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3

Democratic Dangers, Democratic Remedies, and the Democratic Character

JAMES T. SCHLEIFER

This essay is a brief reconsideration of the genesis and development of some of the important themes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, especially his description of democratic dangers, democratic remedies, and the democratic character. To reexamine these key ideas, this paper draws largely upon Liberty Fund’s four-volume, bilingual version of his masterpiece, which presents a very broad and extensive selection of materials relating to the writing of Democracy in America, including early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and the autograph working manuscript.1 The Liberty Fund edition also includes editorial notes, a selection of important appendices, excerpts from and/or cross-references to Tocqueville’s travel notebooks, his correspondence, and his printed sources, as well as significant excerpts from the critical commentary of family and friends, written in response to their readings of Tocqueville’s manuscript. In short, the edition re-creates much of Tocqueville’s long process of thinking (and rethinking) and writing (and rewriting), and allows the interested reader to follow along, from 1832 to 1840, as Tocqueville’s ideas developed and as Democracy took shape.

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The Dangers

Tocqueville’s deepest passion was for liberty, which he considered at risk in democratic times. In large part his book is an exploration of democratic dangers (How does equality threaten freedom?) and democratic remedies (How best to protect liberty in the face of advancing equality?).

What were the essential dangers? Tocqueville warned his readers about three in particular: materialism, individualism (or excessive privatism), and consolidated power. We will touch very briefly on the first two and then elaborate on the third.

In democratic times, people were increasingly concerned with their material comfort, and with the order and public tranquility needed to further this ease and prosperity. Their ceaseless striving toward physical well-being narrowed their hearts and minds, and diverted them from public affairs.

Advancing equality also led people toward a growing sense of isolation and noninvolvement; they ended by withdrawing from public life and by focusing almost exclusively on personal and family well-being. By 1840, Tocqueville would name this phenomenon individualism. But the message was clear in the 1835 text and even in the working papers for the first part of his book. One passage from the 1835 Democracy declared:

There are such nations in Europe where the inhabitant considers himself a sort of settler, indifferent to the destiny of the place where he lives. The greatest changes occur in his country without his participation.… Even more, the fortune of his village, the policing of his street, the fate of his church and his presbytery have nothing to do with him; he thinks that all these things are of no concern to him whatsoever.… When nations have reached this point, they must modify their laws and mores or perish, for the source of public virtues has dried up; subjects are still found there, but citizens are seen no more.2

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And in a draft for the 1835 portion, Tocqueville described the moral costs of despotism and lamented men who became

indifferent to their interests and enemies of their own rights. Then they wrongly persuade themselves that by losing in this way all the privileges of civilized man, they escape all his burdens and evade all his duties. So they feel free and count in society like a lackey in the house of his master, and think that they have only to eat the bread that is left for them, without concerning themselves about the cares of the harvest. When a man has reached this point, I will call him, if you want, a peaceful inhabitant, an honest settler, a good family man. I am ready for everything, provided that you do not force me to give him the name of citizen.3

Both materialism and individualism led therefore to the erosion of public participation and the collapse of civic life, diminishing human beings morally. More specifically, materialism and individualism encouraged people to allow the state or the presumed representatives of the people to gather power and take control of society; they opened the door to the third great danger: power consolidated in the hands of some despot or despotic force.

In Democracy, Tocqueville cataloged and carefully examined the variety of possible democratic despotisms that might arise from the consolidated power that threatened to emerge from modern democratic societies. In the 1835 part of his book, he described legislative tyranny (Tocqueville was thinking particularly of the National Convention), executive tyranny, military despotism, or rule by one man (in these cases, he was thinking especially of Napoleon and the worst of the Caesars), and tyranny of the majority (here, the American republic was the dangerous example).4

Still another possible democratic despotism was administrative

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centralization. Tocqueville’s basic views about centralization are familiar and can be summarized in a few sentences. In the 1835 Democracy he made a well-known distinction between governmental and administrative centralization, praising the first as necessary for national strength and condemning the second as enervating politically, socially, and morally. He described the American republic as highly centralized governmentally but remarkably decentralized administratively, a trait that he saw as one of the key reasons for the social and political health and the material prosperity of the United States.

