the journey itself shaped Tocqueville’s thought and how Tocqueville’s ideas took form during his sojourn in the United States and during the process of drafting Democracy in America. Schleifer particularly focuses on the development of Tocqueville’s thought about what he considered the greatest dangers to democracy: materialism, individualism, and above all, consolidation of power and the “chilling new form” of soft despotism accompanying administrative centralization. Schleifer also analyzes the various arts and institutions of liberty, as well as the habits and mores that Tocqueville believed supportive to a free society, and he develops the idea that part of Tocqueville’s distinctiveness lies in his use of specifically democratic remedies for the problems unique to democratic times.
Through the historical-critical edition, we also learn of Tocqueville’s care in drafting Democracy in America and of the multiple layers behind the printed text. Many of the essays in this volume touch on this topic, showing how various aspects of the final text were modified in the process of writing. Eduardo Nolla’s chapter, for example, offers evidence of Tocqueville’s assiduousness in crafting a message that would be palatable to his audience, showing us how the manuscript’s more democratic message is moderated with an eye to its intended French audience. S. J. D. Green, too, reminds us of Democracy in America’s meticulous craftsmanship, noting that “[t]ime and again, careful perusal of the Nolla edition establishes how concepts, even case studies, apparently new to the second volume actually appear half and even fully formulated in the notes and drafts deployed for the earlier study.”3
The historical-critical edition thus allows us to see also a more figurative sense of voyage, an intellectual one, as Tocqueville’s ideas begin to take shape and the text emerges on the page. The present volume explores the idea of voyage in this sense as well, with chapters investigating Tocqueville’s complex relationship to his primary intellectual
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influences—particularly Montesquieu, Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and to a certain extent, François Guizot—and the development of Tocqueville’s own independent ideas from this intellectual formation and from his American journey. Essays by Nolla, James Ceaser, Catherine Zuckert, and Alan Kahan confront this question of influences perhaps most directly. Ceaser particularly finds Montesquieuian roots to Tocqueville’s thought, most notably in Tocqueville’s deployment of a “Customary History,” which allows philosophic ideas to enter indirectly into political life. Zuckert, too, cites the influences especially of Montesquieu and Rousseau, but her essay focuses
