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American Democracy: The Shape of Democracy Itself

Cheryl B. Welch

in De Tocqueville

This chapter examines the contributions to social and political analysis of Tocqueville's major published texts: Democracy in America I, and Democracy in America II. In the first text, he argues that ... More

This chapter examines the contributions to social and political analysis of Tocqueville's major published texts: Democracy in America I, and Democracy in America II. In the first text, he argues that revolution temporarily perverts democracy as exhibited in France by class warfare, political extremism and distrust. In his second text, he notes the tendency of the revolutionary spirit to intensify mutual distrust and increase individualism. The chapter also considers the loose terminologies that forcers the reader to read carefully to his specific intentions and relevant content of discussion. The failure of others in understanding the true significance of his texts is attributed to his lack of precision in the use of important concepts.Less

Attacking the French Tradition: Popular Sovereignty Redefined in and Through Local Liberties

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This chapter argues that traditionalists fail to realize the fact that for Tocqueville, the power of the people was above all a sociological and moral power, not an institutional one. Democracy in ... More

This chapter argues that traditionalists fail to realize the fact that for Tocqueville, the power of the people was above all a sociological and moral power, not an institutional one. Democracy in America offered an original conception of His Majesty the Majority, which was still called “the Public.” In Tocqueville's eyes, the various organs of decentralized government—the communes (dominated by great landowners) of which the monarchists dreamed, the associations of families in Lamennais, the “social authorities” exalted by Le Play and his followers—made sense only in this context. The Public was not a phantom conjured up by political dreams—a liberal illusion that in Le Play's view stemmed from “the so-called principles of 1789.” The Public was the new subject of history, or at any rate the quintessential totem of political action.Less

/ “The Thing is New”: Sovereignty and Slavery in Democracy in America

Jennifer Greiman

in Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing

In a footnote appended to Democracy in America's most famous chapter, “Tyranny of the Majority,” Tocqueville offers two anecdotes whose relationship to each other appears to lie in the illustration ... More

In a footnote appended to Democracy in America's most famous chapter, “Tyranny of the Majority,” Tocqueville offers two anecdotes whose relationship to each other appears to lie in the illustration of his claim that democratic government in the United States is by no means too weak, “as many Europeans make out,” because the authority and operation of government are not necessarily limited to the state. Democracy's autoimmune response appears to be in full operation in both of these stories, as ostensibly “popular” agents take power upon themselves, acting in place of — even against — the authority of the law and the state in order to prevent the exercise of rights specifically associated with democratic citizenship. Tocqueville's description of the “strange melancholy” that haunts subjects “in the midst of abundance” reads like democracy's hangover.Less

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alan Ryan

in The Making of Modern Liberalism

This chapter offers a reading of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, arguing that the book was not a philosophical analysis of the concept of democracy, nor a simple narrative of the ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, arguing that the book was not a philosophical analysis of the concept of democracy, nor a simple narrative of the origins of American political institutions, but a form of political theory that used historical evidence to teach general lessons about the prospects for politics in the present. The chapter first places Tocqueville in his times and among his family before discussing his journey to America in 1831. It then considers the three major themes that might be extracted from the second volume of Democracy: the quality of intellectual and cultural life in an egalitarian society; the stability or proneness to revolutionary upheaval of such societies; and Tocqueville's final and most distinctive thoughts on democratic despotism, or what one might term quiet totalitarianism.Less

Introduction

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to combine a study of context with an internal reading. Rather than offering a commentary on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in ... More

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to combine a study of context with an internal reading. Rather than offering a commentary on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, it attempts an interpretation based on signs, indices, and even stylistic turns of an author who revealed himself even as he attempted to draw a veil over his own views, and who can also be heard speaking in a different register in his correspondence and manuscripts as well as in the accounts of his contemporaries. To sharpen the intellectual portrait of Tocqueville the man, we need to identify the various levels of meaning contained in the text and the various audiences to which it was addressed.Less

Introduction: The Anxieties of Democracy

Partha Chatterjee and Ira Katznelson

in Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville addresses not just the social geography and laws of the United States, but also how the ‘habits and mores’ of democracy in the wide sense had ... More

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville addresses not just the social geography and laws of the United States, but also how the ‘habits and mores’ of democracy in the wide sense had primarily served to maintain a democratic republic in the United States. For Tocqueville, democracy lies at the intersection of structural tendencies, social being, social consciousness, and social action. Drawing on the arguments made by Tocqueville in Democracy in America, this book compares democracy in India and the United States. It examines how the United States moved ‘from equality’ at birth towards new forms of inequality over time, and how India moved ‘towards equality’ from an inegalitarian social order at independence. The book explores how democratization has influenced key elements of public life such as citizenship, capitalism, religion, the struggle for equality, and the status of the Jews and other minorities in the two countries.Less

Majoritarian and Racial Tyranny: Tocqueville and Beaumont

Michael T. Gilmore

in Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture

This chapter compares Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Gustave de Beaumont’s novel Marie, examining the concept of the tyranny of the majority in both works. Beaumont corrects Tocqueville’s ... More