It is important to note that in the 1835 portion of his book, he already recognized that democracy led to centralization and that this tendency was one of the great dangers facing democratic societies. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there are no nations more at risk of falling under the yoke of centralized administration than those whose social state is democratic.”5 In a draft of the 1835 portion he declared: “Moreover we must not be mistaken about this. It is democratic governments that arrive most quickly at administrative centralization while losing their political liberty.”6

By 1840 he even more emphatically warned that democracy tended almost inevitably toward centralization. In one of his most famous and powerful passages, he offered readers a terrible portrait of the new, “soft” democratic despotism of the centralized state.7 We should note, however, that when he sketched this chilling picture, he was thinking primarily of Europe, in general, and of France, in particular. America, with its particular laws, circumstances, and mores, especially its local liberties, federal structure, associational habits, and doctrine of interest well understood, escaped the danger at that time. The long-term implications of his warnings about administrative centralization have chilled the hearts of many American readers, however, especially during the past half century.

But Tocqueville’s views about centralization are far more complicated than this brief summary. First, his distinction between governmental and administrative centralization was weak and never worked

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effectively.8 Tocqueville himself knew this and wrote: “The permanent tendency of [nations whose social state is democratic] is to concentrate all governmental power in the hands of the single power that directly represents the people.… Now, when the same power is already vested with all the attributes of government, it is highly difficult for it not to try to get into the details of administration … and it hardly ever fails to find eventually the opportunity to do so.”9 So the two centralizations were really inseparable; when an instrument or branch of government, claiming to represent the people, has sufficient power, it cannot resist the temptation to apply it more widely and in more precise ways. After 1835, as he drafted the second part of his book, the distinction disappeared from Tocqueville’s thinking and writing.

Second, Tocqueville was not opposed to centralization as such. On the contrary, in Democracy and elsewhere, he argued forcefully for the benefits of centralization for certain purposes. In some of his working papers, he asserted that administrative centralization, within limits, is a necessary fact in modern societies, arguing that great national enterprises, essential to the public good, required a centralized state. He called on the state actively to support, and even to fund, academic and scientific societies; such support would assure continuing research in the theoretical sciences and in other fields not attractive to the immediate, often shortsighted interests of democratic society. The Americans, he noted, were so decentralized administratively and so afraid of centralization that they did not know some of the advantages of centralization.10

In one draft fragment, with the title “Unity, centralization” and dated March 7, 1838, he wrote: “However animated you are against unity and the governmental unity that is called centralization, you cannot nonetheless deny that unity and centralization are the most powerful means to do quickly, energetically, and in a given place, very

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great things. That reveals one of the reasons why in democratic centuries centralization and unity are loved so much.”11 In another draft, he declared: “Contained within certain limits, centralization is a necessary fact, and I add that it is a fact about which we must be glad. A strong and intelligent central power is one of the first political necessities in centuries of equality. Acknowledge it boldly.”12

Of course, he also warned that the state or central power must not act alone. Tocqueville had noticed that in the United States “internal improvements” often combined private and governmental (local, state, and federal) support. The Americans, Tocqueville realized, had developed a mixed system for major economic undertakings.13 By combining public and private involvement, they accomplished wonders.14 In his drafts, he argued that if the administration in France became deeply involved in great industrial enterprises, it had to be checked by the legislature and by the courts. A system of balance was required.15 The real issue, according to Tocqueville, is not how to bar state participation but where and how to draw the limits of state participation.16

In the 1840 text he forcefully declared: “It is at the very same time necessary and desirable that the central power that directs a democratic people be active and powerful. It is not a matter of making it weak or indolent, but only of preventing it from abusing its agility and strength.”17

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Excessive focus on the dangers of centralization as such, and especially on administrative centralization, has often blinded readers not only to Tocqueville’s praise for what he described as the benefits of centralization but also to his more fundamental concern about democratic societies. Although Tocqueville harshly condemned bureaucratic centralization, his broader message involved the danger of any consolidated power. In his book, he described a long series of possible democratic tyrannies: the majority, the mass, public opinion, the legislature, the military leader, one man alone, the bureaucracy, the state, or even the manufacturing aristocracy or some faction. By claiming and attempting to exercise concentrated and unchecked power, each threatened liberty. Here was the heart of his warnings about democratic despotisms.

