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• Democracy In America,(1840), Volume Iv
• Third Part a ] Influence of Democracy On Mores Properly So Called
• Chapter 1 A: How Mores Become Milder As Conditions Become Equal
• Chapter 2 A: How Democracy Makes the Habitual Relations of the Americans Simpler and Easier B
• Chapter 3 A: Why the Americans Have So Little Susceptibility In Their Country and Show Such Susceptibility In Ours B
• Chapter 4 A: Consequences of the Three Preceding Chapters
• Chapter 5 A: How Democracy Modifies the Relationships of Servant and Master
• Chapter 6 A: How Democratic Institutions and Mores Tend to Raise the Cost and Shorten the Length of Leases
• Chapter 7 A: Influence of Democracy On Salaries
• Chapter 8 A: Influence of Democracy On the Family B
• Chapter 9 A: Education of Young Girls In the United States B
• Chapter 10 A: How the Young Girl Is Found Again In the Features of the Wife
• Chapter 11 A: How Equality of Conditions Contributes to Maintaining Good Morals In America
• Chapter 12 A: How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and of Woman B
• Chapter 13 A: How Equality Divides the Americans Naturally Into a Multitude of Small Particular Societies B
• Chapter 14 A: Some Reflections On American Manners B
• Chapter 15 A: of the Gravity of Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Them From Often Doing Thoughtless Things B
• Chapter 16 A: Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Anxious and More Quarrelsome Than That of the English B
• Chapter 17 A: How the Appearance of Society In the United States Is At the Very Same Time Agitated and Monotonous B
• Chapter 18 A: of Honor In the United States and In Democratic Societies 1
• Chapter 19 A: Why In the United States You Find So Many Ambitious Men and So Few Great Ambitions B
• Chapter 20 A: of Positions Becoming an Industry Among Certain Democratic Nations
• Chapter 21 A: Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare B
• Chapter 22 A: Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies Naturally Desire War
• Chapter 23 A: Which Class, In Democratic Armies, Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary
• Chapter 24 A: What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker Than Other Armies While Beginning a Military Campaign and More Formidable When the War Is Prolonged B
• Chapter 25 A: of Discipline In Democratic Armies
• Chapter 26 A: Some Considerations On War In Democratic Societies
• Fourth Part a ] of the Influence That Democratic Ideas and Sentiments Exercise On Political Society B
• Chapter 1: Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste For Free Institutions
• Chapter 2 A: That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples In Matters of Government Naturally Favor the Concentration of Powers B
• Chapter 3: That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are In Agreement With Their Ideas For Bringing Them to Concentrate Power a
• Chapter 4 A: of Some Particular and Accidental Causes That End Up Leading a Democratic People to Centralize Power Or That Turn Them Away From Doing So B
• Chapter 5: That Among the European Nations of Today the Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stable a
• Chapter 6: What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear a
• Chapter 7 A: Continuation of the Preceding Chapters
• Chapter 8 A: General View of the Subject B
• Notes
• Appendix 1: Journey to Lake Oneida a
• Appendix 2: A Fortnight In the Wilderness a
• Appendix 3: Sects In America a
• Appendix 4: Political Activity In America a
• Appendix 5: Letter of Alexis De Tocqueville to Charles Stoffels
• Appendix 6: Foreword to the Twelfth Edition
• Ouvrages Utilisés Par Tocqueville [ Works Used By Tocqueville ]
• Bibliographie [ Bibliography ]

chapter 18a

Of Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies1

It seems that men use two very distinct methods in the public judgment that they make about the actions of their fellows: sometimes they judge them according to the simple notions of the just and the unjust, which are spread over the whole earth; sometimes they assess them with the aid of very particular notions that belong only to one country and to one period. Often it happens that these two rules differ; sometimes they conflict with each other, but never do they merge entirely or cancel each other out.b

Honor, in the time of its greatest power, governs the will more than belief, and men, even if they submit without hesitation and without murmuring to its commandments, still feel, by a kind of obscure but powerful instinct, that a more general, more ancient and more holy law exists, which they sometimes disobey without ceasing to know it. There are actions that have been judged upright and dishonoring at the same time. The refusal of a duel has often been in this category.

I believe that you can explain these phenomena other than by the caprice of certain individuals and certain peoples, as has been done until now.

[The whim of men enters into it only partly.] Humanity feels permanent and general needs, which have given birth to moral laws; to their disregard all men have naturally attached, in all places and in all times, the ideas of blame and shame. They have called doing evil to evade them, doing good to submit to them.c

Established as well, within the vast human association, are more restricted associations, which are called peoples, and amid the latter, others smaller still, which are called classes or castes.

