26

Chapter 1 - Alexis de Tocqueville and the Moeurs of the Masses

Paraphrasing, quoting, and citing Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) have long

been a part of American political argument. Tocquevilles name has a peerless cachet

when it comes to bolstering claims about the United States, and the sum of this secondary

literature - especially that pertaining to Democracy in America - is astonishing. But

considering these stakes, Tocqueville has, surprisingly, rarely been the subject of

rancourous debate. While there certainly are different appropriations of Tocquevilles

work, many of them converged around a reading which achieved a cultural permanence

in the post-World War Two period. In no other era did Tocqueville more forcefully serve

as a unifying figure than in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was seen to speak directly to

the issue of democratic vulnerability brought into view by wartime fascism and postwar

communism and, thereby, to gather intellectuals around shared analyses of

authoritarianism and democracy in his name.

Tocqueville served as a keystone for the eras prolific pronouncements on mass

politics: a mode of political analysis that found wide circulation in postwar American

intellectual circles. According to these theorists, mass politics was a product of the

particular sociological conditions engendered by democracy which, for lack of a better

term, were gathered under the gloss: mass society. A mass society - of which America

stood as a prime example - was afflicted by despotic tendencies that emanated from an

equality (the democratic social condition) which tended to corrode healthy associative

27

relationships and the lattice of political and social authority characteristic of stratified

communities that oriented individuals around consensual norms.1 As a result, people

become atomized - unconnected to the central value system - and were then vulnerable

to mass political mobilization. Drawing on Tocqueville, those who developed the mass

politics paradigm found democratic activism to be particularly appealing to these

alienated individuals in modern society who were not subject to binding social ties, or

mores. Having become available for political action and radicalization, these

individuals contributed to an activist or participatory form of democracy which was

singled out as one of the major threats of modernity; here political extremism was seen

not as a legitimate expression of discontent, but a symptom of mass or populist

engagement.2

20. 1Joseph R. Gusfield, Mass Society and Extremist Politics, in the American Sociological Review, Vol. 27,

No. 1 (Feb., 1962), pg.,

2Gusfield, pgs., 19-21, 26-28.

This discourse was reliant upon a sociological analysis of those social and cultural

linkages that pull people together in system-stabilizing associations. Again, drawing from

Tocqueville, mass politics theorists used the separation of the social (non-political

associations, religion, values, status) and the political to explain peoples political drives

as products of underlying sociological causes. In attending to the secret sociological

causes of human conduct, American intellectuals fastened upon a shared set of social

values which, they claimed, ought to serve as the touchstone for legitimate political

agreement (and disagreement) and therefore as the substructure for a moderate politics

28

devoid of extremism of the left or right. This approach to political theory also yielded

great results in the effort to undercut Marxist notions of class conflict. Political

radicalism, these theorists claimed, could only be understood as a product of social

causes and accordingly they viewed the political conflicts that emanated from divergent

economic interests as episodes in social alienation.

The result was a political theory grounded in an effort to redefine democracy so

as to insulate the masses from political mobilization and to incline politics towards a

quietist middle. This regnant postwar view rested on an often explicit belief that popular

democracy constituted a threat to the making of responsible political decisions, a belief

made unquestionable by a postwar characterization of the mass as incompetent and

manipulable by external forces and made unassailable by way of the authority of

Democracy in America.

I

Tocquevilles celebrated call for a new science of politics in Democracy in

America was itself a statement about an entire generation in France attempting to forge a

new understanding of social equality and its inevitable corollary - political democracy.

His bid for a more usable and relevant discipline was conceived in the tumultuous

atmosphere of post-Revolutionary France in which a succession of ruling interests, from

the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) to the July Monarchy (1830-1848), failed to

establish broad appeal and social cohesion. During this period, the Crown did little to

29

recognize the popular disaffection that was manifesting itself in calls for broader political

inclusion and labor reform. Stability and liberty seemed incommensurable, and though

attempts were made to reclaim pre-Revolutionary order, there was no going back. The

Revolution had created a new political consciousness, and an expanding and variegated

political community emerged with a taste for political mobilization. The eventual result

was the revolution of 1848. Frances political culture now seemed wedded to extremes:

despotism or revolution. Here, 1789 stood as that immutable object lesson of politics:

democracy could itself be dangerous.3

Alexis Charles-Henri-Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville was born in 1805, into a

well-connected, Norman family. Son of Herv de Tocqueville and Louise de Rosanbo,

young Alexis had lost close relatives to the guillotine and almost lost his parents as well.

Recovery from political misfortune was robust for Alexis father who eventually became

a royal prefect during the Bourbon recrudescence. Tocqueville too, in 1827, and at the

minimum age of twenty one, entered public service as juge auditeur at Versailles. There

he met Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866), a colleague and eventually his lifelong friend.

Thanks to extraordinary ability and propitious connections, Tocqueville rose through the

ranks of royal service and in 1839, he was elected to the Chambre de Deputs, serving

continuously until 1848. There, Tocqueville made a prophetic speech on January 27th,

1848, claiming that the Orleanist regime and the French people were slumbering now on

hap., 5.

3Roger Price, A Concise History of France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chap., 5; Roger Magraw, France 1800-1914 (New York: Longman, 2002), Chap., 1; Andr Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), C

30

a volcano.4

Tocquevilles public service in a time of precipitate change suggests that he was

not a reactionary. Despite having been part of the defeated, Tocqueville wanted to

participate in the thoughtful future development of the French polity and was unwilling

to endorse any artless return to authoritarianism as a shortcut to social peace. He was

equally concerned about the specter of revolution as a means of political change. Finding

this juste milieu was difficult enough, but that Tocqueville tried, despite his legitimist

past, has enamored him to critics. He recognized the need for a shared public philosophy

as the rivet that could secure the sensible democratization of French political life and his

trip to the United States was conceived in this moment of acknowledgment that French

democracy badly needed conscious direction. He and Beaumont, therefore, prepared for a

trip to the United States amidst political discontinuity and inchoate reform. Their stated

purpose was to survey the American penitentiary system - a topic of concern among

reformers - but Tocquevilles real interest was an analysis of American democracy and

what it could teach France.5

tion.

65-185.

4Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America trans., George Lawrence, ed., J. P. Mayer (1966; New York: HarperPerennial, 1969), pg., 753; Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pgs., 4-6; Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), pgs., 8-12. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., Andr Jardin, (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), Introduc

5Welch, 8,12; Roger Boesche, Why Did Tocqueville Think a Successful Revolution was Impossible? in Liberty, Equality, Democracy ed., Eduardo Nolla (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pgs., 1

31

Tocqueville and Beaumont reached New York on May 10th, 1831, and spent a

total of nine months in the United States with fifteen of those days spent in Canada.

They were eager to see the newest areas of settlement as well as the oldest and their

voyages, therefore, brought them to the margins of white settlement in Michigan and to

the centers of American privilege in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. They

survived a close call on the Ohio River, a nuisance on the Mississippi; they made it to

New Orleans, loved Qubec and were, in the end, profoundly moved by the spectacle of

American democracy at work. The two travelers eventually returned to New York and

embarked for Le Havre on February 20th, 1832, a little over nine months after their

arrival. On their return to France, with copious notes in hand, Tocqueville and Beaumont

set to work. Retirement from the magistracy assisted the completion of their official work

- The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France - which was

published in 1833. This was Beaumonts book though; Tocqueville contributed some

notes and other small details, but his thoughts and efforts were already taken with De la

dmocratie en Amrique.6

II

6Drolet, 20-35. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., Andr Jardin (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), pgs., XIX-XXII

There is a suggestive resemblance between Tocquevilles France and Cold War

America. Tocqueville found himself caught between the despotism of the Crown and the

chaos of revolutionary politics. American intellectuals, writing in the 1940s and 1950s,

32

ics.

found themselves caught between totalitarianism abroad and the threat of mass politics at

home. Not surprisingly, Tocquevilles search for the juste milieu - a middle ground of

moderate politics - found a receptive home with American intellectuals seeking to occupy

a similar vital center between Manichaean opposites. The postwar Tocquevillian

revival was therefore rooted (much like the concurrent popularity of Max Weber) in an

appreciation of political sociology and its uses for a politics of democratic moderation.

