Alexis de Tocqueville was an amazing man. In a mere nine months he
traveled the length and breadth of the United States of the 1830's and
came to understand it better than most citizens who live in the US
their whole lives. He expressed his understanding in the two volume
work Democracy in America.
Tocqueville's self-chosen mission was to examine the institutions
of democracy in America and determine what, if anything, could be
applied in his homeland. He was a well-educated French aristocrat
with a long family tradition who had extensively studied the
philosophic and political science writings of his day. He came to
America with a keen mind and a keen eye for the practical details of
American institutions.
Democracy in America turned out to be more than a treatise
on American institutions, however. In the end, Tocqueville came to
understand what made America and Americans work. He understood
America's roots, values and soul. He by no means liked everything he
saw - some features of America he found dangerous, even ominous, and
some he found wondrous. He wasn't afraid to make predictions and,
more than any of his contemporaries, his predictions came true.
The Poor Lawmakers
One of the first observations that Tocqueville makes in the book is
that, in America, "it is the poor who make the law, and they
habitually reserve for themselves the greatest advantages of society."
(pp.45) (page numbers, by the way, refer to the edition described at the
bottom of the writeup) At first, to modern Americans, this seems
absurd. Everyone knows that the rich have always had the greatest
influence on the making of laws and have always had the advantages.
Tocqueville was a little too perspicacious to fall into this
superficial way of thinking:
Now, it is certain that so far, in all the nations of the
world, the greatest number has always been composed of those who did
not have property, or of those whose property was too restricted for
them to be able to live in ease without working. Therefore universal
suffrage really gives the government of society to the poor. (pp.201)
Now people today may not be considered "
poor" if they have to continue
to work for a living, but almost everyone would agree that someone who
does
not have to work for a living is certainly
rich.
Tocqueville lived before the rise of the great American middle class
(although he saw it coming, saying that as more people in America
became
property owners, it would be harder for them to avoid "striking
themselves with the tax they establish" (pp.201))
To prove that his statement is still true today, one need look no
further than the US government's greatest impact on society: the
Federal Income Tax. If the rich really were in charge, why would
their taxes be enormously higher than everyone else's? What better
sign that the poor are really in charge (in terms of number of votes)
than the fact that they have managed to establish a tax code that puts
the burden on everyone else? Tocqueville even saw this one coming,
"the government of democracy is the only one in which he who votes the
tax can escape the obligation to pay it." (pp.201)
Lastly, Tocqueville saw an interesting social phenomenon in the US
that is even more true today than it was then: a distrust of the rich.
The rich had an elevated position in old Europe and, indeed, almost
everywhere else in the world. In the US, however:
In the United States, the people have no hatred for the
elevated classes of society; but they feel little good will for them
and carefully keep them out of power; they do not fear great talents,
but they have little taste for them.
Today, of course, there is little left of the "
elevated classes",
you're either a
celebrity or one of the masses, with the very rich
considered celebrities whether they like it or not. And it's still
true that while being of the "elevated classes" may make someone the
object of public fascination, it doesn't mean that the masses want
them as their political leader (see "Associations" below, however).
Commerce
Tocqueville was at first amazed at the extent to which free people
would turn their focus to commerce. He found the American pursuit of
wealth to be both disturbing and fascinating. He was also intrigued
by the economic mobility of Americans. The poor sometimes became rich
over night and the rich were apt to fall into poverty without warning.
...I know of no country where the love of money holds a
larger place in the heart of man and where they profess a more
profound scorn for the theory of the permanent equality of goods. But
fortune turns here with incredible rapidity and experience teaches
that it is rare to see two generations collect its favors. (pp.50)
He was fascinated by the way Americans held not just the pursuit of
wealth, but the very idea of success itself in such high regard. He
said, "I cannot express my thought better than by saying that the
Americans put a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce
(pp.387)" and "they love success more than glory (pp.603)". While he found
this drive towards commerce somewhat distasteful, he found the
subsequent economic mobility of the citizens to be a
leveling force
within society.