Each one of these associations forms like a particular species within the human race; and although it does not differ essentially from the mass of men, it holds itself a little apart and feels needs that are its own. These are the special needs that modify in some fashion and in certain countries the way of envisaging human actions and the esteem that is suitable to give to them.d

The general and permanent interest of humanity is that men do not kill each other; but it can happen that the particular and temporary interest of a people or of a class is, in certain cases, to excuse and even to honor the homicide.e

Honor is nothing other than this particular rule based on a particular condition, with the aid of which a people or a class distributes blame or praise.f

There is nothing more unproductive for the human mind than an abstract idea. So I hasten to run toward facts. An example will cast light on my thought.

I will choose the most extraordinary type of honor that has ever appeared in the world, and the one that we know the best: aristocratic honor born within feudal society. I will explain it with the aid of what precedes, and I will explain what precedes by it.g

I do not have to search here when and how the aristocracy of the Middle Ages was born, why it separated itself so profoundly from the rest of the nation, what had established and consolidated its power. I find it in place, and I seek to understand why it considered most human actions in such a particular light.

What strikes me first is that in the feudal world actions were not always praised or blamed by reason of their intrinsic value, but that sometimes they happened to be valued solely in relation to the author or the subject of the actions, which is repugnant to the general conscience of humanity. So certain actions that dishonored a nobleman were indifferent on the part of the commoner; others changed character depending on whether the person who suffered them belonged to the aristocracy or lived outside of it.

When these different opinions were born, the nobility formed a separate body, in the middle of the people, whom it dominated from the inaccessible heights to which it had withdrawn. To maintain this particular position that created its strength, it not only needed political privileges; it had to have virtues and vices for its exclusive use [in order to continue to distinguish itself in all things from what was outside or below it].

That some particular virtue or some particular vice belonged to the nobility rather than to commoners; that some particular action was neutral when it involved a villein or blameworthy when it concerned a nobleman, that is what was often arbitrary; but that honor or shame was attached to the actions of a man depending on his condition, that is what resulted from the very constitution of an aristocratic society. That was seen, in fact, in all the countries that had an aristocracy. As long as a single vestige of it remains, these singularities are still found: to seduce a young woman of color hardly harms the reputation of an American man; to marry her dishonors him.h

In certain cases, feudal honor prescribed vengeance and stigmatized pardoning insults; in others it imperiously commanded men to master themselves; it ordered forgetting self. It did not make a law of humanity or of gentleness; but it praised generosity; it valued liberality more than benevolence; it allowed someone to enrich himself by games of chance, by war, but not by work; it preferred great crimes to small gains. Greed revolted it less than avarice, violence often pleased it, while guile and treason always appeared contemptible to it.

These bizarre notions were not born solely out of the caprice of those who had conceived them.

A class that has succeeded in putting itself above and at the head of all the others, and that makes constant efforts to maintain itself at this supreme rank, must particularly honor the virtues that have grandeur and brilliance, and that can be easily combined with pride and love of power. Such a class is not afraid of upsetting the natural order of conscience, in order to put these virtues above all the others. You even conceive that it readily raises certain bold and brilliant vices above peaceful and modest virtues. It is in a way forced to do so by its condition.

[≠These singular opinions arise naturally from the singularities of the social state.≠]

Before all virtues and in the place of a great number of them, the nobles of the Middles Ages put military courage [while they considered fear as the most shameful and most irreparable of weaknesses].

That too was a singular opinion that arose necessarily from the singularity of the social state.

Feudal aristocracy was born by war and for war; it had found its power in arms and it maintained it by arms; so nothing was more necessary for it than military courage; and it was natural that the aristocracy glorified it above all the rest. So everything that exhibited military courage externally, even if it were at the expense of reason and humanity, was approved and often commanded by the aristocracy. The whim of men was found only in the detail.

That a man regarded receiving a slap on the cheek as an enormous insult and was obliged to kill in single combat the man who had lightly struck him in this way, that was arbitrary; but that a nobleman could not receive an insult peacefully and was dishonored if he allowed himself to be struck without fighting, that sprang from the very principles and needs of a military aristocracy.

So it was true, to a certain point, to say that honor had capricious aspects; but the caprices of honor were always confined within certain necessary limits. This particular rule, called honor by our fathers, is so far from seeming to me an arbitrary law, that I would easily undertake to connect its most incoherent and most bizarre prescriptions to a small number of fixed and invariable needs of feudal societies.

If I followed feudal honor into the field of politics, I would not have any more difficulty explaining its workings.

The social state and political institutions of the Middle Ages were such that national power never directly governed the citizens. National power did not so to speak exist in their eyes; each man knew only a certain man whom he was obliged to obey. It was by the latter that, without knowing it, all the others were attached. So in feudal societies, all public order turned on the sentiment of fidelity to the very person of the lord. That destroyed, you fell immediately into anarchy.

Fidelity to the political head was, moreover, a sentiment whose value all the members of the aristocracy saw every day, for each one of them was at the same time lord and vassal and had to command as well as obey.