In the 1835 text he declared:

So I think that a social power superior to all others must always be placed somewhere, but I believe liberty is in danger when this power encounters no obstacle that can check its course and give it time to moderate itself.

Omnipotence in itself seems to me something bad and dangerous. Its exercise seems to me beyond the power of man, whoever he may be; and I see only God who can, without danger, be all powerful, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. So there is no authority on earth so respectable in itself, or vested with a right so sacred, that I would want to allow it to act without control or to dominate without obstacles. So when I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to whatever power, whether called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, whether exercised in a monarchy or a republic, I say: the seed of tyranny is there and I try to go and live under other laws.18

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To preserve liberty in democratic societies, Tocqueville believed strongly that all power has to be limited or hedged in by various restraints, both formal and informal. Unchecked power was dangerous no matter where it was located. For Tocqueville, decentralization was simply one of the ways to spread power as widely as possible.

Even this brief overview demonstrates that beneath the major democratic dangers that worried Tocqueville was an underlying moral concern. Tocqueville was most troubled by the potential moral impact of materialism, individualism, and consolidated power. As a moralist, Tocqueville believed that the worst democratic dangers undermined human responsibility, shrank the human spirit, and diminished the human soul.

The Remedies

For this trinity of dangers—materialism, individualism, and consolidated or unchecked power—what were the remedies? The continuity of remedies for democratic ills that Tocqueville offered his readers in 1835 and 1840 is one of the great evidences of the unity between the two halves of Democracy. Tocqueville wrote about the art and the habits of liberty. By the art of liberty, he meant primarily the legal, constitutional, and institutional mechanisms that mark a society. A people and their lawmakers can shape laws and institutions in ways that lessen democratic dangers and foster liberty. One of the features that Tocqueville admired most about the United States, for example, was the way in which power was scattered or spread about; he often used the word éparpiller when describing American institutional and legal arrangements. In particular, he had in mind decentralization (especially local liberties and associations); the federal system (including checks and balances among the branches of government); liberty of the press; and individual civil and political rights. Many of the most important lessons learned by Tocqueville in the New World republic involved key legal and structural mechanisms for moderating democracy and avoiding its worst dangers.

By the habits of liberty, Tocqueville meant something closely related to mores of a certain kind, especially inherited ideas, behaviors, habits,

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and values, such as the spirit of association, the spirit of religion, a sense of justice, and a grasp of interest well understood. In his book, he consistently stressed the restraints on power that arose from mores in America as well as from legal and institutional arrangements. He also insisted that the habits of liberty were more powerful and enduring, more essential and reliable, than the art of liberty.

Nonetheless, the art and habits of liberty were, for Tocqueville, intimately intertwined. Lawmakers practicing the art of liberty can establish laws and institutions that counteract the worst dangers of democracy. But according to Tocqueville, it is the habits of liberty that give real life to those laws and institutions and that make them more than empty legal and institutional structures. For example, the spirit of locality makes town government come alive, the spirit of association prompts individuals to gather together to address and solve problems, and long practical political experience makes the conceptual intricacies of American federalism possible.

From another perspective, the core of Tocqueville’s program of remedies is civic involvement or public participation; his solutions—by art and by habits—to democratic dangers were related to his concept of citizenship and public life. For Tocqueville, citizenship assumed such basic liberties as the rights to vote; to participate in local self-government; to write, speak, and associate; and to trial by jury. These freedoms, essentially political and civil rights, are related to the art of liberty and make public participation possible.

But the most essential dimension of citizenship for Tocqueville is actual public participation. Ongoing, habitual involvement in public affairs, particularly at the local level, fosters practical political experience and knowledge, a concept of the larger public good, respect for the rights of others, and a comprehension of interest well understood. Note that these elements of genuine citizenship are related to mores and to the habits of liberty.

