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Tocqueville’s Voyages: To and from America?

S. J. D. GREEN

It seems almost pointless to praise Tocqueville these days. His fame has probably never been greater nor, indeed, his standing higher than now. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, putative statesmen, ambitious journalists, and even eccentric philanthropists vie to associate their names with his cause. During the summer of 1996, both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich cited him in speeches to their respective party conventions.1 Two years later, the television company C-SPAN beamed a reenacted version of his great occidental journey into seventy million domestic households, devoting sixty-five hours of live programming to the description, analysis, and celebration of nine months of nineteenth-century travel.2 All the while, anyone willing to donate $10,000 or more to the charitable conglomeration United Way anywhere in the United States is automatically entitled to membership of the National Alexis de Tocqueville Society: ostensibly in honor of their practical corroboration of “Tocqueville’s most important

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observation … that Americans help … each other in time of need.”3 Not entirely coincidentally, at least four new translations of Democracy in America have been published within the last ten years.4

Of course, Tocqueville was always popular in America. He has been positively fêted there for the last fifty years. Every president since Eisenhower has quoted him to preferred, that is, to generally self-regarding, effect. But this was not true until recently in France. Lauded in his own lifetime, and still an acknowledged prophet down to the end of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville’s francophone reputation faded precipitously during the first third of the twentieth century.5 This was so much so that when Gallimard eventually launched the project for an Oeuvres complètes in 1939, it invited a German Marxian specialist, J. P. Mayer, to act as editor, for there were no suitable French scholars willing to undertake the task.6 For perhaps another generation, what little Gallic kudos Tocqueville still enjoyed was owed mainly to those lasting literary qualities his countrymen acknowledged in the otherwise ephemeral Souvenirs.7 Today, all that is changed. As Françoise Mélonio has recently put it:

Tocqueville is [now] the object of a kind of consensus [associated] with the emergence of a new democratic bible. [The family] château

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is a pilgrimage site for … French presidents and ministers. The highest authorities in the land participate in Tocqueville Prize ceremonies.… He is cited in ministry meetings.8

With renewed fame has come enhanced respect. Tocqueville, the philosopher of liberalism, is now widely admired in his own country. Indeed, through the writings of Pierre Manent especially, he has achieved a certain priority there among the great political scientists of the early nineteenth century.9 More remarkably still, he is now revered by serious indigenous scholars as the principal interpreter of France’s world-historical moment. Turn to Mona Ozouf’s monumental edition of François Furet’s collected writings on La Revolution Française. Consult the index. There you will find the most cited actors and commentators in (or concerning) this great event as: Robespierre, Tocqueville, and Louis XVI, in that order. Napoleon comes a poor fourth.10

Yet to apprehend the true, philosophical significance of Eduardo Nolla’s newly translated critical edition of Democracy in America is, paradoxically, to confront a great thinker still seriously underrated. Worse still, it is to meet a philosopher even now insufficiently appreciated by those very philosophers and scholars of philosophy who should otherwise appreciate him most. It is almost as if two generations of intellectual revisionism have left us reeling—anyway uncomprehending—before a great political metaphysician. Some take an original democratic theorist for a “messy … social scientist.” Others confound a great contemporary historian with an aristocratic itinerant, blind to most of what

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was actually in place in Jacksonian America.11 How could this be? How could Tocqueville be at once so famous yet curiously little known? Similarly, why is he so widely praised yet also unjustly belittled? Is it because he remains, as Russell Baker once shrewdly remarked, “the most widely quoted … of all the great unread writers”?12 Or do even those who take the trouble continue to construe him badly? If so, does Nolla’s edition enable us to read him aright—and judge him properly—for the first time?