To remain faithful to your lord, to sacrifice yourself for him as needed, to share his good or bad fortune, to help him in his undertakings whatever they were, such were the first prescriptions of feudal honor in political matters. The treason of the vassal was condemned by opinion with an extraordinary severity. A particularly ignominious name was created for it; it was called a felony.

[≠Fidelity to the feudal head becomes {on the contrary, a kind of religion}.≠]

You find, on the contrary, in the Middle Ages only a few traces of a passion that animated ancient societies [≠and that reappeared among modern ones as the feudal world was transformed.≠]. I mean patriotism.j The very noun patriotism is not old in our language.2

Feudal institutions concealed country from view; they made love of it less necessary. They caused the nation to be forgotten while making you passionate about one man. Consequently you do not see that feudal honor ever made it a strict law to remain faithful to your country.

It is not that love of country did not exist in the hearts of our fathers; but it formed a kind of weak and obscure instinct, which became clearer and stronger as classes were destroyed and [≠political≠] power was centralized.

This is clearly seen in the contrasting judgments that the peoples of Europe bring to the different facts of their history, depending on the generation that judges them. What principally dishonored the High Constable de Bourbon in the eyes of his contemporaries is that he bore arms against his king; what dishonors him most in our eyes is that he waged war on his country. We stigmatize his actions as much as our ancestors, but for other reasons.

I have chosen feudal honor to clarify my thought, because feudal honor has more marked and better features than any other. I could have taken my example from elsewhere; I would have reached the same end by another road.k

Although we know the Romans less well than our ancestors, we nonetheless know that there existed among them, in regard to glory and dishonor, particular opinions that did not flow only from general notions of good and evil. Many human actions there were considered in a different light, depending on whether it concerned a citizen or a foreigner, a free man or a slave; certain vices were glorified, certain virtues were raised above all others.

“Now in that time,” says Plutarch in the life of Coriolanus, “valor was honored and valued in Rome above all other virtues. What attests to this is that it was called virtus, the very noun for virtue, attributing the name of the common type to a particular species. So much so that virtue in Latin was just like saying valor.” Who does not recognize in that the particular need of that singular association formed to conquer the world?

Each nation will lend itself to analogous observations; for, as I said above, every time that men gather together in a particular society, a code of honor becomes immediately established among them, that is to say an ensemble of opinions that is proper to them about what must be praised or blamed; and these particular rules always have their source in the special habits and special interests of the association.

That applies, in a certain measure, to democratic societies as to others. We are going to find the proof of it among the Americans.3

You still find scattered, among the opinions of the Americans, a few detached notions of the ancient aristocratic honor of Europe. These traditional opinions are in very small number; they have weak roots and little power. It is a religion of which you allow a few temples to continue to exist, but in which you no longer believe.

Amid these half-obliterated notions of an exotic honor, appear a few new opinions that constitute what could today be called American honor.

I have shown how the Americans were pushed incessantly toward commerce and industry. Their origin, their social state, their political institutions, and the very place that they inhabit draw them irresistibly in this direction. So they form, at present, an almost exclusively industrial and commercial association, placed at the heart of a new and immense country that its principal purpose is to exploit. Such is the characteristic feature that, today, most particularly distinguishes the American people from all the others.

All the peaceful virtues that tend to give a regular bearing to the social body and tend to favor trade must therefore be especially honored among this people, and you cannot neglect them without falling into public scorn.

All the turbulent virtues that often give brilliance, but even more often give trouble to a society, occupy on the contrary a subordinate rank in the opinion of this same people. You can neglect them without losing the esteem of your fellow citizens, and you would perhaps risk losing it by acquiring them.

The Americans make no less an arbitrary classification of the vices. There are certain tendencies, blameworthy in the eyes of the general reason and of the universal conscience of humanity, that find themselves in agreement with the particular and temporary needs of the American association; and it condemns them only weakly, sometimes it praises them. I will cite particularly the love of wealth and the secondary tendencies that are connected to it. In order to clear, to make fruitful, to transform this vast uninhabited continent that is his domain, the American must have the daily support of an energetic passion; this passion can only be the love of wealth; so the passion for wealth has no stigma attached to it in America, and provided that it does not go beyond the limits assigned to it by public order, it is honored. The American calls a noble and estimable ambition what our fathers of the Middle Ages named servile cupidity; in the same way the American gives the name of blind and barbaric fury to the conquering fervor and warrior spirit that threw our fathers into new battles every day.

In the United States, fortunes are easily destroyed and rise again. The country is without limits and full of inexhaustible resources. The people have all the needs and all the appetites of a being who is growing, and whatever efforts he makes, he is always surrounded by more goods than he is able to grasp. What is to be feared among such a people is not the ruin of a few individuals, soon repaired, it is the inactivity and indolence of all. Boldness in industrial enterprises is the first cause of its rapid progress, its strength, its grandeur. Industry is for it like a vast lottery in which a small number of men lose every day, but in which the State wins constantly; so such a people must see boldness with favor and honor it in matters of industry. Now, every bold enterprise imperils the fortune of the one who devotes himself to it and the fortune of all those who trust in him. The Americans, who make commercial temerity into a kind of virtue, cannot, in any case whatsoever, stigmatize those who are daring.

