SOURCE: "The Problem of Democracy," in Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Stanford University Press, 1967, pp. 41-84.

[In this excerpt, Zetterbaum examines Tocqueville's attempts to reconcile the seemingly contradictory concepts of equality and individuality, justice and excellence, in modern democracy.]

Even if democracy is the only just social condition, it need not coincide with a condition of human excellence; it is not necessarily conducive to what is highest in man. This observation, along with the tension implied by it between justice and excellence, forced Tocqueville to make a critical choice. Traditionally, justice had been considered equivalent to human excellence, or at least an expression of it. In a striking passage at the end of the Democracy, Tocqueville acquiesces to the modern separation of justice and excellence and accepts the priority of the claim of justice. "A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just: and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty."¹ That justice and excellence should continue to be so separated, however, struck Tocqueville as lamentable, and his efforts were therefore directed toward reintegrating the two within the framework of modern democracy.

Yet this hardly conveys the poignancy of Tocqueville's concern with democracy. After all, a regime in which human greatness was by and large unknown but in which most men lived at a tolerably decent level of humanity might not be the cause of any great despair. But worse is possible. The last words of the Democracy warn that democracy may be accompanied by an unparalleled descent into servitude and barbarism. It is as if the realization of justice on earth and the simultaneous demise of civilization itself were compatible in thought. Bizarre conception!

Tocqueville is concerned to show that the triumph of democracy, of equality of conditions, can and will result in the destruction of civilization unless certain countermeasures are instituted. If the trend toward barbarism is not stopped, man might eventually descend to a condition not far removed from that of the brutes. This possibility is remote, and perhaps not to be taken very seriously. But it is very likely that democratic man's primary concerns will be domestic ones, and that he will be isolated from those outside his family group by an obsession with the means of improving or sustaining his livelihood, by a narrowness of imagination, and by a kind of psychological anxiety that will replace the fear arising from physical dangers in a Hobbesian state of nature. Tocqueville also sees a more attractive side to his nature: when his own security is not at stake, democratic man displays a strong sense of compassion for his fellows. All things considered, Tocqueville's "democratic man," like Rousseau's "natural man," is a sort of prepolitical atavist. What democracy most jeopardizes are the virtues closely associated with a political order: not only patriotism, the habit of acting on what is good for the whole rather than for the individual, but also civil or rational freedom, the ability and the opportunity to participate in the formulation of public policy. The disappearance of patriotism foreshadows the disappearance of the possibility of greatness, for in Tocqueville's vocabulary greatness involves power exercised on a grand scale, with consequences of an enduring character. Elements of greatness might be seen in the restless, energetic activity that so captivated Tocqueville in America, but if the energy of the Americans were to be directed to the commercial rather than the political arena, as Tocqueville predicted it would, the active American scene might appear more as a conglomeration of petty actions initiated by those with petty desires. [The promotion of legislation designed to stimulate such energy had been part of the deliberate intention of Hamilton in 1791. In his Report on Manufactures he had written, "Even things in themselves not positively advantageous sometimes become so by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort." (Hamilton, IV, 94.) Tocqueville would no doubt have argued that such legislation only encouraged or elicited what was latent in the democratic spirit itself.]

Tocqueville's understanding of democratic man may be based largely on Rousseau, but his portrayal of democratic man was drawn from his study of America. Hence, a study of Tocqueville must inquire into the intellectual significance for him of his visit to America.

[The visit, as Pierson has pointed out (pp. 12ff), had political significance as well: it was a handy escape from certain embarrassments following the July Revolution of 1830.] According to his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, the questions that appear to have arisen as a result of the visit to America were actually present in Tocqueville's mind before it:

The great problems, which were to be the business of his life, which he would one day go to a new world to study, already rose to his mind. How to reconcile equality, which separates and isolates men, with liberty? How to prevent a power, the offspring of democracy, from becoming absolute and tyrannical? Where to find a force able to contend against this power among a set of men all equal, it is true, but all equally weak and impotent? Was the fate of modern society to be both democracy and despotism? ²

Tocqueville's choice of America as a model reflected his belief that America had solved many of the problems of democracy that still occupied France at the time. When he begins his work on the old regime and the French Revolution, it is as a physician addressing a patient whose prognosis is uncertain.³ France is sick; America is healthy. It is not only that France had not recovered from the effects of her revolution: as Tocqueville was fond of repeating, the end of her revolution was not yet in sight.

Instead of looking to Rousseau for the principles of their regime, as the French did, the Americans looked to the good doctor Locke and his common-sense commercialism. Tocqueville is like Rousseau in his concern with virtue and citizenship, believing with him that these are the characteristics most likely to be lost in contemporary society. Hence, perhaps paradoxically, the appropriateness of America as a model. It was not that the Americans were vice-ridden, or irreligious, or unpatriotic, for by and large they were not; but the cultivation or inducement of virtue was not the function of their regime, and in this respect America was a model of a modern democracy. Other regimes, most notably that of the French during the Revolution, had not divested themselves of the impulse toward moral reformation. It is in this sense that Tocqueville could describe America as "the image of democracy itself." ⁴

Concomitant with the explicit contrast in Tocqueville's writings between modern democracy and feudal aristocracy is a less explicit but by no means insignificant contrast between ancient and modern democracy. Tocqueville completely rejects the relevance to modern problems of classical political experience, particularly that of the democracies of antiquity:

When I compare the Greek and Roman Republics with these American states; the manuscript libraries of the former, and their rude population, with the innumerable journals and the enlightened people of the latter; when I remember all the attempts that are made to judge the modern republics by the aid of those of antiquity, and to infer what will happen in our time from what took place two thousand years ago, I am tempted to burn my books in order to apply none but novel ideas to so novel a condition of society. ⁵

What is it that warrants his rejection? To begin with, there is the alleged irrelevance of the political experience of small city-states. Most of the literature up to the modern era had maintained that a decent democracy (i.e., one compatible with virtue) was possible only within the confines of a small area. But in the modern era this limitation was overcome through the mechanism of representation—a major breakthrough. Tocqueville, in his address on Cherbuliez's "Democracy in Switzerland," sounded the death knell of the small state organized as a pure democracy: "The pure democracies of Switzerland belong to another age; they can teach nothing about the present or the future. . . . Each century has its dominating spirit which nothing can resist. . . . One must consider the small governments of the Swiss cantons as the last and respectable debris of a world that is no longer." [Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes (Mayer), I, Part 2, 356. No less a figure than John Stuart Mill acknowledged his indebtedness to Tocqueville for having first demonstrated to him the impossibility of a pure democracy in the modern age. (Mill, Autobiography, pp. 161-62.)]

The representative principle, Tocqueville suggests, might work to mitigate evils traditionally associated with democracy. For example, he rejects the hypothesis that the citizenry of democratic regimes will experience volatile changes in their opinions and feelings. He remarks that this hypothesis "may be true of small democratic nations, like those of the ancient world, in which the whole community could be assembled in a public place and then excited at will by an orator," but he finds no evidence that the hypothesis may be applicable to America.⁶ Behind the apparent mobility of opinion in America, in fact, is a remarkable and even depressing stability of opinions about religion, morality, and politics; the mobility itself extends only to details, or to new consequences flowing from old convictions.

Nevertheless, the importance of size (and correspondingly, of the principle of representation) can be exaggerated. If representatives are but little better than their constituents, the hoped-for improvement in the government of democracies may come almost to naught. Tocqueville warns that "it may well be believed that in the end the delegate will conform to the principles of his constituents and favor their propensities as much as their interests."⁷ Without discounting entirely the significance of the representative system, we may affirm that its development was not responsible for the alleged superiority of modern over classical democracy, nor for reducing the classical experience to a matter of merely antiquarian interest.

Of Tocqueville's belief in the superiority of modern democracy there is little question. In his disparagement of classical democracy he goes so far as to deny even the applicability of the term "democracy" to the ancient republics, Athens in particular.