There are, I shall suggest here, powerful reasons for thinking that this might be so. True, Tocqueville’s first book brought him instant recognition both in France and beyond. If it did nothing else, Reeve’s virtually simultaneous, though often sloppy, translation saw to that. But it also brought immediate confusion (for which, read multiple interpretation) in both the domestic and the foreign understanding of his work.13 Not all of this can be blamed on Tocqueville’s hapless translator. Some part of the difficulty must also be traced to the author’s elusive, almost aphoristic, prose style. But it owed still more to the detached, seemingly anonymous, method of Democracy’s organization and presentation. For Tocqueville’s “new political science” was, as Harvey Mansfield has wisely observed, a great theoretical departure that barely bothered to explain itself.14 It was also, as Jeremy Jennings notes, a scholarly treatise that

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largely obscured its sources.15 More still: it was a work cast in a curious relationship, with both its author’s youthful past and what became of a mature statesman’s future. The Tocqueville who wrote Democracy barely appears in its pages. No less strikingly still, the celebrated public figure he quickly became interjected himself only rarely into subsequent editions of the text. Perhaps as a result, Tocqueville is still widely misconceived, either as a theoretical ideologue or as an aristocratic dupe, in America. To these ways of thinking, he was alternatively a Parisian intellectual who brought too much continental conceptual baggage and too little unprejudiced observation to his American travels, or a European grandee, characteristically compromised by the testimony of local notables barely better informed about what was actually going on in that country themselves. Whatever, and for all his undoubted intelligence and perspicacity, he remained (so the argument goes) a typical man of the old world—rural, agricultural, and traditional—simply unable to appreciate the dynamic realities of a new order—at once, urban, industrial, and democratic.16

This is nonsense. To be sure, Tocqueville never pretended to have written a mere travelogue. As he said himself, “I admit that in America I saw more than America.”17 Even at the time, he acknowledged that he was “think[ing] about Europe” all along.18 Later, he would make it quite clear, in a letter to Louis de Kergorlay, that while “he rarely spoke of France in the book, he rarely wrote so much as a page without … having it in front of his eyes.”19 Yet, as James Schleifer has properly observed, it would have been quite extraordinary—actually, it would have been

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somewhat disturbing—if Tocqueville had not “touched the shores of America carrying much of the historic and intellectual baggage of early-nineteenth-century France” with him.20 Of course, he was a young man when he visited America. But he was not especially young; within living memory Pitt had been prime minister of England at two years his junior and Napoleon became first Consul barely four years older.21

More to the point, Tocqueville had been the beneficiary of a quite remarkable political education before his arrival in the United States in May 1831. Its purely formal aspects have been quite satisfactorily considered elsewhere.22 We might simply note in passing three of its most important, informal dimensions. First, there was the significance of his birth. This was aristocratic, but it was not simply aristocratic. Tocqueville was also a member of a quite distinct second generation; he was among those men and women who did not make the Revolution at first hand but who grew up under its influence, by way of the Napoleonic Empire and then the restoration—only to become victims of the “great ennui” of the 1820s.23 Second, he was the product of a legitimist upbringing and yet also of deep liberal connections. This was true at the outset, during the years of reaction under Charles X, and then in the wake of the July Revolution and the reign of Louis-Philippe.24

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Finally, he had immersed himself—no other word will do—in the lectures and the writings of François Guizot: about France, on the historic course of European civilization, and concerning the nature of modernity itself.25

The political breadth and moral depth of the intellectual grounding so gained should go without saying. It also enables us to appreciate, without in any way belittling his subsequent achievement, how:

[a]ll the themes which Tocqueville developed (in Democracy in America) were being discussed, indeed were already well known, when he published [his first great book]; the notion of the “social state,” pretty well everywhere; the difference between the two kinds of centralisation (administrative and political), commonly so in the legitimist milieu. The tyranny of public opinion under democracy (normal in certain American circles, and perhaps also from Fenimore Cooper), the religious dimension of democracy (Lamenais, Leroux), the irresistible march of equality (Constant, Guizot, Royer-Collard, Chateaubriand) even the inherent opposition of democratic and aristocratic literature (Mme de Staël)—these were recurrent, contemporary ideas; so too finally … was the idea of democracy in Restoration and post-1830 France.26

