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• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Key Terms
• Foreword
• The Manuscripts of Tocqueville
• Some Details Concerning the Present Edition
• Abbreviations and Symbols Used In This Edition
• Note On the Manuscripts
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Editor’s Introduction
• I: Legacies
• II: To Understand the Revolution
• Democracy In America a (1835), Volume I]: Part I
• Introduction a
• Chapter 1: Exterior Configuration of North America
• Chapter 2: Of the Point of Departure and Its Importance For the Future of the Anglo-americans a
• Reasons For Some Singularities That the Laws and Customs B of the Anglo-americans Present
• Chapter 3: Social State of the Anglo-americans
• That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-americans Is to Be Essentially Democratic
• Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-americans
• Chapter 4: Of the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People In America
• Chapter 5: Necessity of Studying What Happens In the Individual States Before Speaking About the Government of the Union a
• Of the Town System In America C
• Town District
• Town Powers In New England
• Of Town Life
• Of Town Spirit In New England
• Of the County In New England
• Of Administration In New England a
• General Ideas On Administration In the United States
• Of the State
• Legislative Power of the State
• Of the Executive Power of the State
• Of the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization In the United States C
• Chapter 6 A: of the Judicial Power In the United States and Its Action On Political Society B
• Other Powers Granted to American Judges
• Chapter 7: Of Political Jurisdiction In the United States Tn 4
• Chapter 8: Of the Federal Constitution
• Historical Background of the Federal Constitution a
• Summary Picture of the Federal Constitution J
• Attributions of the Federal Government
• Federal Powers
• Legislative Powers: R [difference Between the Constitution of the Senate and That of the House of Representatives]
• Another Difference Between the Senate and the House of Representatives W
• Of Executive Power 16
• How the Position of the President of the United States Differs From That of a Constitutional King In France
• Accidental Causes That Can Increase the Influence of the Executive Power
• Why the President of the United States, to Lead Public Affairs, Does Not Need to Have a Majority In the Chambers
• Of the Election of the President
• Mode of Election
• Election Crisis
• Of the Re-election of the President
• Of the Federal Courts 24
• Way of Determining the Jurisdiction Tn 5 of the Federal Courts
• Different Cases of Jurisdiction
• The Federal Courts’ Way of Proceeding
• Elevated Rank That the Supreme Court Occupies Among the Great Powers of the State
• How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the State Constitutions
• What Distinguishes the Federal Constitution of the United States of America From All Other Federal Constitutions
• Of the Advantages of the Federal System In General, and of Its Special Utility For America M
• What Keeps the Federal System From Being Within the Reach of All Peoples; and What Has Allowed the Anglo-americans to Adopt It

II181

To Understand the Revolution

“Since, like Perrin Dandin, I am driven by the desire to judge without the power to do so, I need to keep going.”182 Tocqueville’s identification with the main character of the Plaideurs can probably be shared by an entire generation of judges who, following the revolutions of 1789 and 1830, had to devote themselves to finding a new equilibrium for society. As Ortega remarked, the solution to the political question was above all an eminently personal problem for Tocqueville and his contemporaries.183 Ultras and liberals, 1789 and 1793, aristocracy and democracy, liberty and equality, monarchy and republic, these were so many opposites that required a choice to be made.

In this context, where to place the author of Democracy? The question continues to be asked.184 The intellectual conversation has refined his thought and made his adjectives more nuanced; that does not prevent the labels from remaining very close to those of 1835. Tocqueville is in turn called a conservative, a liberal, a conservative liberal, a liberal conservative, a Burkean conservative, a liberal despite himself, a liberal aristocrat, a strange liberal—in short, the confusion about his work continues.

For it to be otherwise would be difficult. The Democracy, which sets forth as well one of the most fascinating interpretations of the French Revolution ever made, attempts indeed, by using the American “mirror,”185 to create a political philosophy capable of explaining (and producing) revolution and counter-revolution.186

“Placed in the middle of a rapid river,” writes Tocqueville, “we obstinately fix our eyes on some debris that we still see on the bank, while the torrent carries us away and pushes us backward toward the abyss.”187 Amid this dangerous revolutionary turbulence, there is a pressing need to find a path and a bedrock somewhere; and this is what forces the author to seek an explanation for the Revolution from the very first pages of the Democracy.188 If we must await L’Ancien régime et la révolution for Tocqueville to give a fuller and more detailed interpretation of the great historical upheaval, it is no less true that the principal lines of his theory of revolution are already present in the two Democracies.

Tocqueville’s point of view can be somewhat roughly summarized by asserting that for him the French Revolution was neither a true revolution, nor a French revolution.

The Revolution was not a true revolution because authentic revolutions take place at the level of mentalities, ideas, beliefs, habits of the heart, of all the things that, using once again the meaning of the word mores,189 he designates by the term mœurs.190

Every historical change necessarily begins, according to Tocqueville, at the level of ideas. In turn, the latter transform and are transformed by the social and material conditions of a society. These, according to Tocqueville, constitute the social state of a society.191

The social state in turn shapes the political state.193 (Today we would speak about society and state.) This explains why, in France as in the United States,194 the people are sovereign, for if the French do not live in a condition of liberty strictly speaking, they have already learned to think of themselves as equals.195 The material and intellectual conditions of a society modify and are changed by ideas and sentiments; and once the social state has been changed, the legal and political institutions adapt little by little. “In the long run, political society cannot fail to become the expression and the image of civil society.” Sovereignty of the people is born as public opinion.196

That is why the true revolution took place largely before 1789, accelerated by a change that was above all European in nature,197 that began with the Reformation, continued with Bacon and Descartes, and then gave the Enlightenment universal ideas, applicable in all periods and to all parts of the world.

“[The Revolution] was just a violent and rapid process by the aid of which the political state was adapted to the social state, facts to ideas, and laws to mores,”198 Tocqueville will repeat in the Ancien Régime. It was nothing more than the abrupt adaptation of the real to the ideal, or more precisely to an abstract philosophy formed from theories that had not been refined, called into question, or confirmed by political practice.

The Old Regime wanted to ignore social changes and, by preventing the slow adaptation of the political to the social, had created the conditions for its own downfall. The revolutionaries, removed from the political practice that would have led them to test and adapt their theories to the material and social circumstances of France, tried for their part to make the legal and political world conform to abstract and universal principles that were far from the social state.

A difficulty unfailingly appears, however. If the Revolution indeed had as its point of departure an intellectual movement that predated it, the vast changes whose arrival it marked cannot be completed as long as differences exist between the social and political ideas of the French and their legal and social institutions.199 This raises the following question: can the Revolution end? Are France and Europe condemned to an eternal cycle of revolutions and counter-revolutions? How can you stop a revolution that is constantly unfolding?

Tocqueville observed again in 1850:

Such are the circumstances surrounding Tocqueville’s project of creating a new political science that would succeed in explaining the past and the future, the old regime and the new, or, to reuse his terminology, aristocracy and democracy.201

“There is a country in the world,” we read in the introduction to the first volume, “where the great social revolution that I am speaking about seems more or less to have reached its natural limits; it came about there in a simple and easy way, or rather it can be said that this country sees the results of the democratic revolution that is taking place among us, without having had the revolution itself.”202

Tocqueville intends to determine whether American society offers the sole example in the world of an exceptional situation in which the ideal easily shapes the real, in which the social state coincides with the political state, in which the entire world is “a malleable material that man turns and shapes as he wills.”203 On this strange continent, it seems that the dream of the French and of the Europeans can be realized without the need for a revolution,204 and that their abstract, rational, and theoretical principles are real, concrete, and inductive there.

But, if the exceptional physical and intellectual conditions of America alone explain the success of democracy, there is no hope that Europe could ever know the democratic state without continual revolutions.

The first impressions of the United States, especially of the West, confirm the existence of an America that does not need revolution. The American frontier, the great wilderness that extends to the Pacific Ocean, offers a space in which ideas transform reality without encountering obstacles and in a transparent way, so to speak.205 Tocqueville will perfect and complicate his theory as his journey moves ahead, but the pioneer of Democracy especially announces the democratic man described at length in the second volume of the work.

“Everything that is good and evil in American society is found in such relief [in the West] that you would say it was one of those books published in large type to teach children to read,” already notes the traveler in a letter to his mother. “Everything there is jarring and exaggerated. Nothing has yet taken its definitive place. [...] In the west no one has been able to make himself known or has had the time to establish his credit. Consequently democracy, without this final barrier, appears with all of its distinctive characteristics, its fickleness, its envious passions, its instability and its restless character.”206

The pioneer is, necessarily, occupied entirely by the search for a minimum of commodities. Withdrawn from the rest of the world, isolated in his cabin, his only concern is the yield of his field on which his family’s subsistence depends. Each of his movements is dictated by the necessity of the survival and the protection of his small world. His generosity toward the stranger who appears at his door is nothing more than the fruit of calculation; it comes from reason and not from the heart; it is an investment.207 Obsession with material well-being, individualism, and interest well understood define, apparently accidentally and temporarily, life on the frontier, but they run the risk of becoming permanent conditions for the citizen of every democratic country.

So if North America does not need revolution, it is because the process of adaptation and struggle among philosophy, social state, and political condition is non-existent. Ideas and reality coincide; reason appears covered only by the clothing of the present. In order to be free and happy, it is enough for the American to want to be so.208 No need for struggle or confrontation, no need for the complex interpenetration, necessarily slow, of ideas with habits and laws; nowhere are there ruins, the past, and signs of the past. “The Union ... profits from the experience of the old peoples of Europe, without being obliged, like them, to make use of the past and to adapt the past to the present; it is not forced, as they are, to accept an immense heritage handed down by its fathers, a mixture of glory and misery, of national friendships and hatreds.”209

The United States has the privilege therefore of being able to enjoy the results of European thought without being encumbered by the heavy baggage of history. “In America,” notes Tocqueville, “society seems to live from day to day, like an army in the field.”210

Tocqueville comments on the uncommon position of the New World, which anchors it in an eternal present: “≠For the American, the past is in a way like the future: it does not exist. He sees nowhere the natural limit that nature has put on the efforts of man; according to him what is not, is what has not yet been tried.≠”211

The pioneer is, in a way, the last link in an historical chain that begins in Europe and ends in the American wilderness, where he inhabits a present without limit.212 In the American West the principal characteristics of society are also missing: “The new states of the West already have inhabitants; society still does not exist,”213 writes Tocqueville. In the West, the only common ideas and the sole bond between the most immediate past and the present are found in the weak intellectual network created by the mail and newspapers.214

Is the destiny of democratic man to inhabit a world without social exchanges, an eternal cycle of death and emptiness, such as the American forest or the ocean,215 a definitive present? You could think so. The pioneer clears an opening in the forest, cuts down the trees and in his field leaves the trunks that he does not take the trouble to uproot. He builds himself a cabin and marks with a subtle trace of history the woods that surround him. As soon as he disappears, nature takes back its domain. Then nothing more remains of the passage of man except “a few remnants falling into rot that in a bit of time will have ceased to exist.”216

Is this the price to pay in order to live in a world without revolution?

The question is posed in these terms. So the new political science that Tocqueville imagines and develops in Democracy in America is going to have as its first objective man’s return to society and to history.217

The Theoretician of History

It is undoubtedly difficult to find a period when the question of history attracted more attention than in the first half of the nineteenth century. Uncertainty about the future forces minds to look back: you had to try to place the Revolution in history, to assimilate it as the past, to understand it. In order to do this, liberals, like conservatives, court Clio. Politicians make history and write it; poets and novelists who claim to be historians capture imaginations and, at times, get involved in politics; all offer the world an uncommon example of political practice and political theory.

While Burke and the conservatives explain that the French Revolution was nothing more than an aberration that, far from history, broke its rhythm, the liberals concentrate their efforts on demonstrating the inevitable character of history. At first view, Tocqueville places himself on this side because he seems to follow the liberal theory of the inevitability of history and particularly the historical interpretation of Guizot.

There is no qualifying term that has been more often associated with Tocqueville, the historian-politician, than that of fatalist. Certain critics have spoken about determinism218 or providentialism; others have sought reasons of a pedagogic nature in his use of the idea of the inevitable movement toward equality of conditions.219 How can Tocqueville, who hates all forms of fatalism, who speaks of liberty as an almost holy thing, who asserts that the goal of his book is to reveal very clearly that “whatever the tendencies of the social state, men can always modify them and ward off the bad tendencies while appropriating the good,”220 how can this same Tocqueville talk at the same time about an “irresistible movement” of democracy and make it a “providential fact”?

At once simple and complex, his answer consists of saying that inevitability concerns only the arrival of social equality. With him, and with a certain number of others, this fact receives the name democracy. In the sense that, in the long run, social equality produces legal and political equality, Tocqueville’s theory can be called deterministic, and the arrival of democracy is inevitable. Once intellectual equality is proclaimed (each man has the same faculties for attaining truth as another), the transformation of social and political conditions is no more than a question of time; in terms of Tocqueville’s thought, it is inevitable and even desired by God.

Once you eliminate all secondary causes, Tocqueville continues, all the revolutions in the world have been and are made for the sole purpose of increasing or decreasing equality, which is the foundation or the generating fact of the revolutionary motor. Revolutions have always consisted and still consist of setting the rich against the poor and the poor against the rich.

But this determinism, which is as much logical as historical, is in no way incompatible with the passionate defense of liberty, because, for Tocqueville, the movement toward equality is independent of the development of liberty. The latter is the true human element of historical change. In other words, the inevitability of democracy, understood as the adaptation of the political state to the social state, does not determine the historical evolution of liberty: equality is as good an ally of despotism as of liberty.

So the presumption of attaining equality of social and political conditions makes the classical typology of political regimes meaningless. Whether it takes the form of public opinion or whether it presents itself as it is, sovereignty of the people makes possible only two types of regimes: the republican (or liberal) regime or the despotic regime, liberty or despotism. In the face of this alternative, it is man who chooses and not destiny that imposes.

This understanding of history, as Marx remarked, puts Tocqueville closer to Bossuet than to Guizot.221 Like the bishop of Meaux, Tocqueville believes that all the facts of history obey a divine plan, the meaning of which escapes us, but one that men can predict and whose general tendencies they can discover.222

The action of man, says Tocqueville, always takes place within a narrow circle. It has no meaning if it is situated outside this space. Even if man is incapable of imagining what is going to follow, of reading the plans of Providence, he can, within the domain reserved to him, recognize a law of the evolution of history and of intelligence.

The final stage, that of equality, closes the cycle of history. At the beginning of history, man, isolated and savage, is equal to his fellows in barbarism. He has no need of government.

So the absence of government and equality are found only at the two ends of civilization: “Savages are equal among themselves because they are all equally weak and ignorant. Very civilized men can all become equal because they all have at their disposal analogous means to attain comfort and happiness.”224

For Tocqueville, as we see, history is neither the progressive, rational, and necessary development of the idea of liberty, nor the advance, impossible to contain, of the middle classes, as Guizot thought. The author of Democracy notes a form of liberty appropriate to each period and each country.225 Liberty understood in this way is therefore as ancient, as Madame de Staël calls it, as it is modern, as Benjamin Constant describes it. So post-revolutionary liberty is not and cannot be that of the Old Regime.226 In the same way, a form of despotism corresponds to each period.

The novelty of Tocqueville’s theory is to assert that in order to reach the final stage of history, the point at which true equality and liberty coincide, the aristocratic stage is absolutely necessary as an intermediate moment. If “it is in losing their liberty that men acquired the means to reconquer it,”227 true liberty always requires passing by way of servitude.

This constitutes a first way to put face to face the Old Regime and democracy, to make aristocracy an inevitable moment of history, and then to move beyond it. If, in the state of barbarism, men cannot become civilized as long as they are equal,228 it is aristocracy that, by creating a class free to dedicate itself to the works of the mind, can invent the general and universal ideas that will lead to its own destruction and to the appearance of democracy (understood as equality of conditions).

The first step toward equality was taken in the Middle Ages when peoples began to travel, to enter into contact with each other, to imitate each other. Each nation little by little lost confidence in its particular laws and in its own organization; the idea of rules common to everyone occurred to men. France placed itself at the head of these intellectual, moral, and political changes, even if the impulse that gave them birth was more European than specifically French.

If the course of history follows the change in mentalities which is, in turn, the effect and the cause of the social state,229 and if the latter little by little transforms the political state, that is to say, laws and institutions, then it is not surprising that Tocqueville devotes the first pages of Democracy to philosophy.

A Philosophy of Action

Perhaps the word philosophy is not totally accurate when applied to the theory of Tocqueville, who said that he had a horror of philosophy and who wrote: “Philosophy is in fact only the complete exercise of thought separate from the practice of action.”230

Tocqueville’s very principle is to draw everything out of himself. He does the work of a researcher and does not neglect brochures, reports, collections of laws. But the list of works consulted in the writing of Democracy in America does not include books of philosophy.231

Tocqueville does not like philosophy. He calls it the “essence of all gibberish,”232 and a “voluntary torment that man consented [cf. note 242 below] [...] to inflict on himself.”233

The matter is clear from the beginning of the work of writing the introduction to Democracy. “The author of this work,” we read in a draft, “wanted to write a book of politics and not of philosophy.”234

The imperatives of the history of France forbid Tocqueville, as politician and as the author of Souvenirs, to forget the practical side of political theory. Thought separated from action is philosophy. For Tocqueville, reflection joined to practice constitutes the nature of what he calls his “political science.”235 This does not prevent him, however, from falling into the trap of the celebrated aphorism of Pascal: “To mock philosophy is truly to philosophize.”236

The philosophic aspect of Tocqueville’s thought appears in the form of anti-positivism.237 “≠In all human events,” he writes, “there is an immense portion abandoned to chance or to secondary causes that escapes entirely from forecasts and calculations.≠”238

Tocqueville’s certitude about an impenetrable divine plan and his religious beliefs prevent him from falling into the sensual philosophy of the period and into positivism.239 He accepts the existence of absolute ideas as well as their unknowable character.240 A first conclusion results: every system, every man that claims to discover absolute truth is, for that reason alone, in error; you can advance only hypotheses.

If absolute truth existed, the constant, complex interconnections of the elements of the motor of history would cease. The consequence of this provisional nature of all intellectual study is doubt, which Tocqueville considers characteristic of man, and in particular of philosophy.242

On this point, he summarizes his thought in this way for Charles Stoffels:

The creator of an idea, Tocqueville also believes, is always more uncertain of its truth than his disciples. He knows its defects; he knows the elements that can invalidate its existence. But very few men in democratic times can devote their life to the search for great intellectual truths; and if they do so, they are very much required nonetheless to use general ideas to guide their conduct.244 It follows that the best way to avoid absolute and excessively general ideas is to force each man to occupy himself with ideas, with thinking, with feeling his way, and: “when, tired of looking for what makes his fellows act, he [man] tries hard at least to untangle what pushes himself, he still does not know what to believe. He travels across the entire universe and he doubts. He finally comes back toward himself, and obscurity seems to redouble as he approaches and wants to understand himself.”245

As this conviction about the absence of absolute, demonstrable truths becomes deeper with Tocqueville, it seems to impose its own logic on the writing of Democracy: “You know that I do not take up the pen with the settled intention of following a system and marching at random toward a goal,” he observes; “I give myself over to the natural movement of my ideas, allowing myself to be led in good faith from one consequence to another. The result is that, as long as the work is not finished, I do not know exactly where I am going and if I will ever arrive.”246 The rhythm of the book becomes in fact more and more staccato; the brief chapters of the second Democracy turn into [ricordi, Italian for “souvenirs”; reference to Machiavelli’s Ricordi. ] thoughts, almost as if the presentation of a theory without solution required a brief and fragmentary form of writing.

So Tocqueville’s philosophic ideal is the man who is feeling his way, who judges himself to be incomplete and makes doubt his natural state, while the democratic ideal is the man who can change everything because he has a blind faith in reason and in the philosophic method.

Regarding himself, the author will note for example:

Tocqueville does not, however, share the anti-rationalism of conservative theories. What he fears in democracy is not reason, but anti-rationality. Later he will blame the philosophes for the same thing: “Truly speaking, some of these philosophes adored human reason less than their own reason. Never did anyone show less confidence in common wisdom than those men.”248

For Tocqueville, in contrast to Guizot, the rise of the middle classes is not the arrival of political reason, but of rational individualism, which in the end equates with the absence of reason. The philosophes understood nothing more than the voice of individual reason. As for democratic man, he runs the danger of believing that he is following his own reason when he is only blindly obeying the opinion of the majority.

The best way to avoid excesses in the matter of general ideas, the predominance of thought separated from action, is to force men to enter into practice. That is the advantage of true democracy. It forces each citizen to occupy himself in a practical way with government and moderates the tendency to create the general ideas in politics that equality produces; it provokes uncertainty in this way.

Tocqueville fears in fact that history will pass from the total predominance of action, which is characteristic of barbaric peoples who know only the practice of politics, to the triumph of theory separated from all forms of practice.249

But criticism of philosophy is not just a matter of methodology; it does not consist solely of blaming philosophy for a lack of connection with practice. In the drafts of Democracy there is a detailed reflection on the birth of general ideas.

For Tocqueville, the attempt of democracies to seek general ideas in the domain of politics arises out of an unwarranted application of the method of Descartes and Bacon to matters for which those methods are not made; the attempt arises out of an extension of the presumption of rationality, foreseeability, and recurrence to matters that do not have these qualities.

That is especially dangerous in the case of equality. The lack of debate about the principle of equality (which is the principle par excellence since it comes down to the principle of identity) ends up by imposing a structure in which reason and confrontation are lacking. Aggravated, the individual mind kills reason and its relation to practice, and with it liberty and political confrontation.

The exaltation of individual reason can break the bond between ideology, social condition, and political organization, and lead to the immobility of the social system and ultimately to the end of history. For this reason, far into the second volume and once the foundations of his criticism of democratic thought have been explained, Tocqueville can declare that what he most fears in democracies is not revolutions, but apathy.250

When the tendency to create philosophical systems that are separated from practice becomes general, there is also the danger that theory will not find reality adaptable; it will become always more removed from action and more utopian, and will end up by taking the place of political reality; and men, tired of facing the difficulties of action, will take refuge in theory.251

In this case, political theory can little by little come to resemble a religion, a doctrine applicable to all individuals and all nations, because it has considered man in an abstract way and has studied his general political rights and duties in all periods and all countries.252 The dream of reason lives outside of time, and when it coincides with the predominance of equality over liberty, it ends up by enclosing man within the solitude of his own heart:253 “So each person withdraws narrowly into himself and claims to judge the world from there.... Since they [the Americans] see that they manage without help to solve all the small difficulties that their practical life presents, they easily conclude that everything in the world is explicable, and that nothing goes beyond the limits of intelligence.”254

Democratic man is completely immersed in tasks of a practical type, because democracy takes him away from theory and confines his activities to the economic domain; he no longer believes in anything except his own reason. This tendency, combined with the search for material well-being, takes him away from political activity and predisposes him naturally to accept the opinion of the majority.

Tocqueville notes:

America, Tocqueville also says, has escaped these problems for the most part, thanks to exceptional circumstances, the intellectual influence of England, and the strength of religion.

The unusual physical conditions of the Americans, which place them in a universe that is malleable and can be transformed at will, often allow them to avoid the intellectual tensions of European societies. An American who is not satisfied with his position can always leave his home and go to the West where he can easily create a new life for himself. That is how an idea easily transforms reality, and why the forces that resist that transformation are weak.

The intellectual influence of England serves to assure the general development of thought. Tocqueville observes that, strictly speaking, the Americans do not have a literature and an intellectual class, but he does not see that condition as necessarily peculiar to democracy. How can a democracy be intellectual if the example of the United States proves the opposite? Because the Americans find their ideas and their books in Europe, just like their philosophy and their religion. They put all of that into practice in the New World. The American intellectual class is found therefore on the other side of the Atlantic. The Americans are only the part of the English population that works on the conquest of America:256 “I consider the people of the United States as the portion of the English people charged with exploiting the forests of the New World, while the rest of the nation, provided with more leisure and less preoccupied by the material cares of life, is able to devote itself to thought and to develop the human mind in all aspects.”257

Thus, the United States forms the non-intellectual part of a European people and constitutes a society composed solely of representatives of the middle class. Aristocracy remains on the European shore. In this way Tocqueville connects theory and practice, while avoiding having the Americans serve as an example of the pernicious effects of democracy that his book announces.258 The United States certainly does not innovate in philosophy, in literature, or in the aesthetic domain, but this situation is not due to the fact that the Americans belong to a democratic society, writes Tocqueville; the reason is that they devote themselves exclusively to business,259 or again, that they are showing only the interests and faults of the middle class.

Tocqueville believes, however, in the existence of man’s natural taste for things of the mind: “The mind of man left to itself leans from one side toward the limited, the material and the commercial, the useful, from the other it tends without effort toward the infinite, the non-material, the great and the beautiful.”260

Within the American framework, it is not impossible that an educated and free class will come about, a class that, having the necessary time and money, will be able to devote itself to intellectual work, to encourage and promote literature and the arts.261

Religion, the last element peculiar to the American democratic situation, prevents the Americans from falling into the error of trying to apply the principles of rationalist philosophy to matters that are not suited to such principles.262 For Tocqueville, philosophy is liberty, all that the individual discovers thanks to his own efforts; religion, which covers all that is accepted without discussion, is servitude.263 Excess of the first leads straight to intellectual individualism and to a state of permanent agitation that opens onto anarchy. Religion, which becomes more and more necessary as philosophy develops, can, by its excessive character, lead to intellectual dogmatism and immobility.

But even if that seems paradoxical at first glance, religion, precisely for this reason, is the necessary condition for man to be able to devote himself to practical works.264

“For me,” declares Tocqueville, “I doubt that man can ever bear complete religious independence and full political liberty at the same time; and I am led to think that, if he does not have faith, he must serve, and, if he is free, he must believe.”265 So if religious beliefs place man in relative servitude, they enclose him in the circle within which he is able to exercise his reason; and, by limiting the action of his mind to the practical circle within which it must function, they force him into action and free his intelligence by reducing his dependence on the general ideas of the majority:266

In the context of these ideas, Tocqueville asks himself whether Catholicism is the religion that suits democratic times. He is convinced that Catholicism can be proved by the philosophical method of the eighteenth century.268 But he needs to assure the reader that the multiplication of religions is not going to lessen the importance of religious ideas and of their relation to liberty. Otherwise, it would be impossible for religion to fulfill the limiting role that Tocqueville gives it. That approach produces a difficulty however: religion is accepted rationally, as philosophy, and not as religion; it is not the result of an act of faith. Only the idea, rather unjustified, that solely “minds of the second rank” will apply to religion the principles of the philosophy of Descartes (and this will above all be the case of Protestantism269 ), seems to save Tocqueville from a clear misconception in his explanations.270

The intellectual anarchy that you could think is the necessary result of the daily use of the Cartesian method is, on the contrary, more characteristic of periods of revolution than of those in which democracy reigns.271 Reason, by definition majoritarian, in the end produces characters and opinions that coincide in a certain way.

Here Tocqueville seems to find in democracy a reason for optimism that does not well fit the aristocratic vision that is sometimes imputed to him. In order for the intellectual anarchy that he believes is revolutionary to disappear, the majority of citizens must exercise their reason. But the author himself recognizes that the power that directs the mass will always be aristocratic because, as he says repeatedly, it is impossible for all men to have the time and leisure necessary to occupy themselves with works of the mind.

This way of seeing allows Tocqueville to avoid the eclecticism of Cousin. Eclecticism is the government of the middle class introduced to philosophy. The ideas of Tocqueville do not combine well with this philosophy of the juste milieu. But if Tocqueville’s aristocratic nature pushes him to reject philosophic eclecticism, it does not prevent him from constructing a philosophy of the middle (milieu ) that is his own. He places this principle of “life in the middle” between the two excesses of reason that in his view are represented by Heliogabalus and Saint Jerome.272

Here it was a matter of restoring man to history and society; now it is going to be a matter of restoring him to reason.

The Reign of Total Reason

In democracies, equality reaches and penetrates every aspect of life.273 Equality of minds, equality of conditions and sovereignty of the people are its three constituent elements. But the reign of total reason, in which tyranny of public opinion, the pursuit of well-being, and political apathy combine and toward which the democratic regime seems to go, does not cease to frighten Tocqueville.

That is because what emerges there is a world without society, an individual without individuality, an omnipotent state that separates citizens from each other and that promotes the absence of shared ideas and sentiments;274 in other words, a new form of despotism that, if it still lacks a name, has all the characteristics of a new state of nature.275

In this new despotism, society disappears and loses its power as a creator of change and protective filter of state action. The individual finds himself isolated in the face of the action of the political power that, as the expression of the social state, is also his master and his guardian. This political power, by destroying every center of resistance, finishes by coinciding with society and occupying its place,276 until we are confronted only by either the isolated individual or individuals as an entire group: “In democracy you see only yourself and all.”277

This despotism is not a type of government with its own form, as Montesquieu thought. For Tocqueville, it is the negation of all political and social forms. In this, the author recognizes his debt to Rousseau278 and diverges from the main current of classical liberalism by putting historical linearity in doubt. The state of nature is found as much in a final phase of history as in a pre-historic moment; it is at once pre- and post-social.

But this new condition that we have compared to the state of nature is different from the latter in an important way. By recognizing only the capacities of individual reason alone, man falls into individualistic rationalism; but at the same time, he has total confidence in common opinion, because he is pushed by the need for dogmatism that is inherent in his existence:279 “Faith in common opinion is the faith of democratic nations. The majority is the prophet; you believe it without reasoning. You follow it confidently without discussion. It exerts an immense pressure on individual intelligence.”280

The common sense of the democrat operates in the narrow field in which he has some knowledge and where he is able to put that knowledge into practice. But, in the areas where men are not involved, they accept general ideas that they have not thought of themselves; and in this way, the world, except for the narrow field in which each man is enclosed, “ends up being an insoluble problem for the man who clings to the most tangible objects and who ends up lying down on his stomach against the earth out of fear that he, in turn, may come to miss the ground.”281

Democratic despotism is therefore the exaltation of the individual and of society. It is a double state of nature in which men enter into relation with each other almost exclusively through the mathematical power of interests and through the most faithful expression of that power, which is money; in this double state of nature, society imposes its opinions on its members with a completely unheard of force.

From another perspective, the logic of reason invades the heart of man, eliminating many of his passions and modifying certain of his sentiments, transforming for example his egoism into individualism,282 or his generosity into interest well understood. The State, for its part, by making use of the first rational principle, which is that of unity—the expression of the principle of identity that is contained in the idea of equality—and that of centralization, imposes its forms and opinions with a speed and effectiveness previously unknown.

Democratic despotism thus takes men away from political practice by leading them exclusively toward the pursuit of material well-being, which tends to separate them more and more from each other.283 In the end, “men are no longer tied together except by interests and not by ideas.”284

By separating man from his fellows, this new form of despotism brings about a clear break in the flow of the ideas and opinions that nourish society and history. For “the circulation of ideas is to civilization what the circulation of blood is to the human body”;285 and despotism, by interrupting this movement, creates a society that is no longer composed of anything except solitary social molecules.

“In a society of barbarians equal to each other,” recalls Tocqueville, “since the attention of each man is equally absorbed by the first needs and the most coarse interests of life, the idea of intellectual progress can come to the mind of any one of them only with difficulty.”286

The old despotism was realistic. Facts were its foundation, and it made use of them. It oppressed the body, but the soul escaped its tyrannical enterprise. The new despotism has the perfidious principle of leaving the body free and oppressing the soul.287 While the legal and political tyranny of the majority is the modern version of the old despotism, the new despotism is the mental and social tyranny of the majority, which affects the social state, habits, and mores. Thus the damage caused by the tyranny of opinion is much greater, because this new type of despotism touches on the sources of the movement of history and society, as well as on what is most proper to the individual.

In the end man could end up by no longer belonging to anything except a quasi-society of barbarians equal to each other, thus closing the cycle of history with a despotic regime that has become permanent.

Tyranny of the majority, the tyranny of the electoral voice described in the first Democracy, is already the triumph of individualism, that is to say the triumph of man without individuality and personality.288 The moment of election forces the abandonment of what is specific and particular to the individual and forces him for a moment to become a unit, or, if you want, an abstraction (one man = one voice). In this way, the new form of despotism is entirely compatible with election. Men emerge from servitude to elect their tyrants and return there immediately after.289

In 1840, Tocqueville combines with the practical and legal tyranny of the majority the spiritual and intellectual oppression of the opinion of all, which leads in the last resort to a situation of permanent immobility and unity. If, as he remarks, “sentiments and ideas are renewed, the heart grows larger and the human mind develops only by the reciprocal action of men on each other,”290 then common action and vitality will disappear in democracies:

The inhabitant of America is forced, like every inhabitant of a new country, to acquire rapidly the habit of governing himself,292 but this habit must be prevented from being pushed beyond its natural limits and thereby taking the form of servitude:

Revolutions disrupt the activities of society; they suddenly make movement and social changes easy and unpredictable; finally they destroy personal wealth. It seems then that only the poor, who have nothing to lose, can court a revolution. Democracies seek the opposite, since they need a tranquil and peaceful atmosphere in which their members can concentrate all their activity on the pursuit of their individual well-being and that of their family.294

In democracies, Tocqueville notes,

So democratic despotism finishes by producing the greatest stability in society, but this stability is not desirable because it announces the immobility of death.

Tocqueville clearly perceives the radical nature of such an idea and notes in a draft:

With this last turn, Tocqueville’s thought has for its part completed its own revolution.

Dialectic of Ideas

If democratic apathy can be worse than revolutionary disorders, then the political problem abruptly changes aspect. It becomes necessary to reintroduce into society change, the circulation of ideas, intellectual movement, which does not mean revolution. It is in fact no less necessary to try to avoid revolutions, even if, in Tocqueville’s eyes, temporary anarchy is preferable to permanent order.298

The author distinguishes between legislative instability, which concerns secondary laws, and the instability that affects the foundations of the constitution. The latter produces revolutions and causes breaks in society;299 the former, on the other hand, is the sign of intellectual vitality. So how is it possible to create this first type of instability while avoiding the second? How can we bring about the circulation of ideas and sentiments that are debated and shared at the same time?

To invite men to communicate, to see each other, to exchange ideas, such is the main task of political philosophy: “So the great object of law-makers in democracies must be to create common affairs that force men to enter into contact with each other.... For what is society for thinking beings, if not the communication and connection of minds and hearts?”300

The struggle between opposing principles produces heat and the movement of ideas. It sometimes produces disorder, but it assures the circulation of the ideas and sentiments that nourish society.

Tocqueville wrote to Kergorlay:

This movement and confrontation of ideas is at risk of drowning in apathy, individualism, and the obsession with well-being, first results of democracy.

The “democratic monster” that occupies so many pages of Democracy is the one that has made only half a revolution, that has forgotten the principle of liberty, and that has been entirely captivated by the rational character of the abstract principle of equality.302 This democratic monster produces a political philosophy based precisely upon the social, material, and political conditions that work to promote and to ensure the existence of such a philosophy, but it does not offer the possibility of denying such a philosophy, that is to say, by political practice.

