Democracy in America: A First Look
I’m experimenting with quick, mid-reading posts.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Alexis de Tocqueville was just 26 when he and a coworker visited America to study its prison system. His quest, as it turns out, was far broader: to understand democracy in America as a case study for what he expected to happen in France and beyond.
What surprises me most about Democracy in America is its charm. Like Montaigne or Plutarch, Tocqueville wears his erudition and incisive power lightly, without dryness or pedantry.
He’s a man of faith who claims to see God’s hand in the workings of history, and democracy as a sort of manifestation of God. This idealism doesn’t get in the way of keen observation. Like Thucydides, Tocqueville assures us that his information comes “informed men” as well as primary sources, although he declines to say who.
Here the reader must necessarily rely upon my word. I could frequently have cited names which either are known to him or deserve to be so in support of my assertions; but I have carefully abstained from this practice. A stranger frequently hears important truths at the fireside, which the latter would perhaps conceal from the ear of friendship.
Such a gentleman! And if he contradicts himself, then let him contradict himself. He asks us to judge his work on its cumulative effect rather than isolated arguments. His free-flowing generalizations — and it’s almost all abstract generalization — are eminently quotable, plausible, and prophetic. A few from the early chapters:
- In colonial America, religion was not an imposed authority but a democratizing force that encouraged public education because of the Protestant(?) belief that worshippers should be able to read the Bible for themselves.
- Aristocracy is based on land ownership, so that hierarchies that existed in Europe didn’t carry over when everyone had to work their own land and suffer together.
- Although Puritan codes seem overly strict and authoritarian, they were agreed upon by the community itself through a democratic process. (He dryly quotes a Puritan court sentence on a young woman “who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed.”) Here we get a first taste of what will be a major theme of his treatise: the potentially dangerous tyranny of the majority.
Tocqueville might be expected to be skeptical of democracy. His noble family had felt the brunt of the democratizing French Revolution; his parents had narrowly escaped the guillotine and were exiled to England. Still, he’s not here to blame or praise, but to analyze.
His generalizations seem plausible enough to the lay reader, but as editor Richard Heffner points out, they’re not without fault. Tocqueville thought the power of the president was fairly negligible, even though Jackson was in fact strengthening it; and he thought that state loyalties would trump national ones, although he visited before the advent of railroads, telephone and telegraphs, which strengthened a sense of national identity. He is, however, quite prophetic about the Civil War, and even about the rise of Russia as a world power. Other reminders of the Cold War surface in Heffner’s introduction, which was written in the early 1950s. He claims the book remains relevant for “free people everywhere.”
Its relevance to me is mainly cultural: how democracy affects culture and the institutions that shape it.