...if the principal object of a government, according to
you, is not to give the most force or the most glory possible to the
entire body of the nation, but to procure the most well-being for each
of the individuals who compose it and to have each avoid the most
misery, then equalize conditions and constitute the government of a
democracy.(pp.235)
Tocqueville came to completely understand that democracy frees people
to do the one thing that they desire above all else: make their life
better. Freed of
tyranny and
strife, people naturally begin to work
towards improving their lot. The commercial strivings of the
Americans were nothing more than human nature allowed out of the
cage
of oppression:
All that he (the American) demands of the state is that it
not come to trouble him in his labors, and that it assure him the
fruits of them.(pp.604)
Associations
Tocqueville was amazed at the degree with which Americans took the
running of their society into their own hands. These days, Americans
may be so used to this facet of American life that they think it has
always the way. Tocqueville's reaction shows that this was something
new, an unexpected side-effect of democracy:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds
constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial
associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand
other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very
particular, immense and small; Americans use associations to give
fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to
distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes in this
manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally if it is a
question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with
the support of a great example, the associate. Everywhere that, at
the head of a new undertaking, you see the government of France and a
great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an
association in the United States. (pp.489)
These associations, to Tocqueville, were a replacement for the great
leaders in an aristocracy. He says, "In democratic peoples,
associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons
whom equality of conditions has made disapear. (pp.492)" It is
interesting to think of this in today's American society, where
celebrities constantly lend their names to
good causes. My guess is
that Tocqueville was shrewd enough to know the difference between
celebrity and power. On the other hand, perhaps the modern day cult
of celebrity is just a modern extension of what Tocqueville called the
"mother science", which is the "science of association" (pp.492).
Tyranny of the Majority
Tocqueville was not overly impressed with the intelligence of the
average person. It's not that he thought they were stupid, but that
they were clearly not geniuses. Given this, he found the idea of
majority rule inefficient and at least capable of tyranny.
It is ... as difficult to conceive of a society in which
all men are very enlightened as of a state in which all citizens are
rich... I shall have no trouble admitting that the mass of citizens
very sincerely wants the good of the country; I even go further and
say that the lower classes of society seem to me generally to mix
fewer combinations of personal interest with this desire than do the
elevated classes; but what they always seem to lack, more or less, is
the art of judging the means, even while sincerely wishing the
end.
Here, he has said a mouthful. To be
sincere in a desire is far cry
from knowing the best
means to achieve it. Just because the majority
in the US wants something good and just, there is no guarantee that
they know the best way to make it happen.
The US Government had full powers over its people and Tocqueville
found this dangerous. With nothing to check governmental power, the
majority could do anything and no citizen would have recourse to any
other body than the government, which is made up of the votes of the
majority.
When a man or party suffers from an injustice in the
United States, whom do you want him to address? Public opinion? that
is what forms the majority; the legislative body? it represents the
majority and obeys it blindly; the executive power? it is named by the
majority and serves as its passive instrument; the public forces? the
public forces are nothing other than the majority in arms; the jury?
the jury is the majority vested with the right to pronounce decrees;
in certain states, the judges themselves are elected by the majority.
Therefore, however iniquitous or unreasonable is the measure that
strikes you, you must submit to it. (pp.241)
I can imagine today's
war protesters reading this with some
satisfaction. The majority has created for them a tyranny they can't
escape. On the other hand, it's possible that Tocqueville
underestimated the Bill of Rights. In his eyes, the
Bill of Rights
was subject to Amendment, so represented no permanent check on
governmental power. In practice, however, it has turned out to be
extremely hard to make fundamental changes to these checks on
government power. It takes more than a simple majority to make
changes to the Bill of Rights (or the Constitution in general); it
takes an overwhelming national will. Our most recent Amendment, for
example, was proposed by James Madison in 1789 and only passed in 1992
(the 27th, which bars congress from granting its members pay raises in
the middle of terms). It took the lives of hundreds of thousands of
Americans in the
Civil War to pass the
13th Amendment.
Race Relations
Tocqueville saw race relations as a grave danger to the United
States. Writing in the 1830's, he was one of the first voices to
speak out about the dangers of American slavery and the plight of the
Native Americans. While the Native Americans had, in a sense,
complete freedom (including the freedom to die of starvation or
privation) and the Black slaves had zero freedom; he saw their plights
as similar:
The Negro is laced at the ultimate bounds of servitude;
the Indian at the extreme limits of freedom. Slavery scarcely
produces more fatal effects in the first than does independence in the
second. (pp.305)
Interestingly, Tocqueville saw the
North as being more prejudiced
against the
Black man than the
South. In the South, the white man had
little to fear from the Black man, but in the North he had constantly
to worry that the Black man might become his equal:
In the South, the master does not fear lifting his slave
up to himself because he knows that he will always be able, if he
wishes, to throw him back into the dust. In the North, the white no
longer perceives distinctly the barrier that will separate him from a
debased race, and he draws back from the Negro with all the more care
since he fears one day being intermingled with him. (pp.329)
While Tocqueville certainly considered slavery immoral, his real
concern was for its effect on the society, white and black, in the US.