Certainly, what was at least initially significant about Tocqueville’s Democracy was not that he had such ideas. These were common currency in contemporary, thinking, French circles. Rather, it was that he chose to test them—and that he eventually came to insist that their full implications could only be properly understood—in an American context. Put another way, his fundamental presupposition about America was that it was the country from which he (and others) had most (that was positive) to learn. We underestimate the importance of that conceptual breakthrough at our peril.27

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True, he was not the first to insist upon the importance of this idea. Hegel had famously celebrated—if scarcely elucidated—the great possibilities of America long before.28 But Tocqueville was highly unusual in postrevolutionary France, and perhaps particularly during the early years of the July Monarchy, in looking to America (as opposed to England) as the vital model for his country’s political salvation and indeed civilization’s broader future. It cannot be stated too often that most European visitors to early nineteenth-century America came with no such intention. Still less did they ordinarily leave with so portentous a thought. Most did little more than gawp at Niagara Falls and sneer in New York society.29 Of course, there were serious travelers to the United States at the time. By no means the least observant was Edward Stanley, subsequently 14th Earl of Derby, and thrice Conservative prime minister of England. He visited North America between July 1824 and March 1825, saw everyone who mattered from President Adams downward, and kept an impressive private journal, in which he tempered a damning judgment of democratic politics and an unambiguous condemnation of southern slavery with surprisingly sympathetic accounts of material well-being and moral decorum among the natives. Still, to Stanley, America was for

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the most part an example of what best to avoid.30 This was a view of the United States that (sympathetic) Tory interpreters of Tocqueville subsequently commended in what they took to be a fellow skeptic’s account.31

French observers were generally more disposed to be favorable. The very year that Stanley journeyed (almost incognito) around America, Lafayette toured the United States at the (very public) invitation of President Monroe. Visiting twenty-four states in twelve months, ostentatiously paying homage at the tomb of Washington, even embracing his old friend Jefferson at Monticello, he was finally feted at a banquet in the capital where he declared how delighted he was to “see the American people daily more attached to the liberal institutions which they have made such a success, while in Europe they were touched by a withering hand.”32 Still, this was in a sense the point. Tocqueville may never have had much time for Lafayette, whom he considered a “vain and dangerous demagogue.” But he went to America with the highest opinion of Guizot. And Guizot believed that America had become a successful republic precisely because it had never degenerated into a pure democracy. That had been the fate of revolutionary France.33 The United States, by contrast, had been led into independence by a landed élite; more specifically, by “les classes indépendants et éclairs,”

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who had subsequently established precisely that balance of aristocracy and democracy in its constitution that had averted those class struggles in its society that had so disfigured France during the 1790s.34 As a result, 1787 had proved to be America’s (similarly fortunate) 1688.35

This was precisely the understanding of America that Tocqueville came to reject in his study of Democracy in America. Hence the peculiar significance of his very first words: “Amongst the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”36 Note: new objects, striking him. But how had he reached such a startling conclusion? For if it was just a presupposition, then it was also a very remarkable insight. Certainly, little in his previous reading would have prepared him for what he subsequently claimed to have seen. We know that Tocqueville had Guizot’s History of Civilisation sent to him from France during the week after he arrived in New York.37 Aurelian Craiutu, in an important interpretation of this episode, suggests that Tocqueville “adapted creatively” from Guizot’s theory during his time in America. Yet the old master’s account of the triumph of the Third Estate had been concerned more with Europe generally, and France particularly.38 Indeed, he insisted upon a—shall we call it, certain Anglo-Saxon—difference in this broader development. That, he believed, not only survived, but strikingly, indeed contrarily, postdated Tocqueville’s account of America.39 So if Tocqueville was ostensibly “adapting,” he was in reality transforming Guizot’s thoughts in this matter. In other words, his journey

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to America marked a critical intellectual breaking point between the two men.40 What caused it?

