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• Foreword
• Preface to the Liberty Fund Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Part I: Tocqueville’s Second Voyage to America, 1832–1840
• Chapter 1: The Writing of the First Part of the Democracy
• Chapter 2: An Expanding Task Resumed
• Part II: How to Account For America? Tocqueville Looks At Some Particular Causes Physiques
• Chapter 3: An Hypothesis Weighed and Rejected
• Chapter 4: Further Considerations of Environment
• Chapter 5: Was Race a Sufficient Explanation of the American Character?
• Chapter 6: The Transformation of a Continent
• Part III: Tocqueville and the Union: the Nature and Future of American Federalism
• Chapter 7: The Bond Between the States and the Central Government
• Chapter 8: A Prophet In Error
• Chapter 9: How Large Might a Republic Be?
• Part IV: Democracy, Centralization, and Democratic Despotisms
• Chapter 10: Centralization and Local Liberties
• Chapter 11: Where Would Power Accumulate?
• Chapter 12: Administrative Centralization and Some Remedies
• Chapter 13: Tocqueville’s Changing Visions of Democratic Despotism
• Part V: Democracy, the Individual, and the Masses
• Chapter 14: The Tyranny of the Majority
• Chapter 15: The Tyranny of the Majority: Some Paradoxes
• Chapter 16: Would Démocratie Usher In a New Dark Ages?
• Chapter 17: Démocratie and Egoïsme
• Chapter 18: From Egoïsme to Individualisme
• Part VI: What Tocqueville Meant By Démocratie
• Chapter 19: Some Meanings of Démocratie
• Chapter 20: Tocqueville’s Return to America
• Epilogue How Many Democracies ?
• Selected Bibliography

CHAPTER 19

Some Meanings of Démocratie

Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of Tocqueville’s thought has always been his failure to pinpoint the meaning of démocratie. Many readers have been annoyed by the varied and constantly changing ways in which he used the term, and some have even attempted to identify, count, and analyze the major definitions which appeared in his classic work.1

Interestingly, Tocqueville’s working papers indicate that he, too, was troubled by his lack of precision and that, throughout the eight-year period of reflection and composition, he tried repeatedly to arrive at some adequate basic definition. His manuscripts provide, moreover, an intriguing and constantly expanding catalogue of the various facets of démocratie which he discovered between 1832 and 1840 while mentally turning and returning the concept.

In June 1831, after only a few weeks in America, Tocqueville penned a long letter to Louis de Kergolay describing his early impressions and musings. This missive contained an early definition of démocratie which was in many ways the most fundamental sense in which he would ever use the idea. With the United States in mind, he wrote: “Démocratie2 is ... either broadly advancing in certain states or as fully extended as imaginable in others. It is in the moeurs, in the laws, in the opinion of the majority.” But America, he hastened to persuade Louis, was not a solitary example. “We are going ... toward a démocratie without limits.... we are going there pushed by an irresistible force. All the efforts that people will make to stop the movement will achieve only temporary halts;... riches will tend more and more to become equal; the upper class, to dissolve into the middle; and the latter, to become immense and to impose its equality on all.... 3 In a word, démocratie seems to me, from now on, a fact which a government can claim to regulate, but not to stop.”4

Démocratie was thus an inescapable development, a brute fact of the modern world, one to which all intelligent men would have to accommodate themselves. More specifically, it was a pervasive tendency toward equality which affected property, moeurs, laws, opinions, and ultimately all other areas of society as well.5

Later, in drafts of the 1835 sections of his book, Tocqueville composed an apocalyptic description of this “Inevitable march of Démocratie.” “Démocratie! Don’t you notice that these are the waters of the Deluge? Don’t you see them advance unceasingly by a slow and irresistible effort; already they cover the fields and the cities; they roll over the ruined battlements of castles and even wash against the steps of thrones.... Instead of wishing to raise impotent dikes, let us rather seek to build the holy guardian ark which must carry the human species on this boundless ocean.”6

This irreversible current had obvious revolutionary implications, and Tocqueville was soon writing about yet another though closely related sense of démocratie: “this immense social Revolution.”7 “The social revolution I’m speaking about seems to me the great event of the modern world, the only one which is entirely new.”8