Political sociology was a product of the European social theorists of the nineteenth

century among whom Weber, Tocqueville and Marx stand as its most distinguished

practitioners. A key element in the birth of political sociology was the delineation of the

difference between the social and the political out of which emerged new ideas about

democratic stability. For Tocqueville, such a mode of analysis was itself borrowed from

intellectual mentors seeking to understand and control the uncertainty of

post-Revolutionary French polit

The crisis of political legitimacy that had been gathering strength in France since

the Revolution set in motion an intellectual effort to compass and characterize the

political and social discordances brought about by the gap between the people and their

leaders. French intellectuals developed a science of the social which was designed to

set in authoritative relief the social needs around which politics ought to be organized. To

some, the post-Revolutionary upheaval revealed how those in authority, enamored only

of their own political survival, neglected to address prevailing social demands.

Concerned only with its own incumbency, the Crown had proven unresponsive to popular

calls for reform and the resulting political instability led French intellectuals in search of

33

a lattice of social laws that could help order politics. This nexus encompassed a body of

beliefs, experiences and cultural practices that were also reflected in official creeds, laws

and principles of the state.

At the forefront of this intellectual development were the Doctrinaires, a small

fraternity of French liberals who attempted to construct an intellectual grounding for a

stable, centrist politics amid the tumult of post-Revolutionary France. The Doctrinaires

raised fundamental questions about the nature of political analysis and human action, and

their efforts led them to develop new explanations of the relationship between politics

and the social structure. Specifically, they claimed that authority and legitimacy were

constituted within the social domain, which thereby determined, or ought to determine,

politics. In post-Revolutionary France, the ideological function of articulating a coherent

sociological approach to political theory that highlighted the dependence of political

institutions on a prior social order was not immediately clear - it could be used in an

number of ways - but, in all cases, it served to mitigate the capriciousness of state rule

and mass mobilization.7

f cal

le, 15-17.

7There is some debate about Tocquevilles assimilation of Doctrinaire ideas, especially those concerning the primacy of the social sphere. For a perspective that suggests this assimilation to be substantial see Aurelian Craiutu, Tocqueville and the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, in The Journal o Political Thought XX, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pgs., 456-493 and his Liberalism Under Siege: The Politi Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). For an account that claims Tocqueville never fully accepted the social determinism of the Doctrinaire paradigm see Welch, Tocquevilles Resistance to the Social, in The History of European Ideas 30 (2004), pgs., 83-107and Welch, De Tocquevil

34

A key figure here was Franois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) the

dominant minister in France during the July Monarchy, the leader of the influential

constitutional monarchists, and the author of, among other works, The General History of

Civilization in Europe (1828); The History of Civilization in France (1829-1832); and

The History of France from the Earliest Times to the Year 1789 (1872-1876). It was as a

historian - a Doctrinaire historian - that Guizot exercised the most profound influence on

Tocqueville. From 1828 to 1830, Tocqueville attended Guizots lectures on the history of

civilization in Europe and the history of civilization in France. Guizots History of

Civilization in Europe was the only book that Tocqueville asked a friend to send him

from France, a week after his arrival in the United States, and whose ideas in a letter to

Beaumont he described as truly prodigious.8

8Oeuvres compltes, ed., J.-P. Mayer VIII, (I), pg., 80. Hereafter as O.C. Craitu, 474; Drolet, 8-10.

35

Guizot was a historian most interested in the philosophy of history and politics. In

Tocquevilles hands it would become known as political sociology; Guizot described it as

the physiology of history, or the search for those clandestine laws which constituted

the secret of a nations political destiny.9 This secret turned out to be a complex

array of social and moral undercurrents that were closely connected and self-reinforcing

and culminated in a form of national fate. As such, Guizots intellectual purpose was to

couple a description of the progressive history of civilization with an analysis of those

opaque and axiomatic laws which determined or ought to determine a nations political

structure. At the very instant in which society forms itself and by the very fact of its

formation, it calls forth a government, which proclaims the common truth, the bond of

the society, which promulgates and maintains the precepts which that truth originates.

The power of government, Guizot continued, is implicated in the fact of existence of the

society. And not only is the government necessary, but it forms naturally . . [it]

establishes itself in the society in general.10 This common truth was a natural

equilibrium, which, developing out of the free association of its citizens and under the

influence of these secret laws, determined a countrys political forms. Such was a

political theory grounded in the primacy of social relations.

Guizot also described a a certain universal spirit, a certain community of

2), pgs., 1-12.

9Franois Guizot, Essais sur LHistoire de France (Paris: Charentier, Libraire-diteur, 1847), pg., 1.

10Franois Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization En Europe (Paris: Perrin et Cie, Libraires-diteurs, 1856)., pg., 132. Franois Guizot, History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe trans., Andrew R. Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 185

36

interests, of ideas, of sentiments, that governments ought to promote and reflect.11 This

had immediate implications for French history as it articulated a new conception of what

it meant to act politically. To act politically was to faithfully represent and manifest the

sociological status quo - its secret unity, its natural consensus, and its common spirit or

civic culture. In such a schema, the juste milieu was not political compromise but the

political recognition of latent social trends.

11Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, 210.

37

Quite naturally, democracy represented a threat to this design. Chaos, Guizot

ruefully wrote in a moment of instability in his professional life, is now concealed under

one word - Democracy.12 The potential of democracy to ride roughshod over social

continua was a consequence of its responsibility to the free expression of peoples

appetites and ambitions. The more Democracy . . [held] out an interminable vista and

infinite promises, Guizot argued, the more it moved away from the conditions necessary

to represent a common spirit.13 Confronting democracys transformative potential,

Guizot appealed to an early argument against mass politics by way of a distinction

between the sovereignty of the people and the rule of capable democratic majorities:

It has often been said, that representative government is the government of the majority, and there is some truth in the assertion; but it must not be thought that this government of the majority is the same as that involved in the sovereignty of the people. The principle of the sovereignty of the people applies to all individuals, merely because they exist, without demanding of them anything more. . . Representative government proceeds in another way: it considers what is the kind of action to which individuals are called; it examines into the amount of capacity requisite for this action . . .it seeks for a majority among those who are capable.14

12Guizot, Democracy in France, 2.

13Guizot, Democracy in France, 4.

14Franois Guizot, Representative Government in Europe, pg., 72. A comparison with Tocquevilles letter

n.

to J .S . Mill is suggestive. Rest assured my dear Mill, that you have touched upon the great question, or so I deeply believe. For the friends of Democracy, the question is less one of finding themeans of having the people rule, than of having the people choose those most capable of governing. . . . I am deeply convinced that the future of modern nations depends on its solutioO.C. VI (I), pgs., 303-304.

38

r.

d

, the

merican

hich to warrant a restricted democracy

oriented around complacent social norms.

III

acks

,

Tocqueville made creative use of this early form of political sociology.