It may be, of course, that reading Guizot in situ stimulated such thoughts.41 It may even have been the case that, having come specifically to study one—progressive—American institution, Tocqueville was suitably inspired to learn about others, and that the cumulative effect bore fruit in his truly radical conclusions. The one thing we can say with some degree of certainty is that Tocqueville seems to have been genuinely surprised by much of what he saw in America.42 Professor Schleifer long ago noted just how often Tocqueville recorded a sense of amazement at his discoveries, whether in his notes or in the final published text itself. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these remarks. To the contrary, given what he had previously read and given what he subsequently saw, there is every reason to take him largely at his ingenuous word in this respect. Put another way, Tocqueville’s continued enlightenment by America was the product of time very well spent in America. Whatever he may subsequently have come to insist, the penitentiary project was no mere pretext.43 It produced a major study.44 In constructing it, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled a great deal. As a result, they saw many parts of the country. They never made the mistake—all too common among European travelers to America well into the second half of the twentieth century—of defining the

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United States solely through superficial experience of the Northeastern seaboard and (perhaps) its southern alternative. Few, in fact, seem to have understood quicker the novel historical significance of so much new settlement in and beyond the Mississippi valley: similarly, to have appreciated more fully the novelty of the society that was emerging in the new cities of the Midwest. Here, indeed, was the new epicenter of America, of democracy in America and of the wholly novel society—related only to Europe by language—that was being created there. In our time, it has only moved a bit further west still.45

This is all very well. It still leaves us with a problem. If Tocqueville understood that much, why did he make so little of contemporary American industrial-urbanization? Compare him to Michel Chevalier in this respect and it seems almost as if the aristocrat was stuck in a Jeffersonian dream while the engineer had taken full measure of America’s great leap forward.46 But this is just a superficial impression. Not the least of the great merits of the Nolla edition is that it makes absolutely clear just how inadequate a judgment that is. Tocqueville may not have visited Lowell or spent much time in Pittsburgh.47 He spoke relatively little about the banking crises of the early 1830s in the pages of Democracy in America.48 There is not much concerning the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in his American writings, tout court.49 But as his notebooks make clear, he was fully aware of all these phenomena.50 Professor Jennings offers one very important reason why he

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may have made relatively little use of them in the published text.51 But there might be another. Before he completed Democracy, he had also been to England.

The significance of Tocqueville’s English journey of 1833—its significance, that is, for what would eventually become Democracy in America—is easily overlooked. Indeed, it is all too easily caricatured in much the same way as his American sojourn. His extensive trip across the Channel in 1833 apparently took in not one industrial town.52 This is not proof that he was indifferent to the “great social problems” of his day. To the contrary, the England that Tocqueville visited was a nation in which the “great social problems” of the day issued mainly out of the countryside and largely concerned its rural, agricultural population. He even wrote—actually quite extensively—about them.53 Industrial-urban England remained comparatively peaceful until the economic downturn of 1838.54 Moreover, Tocqueville knew well enough about the phenomena of large, sprawling towns and new factory practices in the northern and midland regions of England.55 This told him something about their development in contemporary America too. That was while they were new in America around 1831–32, they were

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not new to America in the early nineteenth century. Industrial Massachusetts loomed small by comparison with industrial Lancashire at the time.56 Mexico City remained the largest city in North America during the age of Jackson (it still is).57 Industrial activities flowed from “democracy.” Tocqueville knew that much.58 But they were not unique to it. His experience in England told him so: quite definitively.59