Activity in the American town served for Tocqueville as a particularly powerful example of citizenship. In the drafts and working manuscript of the 1835 Democracy, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of public life in the town. “The town puts liberty and government within the grasp of the people; it gives them an education.… A town system is made only with the support of mores, laws, circumstances and

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time. Town liberty is the most difficult to suppress, the most difficult to create. It is in the town that nearly all the strength of free peoples resides.”19 Again later: “Town institutions not only give the art of using great political liberty, but they bring about the true taste for liberty. Without them, the taste for political liberty comes over peoples like childish desires or the hotheadedness of a young man that the first obstacle extinguishes and calms.”20

Civic involvement, especially in the localities, helps therefore to overcome the major dangers of modern democratic society. Involvement on the local level limits any tendency toward the consolidation of power, especially in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy; it supports the scattering of power in the society. Participation in public life brings people out of their own private or narrow spheres of interest, and it teaches them to care about the wider public good, about something other than material goals.

This brief consideration of the art and habits of liberty and of the necessary framework for citizenship should remind us that Tocqueville spoke not only for liberty in the abstract but also for liberties, for the specific list of political and civil rights noted above. Individual liberties protected the individual in the face of all the possible democratic despotisms, especially the majority, the mass, the state, or society as a whole. Liberties made individual independence possible and supported genuine civic participation and true public life.21 As Tocqueville wrote in the 1840 Democracy:

[It] is above all in the democratic times in which we find ourselves that the true friends of liberty and of human grandeur must, constantly, stand up and be ready to prevent the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general execution of its designs. In those times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, or individual rights of so little importance that you can surrender to arbitrariness

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with impunity.… [To] violate [the particular right of an individual] today is to corrupt the national mores profoundly and to put the entire society at risk.22

He summarized:

The political world is changing; from now on we must seek new remedies for new evils. To fix for the social power extensive, but visible and immobile limits; to give to individuals certain rights and to guarantee to them the uncontested enjoyment of these rights; to preserve for the individual the little of independence, of strength, and of originality that remain to him; to raise him up beside society and sustain him in the face of it: such seems to me to be the first goal of the legislator in the age we are entering.23

For Tocqueville, particular liberties made liberty real.

Among all of these remedies of art and habits proposed by Tocqueville, let us focus now on one of the most well known, the doctrine of interest well understood. Tocqueville’s concept of interest well understood developed gradually from 1831, when he was in America, to the late 1830s, when he was completing the 1840 Democracy.24 But the idea clearly emerged from what he had learned as he traveled in the United States.

Very quickly Tocqueville discovered what he would call the bedrock principle of American society, “[the] maxim that the individual is the best as well as the only judge of his particular interest.… This doctrine is universally accepted in the United States.” It served as the foundation of town liberty, but it also exercised a general influence over “even the ordinary acts of life.”25 Even more striking was the way that Americans blended private and public interest. As early as May 1831, Tocqueville realized that what he was seeing in the New World put some familiar theories in doubt.

In his travel notebooks he wrote:

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The principle of the ancient republics was the sacrifice of particular interest to the general good. In this sense, you can say that they were virtuous. The principle of this one appears to me to be to make particular interest part of the general interest. A kind of refined and intelligent egoism seems the pivot on which the whole machine turns. These people do not trouble themselves to find out if public virtue is good, but they claim to prove that it is useful. If this last point is true, as I think it is in part, this society can pass for enlightened, but not virtuous. But to what degree can the two principles of individual good and general good in fact be merged? To what point will a conscience that you could call a conscience of reflection and calculation be able to control the political passions that have not yet arisen, but which will not fail to arise? That is what the future alone will show us.26

By the time he was drafting the 1835 Democracy, he realized that the American example required a revision or recasting of Montesquieu:

Of virtue in republics—The Americans are not a virtuous people and yet they are free. This does not absolutely prove that virtue, as Montesquieu thought, is not essential to the existence of republics. The idea of Montesquieu must not be taken in a narrow sense. What this great man meant is that republics could subsist only by the action of society over itself. What he means by virtue is the moral power that each individual exercises over himself and that prevents him from violating the rights of others.