Such uses of démocratie as fact, trend, or revolution were all intimately connected to a still broader and more basic definition which soon appeared in Tocqueville’s rough drafts. Démocratie was a special social condition (état social) characterized by advancing equality. When writing of America, for example, he declared: “Society ... [in the United States] is profoundly democratic in its religion, in its ideas, in its passions, in its habits as in its laws.”9 And again: “The American societies have always been democratic by their nature.”10 Even more to the point, among remarks gathered under the heading “Of the Social State of the Americans,” he noted that “the outstanding feature of the état social of the Americans is to be democratic.”11 Such an equation of démocratie with a peculiar état social (and égalité) would be one of the constant themes of his 1835 volumes.12

Unfortunately, however, no single general definition would be reached so easily, for Tocqueville soon stumbled into a dilemma that would be one of the abiding puzzles of his work. “Démocratie constitutes the état social. The dogma of the sovereignty of the people [constitutes] the political rule. These two things are not analogous. Démocratie is a society’s fundamental condition (manière d’être). Sovereignty of the people [is] a form of government.”13

These sentences seemed merely to reinforce the idea of démocratie as état social. But the careful distinction between social conditions and political forms endured only until Tocqueville added in contradiction to his initial comments: “Note that in this chapter it is necessary never to confuse the état social with the political laws which proceed from it. Equality or inequality of conditions, which are facts, with Démocratie or aristocracy, which are laws—reexamine from this point of view.”14

Though démocratie was undoubtedly related in some way to égalité, a stubborn riddle had now been posed: was démocratie “a society’s fundamental condition (manière d’être)” (a social state tending toward equality), or certain “political laws”?15 Tocqueville would never be able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution of this problem, and his drafts, working manuscript, and text would consequently continue to offer both meanings, sometimes emphasizing one, sometimes stressing the other.16

In a determined attempt to end his confusion on this matter, he undertook an investigation of the link between social and political equality. “It is incontestable that wherever social equality reaches a certain level, men will make a simultaneous effort toward equality of political rights. Wherever the people come to sense their strength and power, they will want to take part in governing the State.”17 This idea did not succeed in ending his multiple uses of démocratie, but at least he had now stipulated that the social connotation of the word was more fundamental than its political one. Such a judgment followed his general inclination to weigh moeurs more than lois in the destiny of mankind. Quite incidentally, he had also indicated here that démocratie had something to do with civic equality (and the drive toward it).

But this observation still found Tocqueville far from exhausting his analysis of the political dimensions of démocratie. Between 1833 and 1835, he devoted considerable mental effort to this task and succeeded in isolating several different and significant political meanings.18 At one point, as we might have guessed, he leaned toward a definition cast in terms of an underlying principle. “Démocratie properly so called,” he decided, meant the “dogma of the sovereignty of the people” and the “principle of the majority” (majority rule).19 Elsewhere, however, he carefully distinguished between principle and actuality, and concluded that “the Sovereignty of the people and Démocratie are two words perfectly correlative; the one represents the theoretical idea; the other its practical realization.”20

Finally, after considering démocratie in its political sense from yet another point of view, he announced that “every time that the government of a people is the sincere and permanent expression of the will of the greatest number, the government, whatever its form, is democratic.”21 In his working manuscript Tocqueville occasionally used the terms “Democratic Republics,” “Democratic states,” and “Democracies” interchangeably.22

So démocratie, as “political laws,” was a principle (sovereignty of the people or majority rule), the actual operation of that principle (widespread political participation and legal and civic equality), and any government based on the will of the people (a democracy). We should also remember that, particularly in this last sense, démocratie as Tocqueville understood it had no necessary connection with liberty; as we have seen, Tocqueville was very much aware that the will of the people might well support despotism. Democracy, for him, always inclined more easily toward tyranny than toward liberty.

