lessons beyond France and America are indeed Welch’s primary focus, and her essay allows us to see how Tocqueville’s voyage to America remained with him after publication of Democracy in America and how the ideas developed during his American voyage and during the crafting of Democracy in America shaped his thinking about French involvement in Algeria. Welch’s analysis of Tocqueville’s writings and speeches on Algeria invites us to consider the limits within which Tocqueville endorsed imperialism and, thus, the possible limits of his own liberalism, particularly when confronted with the realities of the French political landscape of his day.
Each of the essays on the “Three Races” reminds us of how the ideas Tocqueville developed in Democracy in America continued to influence his thought and writings after his American experience. Situated at the division on the cusp of the first and second parts of this volume, these three chapters serve something of a transitional purpose between the first part’s exploration of Tocqueville as a literal and intellectual voyager, and the second part’s investigations of the “voyage” or application of Tocquevillian ideas beyond their immediate context of nineteenth-century America and France. If the essays in the first part of this volume touch on the development of Tocqueville’s thought and on his indebtedness to a variety of intellectual sources, those in the second part of this volume focus on how we are indebted to him today, or the contemporary legacy of Tocquevillian ideas as they have been disseminated throughout the world.
The chapters composing part two of this volume—those by Enrique Aguilar, Aurelian Craiutu, Reiji Matsumoto, and Filippo Sabetti—thus explore Tocqueville’s voyage beyond the United States and France, by investigating the application of Tocquevillian modes and concepts to contexts in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Aguilar takes his point of departure from Tocqueville’s well-known awareness of the importance of mores to sustain political institutions and laws. Articulated with statements like “I am persuaded that the most fortunate situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of mores, while the latter still turn to good account the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws,” the importance of mores is
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a crucial aspect of Tocqueville’s thought. Yet the historical-critical edition reminds us of the reciprocal influence laws and mores exert upon each other, for in a fragment that was not included in Tocqueville’s final text, he observes, “Laws, however, work toward producing the spirit, the mores and the character of the people,” then musing, “But in what proportion? There is the great problem that we cannot think too much about.”11 Working within this context of reciprocity between laws and mores, Aguilar considers whether Argentina’s present disorders are primarily due to national mores, or to political leaders’ abuses. He argues that the more political signs of disorder, such as the corruption of governmental officials, are but one manifestation of widespread societal movements. Moreover, he notes parallels between Tocqueville’s soft despotism and the tutelary state that has arisen in contemporary Argentina, and he suggests that any reforms that hope to find success in Argentina must engage on both legal and extra-legal levels, and that they must seek above all to generate “consensus and habits related to free institutions.”12
Craiutu’s chapter also emphasizes the importance of mores for a postcommunist Eastern Europe, because, as he observes, Tocqueville invites us to explore whether democracy can first be implanted into the political sphere, then “transplanted” into society’s mores. He finds Tocqueville a particularly apt guide for understanding contemporary Eastern Europe, because of the similarities between that region’s present and those faced by Tocqueville’s France after the end of the Old Regime: in particular, both the France about which Tocqueville wrote and the countries of present-day Eastern Europe are societies struggling with the legacy of an “old regime” as they transition to democracy and attempt to create and strengthen institutions and culture supportive of a free society. In addition to offering Tocquevillian warnings about possible dangers—including soft despotism springing from citizens’ senses of isolation and atomization—Craiutu offers a range of prescriptions for that region’s countries, stressing particularly Tocquevillian concepts such as civil society, social capital, the art of association, local government, and intermediary bodies.
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Like the explorations of Tocquevillian ideas and methods in nineteenth-century and contemporary Italy we find in Sabetti’s chapter, Matsumoto’s contribution to this volume focuses on Toqueville’s relevance to Japan (a country he neither visited nor wrote about), during the period of the Meiji Revolution (1867–1868) and today. Matsumoto traces the manner in which some of Democracy in America’s key ideas, such as freedom of the press, individual rights, administrative decentralization, and voluntary associations, entered into the debates about political life in Japan as that country began to transition from a closed society to an open one and as an egalitarian era dawned. Matsumoto’s discussion particularly emphasizes Tocquevillian elements in the thought of one of the period’s key liberals, Fukuzawa Yukichi. The affinities between Fukuzawa’s writings and Tocquevillian themes such as the role of local government to promote a spirit of independence and the dangers of democratic despotism remind us of Tocqueville’s portability beyond a transatlantic context; similarly, Matsumoto’s analysis of contemporary Japan reminds us of these ideas’ continued application beyond their nineteenth-century articulation.
The ideas expressed by Tocqueville in Democracy in America have continued to move beyond their immediate contexts of time and place. Similarly, Tocqueville’s own literal and figurative journeys continued beyond his time in the United States and the writing of Democracy in America. Although Tocqueville did not cross the Atlantic again, the remaining years of his life witnessed him traveling to England, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Algeria. When health or other reasons made travel impossible, he read travel literature, one of his favorite genres, and allowed his imagination to transport him. His intellectual interests and output continued beyond Democracy in America as well, and his post–Democracy in America writings reflect his interest in France, Algeria, and England, as well as his continued engagement with America and his desire to know more about other countries to which he would not journey, like China.
Yet the voyage to the United States remained with Tocqueville always, for it had marked him deeply. On a personal level, he continued to find it a touchstone, returning frequently to his memories of his time in America and its lessons, corresponding with his American friends
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until the end of his life, and calling himself “half Yankee” or “half an American citizen.”13 Intellectually, he also continued to draw upon the approach he had developed there, particularly the paired comparisons and contrasts characteristic of his analytic method, and the essential categories and conceptual framework of his philosophic mode.
This volume invites the reader to continue Tocqueville’s journeys, considering not only what he discovered in the United States and how he developed his ideas during the process of composing Democracy in America but also how the lessons of America have been and might be carried beyond their immediate contexts of time and place.
If travel is—as Michel de Montaigne suggests and as Tocqueville certainly found his American voyage to be—a means of honing our judgment and of clarifying our vision of ourselves and the world, let our journeys begin.
Christine Dunn Henderson
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Symbols Used in the Liberty Fund Edition of Democracy in America1
| […] | Text not crossed out in the manuscript. |
| <…> | Text circled or surrounded in pen (this generally concerns fragments that Tocqueville wanted to delete, but the presence of a circle around a word sometimes served solely to draw the author’s attention: Is the use pertinent? Does the
|