When this triumph of man over temptation is the result of the weakness of the temptation or of a calculation of personal interest, it does not constitute virtue in the eyes of the moralist; but it is included in the idea of Montesquieu who spoke of the effect much more than of the cause. In America it is not virtue that is great, it is temptation that is small, which comes to the same thing. It is not disinterestedness that is great, it is interest that is well understood, which again comes back to almost the same thing. So Montesquieu was right although he spoke about ancient virtue, and what he says of the Greeks and Romans is still applicable to the Americans.27

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In another draft, Tocqueville listed some of the key intellectual bonds that tied Americans together: “Shared ideas. Philosophical and general ideas. That interest well understood is sufficient to lead men to do good. That each man has the ability to govern himself.”28

Note that in these (and other) drafts for the 1835 volumes, long before he began to write the 1840 Democracy, Tocqueville was already using the term interest well understood and developing the idea. The seeds appear in the 1835 text. In his discussion of public spirit in the United States, Tocqueville remarked on a “more rational” love of country that he had witnessed in America and that “arises from enlightenment; it develops with the help of laws; it grows with the exercise of rights; and it ends up merging, in a way, with personal interest. A man understands the influence that the well-being of the country has on his own.” But how did the Americans “unite … individual interest and the interest of the country”? “[H]ow is it,” Tocqueville asked, “that each person [in the New World republic] is involved in the affairs of his town, of his district, of the entire State as his very own?” “Today,” he declared, “civic spirit seems to me inseparable from the exercise of political rights.”29

Tocqueville carried this argument as well into his discussions of the idea of rights and the respect for law in the United States.30 In both cases, the exercise of political rights was the key to linking personal interest and the larger public interest. When he presented the social benefits of the jury in America, he described how the jury spread the idea of rights to all classes, taught responsibility, and increased the enlightenment of the people. Once again, Tocqueville saw an instrument that linked personal and public interest. “By forcing men to get involved in something other than their own affairs, it combats individual egoism, which is like the rust of societies.”31

In his 1840 text, Tocqueville would call the refined and intelligent egoism, the new kind of virtue that he had described in his travel notebooks

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and in the drafts for 1835, the doctrine of interest well understood. For him it served as a major remedy for democratic individualism.32

I have already shown, in several places in this work, how the inhabitants of the United States almost always knew how to combine their own well-being with that of their fellow citizens. What I want to note here is the general theory by the aid of which they succeed in doing so.…

I will not be afraid to say that the doctrine of interest well understood seems to me, of all philosophical theories, the most appropriate to the needs of the men of our time, and that I see in it the most powerful guarantee remaining to them against themselves. So it is principally toward this doctrine that the mind of the moralists of today should turn. Even if they were to judge it as imperfect, it would still have to be adopted as necessary.

I do not believe, everything considered, that there is more egoism among us than in America; the only difference is that there it is enlightened and here it is not. Each American knows how to sacrifice a portion of his particular interests in order to save the rest. We want to keep everything, and often everything escapes us.33

“[The] Americans,” he remarked elsewhere in his text, “have so to speak reduced egoism to a social and philosophical theory.”34 What is important for us to recognize are the American roots of this doctrine of interest well understood, one of the most famous and original elements of Tocqueville’s thinking and writing. But where and how did the Americans learn to combine private and public interest and to understand individual and general interests in such a strikingly new way?

In a brilliant discussion, James Kloppenberg has described the concept of interest well understood, discovered by Tocqueville in America, as an expression of an “ethic of reciprocity” and has argued that reciprocity is fundamental to the healthy habits of liberty that Tocqueville witnessed in the United States, especially the spirit of locality and the

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spirit of association. The ethic of reciprocity casts the idea of interest well understood in a new light.35

Kloppenberg defines this ethic as fruitful interaction among individuals engaged in a shared enterprise, as awareness of and respect for others, and as the “practice of deliberation,” or the experience of expressing, listening to, and respectfully considering the viewpoints and opinions of others in order to arrive at a mutually acceptable and beneficial conclusion. This mutual consideration, shared involvement, and respectful deliberation rested upon a deep sense of “reciprocal obligation.” It described how Americans (at their best) behaved in their towns and associations and defined what Tocqueville meant by the spirit of locality and the spirit of association. Kloppenberg has argued that the ideal of reciprocity was a fundamental characteristic of American mores. Tocqueville also understood reciprocity as a key solution to democratic dangers. “Sentiments and ideas are renewed,” he declared in Democracy, “the heart grows larger and the human mind develops only by the reciprocal action of men on each other.”36