Democracy in America, in fact, was conceived at the height of Guizots influence on

Tocqueville. Yet, it is also clear that Tocqueville offered a more nuanced analysis of the

way social institutions and political democracy interacted than that offered by his mento

Tocqueville deviated from Doctrinaire analysis in important ways; significantly, he di

not share the determinism explicit in Guizots accounting of national destinies. Most

importantly perhaps, Tocqueville did not fully privilege the social over the political but

illustrated the ways in which the two might avail themselves of each other. As such

separation of the social and the political was not a prerequisite to establishing the

dominance of the former, but became, in Democracy in America, a blueprint for a larger

prescriptive argument about the ways the two might intermingle in the service of taming

radical politics. It was here, in Tocquevilles political sociology, that postwar A

theorists found a most usable past. Democracy in America provided American

intellectuals with a useful paradigm with w

Another striking difference that sets Tocquevilles Democracy in America apart

from the works of his contemporaries - including those of Guizot - is a quality of

feeling. The emotional timbre of Democracy is its essence. Tocquevilles narrative l

the countenance of Doctrinaire historical determinism because it is ambivalent, subtle

39

n a

le,

the

of its past (despotism or

revolution) and the fears of its future (democratic chaos).17

searching, and even disenchanted. The utter clarity of Tocquevilles writing masks a

fundamental ambiguity at the heart of his key terms - an ambiguity not attributable,

however, to duplicity or simple equivocation, but deep uncertainty, and perhaps eve

disinclination to explore the full ramifications of the unfolding democratic ethos.15

Indeed, Tocqueville ultimately wanted France to control its future by acting, if possib

to forestall the forces of democratic change, and Democracy was a manifesto of that

generation in France so concerned to shape (and tame) its emerging democracy. Much

like Edmund Burke in his account of the French Revolution, Tocqueville was writing to

his patrician friends and those of like-mind; he was not trying to convince his enemies.

And as such, his method of exposition relied on a rapprochement with the reader via

attractive generalization, the comparative frame, the perpetual silent reference to

France, in lieu of justificatory or definitional rigor.16 Tocqueville wanted to harness

Americas usable present to liberate France from the tyranny

Carolina Press, 1980).

, 14.

: Harvard University Press, 2004)

15James Schleifer, among others, noted the (suggestively) inconsistent uses of the term. See his chapter Some Meanings of Dmocratie, in The Making of Tocquevilles Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: University of North

16Tocqueville quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution, and Society: Selected Writings eds., John Stone and Stephen Mennell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), pg.

17For an interesting look at the post-Revolutionary and nineteenth century creation of modernity including, the dramatization of change as the restless iteration of the new and also the insistence that the experience of this change is unique and foundational to the idea of modernity, (53-54) see Peter Fritzsches, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA

40

The Americans have a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested

to them certain laws and certain political manners.18 Tocquevilles phrase, as it

appeared in the Introduction to Volume II, explains a great deal about the substance and

mode of his overall analysis in Democracy. To make a claim that a democratic state of

society (or democratic social order in the Lawrence translation) occasioned American

laws, determined politics, and constituted a recognizable and integrated array of accepted

cultural practices, Tocqueville had to draw heavily upon the Guizotian apparatus in

which social forces underlay political institutions. For Tocqueville, politics was, in large

part, an expression of a prior array of self-sustaining habits, attitudes and customs, or

moeurs. This expansive explanatory term - moeurs - is only partially rendered by the

Reeve translation as manners and customs or by the Lawrence translation as

mores. In Volume I, Tocqueville described moeurs as follows:

I have previously remarked that the manners of the people may be considered as one of the great general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States is attributable. I here use the word customs with the meaning which the ancients attached to the word moeurs; for I apply it not only to the manners properly so called - that is, to what might be termed the habits of the heart - but to the various notions and opinions current among men and to the mass of those ideas which constitute their character of mind. I comprise under this term, therefore, the whole moral and intellectual conditions of a people. My intention is not to draw a picture of American customs, but simply to point out such features of them as are favorable to the maintenance of their political institutions.19

cy II.

n History 55, no. 3 (Dec., 1968), 524.

18Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., Henry Reeve, revised Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley (1840; New York: Random House, 1990), pg., V. Hereafter as Democra

19Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., Henry Reeve, revised Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley (1835; New York: Random House, 1990), pg., 299-300. Hereafter as Democracy I. Lynn L. Marshall and Seymour Drescher, American Historians and Tocquevilles Democracy, in The Journal of America

41

For Tocqueville the term democracy was a synonym for civil and social

equality. According to Tocqueville, equality, as a democratic state, encouraged certain

psychic predispositions within the democratic individual. Put another way, the individual

in democratic society came to internalize a set of psychological tendencies that equality

made requisite. So defined, equality, that term of both contempt and esteem in

Democracy, was not primarily a political value - rather it was a compound moeur that

came to shape behavior, and therefore, politics. When Tocqueville spoke of democracy

he spoke not of political institutions, but the inevitability of a social equality which was

itself an alloy of egalitarian social conditions (social leveling) and a set of passions and

habits that revolved around it. In America, Tocqueville wrote in the notes taken during

his American visit, the free moeurs made the free political institutions.20

That these moeurs settled into self-sustaining patterns of behavior and ultimately

cultural and political practices was at once prosaic and subversive. On the one hand,

politics followed, rather straightforwardly, from the Social condition. . . .[which] may be

justly considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas

which regulate the conduct of nations. 21 Yet, by depicting democracy in a manner

similar to the Montesquieuian notion of the spirit of a people - Tocqueville revealed

democracy to be a distinctly new arrangement of social practices that operated beyond

the ambit of politicians. Because political arrangements were the expression of the

20Tocqueville Ouevres, ed., Andr Jardin, 167.

21Democracy I, 46.

42

social condition, the superordinate claims for monarchical rule and aristocratic

complicity - in short the ancien rgimes theoretical legitimacy - was about to be

overwhelmed, Tocqueville claimed, by the customs, manners, habits and beliefs of the

masses. As the single most important causative force in politics these moeurs offered

some hope for political reform from le peuple, but they offered even more cause for

alarm as the public came, under the auspices of democracy, to acquire a capacity to

tyrannize.

When commentators speak of Democracy in America as a cautionary tale they

inevitably refer, in fact, to Tocquevilles most recognizable passages in which he argued

that a new form of modern despotism would result from this democratic state. His

apprehension centered on a meaningful question: I hold it to be an impious maxim that,

politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything; and yet I have asserted that

all authority originates in the will of the majority. Am I, then, in contradiction with

myself?22 Tocquevilles influence in postwar America revolved around his answer that

there was a difference between democracy proper and mass democracy. Specifically, he

claimed that democracies are vulnerable to a form of tyranny in which the despot takes

advantage of a prior social condition characterized by the atomization of the nations

citizens. This social condition is caused by equality which corrodes the binding social

ties of older stratified societies. Vulnerable to political mobilization as a mass, the

democratic collectivity represents an aggregate of solitary individuals unconnected to

traditional associative relationships and seeking new ones in all the wrong places.

22Democracy I, 259.

43

To be sure, the specifics of this cautionary tale differed somewhat in each

volume. In Volume I, Tocqueville described an ideal-type American democrat who was

in constant movement, in pursuit of insatiable appetites. Longing for freedom and

equality and driven at once to the edges of commitment and independence, the American

democrat in Volume I needed restraints and found one, to Tocquevilles chagrin, in the

stifling of individual dissent by majority opinion. This was the substance of

Tocquevilles famous tyranny of the majority claim; that in lieu of rigid social gradations

codified in law and embodied in custom (aristocracy), democracy encourages and

legitimizes the tyranny of majority opinion against the free expression of belief.

Tocqueville wrote, The majority in that country [United States], therefore, exercise a

prodigious actual authority, and a power of opinion which is nearly as great; no obstacles

exist which can impede or even retard its progress, so as to make it heed the complaints

of those whom it crushes upon its path. This state of things is harmful in itself and

dangerous for the future. 23 Majority opinion imposes conformity in a complicated

social recommendation that individuals absorbed as part of their pattern of moeurs. In

short, individual freedom was leading Americans to celebrate their sameness. The power

of this common culture - majority culture - to dominate was expressed politically as a

form of mass politics in which popular sovereignty carried out a form of legislative

,

ideas to critical scrutiny, see Welch, 207-210.