These political meanings also had some crucial implications about who governed and eventually carried Tocqueville to yet another definition of his key word. “Democratic government, by giving an equal right to all citizens and by having all political questions decided by the majority, in reality gives the power to govern the society to the lower classes (classes inférieures) since these classes must always compose the majority. That is to say that under the rule of the Democracy (l’empire de la Démocratie) it is the less enlightened who lead those who are more [enlightened].”23

An additional draft developed the same theme: “I wish that the upper classes (hautes classes) and the middle classes (classes moyennes) of all of Europe were as persuaded as I am myself that henceforth it is no longer a matter of knowing if the people (le peuple) will attain power, but in what manner they will use their power. That is the great problem of the future. I wish that in their leisure they [the upper and middle classes] would apply themselves to inquiring into what society will become in the hands of a restless democracy (une démocratie inquiète) whose movements will not be regulated either by the situation of the country, laws, experience, or moeurs.... The great, the capital interest of the century is the organization and the education of the democracy (la démocratie).”24

Here, for the first time, Tocqueville equated la démocratie and le peuple. So démocratie was not only a leveling tendency, or a social condition, or political principles and forms, but also the people themselves. But what precisely did he mean by le peuple?

In the “Observations critiques,” one reader, perhaps Beaumont, who had seen America firsthand, wondered: “What is le peuple in a society where ranks, fortunes, and intelligence approach as much as possible the level of equality? Assuredly the word peuple in the New World has in no sense the same meaning as among us.”25

Almost as if in anticipation of this query, Tocqueville had earlier offered a brief explanation. “Le peuple: [I understand] this word in the sense not of a class but of all classes of citizens, the people.”26 Rarely, however, did Tocqueville respect this broad definition; instead he continued to write of la Démocratie as if it were synonymous with the lower classes (les classes inférieures).27 Writing of the situation in France, for example, he complained that “The most intelligent and moral portion28 of the nation has not sought to take hold of it [the democracy] and to direct it. So la Démocratie has been abandoned to its savage instincts; it has grown up like those children deprived of bodily care who grow up in the streets of our cities and who know only the vices and miseries of society.”29 Elsewhere he pleaded: “If it were true that there were a way to save future races from the frightful peril30 that menaces them, if there existed a way to raise the moral standards, to instruct, to mold the Démocratie and ... to save it from itself, would it not be necessary to seize it?”31

In the context of this particular definition, the phrase l’empire de la Démocratie (quoted above) takes on considerable new significance. It should be recalled that in the summer of 1834, in the midst of these reflections about the meanings of démocratie, Tocqueville had actually decided to title his first two volumes De l’empire de la Démocratie aux Etats-Unis.32 Perhaps this resolution indicated the full extent of his preoccupation at that time with démocratie as le peuple.

In France and the rest of Europe, democracy had long been associated with confusion and anarchy.33 Tocqueville denied the necessity of any such connection, but while writing his masterpiece, he did develop a theory somewhat related to this popular usage. He began to link démocratie with activity, change, and le mouvement. The idea of démocratie as mobility (especially social and economic) initially appeared in drafts for the first part of his work (1835). When reflecting, for example, about the constantly shifting ownership of wealth and the fluidity of class lines in America, Tocqueville observed: “What is most important to Démocratie, is not that there are no great fortunes, but that great fortunes do not remain in the same hands. In this way, there are rich people, but they do not form a class.”34 The 1835 text, in the section entitled “Activity Prevailing in All Parts of the Political Body in the United States; The Influence Thereby Exerted on Society,”35 would particularly stress the movement, the energy, and the bustle which seemed so integral a part of America. After describing in detail “a sort of tumult; a confused clamor” that he had discovered in the United States, he would remark that “The great political movement ... is only an episode and a sort of extension of the universal movement, which begins in the lowest ranks of the people and thence spreads successively through all classes of citizens.”36

Expanding this idea, he would add: “That constantly renewed agitation introduced by democratic government into political life passes, then, into civil society.... Democracy ... spreads throughout the body social a restless activity, superabundant force, and energy never found elsewhere, which, however little favored by circumstances, can do wonders (enfanter des merveilles).”37 So according to Tocqueville, an intimate connection did exist between such activity and energy and démocratie. But when his first volumes appeared, his focus still remained primarily on the United States. Only after 1835 would the concept of démocratie as le mouvement (or mobility) free itself of its American context and become a major part of his understanding of democracy.

The problem of defining démocratie did not end with the publication of the first portion of Tocqueville’s book; between 1835 and 1840, his drafts repeated most of the meanings we have already noted. But his working papers for that period also introduced at least one almost new use of the word, offered a few final attempts at an inclusive definition of démocratie, and, more important, demonstrated some significant changes of emphasis in his thinking.