What was the deeper source of such an ethic of reciprocity in America? Kloppenberg has located the source in the American religious heritage and has reminded us once again of Tocqueville’s insistence on the Puritan experience as the essential point of departure for the American republic.37 This argument has been taken up in much greater detail by Barbara Allen in a recent book in which she underscores the importance of the Puritan concept of covenant.38 To “own the covenant” in Puritan terms was to take profound moral and religious responsibility for sustaining the relationship between the individual and the community. Its most immediate and direct expressions were in the Puritan congregation and congregational meeting, but it also shaped the mores of the earliest town meetings that took

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place in the “meetinghouse” (as the church building was called) and that reflected Puritan covenantal theology. According to her analysis, covenant brought forth what Tocqueville described as the American habits of liberty, including such basic political mores as assuming and expressing a voice in communal deliberations, feeling a sense of obligation toward political participation, sharing a commitment to the larger public good, and grasping what Tocqueville labeled as interest well understood.

For the Puritans, covenant, as a social and political concept, defined the relationship between the individual and the church or congregation, and between the individual and the larger society. It required the mutual moral responsibilities of the individual and the group for sustaining the larger community, for balancing the good of the individual and the good of the community, and for avoiding any definitive break in communal bonds. It called for mutual commitment, active participation, and respectful deliberation—the very behavioral characteristics included in Kloppenberg’s ethic of reciprocity.

Tocqueville did not specifically locate the source of the concept of interest well understood in the Puritan religious heritage of the American republic. But a case can be made that the concept of covenant, by shaping the mores of American social and political culture, also produced the social and philosophical theory that Tocqueville found so new and so special in the New World republic and that he called the doctrine of interest well understood. Interest well understood involved the essential covenantal principle: the assumption that the fundamental good of the individual and the good of the community were in fact compatible and even mutually supportive, that private and public interest could be harmonized in surprising ways, given the right religious and moral traditions.

This argument underscores the defining role in American society of religion in general and of the dissenting Protestant and Puritan traditions in particular. It reaffirms the brilliance of Tocqueville’s insights about the centrality of religion in shaping American politics, society, and culture, and about the unique way in which Americans blended the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. If the ultimate root of the doctrine of interest well understood is the Puritan concept of covenant,

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we need to recognize the fundamental, if hidden, moral dimension of the doctrine of interest well understood. Most commentators treat the doctrine as essentially utilitarian and amoral; some even treat it negatively, as unworthy of the highest moral dimensions of humanity. But if covenant plays a defining role, we need to acknowledge the profound moral dimension of this innovative American social and philosophical theory.

This quick review of remedies emphasizes three fundamental features of Tocqueville’s intellectual journey. It demonstrates once again how Tocqueville’s ideas, as he envisioned and wrote Democracy between 1831 and 1840, were shaped by American lessons. The American experience was, in many ways, transformative; it significantly inspired, deflected, and renewed Tocqueville’s thinking. This summary also illustrates a fixed principle of Tocqueville’s thought. For him, remedies based on habits were more important than those based on art. Mores, as Tocqueville insisted so eloquently, are more crucial to the health and success of democracies than are laws, institutions, or circumstances. Finally, this survey reveals that hidden beneath Tocqueville’s remedies for democratic ills was the goal of a vigorous civic life. As Tocqueville wrote, the best cure for democracy was more democracy, understood as the broadest possible public participation.

The Democratic Character

Tocqueville believed that a new, emerging society would call forth a new man: the “democratic man,” who would exhibit characteristic habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ideas (mores). The story of Tocqueville’s developing understanding of the democratic character is complex; what follows is only a summary treatment of the topic. Once again, we must begin in America, where, as he traveled, he carefully observed those around him and gradually developed a full picture of the American character.

Throughout the writing of his book, Tocqueville’s concept of national character remained vague and elusive. But in an early version of the manuscript of Democracy, he offered a tentative definition.