23Democracy I, 255. Tocqueville was mum as to the problems obstructive minorities could pose for the state. Part of this is explained by Tocquevilles assumption that the only minority that could effectively and legitimately interpose itself between the government and the mass was the aristocracy or elite of some sort. Part of this was also a conscious avoidance, on Tocquevilles partof exploring beyond the bounds of his own forecasts to a time when emergent minorities mightexact even more political power. For a good exploration of Tocquevilles reluctance toexpose his deepest

44

ial to

ism.

despotism, (the social power thus centralized). 24 The ability of the pouvoir soc

ride roughshod over others was made particularly unbearable because the masses had

little ability to recognize their authoritarian

24Democracy I, 88.

45

Volume II offered an even more unyielding analysis of modern democratic

despotism, and an even more disenchanted portrait of the impoverishment of democratic

life. The exceptionalism or particularism of American circonstances was downplayed in

the second volume in favor of a broader analysis of sociological constants and universals

the French themselves would soon have to confront. An empiricism driven by acute

observation led Tocqueville to measured conclusions in the first volume. In the second

volume, Tocqueville reasoned philosophically about democracy as a comprehensive state

of existence. What resulted was an emphasis on the threat of individualism: a form of

anomie brought on as democracys citizens retreated into the cocoon of their private

interests and satisfactions. Tocqueville termed this democratic permutation of egoism

individualisme. Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given

birth, Tocqueville wrote in an often-quoted passage. Our fathers were only acquainted

with gosme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self,

which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything

in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of

the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his

family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he

willingly leaves society at large to itself.25 Tocqueville, therefore, revealed that

democracy wins an unsatisfying victory - in the name of freedom and equality - insofar

as the free pursuit of private satisfactions comes at expense both of citizenship and true

individuality. This new threat, different in scope from Tocquevilles earlier tyranny of the

25Democracy II, 98.

46

majority, was grounded in a new description of the American democrat as timid and

altogether less intentioned by the civic demands of democracy and confining himself

entirely within the solitude of his own heart.26

26Democracy II, 99.

47

Yet a key similarity remained: in both volumes democracy was inherently

vulnerable to a form of centralized, mass politics. In the first volume, Tocqueville

described how democracies tend toward a form of administrative centralization which

encroaches and subjugates. I am also convinced that democratic nations are most likely

to fall beneath the yoke of a centralized administration, for several reasons, among which

is the following: The constant tendency of these nations is to concentrate all the strength

of the government in the hands of the only power that directly represents the

people. . . .27 Such was the difference, Tocqueville warned, between democratic tyranny

and the arbitrary power of aristocracies - the former has a legitimacy insofar as it

tyrannizes in the name of the people; the latter often commands in spite of the people.

27Democracy I, 95. Welch, 78-81.

48

In the second volume, Tocqueville described a similar scenario in which a form of

administrated, paternalist despotism would pervade life by taking advantage of the

detached, democratic individual. This despotism was made possible first and foremost by

the central democratic principle of equality. The more equal the conditions of men

become and the less strong men individually are, the more easily they give way to the

current of the multitude and the more difficult it is for them to adhere by themselves to an

opinion which the multitude discard, he wrote.28 Democracys subjects were just that -

subjugated souls who became the victims of their own appetites which were, in a cruel

and self-reinforcing irony, put together out of democracys constitutive attributes:

equality and freedom. Thus the vices which despotism produces are precisely those

which equality fosters, Tocqueville claimed. These two things perniciously complete

and assist each other. Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie;

despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to

consider their fellow creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public

virtue.29 Unconnected to any meaningful social ties, the alienated paved the way for the

collectivity. In more modern parlance Tocquevilles dystopia would be considered

totalitarian - Tocqueville called it a mild despotism - but the results were the same:

Despotism, then, which is at all times dangerous, is more particularly to be feared in

democratic ages.30

28Democracy II, 114.

29Democracy II, 102.

30Democracy II, 102. See also Democracy II, Book 4, Chap., 3 - That the Sentiments of Democratic

49

ll

m

Tocquevilles Democracy also offered a reasoned analysis of the ways in which

Americas moeurs could serve to mitigate democracys tendency towards mass politics.

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny of the majority in America at the

present day; he observed, but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that

the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and

the manners of the country more than its laws.31 The continued reference, made in both

volumes, to the ways in which American democracy depended upon a shared a

deep-seated system of beliefs about politics, society, morality, and religion served to te

an instructive, cautionary tale - that democracy was going to have to be moderated fro

within its underlying social framework, rather than through politics. According to

Tocqueville, political discussion and compromise were not the answers, rather, the issue

was to foster and eventually legitimize a stabilizing social consensus which could be used

to control the capriciousness of democratic politics. This was the challenge of modernity.

Power. Nations Accord with Their Opinions in Leading Them to Concentrate Political

31Democracy I, 261-262,

50

Tocquevilles hope for the future was expressed in the idea of self-interest

rightly understood - a description of the state when self-interest and public interest

become commensurate within an individuals set of values. Bridging the idea of social

stability and individual freedom was not easy, but it could be accomplished both

Tocqueville and Weber thought, if a desire for social cohesion inhered in the psyche of

the individuals who would champion order in the name of free choice. In this ideal state,

the democratic individual would will or voluntarily make sensible political choices

thereby lessening the vulnerability of political freedom. For Weber, this was articulated

in his notion of elective affinity, for Tocqueville, it was self-interest rightly

understood; in both cases it was a correspondingly dismal appraisal of the capacities of

the masses to act responsibly or intentionally. The masses, of their own reasoned accord,

could not be expected to act on principle, rather, they had to be convinced that their

material interests were in harmony with the greater good.32

32The mild condescension of this perspective can be seen in the oft-quoted passage from Democracy II: It

he

erican

is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to interest him in the destiny of the state, because he does not clearly understand what influence the destiny of the state can have upon his own lot. But if it is proposed to make a road across the end of his estate, he will see at a glance that there is a connection between this small public affair and his greatest private affairs; and he will discover, without its being shown to him, the close tie that unites private to general interest. pg., 104. Or, in Tocquevilles notes for May 29th, 1831 - The principle of tancient republics was the sacrifice of particular interest to the general good, in this sense, we can say that they were virtuous. This principle, it seems to me, ensconces the particular interest within the general interest. A sort of refined and intelligent gisme seems the pivot around which the entire machine operates. These people [the Americans] are not shy to avoid searching whether the virtue is good, but to prove that it is useful. If this last point is correct, as I think it is in part, this society can pass for enlightened but not virtuous. Tocqueville then goes on the ponder the self- interest rightly understood as an explanation for this state of Amaffairs. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., Andr Jardin, 230.

51

y which

realm

The most important contribution Tocqueville offered as avenues toward

self-interest rightly understood was to present civil associations and religion as

effective (secret) mechanisms of intervention in the democratic social condition. That is,

both civil associations and religion were introduced as instruments of influence in the

substructure of democratic life which could moderate democracys tendency towards

mass politics.33 This was natural outgrowth of Tocquevilles political sociolog

sharply distinguished civil society from political society and set the former in a

independent of the state and, if necessary, in opposition to it. In both volumes, for

instance, Tocqueville described how these associations had become a necessary

guarantee against the tyranny of the majority by alleviating the effects of individualism

and the unremitting material self-interest of the democratic individual.34 Tocqueville

further claimed that associations must not follow too closely the pattern of divisive

political solidarities and serve for the advocacy of interests, rather, they ought to serve a

deeper function - the political maturity of their members who would come to accept a

more legitimate and stabilizing set of political moeurs. Feelings and opinions are

recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal

influence of men upon one another, Tocqueville claimed. I have shown that these

influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially

), pgs., 343-344.

33See Democracy II, Book II, Chap., 5 - Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

34Democracy I, 194.

52

created, and this can only be accomplished by associations.35

Religion could serve the same end. Concerned with the loss of civic virtue that

resulted from the corroding effects of the democratic social condition, Tocqueville

described how religion buttressed social authority. The chief concern of religion is to

purify, to regulate, and to restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for well-being that

men feel in periods of equality, he wrote.36 Tocqueville championed a coherent set of

beliefs, a civil religion, that could help maintain a vital center, rather than a balanced

plurality of belief systems. Conceived as such, religion could help remedy the prosaic

and mundane quality of thought and culture in democracies and help in community

building by setting itself against that spirit of independence which is her most dangerous

opponent.37 But it could also serve to curb democratic excess by inculcating habits of

restraint that will recur in political society and thereby serve to maintain political

tranquility.38 Religion. . . is more needed in democratic republic than in any others,

Tocqueville argued. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the

moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?39 Attending to

those secret forces that determined politics, religion could most effectively orient a

ardin, 167.

35Democracy II, 109.

36Democracy II, 26.

37Democracy II, 28. In this regard, Tocqueville recognized that religion also wielded political influence. There is, in every religious doctrine a political doctrine which by affinity they are joined. Tocqueville Ouevres, ed., Andr J

38Democracy I, 305.

39Democracy I, 307.

53

democracy towards temperate ends.

In an effort to stabilize democracy Tocqueville narrowed the parameters of

political conduct. Seeking to save democracy from itself, he concerned himself with

those elements that could counteract democracys innate tendency toward mass politics

with a separate realm of assentient civil activity. In other words, Tocqueville legitimized

democratic opposition and democratic change only insofar as they were favorable to the

maintenance of a certain social consensus. Claiming that democracy could achieve

stability by reflecting what people have in common was this architectures greatest

contribution; claiming that this had to be achieved in spite of le peuples other interests

or intentions was its least.

IV

The American encounter with Democracy in America came via the English

translation of Henry Reeve. A friend and contemporary, Reeve commissioned the

translation on Tocquevilles second trip to England. The first American edition of

Democracy in America (Part I) was published in 1838; Part II was published in 1840. The

1850 edition (the twelfth) was the last to be corrected by Tocqueville himself and

Reeves translation was itself amended twice, once in 1862 by Francis Bowen, and again,

in 1945, by Phillips Bradley. There have been other translations - George Lawrences

1966 translation for example - but it was Reeves translation, supplemented with fine

prefaces over the years, that remains our starting point. The dissemination of Democracy

54

was further helped by a 1945 mass market edition that carried a foreword by Harold

Laski, as well as Bradleys revised translation and his thorough introduction which

remains a fine resource especially for those interested in the initial reception and reviews

of Tocquevilles work. Subsequent mass market editions, including the 1947 Oxford

abridged edition which featured an introduction by Henry Steele Commager, and Richard

Heffners 1956 abridged edition, which remains in print, contributed to Tocquevilles

presence.40

The story of Tocquevilles impact on the American mind begins as a tale of

astonishing, if delayed, success. After a brief period of hesitation, American reviewers

fully embraced Tocquevilles observations on American politics and were pleased to

come across a Europeans account of American culture that was on the whole quite

positive. The legacy of unflattering European descriptions of American mores accounted

for the delay in issue of an American edition of Democracy and some unfavorable early

reviews. Soon enough, however, Part I came to be recognized as work of unrivaled

perspicacity. The first English translation of 1835 and the first American edition of 1838

appeared well enough in advance of the publication of Part II (1840) to mellow the

criticisms of that more brooding later work and ultimately established Tocquevilles early

reputation as a gracious observer of American mores.

cToqueville was an accurate observer according to many early reviewers who

-180.

40James T. Kloppenberg, Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America, in La Revue/The Tocqueville Review Vol. XVII No., 2 (1996), pgs., 19-25. Robert Nisbet, Many Tocquevilles, in The American Scholar 46 (Winter 1976-1977), pgs., Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals (NewYork: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), Chapter 4,and 164

55

claimed that his unbiased perspective made possible a trenchant understanding of

American life. Part I, thereby, became a successful and important nineteenth century

book on American political institutions. In the second third of the nineteenth century,

Democracy was adapted and used as a textbook in American schools, suggesting that his

observations more than his predictions were of interest. In particular, his celebration of

American political progress was widely accepted and his broad yet detailed look at the

machinery of American government proved to be highly valued. When Part II appeared,

reviewers were less enthusiastic, but Tocquevilles reputation was set: He understood

Americans and their exhilarating democratic experiment.

Yet Democracy fell from these heights during Reconstruction to late 1930s.

Tocqueville had little presence in the representative and important historical works of the

end of the century and Progressive Era including those of Frederick Jackson Turner and

Charles Beard. Choosing to emphasize conflict rather than consensus, Beard and others

had little use for Tocquevilles observations on American national character and its array

of shared moeurs. From 1904 to 1945, Democracy was rarely in print and was seldom

cited by students of American politics. Conventional survey texts such as Jesse Macys

Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861(1900) and Party Organization and

Machinery (1904) and Henry Jones Fords The Rise and Growth of American Politics

(1898) made little use of Tocqueville. Perhaps more revealingly, works of broad political

theory and commentary such as those of Herbert Croly, contained few references to

Tocqueville as well.41 Tocquevilles wane during this era was conspicuous. In the second

41Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: MacMillan, 1909); Herbert Croly, Progressive

56

third of the nineteenth century, his name was invoked often and with authority; from the

end of the Civil War until the late 1930s, few were mining Tocqueville for insights, fewer

still considered him worthy of study. Even among those foreign observers of American

life Tocqueville could no longer claim supremacy as Democracy shared pride of place

with other works such as Lord Bryces 1888 classic, The American Commonwealth.

To be sure, Tocqueville did not disappear. Matthew Mancini has illustrated that

Tocqueville was in fact a continuing presence in American intellectual life during that

post-Civil War period when he is seen to have been eclipsed or forgotten.42 Articles

continued to issue, editions of Democracy continued to be printed, and course syllabi

which assigned his readings continued to be handed out to students. His Recollections

was published in 1893 and Democracy underwent three separate editions and a number of

printings between 1898 and 1904.43 In his History of the United States during the

Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1891-1898), Henry Adams

quoted from Democracys second volume and drew upon Tocquevilles analysis of

democratic society. Bryce too had taken note of Tocqueville and Turner came later to

discover him.44 Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins, and Francis Lieber a

pioneer in the establishment of American political science, directly and indirectly reveled

4).

-515.

Democracy (New York: MacMillan, 191

42Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals), 107.

43Democracy II, 417.

44James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan and co., 1888) Frederick Jackson Turner The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1920) and The United States, 1830- 1850: The Nation and its Sections (New York: H. Holt and Co.,1935). Marshall and Drescher, 513

57

their interest in Tocqueville during the quiet phase in Tocqueville scholarship.45 Yet

Tocquevilles appearances in the eras literature were sporadic and not connected by any

comprehensive revival of his main themes or predictions. Even those who acknowledged

him did so at a distance: Many of the evils he saw, and which he thought inherent and

incurable, have now all but vanished, Bryce wrote. Other evils have indeed revealed

themselves which he did not discern, but these may prove as transient as those with

which he affrighted European readers in 1834.46 Tocquevilles Democracy had lost its

vitality as a source of usable knowledge.

The causes of this relative quietude are debated but have collected around two

explanations: the irrelevance of Tocquevilles consensual architecture vis-a-vis the

dislocation caused by urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and other forms of

diversity that made themselves apparent at turn of the century; and the disuse brought on

by a surfeit of sameself celebration as Robert Nisbet has termed it.47 There were few

then who doubted American destiny, Nisbet wrote in Many Tocquevilles - his account

of Tocquevilles cyclical presence in the American mind. Ironically, it was this very

45Mancini, Chapter 4.

46James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan and co., 1888), pg., 911.

47Kloppenberg, Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America, 22. Kloppenberg cites Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) and Nisbet as proponents of the second explanation; and himself, of the first. Nisbet, 59-75. Welch, chap., 5. In some important ways, the explanation of Tocquevilles eclipse as the product of social dislocation confuses more than it explains. One might just as plausibly contend that Tocquevilles palliative arguments should have appeared at a time - during social stress - when Americans needed them most (as they did in France). Why would Tocqueville necessarily fall out of favor in times of disruption? In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, Tocqueville spoke to those concerned about the perceived frailties of American democracy and the vulnerability of American social norms in an age of political uncertainty.

58

intoxication with American progress, I believe, that led to Tocquevilles decline. Granted

he had praised American progress-but not recently! His place was taken by dozens, then

hundreds, of Americans able themselves to praise the spirit from which all blessings

flowed. Tocquevilles 1835 ode to American progress was now lost in the vast chorus

that stretched from one ocean to the other.48 As Nisbet suggests, Part I was all but

forgotten by the early twentieth century. Part II had yet to make an impact. Tocquevilles

observations had lost their immediacy and relevance with the passage of time. The early

emphasis on Tocquevilles straightforward observations concerning American politics

and manners had actually created a problematic legacy: it was inflexible and soon

became dated. An excerpt from an essay of the 1860s captured an image of Tocquevilles

work that would be unrecognizable to the postwar theorists for whom its expansiveness

explained so much: It is a noticeable feature of his works, that his mind was continually

directed to a specific object; and that he never indulges in that theoretical speculation

which either rejects facts or is incapable of practical application. He always looked

forward to a direct result.49

The mid to late 1930s witnessed a renewed interest in the theoretical and

normative qualities of Democracy in America. Though revival is not an accurate term, the

re-acclamation of Tocquevilles oeuvre was grounded in a new appreciation of the

second volume and Tocqueville thereby acquired unassailable legitimacy as a pioneering

political sociologist commenting on democracy as a social condition as well as the

48Nisbet, 64.

49Anonymous, Alexis de Tocqueville, North American Review 95 (July, 1862), pg., 160

59

nd it

character of mass politics.

This process owed a great deal to George W. Piersons excellent work,

Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938) and the publication of J. P. Mayers

Tocqueville: Prophet of a Mass Age (1939), overseas.50 Tocqueville could not have

asked for a more able expositor than Pierson. His account was remarkably balanced a

maneuvered around Tocquevilles insights and oversights with intellectual honesty.

Much of Piersons book was taken up - as the title suggests - with the travel minutiae of

Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. But in the latter part of the book, Pierson offered

an important accounting of Democracy as a work of political theory. What Pierson also

revealed was the complexity and nuance of Tocquevilles work in its biographical

context. Pierson uncovered an earnest Tocqueville who wrote Democracy because he had

to. The book was not an aristocratic dalliance or an opportunity to offer the requisite

European chastisement of American culture; rather, it was an honest attempt to

understand the complexity of American democracy. That it was written for the French

made it no less important for Americans - in fact, it made it more so. An American

audience would have made impossible any allusive analysis of American politics and

culture. It was Tocquevilles angle of vision that was key according to Pierson;

Tocqueville was not a scientist, but a prophetic if appropriately estranged political

theorist.51

50It too should be noted that at about this time Tocqueville was finding his way into a number of nascent

sub-disciplines including American studies and the myth and symbol school in American literary theory.

51George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), see especially, Chapters LVII Tocquevilles Work in Retrospect: Its Defects, and LVIII Tocquevilles

60

Laski,

individual to the mass.53

Behind this renewed admiration lay the notion that Tocqueville saw beyond mere

external forms to the secrets or unseen sociological impulses of modernity. Writing

in 1932, Harold Laski suggested that the book [Democracy] is not really about America

at all. Tocqueville, in fact, sought to illuminate those underlying and universal currents

of democratic life and he thereby saw with remarkable profundity into the secret of his

time.52 This was a significantly new approach to Democracy - unthinkable by the

standards of nineteenth century assessments. The idea that Tocqueville was describing

something more than America and something deeper than self-evident politics, however,

would become a standard approach in the postwar era. Another key element of this

re-evaluation was the discovery of Democracys normative attributes. Tocqueville was

no longer an observer, rather he was making prescriptive arguments about how

Americans, and others, ought to live in a democracy. Laski described this as

Tocquevilles foray into the moral ethics of democracy, and for many, including

this prescriptive dimension centered around Tocquevilles warnings about equality and

the setting of standards in terms of the wants of the mass. The books ultimate

sadness, Laski wrote, lay in an insistence on the right of the individual at all costs to

affirm his own essence, a sad indignation at those implications of social life which, by

their nature, subordinate the

Work in Retrospect: Its Enduring Qualities.

52Harold J. Laski, Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy, in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age, F.J.C. Hearnshaw ed., (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1935), pgs., 102, 100.

53Laski, 106, 111.

61

The image of Democracy that emerged from the 1930s was primarily derived

from Part II as egalitarianism and the attendant anomie thought to characterize mass

democracies became increasingly important to American intellectuals. As Harold W.

Stoke wrote in The South Atlantic Quarterly (1937), De Tocqueville almost alone

among writers on democracy, saw that an insistence upon equalitarianism can, at the

same time, lead to disaster and is bound to do so unless special safeguards are set up.

And it is in this warning to later generations of the dangers inherent in the idea of

equality in social and political life that De Tocqueville at once exhibited his greatest

intuition and performed his greatest service to future democrats.54 Describing

Tocqueville as a French philosopher, Matthew Josephson suggested in The Virginia

Quarterly Review (1938) that, To sum up briefly the report which Tocqueville brought

back of American democracy in flower, the essential determining condition which he

emphasized was first and last the almost unexampled equality ruling there.55 Thanks to

Piersons work which had the effect of suddenly opening a forgotten door to the past,

Josephson described how Democracy was now more appropriate than ever for use in

modern political theory, especially as a means to cope with democracy in the Machine

Age.56 These were themes drawn from Tocquevilles political sociology and their tone

was accordingly uncertain.

., 19.

589.

54Harold W. Stoke, De Tocquevilles Appraisal of Democracy - Then and Now, in The South Atlantic Quarterly 36 (1937), pg

55Matthew Josephson, A Century After Tocqueville, in The Virginia Quarterly Review 14 (Winter 1938), pgs., 591,

56Josephson, 585, 582.

62

The vibrant American democrat described in Part I was supplanted in such

articles of the 1930s by a timid follower seeking the approbation of the group. The

desire of the individual to differentiate himself and his activities from masses of other

individuals is steadily declining, Stoke warned the reader in words that would be

repeated like a mantra throughout the 1950s.57 Democracy often provided key shared

assumptions about the social conditions underlying democratic politics that could be used

for broad criticism of reformist and populist democracy and its attendant values. Stoke

wrote, the mass effects of equalitarianism are given force by the other principal

characteristics of democracies, the belief in the right of majorities to rule.58 Drawing

from Tocquevilles own illustration of democracy as both an instrument of political

organization and a purveyor of destabilizing moeurs, Stoke argued for a cautious

approach to democracys potential for politicizing the masses.

In this regard, two articles by Albert Salomon, one written for the journal Social

Research, the other for The Review of Politics, proved important. Tocqueville, Moralist

and Sociologist, (1935) and Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, (1939) were

expansive treatments of Tocqueville as an authority on modernity. The first claimed him

as a sociologist and a moralist, the second as a philosopher, but in both cases Salomon

argued that Democracy acquired a new relevance thanks to the sociological and

philosophical profundity of Part II. The presuppositions and the direction of

Tocquevilles thought come to even clearer expression in the second part of Democracy

57Stoke, 20.

58Stoke, 20

63

in America, Salomon argued. Here for the first time in the nineteenth century the

attempt is made to show the change in forms of human existence in and through the

process of social development. In fact, Salomon claimed, recognizing the sociological

significance of Democracy was made difficult because the outward form of his concepts

is political, [while] their content nearly always refers to a sociological structure or

relations. Far from being vestiges of an outmoded liberalism, Tocquevilles ideas tapped

into sociological constants that explained the course of modern democracy. The key was

to dig beneath and beyond Part I to the arguments in Part II that addressed the new social

conditions emerging within modern democracies. This is the legacy of Tocqueville for

our times, his actual significance for our day.59

In Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, Salomon barely mentioned

Democracy at all, using Tocquevilles ideas instead for wide-ranging comparisons and

speculations including a justification for elite rule. Opening Democracy for use in broad

analyses of politics and culture was made possible, Salomon claimed, by Pierson whose

scholarly masterpiece revealed that, Tocquevilles work is wrongly ignored as

belonging to a finished stage of political liberalism. Unlike Auguste Comte or Hegel

who fashioned philosophical and sociological systems that shared the same indifference

concerning the philosophical and structural problems of human existence (and were

thereby products of an older liberalism that had run its course), Tocqueville understood

that a modern political theory would have to address the problematical situation of

427.

59Albert Salomon, Tocqueville, Moralist and Sociologist, in Social Research 2 (1935), pgs., 414, 411,

64

personality in the irreversible process of democratization and industrialization. In a soon

to be familiar Tocquevillian gambit, Salomon argued that individuals in a democracy

were subjected to new patterns of despotism in the radical pursuit of equalization,

which either overwhelmed them, or, most often, were internalized as drives to immerse

oneself in the group. For this reason, Salomon wrote, the main concern in these

sociological democratic times is not man and his action any more, but the knowledge of

those forces and those general movements and tendencies that bring man into power and

reveal him as a reflection of the standards of the multitude rather than as an exponent of

highest ideals of the few.60 Such was the insight that people could oppress themselves.

This proved to be a highly rarefied argument that had little use for evidence other

than textual references to European social theorists. Of course, Tocqueville proved highly

useful for such constructions. Summoning his name was a means to instant sagacity and

the observations and forecasts in Democracy were often taken, without caution, as

evidence about extremely complex, modern social trends. Take one excerpt: The

omission of this group [the elite] increases the trend toward despotism inherent in the

individualistic egalitarianism of the democratic societies. How was it possible to

measure such despotism? And how was the march of political democracy and social

egalitarianism diminishing a societys total freedom, rather than redistributing freedom to

those from whom it had been previously denied? Such questions were rarely asked. For

Salomon, as for a number of other postwar American theorists, invoking Tocqueville

, 408. 60Albert Salomon, Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, in The Review of Politics 1 (1939), pgs., 403,

402, 410

65

sometimes absolved them from providing the sort of empirical evidence necessary to

answer fairly basic questions about the democracy-to-despotism thesis. For Salomon, the

strengthening of democracy meant the summoning of countervailing forces. Here he

rather narrowly followed Tocquevilles idea that associations and religion - taken

together - represented the most effective counter-measures for democratic activism and

excess. To foreclose dangerous attempts at political mobilization, those professional,

municipal and local organizations helping in the maintenance of equilibrium through a

union of interests, were to be prized, Salomon asserted, along with the embracing

solidarity of the religious communion, which served as an indispensable element for

the maintenance of a free society.61

Democracy in America experienced its postwar revival not so much as an object

of study, but as the substructure for normative arguments about democracy. Few books

and articles undertook a full-scale analyses or a wholesale excavation of Tocquevilles

life and work. In fact, in a period of so-called revival there were fewer prominent

American works devoted solely to Tocqueville than one might expect. Rather, his

concepts about democracy, mass politics, the social sphere, consensus and conformity,

were reproduced for use within broad theories about democratic mobilization.62 This

does not mean, however, that his ideas became mere bromides for those wary of

61Salomon, Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, 418, 422-423.

62Tocqueville was (and is) so often cited - directly in epigrammatic quotes or indirectly in supplicatory paraphrases - at the outset of a chapter or book to indicate the gravity of the analysis to be presented, or at its end, to seal its justness. The lucidity of his writing lends itself to such applications. But the continuous use of his words as self-standing aphorisms presents his main ideas as almost beyond scrutiny. Without any encumbering commentary his positions have easily became proverbs to be accepted without debate.

66

ely

rk for

t avoid them.64

democratic disorder. Quite the opposite. They were used to help construct and then

justify a new vocabulary for democracy and democratization. Again, this can be

explained by the new Tocquevilles who emerged in the mid to late 1930s. The

re-discovery of Democracy centered around the more formidable and heretofore

neglected arguments of Part II and his ideas acquired a new legitimacy as the lens - what

Louis Hartz called the Tocquevillian facts of American life - for ideological debates

and political theorizing.63 Tocquevilles ideas were, by the 1940s and 1950s, quite rar

the subject of critical debate or scrutiny; instead they quickly became the groundwo

sweeping and axiomatic descriptions of the American national character and political

culture, as well as prescient explanations of how democratic despotisms could emerge

from within free societies and how Americans migh

V

63Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), pg., 94.

64Marshall and Drescher, 513-517.

67

What best explains the nature of the Tocqueville revival among political theorists

in postwar America were the specific conditions under which the renewed interest and

appreciation for his arguments occurred. Simply put, Tocqueville was summoned in

answer to the problem of democratic instability brought to light by wartime

totalitarianism. The appeal to mass politics among fascist parties in Italy and Germany

(and left-wing parties after the war) created a distrust of political cures and the political

mobilization that supported them. Totalitarianism (in its modern form) initiated a crisis in

democratic theory and yielded a wealth of exacting debates and jeremiads because it was

seen to be the product of popular support and demagogic manipulation. It is at the level

of popular response and participation, therefore, that twentieth-century totalitarian

regimes differ most sharply from their pre-industrial predecessors, Barrington Moore Jr,

claimed in Political Power and Social Theory (1958).65

Such assumptions led many theorists scrambling in search of democracys

theoretical underpinnings. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, a significant portion

of this collective self-assessment of American democracy turned to Tocquevilles

Democracy and took as a starting point Tocquevilles claims about the social bases of a

quiescent democratic politics. As such, Democracy filled a postwar need for a theoretical

touchstone in the American search for a stable democracy of the vital center. As

Benjamin Wright wrote: There is still, over a century later, no satisfactory book on the

nature of democracy - none, I think, that does a more comprehensive or a more

., 80. 65Barrington Moore, jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1958), pg

68

t

meaningful job of description and analysis than Tocquevilles.66 Or, in a book with one

of the eras most suggestive titles, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), J. L.

Talmon maintained, There exists no special and systematic study on the subject of this

work; neither a theoretical treatise on the main thesis of the present essay, nor a historical

investigation into the emergence and growth of what will be called here the totalitarian

trend of democracy. The keenest perception of the current and of its vital significance is

to be found in some of the - considering the early date - prophetic utterances of Alexis de

Tocqueville.67 In this influential work, Talmon, an British political theorist, noted tha

totalitarian democracy regarded, in the last analysis, the popular vote as an act of

self-identification with general will, and refused to allow individuals to opt out from the

demands of political life.68 According to Talmon, this idea could be traced back to the

assertions of J. J. Rousseaus concerning popular mobilization. Contrasted to his

intellectual legacy (as one of democracys saboteurs) was Tocqueville who suggested

the distinctive vulnerability of mass society long before the rise of nazism and

communism.69 As Tocqueville well-noted, liberal-democracy could ensure its stability

only insofar as it did not inflate the importance of politics but accepted its basis in a prior

social structure. For Talmon, this claim was imported without alteration to explain how a

g., 58.

mons.

66Benjamin F. Wright, American Government and Politics of Democracy in America, in The American Political Science Review XL no. 1 (Feb., 1946), p

67J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), pg., 257. Emphasis is Tal

68Talmon, 251,

69Talmon, 121.

69

polity reflecting a social consensus was the necessary alternative to totalitarian

democracys answer to the paradox of freedom (the uneasy co-existence of freedom

and orderly political existence) which realized itself in a forced political unanimity

caused by enlarging the scope of political behavior - a dictatorship resting on popular

enthusiasm - as Talmon phrased it. 70

Another indication of Tocquevilles credibility can be seen in a UNESCO survey

(1947-1948) that bore upon the idea of democracy and the (mis)understandings it

occasioned among those of different political sympathies. Claiming that, Few words

have played a greater role in these [postwar ideological] conflicts than the word

democracy, the surveys committee, including E. H. Carr, Richard McKeon and Paul

Ricoeur, set out probe the opinions of a vast array of the worlds luminaries.71 It is the

central aim of the inquiry launched by UNESCO, the committee members stated

confidently, to remedy this [lack of material concerning the problem of democracy]

shortcoming, to organize philosophically detached debates between nations, between

opposed ideological camps: to elucidate, through international exchanges of views, the

divergencies of usage and interpretation, to analyze the normative foundations of those

divergencies and to search for potential sources of reconciliation.72 The somewhat

complicated questionnaire made use of Lincoln and Tocqueville alone at any substantive

513.

70 Talmon, 2, 6.

71Democracy in a World of Tensions, ed., Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pg.,

72Democracy in a World of Tensions, 514.

70

length. Using Tocquevilles 1848 speech in the Assemble Constituante when he

famously delineated the fundamental differences between socialism and democracy, the

surveys authors set out to establish normative political definitions to which the

contributors could respond. This proved to be one of the most suggestive passages and

the one that occasioned the most passionate rejoinders among the participants who

included John Dewey, Giovanni Borgese, Wilhelm Rpke, Henri Lefebre, and C. I.

Lewis.

Emphasizing how politics reflected an underlying and stabilizing social structure

was an effective way of distinguishing Soviet-style mass politics from the healthy

democratic equilibrium of America. Yet, Tocqueville also revealed how the struggle

between democracy and despotism can take place within nations, as much as between

them. Specifically, Tocqueville illustrated how democracy (American democracy) itself

creates the favorable conditions for the despotism of the mass. First and foremost,

democracy explained the loss of community and the emergence of the atomized

individual who was vulnerable to political mobilization on behalf of radical causes.

According to mass politics theorists, including Arthur Kornahuser, Robert Nisbet, Philip

Selznick, and Seymour Martin Lipset, democracy ate away at those bonds of loyalty to

groups and associations which had characterized the social structure of an earlier

historical period. Egalitarian conditions paved the way for a ruinous conformity and

helped create a discontented public with an aversion for traditional sources of political

and social authority. As a result, democratic political institutions had to deal with a large,

other-directed mass unmoored to any stabilizing social ties and inclined towards

71

political activism. Because of this accepted fact, the mass politics debate also cut to the

core of participatory democracy. Tocquevillian social theory, as put to use in the postwar

era, revealed that popular participation was not necessarily a measure of political health,

but more often a symptom of an impending democratic despotism. Over time, activist

politics emerged as the central problem of democratic legitimacy and the all-important

question for those proponents of the mass politics paradigm - and a good place to begin

an illustration of its principles - then became, how do we distinguish legitimate

democratic majorities, from despotic ones?73

In one of this genres most notable works, The Politics of Mass Society (1959),

William Kornhauser used a thoroughly Tocquevillian argument to establish the outlines

of a political theory that could be used to such discriminating effect. Kornhausers gambit

was based on the premise that the strength of democratic institutions depends on the

underlying social structure. . . .74 With the requisite invocation of Tocqueville - De

Tocqueville suggested the distinctive vulnerability of mass society long before the rise of

nazism and communism, - Kornhauser outlined the social contexts of democratic

political behavior in such a way as to set in relief the threat of massism.75 Such

massism, as Kornhauser described it, was a Tocquevillian anomie that included groups

of individuals who were disconnected from the mainsprings of the national, stabilizing

73For a good description of the ways European social theory was used in modernization theory and

American foreign policy debates, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Chapters 1-3.

74William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pg., 13.

75Kornhauser, 121.

72

culture. He called these crises of disconnection, discontinuities in the social process

that weakened the social relations intermediate between the individual and the state.76

The attenuation of these social relations was the central problem of modern

democracies because it ate away at those relationships which bound the individual to

uphold the political equilibrium and which provided a buffer from direct political

engagement. Unmoored by any of these associative connections/restraints meant the

realization of mass societys first prerequisite: social alienation, or the distance between

the individual and his society.77

Of course, these atomized individuals were most prone to mass action only if

effectively politicized. People cannot be mobilized against the established order,

Kornhauser wrote, until they first have been divorced from prevailing codes and

relations. Only then are they available for activist modes of intervention in the political

process.78 Groups, therefore, were a natural outgrowth of the stable and established

social structure and remained, for the most part, non-politicized, while masses were

highly politicized, organized around the idea of political action, and therefore, very

dangerous. Not surprisingly, participatory democracy was at fault. Modern democratic

systems possess a distinct vulnerability to mass politics because they invite the whole

population, most of which has been historically quiescent, to engage in politics, he

76Kornhauser, 125.

77Kornhauser, 237.

78Kornhauser, 123.

73

wrote.79

To what ends people were politically active was of little concern to Kornhauser.

In fact, democracy was evaluated by mass politics advocates, including Kornhauser, as a

mode of regulating social tensions not of realizing social justice. Such a paradigm

effectively marginalized other causal factors in the nascence of democratic unrest

including class. How American democracy measured up as means to address significant

economic, racial or other issues was not considered as important as the underlying social

and political forces politicizing the mass. Kornhauser argued that Differences in

receptivity to mass symbols and leaders are due primarily to the strength of social ties,

and not to the influence of class, or any other social status, by itself.80 That some

Americans might be alienated from the political vital center because of economic

issues, was seen first and foremost as a problem for political stability requiring a

countervailing force. Unemployment, Kornhauser claimed, helped prepare people

psychologically for all kinds of extreme behavior they would reject as members of

established groups and social institutions.81 Coherence and integration were to be

defended at all costs (not reform), since poorly integrated sections of the community are

most likely to engage in mass action outside and often against established social

institutions in times of crisis. For people with few social and psychological ties to the

79Kornhauser, 227.

80Kornhauser, 237.

81Kornhauser, 163.

74

community are subject to less social or self control.82

Quoting variously from both Democracy and the Ancien Rgime, Kornhauser

prescribed social integration by means intermediate associations: More than one

hundred years ago, De Tocqueville also argued that French political upheavals were

related to the lack of independent group life. . . .83 Mass Society then, represented a

classic form of postwar Tocquevillian de-politicization; democracy had to be protected

from its inherent tendencies by a countervailing response from the consensual social

structure. So stated, Kornhausers argument was not concerned with improving

democracy, but controlling it.

Describing how a mass could suffer from a state of social isolation and yet be

prone to excessive political engagement was no simple task. In a key article,

Institutional Vulnerability in Mass Society, Philip Selznick explained how, Mass

behavior connotes weakened social participation, and yet mass organization is associated

with a high degree of involvement. This apparent inconsistency is soon resolved,

however, if we consider the meaning of mobilization.84 As with Weber, postwar

American theorists used Tocqueville to help define legitimate democratic behavior.

Attending to the quality of participation allowed theorists to de-legitimize activist

y