What We Neglect in Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat and one of America’s very best friends, the special, rare kind that tells you the truth. His Democracy in America is quoted often for support, but less often sought for advice. Here are a few points in his great book, often neglected, from which we can learn. (An anniversary is a time to celebrate, but any time is a good time to learn.) 

The meaning of democracy. Many readers today wonder how Tocqueville could speak of “democracy” in 1835, when women had no vote and blacks were enslaved. Tocqueville specifies “equality of conditions” to define democracy, a state in which each individual thinks he has sufficient intelligence to rule himself, resulting in the rule of the majority of such individuals. It’s not that individuals are equal, but that they think they are. Others are held to be “similar” to oneself, neither inferior nor superior. Democracy is not a self-evident truth taken from nature’s God but a plausible convention held to be true. Democracy can become more equal — give women the vote and abolish slavery — when the majority rules it to happen, but the majority can also accept imperfections and inequalities if it wishes and still remain democratic. Such inequalities, for example offices filled by elections, often make democracy work better. Even in its normal functioning, even when officials have powers unequal to those of citizens, democracy has hidden aristocratic aspects necessary to its good functioning.

Democracy and aristocracy. Tocqueville — an aristocrat himself, living just after the French Revolution — knew the contrast between the Old Regime and the democratic future that he found in America in a way we cannot today. For us there is only one way to live justly and reasonably — in democracy. Even the hateful regimes we know, such as communism and Nazism, are perversions of democracy. Tocqueville refers to the “providential fact” that democracy in our time is inescapable, but he explains democracy to itself in constant contrast with its rival, aristocracy.

Of the two regimes, democracy is more spontaneous, as it arises naturally from individuals’ need of others to help them live (the famous township government he describes). And as it depends on consent, it has more justice than aristocracy. But aristocracy has heroism and higher, more resplendent virtues to display, and in its day it had greater legitimacy because it depended on myths that gave everyone a fixed status and sustained belief in tradition and divinity. Democracy, more reasonable, lives with doubt rather than belief, since all think themselves equal and no one can claim unquestioned authority. Doubt brings democratic peoples either to obey what they question or to impose what they know others question: either tyrannized or tyrannical. The most likely abuse of democratic freedom is the “tyranny of the majority,” in America enslavement of a race (shown in the first volume of the book) and “democratic despotism” over the mind (in the second).

Human greatness. Aristocracy aims at greatness; democracy tends to be satisfied with mediocrity, which is closer to equality. We today hardly discuss greatness, and our democratic theorists do not mention it, even though we commonly speak of great presidents and have just had a president who said he wanted to make America great again. Tocqueville addresses “the true friends of liberty and human greatness,” implying that they are connected. Human greatness is not America’s alone, and it seems to call for undemocratic inequality. Yet Tocqueville notes that America found a certain commercial greatness in the voyages of the Yankee clippers, and today, looking back at the 20th century, Americans can see that it was ordinary “doughboys” and “GIs” and “grunts” whose greatness in war saved free civilization for humanity. If freedom is to be gained and kept, it needs a spirit of sacrifice and vigilance that Tocqueville found modeled in the resistance of the medieval nobility to kings, not in John Locke’s arguments for equality.

Materialism is the argument for equality not only of humans but of all things. In America it appears in the form of a love of material well-being, a softening of desire, neither ruthless nor aggressive, that takes the edge off pride and makes people eager to do business. Americans are not great sinners, nor are they lawless, like individuals in the “state of nature” of the great liberal philosophers. Tocqueville reproaches them for indulging in permitted, not forbidden, pleasures. Material­ism is promoted by democratic intellectuals, resembling today’s social scientists, who describe the behavior of democratic individuals in scientific studies as being caused by large social forces over which they have no control — “systemic racism” or “radical feminism.”

The soul. As against democratic materialism, Tocqueville fashions a democracy of soul. He retains this feature of Christianity and classical philosophy — one might also say of common sense — representing an individual’s awareness of being free. Today one hears of people who claim to be woke, by which they do not mean the state of having discovered one’s material interest.

“Self-interest well understood” is Tocqueville’s well-known formula for what Americans believe is their typical motivation. He is not happy with that, and he suggests that they would do better to take pride in their virtue and in the souls that form it. Self-interest can lead one to submit to the despotism of majority opinion, always a danger in democracy, but virtue reinforced by pride will bring one to stand up for one’s freedom. Self-interest shows the easy way out; virtue offers the thrill of taking a risk and the satisfaction of having nobly won or lost. Democracy is made noble and great with the aristocratic notion of soul.

Individual rights are elevated by the effort of standing or speaking up for them oneself, as opposed to receiving them by gift or favor from someone else. It is the business of government to secure them, not award them, and to do so with the cooperation of those who benefit rather than as a gift from on high. Being individual, rights may be combined to sustain a majority, but Tocqueville ends his great work by insisting that in a democracy, their main exercise is to protect individuals from the tyranny of democratic society. To call something “democratic” is not enough to recommend it, because the greatest danger to democracy comes from within democracy.