His almost new use of démocratie was somewhat related to the earlier debate over who le peuple was. As early as 1831, in the letter to Kergolay quoted above, Tocqueville had hinted that démocratie had something to do with la classe moyenne.38 By 1835, however, this idea became much more specific; we have observed Tocqueville in England musing about the connection between industry and democracy and describing a particular “class apart ... where instincts are all democratic.... As a people expands its commerce and its industry, this democratic class becomes more numerous and more influential; little by little its opinions pass into the moeurs and its ideas into the laws, until finally having become preponderant and, so to speak, unique, it takes hold of power, directs everything as it likes, and establishes democracy.”39 In the rough drafts and working manuscript of the 1840 volumes, he at least once called the English middle class “une immense Démocratie.”40 In the margin of a description of the rising power and prominence of la classe industrielle, or bourgeoisie, he scribbled the following phrase: “la classe Démocratique par excellence.”41 So, démocratie, on some occasions, could also mean la classe moyenne, as well as les classes inférieures or le peuple.42

Just after his debut in 1835 as famous author, Tocqueville patiently tried to explain some of his major ideas to a disturbed Kergolay, and in the process, he offered a significant restatement of a familiar definition: “I am as convinced as one can be of something in this world that we are carried irresistibly by our laws and by our moeurs toward an almost complete equality of conditions. Conditions once equal, I admit that I no longer see any intermediary between a democratic government (and by this word I understand not a republic, but a condition in the society where everyone more or less takes part in public affairs) and the government of an individual (d’un seul) operating without control.”43

Tocqueville’s explanation clearly distinguished once again between démocratie as a profound social movement and démocratie as particular political structures. Beyond this, however, Tocqueville here indicated his belief that political democracy did not demand republican forms, that it was not incompatible with monarchy. Politically the essential feature of a democracy was, he declared, some degree of effective participation in public affairs by the citizenry. Here was yet another specific definition of démocratie (in its political sense). But the focus in this letter to his friend was on égalité des conditions and the trend toward it. In fact, so frequently did the drafts of Tocqueville’s last volumes repeat and reinforce that emphasis, that between 1836 and 1840 égalité or égalité des conditions became, more than ever, the single most important definition of démocratie.44 A list of chapters under the general heading “On the Taste for Material Pleasures in Democracies” included, for example, a section labeled: “How Equality of Conditions (or Democracy) Carries Americans toward Industrial Professions.”45

A similarly revealing choice occurred when he selected a name for the last major section of his work. The “Rubish” harbored the “great chapter entitled: How the Ideas and the Sentiments That Equality Suggests Influence the Political Constitution.” But the 1840 text would call this part: “On the Influence of Democratic Ideas and Feelings on Political Society.”46

Even the working manuscript offered numerous instances of Tocqueville’s pronounced tendency between 1835 and 1840 to use démocratie and égalité (or égalité des conditions) interchangeably.47 Perhaps it was his growing preoccupation with this particular sense of démocratie that led him once again to consider a different title for his grande affaire. In the fall of 1839, he had temporarily decided to call his last two volumes [De] l’influence de l’égalité sur les idées et les sentiments des hommes rather than simply De la Démocratie en Amérique, volumes three and four.48

Despite his frequent use of démocratie as égalité, Tocqueville was also fully aware that his discussions in this vein were purely theoretical. “In order to make myself well understood I am constantly obliged to portray extreme states, an aristocracy without a mixture of démocratie, a démocratie without a mixture of aristocracy, a perfect equality, which is an imaginary state. It happens then that I attribute to one or the other of the two principles more complete effects than those that in general they produce, because in general they are not alone.”49 His use of exaggerated portraits was an increasingly important intellectual device for Tocqueville and helped him to push his thoughts forward. Especially after 1835 he found such an analytical tool useful as he struggled to distinguish not only aristocratic and democratic features, but also American and democratic, transitional and democratic, and revolutionary and democratic. (In this technique, he was of course anticipating the common use of “models” or “types” by modern social scientists.)