That is why in the United States such a singular indulgence is shown for the merchant who goes bankrupt; the honor of the latter does not suffer from such an accident. In that, the Americans differ, not only from European peoples, but from all the commercial nations of today; but then, in their position and their needs, they do not resemble any of them.

In America, all the vices that are of a nature to alter the purity of morals and to destroy the conjugal union are treated with a severity unknown to the rest of the world. That contrasts strangely, at first view, with the tolerance that is shown there on other points. You are surprised to meet among the same people a morality so lax and so austere.

These things are not as inconsistent as you suppose. Public opinion, in the United States, only mildly represses love of wealth, which serves the industrial greatness and prosperity of the nation; and it particularly condemns bad morals, which distract the human mind from the search for well-being and disturbs the internal order of the family, so necessary to the success of business. So in order to be respected by their fellows, Americans are forced to yield to regular habits. In this sense you can say that they put their honor in being chaste.

American honor agrees with the old honor of Europe on one point: it puts courage at the head of virtues, and makes it the greatest of moral necessities for man; but it does not envisage courage in the same way.

In the United States, warrior valor is little prized; the courage that is known the best and esteemed the most is the one that makes you face the furies of the Ocean in order to arrive earliest in port, bear without complaint the miseries of the wilderness, and its solitude, more cruel than all the miseries; the courage that makes you almost insensitive to the sudden reversal of a fortune painfully acquired, and immediately suggests new efforts to build a new one. Courage of this type is principally necessary for the maintenance and the prosperity of the American association, and it is particularly honored and glorified by it. You cannot show yourself lacking in it, without dishonor.

I find a final feature; it will really put the idea of this chapter into relief. In a democratic society, like that of the United States, where fortunes are small and poorly assured, everyone works, and work leads to everything. That has turned the point of honor around and directed it against idleness.

I sometimes met in America rich young men, enemies by temperament of all difficult effort, who were forced to take up a profession. Their nature and their fortune allowed them to remain idle; public opinion imperiously forbid it to them, and they had to obey.n I have often seen, on the contrary, among European nations where the aristocracy still struggles against the torrent that carries it along, I have seen, I say, men goaded constantly by their needs and their desires who remain idle in order not to lose the esteem of their equals, and who subject themselves more easily to boredom and want than to work.

Who does not see in these two so opposite obligations two different rules, both of which emanate nonetheless from honor?

What our fathers called honor above all was, truly speaking, only one of its forms. They gave a generic name to what was only a type. [If the aristocratic honor of the Middle Ages had more marked features and a physiognomy more extraordinary than all that had preceded and followed it, that was only because it was born amidst the most exceptional social state that ever existed and the one most removed from the natural and ordinary condition of humanity. Never in fact, in our western world, had men been separated by so many artificial barriers and felt more particular needs.]o So honor is found in democratic centuries as in times of aristocracy. But it will not be difficult to show that in the former it presents another physiognomy.

Not only are its prescriptions different, we are going to see that they are fewer and less clear and that its laws are followed with less vigor.

A caste is always in a much more particular situation than a people. There is nothing more exceptional in the world than a small society always composed of the same families, like the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, for example, and whose objective is to concentrate and to hold enlightenment, wealth and power in its hands exclusively and by heredity.

Now, the more exceptional the position of a society is, the more numerous are its special needs, and the more the notions of its honor, which correspond to its needs, increase.

So the prescriptions of honor will always be fewer among a people that is not divided into castes, than among another. If nations come to be established where it is difficult even to find classes, honor will be limited there to a small number of precepts, and those precepts will be less and less removed from the moral laws adopted by the generality of humanity.

Thus the prescriptions of honor will be less bizarre and fewer in a democratic nation than in an aristocratic one.

They will also be more obscure; that results necessarily from what precedes.

Since the characteristic features of honor are less numerous and less singular, it must often be difficult to discern them.

There are still other reasons. Among the aristocratic nations of the Middle Ages the generations succeeded each other in vain; each family was like an immortal and perpetually immobile man;p ideas varied scarcely more than conditions.

So each man had always before his eyes the same objects, which he envisaged from the same point of view; little by little he saw into the slightest details, and his perception could not fail, in the long run, to become clear and distinct. Thus, not only did the men of feudal times have very extraordinary opinions that constituted their honor, but also each one of these opinions was shaped in their minds in a clear-cut and precise way.

It can never be the same in a country like America, where all the citizens are in motion; where society, itself changing every day, changes its opinions with its needs. In such a country, you catch a glimpse of the rule of honor; you rarely have the leisure to consider it intently.

