Title page of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, printed at New York, 1838
| |
| Author | Alexis de Tocqueville |
|---|---|
| Original title | De la démocratie en Amérique |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Saunders and Otley (London) |
Publication date
| 1835–1840 |
De La Démocratie en Amérique; published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville. Its title translates as On Democracy in America, but English translations are usually simply entitled Democracy in America. In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years.
In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead. They arrived in New York City in May of that year and spent nine months traveling the United States, studying the prisons, and collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. The two also briefly visited Canada, spending a few days in the summer of 1831 in what was then Lower Canada (modern-day Quebec) and Upper Canada (modern-day Ontario).
After they returned to France in February 1832, Tocqueville and Beaumont submitted their report, Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France, in 1833. When the first edition was published, Beaumont was working on another book, Marie, ou, L'esclavage aux Etats-Unis (two volumes, 1835), a social critique and novel describing the separation of races in a moral society and the conditions of slaves in the United States. Before finishing Democracy in America, Tocqueville believed that Beaumont's study of the United States would prove more comprehensive and penetrating.
Purpose
He
begins his book by describing the change in social conditions taking
place. He observed that over the previous seven hundred years the social
and economic conditions of men had become more equal. The aristocracy,
Tocqueville believed, was gradually disappearing as the modern world
experienced the beneficial effects of equality. Tocqueville traced the
development of equality to a number of factors, such as granting all men
permission to enter the clergy,
widespread economic opportunity resulting from the growth of trade and
commerce, the royal sale of titles of nobility as a monarchical
fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture.
Tocqueville described this revolution as a "providential fact" of an "irresistible revolution," leading some to criticize the determinism
found in the book. However, based on Tocqueville's correspondences
with friends and colleagues, Marvin Zetterbaum, Professor Emeritus at University of California Davis,
concludes that the Frenchman never accepted democracy as determined or
inevitable. He did, however, consider equality more just and therefore
found himself among its partisans.
Given the social state that was emerging, Tocqueville believed that a "new political science" would be needed, in order to:
[I]nstruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its motives, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true instincts for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.
The remainder of the book can be interpreted as an attempt to
accomplish this goal, thereby giving advice to those people who would
experience this change in social states.
Main themes
The Puritan Founding
Tocqueville begins his study of the U.S. by explaining the contribution of the Puritans.
According to him, the Puritans established the U.S. democratic social
state of equality. They arrived equals in education and were all middle
class. In addition, Tocqueville observes that they contributed a
synthesis of religion and political liberty in America that was uncommon
in Europe, particularly in France. He calls the Puritan Founding the
"seed" of his entire work.
The Federal Constitution
Tocqueville believed that the Puritans established the principle of sovereignty of the people in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. The American Revolution then popularized this principle, followed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787,
which developed institutions to manage popular will. While Tocqueville
speaks highly of the U.S. Constitution, he believes that the mores, or
"habits of mind" of the U.S. people play a more prominent role in the
protection of freedom. These include:
- Township democracy
- Mores, laws, and circumstances
- Tyranny of the majority
- Religion and beliefs
- The family
- Individualism
- Associations
- Self-interest rightly understood
- Materialism
Situation of women
Tocqueville was one of the first social critics to examine the situation of U.S. women and to identify the concept of Separate Spheres. The section Influence of Democracy on Manners Properly So Called
of the second volume is devoted to his observations of women's status
in U.S. society. He writes: "In no country has such constant care been
taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for
the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two
pathways that are always different."
He argues that the collapse of aristocracy lessened the patriarchal
rule in the family where fathers would control daughters' marriages,
meaning that women had the option of remaining unmarried and retaining a
higher degree of independence. Married women, by contrast, lost all
independence "in the bonds of matrimony" as "in America paternal
discipline [by the woman's father] is very relaxed and the conjugal tie
very strict".
Because of his own view that a woman could not act on a level
equal to a man, he saw a woman as needing her father's support to retain
independence in marriage. Consistent with this limited view of the
potential of women to act as equals to men, as well as his apparently
missing on his travels seeing the nurturing roles that many men in the
United States played, particularly in the Delaware Valley region of cultures where there was a lot of influence by Society of Friends
as well as a tradition of male and female equality, Tocqueville
considered the separate spheres of women and men a positive development,
stating:
As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply,—to the superiority of their women.
Summary
The primary focus of Democracy in America is an analysis of why republican representative democracy
has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other
places. Tocqueville seeks to apply the functional aspects of democracy
in the United States to what he sees as the failings of democracy in his
native France.
Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the risk of developing a tyranny of the majority. He observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation
from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. He
contrasts this to France where there was what he perceived to be an
unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious, which he
relates to the connection between church and state.
Tocqueville also outlines the possible excesses of passion for equality
among men, foreshadowing the totalitarian states of the twentieth
century.
Insightful analysis of political society was supplemented in the second volume by description of civil society as a sphere of private and civilian affairs mirroring Hegel.
Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve".
He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social
conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to
itself.
Tocqueville's views on the United States took a darker turn after 1840, however, as made evident in Aurelian Craiutu's Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings.
Impact
Democracy in America
was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the other in 1840.
It was immediately popular in both Europe and the United States, while
also having a profound impact on the French population. By the twentieth
century, it had become a classic work of political science, social science, and history. It is a commonly assigned reading for undergraduates of American universities majoring
in the political or social sciences, and part of the introductory
political theory syllabus at Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton and other
institutions. In the introduction to his translation of the book,
Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield calls it "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America."
Tocqueville's work is often acclaimed for making a number of astute predictions. He anticipates the potential acrimony over the abolition of slavery that would tear apart the United States and lead to the American Civil War as well as the eventual superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, which exploded after World War II and spawned the Cold War.
Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy,
Tocqueville, some scholars have argued, also correctly predicted that
an industrial aristocracy would rise from the ownership of labor. He
warned that '... friends of democracy must
keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times', observing
that the route of industry was the gate by which a newfound wealthy
class might potentially dominate, although he himself believed that an
industrial aristocracy would differ from the formal aristocracy of the
past.
On the other hand, Tocqueville proved shortsighted in noting that
a democracy's equality of conditions stifles literary development. In
spending several chapters lamenting the state of the arts in America, he
fails to envision the literary Renaissance that would shortly arrive in
the form of such major writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
Equally, in dismissing the country's interest in science as limited to
pedestrian applications for streamlining the production of material
goods, he failed to imagine America's burgeoning appetite for pure
scientific research and discovery.
According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable
consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation
with material goods, and isolated individuals.
Translated versions of Democracy in America and effects on meaning
- Henry Reeve, translated 1835
- This translation was completed by Reeve and later revised by Francis Bowen. In 1945, it was reissued in a modern edition by Alfred A. Knopf edited and with an extensive historical essay by Phillips Bradley.
- George Lawrence, translated in 1966 with an introduction by J. P. Mayer
- Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, translated circa 2000
- Gerald Bevan, translated circa 2003
- Arthur Goldhammer, translated circa 2004
- James T. Schleifer, edited by Eduardo Nolla and published by Liberty Fund in March 2010
- Bilingual edition based on the authoritative edition of the original French-language text.