Tocqueville’s recognition of the dangers of dealing with “imaginary states” eventually drove him in the summer of 1838 to attempt a final, more subtle definition of démocratie: he returned to the concept of démocratie as mobility.

Démocratie thus implied an open society, one without extreme or fixed distinctions,54 and especially one that fostered the hope or belief that opportunities existed and that full equality was possible (le sentiment de l’égalité). In a democratic nation, people would be persuaded that, in certain respects, they were all equal and that society offered real possibilities for the achievement of individual aspirations. On the basis of such convictions, they would organize their efforts and conduct their lives. In the New World republic Tocqueville had noticed that these beliefs had become a central part of the national myth.55 Tocqueville’s recognition that democratic times would be marked by a pervasive sense or feeling of equality—despite any actual inequalities—led him to yet another significant facet of démocratie: its psychological dimension, the unshakable conviction of equality.

In other drafts, Tocqueville continued to pursue the idea of démocratie as mobility. “A democratic people, society, time do not mean a people, a society, a time when all men are equal, but a people, a society, a time when there are no more castes, fixed classes, privileges, special and exclusive rights, permanent riches, properties fixed in the hands of certain families, when all men can continuously climb and descend and mix together in all ways. When I mean this in the political sense, I say Démocratie. When I want to speak of the effects of equality, I say égalité.”56

Here he neglected the important psychological element of democratic times, le sentiment de l’égalité, but presented a final attempt to separate the political and social senses of his central concept. He began by assuming a society characterized by social and economic mobility and relative legal and civic equality. When considering the political aspects of such a fluid society, he would use the word démocratie. When thinking of the more general (social? or economic? or cultural? or intellectual?) consequences of such a society, he would write: égalité. This effort, still far from satisfactory, was the closest Tocqueville ever came to solving the riddle that had troubled him since at least 1833.

If any single solution did exist, however, it probably rested with Tocqueville’s recurring concept of the two levels of démocratie: social and political. On the one hand, democracy was an underlying social condition (characterized by advancing equality and mobility). On the other hand, democracy meant certain political laws and forms (such as widespread suffrage, freedom of association and other civil liberties, and structures for expressing the will of the citizenry). The first was especially the providential, inevitable fact with which all people would have to reckon. The second was perhaps equally inescapable (since social democracy tended to carry political democracy in its wake), but at least to some extent the impeding or furthering of political democracy depended on the efforts of men.

Most significantly, Tocqueville believed that the key to liberty in democratic times was the proper matching or balancing of these two fundamental senses of démocratie. One of the characteristics most attractive to Tocqueville about America was the “universal” nature of democracy in the New World republic; democracy had influenced every aspect of American life; there society and politics were in harmony. He repeatedly stressed that, in Europe, the only reasonable cure for the potential flaws of social democracy was the introduction of greater political democracy. “For there is only Democracy (by this word I understand self-government) which can lessen and make bearable the inevitable evils of a democratic social state. 5 September 1838.”57 And again: “Many people consider democratic civil laws as an evil and democratic political laws as another and greater evil; as for me, I say that the one is the only remedy that one can apply to the other. The whole idea of my politics is here.”58

This persistent duality reflected not only the nearly insurmountable difficulty of precisely defining the “fact” of démocratie, but also echoed Tocqueville’s earlier distinction between moeurs and laws (lois) and the power which humanity had over them. Social democracy (like moeurs) was more fundamental and, at the same time, less amenable to human effort. Political democracy (like lois) was less fundamental (though still extremely important), but could be shaped by the power of men. So human energy, Tocqueville advised, should be directed not toward any useless attempt to retard or to deflect democracy as a developing social condition. Intelligent individuals should labor to introduce political democracy and so to “educate” and “mold” the people. “Use Democracy to moderate Democracy. It is the only path to salvation that is open to us.... Beyond that all is foolish and imprudent.”59 Here again was the immense burden of human responsibility to which Tocqueville was always so sensitive.

Tocqueville never abandoned his plural meanings of démocratie. Throughout the four volumes of his work, the concept continued to conjure up a multitude of trends and conditions, laws and attitudes, political forms and social groups. Furthermore, within this cluster of definitions, he frequently shifted primary attention from one to another, from état-social to lois politiques and back again, or from le peuple to l’égalité, and then to le sentiment de l’égalité and le mouvement. But these shifts in emphasis implied neither that other uses had been forgotten nor that one particular meaning was ultimately the single most important; these changes merely reflected his desire to establish as broad and as thorough a definition as possible and his recurring tendency, while drafting his grande affaire, to focus on one idea to the temporary exclusion of competing ones.