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There is indeed in the bent of the ideas and tastes of a people a hidden force that struggles with advantage against revolutions and time. This intellectual physiognomy of nations, which is called their character, is found throughout all the centuries of their history and amid the innumerable changes that take place in the social state, beliefs and laws. A strange thing! What is least perceptible and most difficult to define among a people is at the same time what you find most enduring among them.39

For him, national character really meant the mores of a particular nation.

What was the bent of the ideas and tastes, or the intellectual physiognomy of the Americans? Among the features of the American character that Tocqueville noted and praised in his travel notes and in the working papers and text of Democracy were:

 Religious faith and a high regard for religion;

 Good morals and a positive attitude toward women;

 Abundant energy, hard work, and relentless activity;

 Practical political experience and general knowledge and intelligence;

 Good sense and steadiness of habits or “habits of restraint”;

 Fixity of certain fundamental principles;

 Public spirit and a drive to participate in public life;

 A sentiment or feeling of equality with fellow citizens;

 Respect for law and for the rights of others;

 Willingness to help others, or a benevolent attitude; and

 An intelligent and refined egoism, or a remarkably different understanding of how private and public interest were linked.

Among American traits that Tocqueville observed and criticized were:

 Love of money and passion for wealth and material well-being;

 Commercial passions and habits of business;

 Greediness to acquire material goods and to dominate the continent;

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 Lack of general ideas and interest in practice rather than theory;

 Restlessness and constant movement;

 Tendency to follow momentary passions;

 Passion for change and expectation of constant improvement;

 Nearly universal ambition and drive to advance in society;

 Exaggerated seriousness or coldness;

 Inability to enjoy life;

 Tendency to conform to the majority and to follow public opinion;

 Discontent and frustration despite prosperity and success;

 Envy;

 Deep anxiety; insecurity about status and well-being;

 National self-absorption and pride;

 Racist attitudes toward blacks and Native Americans; and

 Fanatical spiritualism (at times).

Even these two short lists underscore several significant features of Tocqueville’s portrait of the American character. Remarkably, Tocqueville’s portrayal began to emerge quickly during the first days of his American journey and can be found throughout the working papers and final text of the 1835 Democracy. Yet his depiction is complex and extraordinarily perceptive, containing both high praise and severe criticism. It particularly highlights certain fundamental American traits, such as religious faith, practical political experience, constant activity, and the ability to understand private and public interests in a new way.

But Tocqueville’s portrait is also limited in several respects. First, it focuses on the Anglo-American man; women and the other two races of North America are largely considered apart. Second, it is a description even more specifically of the Northerner (even of the New England Yankee); in the pages of Democracy, Tocqueville offers us a separate picture of the Southerner that differs in several important ways from the general image. Third, and finally, we should note that much of his portrayal, especially the features that he most disliked, is a description of middle-class habits and characteristics. To some extent, Tocqueville saw the Americans through the preexisting lens of his profoundly unfavorable conception of the middle class and of middle-class society.

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Among Tocqueville’s catalog of American characteristics, the psychological features offer arguably the most brilliant insights of his analysis. Again we need to remember that these psychological traits as well are already present in Tocqueville’s travel notes and in the drafts and manuscripts of the 1835 Democracy. His journey notebooks, for example, describe an American who has a profound sentiment or feeling of equality with his fellows.40 In the working papers of the 1835 portion of Democracy, Tocqueville observes that, in a society without the traditional markers of caste and class, the Anglo-American is constantly anxious about his status in society, and in a society where the primary distinction is wealth, he is constantly worried about his material well-being.41

Tocqueville also describes an American who, despite great prosperity, remains restless and profoundly disappointed because the two key goals that he is always pursuing inevitably elude him. Full equality can never be attained. Paradoxically, as equality comes closer, the small remaining inequalities become more irritating and frustrating. The passion for equality can never be satisfied.42 Tocqueville even remarks on a pervasive envy and on what he calls the principle of “relative justice,” which means that small inequalities among those most similar to you are harder to endure than the vast inequalities between castes or classes.43 A satisfying material success also eludes the American; he always wants more, and ultimately he runs out of the time needed to acquire all that he desires.44

Despite the sad realization that his desires would never be fully achieved, the American, according to Tocqueville, lives with his eyes fixed on a better tomorrow; he assumes that change is improvement and expects the future to surpass the present.45 This assumption also

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feeds both his discontent with his current situation and his unrelenting drive forward.