This chapter compares Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Gustave de Beaumont’s novel Marie, examining the concept of the tyranny of the majority in both works. Beaumont corrects Tocqueville’s generally favorable view of American democracy by arguing that the United States has reinstituted the caste system of race.Less

Democracy as Modern Religion

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

The second volume of Democracy in America begins with the other question that Tocqueville regarded as crucial: that of public opinion conceived as a form of belief. The chapter in question— “On the ... More

The second volume of Democracy in America begins with the other question that Tocqueville regarded as crucial: that of public opinion conceived as a form of belief. The chapter in question— “On the Principal Source of Beliefs among Democratic Peoples”—deserves to be read carefully because in it Tocqueville sets forth one of his strongest intuitions, but in a complex style that proceeds from paradox to paradox. Tocqueville's intuition is the following: that the “principal source” of what the citizens of a democratic society think takes on the form and power of an authority—an authority that everyone collectively exerts on each individual. But because “everyone” creates this authority without knowing it, individuals find themselves facing an entity that is not fragmented but monolithic and therefore omnipotent. Democratic public opinion becomes the god of modern times, a god strangely immanent in society and with a face that changes daily. This chapter is devoted to the mechanisms of this alienation, which Tocqueville characterizes as “religious.”Less

Resisting the Democratic Tendencies of Language

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This chapter begins by discussing Tocqueville's comments about his own practice of writing and what “writing well” meant to him. It then turns a question that others asked but Tocqueville made ... More

This chapter begins by discussing Tocqueville's comments about his own practice of writing and what “writing well” meant to him. It then turns a question that others asked but Tocqueville made specially his own: Did democracy lack an authoritative institution in intellectual matters? If commerce could proceed on its own thanks to the market, could literature develop on its own and correct its errors by way of competition and interaction? Yet we can also ask whether Tocqueville was right in thinking that modern society, for all its liberty and equality, lacked a literary authority. The remainder of the chapter considers the claim that Tocqueville's aesthetic appealed to a certain idea of “the natural” that exists only thanks to the guardians of taste; and his investigation of the sources of authority in literature. It also argues that in Tocqueville's view, literature continued to have a mission, and its freedom of action was to be encouraged.Less

An Immense and (In)complete Democracy: A Tocquevillean Perspective on India’s Experiment with Democratic Citizenship *

Niraja Gopal Jayal

in Anxieties of Democracy: Tocquevillean Reflections on India and the United States

This chapter examines India’s experience with democratic citizenship by referring to two interrelated aspects of Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument in Democracy in America. The first argument is about ... More

This chapter examines India’s experience with democratic citizenship by referring to two interrelated aspects of Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument in Democracy in America. The first argument is about the relationship between social equality and democracy, and the second is about civil society or the associational sphere for the performance of citizenship. However, neither the equality-democracy thesis nor the theory of citizenship was invoked by Tocqueville in his narrative of the ‘two unlucky races’ or indeed of women. This chapter looks at the Indian constitutional discourse and state policies on comparably disadvantaged groups, including women. Dana Villa has argued that the central distinction for Tocqueville was not between société politique and société civile, but between centralized and local and organizations of power with their implications for politics and participation in public life. This chapter situates the argument about differentiated citizenship in the local.Less

Crumbling Columns and Day-Old Ruins Specters of Antiquity on the American Grand Tour, 1819–1837

in Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919

Ruins can elicit a wide range of responses and representations. This is evident in two contrasting scenes in 1835–1836, the first in Thomas Cole's painting Desolation and the second in Alexis de ... More

Ruins can elicit a wide range of responses and representations. This is evident in two contrasting scenes in 1835–1836, the first in Thomas Cole's painting Desolation and the second in Alexis de Tocqueville's book Democracy in America. In Desolation, the last canvas of his Course of Empire series, Cole portrayed the kinds of classical ruins that adorn the Mediterranean coastline. In the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville described some non-classical ruins discovered in the wilderness of the American interior. These are only “day-old ruins,” the remains of a settlement that was built and abandoned hastily and reclaimed almost as hastily by nature. This article focuses on “inland cities” such as Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo that rose up along the Erie Canal. The canal's unpredictable and fluctuating effects upon the fortunes of settlers, boosters, and town founders may also account for Lake Oneida's ruins.Less

Democracy as Expectation of Material Pleasures

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This chapter deals with the taste for material pleasures that inevitably accompanies the development of democracy. What Tocqueville indiscriminately referred to as the “taste for material pleasures” ... More

This chapter deals with the taste for material pleasures that inevitably accompanies the development of democracy. What Tocqueville indiscriminately referred to as the “taste for material pleasures” or the “passion for well-being” was a phenomenon directly linked to equality, which therefore became characteristic of “democracy.” Here, then, we have a new facet of equality, different from the one encountered previously in decentralized town government in America, where popular sovereignty achieved its concrete realization, and different too from the religion of the Public, in which the citizen is at once strong and weak because he must deal with “increasingly similar and equal men.” Any definition of democracy that does not count pleasure in well-being as its foremost aim will fail to do justice to Tocqueville's thought. What is more remarkable still is the fact that the commentators' embarrassed silence is not a recent phenomenon: no serious analysis of this point can be found even in the first reviews.Less

Tocqueville and the Protestantism of His Time: The Insistent Reality of the Collective

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

For Tocqueville, Protestantism was the historical and cultural source of modern political democracy, He believed that, in social terms, it contributed to the exercise of individual judgment that is ... More

For Tocqueville, Protestantism was the historical and cultural source of modern political democracy, He believed that, in social terms, it contributed to the exercise of individual judgment that is political democracy's indispensable complement. Yet his recognition of Protestantism's due did not lead him to accept the sociological axioms or epistemology of such leading Protestant writers as Alexandre Vinet and Benjamin Constant. This chapter considers examples of texts from the two Swiss authors, who, despite being Swiss, influenced the way in which Democracy in America was read because all cultivated French readers were familiar with them. In 1828, Vinet received a French award for an essay on freedom of religion from the Société de la Morale Chrétienne. By contrast, Constant rattled his audience and seemed to confirm that “Coppet liberalism” was a foreign import.Less

The Discovery of the Collective

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This chapter examines Tocqueville's sociology. In Democracy in America, what is properly called Tocqueville's sociology stems from his conviction that the collective is a specific object of study ... More

This chapter examines Tocqueville's sociology. In Democracy in America, what is properly called Tocqueville's sociology stems from his conviction that the collective is a specific object of study because it obeys distinctive laws of its own. What is original about his analysis is that he showed how individuals in society can achieve a result opposite to that embodied in their image of themselves and their expectations; to “deconstitute,” to borrow Bonald's term, is to create a different constitution: the power of the collective. The originality of Tocqueville's sociology resides entirely in the analysis of this inversion, which makes it impossible to classify him as a “methodological individualist,” as is too often alleged.Less

Counterrevolutionary Traditionalism: A Muffled Polemic

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

In the counterrevolutionary school, it remained an article of faith from the time of the Directory to the end of the nineteenth century that individualism is destructive of the social bond, that it ... More

In the counterrevolutionary school, it remained an article of faith from the time of the Directory to the end of the nineteenth century that individualism is destructive of the social bond, that it is impossible to create a society from individual atoms. This chapter argues that Tocqueville did not believe that one could simply say that individualism destroys the social bond. Although he conceded the point to a certain extent, he was also impressed by the way in which individualistic Americans joined together to form associations, linking their particular interests to the general interest and ultimately creating a society with sovereignty of the people. In contrast to Bonald (who argued that democratic republics are not “constituted”) and de Maistre (who held that a democratic republic is a society without sovereignty and therefore without solidity), Tocqueville thus recognized that society could be constituted in new ways: associations linking public and private, forms of life created by decentralization, avowed or implicit religions, and so forth. But he aimed his criticism primarily at an idea that de Maistre had made famous: “the generative principle (principe générateur) of political constitutions.”Less

Conclusion

Lucien Jaume

in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to show that what sharpened Tocqueville's perception of the ever-present perils of democracy was his ... More

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to show that what sharpened Tocqueville's perception of the ever-present perils of democracy was his aristocratic culture, which he translated into the structuring myth of Democracy in America: namely, the return of the despot. In this light, it is possible to reconsider a problem with which students of Tocqueville have long grappled: Is the “soft” tutelary despotism described at the end of volume 2 incompatible with the view of American democracy set forth in volume 1? Are there in fact “two democracies” and indeed two distinct books, one in conflict with the other?Less

History as Moral Drama

Arthur Kaledin

in Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon

Despite having no training as a historian, Alexis de Tocqueville had an essentially historical imagination and relied on history primarily to understand current political and social issues. He also ... More

Despite having no training as a historian, Alexis de Tocqueville had an essentially historical imagination and relied on history primarily to understand current political and social issues. He also viewed the writing of history as a moral act whose central responsibility was to narrate what had strengthened or weakened liberty, rather than equality. He called his book Democracy in America “un ouvrage philosophico politique” and not a history, yet his analysis of the new world of democracy and his desire to introduce “a new science of politics for a new age” brings up central questions about the meaning and direction of history. On all levels, Democracy in America is a book about the nature of freedom. Tocqueville wrote extensively about François Guizot, a French historian who influenced him intellectually.Less

Conclusion

Arthur Kaledin

in Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville discusses what he perceives as the weaknesses of democracy, including its weak sense of a common good, its permanent cultural and social ... More

In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville discusses what he perceives as the weaknesses of democracy, including its weak sense of a common good, its permanent cultural and social disorder, its inability to make sacrifices for the long-range good, the rise of an anti-intellectual mass culture, and the moral effects of hyperindividualism. He believed that an aristocracy of merit was the necessary antidote to such weaknesses, but it was missing in America and unlikely to appear. Tocqueville laments in the book the serious decline in the quality of political leadership in democratic America since the time of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. He attributes this decline, which was also occurring in his native France, to the dynamics of democratic social and cultural change. Tocqueville provides detailed, critical observations of American politics and culture in the second volume of Democracy in America. These observations were structured in large part by his theoretical analysis of the relationship of “the social state” of a people to their culture and politics.Less