Were society immobile, it would still be difficult to fix the meaning that must be given to the word honor.

In the Middle Ages, since each class had its honor, the same opinion was never accepted simultaneously by a very great number of men, which allowed giving it a fixed and precise form; all the more so since all those who accepted it, all having a perfectly identical and very exceptional position, found a natural disposition to agree on the prescriptions of a law that was made only for them alone.

Honor thus became a complete and detailed code in which everything was foreseen and ordered in advance, and which presented a fixed and always visible rule to human actions. Among a democratic nation like the American people, where ranks are mixed and where the entire society forms only a single mass, all of whose elements are analogous without being entirely the same, you can never exactly agree in advance about what is allowed and forbidden by honor.

There exist indeed, within this people, certain national needs that give birth to common opinions in the matter of honor; but such opinions never present themselves at the same time, in the same manner and with equal force to the mind of all the citizens; the law of honor exists, but it often lacks interpreters.

The confusion is even still greater in a democratic country like ours,q in which the different classes that composed the old society, starting to mingle without yet being able to blend, bring to each other every day the various and often contradictory notions of their honor; in which each man, following his caprices, abandons one part of the opinions of his fathers and holds onto the other; so that amid so many arbitrary measures, a common rule can never be established. It is nearly impossible then to say in advance what actions will be honored or stigmatized. These are miserable times, but they do not last.

Among democratic nations, honor, not being well defined, is necessarily less powerful; for it is difficult to apply with certainty and firmness a law that is imperfectly known.r Public opinion, which is the natural and sovereign interpreter of the law of honor, not seeing distinctly in which direction it is appropriate to tip blame or praise, only delivers its judgment with hesitation. Sometimes it happens that it contradicts itself; often it remains immobile and lets things happen.

[≠The law of honor, were it clear, would still be weak among democratic peoples by the sole fact that its not very numerous prescriptions are few. For the principal strength of a body of laws comes from the fact that it extends at the same time to a multitude of matters and, every day in a thousand diverse ways, bends the human mind to obedience. A law that provides for just a few cases and that is only applied here and there is always feeble.

Now, the prescriptions of honor are always more numerous and less detailed to the extent that classes, not being as close to each other, have fewer interests apart from the mass and fewer particular needs.≠]

The relative weakness of honor in democracy is due to several other causes.

In aristocratic countries, the same honor is never accepted except by a certain, often limited number of men, always separated from the rest of their fellows. So honor easily mixes and mingles, in the minds of those men, with the idea of all that distinguishes them. It appears to them like the distinctive feature of their physiognomy; they apply its different rules with all the ardor of personal interest, and if I can express myself in this way, they bring passion to obeying it.

This truth manifests itself very clearly when you read the customary laws of the Middle Ages, on the point of legal duels.s You see there that the nobles were bound, in their quarrels, to use the lance and the sword, while the villeins used the cudgel with each other, “it being understood,” the laws add, “that the villeins have no honor.” That did not mean, as we imagine today, that those men were dishonorable; it meant only that their actions were not judged by the same rules as those of the aristocracy.t

What is astonishing, at first view, is that, when honor reigns with this full power, its prescriptions are in general very strange, so that it seems to be obeyed better the more it appears to diverge from reason; from that it has sometimes been concluded that feudal honor was strong, because of its very extravagance.

These two things have, in fact, the same origin; but they are not derived from each other.

Honor is bizarre in proportion as it represents more particular needs felt by a smaller number of men; and it is powerful because it represents needs of this type. So honor is not powerful because it is bizarre; but it is bizarre and powerful because of the same cause.

I will make another remark.

Among aristocratic peoples, all ranks differ, but all ranks are fixed; each man occupies in his sphere a place that he cannot leave, and in which he lives amid other men bound around him in the same way. So among these nations, no one can hope or fear not being seen; there is no man placed so low who does not have his stage, and who can, by his obscurity, escape from blame or from praise.

In democratic States, on the contrary, where all citizens are merged in the same crowd and are constantly in motion, public opinion has nothing to hold on to; its subject disappears at every instant and escapes.u So honor will always be less imperious and less pressing; for honor acts only with the public in mind, different in that from simple virtue,v which lives on its own and is satisfied with its testimony.

If the reader has well grasped all that precedes, he must have understood that there exists, between inequality of conditions and what we have called honor, a close and necessary connection that, if I am not wrong, had not yet been clearly pointed out. So I must make a final effort to bring it clearly to light.w

A nation takes up a separate position within humanity. Apart from certain general needs inherent in the human species, it has its own particular interests and needs. Immediately established within the nation in the matter of blame and praise are certain opinions that are its own and that its citizens call honor.

Within this same nation, a caste becomes established, which, separating itself in turn from all the other classes, contracts particular needs, and the latter, in turn, give rise to special opinions.x The honor of this caste, bizarre mixture of the particular notions of the nation and of the still more particular notions of the caste, will diverge as far as you can imagine from the simple and general opinions of men. We have reached the extreme point; let us go back.