Out of this image of the Anglo-American came Tocqueville’s parallel portrait of the “democratic man.” Certain striking differences between his depiction of the American and that of the “democratic man” must be noted, however, especially the latter’s lack of sufficient religious faith to counterbalance materialistic passions and his impulse to withdraw from public life (individualism). These twin tendencies of “democratic man” toward unchecked or unrestrained materialism and toward noninvolvement or nonparticipation in civic affairs were, for Tocqueville, two of the most troubling features of the democratic character.

But Tocqueville’s psychological sketch of “democratic man” (fully presented in 1840) closely mirrored his portrayal of the Anglo-American (already apparent between 1831 and 1835). The democratic psychology was marked by the same envy, anxiety, frustration, discontent, and restlessness that Tocqueville had observed among the Americans.

Another significant question remains. How is the character of “democratic man” related more broadly to the theme of democratic dangers and remedies? Tocqueville’s sketch of the democratic character is deeply critical. The impulses and psychological traits of “democratic man” exacerbate the democratic threats that so worried Tocqueville, especially the dangers of materialism and individualism that have been discussed above.

If, however, the democratic character largely heightened Tocqueville’s worries, he also found among American characteristics some features of democratic mores that served—at least potentially—as possible remedies for democratic dangers. Precisely where the American character differed from that of “democratic man,” Tocqueville found habits, ideas, and attitudes—most notably religious faith, the drive toward participation in public life, and the sense of interest well understood—that could correct some of the worst flaws and weakness of the democratic character.

From one perspective, Tocqueville offered readers two possible democratic scenarios: one, healthy; the other, toxic. As we have seen, his portrayal of the democratic character was largely anticipated by and even modeled on his depiction of the American character. But where the mores of “democratic man” seemed especially toxic, Tocqueville

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looked to what was distinctive about the American example in order to find healthy corrections. For him, the peculiar features of the American character served as important remedies for particular dangers presented by democratic mores. Once again Tocqueville found in the American experience reasons for hope about the democratic future.

This brief discussion of democratic dangers, democratic remedies, and the democratic character serves once again as a powerful demonstration of the unity between the 1835 and the 1840 portions of Democracy. Not only does Tocqueville’s political program—his suggested remedies for democratic dangers—remain constant, but also we have seen several important examples of how chapters in the 1840 text grew out of a few sentences or paragraphs in the 1835 Democracy, including such important concepts as individualism and interest well understood, and such psychological features of democratic man as envy, discontent, restlessness, and anxiety. A careful reading of the Liberty Fund edition, with its rich presentation of materials from the drafts and other working papers of Tocqueville’s masterpiece, reveals the way in which the 1840 volume grew almost organically out of the seeds first put down in 1835 (or earlier). This characteristic of Democracy reflects Tocqueville’s habit of constantly turning and returning ideas in his mind: an inescapable feature of his method of thinking and writing.

We have also repeatedly followed the ideas of Tocqueville, the moralist. If the fundamental threat from democratic dangers is the narrowing of the human heart (due to materialism, excessive privatism, and withdrawal from public life), the most basic benefit of democratic remedies is its feeding and expansion (due to reciprocity, involvement with others, and focus on the larger public good). Tocqueville’s effort to grasp the democratic character was essentially an attempt to understand democratic mores. We have already noted that his primary concern as a political analyst was mores rather than laws, institutions, or circumstances. As a moralist, Tocqueville believed that mores—ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors—ultimately held the key to liberty and to the future of democratic societies.

Finally, our discussion showed Tocqueville drawing on American lessons to teach his readers how to use the habits of liberty and particular democratic mores to counteract the dangers in modern societies,

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or, if the necessary habits were weak or absent, how to use the art of liberty—the establishment of proper laws and institutions—to address those dangers. Here at its most basic is the new science of politics that Tocqueville urged upon the citizens and legislators of the new democratic world.46