What was called the People in the most democratic republics of antiquity was very unlike what we designate by that term. In Athens all the citizens took part in public affairs; but there were only twenty thousand citizens to more than three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. All the rest were slaves, and discharged the greater part of those duties which belong at the present day to the lower or even to the middle classes. Athens, then, with her universal suffrage, was, after all, merely an aristocratic republic, in which all the nobles had an equal right to the government. [Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 65. In his rejection of the relevance of classical democracy, Tocqueville anticipated the work of Fustel de Coulanges, who less than a decade after Tocqueville's death was to make the same point in his own classic, The Ancient City (p. II): "Having imperfectly observed the institutions of the ancient city, men have dreamed of reviving them among us. They have deceived themselves about the liberty of the ancients, and on this very account liberty among the moderns has been put in peril. The last eighty years have clearly shown that one of the great difficulties which impede the march of modern society is the habit which it has of always keeping Greek and Roman antiquity before its eyes."]

It is the institution of slavery then, that distinguishes ancient democracy from modern. "[The] different effects of slavery and freedom may readily be understood; and they suffice to explain many of the differences which we notice between the civilization of antiquity and that of our own time."⁸ A civilization in which only a few are free can offer no guidance to one in which all are. Classical democracy had not understood the principle of freedom. "The most profound and capacious minds of Rome and Greece were never able to reach the idea, at once so general and so simple, of the common likeness of men and of the common birthright of each to freedom [du droit égal que chacun d'eux apporte, en naissant, à la liberté]', they tried to prove that slavery was in the order of nature and that it would always exist." Tocqueville attributes the acceptance of the idea of the natural equality of all men as originating in the teaching of Christ.⁹ Curiously, despite Christianity's triumph, until the modern age no republic had been erected on a foundation of natural rights. This development could not occur until the political implication of the idea of equality—that every man must enjoy the right of participation in his government—was understood. Tocqueville recognizes that this enlargement of the original concept is "wholly modern" and that "it alone is sufficient to constitute a great difference between our times and all that has preceded."¹⁰ Thus, what is new in modern times is the recognition of the right of all to citizenship; in America, this idea of the sovereignty of all has been most nearly realized. It was in America, Tocqueville says, looking back, that "the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past."¹¹ America is thus the regime in which the consequences of the idea of equality, among them the equal participation of all in the processes of government, may best be studied.

"Another point demonstrated by America is that virtue is not, as it has long been pretended, the only thing which can preserve Republics, but that enlightenment more than anything else facilitates that social state. The Americans are hardly more virtuous than others, but they are infinitely better educated (I speak of the mass) than any other people of my acquaintance." [Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 258 (italics mine). The enlightment of which Tocqueville speaks refers to the practice by Americans of the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. Cf. Aron, pp. 177-78: "Ancient republics were egalitarian, but virtuous.... Modem democracy, as seen by Tocqueville, is fundamentally a commercial and industrial society. . . . One can therefore say that the principle . . . of modem democracy . . . is self-interest, and not virtue."]

We may say, then, that in Tocqueville's view great progress has occurred since classical times. Classical democracy was deficient in its failure to understand the principle of freedom, in its misjudgment of the possibilities latent in a reliance upon self-interest, and in its Periclean insistence on the paramount role of virtue. In modern times, the Christian concept of the equality of all men has been adopted as the foundation of government, and in education of a particular kind a substitute has been found for the classical training in virtue.

Despite the apparent irrelevance of classical democracy, Tocqueville points out one respect in which its success reproaches the modern world. Classical democracy had been characterized by public-spiritedness, while in the modern world individualism has eroded the justification for devoting oneself to the public realm. According to Tocqueville, patriotism was "the passion that constituted the life of the nations of antiquity." ¹²

Till I reflected upon the present behavior of our armies, I thought that there was much exaggeration in the accounts handed down to us of the public virtues of the ancients. I could not understand how the men of those days were capable of them. For, after all, man is the same in every age. The everyday conduct of our armies explains the mystery. Civil society was at that time constituted as military society is now. The men of those days, as individuals, were not better than we are; in private life they were probably worse. But in public life they were subjected to an organization, a discipline, a prevailing opinion; to fixed customs and traditions, which forced them to a conduct different from our. ¹³

The everyday conduct of armies, as Tocqueville makes clear in the letter just quoted, results not from respect for equal rights, but from the imposition and acceptance of obligations and duties. In altering the basis of the franchise for participation in public life from virtue or duty to rights, modern democracy has damped the forces that make patriotism flourish. Not only does the doctrine of natural rights tend to weaken the traditional forces of social cohesion; it also subjects the state to the onerous task of justifying, to an unprecedented degree, the demands it typically makes of its citizenry. This is the first intimation we have that the progress from classical to modern times has been accompanied by consequences that may make it equivocal.

The problematic character of this progress is indicated also by the responsibility Christianity itself apparently bears for its part in undermining the spirit of patriotism. Contrasting pagan religion with Christianity, Tocqueville notes:

The pagan religions of antiquity were always more or less linked up with the political institutions and the social order of their environment, and their dogmas were conditioned to some extent by the interests of the nations, or even the cities, where they flourished. A pagan religion functioned within the limits of a given country and rarely spread beyond its frontiers. . . . Christianity, however, made light of all the barriers which had prevented the pagan religions from spreading . . . and partly owed its triumph to the fact that, far more than any other religion, it was catholic in the exact sense, having no links with any specific form of government, social order, period, or nation. [Tocqueville, Old Régime, p. 12. Cf. Tocqueville's letter to Mme. Swetchine of October 20, 1856: "Without doubt, Christianity can exist under every government. This is an evidence of its truth. It never has been bound, and never will be bound, to any form of government, or to the grandeur of any single nation." (Memoir, II, 333.) On the question of the relationship of Christianity to the decline in public virtue, Tocqueville wrote to Prince Albert de Broglie: "How is it that the Christian religion, which has in so many respects improved individuals and advanced our race, has exercised, especially in the beginning, so little influence over the progress of society? Why is it that in proportion as men become more humane, more just, more temperate, more chaste, they seem everyday more and more indifferent to public virtue; so much so that the great family of the nation seems more corrupt, more base, and more tottering while every little individual family is better regulated? . . . This contrast . . . between Christian virtues and what I call public virtue, has frequently reappeared. There is nothing which seems to me so difficult of explanation, when we consider that God, and after Him his revelation, are the foundations, or rather the sources, of all virtues, the practice of which is necessary in the different states of mankind." (Letter of July 20, 1856, Memoir, II, 317.)]

The civil support that the republics of antiquity received from parochial religions is denied modern republics, for the doctrine of their religion transcends national boundaries. In practice, this ultimate implication of Christianity has more often than not been tempered by injunctions to render unto Caesar his due. Moreover, it might be argued that the effectiveness of Christian doctrine in weakening the ties of public virtue could not be fully experienced until the concept of the equality of all men had been given a this-worldly orientation, and that for this reorientation Christianity itself could not be held responsible. Yet the tension created by the demands of Christianity on the one hand and those of patriotism on the other becomes one of Tocqueville's principal concerns. "The organization and establishment of democracy in Christendom," he had written in the Democracy, "is the great political problem of our times." ¹⁴

Investigating Tocqueville's turn to America has dis-closed, I believe, that he conceives political life in our time as being composed of elements that have undergone radical transformation since their ancient inception. He confronts feudal aristocracy with democracy on the basis of a rejection of classical democracy, a rejection made in the name of freedom, natural rights, and Christianity. The paganism of antiquity has been replaced by Christianity, and the sovereignty of the few by the natural sovereignty of all. But the public-spiritedness of antiquity has been succeeded by the self-interest and individual concern of the modern age, and the spirit of enlightenment has taken the role once filled by virtue. Modern democracy is not, after all, unequivocally superior to its classical predecessor. Almost all the problems Tocqueville confronts—equality, freedom, self-interest, virtue, patriotism, and religion—have their counterpart in the classical experience, an experience that does not provide any clear solution. The locus of these problems in the modern world was America. America was the archetype of a Christian democracy, a democracy of a wholly new kind.

Tocqueville's turn to America also reflects a methodological commitment. His approach to the study of politics departs from the method of the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who began their inquiries with the study of man simply (for example, man in the state of nature), irrespective of his citizenship in a given regime. Tocqueville, like Burke before him, avoids the abstractness of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and embraces instead the concrete, the political. This does not prevent him from generalizing about the nature of man and the human condition, but his generalizations appear to derive from his research into a particular, actual, human situation.