Ranks mingle, privileges are abolished. Since the men who compose the nation have again become similar and equal, their interests and their needs blend, and you see successively vanish all the singular notions that each caste called honor; honor now derives only from the particular needs of the nation itself; it represents its individuality among peoples.

If it were finally allowed to suppose that all races were blended and that all the peoples of the world had reached the point of having the same interests, the same needs, and of no longer being different from each other by any characteristic feature, you would cease entirely to attribute a conventional value to human actions; everyone would envisage them in the same light; the general needs of humanity, which conscience reveals to every man, would be the common measure. Then, you would no longer find in this world anything except the simple and general notions of good and evil, to which would be linked, by a natural and necessary bond, the ideas of praise and blame.

Thus finally to contain in a single formula my whole thought, it is the dissimilarities and the inequalities of men that created honor; it grows weaker as these differences fade away, and it would disappear with them.y

[a. ] Honor derives from the particular needs of certain men. Every particular association has its honor.

This proved by feudal honor, applicable to American honor.

What must be understood by American honor.

1. It differs from feudal honor by the nature of its prescriptions.

2. It differs from it also by the number of its prescriptions, by their clarity, their precision; the power with which it makes them followed.

That more and more true as citizens become more similar and nations more alike (YTC, CVf, p. 47).

The drafts of this chapter are found in three different jackets. Two of them bear the same title as the chapter; the third bears the following title: “why men are more unconcerned about their honor in democracies. To examine separately.Subtle and perhaps false idea.”

In pencil on the first page of an old version: “<The chapter is a bit too theoretical. General impression ofÉdouard>” (Rubish, 2). In the beginning, the ideas on honor seem to have belonged to the chapters on the army (see note b of pp. 1070-71).

[1. ]The word honor is not always taken in the same sense in French.

1.It means first the esteem, the glory, the consideration that you get from your fellows; it is in this sense that you say win honor.

2.Honor also means the ensemble of rules by the aid of which you obtain this glory, this esteem, and this consideration. This is how you say that a man has always conformed strictly to the laws of honor; that he has forfeited honor. While writing the present chapter, I have always taken the word honor in this last sense.

[The reader will perhaps find this note superfluous, but when your language is poor, you must not be miserly with definitions.]

[b. ] On the jacket of the manuscript: “The capital vice of this entire chapter, what makes it sound false, is that I give to honor a unique source while it has several. Honor is without doubt based on particular needs arising either from the social and political state, or from the physical constitution and climate. It arises as well, whatever I say, from the whim of men.

“Whim has a part, but it is the smallest.

“<Baugy, 27 January 1838.>”

[c. ] “There are certain general rules that are necessary to the existence and to the well-being of human societies whatever the time, the place, the laws; individual conscience points these rules out to all men and public reason forces them to conform to them. Voluntary obedience to each of these general laws is virtue” (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 58-59).

[d. ] I must be careful,Éd[ouard (ed.)] told me, not to destroy in this way the (illegible word) of virtue and to bring the mind of the reader to the conclusion that virtue is not always necessary, or even useful to men. To reflect on that./

I fear being too absolute by saying that honor comes from the special needs of a special society, and that consequently it is always useful and often necessary for its existence, which would legitimize in a way all its immoralities and its extravagances to the detriment of virtue. To say that honor is explained by the special constitution of associations, that is incontestable, but to add that it is necessary for their existence, isn’t that to go too far in a multitude of cases?

There is in honor an element different from the needs and the interests of those who conceive it. That seems to me at least very probable upon examination.

[To the side: Use the Blacks to prove how the point of honor can become intense (illegible word) powerful, as soon as the social state departs from nature.]

Religion, climate, race must influence the notions of honor. Perhaps it would be necessary to grant a part to all of that. My idea would only be more correct, by becoming less general and less absolute.

Let us never lose sight of the fact that honor is the ensemble of opinions relating to the judgment of human actions, in view of the glory or the shame that our fellows attach to them. This forms a radical difference between honor and virtue, apart from all the other differences.

[To the side] Say somewhere that an extraordinary honor announces an extraordinary social state and vice versa. That generalizes the past in a useful way (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 61-62).

[e. ] There is an idea that crosses my mind at every instant; I must finally try to look at it one moment and confront it.

I fear that the outcome of my chapter is that true and false, just and unjust, good and evil, vice and virtue are only relative things depending on the perspective from which you see them, a result that I would be very upset to reach, for I believe it false; and in addition such an opinion would be in clear contradiction to the ensemble of my opinions. I am at this moment too tired of my subject to see these questions clearly, but I must come back to them with a fresh mind./

[In the margin: Good and evil exist apart from the blame or the praise of certain men and even of humanity. What I am looking for here is not what is good or evil in an absolute way, but what men praise or blame. This is capital.