I

What was truly novel about America—what differentiated it from the rest of the world—was its equality of conditions. What was—increasingly—remarkable about the American republic was the ordered liberty it still enjoyed. The fundamental problem of democracy, as Tocqueville’s contemporaries understood it, lay in its innate tendency to destroy authority. This was true of all hitherto existing authority, whether of rank, tradition, or even revelation. The modern world had wrought what Tocqueville himself characterized as “a carnage of all authorities … in all hierarchies, in the family, in the political [sphere].”60 Revolutionary France furnished powerful corroboration of that proposition. The superficial evidence of American history pointed to a similar catalog of catastrophic vandalism, ruthlessly pursued down precisely that path. The American nation had rid itself at birth of both monarchical rule and aristocratic right. Its constituent states subsequently spent much of the next generation divesting themselves of established churches. Nineteenth-century property law dissolved traditional family bonds. But above all, equality of conditions destroyed intellectual authority, including the authority of priests, whom no good Protestant acknowledged, or the authority of history, which no

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self-respecting American recognized. The Americans’ peculiar point of departure enabled them not only to ignore the Church but also to forget their own past as well. This was how America had become “one of the countries in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.”61

Yet the expected outcome—perfectly well demonstrated by France’s continuing nightmare of alternating anarchy and tyranny—had not eventuated in America. That Western-most republic was, by now, self-evidently a land of stable government. This was characterized not by “weakness” but by almost “irresistible strength,” its administration served by a lawful people, themselves subject to strict moral codes.62 Indeed, firsthand examination of American society suggested that its fundamental underlying problem was defined not by any tendency toward disorder but rather in a surreptitious slide to “soft despotism.”63 If this was true—if what his eyes revealed to him was indeed so—then all hitherto existing accounts of the fundamental basis of political order were wrong. At the same time, America, for all its inherent propensities to facilitate the consolidation of power, was visibly a land of liberty: blessed by freedom of religion, of the press, even of association. Just as revolution had not entailed social dissolution, so social order did not preclude freedom. All of which meant that neither democracy in general nor this democracy in particular was especially well understood. A “new political science” was going to be needed to understand “a world altogether new.” Democracy in America set out to furnish it.64

That declaration, as Nolla rightly insists, is the pivotal moment in the book. But it is also easily misunderstood. This was true for one obvious reason. Tocqueville may have dramatically announced the necessity for change, yet he scarcely proceeded to describe any detailed content of the matter.65 Indeed, there is not much in the way of a conceptually

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explicit, methodologically precise, still less empirically grounded analysis—for which read recognizable political science—at work in the chapters of Democracy in America. As such, it is a good deal easier to describe what Tocqueville’s political science is not rather than what it is. Few would doubt that it bears little obvious relation to received wisdom of the ancients in this respect. It effectively denied the priority of the régime. It dismissed even the possibility of a mixed government and generally derided Greek concepts of justice.66 Yet, as Harvey Mansfield has noted elsewhere, it offered little comfort to modern prejudices either. It spurned any prepolitical state of nature. Then it eschewed the social contract.67 Most strikingly of all, it rejected Federalist political science.68

There is no need to exaggerate the full force of this departure in order to appreciate its vital significance. Certainly, there is little to be gained in contrasting supposedly backward-looking Americans with a future-orientated Frenchman. The once fashionable image of the framers as classical republicans, determinedly devoted to an agrarian ideal, has long since faded. All of them—from Hamilton to Jefferson—were committed to a liberal republicanism rooted in the improving

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possibilities of a commercial society.69 The Federalist Papers served, inter alia, to outline that new, improved political science appropriate for the new, improved order of the ages that the American founding had inaugurated.70 Tocqueville was properly respectful of the insights that these studies afforded into the American political scene, even as late as 1831. Nonetheless, he doubted that they had achieved this wider aim.71 That was not because the Federalists repudiated the doctrine

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of the sovereignty of the people, as Guizot did.72 To the contrary, they openly acknowledged it. However, in recognizing its just claims, they did not grasp the broader results seriously enough. They afforded proper due only to what they took to be popular sovereignty as a political norm. They failed to appreciate that this creed defined the whole social state over which they were attempting to preside. They had not realized just how radical a rupture was entailed in the events of 1776 and their aftermath.73