So Tocqueville aspires, in a certain way, to completing the French Revolution, to finishing it, without forgetting that fraternity is the fruit of liberty and equality, as well as of a constant tension between the two, as had been the case in 1789.

Tocqueville remarks in the Ancien Régime:

For the exceptional moment represented by 1789, a momentary and magnificent combination of liberty with equality, Tocqueville shows and seems to have shown all his life a quasi-religious respect, a sort of faith never denied. In this regard, Sainte-Beuve shares with Beaumont the following anecdote:

History, according to Tocqueville, is defined as a struggle between the abstract and the concrete; thus the opposition between liberty and equality. The objective of political science is consequently to maintain these two existing principles in constant tension in such a way that no monopoly exists of equality over liberty, which would lead to despotism, and that equality does not run the risk of being carried away into anarchy by the excesses of liberty. In this sense, it is a matter of prolonging 1789.

For Tocqueville, liberty is a passion,305 changing and impossible to define.306 It belongs to the order of the heart. Equality, to use Pascal’s distinction, reigns in the order of the mind.

When he writes to John Stuart Mill, “I love liberty by taste, equality by instinct and by reason,”307 Tocqueville is only expressing in another way the principal elements of his thought. The taste for equality is always of a rational, mental nature. Liberty, in contrast, is a passion, a sentiment.308

Liberty is an individual, particular sentiment, impossible to communicate; it represents the human because it is indefinable, incomplete, always in process, always being defined, by wagering, risking, making mistakes, and beginning again. Liberty must be lived as you live your life, never ceasing to invent. Authentic democracy is the equal participation of citizens in the definition of liberty, a definition that is always complicated, disorderly, and risky. God marks out the road toward equality, but liberty is a path that man opens and that crosses always different countries.

Equality is abstract, rational, always identical to itself; it is deductive, while liberty is inductive, as within reach and clear as liberty is complicated and fleeting.

The despotic democratic regime produces an unbearable and unlimited predominance of the mind over the heart, of equality over liberty. Liberty then disappears in the face of what can be defined and what is definite, in the face of equality; the principle of equality is allowed to reign alone. That is what philosophy must avoid at all cost. That is also what constitutes the ultimate objective of Democracy, as Tocqueville notes in a draft: “Danger of allowing a single social principle to take without objection the absolute direction of society. General idea that I wanted to emerge from this work.”309

If, in the plan of history, the principle of liberty must be introduced as a counterbalance to that of equality, in the political world strictly speaking310 the struggle of ideas takes place between two great universal principles that, for Tocqueville, are called democracy and aristocracy;311 the one seeks to concentrate public power, the other to scatter it.312 Once the sentiment of liberty has disappeared or is in serious danger of doing so, Tocqueville is forced to imagine institutions that can produce the conditions necessary for liberty to exist; the hope is that they will give rise to the sentiment and passion that are otherwise in danger of disappearing. In the future, liberty, according to him, will be a product of political art. Thus, if the social state moves men away from each other, the political state must unite them;313 if society destroys the passions and tends no longer to promote anything except interest, the political state must work to maintain passions314 and to turn away from economic well-being.315

The opposition of the social power to the force of the state, the opposition of society to the political power must also exist. For Tocqueville, as we know, the ideal instrument for achieving this situation is associations,316 organizations of an aristocratic character that oppose the omnipotence of the majority that characterizes democracy.

Tocqueville’s ideal is not the mixed regime, however. A predominating principle will always exist because men will always try to order society and the state according to the same principle.317 Nonetheless, in order to avoid falling into despotism and omnipotence, that is to say, into the ultimate tyranny of equality (one = one), the opposite principle must always exist.

The classical mechanisms of liberalism, such as the separation of powers, the idea of rights, liberty of the press, and federalism, serve Tocqueville only to the degree that they can be used to that end.

The author of Democracy wants democracies to oppose a strong legislative power with a power elected for a longer period (or put in place in a permanent way, as in monarchy); this recalls the mechanism of balance and counterbalance inspired by Montesquieu. But Tocqueville demands that, within each power, concentration be balanced by an action of dispersal. If the first chamber is elected by universal suffrage, the second must be formed by indirect election. If the political power must be centralized, the administration must be decentralized to the same degree. The jury does wonders for the education of the people, but it must be guided by the judge’s hand. The excesses of the majority, a constant danger in democracies, are opposed by the creation of an aristocracy of associations. And in the same way, against the associations of owners, there are the associations of workers; against the state, the society, etc.

The examples of opposition multiply throughout the book and extend from the purely political field to all aspects of intellectual life. “The most favorable moment for the development of the sciences, of literature and of the arts,” Tocqueville specifies in this regard, “is when democracy begins to burst into the midst of an aristocratic society. Then you have movement amid order. Then humanity moves very rapidly, but like an army in battle, without breaking ranks and without discipline losing anything to ardor.”318

The author of Democracy found this idea in Montesquieu;319 the idea of the opposition of the three powers ends up by amounting to the opposition between the legislative power and the executive power, which in Tocqueville is the confrontation between democracy and aristocracy.320 Nonetheless, the problem for Montesquieu, like that for all of political philosophy before him, was purely political despotism, while Tocqueville points out for the first time a new form of tyranny that does not have a name, but that spreads from the political power to ideas, habits and thoughts, invading all of private and public life.321

There are no recipes or definitive solutions; no formula allows us to go beyond this system of opposition. The terms are in continual tension, changeable and alive. Tocqueville advances in this way between two abysses with the talent of a Malesherbes or of a Royer-Collard,322 by adopting what is best in each condition, by maintaining a precarious equilibrium, by going along in doubt and uncertainty.

* * * * *

The objective of political philosophy is to produce among the citizens those passions that can destroy or save society, to produce that dialectic of ideas, of the abstract and the concrete, of liberty and equality, of reason and of passion, that causes small, continual revolutions.323

According to Tocqueville, liberty certainly cannot be defined in a negative way by obedience to laws that are the result of the compromises and struggles of two permanent and equally strong parties. The author of Democracy lives in a world in which one of the two powers can disappear completely and in which the best laws are capable of coexisting with a social condition similar to that of the state of nature, in which legal liberty can go hand in hand with political and intellectual despotism.

For Tocqueville, man is above all a participant in history. He is part of a vast project that he himself must work on each day. The pilot of a boat, even if he does not determine either the winds or the waves, can hoist or lower the sails; he guides his ship. He is a man who looks at the past and the future, but who cannot learn very much from history. The past does not offer rules of conduct or solutions for the present; it gives sentiments, but not reasons; it creates passions and faith, but not laws; it develops tendencies, it calls for prudence, but does not offer judgments.

Nor does the history of peoples offer solutions for the present, just as Democracy in America does not claim to give to the French or to Europeans a theory of democracy. It is not a matter of imitating America, Tocqueville says in substance; it is a matter of understanding America. For the rest, the destiny of man is still, and is forever, in his own hands.

Eduardo Nolla
Universidad San Pablo-CEU Madrid

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICAa (1835), Volume I]

PART I

[181.] The interpretation I am offering here is necessarily limited.

[182.] Letter from Tocqueville to the Countess de Pisieux, 5 July 1833, YTC, CIf.

[183.] “Tocqueville y su tiempo,” in Meditación de Europa, Madrid. (Revista de Occidente, 1966), pp. 135-41.

[184.] There are dozens of books devoted to Tocqueville’s thought, but I limit myself to pointing out those of Jean-Louis Benoît, Tocqueville moraliste (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004); Luis Díez del Corral, El pensamiento político de Tocqueville (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989); Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux démocraties (Paris: PUF, 1983); Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Julliard, 1982); Nicola Matteucci, Alexis de Tocqueville (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990); the brief introduction to the abridged edition of Democracy by Dalmacio Negro (Madrid: Aguilar, 1971); and Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[185.] “I did not want to do a portrait, but to present a mirror,” Tocqueville confessed to Ampère. Jean-Jacques Ampère, “Alexis de Tocqueville,” Correspondant 47 (1859): p. 322.

[186.] “The Revolution that reduced to dust the aristocratic society in which our fathers lived is the great event of the time. It has changed everything, modified everything, altered everything” II, p. 690, note c.

Not by chance did Tocqueville choose as a matter of fact to publish the chapter on revolutions separately, before the second volume. The chapter on revolutions undoubtedly constitutes the axis around which the whole book turns; cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Des revolutions dans les sociétés nouvelles,” Revue des deux mondes, XXII, 1840, pp. 322-34.

[187.] I, p. 514, note o. Cf. I, p. 12, note r.

[188.] The unpublished texts of this edition tend to erase a certain number of differences between Democracy and L’Ancien régime et la révolution. Tocqueville is an author who treats a very small number of subjects that he considers and studies many times in each of his writings, while keeping them all interrelated, like the chapters of the same book. So in a way we have something of a Democracy that extends from 1835 to 1859.