Tocqueville’s very failure precisely to define démocratie accounts, in part, for the brilliance of his observations. If he had at one time fixed definitively upon a single meaning, all of the others would have been more or less lost from sight. His vision would have been at once restricted, his message narrowed, and his audience diminished. His extraordinary ability to imagine and to consider so many different uses, to revolve the idea so continuously in his mind, led to the richness and profundity of his insights.

[1. ]Consult, in particular, the efforts of Pierson, Toc. and Bt., pp. 6–7 note, 158–59 and note, 165–66, 757–58; and Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 49–50. Both men identify over a half-dozen major senses in which Tocqueville used the term démocratie, and even then, their lists do not entirely overlap. Also see the briefer but valuable discussions of this question by Phillips Bradley, Democracy (Bradley), 2:407–8 note; Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, pp. 53–54, 55–56, 69; and Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization, pp. 14 note, 30–31, and especially 30–31 note.

[2. ]Almost always, from very early correspondence, through early and later drafts, and even to the original working manuscript of the last volumes of his work, Tocqueville capitalized the term démocratie. Only in the final published text did this idiosyncrasy disappear.

[3. ]Here Tocqueville echoed Guizot’s theme of the rise of the middle classes.

[4. ]Toc. to Louis de Kergolay, Yonkers, 29 June 1831, O.C. (Mayer), Jardin and Lesourd, 13:1, pp. 232–34.

[5. ]Cf. the famous “Introduction” to the 1835 volumes, especially Democracy (Mayer), pp. 9, 12–13.

[6. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, pp. 27–28. Compare the emotion of this excerpt to that found in passages on the threat of barbarism (quoted in chapter 16).

[7. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, p. 28.

[8. ]Ibid., CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 4, p. 1.

[9. ]Ibid., CVb, Paquet 13, p. 14.

[10. ]Ibid., CVe, Paquet 17, p. 61. Here Tocqueville presumably had particularly in mind the historical preconditions of the United States, i.e., a rough social and economic equality.

[11. ]Ibid., CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 5, pp. 8–9.

[12. ]See especially Democracy (Mayer), “Author’s Introduction,” pp. 7–20.

[13. ]Chapter on état social, Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 1. These sentences are also quoted above in chapter 1; see that chapter for elaboration.

[14. ]Chapter on état social, Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 1. See above, chapter 1, for elaboration.

[15. ]The question might also be put another way: Why was démocratie not synonymous with égalité (or égalité des conditions)?

[16. ]Note that Tocqueville’s indecision about whether to stress démocratie as a particular état social or as a political form somehow related to la souveraineté du peuple would also be reflected in the 1835 text. Consult his two chapters entitled “Social State of the Anglo-Americans” and “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America”; Democracy (Mayer), pp. 50–57 and 58–60.

[17. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, p. 32.

[18. ]The letter to Kergolay cited above (Yonkers, 29 June 1831) had also briefly hinted at possible political definitions of démocratie. Several times in the epistle, Tocqueville had referred to a “democratic government,” and once he had actually identified such a government as “the government of the multitude.”

[19. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 5, pp. 7–8.

[20. ]Ibid., CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 1, p. 22. Cf. Tocqueville’s previous attempts (quoted above) to distinguish between démocratie and souveraineté du peuple.

[21. ]Ibid., CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, pp. 38–39. Compare with this remark the following pages from the 1835 text: Democracy (Mayer), pp. 231–35.

[22. ]For examples, see Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 1, section entitled “How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the State Constitutions,” and ibid., tome 2, section entitled “Activity Which Reigns in All Parts of the Political Body of the United States.”

[23. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 4, pp. 84–85. In the copy, the final sentence is incomplete. Emphasis added.

[24. ]Ibid., CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, pp. 30–33; emphasis added. Also consult ibid., cahier 3, p. 107; and cahier 4, pp. 42–43, 54–57.

[25. ]“Observations critiques,” Yale, CIIIb, cahier 2, p. 90.