He saw slavery as bad, even for the masters, and worse for the slaves.
He knew that even freeing the slaves would not be enough to solve the
problem. Americans would have to either free themselves from
racial
prejudice or ship the Black man away:
Leaving the Negro in servitude, one can keep him in a
state bordering on that of a brute; free, one cannot prevent him from
instructing himself enough to appreciate the extent of his ills and to
glimpse a remedy for them... From the moment that whites and
emancipated Negroes have been placed on the same soil as peoples
foreign to one another, one will understand without difficulty that
there are no more than two choices for the future: Negroes and whites
must intermingle entirely or separate. (pp.341)
He didn't think the "intermingle entirely" choice had any chance at
all.
Religion
People of present day America can't really think about religion and
democracy together in the same sentence. We've been conditioned for
decades to keep the two separate. Tocqueville had no such
conditioning, however, so he could freely ponder the relationship. He
saw a great benefit to democracy from religious morality. As shown
above, Tocqueville was distinctly worried about the fact that
democracy in the US had placed complete power in the hands of its
people. One possible help for this, he thought, was religious
morality:
...at the same time that the law permits the American
people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving
everything and forbids them to dare everything. (pp.280)
Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot.
He also saw religion as a brake on human nature's love of "
material
enjoyments", saying "The greatest advantage of religions is to inspire
wholly contrary instincts." (pp.419)
Tocqueville also believed that the Christian faiths were destined
to live on in American life. While he was aware that not everyone who
lived by Christian values, he saw those values so permeating society
that some Americans would pretend to be believers because "they were
afraid of not looking like they believe them." (pp.279) He even
contrasted Christianity with Islam (in yet another of his stunningly
prescient pronouncements), noting that a religion that is to serve as
the moral basis for government needs to restrict itself to moral codes
only:
Mohammed had not only religious doctrines descend from
Heaven and placed in the Koran, but political maxims, civil and
criminal laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, in contrast,
speak only of the general relations of men to God and among
themselves. Outside of that they teach nothing and oblige nothing to
be believed. That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to
show that the first of these two religions cannot dominate for long in
enlightened and democratic times, whereas the second is destined to
reign in these centuries as in all the others. (pp.419)
Argue among yourselves about the possibility that Islam has "dominated"
for "long" in "
enlightened and democratic times"; it seems clear that
fundamental
Islam and democracy are not natural bedfellows.
Lastly, Tocqueville felt that the separation of church and state
was more important for the church than the state and he felt that
supporting the authority of religion with government power was a fools
errand:
I do not believe in the prosperity any more than the
longevity of official philosophies, and as for state religions, I have
always thought that if sometimes they could temporarily serve the
interests of political power, they would always sooner or later become
fatal to the Church.
Nor am I in the number of those who judge
that to elevate religion in the eyes of peoples and to put the
spiritualism that it professes in honor, it is good to give its
ministers indirectly a political influence that the law refuses
them.
I feel myself so sensitive to the almost inevitable
dangers that beliefs risk when their interpreters mix in public
affairs, and I am so convinced that one must maintain Christianity
within the new democracies at all cost, that I would rather chain
priests in the sanctuary than allow them to leave it. (pp.521)
To solve this quandary of keeping religion in everyday mores and the
moral compasses of government officials without polluting the church
or the government by associating them closely together, Tocqueville
offers this:
I believe that the only efficacious means governments can
use to put the dogma of the immortality of the soul in honor is to act
every day as if they themselves believed it; and I think it is only in
conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that
they can flatter themselves they are teaching citizens to know it,
love it, and respect it in small ones. (pp.521)
Think about this - and the fact that almost all
Presidents have read
Tocqueville - next time you listen to a speech that brings religious
morality into government action.
Predictions
Tocqueville wasn't afraid to make predictions. He seemed certain of
most of them:
- (predicting almost exactly the future growth of America)
Before a hundred years have passed, I think that the territory
occupied or claimed by the United States will be covered by more than
a hundred million inhabitants and divided into forty states. (pp.362)
- (speaking about that other great people, the Russians, and
predicting, in a way, the cold war) The American struggles against the
obstacles that nature opposes to him; the Russian grapples with men.
The one combats the wilderness and barbarism, the other, civilization
vested with all its arms: thus the conquests of the American are made
with the plowshare of the laborer, those of the Russian with the sword
of a soldier.
To attain his goal, the first relies on a
personal interest and allows the force and reason of individuals to
act, without directing them. The second in a way concentrates all the
power of society in one man.
The one has freedom for his
principal means of action; the other servitude.
Their point of
departure is different, their ways are diverse; nonetheless, each of
them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold the
destinies of half the world in its hands one day. (pp.396)
- (predicting the strife of the industrial revolution) I showed in a
previous chapter how aristocracy, driven out of political society, had
withdrawn into certain parts of the industrial world and established
its empire there in another form. (pp.556)
- (on the pace of change in democratic times) It therefore seems
natural to believe that in a democratic society, ideas, things, and men
must change forms and places eternally and that democratic centuries
will be times of rapid and incessant transformations. (pp.607)
- (about the effects of abolition) If one absolutely had to forsee
the future, I would say that, following the probable course of things,
that the abolition of slavery in the South will increase the
repugnance for blacks felt by the white population. (pp.343)
- (the future of slavery) ..whatever the efforts of Americans of the
South to preserve slavery, they will not succeed at it forever... It
will cease by deed of the slave or the master. In both cases, one
must expect great misfortunes. (pp.348)
- (predicting the Civil War) The most dreadful of all the evils that
threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of
blacks on its soil. (pp.326)
Tocqueville had a lot more to say on a lot more subjects: Indians, the
dangers of government, the curiosities of American executive power,
taxation, the industrial revolution and so on. Far to much to cover
in detail here. His clarity of vision has kept him relevant for
almost 200 years. He's still often quoted today. Interestingly, by
both political parties. As Mansfield and Winthrop put it in their
introduction:
On the Left he is the philosopher of community and civic
engagement who warns against the appearance of an industrial
aristocracy and against the bourgeois or commercial passion for
material well-being: in sum, he is for democratic citizenship. On the
Right he is quoted for his strictures on "Big Government" and his
liking for decentralized administration, as well as for celebrating
the individual energy and opposing egalitarian excess: he is a
balanced liberal, defending both freedom and moderation.
Indeed, his contribution to the understanding of Democracy and America was unique.
For those of you seeking erudite-sounding sig lines, here is a
sample of Tocqueville quotes:
...parties in the United States as elsewhere feel the need to group
themselves around one man in order to more easily reach the
intelligence of the crowd. They therefore generally make use of the
name of the presidential candidate as a symbol; they personify their
theories in him. (pp.127)
It is therefore permissible to say that in a general manner that
nothing is so contrary to the well-being and freedom of men as great
empires. (pp.151)
To a stranger, almost all the domestic quarrels of Americans at
first appear incomprehensible or puerile, and one does not know if
one ought to take pity on a people that is seriously occupied with
miseries like these or envy it the good fortune of being able to
occupied with them. (pp.170)
When an idea has taken possession of the mind of the American
people, whether it is just or unreasonable, nothing is more difficult
than to root it out. (pp.178)
In the eyes of democracy, government is not a good; it is a
necessary evil. (pp.194)
The people feel much more than they reason; and if the present
evils are great, it is to be feared that they will forget the greater
evils that perhaps await them in case of defeat. (pp.214)
Someone said to me one day in Philadelphia that almost all
crimes in America are caused by the abuse of strong liquor, which
baser people could use at will because it was sold to them at a low
price. (pp.214)
There is nothing more annoying in the habits of life than this
irritable patriotism of the Americans. (pp.227)
I think there is no country in the civilized world where they
are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.
(pp. 403)
Give democratic peoples enlightenment and freedom and leave them
alone. With no trouble they will succeed in taking all the goods from
this world that it can offer; they will perfect each of the useful
arts and render life more comfortable, easier, milder every day; their
social state naturally pushes them in this direction. I do not fear
they will stop. (pp.518)
In the United States women are scarcely praised, but it is shown
daily that they are esteemed. (pp.575)
There are two things that a democratic people will always have
much trouble doing: beginning a war and ending it. (pp.621)
The above quotes are from this very fine edition: Democracy in
America, Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey
C. Masfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, (c) 2000,
ISBN 0-226-80532-8.