This was, perhaps, scarcely remarkable. For all their intellectual progressivism, the framers remained the aristocrats that Adams (among their number) and Guizot (among their admirers) took them to be. As such, they believed it was possible to regulate a popular democracy by just rule: in a government of laws, not men.74 They also presumed it was desirable to lead it with wisdom rather than through whim, that is, by representative methods of administration and legislation. This was the political science the Federalist Papers were supposed to describe.75 But Tocqueville’s journey through Jacksonian America proved to him that such aspirations were—in truth, had always been—forlorn hopes. What he discovered was that in a democracy, in the final analysis, the majority observed only those laws it chose to honor. That was why Negroes

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never got to vote in Pennsylvania.76 Not that Americans were often confronted by legislation of which they disapproved. This was because in the United States, the people increasingly elected congressmen only like themselves: “for the most part, village lawyers, businessmen, or even men from the lowest classes.”77 As a result, the tyranny of the majority was an ever-present threat in American society.78 Tocqueville has often been accused of overstating the contemporary importance of this malevolent possibility. In truth, he did no more than state its stark potential.79 The “planned extinction of the American native” and the “slavery of the African Americans” bore grim witness to what proved all too easily realizable under its sway. Abraham Lincoln knew that much; so too, in a very different way, did Stephen Douglas.80

But if the tyranny of the majority was such a threat to liberty, how could its sway be sufficiently tempered, if not by law and representation? Tocqueville found the answer to this critical question in his subtle reworking of the doctrine of the “democratic social state.” His argument went like this. Equality of conditions destroyed the historical basis of authority. But they failed to preclude the passion for rule.81 At the same time, they diminished the sense of individual responsibility and elevated the aura of personal vulnerability. This was because in extending the “doctrine … of equality” wholesale, even to personal intelligence, democracy “attacked the pride of men in its last refuge.” The result was not a republic of autonomous selves but rather a state of fearful similars (semblables).82 Such men, so placed, still occasionally sought to lord it over each other. But what they most desperately

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desired was the mutual protection of common authority. They found it in America, as “democratic man” qua democratic man can only find it, in the “moral empire of the majority.”83 What this meant was that men in the “democratic social state” were governed, at least in the first instance, by extrapolitical common custom, or mores, that is, by those broad-ranging attitudes and feelings that informed the whole rather than by specific laws, which instituted individual rights. If this was true in general, it is especially so of Jacksonian America. There, the vital instrument of this amorphous empire was found in “public opinion.”84

It is easy to miss the true significance of this, characteristically Tocquevillian, formulation, or rather, reformulation. For, in drawing such attention to the significance of “public opinion” in the social and political organization of early nineteenth-century American life, Tocqueville deployed a concept seemingly well known to his contemporaries. But he surreptitiously redefined it. This was “public opinion” conceived not as that “sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent and most moral persons in the community,” as William MacKinnon’s famous rendering theoretically had it.85 Rather, it was “public opinion” laid bare, as Tocqueville had actually seen the phenomenon, at work in America.

Mass opinion … common opinion … ready-made opinion … covering … a great number of theories in matters of philosophy, morality and politics [even including] religion itself … which reigns there

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less as revealed doctrine [and more] as adopted in this way by each person without examination … on the faith of the public.86

In that way, he disclosed an entirely new form of authority. This was democratic, social authority. Just as Tocqueville said it must, “the [new] social world” had created new forms of “intellectual and moral authority” out of the carnage democracy had wrought in the old [social] order.87 The authority of such “mass … opinion” would extend, progressively, to the whole of the world. It was already “infinitely greater than any other power.” Indeed, it was all the more effective for wielding such sway silently, that is, without ostentatious action.88 This was how republican democracies “immaterialisent le despotisme.” It explained why the freest society on earth boasted virtually no variety of views about any question that really mattered.89