[26. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 1, p. 82.

[27. ]For example, in the Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 2, see the section entitled: “On the Legal Mind (esprit) in the United States and How It Serves as a Counterweight to the Democracy.”

[28. ]Alternative to “portion”: “class.”

[29. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 3, p. 107.

[30. ]Alternative to “peril”: “fate.”

[31. ]Drafts, Yale, CVh, Paquet 3, cahier 4, p. 57.

[32. ]See above, chapters 1 and 2.

[33. ]Tocqueville referred to this tradition in a letter to Eugène Stoffels, Paris, 21 February 1835, O.C. (Bt.), 5:425–27.

[34. ]Drafts, Yale, CVe, Paquet 17, pp. 60–61.

[35. ]Democracy (Mayer), pp. 241–45.

[36. ]Ibid., p. 243.

[37. ]Ibid., pp. 243–44.

[38. ]Also in 1831, he had discussed the American and French middle classes in his American travel diaries; see, for example, comments dated 30 November 1831, Notebook E, Mayer, Journey, pp. 257–58.

[39. ]Drafts, Yale, CVj, Paquet 2, cahier 2, pp. 16–17. Already quoted in chapter 12 above.

[40. ]Drafts, Yale, CVg, Paquet 9, cahier 1, p. 171. Also quoted in Drescher, Tocqueville and England, p. 126 note.

[41. ]Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 4, from the section entitled: “That among European Nations of Today the Sovereign Power Increases Even Though Sovereigns Are Less Stable.”

[42. ]Cf. an ambiguous but related classification which had appeared in the 1835 text, Democracy (Mayer), p. 34.

[43. ]Toc. to Kergolay, undated letter, O.C. (Mayer), Jardin and Lesourd, 13:1, p. 373.

[44. ]As should be clear from remarks above, this is not meant to imply that démocratie as égalité had been unimportant in 1835. I am only pointing out a shift in emphasis among several basic definitions.

[45. ]Drafts, Yale, “Rubish,” tome 3. (For Bonnel’s copy, see ibid., CVg, Paquet 9, cahier 1, pp. 186–87.) Compare this title to the one which would appear in the 1840 text: “What Gives Almost All Americans a Preference for Industrial Callings.” Democracy (Mayer), pp. 551–54.

[46. ]Drafts, Yale, CVg, “Rubish,” tome 4; and Democracy (Mayer), pp. 665–705.

[47. ]For examples, see Original Working Ms., Yale, CVIa, tome 3, the section entitled: “On Some Sources of Poetry within Democratic Nations”; and ibid., tome 4, the title page of “Ch. [Chapter] 47.”

[48. ]See above, chapter 2.

[49. ]Drafts, Yale, CVk, Paquet 7, cahier 1, p. 51. Cf. Jack Lively’s comment about Tocqueville’s use of “models”; Lively, Social and Political Thought, pp. 49–50.

[50. ]Note the significantly unresolved choice.

[51. ]Copyist’s comment: two illegible words.

[52. ]Copyist’s comment: one illegible word; “felt” is an educated guess on my part.

[53. ]Drafts, Yale, CVk, Paquet 7, cahier 1, pp. 45–46.

[54. ]Drescher has already drawn attention to this aspect of Tocqueville’s thought; see Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy, pp. 30–31 and notes, and his full discussion of Tocqueville’s use of the contrast between aristocratic and democratic societies, pp. 25–31.

[55. ]See the conversation with Mr. Duponceau, 27 October 1831, Non-Alph. Notebooks 2 and 3, Mayer, Journey, pp. 69–70, in which the Philadelphian mentioned that “there is no one but believes in his power to succeed in [growing rich and rising in the world].”

[56. ]Drafts, Yale, CVk, Paquet 7, cahier 1, pp. 50–51. Another version of this passage is quoted in Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy, pp. 30–31 note. For echoes of this idea in the 1840 text, see especially Democracy (Mayer), pp. 429–30, 440, 452–54, 465–66, 485–86, 537–38, 548.

[57. ]Drafts, Yale, CVk, Paquet 7, cahier 2, pp. 53–54; quoted above, chapter 13.

[58. ]Ibid.

[59. ]Ibid., p. 52.