[189.] The whole body of the ideas and the mores of a people form its character, and on this point Tocqueville recalls Montesquieu:

[190.] “So by this word I understand the whole moral and intellectual state of a people” (I, p. 466).

Montesquieu in fact remarks: “The customs of a people in slavery are part of its servitude; those of a free people are part of its liberty.” De l’esprit des lois, book XIX, ch. XXVII, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1951), II, p. 382. For Tocqueville, the mores of a people constitute nearly its entire liberty.

[191.] Tocqueville did not believe that he had resolved the question of knowing if ideas are the result or the cause of the social state. “Is the social state the result of ideas or are the ideas the result of the social state?” II, p. 748, note f. Ideas will act, alternately, as effect and as cause.

[192.] Letter to Corcelle, 17 September 1853, OC, XV, 2, p. 81. This is so true that a change in the law (the abolition of slavery, for example) is useless and even negative if it is not accompanied by a change in the intellectual world (the idea that the Black man is henceforth equal to the white man). In this sense Tocqueville can say that, if he had the power, he would not immediately decide on the abolition of slavery. He was convinced that, without a previous radical change in the mores, the situation of the free Black would probably be worse than the situation of the slave.

[193.] This term reappears from time to time (II, p. 1262, note b).

With this supposition, Tocqueville places himself at the origin of the modern social sciences. If his work attracts sociologists as well as historians, critics, and political scientists, it is because in his work the classic elements of political philosophy are beginning to separate and take form as sociology, history, or the political sciences. In the same way, if Democracy, and especially the second part, has not sufficiently gained the attention of researchers in the political sciences, it is undoubtedly because it requires the latter to go beyond the position of historians of ideas in order to be political philosophers for a time.

[194.] In the United States, the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is not an isolated doctrine that is attached neither to the habits nor to the ensemble of dominant ideas; you can on the contrary envisage it as the last link in a chain of opinions that envelops the entire Anglo-American world. Providence has given to each individual, whatever he is, the degree of reason necessary for him to be able to direct himself in the things that interest him exclusively. Such is the great maxim on which in the United States civil and political society rests: the father of the family applies it to his children, the master to his servants, the town to those it administers, the province to the town, the state to the provinces, the Union to the states. Extended to the whole of the nation, it becomes the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.

[≠So the republican principle of the sovereignty of the people is not only a political principle, but also a civil principle.≠] (I, p. 633)

[195.] II, p. 1033, note 1. Did Tocqueville participate in Beaumont’s plan to present an essay on the influence of laws on mores and of mores on laws for the Montyon competition in 1830? See YTC, CXIb6.

[196.] “What is the sovereign rule of public [v: national] opinion to which all the English of the last [century (Ed.)] constantly declared that you must submit, if not a still obscure notion of the democratic dogma of the sovereignty of the people?” II, p. 1033, note e.

[197.] “The French Revolution, in my eyes, is a European event, and everything that happened in the same period in Europe, principally in Germany, interests me nearly as much as what [took (Ed.)] place among us” Letter to Charles Monnard, 5 October 1856. With the kind permission of the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne.

[198.]L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 66.

[199.] Tocqueville noted that Napoleon, not wanting to give democratic political laws to France, had agreed to a body of social laws much more democratic than American laws and thus, very unwillingly, had accelerated the arrival of democracy. For the same reason, the primacy of the social over the political, Tocqueville asserted: “I would believe the future of liberty more assured with a government that would have many political rights and few civil rights than with a government that would have few political rights and many civil rights.” (II, p. 1230, note p).

[200.] Letter to Edward Everett, 15 February 1850, Massachusetts Historical Society. The preface to the 1848 edition of Democracy (IV, p. 1373) repeats the same idea.

“There is only a single [revolution], a revolution always the same across various fortunes and passions, that our fathers saw begin and that, in all probability, we will not see end” Souvenirs,OC, XII, p. 30.

[201.] Tocqueville’s two books thus answer the desire to elucidate first the new regime and the Revolution (Democracy ), then L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution.

[202.] I, p. 27. The same idea appears, for example, at the beginning of the second volume: “The Americans have a democratic social state and a democratic constitution, but they have not had a democratic revolution. They arrived on the soil that they occupy more or less as we see them. That is very important.” II, p. 708.

[203.] To Ernest de Chabrol, letter of 9 June 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[204.] “The Americans seemed only to have carried out what our writers had imagined; they gave the substance of reality to what we were busy dreaming” L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 199.

[205.] The first thing that the pioneer does is to clear his property, to chop down the trees, to open up his view. The first symbol of civilization is the absence of trees.

[206.] Letter of 6 December 1831, YTC, BIa1, pp. 54-56, and OCB, VII, p. 90.

[207.] II, p. 1289.

[208.] I, p. 276.

[209.] I, p. 369.

“For him [the American] the possible has hardly any limit. To change is to improve; he has constantly before his eyes the image of indefinite perfection that throws deep within his heart an extraordinary restlessness and a great distaste for the present” (II, p. 935, note b).

[210.] I, p. 331.

[211.] I, p. 643, note n.

The American inhabits a land of wonders, around him everything is constantly stirring, and each movement seems to be an improvement. So the idea of the new is intimately linked in his mind to the idea of the better. Nowhere does he see the limit that nature might have put on the efforts of man; in his eyes what is not is what has not yet been attempted (I, p. 643).

Tocqueville specifies about the frontier:

[212.] The Indians find themselves in a quite similar situation. Beaumont writes about them: “Focused on the necessity of the present and fears of the future, the past and its memories have lost all their power over them” (Marie, II, p. 297). Citing Clark and Cass, Tocqueville repeats the same idea: “He [the Indian] easily forgets the past, and is not interested in the future.” I, p. 527, note 7. The same thing can be said about the Black race, which has left its history in another continent.

[213.] I, p. 86.

[214.] “The only historical monuments of the United States are newspapers. If an issue happens to be missing, the chain of time is as if broken: present and past are no longer joined.” I, p. 331.

[215.]A Fortnight in the Wilderness, II, p. 1339.

Also “rivers ... are roads that respect no trails.” II, p. 1353.

[216.]Journey to Lake Oneida, IV, p. 1301.

[217.] Ampère said with a great deal of wisdom about Democracy: “In short, at the core of the whole book stirs the question of time” (Correspondance avec Ampère,OC, XI, p. xvi).

[218.] Jean-Claude Lamberti, La notion d’individualisme chez Tocqueville (Paris: PUF, 1970).

[219.] Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 17. Cf. I, pp. 10-12, note q.

[220.] II, p. 694, note m.

[221.] The Anglophile attitude of Guizot bothered Tocqueville, who was incapable of accepting that the model of the English revolution was applicable to France. These differences of opinion did not pass unnoticed. After the publication of the Democracy of 1840, Guizot wrote to his former student: “Why don’t we think alike? I do not find any good reason.” Roland-Pierre Marcel, Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910, p. 319). Also see Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism Under Siege (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003).

[222.] See Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, part III, section II, entitled: “The revolutions of empires have particular causes that princes must study.”

[223.]Voyage, pp. 89-90.

[224.] “Mémoire sur paupérisme,” republished in Commentaire, 30, 1985, p. 633.

[225.] “I would regard it as a great misfortune for humankind if liberty, in all places, had to occur with the same features.” I, p. 513.

[226.] Guizot had, however, distinguished between two forms of liberty: 1. Liberty as independence of the individual, who has only his own will as law. This is the barbaric and anti-social liberty of the childhood of nations, natural liberty. 2. Liberty as independence from any will that is different and contrary to reason. Moral liberty or liberty by right. The survival of society demands the submission of all individuals to a common rule that cannot exist if natural liberty subsists to its full extent. Journal des cours publics de jurisprudence, histoire et belles-lettres (Paris: au bureau du journal, 1821-1822), I, pp. 248-52, lecture 23.

[227.] “I ≠{think that it is in losing their liberty that men acquired the means to reconquer it}≠ that it is under an aristocracy or under a prince that men still half-savage have gathered the various notions that later would allow them to live civilized, equal and free.” II, p. 879, note f.

[228.] “If nations had begun with democratic government, I doubt they would ever have become civilized.” I, p. 332.

Even industry follows this general law of evolution. The manufacturing aristocracy is the equivalent of the landed aristocracy. II, p. 980, note b.

[229.] Economic conditions are part of the social state, and Tocqueville judges them to be of secondary interest.

[230.] II, p. 739, note c.

“For no one is less philosophical than I, who preaches to you.” OCB, VI, p. 370.

[231.] See vol. IV, pp. 1377-95.

[232.] Draft of a letter to Le Peletier d’Aunay, 8 November 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[233.] To Charles Stoffels, 22 October 1831, YTC, BIa1, and OCB, VII, pp. 83-84. See OCB, VI, p. 370.

[234.] YTC, CVk, 1, p. 73.

[235.] Tocqueville thinks that Thomas More would not have written Utopia if he had been able to change the government of England. He also thinks that the Germans do philosophy because they cannot generalize their ideas in politics (II, p. 727, note b).

[236.] Pensée 513 (Ed. Lafuma). Cited by Luis Díez del Corral, El pensamiento politico de Tocqueville, p. 42.

[237.] The predilection of Tocqueville for Plato is symptomatic: “I consider him a poor politician, but the philosopher has always appeared to me superior to all others and his aim, which consists of introducing morality as much as possible into politics, admirable.” Correspondance avec Kergorlay,OC, XIII, 1, p. 41. Cf. Correspondance avec Beaumont,OC, VIII, 1, p. 292.

[238.] I, p. 574, note b.

[239.] “There is nothing so difficult to appreciate as a fact.” I, p. 343.

“The world is a book entirely closed to man.” I, p. 383, note m. Also see I, p. 574.

[240.] “Of all beings, man is assuredly the one best known; and yet his prosperity or miseries are the product of unknown laws of which only a few isolated and incomplete fragments come into our view. Absolute truth is hidden and perhaps will always remain hidden.” I, p. 263.

We again see the imprint of Pascal in this attitude of Tocqueville: “The final step of reason is to recognize that an infinite number of things surpass it. It is weak only if it does not go far enough to know that.” Ed. Lafuma, pensée 373.

[241.] “The great Newton himself resembles an imbecile more by the things that he does not know than he differs from one by the things that he knows.” II, p. 715, note f.

[242.] “I consider this doubt as one of the greatest miseries of our nature; I place it immediately after illnesses and death. But because I have that opinion of it, I do not understand why so many men impose it on themselves without cause and uselessly. That is why I have always considered metaphysics and all purely theoretical sciences, which serve for nothing in the reality of life, as a voluntary torment that man consented to inflict on himself.” Letter to Charles Stoffels, 22 October 1831, YTC, BIa1 and OCB, VII, pp. 83-84.

[243.]Ibid., pp. 82-83.

[244.] “So general ideas are only means by the aid of which men advance toward truth, but without ever finding it. You can even say that, to a certain extent, by following this path they are moving away from it.” II, p. 728, note c.

[245.] II, p. 840, note v.

“There is no being in the world that I know less than myself. For me, I am constantly an insoluble problem. I have a very cold head, and a reasoning, even calculating mind; and next to that are found ardent passions that sweep me along without persuading me, mastering my will, while leaving my reason free.” Letter to Eugène Stoffels, 18 October 1831, OCB, V, p. 422.

[246.] Letter to Mill, 19 November 1836, OC, VI, 1, p. 314.

[247.] II, p. 840.

[248.]L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 306. We could say that Tocqueville fears that the men of democracies are being transformed into little philosophes.

[249.] And more especially, from a simplistic philosophy characteristic of an intermediate period that wants to explain everything with a single principle and that is embodied as much in the fatalism of the theories of democratic historians as in administrative centralization.

Simplicity of means in politics is a product of human weakness. Tocqueville wants men to be able to combine a large number of means to reach an end. According to him, beauty is not in simplicity of means, but in complexity, which is nothing more than imitating God, who creates with a multiplicity of agents and places “the idea of grandeur and perfection not in executing a great number of things with the help of a single means, but in making a multitude of diverse means contribute to the perfect execution of a single thing.” II, p. 740, note d.

“Centralization is not at all the sign of high civilization. It is found neither at the beginning nor at the end of civilization, but in general in the middle.” II, p. 799, note e. The idea of unity is appropriate to a middle state. The echo of Pascal and of multiplicity in unity is clear.

[250.] II, p. 1150, note x.

[251.] This is an idea that has a very important place in the explanation of the importance of intellectuals during the Revolution, but that already appears in Democracy. See II, p. 727, note b.

[252.] The French Revolution created a body of independent ideas that were easy to transmit. Tocqueville observes that “it formed, above all particular nationalities, a common intellectual country in which the men of all nations could become citizens.” L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 87. He also asserts that the Revolution was a religious revolution because it developed a corpus of doctrines that, like a religion, can be applied indiscriminately to all men and to all peoples, because it considered man in the abstract, like all religions, and his general political rights and obligations. Ibid., pp. 88ff.

[253.] “Thus, not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to enclose him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” II, p. 884.

[254.] II, p. 701.

[255.] II, p. 718.

[256.] American society depends therefore on the intellectual situation of England. It follows that during its formative years, democracy in the United States does not have the following ingredient necessary for social change: the production of new ideas.

[257.] II, p. 768. And more particularly of the middle class: “≠America forms like one part of the middle classes of England≠” II, p. 767, note f. Also see II, p. 805, note j.

[258.] Thus, in the case of America, the tension between aristocracy and democracy at the level of general principles also occurs, a mechanism that we will return to. Tocqueville needed England to explain how the American model combines democratic and aristocratic principles.

[259.] II, pp. 786-87, note p.

[260.] II, p. 769, note g. We see that here, too, Pascal is not far away.

[261.] II, p. 772.

[262.] In the intellectual world, the rivalry between religion and philosophy (authority/ liberty) is a variant of the opposition aristocracy/democracy. See II, p. 711, note b.

[263.] II, p. 724, note s.

[264.] “Man needs to believe dogmatically a host of things, were it only to have the time to discuss a few others of them. This authority is principally called religion in aristocratic centuries. It will perhaps be named majority in democratic centuries, or rather common opinion.” III, p. 720, note p.

[265.] III, p. 745.

[266.] “During centuries of fervor, men sometimes happen to abandon their religion, but they escape its yoke only to submit to the yoke of another religion. Faith changes objects; it does not die.” I, p. 485. Tocqueville fears in this sense that the opinion of the majority will someday become a cult.

[267.] II, p. 721, note r.

Religion is an authority (illegible word) to humanity, but manifested by one man or one class of men to all the others, who submit to it. Common opinion is an authority that is not prior to humanity and that is exercised by the generality of men on the individual.

The source of these two authorities is different, but their effects come together. Common opinion, like religion, gives ready made beliefs and relieves man from the unbearable and impossible obligation to decide everything each day by himself. These beliefs were originally discussed, but they are no longer discussed and they penetrate minds by a kind of pressure of all on each (II, p. 720, note p).

[268.] All the American sects have a core of common ideas. I, p. 473.

[269.] “I have always believed, you know, that constitutional monarchies would arrive at the republic; and I am persuaded as well that Protestantism will necessarily end up at natural religion.” Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 26 October 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[270.] Tocqueville speaks of a convention that checks the spirit of innovation at the doors of religion. This idea is the result of a personal reflection, but at the beginning of the second volume he notes: “if you look very closely, you will see that religion itself reigns there much less as revealed doctrine than as common opinion.” II, p. 720. Therefore the foundations of religion are not religious, but philosophic, in the sense that the author gives to that word.

“The moral dominion of the majority is perhaps called to replace religions to a certain point or to perpetuate certain ones of them, if it protects them. But then religion would live more like common opinion than like religion. Its strength would be more borrowed than its own.” Ibid., note p.

[271.] II, p. 708, note t.

[272.] See II, p. 960, note k, and p. 1281, note e.

[273.] When Tocqueville speaks about the existence of equality in America, he means the sentiment of not being inferior to anyone and not the equal division of wealth or power. In an interesting commentary on American equality, placed in travel notebook E and from which we can quote only an extract, he explains this difference: “Men, in America as with us, are ranked according to certain categories in the course of social life; common habits, education and, above all, wealth establishes these classifications; but these rules are neither absolute, nor inflexible, nor permanent. They establish temporary distinctions and do not form classes strictly speaking; they give no superiority, even of opinion, to one man over another.” YTC, BIIa, and Voyage (OC, V, 1), p. 280.

The explanation of the sentiment of equality that Beaumont gives in a note in Marie (I, pp. 383-90) seems equally clear on this point. But certain historians have seen in Tocqueville the model of an egalitarian society. See particularly Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1969); “The Egalitarian Myth and the American Social Reality: Wealth, Mobility and Equality in the ‘Era of the Common Man,’” American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1971): 898-1034; and “Tocqueville’s Misreading of America, America’s Misreading of Tocqueville,” Tocqueville Review 4, no. 1 (1982): 5-22; Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), 57-62.

[274.] “Sentiments and ideas are renewed, the heart grows larger and the human mind develops only by the reciprocal action of men on each other.” II, p. 900.

[275.] Referring to Hobbes, Tocqueville wonders: “what is a gathering of rational and intelligent beings bound together only by force?” I, p. 389.

[276.] “Despotism would not only destroy liberty among these people, but in a way society.” II, p. 889, note f.

[277.] II, p. 718, note m. Here we see Rousseau’s man divided between himself and society.