But that was not a justification for nostalgic fatalism. Rather, it explained an essential task of Tocqueville’s political science. This was, as James Schleifer so arrestingly puts it, “to speak for liberty,” under conditions of equality.90 It was a goal specifically defined. This necessarily determined much of the resultant method. For, just as Tocqueville dismissed long-standing liberal hopes vested in representative democracy, so he also derided those new scientific pretensions entailed by purely regulative, political organization. Practical wisdom rather began in appreciating the possibilities that critical observation established between the nature and arts of democracy.91 Nowhere were these more

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apparent than in America. Its nature always tended toward equality. But its art sometimes allowed for liberty. Such artificial freedom was achieved not just, nor even primarily, through the application of rules as in the performance of duties. That was why Tocqueville began his analysis of American liberty in American associations. It was also why the fruits of that association ended, for Tocqueville, not just in reciprocation but in self-knowledge. Recall his understanding of the social function of the jury system. Moreover, liberty, in America, was nurtured both through its own arts, which he called the “legal, constitutional and institutional mechanisms” that make a society, and in habits, by which Tocqueville meant those mores that sustained them. Schleifer lists some of these:

The spirit of industry, the spirit of association, the spirit of religion, political experience, general enlightenment, public and private morality, a sense of justice, respect for the law, public spirit, sensitivity to the rights of others, and a grasp of interest, well-understood.92

All of this made for what Harvey Mansfield has called an “instructional political science.”93 It was concerned, quite specifically, “to instruct democracy … to revive its beliefs, to regulate its movements, to substitute … the science of public affairs for its inexperience (and) knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts.”94 It was forged by means of a treatise conceived less as a compendium of profound abstractions and invariable laws than through a description of contingent truths and admirable practices: put simply, by means of a useful guide, replete with examples. Thus Democracy begins with a historical moment—the American point of departure—and moves on to a continuing model—the New England township.95 And it goes on, and on, in that fashion. Moreover, this is true for the whole book. Time and again, careful perusal of the Nolla edition establishes how concepts, even case studies, apparently new to the second volume, actually appear half and even fully formulated in the notes and drafts deployed for the

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earlier study. In that way, the intellectual unity of the work is demonstrated as never before. These—seeming—distinctions, between the supposedly empirical first and allegedly abstract second volume, similarly between a consideration first of the political then of the social state of the Americans, even between an optimistic departure and a pessimistic arrival, turn out to be more superficial than profound on closer inspection.96

This is not to say that there are no differences between the two Democracies. It is to suggest that such divergences as emerge were cumulative and contingent rather than clear-cut and crucial. Moreover, there may have been important reasons behind such apparent messiness. For if Tocqueville wrote an instructional book—put simply, an exposition to a French audience of how the Americans did so many things so much better—his brother Édouard believed that he also authored something of an insinuating account. Stated in another way, it was a subtle work, one which, in Lucien Jaume’s words, surreptitiously attempted to “guide the reader” toward certain critical conclusions. On the surface, it seemingly left him free to “forge his own opinion,” as if he had “devised that [judgment] all by himself.”97 Underneath, he was actually being persuaded by a gentle but persistent philosopher of one course of action rather than another.98

How did Tocqueville achieve that ulterior end? He did so, at least in part, by posing as a detached arbiter between the aristocratic and the democratic way of doing things. He was a curious arbiter, to be sure: one who, after all, always insisted that the (historic) aristocratic dispensation was dead.99 But he was an insistent one too, one whose genuine ambivalence about our democratic fate—think of Tocqueville on human dignity, sociability, and well-being against individualism,

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materialism, and mediocrity—always pointed toward other, tantalizing, possibilities.100 This element in Tocqueville’s persuasive purposes may have increased in scope as the chapters of his analysis unfolded. For all that, Craiutu’s ingenious division of Democracy into two voyages—one literal, one intellectual—is, perhaps, best resisted.101 It is not as if Tocqueville revealed himself as unconcerned to preserve those (surreptitious) aspects of aristocracy that governed in Jacksonian America. Think of his account of the lawyers in volume 1.102 Nor can his increasing concern for the preservation of the aristocratic sources of liberty in democracies beyond America be unrelated to his all too obviously enraptured description of those extrademocratic bulwarks for liberty—above all else, its Puritan religious heritage—that America had historically enjoyed.103