How, moreover, to define evil, if not what is harmful to humanity, and good what is useful to it?

Where is our (three illegible words)?

I do not want to say that there is no absolute good in human actions, but only that the particular interests of certain men can lead them to attribute arbitrarily to certain actions a particular value, and that this value becomes the rule of those who act with praise or blame in view, that is, by honor. ]

To act by virtue, that is to do what you believe good without other motive than the pleasure of doing it and the idea of complying with a duty. To act by honor, that is to act not with absolute good or evil in view, but in consideration of what our fellows think of it and of the shame or the glory that will result from it.

The rule of the first man is within himself, it is conscience.

The rule of the other is outside, it is opinion.

The goal of this chapter is to show the origin and the effects of this opinion (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 62-63).

[f. ] The recompense of the man who follows honor is more assured and more immediate than that of the one who follows virtue. That is why men have never taught [that (ed.)] virtue is in view of God and of yourself, honor in view of opinion. Why? So that you can place in the other world the recompense of those who submit to thelaws of honor. Judgment, discernment, spiritual effort are necessary for virtue; only memory is necessary to conform to honor.

[In the margin: Honor, visible rule, convenient for actions, less perfect, more sure./

Sometimes finally the rule makes an action indifferent in the eyes of virtue into a matter of glory or of shame. Virtue, flexible; honor, inflexible] (YTC, CVk, 1, p. 60).

[g. ] A draft of what follows exists in YTC, CVk, 1 (pp. 64-73). Tocqueville noted on the jacket: “Review carefully these variants [illegible word] this 25 October 1839.

“Piece that I reworked so laboriously that I fear that I have ruined it.

“October 1839” (YTC, CVk, 1, p. 64).

[h. ] Édouard considers it of the greatest [importance? (ed.)] to include this./

It is impossible that there is not something useful to draw from the opinions of the Americans on Blacks and from the opinion suggested to them by the presence of Blacks.

In the South of the United States:

It is shameful to become familiar with a Black, to receive one at home even though he is free and rich, unspeakable to marry one.

It is not shameful to mistreat one, to seduce one. A host of actions, rebuked when they concern a white, are not suppressed by public opinion when they concern a Black. There are certain virtues and certain vices that are thought to be principally appropriate to him.

In the same portion of the Union, it is glorious to be idle, to be a duelist, a good horseman, a good hunter, to be magnificent in manners, opulent, generous, not to let others be disrespectful to you, to be very susceptible to insults, to keep your word scrupulously, little esteem for industry.

These are in a word the opinions of the aristocracy of the Middle Ages (the opposite of what is seen in the North, so that from one side aristocratic honor, from the other democratic) modified and softened by these causes.

It is not a warrior aristocracy.

Its position gives it the taste for the acquisition of wealth and for agriculture.

Its intimate connection with the North suggests to it many opinions not in harmony with the social state and that it would not have if it was isolated.

The absence of hierarchy in its ranks./

The difficulty of making use of all of that is that what I have just said constitutes an aristocratic honor and that, as to America, my goal and my interest is to get imperceptibly into democratic honor. That is, however, very interesting and could perhaps be placed at the head of America (Rubish, 2).

[j. ] Of patriotism.

(How to link this to democracy?)

[In the margin: Parallel of ancient and modern patriotism.

The Romans and the Americans, real, profound, dogmatic, simple, rational, egoistic, superficial, talkative.]

To judge patriotism, it must not be taken when it acts in the direction of the passions that serve it as a vehicle, but on the contrary when it must struggle against those same passions. When I see the French people rushing to the borders in 1792, I am in doubt about whether they came to defend France or the Revolution thatassured the triumph of democracy [v: equality]. But when in Rome the Senate goes as a body before Varro, man of the people, raised by the caprice of the people to the Consulate, and thanks him for not having lost hope in the country, I see into the bottom of hearts and I no longer doubt.

I do not claim that the patriotism that is combined with an interest of party is a thing without value. I am only saying that to judge it well, it must be reduced to itself. Everything that shakes the human heart and calls it beyond the material interests of life, and raises it above fear of death is a great thing (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 13-14).

[2. ]The word patrie itself is found among French authors only after the XVIth century.

[k. ] I have only wanted to examine among feudal peoples solely the opinions of the aristocratic class. But if I had descended into the detail of these complicated societies≠and if I had contemplated separately the different classes that formed the social body≠, I would have found (illegible word) an analogous spectacle.

In each one of the classes ≠of feudal society≠ as well as within the aristocracy reigned in fact a public opinion that distributed in a sovereign way praise and blame according to a rule that it had created for its own use {and that was not always} consistent . . .

[In the margin: ≠All of this is not necessary in itself, but slows and hinders the movement of the piece. To have it copied separately and probably to delete (illegible word).

Ideas to introduce somewhere in the portrait of the feudal world.≠]

The particular condition of the men who composed these classes suggested tothem a particular esteem for certain human actions and a very special scorn for certain others, and it led them to attach to some of their actions glory or shame, according to a measure that was their own. In that time, opinions, although aristocratic, colored more or less all human opinions; it was easy, however, to recognize a bourgeois honor, one of villeins, one of serfs, like an honor of nobles. Each one of them differed from aristocratic honor in its rules and was similar to it in its cause and in its objective (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 71-72).

[n. ] To the side: “<The question is to know if I must say only that about America. I believe that the reader expects more and would be surprised.>”

[o. ] In the margin: “Piece to delete probably. To see again.”

[p. ] To the side: “<Good sentence, but which is, I believe, found elsewhere.>”

[q. ] The manuscript says: “. . . among a people in which the different classes . . .”

[r. ] “<Delicate idea and a little subtle but true at bottom. To include./

“The pleasure that honor gives is an intellectual and moral enjoyment that must lose its value like all the others of this type in democratic centuries, even if the notions of honor did not become fewer and more confused>” (In the jacket why men ...,Rubish, 2).

[s. ] The duel. Why the duel diminishes as nations become more democratic. The progress of public reason is not a sufficient cause. The duel is the sanction of the law of civility. When the law becomes uncertain and is almost abolished, it ceases by itself. But it remains a means of vengeance.

[In the margin: Almost purposeless efforts of the legislators of today who want to destroy the duel. The duel is attacked by a general cause more powerful than legislation, and that cause alone is strong enough to destroy it.]

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

No one fights in the United States for conventional insults, but for insults that are considered as mortal in the eyes of reason, such as the subornation of a woman or of a girl, for example. And then they fight to the death. The custom of the duel must tend to disappear everywhere military aristocratic honor is disappearing. So what I said in the preceding chapter explains sufficiently why the custom of the duel is gradually growing weaker among modern peoples and particularly among democratic nations. But there are still other reasons, and were the duel held in honor by the opinion of these peoples it would still be more difficult to find the occasion to fight a duel.

Great number of those to whom it would be necessary to answer.

Uncertainty of the insult. The duel no longer keeps order. Men do not kill each other and (illegible word) to take (illegible word); the duel for conventional insult must first disappear, then finally the duel for real insult, rarer duel and more cruel. Example: United States of the South. States of the North.

Here they still fight, there they do almost nothing more than go to court. The Americans fight when the Romans murdered (YTC, Cva, pp. 51-52). During the judicial year 1828 or 1829, Tocqueville gave a speech on the duel (André Jardin,Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 75). Beaumont dedicated a long commentary to duels in Marie (I, pp. 370-77).

[t. ] This paragraph is not found in the manuscript.

[u. ] <Public opinion, which is the sovereign judge in the matter of honor, is often uncertain. It does not discern clearly> for it is difficult to apply with certainty and firmness a rule that is only imperfectly known. So public opinion, which is the natural and sovereign interpreter of honor, almost always strikes while hesitating and often its voice is lost amid the thousand discordant noises that arise on all sides, and since it constantly changes interpreters you always imagine that its decision is not without appeal (In the jacket why the men ..., Rubish, 2).

On the jacket of the manuscript you read: “Read what Montesquieu wrote on honor, books III, IV and XXVIII.” A jacket of the rubish of this chapter bears the following note: “In these rubish there are several good ideas that I left behind and that it would be good to reexamine.” This jacket contains two unpublished letters. The first is a letter of M. Feuillet, of the Royal Institute, to Hervé de Tocqueville, in which he mentions that he has not been able to find a treatise on the dispositions of the preconception of honor and that he recommends reading the Encyclopédie and books III, IV, and XXVIII ofL’Esprit des lois. The second is a letter from Hervé de Tocqueville to his son, that we reproduce here in full:

In January 1838, Kergorlay, on a visit to Baugy for four days, probably helped Tocqueville in drafting this chapter. The author wrote to Beaumont on 18 January: “Louis has just spent four days here; I was at that moment tangled in a system of ideas from which I could not extricate myself. It was a true intellectual cul-de-sac, which he got me out of in a few hours. This boy has in him a veritable mine from which he alone cannot and does not know how to draw” (Correspondance avec Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, p. 279). The papers of the heirs of Tocqueville contain a manuscript from Kergorlay on honor with this commentary from the author: “Very remarkable piece by Louis de Kergorlay. To see again, if I do a second edition.”

[w. ] <If the reader has clearly grasped all that precedes, he must have understood that there exists a singular correlation between inequality of conditions and what we have called honor. These are two facts that derive necessarily from each other.

As conditions become equal within a people and as the citizens become more equal and more similar, honor does not disappear, but it becomes less strange in its precepts, less absolute and less powerful> (Rubish, 2).

[x. ] In the margin: “<Here this eternal question presents itself. Is it opinion that gave birth to fact or fact, opinion?>”

[y. ] On a sheet at the end of the manuscript: