7
Democracy in America

When Alexis de Tocqueville went to America—in 1831—he was twenty-five years old. A disenchanted jurist, he embarked on a journey to study the characteristics of the American penitentiary system. In reality, however, he was interested in the functioning of democracy. Later, he wrote about many other things—about the French prison system, the political dangers of equality, the French Revolution, colonial expansion, and the revolution of 1848—but he is known today mostly for his first book, Democracy in America . Read and reread by countless students of the American system, Democracy is a model of political writing and makes part of a canon. Tocqueville's intellectual alertness, as if in imitation of the American "free circulation of things and ideas" (1: 167), makes his analysis active, mobile, and undogmatic, always following new openings and probing the limits of the visible. There is nothing capricious about it, however: he operates through "pairs in tension" (to use James Schleifer's formulation), and his analysis is held within the boundaries of binary divisions leading to further division, comparisons, and definitions.^[1] The aristocratic system of government is opposed to the democratic; within the latter, the possibilities of freedom are measured against the dangers of tyranny; the relationship of equality to freedom is then debated; an appraisal of the workings of American democracy

[1] "It was the idea of right that enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny," he writes in one typical instance. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, the Henry Reeve text rev. by Francis Bowen (New York: Knopf, 1945), 1: 244. Translations are sometimes made more literal.

shows the working of the safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Each of the divisions is pursued as long as is necessary to exhaust its ramifications; all lead back to the New World. This movement reflects the major image that Tocqueville sees before his eyes: that of the unstoppable march of equality. His thought attempts to follow that march with matching energy and determination.

In describing Tocqueville's method, I use the words "visible" and "sees" very deliberately: to see, to look, and to perceive are Tocqueville's three most common verbs in describing his cognitive attitude to America. He uses them extremely frequently both in their literal and metaphorical sense. "Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly [frappé mes regards] than the general equality of the condition of the people," he wrote in the first sentence of the introduction.^[2] "However sudden and momentous the events which have just been accomplished before our very eyes [viennent de s'accomplir sous nos yeux], the author of this book has a right to say that they have not taken him by surprise," he writes in the famous 1848 introduction to the twelfth edition (1: cx). And the text proper opens with a sweeping first sentence also alluding to eyes and to visual perception: "North America presents in its external form certain general features which it is easy to distinguish at the first glance [au premier coup d'oeil]" (1: 17). These first sentences are not casual: verbs denoting seeing are Tocqueville's way of writing about his intellectual discovery of the American system of government.

What he sees in Democracy in America —"homme de tête" that he was—he sees with "les yeux de la tête" (to use Stendhal's phrase).^[3] America presents herself to him as a "spectacle" that attracts his attention ("attire, frappe ses regards"). In his description of the exterior form of North America, he sees her beauty in symmetry, in "a sort of methodical order [that] seems to have regulated the separation of land and water, mountains and valleys" (1: 17). Symmetry, then, is not only a characteristic of his thinking, it also characterizes the beauty to which he aspires. The beautiful objects he sees in America are of the ideal order, and the most beautiful among them is the Constitution—that "fine creation of human industry" (1: 167). The consistent use of "voir" and of its many synonyms in Democracy in America ("percevoir," "aperce-

[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1: 3.

[3] He wrote the first two volumes sustaining, as he said in a letter, an "existence toute de tête" for very long periods of time. See James Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 17).

voir," "reconnaître," "jetter un coup d'oeil") expresses the empirical nature of his thinking—the fact that it is a reaction and response to reality rather than a purely intellectual enterprise. Yet, his intense and open reaction to America was singularly predetermined, and he looked for answers to the questions he brought with himself from France.

Tocqueville displayed extraordinary energy during his American trip: he was working intensely, thinking, talking, and writing about what he saw. His notebooks show that many of the ideas in Democracy in America were conceived en route there, and some of them may have been brought to America ready-made. "Tocqueville is an extreme example of an intellectual who never 'learned' anything outside of the conceptual framework that he had developed beforehand."^[4] It was his "feeling of the irreversible march of history," shared with the generations marked by the French Revolution, that made his encounter with the "New World" so astonishingly fruitful.