Still, we might reasonably ask, instruction in what? Similarly, we might profitably demand, insinuation with what end in mind? It seems scarcely sufficient to answer “liberty.” For that simply begs further questions. What kind of liberty? And to what purpose? As Harvey Mansfield observes, Tocqueville acknowledged no notion of a prepolitical state of liberty.104 Yet he also denied the autonomy of politics. For all that, he never reduced the political to the social. And he became a protosociologist only in the very broadest sense. Even in its strange novelty, his was still a political science. And it remained political freedom that he was trying to defend. Still, Tocqueville’s text points to no specific goal. It contains no obvious end state of freedom. Perhaps, in the final analysis, the reader really was left to do his own thinking in this respect. That possibility compels the present author to conclude that in so explicitly

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differentiating human nature, rightly understood, from the merely material sum of things, Tocqueville surely also intended to distinguish what makes a man free from what merely renders us all the same.105

II

But what about Tocqueville after America? Did he change his mind, not just about the future for freedom in America, but also concerning the possibility of liberty, within democracy, tout court? Did he, in other words, make one final—melancholy—moral voyage, after 1848? If so, what are we to make of his lasting intellectual achievement? Many readers have noted a difference in tone between even some of the more pessimistic remarks of volume 2 in Democracy and many, if not most, of the substantive conclusions of L’ancien régime et la révolution.106 Confronted by such evidence, some have concluded that Tocqueville’s rhetorical remarks in the Avant-propos—defending what he then described as an unfashionable cause—cut little conceptual ice.107 There can be no doubt that Tocqueville intended Democracy to be a book for the ages: timely only for its obvious connotations, more genuinely timeless in its deeper significance.108 The suggestion is that experience eventually disillusioned him. The implication is that his teaching was flawed.

We might note in passing that if Tocqueville had particular reasons to be bitter after 1851, other contemporary “aristocratic liberals” passed through a chronologically concurrent path from simple hope to complex anguish.109 John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville’s English champion, struck a notably bullish tone during the early years of Whig government after 1830. Yet On Liberty, his best-known later work, often reads like a nostalgic memoir. Much of it pointed to the possibility of a drearily conformist—read illiberal—future that would have struck

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a definite chord with his recently deceased friend.110 In a different way, Tocqueville’s own observations about America after 1840 often hinted at an increasingly uncertain future—even there—for the ends he had long espoused for the whole world. But then again, he had every reason to be uncertain about America after the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In addition, he was unlucky enough to die before the promulgation of the Fourteenth Amendment. A careful reading of his subsequent writings on America reveals a man properly concerned for the future but not fatalistic about the possibilities of freedom, either there or elsewhere.111

What is less clear is whether anything linked these concerns. He certainly did fear the concentration of power, for which the whole of recent French history—ancien régime as well as the revolutionary era—so powerfully attested.112 But if America was moving in the same direction, it was doing so in a rather different way.113 This is not to minimize the crisis of the 1850s. Rather, it is to emphasize the significance of Tocqueville’s abiding insight that American liberty was sustained, in America, as much by what was American as by what was democratic. This mattered more generally because it pointed to how the future of liberty there depended in no small measure on what was permanent, as opposed to purely transitory, in the American “democratic experiment.” That was what Tocqueville had discovered on his voyage to America. He never forgot that lesson, however much he subsequently journeyed (literally and figuratively) beyond America. So it is surely not fanciful to assert that, for Tocqueville, a true apprehension of these

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permanent things will determine liberty’s place in the origins, course, and consequences of those many “democratic experiments” that he anticipated and that have eventuated far beyond America’s shores. If this is true, then we still have much reason to praise him in our own time, after all.