His study of politics begins with an inquiry into one facet of that human situation, namely, social condition:

Social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but when once established, it may justly be considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations: whatever it does not produce, it modifies. If we would become acquainted with the legislation and the manners of a nation, therefore, we must begin by the study of its social condition. ¹⁵

The two volumes of Democracy in America are explicitly devoted to an exposition of the way in which a particular social condition has made itself felt, both in the political institutions of America and in the customs, manners, and intellectual habits of its citizens. Social condition is the appropriate focus of attention, according to Tocqueville, not only because it is the condition that characterizes the regime, but also because (in classical terminology) it is the principle that sets the regime in motion. In a fundamental sense, it is the cause of a regime's having its own particular characteristics. This is not to say that social condition explains everything about a society: antecedent customs, geographical factors, and the like also shape the regime. But these secondary factors will never conceal or frustrate the operation of the fundamental moving principle for long. Social condition forms opinions and modifies passions and feelings; it determines the goals pursued, the type of man admired, the language in use, and, ultimately, the character of the men who live under it.

Tocqueville's comprehensive analysis of the way in which the principle of a regime impresses itself on every aspect of life under that regime—so that the differences between regimes can be stated in terms of the differences in their principles—is classical in its approach. In his mode of analysis, at least, Tocqueville, following Montesquieu, returns to classical models. Tocqueville's indebtedness to Montesquieu in this respect does not prevent him from taking exception to certain views he associates with Montesquieu: he denies, for example, that nations "obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events—from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country."¹⁶ But he shares with Montesquieu, as well as with Plato and Aristotle, the view that the springs that set regimes in motion—honor, courage, wisdom, fear, equality—may be said to be their causes. It is true that for all practical purposes Tocqueville considers only two such principles, equality and inequality; but he looks on equality and inequality as the extremes of the spectrum of social and political principles that motivate every regime. His works are thus intended to convey his reflections about political things as such, not merely his understanding of democracy. In point of fact, of course, it is through his awareness of aristocracy as the ultimate political alternative that he is able to take the measure of democracy itself.

Two obstacles apparently stand in the way of our coming to grips immediately with Tocqueville's understanding of democracy. In the first place, Tocqueville has been roundly criticized not only for equating democracy with equality of conditions, that is, for confusing an idea with a social fact, but even more so for using the term democracy imprecisely throughout Democracy in America. [Pierson, for example (pp. 104, 451, 459), counts seven or eight different senses in which it is used. There is an excellent discussion of this point in Lively, pp. 49-50; see also the essay by Phillips Bradley in Democracy, II, 407-8.] This is startling: Tocqueville himself (in the very same work) inveighs against those who use a word ambiguously, and dreads that "the meaning of a word in our own language should become indeterminate."¹⁷ It would be surprising if he were to fail to apply these standards to the most important term he uses. He could be precise about the meaning of democracy, as is demonstrated in his notes for the final volume of the European Revolution:

We . . . live in an inextricable confusion of ideas, to the great advantage of demagogues and of despots. . . . [Democracy] can mean only one thing in the true sense . . . a government where the people more or less participate in their government. Its sense is intimately bound to the idea of political liberty. To give the democratic epithet to a government where there is no political liberty is a palpable absurdity, since this departs from the natural meaning of these words. ¹⁸

But in the Democracy Tocqueville does precisely what he here condemns: he speaks of democratic liberty as well as of democratic tyranny. Yet before we conclude that such inconsistency can only be understood as a serious lapse on his part, we would do well to consider his purpose in the Democracy: to show men how they may be both equal and free. The danger was that men might achieve equality at the price of freedom. By not making democracy synonymous with any institutional form associated with it, by not restricting the range of its meaning to the political arena (government of the people, representative government, separation of powers) Tocqueville underscored his fear that democracy as most men understood it—namely, participation by the many in the act of sovereignty—was compatible with tyranny as well as with liberty. More precisely, tyranny could coexist with what appeared to be democratic institutions. A regime could not be understood solely in terms of its political foundations. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who believed that the gradual development of equality meant the gradual but final destruction of the possibility of tyranny on earth, Tocqueville understood that the democratic principle could lead to a despotism never before experienced.

The second obstacle has to do with the criticism of those who despair at the carelessness with which Tocqueville tends to confuse and confound democratic things with things peculiarly American. Bryce, for example, asserts that in practice Tocqueville "underrates the purely local and special features of America, and often . . . treats it as a norm for democracy in general."¹⁹ That Tocqueville is not unmindful of this difficulty is indicated by his repeated warnings not to confuse democracy with American practice, and it is with his warning in mind that we must approach Democracy in America. To take an obvious example, equality of conditions had not determined the geographical setting of the United States, but the Americans' disposition to deal with their physical environment in one way rather than in another was in large measure determined by the character they had acquired through the operation of equality of conditions. A people in whom the acquisitive instinct had been unleashed by the democratic principle would and did regard the gifts of nature in a different manner than would their neighbors living under different regimes. ²⁰

Unfortunately, Tocqueville's awareness of the need to distinguish democratic things from American things as such does not relieve the reader of the responsibility for making this distinction himself. Tocqueville devotes one chapter in the Democracy to problems, such as relations between the races in the United States, that are specifically "American without being democratic."²¹ In this chapter he characterizes as "American" certain attitudes—such as the emphasis on self-interest, natural rights, continual change, and perfectibility—that he either has or will subsequently (in the second volume) come to identify with the nature of democracy itself. ²²

Three conclusions about his procedure seem warranted. First, that he fails, in part, to make proper distinctions. Second, that acknowledging this much we may nevertheless agree with Lively that Tocqueville's concern with American things was wholly subordinate to his concern with democracy.²³ (Hence, insofar as I am explicating Tocqueville, I shall deal primarily with the latter concern.) Third, that so forewarned, we should not be surprised to find very pregnant material for an understanding of democracy itself in his discussions of matters that are put forward as American only, as in the case of the chapter on race relations.

We are, perhaps, too prone to accept it as a matter of course that equality (and ultimately equality of conditions) should be the principle of democracy. The demands for equality in the civil rights struggle of the Fifties and Sixties seem to confirm our own identification of democracy with certain conceptions of equality. And yet it has not always been so. We have only to go back to Montesquieu, to whom Tocqueville is explicitly indebted, to find the proposition that the principle of democracy is virtue, or a kind of public-spiritedness—although even Montesquieu regards approximate economic equality as indispensable to any democracy. The classical objections to democracy arose from the belief that democratic aspirations based on claims of equality diminished the likelihood of a regime of virtue, understood either as patriotism or as any other form of excellence. It is interesting to note that Aristotle, whom Tocqueville found "too antiquated" for his taste, came very close to Tocqueville's conception of democracy.²⁴ "The underlying idea of the democratic type of constitution," Aristotle tells us, "is liberty." This liberty has two facets—one political, one social—which derive from the concept of equality. On the political side, each citizen, whatever his merit and however firm his devotion to the common good, must count as one, and each must rule and be ruled in turn. On the social side, each citizen must be allowed to live as he sees fit—a demand Aristotle recognizes as the ideal of "freedom from any interference of government." Should the ideal fail—should freedom from government as well as freedom from any responsibility for government prove unattainable—then, Aristotle says, democratic men will settle for nothing less than "such freedom as comes from the interchange of ruling and being ruled."²⁵ They will not permit a settled, fixed order of rule. Inevitably, the distinction between those who care for the common good and those who do not would be rejected as an improper criterion for use in selecting men for high office; freedom (or equality) would be completely divorced from virtue. The end would be national disaster.