[278.] Here [in despotism] is the final outcome of inequality, and the extreme point that closes the circle and touches our starting point. This is where all individuals again become equal, because they are nothing, and where, since the subjects have no other rule than the will of the master and the master has no other rule than his passions, the notions of good and the principles of justice disappear yet again. Everything here leads to the law of the strongest alone and consequently to a new state of nature different from the one where we began; the first was the state of nature in its purity, and the second is the fruit of an excess of corruption. Yet there is so little difference between these two states, and the contract of government is so dissolved by despotism, that the despot is the master only as long as he is the strongest; and as soon as the despot can be driven out, he has no grounds to protest against violence. The riot that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is an act as lawful as those by which the day before he disposed of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him; force alone overthrows him.

J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1964), III, p. 191. See below, I, p. 231, note z.

[279.] If man was forced to prove to himself all the truths that he uses every day, he would never finish doing so; he would wear himself out with preliminary demonstrations without advancing; as he has neither the time, because of the short span of his life, nor the ability, because of the limitations of his mind, to act in this way, he is reduced to holding as certain a host of facts and opinions that he has had neither the leisure nor the power to examine and to verify for himself, but that those more clever have found or that the crowd adopts. On this foundation he builds himself the structure of his own thoughts. It is not his will that leads him to proceed in this manner; the inflexible law of his condition compels him to do so. II, p. 714.

[280.] II, p. 720, note p.

[281.] II, p. 1370.

[282.] “Egoism, vice of the heart. Individualism, of the mind.” II, p. 882, note d.

[283.] Tocqueville learned from Guizot that the barbarians of the IVth century acted in the same way: “It is not by exterminating the civilized men of the IVth century that the barbarians managed to destroy the civilization of that time. It was enough for them to come between them so to speak and by separating them to make them like strangers to one another.” II, p. 896, note c.

“There is a society only when men consider a great number of objects in the same way; when they have the same opinions on a great number of subjects; when, finally, the same facts give rise among them to the same impressions and the same thoughts.” I, p. 598. Also see note y on the same page.

[284.] II, pp. 708-9.

“Don’t you see, on all sides, beliefs giving way to reasoning, and sentiments, to calculation?” I, p. 391.

There is, however, a profound change from one Democracy to the other relating to one passion, that of well-being. If Tocqueville asserts in 1835 that “there, ambition for power is replaced by the love of well-being, a more vulgar, but less dangerous passion” (I, p. 943), he will reveal all of its malignity in the 1840 part.

[285.] II, p. 886, note c.

[286.] II, p. 878, note g.

[287.] The new despotism has the same relation to the old as the slavery of antiquity has to the enslavement of American Blacks. The Americans of the South “have, if I may express myself in this way, spiritualized despotism and violence.” I, p. 579. Ancient slavery bound the body and left the mind free; modern slavery prevents instruction and controls the mind. Thus the enormous importance of liberty of the press in democracies. See I, pp. 290-94, and II, p. 908.

[288.] By saying that tyranny of the majority is the equivalent of the state of nature, Tocqueville also repeats Madison. I, p. 425.

[289.] This explains why readers have been able to find in Tocqueville a critique of communist totalitarianism as well as mass society. The interest in Tocqueville’s work owes a great deal to the fact that democratic despotism is more social than political, and is, in large measure, independent of the political form. The distinction between the social and the political is, however, debatable and not very clear, even if we cannot blame Tocqueville for a lack of clarity concerning a dichotomy that we are not able to express more clearly at the present time.

[290.] II, p. 900.

[291.] II, p. 1272, note t.

[292.] I, p. 650, note l.

[293.] II, p. 1151.

[294.] “Great revolutions are not more common among democratic peoples than among other peoples; I am even led to believe that they are less so. But within these nations there reigns a small uncomfortable movement, a sort of incessant rotation of men that troubles and distracts the mind without enlivening or elevating it.” II, p. 780.

[295.]L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 74.

[296.] IV, p. 1144, note q.

[297.]Ibid.

[298.] See IV, p. 1191, note b.

[299.] II, pp. 424-26.

“The small shake-ups that public liberty imparts constantly to the most settled societies recall everyday the possibility of reversals and keep public prudence awake.” L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 197. In this way, small revolutions prevent great ones.

[300.] III, p. 891, note k.

[301.] Letter to Kergorlay, 3 February 1857, OC, XIII, 2, p. 325.

During the last years of his life, when he was working on Ancien Régime, Tocqueville wrote: “I am more and more attached to my lands and my great fields, to my ocean above all, and to its serious beaches, and I feel that only there do I live happily. But even there, to be happy, some great occupation must animate my mind, and only through ideas do I see, so to speak, the physical beauties that surround me.” Letter to Freslon [?], 8 October 1856, YTC, DIIIa.

[302.] See IV, p. 1209. See Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, edited by M.= C.= M. Simpson (London: H.= S. King, 1872), II, pp. 92-94.

[303.]L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 247.

“Democracy is liberty combined with equality.” Roland-Pierre Marcel, Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 168.

[304.] Letter to Beaumont, 26 November 1865. With the kind permission of the Biblothèque de l"Institut, Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

[305.] “Only liberty is able to suggest to us those powerful common emotions that carry and sustain souls above themselves; it alone can throw variety into the midst of the uniformity of our conditions and the monotony of our mores; it alone can distract our minds from small thoughts and elevate the goal of our desires.” Discours de réception at the Académie française.OCB, IX, p. 20.

[306.] “Do not ask me to analyze this sublime taste; it must be experienced.” L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,OC, II, 1, p. 217.

[307.] Letter to John Stuart Mill, June 1835 (Correspondance anglaise,OC, VI, p. 293). Also see Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie,OC, V, 2, p. 91.

[308.] “For democratic institutions I have a taste from the head, but I am aristocratic by instinct.” Quoted by Antoine Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville, p. 48.

[309.] III, p. 740, note d.

“Do not adopt one social principle alone however good it seems. Do not use one form of government alone. Stay away from unity.” IV, p. 1266, note j.

In the same way, Tocqueville claims that views expressed in the French parliamentary debates have become less elevated since the victory of the liberal party and the disappearance of the opposition. II, p. 284, note c.

[310.] If men create laws, women create mores. A good reader of Rousseau, Tocqueville claims therefore that in America the women are superior to the men (for mores create laws). See II, p. 482, note u. Woman represents the indefinite, liberty, passions, while man represents equality, the defined, the rational.

[311.] The democratic social state and the aristocratic social state appear with very defined features in the letter of 1830 to Charles Stoffels. The text will be found in appendix V.

[312.] II, p. 286.

[313.] “The social state separates men, the political state must draw them closer./

The social state gives them the taste for well-being [v: inclines them toward the earth], the political state must raise them up by giving them great ideas and great emotions” IV, p. 1262, note b.

[314.] In a letter to Corcelle of 19 October 1839 (OC, XI, 1, p. 139), Tocqueville asks: “So will we never see the wind of true political passions rise again, my dear Corcelle, those violent, hard, sometimes cruel, but great, disinterested, fruitful passions; those passions that are the soul of the only parties that I understand and to which I would feel myself willingly disposed to give my time, my fortune and my life?” Also see the speech on the question of the right to work (OCB, IX, p. 542).

[315.] There are many examples of opposition. Political liberty, we have said, implies religious beliefs:

Tocqueville wants to develop the sciences in aristocratic societies and the moral sciences in democracies, in order, in both cases, to counter the tendencies of the social state (III, p. 962, note n) and he wishes to promote spiritualism to stop democratic materialism:

[316.] “Sentiments and ideas are renewed, the heart grows larger and the human mind develops only by the reciprocal action of men on each other. I have demonstrated that this action is almost nil in democratic countries. So it must be created there artificially. And this is what associations alone are able to do.” III, p. 900.

[317.] Four types of regimes (that can be despotic or free) exist: 1. Democratic social state (social equality) and democratic political state (political equality): democracy. 2. Democratic social state combined with an aristocratic political state. This regime tends toward and will arrive at democracy, for the political state finishes by being the reflection of the social state. 3. Social inequality and political equality (this is, according to Tocqueville, a chimera). 4. Social inequality and political inequality: aristocracy.

[318.] III, p. 810, note q.

[319.] As Luis Díez del Corral pointed out, Tocqueville could have had this idea from the very mouth of Guizot (El pensamiento político de Tocqueville, pp. 285-86, 315, 377-79). But differing from Guizot, Tocqueville does not believe that the result of the struggle between the forces of society and those of the individual is the bourgeois mentality.

[320.] Book XI, chapter VI of Esprit des lois. Also see book I, chapter 2.

[321.] This sets him apart from Rousseau. See I, p. 406, note g, pp. 407 and 413.

[322.] See Luis Díez del Corral, El pensamiento político de Tocqueville, pp. 158-59, and OCB, VI, p. 445.

[323.] “As I grow older, I have more regard, I will almost say respect, for the passions. I love them when they are good, and I am not even sure about detesting them when they are bad. They are power, and power, wherever it is found, appears at its best amid the universal weakness that surrounds us.” Letter to Ampère, 10 August 1841, OC, XI, p. 152. Also see OCB, VI, p. 407.

[a. ] The drafts contain the following note, probably meant to announce the publication of the book: