Democracy in America is a beast of a book; sort of a history, sort of a travelogue, and partly a textbook for what later became political science.
For the Americans it is a foundational work, a window into their own formation and a reminder of a time when the European attitude towards America was mostly curiosity, and not so much one of rancour and distrust.
It also has more than a little relevance for Australians, a point which I’ll come back to at the end.
The author was, to give him his full name, Alexis-Charles-Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville. He was born in 1805 and died in 1859. He came from a family of minor nobility and Tocqueville was the titled name. If not for the revolution his inherited title would have been the Comte de Tocqueville.
One of his biographers, Joseph Epstein (Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide, 2006) got it right when he said not everyone agrees that Democracy in America is a great book, but there can be no question that it is an amazing one. Volume I was published in 1835, and the second and final Volume in 1840.
Three things make it amazing: its conception, the method, and the sheer intellectual fertility and profundity of the author.
First the conception: Tocqueville was heir to a noble family and his mother and father had narrowly escaped the guillotine during the revolution. Others of his extended family were not so lucky. His maternal great-grandfather was defence counsel for King Louis XVI, and paid the price in the Terror.
So although he was not born until 1805, young Alexis inherited the race memory of his family and his class, which was full of the revolution, the Terror, the Napoleonic dictatorship and the somewhat wobbly restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
He could have become a reactionary, like many in his social set, but as he looked back on that whole dreadful period what the young Tocqueville saw was the unstoppable growth of the principle of equality, and of its political expression through Democracy. This was his consistent view and his last major work, in the mid-1850’s, was an account of the ancien regime which said the real story was not so much about Versailles and Marie Antoinette, as a highly decentralised State apparatus. Centralisation was the result, not the cause, of the Revolution.
So early on, in his twenties, he saw in his country’s recent history this upward trajectory of equality and democracy, and his concern was to imagine how France could accommodate that force whilst preserving individual liberty and the heritage of its culture. He wanted to know how to manage the transition without bloodshed, while retaining the legitimacy and the unity of the state. These are, needless to say, timeless questions that still exercise the minds of liberals and nation-builders all over the world.
The overthrow of the Bourbons and installation of the so-called bourgeois monarchy in 1830 was for Tocqueville just further proof of the inexorable march of the egalitarian impulse. ‘What then to do?”, he asked himself and out of the that thought process the great conception was born.
Time and time again we have seen that the great works of political theory are produced not in academic isolation, but in the heat of battle or at the head of a great cause. Milton’s Areopagitica, Locke’s Treatises and the Federalist Papers so ably covered by Scott Ryan last month are classic examples.
Tocqueville was similarly engaged but resisted the urge to simply add to the pile of pamphlets. Instead he conceived a scheme to see first-hand that great laboratory of democracy, America.
He and his great friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont convinced their employer, the French Ministry of Justice, to sponsor them on a visit to America to investigate the growth in that country of the radical new penitentiary system for the housing and rehabilitation of prisoners.
Like many officials before and since, however, their real objects were elsewhere. They had conceived of this great study of America’s institutions, customs, beliefs and most of all, its system of democracy.
Their effort in America and how they wrote it up afterwards was remarkable, especially considering they were still in their mid twenties.
Across the United States.
They travelled 7,000 miles in nine and a half months and saw seventeen of the then twenty-four States. They did indeed visit penitentiaries, to the point that Tocqueville complained they all started to seem alike, but they gathered so much besides.
They talked to whomever they could and gathered vast amounts of data, documents and references. Sorting through their own notes and the information they collected was a massive task and it took nearly four years just to complete Volume 1. Originally conceived as a joint exercise, Beaumont had headed in other intellectual directions and the book was almost entirely Tocqueville’s own work.
It covered the institutions so indispensable to the functioning of a great democracy, such as:
- The free press
- Trial by jury
- The role of independent associations
- The separation of powers
- The Federal system
- The Supreme Court as ultimate arbiter, and
- The decentralisation of administrative power
The tone is generally that of approbation and his approach to examining the theory and practice of these institutions ranks his contribution with the great liberal writers. But as I say his approach is different to that of a classical theorist, he is concerned with what works and why it works. He is interested in the spirit of the people that enables it to work, he said:
Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted, neighbours at once form a group to consider the matter: from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.
Similarly, when talking about juries he is interested not so much in the legal process as the educative role they play for citizens. The frequent elections are the same – citizens are educated by doing, not by being taught the theory. Even the roughest backwoodsman can, he says, give an excellent discourse on theories of Government and the current state of politics, because these are to him matters of immediate relevance. This despite the fact, as Tocqueville also notes, that same man would be entirely ignorant of world affairs or the literary and cultural heritage of Western Civilisation.
That last observation reminds us that Tocqueville was a bit of a snob, as brought out by biographer Hugh Brogan (Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, 2008). In America he gravitated to whatever he could find in the way of the literary and social elites, particularly around Boston, but then could remark of the typical American that:
there is something wonderful in the ingenuity of his talent and a kind of heroism in his desire for profit.
I think his open-mindedness conquered his aristocratic heritage.
The second amazing thing about this work is the method. Tocqueville could not look at a fact without attempting a generalisation. This deductive approach is the strength and weakness in his work. At its best his insights are dazzling and spot on, but at other times not so much.
A classic example is the mutual reinforcement of religion and Democracy in America, which Tocqueville believed to be a fundamental feature of a democratic republic. The reality is that this is particularly true of America but not necessarily of democracy in general, as shown by English Constitutional Lawyer Lord Bryce in his critique from the 1880s.
As a Book of Wisdom
But because the general and particular are never far apart, Democracy in America can be a dazzling read. Sort of a cross between Michael Palin and John Stuart Mill. And this is the third amazing thing: there are so many insights, so much wisdom scattered through this very large book that it rewards a second or even a third read. He was not just trying to examine the institutional structures, he was trying to understand the American people, their customs, how these informed democracy and they were in turn moulded by democracy.
He had read Edmund Burke and shared many of his views. The only solid foundation for a political institution was in the habits, history and temperament of the people concerned. He also believed that the British heritage was critical, as the immigrants had taken the egalitarian values of the Puritans and the commitment to liberty of the Glorious Revolution with them, across the Atlantic. The point of departure of a people was critical to their subsequent development.
A long time before Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone (2000), Tocqueville focussed on the importance of civil society and voluntary associations. His exemplar of the democratic spirit of America was the New England town meeting, where issues were thrashed out and the majority could prevail over the discretion of the officials.
These town hall meetings are in any event a staple of American life, even if they are simultaneously practical and creatures of myth. Recently when President Obama was struggling with his health care reforms, where did he go? To the town hall meetings.
The vital local spirit they embody also accounts for the strength of America’s municipal institutions as studied by Tocqueville. Australian historian Keith Hancock pointed out that in Australia we have the same institutions but, lacking the same spirit, they are almost wholly disastrous. But that’s an argument for another day.
Tocqueville coined the phrase and was greatly concerned with the risk of Government becoming a “tyranny of the majority”, when the rights or interests of the minority can be, quite legally and democratically, trampled by the majority. Democracies are more prone to this than even monarchies precisely because the cloak of popular sovereignty legitimises the centralisation of power. This concern emerges even more strongly in the second part of Democracy in America, completed nearly five years after the first volume and which reflected more of Tocqueville’s own experience in the French House of Deputies.
This may be an opportune moment to note that the other great conception of Tocqueville and his friend Beaumont, that they would write great books about their trip to America, become famous, and be elected to Parliament, turned out to be entirely successful. It is good to see that the wild ambitions of youth are sometimes rewarded.
The US President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) personified for Tocqueville the populist demagoguery most to be feared from democracy. The former General – virtual founder of the Democratic party – had entered his second term when Tocqueville was granted an audience in 1831, but Tocqueville was unimpressed. He thought the President a mere military man, and a dangerous one. But it may be that his views were somewhat slanted by the elites amongst whom he moved, who were very much Federalists in the tradition of Madison. Jackson was a populist, but hardly a dictator.
Tocqueville was perhaps obsessed with the notion of the tyranny of the majority, but as far as his own career was concerned it was entirely vindicated. As a Member of the French Parliament he was disappointed by the election of the populist Louis-Napoleon, in 1848. A great nephew of Bonaparte, this political opportunist used the family name to fill the void left by the final collapse of the bourgeois monarchy.
Tocqueville then watched with dismay when the elected leader then launched a successful coup d’état and appointed himself Emperor Napoleon III. Opposing the coup and briefly thrown into jail, just as his parents had been sixty years earlier, Tocqueville would have had just cause to consider how the will of the majority could be turned to tyranny.
Tocqueville felt that in America, which lacked an aristocracy, the only class which provided a counterpoint to the tyranny of the majority were the lawyers, working through the courts and political process. He was concerned that otherwise the overwhelming weight would be towards centralisation of power and a form of administrative despotism.
At times Tocqueville’s concern seemed to reflect a certain shock at the way public opinion worked in a robust democracy, at least when it came to settled issues. In that vein, he said he knew of:
no country where there is generally less independence of thought and real freedom of debate than in America.
I first read that about five years ago, and had cause to reflect upon it quite a bit. It was the time when the Howard and Bush Governments were at the height of their popularity, and the cultural left in Australia and America made the claim that these Governments were stifling dissent. Tocqueville was a very useful prism to examine the notion that in Australia at least Howard and his so-called attack dogs were crushing the life out of the left opposition.
In the end I came to the view that both Tocqueville and our modern cultural left were wrong because they confuse State repression of thought with the ordinary cut and thrust of the political process, and I think it’s dangerous to do so. If you can’t tell the difference between a Government jailing opponents as opposed to a newspaper editorial backing the Government of the day on a particular decision, then I don’t think you’re grown up enough for politics. I could be wrong on that, but I offer that personal opinion as an example of how reading Tocqueville is definitely an aid to reflecting on contemporary issues. In America, it is said there is too much of this; in Australia I think not enough.
But to return to the main point – about the tyranny of the majority – you will see I don’t think Tocqueville ever quite brought this part of his analysis to a landing. Sometimes it merges with his concerns about the centralisation of power, and at other times it is about his concern for the rule of law. At other times he points to the American capacity to simply not enforce laws that are unpopular. And there also examples of rough justice, administered by mobs to those who oppose the popular will. So it’s a slippery concept, but one that bears continued reflection.
I think we can forgive him any methodological flaws because he was looking at what was then the world’s first democracy, and the study of popular democracy was almost brand-new. Tocqueville was helping build the study of democracy from the ground up, based on a sample of one. The world’s first and then still the only functioning democracy.
Manning Clark, by the way, tried a critique of Tocqueville’s work for his Masters’ thesis, but because he had no care for liberal democracy and no understanding of politics it was pretty wretched (edited and published in 2010 as The ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville).
My final example of Tocqueville’s mind at work is what he wrote about slavery, to which he was vehemently opposed both in America and in the French colonies.
Tocqueville believed slavery in America was unsustainable, and in Democracy in America all but predicted it was to provoke a great war, one way or another. This was contained in an essay within the larger work which also included an analysis of the American Indians and the various miseries to which they were then subject.
The conclusions he drew from seeing slavery in action are beautifully captured in his description of a journey down the Ohio River, Kentucky on one side and Ohio on other. One slave state, one free. On the Kentucky side he says:
the population is sparse; occasionally a troop of slaves can be seen loitering in half-deserted fields… society seems to be asleep, man looks idle while nature looks active and alive. On the right bank, by contrast, a confused hum announces from long way off the presence of industrial activity, the fields are covered by abundant harvests; elegant dwellings proclaim the taste and industry of the workers; in every direction there is evidence of comfort, men appear wealthy and content: they are at work.
Here he combines revulsion at servitude, admiration for the restless energy of Americans, and a sense of wonder at what they were accomplishing in what had until recently been a wilderness. All in one we see the conception, the method and the remarkable results of Tocqueville’s book.
Australians come at Tocqueville from an odd direction, because we share so many of the values he elevates but the not the culture that he celebrates. Writing at the time of Democracy in America he said that:
… of all British colonies, Australia is the only one deprived of those precious civil liberties which constitute the glory of England…How could men who themselves but recently stood trial before the Court of Assizes be entrusted with function of a jury?
Sweeping and interesting as always, but mostly wrong. What a shame he never made it here. And I think we can say that regardless of our early handicaps we have made not a bad fist of Democracy and even liberty, albeit in a way suited to our own point of departure and our own unique culture.
About 100 years after Tocqueville penned those words on Australia our own historian of democracy, Keith Hancock, said (Australia, 1930):
Australians could attempt no more useful exercise than to read through Democracy in America, asking themselves: Is this true of Australia? To what extent is it irrelevant?
I think that’s still right.
Delivered as a talk at the IPA Liberty Sessions, 2010
Democracy in America (Vols I and II), Alexis de Tocqueville, Liberty Fund Folio Edition, 2012 (volumes first published 1835 and 1840).
