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Tocqueville faces, consequently, his object as if struggling against a complex and multifaceted mystery. Hidden laws, secret instincts, veiled41 relations people the pages of both his drafts and his notes, and the final printed version of the work.
Without the aim of being exhaustive or repetitive in the enunciation of the many underground processes found in the book, the reader can find the following many different mysteries.
To begin with, God’s grand designs are secret to common man. Chance is the form under which God’s hidden will42 appears to the immense majority of mortals. Only the extraordinary mind of a Pascal could “have been able to summon up, as he did, all the powers of his intelligence to reveal more clearly the most hidden secrets of the Creator.”43 We do know that Providence has the secret design to divide the world between America and Russia44 and that the movement toward equality is also divinely inspired.
If God’s projects are inscrutable, so are events to come. The future is, according to Tocqueville, a hiding place for human will,45 for the
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passions of the New World,46 for the results of the American population moving toward the West,47 for the forces secretly gathering in New England48 or the American forests,49 as well as for the unstoppable power of the majority.50
When we descend to the study of democratic society, we find ourselves in the midst of multiple invisible processes. Originally, national character is defined as an unseen force that struggles against time.51 Aristocracy and democracy are themselves secret tendencies to be found under all political parties.52 The benefits of democracy are initially hidden and will only be discovered after the passage of time.53 It is also an unnoticed tendency that brings democracies toward prosperity.54
Furtive affinities exist between the Native Americans and the
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French,55 as between liberty and industry,56 or, mistakenly, between equality and revolution.57 Surreptitious connections also exist between military mores and democratic mores,58 democratic ideas and pantheism,59 material enjoyment and restlessness,60 and equality and servitude.61
Secret or hidden instincts abound among political factions,62 majorities,63 the human heart,64 democratic governments,65 French
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democracy,66 the lower classes,67 political bodies,68 religious men,69 or democratic citizens.70
Even while traveling through the wilderness, among hidden streams71 and animals concealed in the woodland,72 to the author of Democracy the noises of the American wilderness sound as a “secret warning from God.”73
It is not surprising then that, for the Frenchman, one of the traits that best defines democracies is that these underground processes are much more complex and difficult to comprehend than in all previous forms of society.
I am very persuaded that, among democratic nations themselves, the genius, the vices or the virtues of certain individuals delay or precipitate the natural course of the destiny of the people; but these sorts of fortuitous and secondary causes are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complicated, less powerful, and consequently more difficult to disentangle and to trace in times of equality than in the centuries of aristocracy, when it is only a matter of analyzing, amid general facts, the particular action of a single man or of a few men.74
It is typical that authors of mystery novels present their cases to the reader as the most difficult and complicated ever. Tocqueville places
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himself avant la lettre in the position of the detective who will solve the tangle of democratic obscure secrets and concealments.
I have yet to make known by what paths this power, which dominates the laws, proceeds; what its instincts, its passions are; what secret motivating forces push, slow or direct it in its irresistible march; what effects its omnipotence produces, and what future is reserved for it.75
Similarly, the end of a liberal form of government, which is the objective of Tocqueville’s project, is also linked to the discovery of the secrecy of self-sufficiency.
So the government [v. social power], even when it lends its support to individuals, must never discharge them entirely from the trouble of helping themselves by uniting; often it must deny them its help in order to let them find the secret of being self-sufficient, and it must withdraw its hand as they better understand the art of doing so.76
At almost the very end of his book, Tocqueville explains what would have been his existence if he had not written Democracy in America.
I would not have written the work that you have just read; I would have limited myself to bemoaning in secret the destiny of my fellow men.77
Secrets, once more.
Basic Colors
It is easy to understand why many trappings of Democracy were kept hidden from the reader. Authors don’t want their public to see their thought processes, only the final result.
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But the meanderings of the mind and pen offer a unique opportunity to better understand the intentions and success of an author as complex as Tocqueville himself. I would like to point out in the next pages some of those hidden elements that never made it to the printed version.
Given the wealth of materials available to researchers, I will concentrate myself exclusively in some curious or outstanding texts from the working manuscript. I will make no references to any additional materials from the drafts, notes, letters, or the famous Rubish.
Tocqueville was aware of the newness of his project and recurrently struggled to find the language and words appropriate to this new endeavor. His new science of politics needed a new name. Democratic despotism was qualified as “soft” in the absence of a better word. Individualism was a neologism he knowingly used. His manuscript reveals these and other frequent quarrels with the written word.78
Problems with words and terminology concern expressions such as social state, mores, sovereignty, tolerant, rationalism, individualism, sympathy, courtesy, civility, honor, patrie, vulgar, industrial, civil rights, despotism, democracy, or settlers.
In writing about the positions becoming an industry, for instance, Tocqueville initially wrote: “Citizens, losing hope of improving their lot by themselves, rush tumultuously toward the power of the State.” A note in the margin reads: “<I do not like this word ‘power,’ vague and new.>”79 The final version will substitute the word “power” by the word “head.”
Writing on poetry, he observes: “≠To idealize [idéaliser] isn’t French. Try to find an equivalent or, in any case, only put it in italics.≠”80 The word appears also in his drafts but will not be in the printed version.
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In the margin of one page we read: “≠Tolerant indicates a virtue. A word would be needed that indicates the interested and necessary toleration of a man who needs others.≠”81
But most of Tocqueville’s problems will come from the need to use neologisms for new social or political phenomena. “≠The thing is