Intended or not, this description is surely a caricature of any actual democratic regime. Selection by lot may be resorted to in trivial matters, but no regime could survive if the principle of equality were not mitigated at some point and in some way by the claims of virtue. Montesquieu's identification of the democratic principle with virtue may thus be understood as the minimum precondition for turning democracy into a viable regime. But Montesquieu had also discovered that at least one contemporary quasi-popular regime had found in the pursuit of self-centered acquisitive goals a modern substitute for virtue. The full growth of the commercial spirit in England had made possible a regime that was not only viable, but in which the arts and sciences flourished.²⁶ Tocqueville and Montesquieu may have differed over whether England or America was the better example of a regime in which self-interest took the place of virtue, but they agree completely that the modern world made it possible to gain an entirely new understanding of democracy. The discovery of a substitute for virtue, moreover, had the effect of unshackling equality: freed from the restraints traditionally imposed on it, equality makes its appearance, perhaps for the first time, with an unabashed claim to be the sole principle of democracy. Few have captured the sense of Tocqueville's conception of equality as well as Faguet:

Tocqueville never defined Democracy, but he made it everywhere apparent what he meant by the word. To him it is the need which man feels, not by any means to suppress government, but to suppress hierarchy. What annoys man is not the fact of being governed but of being dominated, so to speak, menaced; not of having to obey but of having to respect; not of being restrained but of having to bow down; not of being a slave but of being inferior. This sentiment is neither good nor bad; it is natural and it is eternal. ²⁷

In emphasizing equality of conditions rather than equal-ity per se, Tocqueville not only reveals his methodological revulsion from certain types of abstractions, but makes a more important point, by calling attention to a state of society in which the concept of equality has been put into practice. It is a state of society in which men confront each other when their equality has been lifted from the pages of the philosophers and made real to them in equal opportunities for education, in a general leveling of wealth, in equality before the law, and in the uniform assurance of political rights. Above all, it is a state of society characterized by the absence of permanent hierarchical arrangements, whether political, social, or economic. Obviously, such a state does not preclude the formation of distinctions between men based on differences of wealth, education, or the like; but in principle at least, and to a remarkable degree in practice, each man in such a society counts equally. Tocqueville did not regard America, or any regime, as one in which the principle of equality had been fully put into practice, but America approximated this condition for him more than any other regime. In one of his notebooks, he summarized the state of things as he viewed them:

Men in America, as with us, are ranked according to certain categories by the give and take of social life: common habits, education, and especially wealth establish these classifications; but these rules are neither absolute, nor inflexible, nor permanent. They establish passing distinctions and by no means form classes properly so called; they give no superiority, even in thought, to one man over another. So that although two men may never see each other in the same drawing-rooms, if they meet outside, they meet without pride on one side or envy on the other. At bottom they feel themselves to be, and they are, equal. ²⁸

Tocqueville's observations on democratic society have been reproduced, summarized, criticized, and made the object of further research and inquiry down to the present day. Their own fame, together with the profusion of secondary materials, renders unnecessary any detailed recounting of all his insights into the ways of democracy. The primary features need to be set forth; the individual ramifications must be passed over. However loath one may be, for example, to suppress Tocqueville's judgment that the education of women in a democracy may make them "cold and virtuous" instead of "affectionate wives and agreeable companions," one cannot very well equate this with his reflections on, say, the tyranny of the majority. ²⁹

The characteristic feature of democratic society is its atomism. Gone are the carefully prescribed codes, predominantly legal and contractual, that governed relations between the three classes of society in aristocratic times. Gone are the economic and social barriers that kept those classes distinct, but gone also is the sense of cohesiveness and responsibility that made aristocratic society an organic whole. "Aristocracy," Tocqueville tells us, "made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it."³⁰ The citizens of a democratic society have no natural ties to one another; each being the equal of every other, no one is obliged to be responsive to the needs or commands of another; nor is he, typically, except when his own interests are at stake. Each citizen preserves a sense of his own separateness, independence, and equality. He is, one might say, the center of a tiny private universe consisting of himself and his immediate circle of family and friends. Wholly absorbed in this universe, he loses sight of that greater universe, society at large.

According to Tocqueville, the cause of the atomism of democratic ages lies in the spread of "individualism," which he defines as a disposition to reject the legitimacy of any obligation or article of faith that has not been submitted to personal inquiry. The word, Tocqueville reminds us, is of recent origin; it is a word "to which a novel idea has given birth." Since its roots are intellectual, it must be distinguished from selfishness, the exaggerated love of self that originates "in blind instinct."³¹ Selfishness is coeval with man; individualism can be traced to a philosophic doctrine arising at a specific time and place. The spiritual father of individualism is Descartes, whose philosophic method supplies the example and the justification for submitting all theories and beliefs to private judgment. In his chapter on the philosophic method of the Americans, Tocqueville describes a revolution of the mind whose consequences parallel those of the overthrow of feudalism:

In the sixteenth century reformers subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to the scrutiny of private judgment; but they still withheld it from the discussion of all the rest. In the seventeenth century Bacon in the natural sciences and Descartes in philosophy properly so called abolished received formulas, destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the schools. The philosophers of the eighteenth century, generalizing at length on the same principle, undertook to submit to the private judgment of each man all the objects of his belief. ³²

Descartes, though he had chosen to apply his method only to certain matters, "had made it fit to be applied to all."

What is the relation between individualism and equality of conditions? Which is cause, and which effect? Actually, they are not related causally. Whatever the ultimate causes of each, in democratic ages they complement each other. Democratic conditions encourage every man to seek within himself for an understanding of the world about him. The traditional sources of such an understanding—custom, one's superiors, one's forefathers, one's social class, even the inherited wisdom of religion or philosophy—have all lost their aura of authority. There is little choice but to fall back on one's own resources. Equality of conditions is thus responsible for the ready and widespread acceptance of individualism, and individualism is a welcome ally of democracy in its attempts to overturn the social and political restraints of the Middle Ages.

Tocqueville's attitude toward the new doctrine appears to be straightforwardly negative: "Individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment . . . it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart." ³³This is readily accounted for by his fear that excessive enthusiasm for individualism may carry societies to the brink of dissolution. A sense of community is built upon tradition and custom, whose strength is directly proportional to the degree to which they are not subjected to individual inquiry. America, for example, has been spared the effects of extreme individualism by the fortuitous persistence of religious beliefs that act to unite the nation and to confine speculation within salutary limits.

Still, no liberal (and Tocqueville considers himself one) could possibly be altogether critical of individualism. In fact, Tocqueville goes to great lengths to defend and encourage the positive results of the new spirit of inquiry and independence. Another unfortunate thing about individualism, however, is that it seems to generate a kind of dialectic of its own, which, when it has proceeded to its conclusion, eventuates in authoritarianism. Though this authoritarianism is surely different in origin and character from that against which individualism originally rebelled, it is a form of authoritarianism nonetheless.

. . . I perceive how, under the dominion of certain laws, democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which a democratic social condition is favorable; so that, after having broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or by men, the human mind would be closely fettered to the general will of the greatest number.

If the absolute power of a majority were to be substituted by democratic nations for all the different powers that checked or retarded overmuch the energy of individual minds, the evil would only have changed character. . . . For myself, when I feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know who oppresses me. . . , ³⁴

Thus, if democracy is to survive, or if it is to fulfill the expectations that may be held of it, individualism as a social force must have its anti-societal tendencies neutralized (it must cease to act as the solvent of society), and society in turn must be rendered incapable of destroying the independence that individualism fosters. Individualism must be weakened or transformed, but not made impotent. What is needed is a salutary individualism.

In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau had observed that the love of well-being, the desire for the material comforts that make life something more than a struggle for mere subsistence, was the exclusive motive of human behavior.³⁵ Tocqueville is less concerned with ascertaining whether it is man's prime desire than he is with describing the special force it takes on when linked with individualism and equality of conditions. It is, he admits, a "natural and instinctive" desire; as such, it is more or less present in every man, but in most men it lives a kind of marginal existence until a social condition arises that allows it to assert itself to the fullest. Equality of conditions renders the passion for well-being "peculiarly intense," infuses it into "the heart of every man," and makes it "the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times."³⁶ If equality of conditions is accompanied, as indeed it is, by skepticism about eventual heavenly rewards, it is only logical that most men should become attached "to the only prospects that remain before them, to the benefits of this world." ³⁷

The liberation of the drive for well-being has far-reach-ing political and social consequences. Under the conditions of the old regime, the disparity of wealth and well-being had been accepted as part of the natural order of things. The few who had had the opportunity as well as the right to enjoy creature comforts had managed to satisfy their desires in a way that also left them free to develop other pursuits. Confident that the wealth they enjoyed would not at any moment be seized from them, the nobility could, for example, turn their attention to studies in the arts and sciences, as well as to the tasks of government. With the overthrow of the feudal system and the advent of individualism, well-being was seen as a natural right of all men. Democracy, then, must satisfy the desire for well-being not of a few, but of all; but unless it is prepared to abandon the communal and cultural achievements that elevate men, it must fulfill this demand in a way that will induce some men, at least, to devote a part of their energies to other concerns.

Taking a cue from feudal times, we might see a solution if material goods could be produced to the extent that no one need fear getting a smaller share than he desired, or if democratic man could learn to moderate his desires. Even so, we would still have to assume that with the acquisition of his share a man would typically turn his attention to other matters. Tocqueville appears to hold two conflicting views on the likelihood of solving the problem. At first, he seems confident that the search for physical gratification will be kept within modest bounds. Democratic man is not one to build sumptuous monuments to his sensuality, to wear out his life in continual acts of depravity. His is rather a simple search for the little comforts of life: to acquire the means to render life less arduous, perhaps to purchase and plant a few more acres of land, or to enlarge his dwelling. "In democratic society the sensuality of the public has taken a moderate and tranquil course. . . ." Tocqueville's reproach to the principle of equality is not that it encourages men to pursue criminal gratifications, "but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those that are allowed. By these means a kind of honest materialism may ultimately be established in the world, [a materialism] that would not corrupt, but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action." The sudden, dramatic and violent rejection of religion, morality, and property that had erupted in 1789 was but a temporary attitude, characteristic only of a revolutionary period; it should not be thought of as a permanent characteristic of democratic eras. Democratic man's desire for well-being is not only compatible with morality and public order, but may even require them. It may even be combined with "a species of religious morality." Nevertheless, Tocqueville is apprehensive lest in the pursuit of well-being democratic men "lose sight of those more precious possessions that constitute the glory and the greatness of mankind." ³⁸

Although democracy thus may be accompanied by the neglect of what is highest in man, at least it will provide a modest well-being for the greatest number. This is the virtue Tocqueville celebrates in his famous conclusion to the second part of the Democracy. But an insatiable thirst for even modest comforts may generate great economic problems: where will the goods come from? Moreover, Tocqueville's account of the characteristic restraint with which democratic man exercises his taste for well-being ("to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, to enlarge a dwelling, to be always making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble . . .")³⁹ is in striking contrast with the image of democratic man in America given just a few pages later:

In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. . . . Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him. ⁴⁰

The second account more accurately depicts Tocqueville's view of what occurs when all avenues to the satisfaction of the desire for well-being are opened, but opened equally to all. The competition is terrific. However much a man may have, he thinks continually of the vast store of goods that constantly eludes him, a thought that "fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation."⁴¹ A materialistic hedonism thus can only bring unhappiness, not pleasure; in turn, there can be no technological solution to the problem of well-being. The desires of men increase as they are gratified; there can never be enough for all.

This unexpected shift from a virtuous or decent materialism to a more or less thoroughgoing hedonism results from the rise of the commercial spirit—commerce being seen as the most effective means of satisfying the taste for well-being. Commerce readily transforms the simple desire for modest comforts into a caricature of its former self. Commerce and manufacture not only intensify the desire for well-being, but impart a peculiar tone to the whole society:

All men who live in democratic times more or less contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes; their minds take a serious, deliberate, and positive turn; they are apt to relinquish the ideal in order to pursue some visible and proximate object which appears to be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. Thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of earth. ⁴²

Commerce comes to be regarded as the noblest of all pursuits, and beguiles the faculties of the most able men in society. It offers for their exertions a grander and more challenging theater than politics. Men of superior intellect are thus diverted from politics to business, from public life to private affairs, there finding not only grand opportunities, but freedom from the conformity and vulgarity of political life as well. But even more is at stake than the loss of the ablest minds from public service. In a democratic society each man habitually thinks of himself and his family only; when, if ever, he thinks of the nation, it is solely as an instrument for the protection of his quest for material gain. The spirit of commerce even makes him regard all society as an oversize commercial enterprise, to be conducted along the same lines and in accordance with the same exclusive concern for gain as any other business. Politics becomes indistinguishable from commerce. ⁴³

Individualism and materialism, the divisive features of democracy, are offset to a degree by a general softening of manners and the growth of a spirit of compassion or human fellow-feeling. The manners, pursuits, and tastes of the classes of the Middle Ages were so different that they looked on each other as different species. Medieval society was cool, uncompromising, and severe. Men fulfilled duties that originated not in any natural obligation, but in a purely conventional code obligatory on noble and serf alike ("pas du droit natural, mais du droit politique"). "The claim of social duty was more stringent than that of mere humanity."⁴⁴ The democratic revolution, on the other hand, succeeds in dissolving social or political obligations while bringing natural human ties to the fore. As conditions become equal, men realize their essential similarity; this awareness evokes genuine empathy, and a simple act of the imagination suffices to enable one to experience the sufferings of another. There is, moreover, a direct link between the consequences of individualism and the growth of compassion. Contrary to what might have been expected, emancipation from traditional restraints does not leave democratic man confident in himself and proud of his new-found freedom. Confronted as he is on all sides by those who, like himself, are restlessly striving for unattainable goods, each citizen "is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object: namely, himself."⁴⁵ His demeanor is characteristically grave, filled as he is with "anxiety, fear, and regret." In the circumstances, he has no alternative but to seek the assistance of others, something he is more obliged to do the more equal social conditions become. However, although a condition of equality supports the increase of human fellow-feeling, this increase is limited by the inevitable conflict between each man's self-interest and his concern for others. In what amounts to a restatement of Rousseau's doctrine that man is naturally good, Tocqueville describes the role of compassion in democratic times: "In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for one another, but they display general compassion for the members of the human race. They inflict no useless ills, and they are happy to relieve the griefs of others when they can do so without much hurting themselves; they are not disinterested, but they are humane." ⁴⁶

It might appear that compassion and self-interest together could serve as the foundation of a social or political bond in democratic times, thus overcoming the divisive forces of individualism and materialism. But compassion and self-interest, though not necessarily opposed, are also not always compatible. Tocqueville, again like Rousseau, sees compassion as a natural instinct that is weakened by calculation. Inasmuch as men are not disinterested, they will look to their own interest before the interests of others; democracy encourages this by throwing each man on his own resources. One democratic man will come to another's aid if to do so involves no loss or injury to himself. For the spirit of compassion to become fully effective, society would require not only a condition of equality, but also a condition of plenty, or at least its equivalent in the minds of men. I have already mentioned the forces within democracy that work against such a possibility.

Furthermore, compassion, as a natural instinct, tends to undermine bonds that are merely conventional, and Tocqueville believes political society to be based on such bonds. The gentleness, softening of manners, and air of humanity that characterize democratic societies are not altogether unmixed blessings; they are apt to be more strongly felt within the family than between citizens. "Democracy," Tocqueville tells us, "loosens social ties, but tightens natural ones; it brings kindred more closely together, while it throws citizens more apart." [Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 208; cf. 311: "As in periods of equality no man is compelled to lend his assistance to his fellow men, and none has any right to expect much support from them, everyone is at once independent and powerless. These two conditions . . . inspire the citizen of a democratic country with very contrary propensities. His independence fills him with self-reliance and pride among his equals; his debility makes him feel from time to time the want of some outward assistance, which he cannot expect from any of them, because they are all impotent and unsympathizing [impuissants et froids]." (Italics mine.)] In effect, the spirit of compassion reinforces domesticity, and thus reinforces the atomism of democratic society.

The propensities of democratic man I have described—toward materialism, mediocrity, compassion, domesticity, and isolation—these propensities, arising or gathering their strength from equality of conditions and individualism, constitute the core of Tocqueville's characterization of democracy. A regime under which their effects were not somehow mitigated would be one in which little opportunity would be available for the exercise of higher human faculties, one in which society would stagnate and public virtues languish altogether. Nor is this all. These same propensities make democratic man all too prone to accept or to drift into what Tocqueville labels a "soft" despotism. The fundamental paradox of democracy, as he understands it, is that equality of conditions is compatible with tyranny as well as with freedom. A species of equality can coexist with the greatest inequality. Left to its own devices, democracy is actually prone to the establishment of tyranny, whether of one over all, of the many over the few, or even of all over all.

The passion of democratic ages is for equality. It arises from the prevailing social condition, which, as we have seen, is the fundamental source of almost all the passions, ideas, and manners of society. But the drive for equality overpowers the desire for all else, even liberty. At first, Tocqueville throws up his hands in despair of discovering the roots or the source of strength of this drive. He resorts to a bald statement that it exists, that it is simply a fact of our times: "Do not ask what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages that society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that of itself is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest."⁴⁷Yet he proceeds at once to explain why most men will invariably prefer equality to freedom. Liberty is gained by vigilant effort; it is difficult to attain and easily lost. Moreover, its excesses are apparent to all, while its benefits may easily escape detection. The advantages of equality, on the other hand, are immediately felt. In one of his finest passages, Tocqueville reveals the intimate connection between equality and pleasure:

Political liberty bestows exalted pleasures from time to time upon a certain number of citizens. Equality every day confers a number of small enjoyments on every man. The charms of equality are every instant felt and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most vulgar souls exult in them. The passion that equality creates must therefore be at once strong and general. Men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions. But the pleasures of equality are self-proffered; each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them, nothing is required but to live. ⁴⁸

If this is true, the shortcomings of equality may not be evident at all, except perhaps to those who have not been benumbed by its delights. At any rate, equality of conditions has unleashed a passion that will not be put down; every government of the future must acknowledge the source of its energy in this omnipotent drive. The passion of men of democratic communities for equality is "ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible; they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery." ⁴⁹

Love for equality may express itself in either of two forms: a "manly and lawful passion" that seeks to raise all men to the level of the great, or a "depraved taste" that strives to reduce them to the lowest common denominator.⁵⁰ Obviously, if the former passion for equality were to prevail, the power of the objections to democracy would be appreciably reduced. But the forces at work under conditions of equality offer little hope that the manly passion for equality will triumph. The competition for material gain is so intense that each man has little likelihood of realizing his ambitions. Moreover, all men are not equally fitted for the race to satisfy their desires; all other things being equal, the victory inevitably goes to those of superior ability. All cannot be raised to the level of the great, for differences of ability come from God, or from nature. Democracy thus awakens a consciousness of the equal right of all to the advantages of this world, but frustrates men in attaining them. As long as freedom prevails, the struggle will go on unceasingly. Men of democratic times seek relief from this tension in a solution that at once gratifies their most intense desire and relieves them of the anguish to which it gives rise. Equality thus prepares man for the surrender of his freedom in the name of equality itself.

To Tocqueville, the from that this surrender might take ranges from capitulation to a despot of the time-honored description to the more subtle subservience to the tyranny of the majority. Viewed in this way, his famous account of the tyranny of the majority may be seen as a description of a particular form of the new despotism. Common to all its forms is a surrender of the self-governing capacity, a retreat from individualism, and an escape (or at least an attempt to escape) from the psychological duress engendered by equality of conditions. At first, Tocqueville appears to have thought that an old-style despot would be the most likely recipient of the power that the masses would either surrender or passively allow to slip from their hands, and of course he never dismisses this possibility altogether. But as he considered it again, his thought took a new turn: terms like "despotism" and "tyranny" became almost inadequate, and he finally fell back on description to convey his meaning.⁵¹ In a society in which all are equal, independent, and impotent, power naturally gravitates to one center—the state—that is especially anxious and able to accept and supervise the surrender of freedom. There is no thought here of the state in the grip of a power-hungry individual or clique. Instead, the state is a benevolent, faceless and impersonal servant of the people, more often than not taking the form of a vast bureaucracy. Tocqueville calls attention to the increasing centralization of governments, to the growth of immense tutelary powers standing ready to assume the burden of governing and providing for the comfort and well-being of their citizens. Democratic men, he warns, will abandon their freedom to these mighty authorities in exchange for a "soft" despotism, one that "provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry," and ultimately, spares them "all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living." [Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 336. It need hardly be remarked that certain twentieth-century regimes that have been characterized by their self-styled devotion to egalitarianism have also been characterized by anything but a "soft" despotism. Tocqueville was guilty of grossly underestimating man's capacity for violence, and of failing to see how it could persist under the veneer of democratic compassion.]

Tocqueville foresaw that such a government was not inconsistent with popular sovereignty. The people might very well support it: "They console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain."⁵² Democracy originates a new form of despotism, society tyrannizing over itself. The only limitation imposed on the central authority is that its rules and its power be uniform, and applied to all without distinction. Thus the principle of equality is, ironically, preserved to the very end. This restriction actually facilitates the establishment of despotism, for government is relieved of the responsibility for making inquiry "into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men." ⁵³

There is a description of democratic despotism in theOld Régime that appears to refute the view that tyranny of the majority is a form of the new despotism. Prior to the French Revolution, the Economists had formulated a social order in which all class distinctions were to be abolished:

The nation was to be composed of individuals almost exactly alike and unconditionally equal. In this undiscriminated mass was to reside, theoretically, the sovereign power; yet it was to be carefully deprived of any means of controlling or even supervising the activities of its own government. For above it was a single authority, its mandatary, which was entitled to do anything and everything in its name without consulting it. This authority could not be controlled by public opinion since public opinion had no means of making itself heard. . . . ⁵⁴

What the blueprint makers failed to appreciate was that under equality of conditions public opinion, majority opinion more precisely, had hit on a more subtle means of getting its wishes attended to than any traditional form of "consultation." So pervasive is the sway of public opinion in a democracy that it sets the tone of the whole society, to the extent that the governors can scarcely come to have desires different from those of the governed. The governors, however much they think themselves independent of the masses, are nonetheless their servants. As Tocqueville expresses it, the "universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself."⁵⁵ And what the majority of the governed want is soft despotism.

From the time when Mill saw fit to challenge Tocqueville by remarking that it was "not easy to see what sort of minority it can be over which the majority can have any interest in tyrannizing," Tocqueville's account of the tyranny of the majority has not escaped criticism.⁵⁶ A hundred years ago the central issue was whether property owners had anything to fear from the propertyless masses. More recently, concern with majority tyranny has dropped off because of the alleged discovery that majorities do not govern at all; that is, that the real dangers to democratic government lie in the tyranny exercised by minority or special-interest groups. ⁵⁷Tocqueville dealt with the issue of property explicitly. Moreover, despite his awareness of the pleadings of special-interest groups, he continued to regard majority tyranny as a particular threat to democracy. He realized that the composition of the majority in a democracy frequently fluctuates, but he also realized that this fluctuation takes place within the context of settled convictions that are themselves more or less unchanging.⁵⁸ In this sense one can speak of a permanent majority within a democracy. Tocqueville reminds us: "Two things are surprising in the United States: the mutability of the greater part of human actions, and the singular stability of certain principles. Men are in constant motion; the mind of man appears almost unmoved."⁵⁹ There is a somewhat surprising confirmation of Tocqueville's position in Robert Dahl's Preface to Democratic Theory, a work whose primary contribution is to demonstrate that majority rule is mostly a myth, and that majority tyranny is consequently a myth also. But Dahl concedes that:

If the majority rarely rules on matters of specific policy, nevertheless the specific policies selected by a process of "minorities rule" probably lie most of the time within the bounds of consensus set by the important values of the politically active members of the society. . . . Politicians subject to elections must operate within the limits set both by their own values, as indoctrinated members of the society, and by the expectations about what policies they can adopt and still be reelected. In a sense, what we ordinarily describe as democratic "politics" is merely the chaff. It is the surface manifestation, representing superficial conflicts. Prior to politics, beneath it, enveloping it, restricting it, conditioning it, is the underlying consensus on policy that usually exists in the society among a predominant portion of the politically active members. ⁶⁰

Tocqueville devotes a chapter of the Democracy (it is six sentences long) to showing how "it can be strictly said that the people govern in the United States," even if they are not politically active in any direct sense. "It is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the people are hindered by no permanent obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on the daily conduct of affairs. In the United States the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all countries in which the people are supreme." ⁶¹

Two democratic minorities were of particular concern to Tocqueville, especially since the apparent homogeneity of democratic society might cause one to overlook what in fact were two ineradicable sources of heterogeneity that could easily serve as the target of majority tyranny. These were the more or less permanent minorities of intellect and of wealth. The origins of the first lie beyond the reach of man; moreover, beyond the question of capacity, the difficulties of attaining knowledge are such that men under democratic conditions will rarely have either the time, the patience, or the inclination to pursue it. Tocqueville envisages no revolutionary breakthrough in the means of education, no "profusion of easy methods and cheap science" sufficient to overcome the want of time and talent. As long as the people remain the people, i.e., the many, they will be obliged to earn their bread, and hence will lack the leisure that is necessary for the cultivation of knowledge. "It is therefore quite as difficult to imagine a state in which all the citizens are very well informed as a state in which they are all wealthy; these two difficulties are correlative." [Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 207-8; cf. II, 43: "Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. . . . In the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this continual striving of men after fortune, where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect?"] It is true, of course, that Tocqueville did not envisage the fully automated, affluent society with its promise of virtually unrelieved leisure for everyone. Yet the realization of that leisure will not necessarily guarantee its fruitful use, and it seems doubtful that the innate differences between men will ever be eliminated.

If the people acknowledge these innate differences, it is certain that they dispute the significance of them. For the qualitative superiority of the few they substitute a superiority based on quantity: "The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality." This is a venerable argument;⁶² what is novel under equality of conditions is that the minority comes at last to assent to this assault on the intellect. Perhaps assent is the wrong word, for it implies conscious agreement. The power of the majority in a democracy is sufficient to erode the capacity for dissent, the ability to conceive and above all to act on an idea different from that of the herd. To hold an opinion contrary to that of the majority on an important matter is not merely imprudent or unavailing, but is felt, Tocqueville maintains, to degrade one as a human being: "The power of the majority is so absolute and irresistible that one must give up one's rights as a citizen and almost abjure one's qualities as a man if one intends to stray from the track which it prescribes."⁶³ This tyranny of the majority over the minds of its intellectual superiors accentuates the disposition of democracy toward conformity and mediocrity.

There remains the problem of the attitude of the majority toward those who possess property, a problem that cannot be reduced to a crude conflict between the haves and the have-nots. Tocqueville certainly tries to overcome the fears of those critics of democracy who saw in the rule of the many the inevitable destruction of all property rights; in the Preface to the Democracy he takes care to point out that in the most advanced democratic country in the world property rights have enjoyed greater guarantees than anywhere else. Still, he is not sanguine that the eternal struggle between the rich and the poor has been overcome by the democratic revolution—all have not been reduced or elevated to the same level of wealth, and the envy of the poor toward those in better circumstances has not been assuaged by whatever leveling has occurred. How secure, then, are the rights of property?

According to Tocqueville, the division between the few and the many, the rich and the poor, is a permanent feature of all societies, destined to remain despite the progressive realization of equality of conditions. This is a "fixed rule" to which all communities are subject.⁶⁴ On the other hand, the proportion of individuals within a society making up each of the three great orders—the wealthy, those of moderate means, and the poor—may vary from one society to another. Though the proportion may change, Tocqueville rejects the idea that the wealthy or the moderately wealthy may ever constitute a majority. "Universal suffrage, therefore, in point of fact does invest the poor with the government of society." [Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 222. Tocqueville uses the term "poor" in a relative, not in an absolute, sense; see 222n.] Once in a position of power, the poor will rule in their own interest, as they understand it. But, as if in anticipation of Mill's argument that common sense will persuade the poor that their interest lies in respecting property, Tocqueville declares:

In vain will it be objected that the true interest of the people is to spare the fortunes of the rich, since [the people] must suffer in the long run from the general impoverishment which will ensue. . . . If remote advantages had power to prevail over the passions and the exigencies of the moment, no such thing as a tyrannical sovereign or an exclusive aristocracy could ever exist. ⁶⁵

He sees, then, no reason to believe that the traditional conflict between rich and poor will cease under democratic conditions, or that the one will lack the will or the opportunity to oppress the other. Since the majority are poor, and since it is they who will be sovereign, the fears of the critics of democracy are justified after all.

Yet how are we to reconcile this with apparently contradictory statements elsewhere in the Democracy? In the second part, for example, Tocqueville declares that in democratic communities the poor, instead of being a great majority, will be comparatively few in number, and that the new middle classes will be in the majority. But the middle classes own property and are, in fact, the foremost defenders of property rights.⁶⁶ What, then, have the rich to fear from a majority whose passions and interests are so similar to their own?

It must be recalled that one of the fundamental discoveries of the modern era was that freeing the acquisitive instinct of man from the shackles of an unrealistic morality would make possible not only a proliferation of material goods, but also the enjoyment of an unprecedented degree of freedom from religious and secular authorities. It took a special breed of men to succeed in freeing that instinct, and the members of the new middle class that Tocqueville describes are not at all identical with those men, the "rational and industrious" men that Locke had in mind. They are rather more cautious, more timorous, more concerned with preserving what they have. They cannot shake the anxiety that to Tocqueville seems the earmark of democratic man, the anxiety that derives from the peculiar conditions of their pursuit of the good life:

It may readily be conceived that if men passionately bent upon physical gratifications desire eagerly, they are also easily discouraged; as their ultimate object is to enjoy, the means to reach that object must be prompt and easy, or the trouble of acquiring the gratification will be greater than the gratification itself. Their prevailing frame of mind, then, is at once ardent and relaxed, violent and enervated. Death is often less dreaded by them than perseverance in continuous efforts to one end. ⁶⁷

Here, perhaps, is another link between the tyranny of the majority and the new despotism. The men who surrender to soft, comfortable despotism are the men of the new majority who have enjoyed the first rewards of the universal pursuit of well-being. But their desires have outrun their opportunities. Frightened at the prospect of losing what they have to those more able than themselves, the majority turn to government as the only power capable of protecting their rights and goods and of restraining the ambitions of the few. [By the same token, the new middle class is equally apprehensive of the socialistic inclinations, real or imagined, of the poor. As Salomon notes: "A new despotism arose because the bourgeois classes were willing to bow to any ruler, however legally questionable, who would protect their interests against the masses." ("Tocqueville, 1959," p. 470.)] At the expense of the few, the wealthy, the government secures to the many a modest enjoyment of the good things of this life, a policy that is not incompatible with protection of property rights on a limited scale.

The advent of a new type of despotism revives the ancient discussion of the good man and the good citizen. Aristotle had pointed out that except under the most fortuitous circumstances the two were not identical. The main point of his argument is that it is far easier to be a good citizen, since this requires only subservience to the principles of the regime under which one lives. Their goodness or badness is irrelevant: one could be a good citizen of a bad regime. To be a good man, however, one must live in a society that encourages the realization of man's moral and intellectual potentialities. It is barely conceivable that a good man might develop under a tyranny, but if he did it would be an instance of nature asserting herself over the normally sovereign way of life of the regime.

What Tocqueville discovered is that in a democracy, under certain conditions, it is easier to be a good man than a good citizen:

True, democratic societies which are not free may well be prosperous, cultured, pleasing to the eye, and even magnificent, such is the sense of power implicit in their massive uniformity; in them may flourish many private virtues [qualités], good fathers, honest merchants, exemplary landowners, and good Christians, too. . . . But, I make bold to say, never shall we find under such conditions a great citizen, still less a great nation. . . . [Tocqueville, Old Régime, p. xiv; cf. Democracy, II, 347: "It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens."]

Moreover, the decline of citizenship is not to be associated only with the appearance of the new despotism. Equality of conditions, as we have seen, even if accompanied by some freedom naturally generates a disposition to forsake the public arena for private life.⁶⁸ This development, which Tocqueville associates with democracy, may have arisen from ideas that were the common stock of the political philosophers of the modern era. From Machiavelli to Locke there is an unprecedented celebration of what we have come to regard as the private sector. Some philosophers encouraged and protected this sphere (which necessarily included within it a certain degree of freedom) as a means of increasing or strengthening the security of the sovereign; others adopted the same scheme for directly opposite reasons, seeing in the security of the individual's private pursuits the only protection against unwarranted encroachments by the sovereign. Whatever the motivation of its midwives, the liberal era had been born, with its division of political life into public and private spheres and its frank acknowledgment of the superiority of the latter. At the heart of the liberal tradition, ultimately, is the doctrine of natural rights. Its initial acceptance led to what Leo Strauss has called "the first crisis of modernity," when some philosophers, most notably Rousseau, warned that this doctrine would cause the demise of all those virtues and qualities associated with patriotism and public-spiritedness. The neglect of any concern with the whole, of any genuine identification with the fatherland, turned men into "bourgeois rather than citizens."⁶⁹ It mattered little that these bourgeois manifested the ordinary traits of decency: moderation in their appetites, faithfulness to their obligations, respect for civil peace and order. It mattered little, in other words, that they were good men. What was essential was that they be transformed into citizens. [In the Old Régime, Tocqueville had stressed the connection between material well-being and individualism: "Eighteenth-century man had little of that craving for material well-being which leads the way to servitude. A craving which, while morally debilitating, can be singularly tenacious and insidious, it often operates in close association with such private virtues as family love, a sense of decorum, respect for religion, and even a lukewarm but punctilious observance of the rites of the established Church. While promoting moral rectitude, it rules out heroism and excels in making people well-behaved but mean-spirited as citizens" (p. 118).]

As I have mentioned earlier, Tocqueville consistently elevates political considerations above all others. It is not surprising, then, that he should prefer the good citizen to the good man, even to the extent of finding the great citizen more praiseworthy (his path being strewn with greater obstacles) than the good Christian. The superiority of public life over private pursuits is everywhere assumed in Tocqueville's work: it is evident in his praise of such grandiose exploits as the civilizing missions of the English in India or of the French in Algeria, in his frank acknowledgment of the uses of war, and in his undisguised admiration for the dedication of aristocratic regimes to political purposes. In the Democracy he had posed this apparently rhetorical choice:

We must first understand what is wanted of society and its government. . . . Would you constitute a people fitted to act powerfully upon all other nations, and prepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be their results, will leave a name forever famous in history? If you believe such to be the principal object of society, avoid the government of the democracy, for it would not lead you with certainty to the goal. . . . If, in short, you are of the opinion that the principal object of a government is not to confer the greatest possible power and glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery to each of the individuals who compose it—if such be your desire, then equalize the conditions of men and establish democratic institutions. ⁷⁰

Yet Tocqueville never resigned himself to either of these alternatives: he did not believe that democracy was simply inevitable, nor did he believe that under democratic conditions one had to relinquish all hope of greatness. He had no illusions on this score; he understood better than any man before him how the forces released by equality vitiated men's devotion to causes that bore only indirectly on their own well-being. For example, should a "bold innovator" arise to rouse the people from their apathy, Tocqueville predicts this reception:

To his vehemence they secretly oppose their inertia, to his revolutionary tendencies their conservative interests, their homely tastes to his adventurous passions, their good sense to the flights of his genius, to his poetry their prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they speedily escape from him and fall back, as it were, by their own weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted multitude and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not because he is conquered, but because he is alone. ⁷¹

The quotation is taken from Tocqueville's chapter on revolutions in democratic times, and "innovator" might be construed as meaning a mere adventurer, perhaps even a self-seeking demagogue. Tocqueville has, of course, no sympathy for such men, but neither has he any for a society in which there is constant experimentation with secondary matters, such as the material conditions of life, but in which people carefully refrain from touching whatever is fundamental in religion, morals, or politics. If citizens shy away from this kind of soul-searching, if every fundamental innovation is considered incitement to revolution, any genuine growth may be jeopardized:

If men continue to shut themselves more closely within the narrow circle of domestic interests, and to live on that kind of excitement, it is to be apprehended that they may ultimately become inaccessible to those great and powerful public emotions which perturb nations, but which develop them and recruit them. When property becomes so fluctuating and the love of property so restless and so ardent, I cannot but fear that men may arrive at such a state as to regard every new theory as a peril, every innovation as an irksome toil, [and] every social improvement as a stepping-stone to revolution, and so refuse to move altogether for fear of being moved too far. I dread, and I confess it, lest they should at last so entirely give way to a cowardly love of present enjoyment as to lose sight of the interests of their future selves and those of their descendants, and prefer to glide along the easy current of life rather than to make, when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose. ⁷²

If Tocqueville continues to maintain that equality of conditions will not lead men and nations "with certainty" to a human life compatible with greatness, he must also mean that this goal, though difficult, is not unreachable. We are led once again to the dichotomy between democracy and human excellence, the permanence and intransigence of which he refused to acknowledge. Every regime in the past that showed signs of excellence or greatness was tarnished at its core by its hostility to the requirements of natural justice. A genuine integration of justice and excellence would approximate a total solution of the human problem. To discover how future regimes may realize this objective is, I believe, Tocqueville's enterprise. Resolving the problem of democracy requires finding a place within democracy for liberty, for human excellence, for a renaissance of public virtue, and for the possibility of greatness. It has been said that Plato's objective in the Republic was to construct a society that would be safe for philosophy; in a similar vein, Harold Laski has written of Tocqueville, "There is a fascinating sense in which the whole effort of his thought was to discover the secret of a social order in which there was scope for the manner of man he himself was." ⁷³

Notes

¹ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 351. Tocqueville,

² Tocqueville,Memoir, I, 19-20.

³ Tocqueville,Old Régime, p. xii.

⁴ Tocqueville,Democracy, I, 15.

⁵Ibid., p. 327.

⁶Ibid, II, 271-72.

⁷Ibid, I, 223.

⁸Ibid., p. 377.

⁹Ibid., II, pp. 16, 17; Oeuvres Complètes (Mayer), I, Part II, 22.

¹⁰ Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes (Beaumont), VIII, 448.

¹¹ Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 26.

¹²Ibid., II, 246.

¹³ Tocqueville, to Madame Swetchine, Oct. 15, 1855, Memoir, II, 299-300.

¹⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 337, italics mine.

¹⁵Ibid, p. 48.

¹⁶Ibid., II, 352.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 71.

¹⁸ Tocqueville, European Revolution, p. 102.

¹⁹ Bryce, Predictions, pp. 24-25; cf. Lively, pp. 26-27.

²⁰ See, e.g., Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 33off.

²¹Ibid., p. 343.

²²Ibid., pp. 409-10, 443-44.

²³ Lively, p. 27.

²⁴ Tocqueville, Memoir, II, 35.

²⁵ Aristotle, 1317 40-1317 17.a b

²⁶ Montesquieu, Bks. XX, XXI; see also Lowenthal, "Montesquieu," pp. 473, 478-88.

²⁷ Faguet, p. 81.

²⁸ Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 260.

²⁹ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 211; cf., however, I, 315.

³⁰Ibid., II, 105.

³¹Ibid., p. 104.

³²Ibid., p. 5.

³³Ibid., p. 104.

³⁴Ibid., pp. 12-13.

³⁵ Rousseau, p. 237.

³⁶ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 27.

³⁷ Tocqueville, European Revolution, p. 206.

³⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 140f, translation amended; cf. Old Régime, p. 118; also Recollections, p. 3.

³⁹ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 140.

⁴⁰Ibid, pp. 144-45.

⁴¹Ibid

⁴²Ibid, p. 219; cf. pp. 164n, 165.

⁴³ Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 3.

⁴⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 173.

⁴⁵Ibid, p. 82.

⁴⁶Ibid, p. 176.

⁴⁷Ibid, pp. 100-101.

⁴⁸Ibid, pp. 101-2.

⁴⁹Ibid. , p. 102.

⁵⁰Ibid, I, 56.

⁵¹ Cf. ibid, 342, with II, 334ff.

⁵²Ibid., II, 337.

⁵³Ibid, p. 313.

⁵⁴ Tocqueville, Old Régime, p. 163.

⁵⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 335.

⁵⁶ Mill, "Tocqueville on Democracy," p. xxxviii.

⁵⁷ The literature is extensive. See, e.g., Dunning, pp. 277-78; the essay by Phillips Bradley in Tocqueville, Democracy, II, 454; and Dahl, passim, Dahl would not argue, I believe, that rule by minorities constitutes any special danger to democracy. For a useful discussion of the problem of majority tyranny, see Sartori, pp. 98-102.

⁵⁸ On special interest groups, see Democracy, II, 171; on the fluctuation of the majority, see I, 257, 266, 279; II, 266.

⁵⁹Ibid, II, 271; cf. 272, 276, 277.

⁶⁰ Dahl, p. 132.

⁶¹ Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 180.

⁶²Ibid, I, 265.

⁶³Ibid., p. 277. Cf. the description of the "fatalism of the multitude" with that of the "tyranny of the majority," in Bryce, American Commonwealth, II, 341-58.

⁶⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 221.

⁶⁵Ibid, p. 222.

⁶⁶Ibid, II, 266-67.

⁶⁷Ibid, pp. 145-46.

⁶⁸ See Goldstein, p. 41; Drescher, pp. 9-10; Salomon, "Tocqueville's Philosophy of Freedom," pp. 412-17.

⁶⁹ Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 252ff.

⁷⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy, I, 262.

⁷¹Ibid., II, 269, translation amended.

⁷²Ibid, p. 277.

⁷³ Laski, p. 114.

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