For the French historian François Furet, Tocqueville's thought is one long meditation on the nobility. "Tocqueville posited as an axiom, or a self-evident truth, that mankind was moving in great strides toward the age of democracy. This conclusion was not the outcome of a systematic inquiry; it was merely the abstract expression—in keeping with the nature of Tocqueville's genius—of the actual experience of Tocqueville and his milieu" (Furet 1984, 17).^[5] In fact, Tocqueville saw the democracy of America as a negation of France—France was the underlying measure for all his comparisons. Although equality was marching forward in both countries, in France it was hampered by old and degenerate institutions, whereas America faced no such obstacles. America was first described—and this is particularly noticeable in his travel notes—in terms of absence. There was no bureaucratic government there, no capital like Paris; power was not embodied in a king or in a "prefect"; the class structure was different: there was no aristocracy and no peasantry, and therefore no violent resentments that characterized France during the late "Old Régime." Politics as understood in France was absent in America: there were no parties, no ideologues, no revolutionary spirit. America's positive aspects were also a negation of France: unlike diversified France, America was a country of uniformity, of the

[4] François Furet, "The Conceptual System of Democracy in America, " in In the Workshop of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 167–196; 169.

[5] See also the chapter "Tocqueville's Aristocratic Heritage" in Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 169–172.

widespread education so necessary for democracy, of widespread participation in social life. France was an aristocratic society, and America was not.

Tocqueville circumvented the rigidity of the binary system by continuously introducing third elements. England was also an aristocratic society, but very much unlike France; Tocqueville often compared America to England and other societies. The comparisons were never final, and the "destabilization" of the "pairs" saved Democracy in America from becoming a system, which Tocqueville would have abhorred. Unlike many of his contemporaries—Marx, Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon—he escaped the temptation to encapsulate human history in a formula.^[6] The march of equality is irresistible, but the shape it takes in practice depends on human effort. He was deeply pessimistic and thought that the human mind and understanding are limited; but there was always a margin for the inexplicable in human life and activity, and human free will permitted history to rebel against systems. This is why he insisted that what he wrote was the result of observation, and the verb "to see" allowed him to express this particularity of his position. He was "essentially practical in all his intellectual meditations," Beaumont wrote about him (as always, very perceptively), "he thought of the past only from the perspective of the present, and of foreign peoples only with his own country in mind" (Beaumont 1897, 13). Being capable of sight, he was also capable of foresight.

Democracy in America, as its title indicates, is a book about the workings of democracy in general and about the democratic system of government in the United States of America in particular. The first two volumes (1835) stay close to the American experience. In these, Tocqueville discusses various aspects of the social condition of the Americans, including the Constitution, associations, newspapers, geography, government, and the parties. He pays attention to the role of religion and the family, to "manners," and to the relationship between the races. (These last subjects were also treated by Beaumont in his companion text to Democracy in America, the novel Marie or Slavery in the United States, published also in 1835.) In the following two volumes, finished eight years after the American voyage, he felt free to detach himself

[6] "I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations" (Democracy, 2: 334).

more from the particularities of American society. Democracy was not a uniquely American system, and its shape had to be different in other countries; in the second part, therefore, the comparison of various countries and systems is wider and more general, with long reflections on democracy in France and the aristocratic system in England. This volume is "more about democracy, and less about America," Tocqueville wrote in a letter. It ends, as it began, with Tocqueville seeing a great panorama, but this time it is not a panorama of America but of humanity itself:

For myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, I am full of apprehensions and of hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off, mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, they require but to will it. . . . Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness. (2: 334)

This soaring ending does not come unexpectedly. It is the result of a long and strenuous climb, a march or a race (course ), to use Tocqueville's terms. In the last part of his work, he reiterates many of the images and metaphors that reappear consistently throughout his work and reflect his emotional vision of America. As he attempted to see the general image of the society he described in four volumes, he was "stopped by the difficulty of the task" which caused his "sight" to be "troubled" and his "reason" to "fail." What he sees in front of his eyes is chaos: "The world that is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world that is waning into decay" (1: 331). It is striking to find this image at the very end of what for the most part has been a sustained and rigorous analysis. And yet this image of America predated Tocqueville's analysis and, as I will show, even his visit. It was an image that the analysis lacked the power to dispel. It is an America of chaos, of debris, of life-in-death which haunts Tocqueville's book—an America of exile, of forests, America as a forest; prerational, nonrational, and yet present throughout his work. To discover its origins, we must return to Chateaubriand.