SOURCE: "The New Despotism," in The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 229-59.

[In this excerpt Boesche discusses Tocqueville's warnings of a "new despotism," potentially originating within American-style democracies, that would enslave the soul and would be brought about by equality, isolation, and abundance.]

With a Newtonian view of the political world, Madison and others offered a mechanical notion of political freedom in which free political institutions, once set in motion and properly balanced, continued to function almost by themselves. By contrast, Tocqueville pictured freedom as if he still agreed with Aristotle's theory that said objects stay in motion only if continually propelled by some force external to the object. In a marvelous passage, Montesquieu suggested why freedom is so precarious. "What makes free states last a shorter time than others is that both the misfortunes and the successes they encounter almost always cause them to lose their freedom. In a state where the people are held in subjection, however, successes and misfortunes alike confirm their servitude."¹

Tocqueville argued in a similar fashion. Equality, he said, was the "generating principle" of modern democracy, the fundamental principle upon which the habits, the culture, and the institutions of modern democracies rested. As such, a culture can eliminate equality "only by long and laborious efforts" over a period of many generations. But if equality can weather most modern storms by itself, freedom must be nursed even through fair weather. "Political liberty is more easily lost; to neglect to hold it fast is to allow it to escape."² As a consequence, almost any development, good or bad, tends to weaken freedom: successful wars centralize the government, unsuccessful ones destroy it; prosperity enfeebles public virtue, poverty foments class hatred; good leaders foster a sense of security, bad leaders corrupt; pleasures breed passivity, misery makes citizens anxious for revolt.

Moreover, a threat to freedom rarely strides toward us forthrightly, but it ambles and sidles until, just when we have concluded that it is an intruder that will never arrive, we find that it has already entered our house noiselessly. "Political institutions are like religions," said Tocqueville, "in that observances for a long time survive faith."³ Or as Montesquieu said of Rome's method of subjugating others: the nation became "a subject people without anyone being able to say when its subjection began."⁴ While Tocqueville clearly hoped that certain tendencies in modern democracies might lead to freedom, he grew increasingly pessimistic, believing more and more that other tendencies accompanying this new commercial world might escort modern democracies to a "new" despotism.

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to describe it.⁵

Of course Tocqueville never said this new despotism was inevitable; it was only a possible outcome of his worst fears.

ORIGINS OF THE NEW DESPOTISM

Bourgeois Roots of the New Despotism

When reading the descriptions of despotism offered by Boulanger, Holbach, Diderot, and Condorcet, one notices that their models of despotism assumed the spectre of their enemies, of those political actors these men perceived as threatening: namely, kings and priests.⁶ Similarly, the tendencies of modern industrial democracies that Tocqueville disliked were indelible characteristics of the class he feared. Like so many of the writers of his generation, he blamed the bourgeoisie for many of the ills of the age; in this case he argued that the despotism he dreaded would ride on the back of this class's race for predominance. It is well known that Tocqueville used the word democracy in a variety of ways, not all of them consistent. He used it to mean an irresistible tendency to equality, or majority rule, or the absence of fixed classes, or more equal opportunities for political participation. Nevertheless, Guizot's analysis of recent French history as chiefly the rise of the middle class to political and economic power remained persuasive for Tocqueville.⁷ Consequently, the word democracy frequently means middle-class society, and when he wrote of his anxiety about democratic despotism, he was speaking of a despotism originating in bourgeois society.

Tocqueville did not come immediately to this conclusion that the new despotism will emerge rather naturally from the new commercial world, but instead, in his unpublished notes, he considered two other possible forms of despotism. First, he considered a tyranny of the lower classes, perhaps some all-powerful state that would rule in the name of the working classes, a state that would emerge from anarchy, since "despotism is the party of anarchy."⁸ Clearly Tocqueville the aristocrat feared the new urban masses. "The barbarians are already at our gates. . . . They are around us, in the bosoms of our cities."⁹ Second, probably thinking of Julius Caesar and Napoleon, Tocqueville considered a military tyranny, and he wondered in his notes if he should not simply adopt "the ancient idea of the military despotism" in his analysis of the future.¹⁰ Long before he wrote his famous chapter on the new aristocracy of manufacturers, he considered the possibility of a new aristocracy of warriors. "When I said that an aristocracy was no longer possible, I was wrong, because one could still have an aristocracy of men of war." Even though he still maintained that war is sometimes good for "the hygiene of a democratic people," he admitted that war easily creates "a central power" that is "very energetic and nearly tyrannical"; hence war is a useful friend to all those who aim for despotism. "Even if I were allowed to lift the veil that hides us from the future, I would not dare to do so. I would be afraid to see the entire society in the hands of soldiers. A military and bureaucratic organization, the soldier and the clerk. Symbols of the future society. . . ."¹¹

Yet Tocqueville ultimately abandoned both these early sketches of despotism. Although he still feared a bureaucratic world of clerks, he concluded that such a world would result, not from the violence either of the working classes or of the military, but from the predictable, inevitable, and perhaps ineradicable characteristics of the new bourgeois society. On one page of his notes about this new despotism, he wrote: "Centralization. Individualism. Material Enjoyments."¹² All these concerns, as we have seen, were held by his generation, and to Tocqueville, they quite logically accompanied the new commercial world. In the end, he perceived the greatest danger to be neither working-class irrationality nor military adventurism, but rather fundamental, yet frightening, characteristics of bourgeois society. "Commerce," he wrote, "has made man lowly."¹³

Tocqueville blamed the bourgeoisie only in private. In a letter to his father written from the United States, he mentioned his wish to write a book on the United States, but only if he could use it to comment on France, and only if he could find an indirect way to say everything he truly thought. "It is not good to announce every truth."¹⁴ In published writings and public speeches, Tocqueville retreated from pointedly criticizing the bourgeoisie, even though in his letters and in his Recollections, which he did not originally intend for publication, he declared that the bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy was "the most selfish and grasping of plutocracies" and "treated government like a private business."¹⁵ In public pronouncements he moved carefully and indirectly in his criticisms of the commercial classes, but how could he be expected to act otherwise? The small electorate under the July Monarchy was composed mainly of landowners who had accumulated wealth, for the most part, in commerce and industry. Tocqueville said repeatedly that the electoral laws excluded both the great majority of ordinary people and the old aristocracy; he saw the electorate, perhaps not with complete accuracy, as overwhelmingly bourgeois. In pursuing his political ambitions, he certainly could not openly attack this class. In fact, he worked diligently to bury the issue of his own aristocratic heritage, to overcome the fact that his great-grandfather had defended Louis XVI; still he lost his first election because of hostility toward his class background. "When I first was a candidate I failed not because I was not personally popular, but because I was gentilhomme. I was met everywhere by the proverb: 'Cats seize mice.'"¹⁶ If he openly castigated the bourgeoisie, he would be dismissed as just another royalist. Thus, he contented himself with depicting the dangers of "democracy."

Tocqueville's contempt for the bourgeoisie, however, was evident in the opening pages of Democracy. "Can it be believed that the democracy [which in this case he equated with equality] which has overthrown the feudal system and vanquished kings will retreat before tradesmen and capitalists?"¹⁷ Tocqueville clung to—but masked—an instinctive, aristocratic dislike for the middle class. (When Voltaire said "the people," he meant lawyers, scientists, laborers, merchants, and mechanics; when the Duc de St. Simon said "the common people," he meant the middle class.¹⁸ ) For example, throughout his works, Tocqueville suggested that commerce threatened personal liberty, whereas landed property was invaluable to freedom. The division of the land into small independent properties" is most conducive to "perfect freedom" and individual independence. By contrast, the individual engaged in business must bend to the desires of others, "is exposed to every vicissitude in the commercial or industrial condition of his country," and receives from this bustle of the business climate "disorder into his ideas and instability into his tastes."¹⁹ In a letter to Senior disputing the claim that the French peasant was poorer than the English peasant, Tocqueville asked, even if we admitted "that the poor man temporarily makes more from cultivating the land of another rather than his own, do you think that there are not political, moral, intellectual benefits attached to the possession of the earth, and which more than compensate, and above all in a permanent manner, for the disadvantage that you point out?"²⁰ The French peasant in Canada was superior in heart to the American farmer, because he manifested none of that "mercantile spirit which obtrudes in all the actions and sayings of an American." ²¹Indeed, Tocqueville consistently displayed an aristocratic, if sometimes paternalistic, fondness for the peasantry, writing late in his life, "I have always thought that, after all, the peasantry were superior to all other classes in France."²² A close reading of his Old Regime reveals a persistent attempt to vindicate the peasantry against the arrogance and abuses of other classes. ²³

If Tocqueville admired those who owned their own land, he had great misgivings about those engaged in commerce or industry, and yet these classes he virtually identified with the word democracy. Every nation, he said, has had industry and commerce, but in the United States, "what never occurred elsewhere, the whole community is simultaneously engaged in productive industry and commerce."²⁴ Indeed, he referred to the American republics as "companies of merchants formed to make a business that will prosper." ²⁵American democracy, he suggested, demonstrated once and for all that "the middle classes can govern a state" with "practical intelligence," but this is "in spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education and their vulgar manners."²⁶ Once more we see not only his conviction that democracy means middle-class rule but also his contempt for the middle class.

Up to now it seems to me that [the United States] illustrates the most complete external development of the middle classes, or rather that the whole of society seems to have turned into one middle class. No one seems to have the elegant manners and refined politeness of the upper classes in Europe. On the contrary one is at once struck by something vulgar, and a disagreeable casualness of behavior. ²⁷

This analysis extended from the United States across the Atlantic to France as well. The French government of his time, something he once called the "bourgeois state,"²⁸ exhibited a "narrow atmosphere of bourgeois and shopkeeper's aristocracy whose egoism and corruption equalled the lack of enlightenment."²⁹ In an 1847 letter he wrote of France, "The system of administration that has been practiced for seventeen years has so perverted the middle class, by making a constant appeal to the individual cupidities of its members, that this class is becoming little by little, for the rest of the nation, a little corrupt and vulgar aristocracy, by which it seems shameful to let oneself be led."³⁰ In fact,Tocqueville pointedly suggested that the ruling middle classes of the United States and France were remarkably similar. ³¹

When Tocqueville identified democracy with middle-class rule, he was again borrowing from Guizot's analysis of class struggle in European history since the Middle Ages. For Tocqueville, the decline of aristocracy and the rise to power of the industrial classes was in fact the very phenomenon he called democracy. We find the following passage in his notebooks, and off to the side he wondered whether he "ought" to include this in Democracy in America.

I have shown in this chapter how democracy serves the development of industry. I should be able to show equally how industry, in its turn, hastens the developments of democracy, because these two things are connected and react upon each other. Democracy gives birth to the taste for material enjoyment, which pushes men toward industry, and industry creates a multitude of medium-sized fortunes and constitutes, even in the bosom of aristocratic nations, a class apart where the ranks are badly defined and badly preserved. . . . This class forms over the long run, even in the bosom of aristocratic nations, a sort of small democracy that has its separate instincts, opinions, and laws. To the extent that a people extends its commerce and its industry, this democratic class becomes more numerous and more influential, little by little it passes its opinions into the mores and its ideas into the laws, until finally it has become preponderant and, so to speak, unique, it takes hold of power and directs all things as it pleases, and founds democracy. ³²

Although Tocqueville's distaste for rule by the middle classes comes from his aristocratic heritage and from the concerns of his generation, as we saw in chapter 4, his analysis of how this class came to power reminds us of Marx, another political thinker who acknowledged a debt to Guizot's historical and class analyses.

It is worthwhile to emphasize, however, that Tocqueville's critique of the bourgeoisie was most emphatically not a Marxist one, nor was it a nostalgic longing for the Old Regime. Rather, as should be amply clear by now, his critique sprang from the anxieties and aspirations of his own generation, whereas his political convictions—especially about the idea of freedom—had deep roots in the French tradition of political thought and in the political ideas of ancient authors. If Tocqueville disliked the middle class, he certainly did not transfer his faith to some new working-class world, as we indicated in chapter 5. Tocqueville feared working-class rebellion, and he feared that the laboring classes might couple their strength with misguided aspirations for socialism, "a new form of servitude." Yet whenever he described socialism, he gave it characteristics that he always contended entered the world with the bourgeoisie. Socialism, Tocqueville said, is an "energetic continuous appeal to man's material passions," a political goal that foments "greedy, envious desires"; the prototypical socialist dreams of "unlimited consumption for everybody."³³ But the obsession with consuming goods, as Tocqueville said so frequently, was a "natural instinct" of the bourgeoisie, because in the absence of hereditary distinctions, money established itself as the "natural test to measure men's merit."³⁴ Indeed, "all men who live in democratic times more or less contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes," and the general motivation of these classes is, Tocqueville claimed, profit. "The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that Americans do." Thus, the ethic of greed, acquisition, and envy, which in Tocqueville's eyes made working-class movements so dangerous to freedom, was bequeathed to the working classes by the bourgeoisie. "The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes; with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it is preponderant. From them it mounts into the higher orders of society and descends into the mass of the people"³⁵ Tocqueville might well have described socialism as Flaubert did democracy, that is, as an attempt to "elevate the proletariat to the level of stupidity of the bourgeoisie."³⁶ Because of the acquisitive ethic, because of the centralized government needed to watch over the economy, "it would seem as if despotism lurked within [the manufacturing classes] and naturally grew with their growth." ³⁷

Equality: Prerequisite for Freedom, Prerequisite for Despotism

Tocqueville suggested that although people in modern democracies tend to admire freedom, they cling stubbornly and passionately to equality, even if it means forfeiting this freedom.

I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible; they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy. ³⁸

Thus, the most important prerequisite of despotism in modern times must be the reduction of the state to a condition of equality. "The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it."

One cannot conclude from this, as some authors have done, that Tocqueville wanted to find a new elite or new forms of inequality to curb the dangers of equality and so-called "mass" society. For example, Tocqueville thought in terms of equality under the law, equality of both economic and political opportunity, and equality of power in the decision-making process, at least at the local levels of governance. In this sense, equality was not dangerous; it was indispensable to freedom. As a consequence, Tocqueville never urged that the modern world abandon a quest for equality; instead he thought it must seek to reconcile equality with freedom. "I love liberty by taste, equality by instinct and by reason."³⁹ All aristocracies have assumed that "inequality of condition" was a right, but such assumptions, said Tocqueville, are no longer valid in a modern democratic world. ⁴⁰

One might legitimately wonder why those who comment on Tocqueville's ideas stress the potential tension between freedom and equality and not their compatibility.⁴¹ What is at stake here? Many seem to see in Tocqueville's analysis an argument that the laboring classes will advance beyond a demand for legal and political equality to do battle for economic equality. In other words, these commentators understand Tocqueville to be suggesting that the primary danger to modern democracy lies in the irrational masses, motivated by what Nietzsche called envy or ressentiment, demanding equality of condition, even if the condition is servitude. In fact, Tocqueville probably did harbor that fear. "Democratic institutions develop to a very high degree the sentiment of envy in the human heart."⁴² Yet Tocqueville always thought that the origin of working-class envy lay in the ethic that accompanied the bourgeoisie to power, an ethic of self-interest and obsession with consuming goods and pleasures. As a consequence, Tocqueville's fear of the working classes could not lead him to defend the privileges of the middle class, or what he called a new industrial aristocracy. Some commentators, forgetting Tocqueville's analysis of the origin of working-class greed and his powerful reservations about the commercial classes, have seized upon his argument to justify the privileges of inequality and property as well as a pluralist political system boasting of a new elite composed of the very commercial classes Tocqueville blamed the most.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NEW DESPOTISM

The Prison as Tocqueville's Model for Despotism

Once we have seen the roots of the new despotism, how can we approach its surface shape? Tocqueville's model for this despotism was quite possibly the prison he found in Philadelphia.⁴³ In describing this prison, which Tocqueville called the "most complete despotism,"⁴⁴ we can obtain a quick overview of Tocqueville's analysis of the possible new despotism.

The three fundamental principles of the Philadelphia prison, founded as a matter of fact by Quaker reformers, were equality, isolation, and powerlessness. First, the prisoners ate the same bread, wore the same clothes, performed the same manual work and occupied identical cells. Second, the Philadelphia reformers regarded the isolation of prisoners, architecturally quite expensive, as the one indispensable ingredient to rehabilitation. Each new convict was led to his cell with a cloth over his head, in order to prohibit any contact or recognition among prisoners. The convicts then remained in their cells all day and night, emerging only to a private, separated courtyard for fresh air and moderate exercise. Third, the prisoners were carried—through isolation—to a sense of helplessness and utter despair. Many, if not most, of the prisoners Tocqueville interviewed described a tremendous terror that seized them upon first being left in solitary confinement. After gradually triumphing "over the terrors which almost surrendered him to insanity or despair," the prisoner was "tamed and forever submissive to the rules of the prison."⁴⁵ "It is impossible that a regime especially designed to make a sharp impression on a great number of minds, does not push some of them towards madness." ⁴⁶

Tocqueville and the Philadelphia reformers considered isolation not as mere punishment but as a powerful instrument for bringing genuine reform of the prisoner. Isolated from one another, the prisoners found themselves powerless to communicate and hence completely unable to act in concert against prison authority. In fact, Sing Sing was built by the nine hundred prisoners at Auburn who were constrained by a strict silence enforced by whips—all out in the open and watched by only thirty guards. As Beaumont explained, the prisoners were "isolated one from the other. All strength is born of association; and 30 individuals united through personal communication, by ideas, by plans in common, by concerted schemes, have more real power than 900 whose isolation makes them weak."⁴⁷ If the isolation among prisoners ever dissolved, they would be able to resist reform. As Tocqueville said, once inmates formed an "association," they could no longer be manipulated individually. ⁴⁸

If isolation and powerlessness remained intact, however, the prisoner was vulnerable to manipulation. The warden, priests, and other upright citizens visited the prisoner regularly, attempting to reform him morally and impress upon him the benefits of rehabilitation. This meant, of course, that the isolation was not quite complete; indeed, Tocqueville wrote, complete isolation "destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills."⁴⁹ Through this aperture in his cell, the prevailing values embodied in the dominant culture rushed into the prisoner's private world. Isolation and powerlessness constituted a despotism that brought rehabilitation; the prisoner listened to and accepted the moral lessons of the priest and rushed to adopt an ethic of hard work as a central diversion from the fears of solitude.

The necessity of labour which overcomes his disposition to idleness; the obligation of silence which makes him reflect; the isolation which places him alone in the presence of his crime and his suffering; the religious instruction which enlightens and comforts him; the obedience of every moment to inflexible rules; the regularity of a uniform life; in a word, all the circumstances belonging to this severe system are calculated to produce a deep impression upon his mind. ⁵⁰

Because it endeavored to control more than mere behavior, as past prisons managed to do, this system of isolation aspired to remold the very nature of the prisoner. If rehabilitation were successful, it would manage "to inculcate in him totally new sentiments, to change profoundly the nature of his habits, to destroy his instincts, to make in a word a virtuous man out of a great criminal."⁵¹ In such a case, the prison "would cause so great and so salutary a revolution in the mind of man" and recast "the instincts of a bad nature or the propensities to which a bad education has given birth." ⁵²

Thus, for Tocqueville, the despotism of the prison was a powerful instrument for good, insofar as the individual criminal was like a caterpillar, hastened by prison processes into the proper state of a butterfly, grateful to the administrative despotism of the prison for transforming him into a new state of moral rectitude. If this microscopic despotism were ever writ large in society as a whole, however, it would have the capacity to alter the thoughts and habits of ordinary men and women in terrifying ways. The butterfly might regress to being a caterpillar.

Isolation

When Tocqueville discussed despotism more directly, isolation was the fulcrum on which he thought the new despotism would balance itself. Isolation was axiomatic, however, even in ancient theories of despotism, as in Tacitus, or in Bodin—who said, "the tyrant tries to eradicate [associations] altogether, knowing full well that unity and bonds of friendship among his subjects spell his inevitable ruin."⁵³ Similarly,Montesquieu asserted that "in despotic states, each house is a separate government"; Rousseau declared that "it is only the fiercest despotism which is alarmed at the sight of seven or eight men assembled."⁵⁴ Tocqueville merely followed his mentors in arguing that despotism endeavored to separate citizens. "Despotism, which by its nature is suspicious, sees in the separation among men the surest guarantee of its continuance, and it usually makes every effort to keep them separate." ⁵⁵

Although Tocqueville certainly borrowed from a time-honored analysis of despotism, he also added much to it. Ancient despotisms relied on fear to enforce separation among citizens and to dissolve all groups or associations; the isolation of the new despotism originated in the dissolution of the old ties and groups characterizing aristocratic society. Thus, as we saw in chapter 2, modern isolation eliminated all natural intermediaries between the individual and the state. Never in the past, Tocqueville maintained, could this new despotism have existed, because never before had isolation, its central precondition, flourished so widely. "No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire." In fact, even if a former despot such as the so-called absolutist Louis XIV had wanted to control and to direct every community and every individual, it would have been impossible because of poor means of communication, an imperfect administrative system, and the recalcitrance of intermediate associations that have always appeared whenever there has been an "inequality of condition."⁵⁶ Only in this modern, urbanized world of industry and commerce does each individual—deprived of groups, trade corporations, classes, parishes, extended families, and associations—dwell isolated and alone in the shadow of all-powerful government.

Middle-class society, Tocqueville felt, rushed to make modern isolation its undetachable companion; it befriended this isolation while celebrating the demise of aristocratic society, and like a good chum, it lent a hand by disseminating the passion for wealth and private enjoyment. Eventually citizens of the new middle-class world might surrender public affairs and political concern to whatever government will labor to secure their pleasures.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. ⁵⁷

Tocqueville generally depicted this new despotism as faceless and without identifiable despots, like Kafka's world in which everyone is entangled but no one does the tangling; occasionally Tocqueville thought that a faction of the manufacturing class might direct this despotism. "When the bulk of the community are engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs . . . they alone are in action, while all others are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice." ⁵⁸

The most fundamental characteristics of bourgeois society—individualism, private business and private profit, the accumulation of wealth, and self-interest—become the indispensable conditions for the new despotism to stage its alluring and awesome spectacle. Once again, however, the chief element of the drama is personal isolation.

For in a community in which the ties of family, of caste, of class, and craft fraternities no longer exist, people are far too much disposed to think exclusively of their own interests, to become self-seekers practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the public good. Far from trying to counteract such tendencies despotism encourages them, depriving the governed of any sense of solidarity and interdependence; of good-neighborly feelings and a desire to further the welfare of the community at large. It immures them, so to speak, each in his private life and, taking advantage of the tendency they already have to keep apart, it estranges them still more. Their feelings toward each other were already growing cold; despotism freezes them.

Since in such communities nothing is stable, each man is haunted by a fear of sinking to a lower social level and by a restless urge to better his condition. And since money has not only become the sole criterion of a man's social status but has also acquired an extreme mobility—that is to say it changes hands incessantly, raising or lowering the prestige of individuals and families—everybody is feverishly intent on making money or, if already rich, on keeping wealth intact. Love of gain, a fondness for business careers, the desire to get rich at all costs, a craving for material comfort and easy living quickly become ruling passions under a despotic government. . . . It is in the nature of despotism that it should foster such desires and propagate their havoc. ⁵⁹

This passage from the introduction to his Old Regime is among Tocqueville's last systematic descriptions of the despotism he feared. When he linked "interests," "narrow individualism," "private life," "love of gain," and "business careers," he revealed even to the most casual reader his conviction that the isolation of the new despotism had its roots in the soil of bourgeois society.

One cannot overstress the importance of this point. Tocqueville argued clearly and forcefully that bourgeois society, if not despotic at its inception, slowly and relentlessly unfolds the preconditions of this new despotism. The seed of despotism was planted by the bourgeoisie, it germinated with isolation and the collapse of the ties and the groups of aristocratic society, it sprouted with the praise of self-interest, and it might blossom fearfully if the world immerses itself in an obsessive, private pursuit of wealth. "Thus the vices which despotism produces are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things perniciously complete and assist each other. Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie; despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to consider their fellow creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public virtue."⁶⁰ Although Tocqueville never foresaw the murderous character of Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, he was correct in seeing isolation as the requisite foundation, something we can see in a passage from Arendt:

[Himmler] proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.

The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power and systematic coordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep." ⁶¹

Powerlessness and the Absence of Political Action

The new despotism would rob individuals of the ability, the desire, and the forum for political action. Isolated and concentrating on increasing their own fortune, people would feel helpless outside their private worlds. As Tocqueville said of the individual who is isolated from fellow citizens, "when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness." Furthermore, as we have seen, people engrossed in private affairs do not gather to act publicly; a political inertia accompanies their quest for accumulating greater goods and pleasures in their personal lives. Every American, Tocqueville said, was constantly engaged in private pursuits designed to improve his or her economic position, and the long-term result of this might be indifference to any political action whatsoever. "Do not talk to him of the interest and rights of mankind; this small domestic concern absorbs for the time all his thoughts and inclines him to defer political agitation to some other season." If a society offers a host of private gains such as wealth and pleasure—whereby desires are only increased rather than satisfied by temporary gratification—it enfeebles all inclination for public involvement and political action. "Political passions" for "momentous undertakings" have "but little hold on those who have devoted all their faculties to the pursuit of their well-being." Tocqueville suggested that great political movements designed to effect far-reaching change would become less and less likely in modern commercial societies. Even if an individual with great energy, high ideals, and staggering charisma appeared, the person would have to drag an entire population that wanted only to be left alone with its private concerns.

They will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will even applaud him; but they do not follow him. 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.... 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. ⁶²

Under the new despotism, Tocqueville suggested, each individual would become a consumer not a citizen, an observer not a participant. The proliferation of entertainment and the cult of enjoyment (the modern sense of the word fun entered the English language in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) would sap people's energies, lulling them into a vicarious enjoyment of adventures that were not political and often not their own. Rousseau's critique of the theater argued this well. "In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves." Theaters and entertainment teach people, in Rousseau's words, to see life "only on the stage," not to live it.⁶³ Thus, in entertainment, we win battles, rescue the unfortunate, vanquish political corruption, save the hungry, and feel self-satisfied, even though the entire action is fiction. Tocqueville agreed emphatically.

I read [no novels] that end ill. Why should one voluntarily subject oneself to painful emotions? To emotions created by an imaginary cause and therefore impelling you to no action. I like vivid emotions, but I seek them in real life, in society, in travelling, in business, but above all in political business. There is no happiness comparable to political success. . . . Having enjoyed that, I am ashamed of being excited by the visionary sorrows of heroes and heroines. ⁶⁴

The new despotism will replace actors on a political stage with an arena full of spectators.

Despotism with the Appearance of Freedom

Most pernicious and most deceptive, the new despotism will announce itself in the name of freedom, and in fact, the very ideology designed to buttress the despotism will ostensibly embrace freedom as its most basic value, until those in servitude believe themselves to be free. While sparkling with the glitter of diamonds, the gems will merely be glass, for "the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed lover of freedom." ⁶⁵

Retaining the form of freedom has always helped conceal the fact that the substance has been drained. "Every student of history knows that this phenomenon is a common one; rulers who destroy men's freedom commonly begin by trying to retain its forms—and so it has been from the reign of Augustus to the present day."⁶⁶ Tocqueville even argued that the new despotism might well be an elected one that, however preferable that might be to nonelective government, would not change the despotic character of society. In his notes, Tocqueville wrote that if he were a friend to despotism, he would allow "the deputies of the country [to deliberate] freely about peace and war, about the nation's finances, about its prosperity, its industries, its life. But I would avoid agreeing, at any price, that the representatives of a village had the right to assemble peacefully to discuss among themselves repairs for their church and the plan for their parsonage."⁶⁷ In the absence of municipal freedom, the debates of a national legislature offer only the appearance of freedom, as the Senate did under the Roman Empire. Tocqueville labeled this "theatrical representation." Elections procure only the illusion that individuals have control over their lives, allowing them to hasten back within their private walls, close the door, and pretend that they are free. As we have seen, Tocqueville did not equate freedom, as did Constant, with the preservation of an independent and private place in which one can do as one pleases; rather for him, free citizens participate in decision making. The new despotism, even if benevolent and elected, would slowly but relentlessly corrupt people until they could neither act nor think for themselves.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people . . . they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. . . .

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. . . .

It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity. ⁶⁸

The new despotism will summon apologists who will help retain the appearance of freedom without the reality, and lawyers in particular will rush to legitimize the new despotism. Tocqueville, who did appreciate the protection laws can offer, also thought that laws were efficient tools invariably used by despots, because they created the twin illusions of consensus and civility. Whereas the Spanish "pursued the Indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts," the Americans managed to do it legally and, to appearances, morally. "It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity."⁶⁹ Despots can always find "a lawyer ready to prove the lawfulness of their acts—to establish learnedly that violence was just, and that the oppressed were in the wrong."⁷⁰ More important,perhaps, Tocqueville claimed that lawyers attempt to substitute legal questions for political ones, legal quarrels for popular political activity, rules for movements. Laws confine quarrels to legal disputes over property and rights but obscure questions of general interest. Indeed, the entire legal vocabulary, focusing on individual rights and the protection of property, will convince people that a private, self-interested pursuit of goods and pleasures is both necessary and sufficient for freedom.

The blame for legitimizing despotism with the banner of freedom, however, does not lie with lawyers alone. As we will see in the next section, the whole ideology of society—created by newspapers, schools, intellectuals, and public opinion—threatens any diversity of thought.

The Eclipse of Both the Private World and Independence of Thought

Montaigne suggested that, in a harsh and unstable world, one could protect one's personal freedom by private withdrawl. As we saw in chapter 5, Stendhal continued this argument two centuries later when his characters found freedom and security from a threatening world in private rooms and prison cells. Tocqueville maintained that this alternative of a private, independent existence, an alternative that was once probably attainable under past despotisms, would no longer be feasible in the despotism of the new industrial world. Rousseau had been one of the first to suggest that a new despotism might control not just public behavior but private life and thought. "Do you think it is so easy to find a place where you can always live like an honest man? . . . beware lest an unjust government, a persecuting religion, and evil habits should disturb you in your home." ⁷¹

Tacitus had declared that men and women in the Roman Empire had lived in anxiety and suspicion even in their homes—"the very roofs and walls were eyed with suspicion"⁷² —but this was the ordinary fear of violence, falling heavily on those with threatening influence but leaving the bulk of the population alone. Tocqueville suggested that every private sphere would be invaded, only rarely by police, but instead by a uniformity of ideas, habits, and tastes. The new despotism will quietly influence our most private thoughts, and if not forestalled will permeate every home; and even those drawing rooms that once witnessed frank and free thought will resemble "one of those low, close, and gloomy abodes where the light which breaks in from without soon faints and fades away."⁷³ Not only is this despotism the "absolute master of public life," it also "penetrates from all sides into private life."⁷⁴ Confronted by powerless individuals who live as hostile strangers to one another, the new government will seep into each home and invade "the domain heretofore reserved to private independence . . . it gains a firmer footing every day about, above, and around all private persons, to assist, to advise, and to coerce them."⁷⁵ Not contenting itself with destroying public life, the new despotism will exert control over the private habits and thoughts of citizens. Once more, Tocqueville foresaw the basis, if not the violent character, of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. ⁷⁶

How is it that despotism, which had once contented itself with controlling behavior, has found a new way to insinuate itself into the minds of its subjects? How could Tocqueville argue that, in the "tyranny of democratic republics," the "body is left free, and the soul is enslaved"? The process should be familiar by now. Individuals left to themselves simply accept without question the predominant opinion of society, because only as active participants in groups and communities can one sustain a diversity of opinion in the modern world. "The multitude require no laws to coerce those who do not think like themselves: public disapprobation is enough; a sense of their loneliness and impotence overtakes them and drives them to despair."⁷⁷ By the second part of Democracy, Tocqueville had refined his notion of tyranny of the majority, because it was quite possible that virtually no dissenters would exist to be tyrannized and that all would embrace, or be enveloped by, the dominant opinions.

Tocqueville recognized that individual beliefs had been controlled before, especially by religions (Louis XIV deferred to Church leaders "in order that they might aid him in ruling over the minds of the people"⁷⁸); but,he suggested, the manner and the extent of this rule would become historically unique under this possible new despotism. Dissenting intellectuals, for example, might write what they wish, because few would read them and their thoughts would hardly damage the predominant ideas of the age. Under Louis Napoleon's dictatorship, he said, "Montalembert, or Guizot, or Falloux, or I may publish what we like. We are not read by the soldier or by the proletarian."⁷⁹ The dominant ideas—reinforced by intellectuals, churches, and schools—would reach into every home largely by means of the press. Before the enormous new capacities of the electronic age, Tocqueville worried about newspapers that "can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment."⁸⁰ The press managed to "set the public mind" and "to [form] political questions."⁸¹ When concentrated, the influence of the press is "unbounded."⁸² Tocqueville was not afraid simply of straightforward government censorship; he also feared its eventual control of the mind. Even a press independent of government control, he suggested, might embrace a subtle self-censorship, unconsciously reflecting the dominant values and repeating them ceaselessly until no one ever dreamed of questioning them.

The Pleasures of Servitude

Although in one passage Tocqueville feared "a yoke heavier than any that has galled mankind since the fall of the Roman Empire," he generally argued that the new despotism would be distinguished by its "sweetness."⁸³ The despotism that Tocqueville envisioned would rarely use violence—only "at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger."⁸⁴ Its strength would derive not from force but from the material enjoyments it could provide; not from fear, but bribery. "Civilization, instead of preparing men to live without any master except themselves, seems to have been useful only for sugarcoating and legitimizing their servitude."⁸⁵ Not only will the despotism refrain from cruelty, it will seek to please, but all the while degrading its subjects. Tacitus described this well: "Step by step [the Britons] were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude."⁸⁶ In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, a eunuch wrote to his master, "you are more absolute when you caress than when you threaten."⁸⁷ Similarly,Tocqueville said:

Above this race of men stands in immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should enjoy themselves, provided they think of nothing but enjoyment. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ⁸⁸

This condition "degrades men without tormenting them," for it transforms human beings who might be active makers of history into gratified beasts.

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ⁸⁹

In the end, "that mighty human intelligence which has so often stirred the world" busies itself with satiation.

Just as the Roman people wept at the death of their own tyrants,⁹⁰ the subjects of the new despotism might eventually enjoy their degradation. Stendhal explored this idea in The Charterhouse of Parma when the prisoners in Parma, confined to "dungeons three feet high," grew to love their jailers.⁹¹ Similarly,Tocqueville argued that people often learn to love and respect their oppressors, "for nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor." His premier example was probably the servant of the Old Regime who, Tocqueville suggested, abandoned his own personality and lived vicariously through the activities of his master.

Servants sometimes identify themselves with the person of the master, so that they become an appendage to him in their own eyes as well as in his. . . .

In this predicament the servant ultimately detaches his notion of interest from his own person; he deserts himself as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character of his master and thus assumes an imaginary personality. He complacently invests himself with the wealth of those who command him; he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank, and feeds his mind with borrowed greatness. . . . ⁹²

People will cherish and revere their new servitude, because it is built, buttressed, and guarded by the practice of granting satisfactions. Some of Tocqueville's French predecessors had already argued that despotism maintained its rule by disseminating the material goods, pleasures, and sometimes security that were accorded a servant. Montesquieu argued that great wealth signaled the downfall of republics, but "in despotic governments . . . the principle motive of actions is the hope of the conveniences of life."⁹³ In the seraglio of Montesquieu's Persian Letters—probably an important source for Tocqueville's theory of despotism—each woman eagerly busied herself with prolonging and perfecting her submission, simply because she felt a "dreadful need" for the rewards bestowed for good behavior. "We note that the more women we have under our eyes, the less trouble they give us. A more stringent need to please, less opportunity to band together, more examples of submissive obedience—all of this forges chains for them."⁹⁴ This idea of a despotism that caresses also appears in Rousseau's claim that people "forge themselves chains of gold, not as a mark of slavery, but as an ornament of pride"; likewise in a remark by Balzac's character Vautrin, who whispered that you can control others if you manage to "engineer dreadful needs." ⁹⁵

Tocqueville argued this point far more systematically. Human beings, he suggested, were created with comparatively few needs, but needs multiplied with the development of civilization. "Man is born with needs, and he creates needs for himself. . . but in proportion as life's pleasures have become more numerous, they have become habits. These in turn have finally become almost as necessary as life itself."⁹⁶ As these needs proliferate and as what used to be "superfluities" (a word dear to Fénelon) become necessities, people succeed in fastening their chains with their pleasures. So sensitive was Tocqueville to the seductive power of pleasures and comforts that he advocated the conscious proliferation of material pleasures as a means of bringing the Cabyles of Algeria into submission. The French must engender an envie, he said, quelling the rebelliousness of the Cabyles and capturing them by their desires. "The great passion of the Cabyle is the love of material enjoyments, and it is by this that one can and one must seize him."⁹⁷ Individuals obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and pleasure both reinforce their isolation and powerlessness and become more willing to submit to any order that promises them the security of ownership. "Thus men are following two separate roads to servitude; the taste for their own well-being withholds them from taking a part in the government, and their love of that well-being forces them to closer and closer dependence upon those who govern." ⁹⁸

Abundance, Doubt, and Nihilism

In his notebooks from North America, Tocqueville made the following cryptic entry: "This commercial movement will for America still further delay the moment of plenitude, which is so much to be feared, and will put off the century of revolutions."⁹⁹ Why is the "moment of plenitude" to be feared? Once more Montesquieu can assist us. First, as we have seen, comfort isolates and adversity unites; when citizens create wealth slowly and laboriously, they must rely on each other, but when wealth is excessive, people tend to withdraw and confine themselves to enjoyment. As Montesquieu said, land that is too fertile destroys a republic, whereas the "barrenness of the earth renders men industrious, sober, inured to hardship, and fit for war," all while fostering republican institutions.¹⁰⁰ Second, plenitude, or abundant wealth,corrupts. Tocqueville was suggesting that Americans, for whom wealth was available in the nation's early decades only on condition of hard work, would for a while maintain an ethic of selfdenial, self-discipline, frugality, morality, and moderation needed to extract this wealth from the continent. When wealth came easily and abundance dispersed throughout the population, then desires would proliferate uncontrollably, self-interest would surface as the predominant virtue, and the republic—which demands austerity—would vanish. As Montesquieu said, the spirit of commerce is compatible with democracy for a while, because "the spirit of commerce is naturally attended with that of frugality, economy, moderation, labor. . . ." The difficulty, he added, arises "when excessive wealth destroys the spirit of commerce," because then this abundance destroys the very ethic needed for a workable democracy. ¹⁰¹

Last of all, the abundance brought by the productivity of the industrial world will increase both the goods and the desires for these goods, but along with this will come a sense of doubt and even nihilism. With the emergence of equality, and of course the new world of commerce and industry, people "are plunged" into "uncertainty," and they know "neither the extent of their duties, nor that of their rights."¹⁰² Tocqueville thought that the anxiety and despair, discussed in chapters 1-4, emanated from the sense of isolation and powerlessness inherent in bourgeois society; but at the moment of abundance the anxiety would transform itself into serious doubt about any certain belief. Despotism, said Tocqueville, "confounds the notions of good and evil."¹⁰³ The obsession with material comforts would become a feeble substitute, always accompanied by anxiety, for what Tocqueville regarded as genuine human needs—participation in the control over one's world, a sense of purpose, membership in a community, and so forth. Thus we return to the first chapters of this book. Tocqueville answered that the anxiety of his generation sprang from a society that ignored genuine needs and tried to substitute spurious satisfactions. The argument was Pascal's.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair. . . . I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. ¹⁰⁴

So disconcerting is this realization, Pascal said, that people spend (an apt verb) their time trying to banish it from their minds. "The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries." ¹⁰⁵

Similarly, Tocqueville argued that the isolation of individuals would bring a sense of insignificance, and with this would come indifference to all belief and then doubt about the validity of any belief whatsoever. "It was not only the isolation of minds that was to be dreaded, but their uncertainty and their indifference; each searching in his way for the truth, many were to arrive at doubt, and with doubt, the taste for material enjoyments, that taste so fatal to liberty and so dear to those who want to ravish men, penetrated naturally into these souls."¹⁰⁶ It is a circular argument, but still important. People obsessed with accumulating goods become anxious and restless, but people who are anxious and restless try to overcome anxiety by accumulating goods. Eventually disillusion, doubt, and uncertainty about any ideals set in, and people perceive themselves as mere consumers. Each "has so contemptible an opinion of himself that he thinks he is born only to indulge in vulgar pleasures. He willingly takes up with low desires without daring to embark on lofty enterprises, of which he scarcely dreams."¹⁰⁷ A despotism in which "the people may amuse itself, as long as it dreams only of amusing itself and in which the people may "have pleasure, even if it has no happiness"¹⁰⁸ paints a desperate picture.

A World without a Future: A People Fastened to the Present

As we saw in chapter 10, people who are bereft of any historical purpose fasten themselves to the pleasures and interests of the present; as Balzac said, "Misers do not believe in a life hereafter: the present is everything for them. This throws a horrible light on the present day, when more than at any other time, money controls law, politics, and morals."¹⁰⁹ Societies without a future, Tocqueville said, "dissolve."¹¹⁰ We saw several reasons for this; a sense of the future gives people a definition of themselves, a grand goal that affirms their political ideas and principles, a public interest that militates against self-interest and even hedonism. If people accepted Gobineau's fatalism, if they had no vision of the future at all, they might act like Boccaccio's Florentines who faced the plague and "think of nothing else but to sample all the possible pleasures before this inevitable end."¹¹¹ Members of an aristocracy who no longer believe in a religious future can degenerate into consumers of pleasure who "require sumptuous depravity and splendid corruption."¹¹² Whenever people close themselves off in their private homes, trying to be content with petty pleasures and comforts, the blame, according to Tocqueville, must descend upon the political world, for people who derive no sense of purpose from society at large will try to construct goals in their private lives. "When no opinions are looked upon as certain, men cling to the mere instincts and material interests of their position, which are naturally more tangible, definite, and permanent than any opinions in the world." ¹¹³

People immersed in the consumption of goods and pleasures and tied to enjoyment of the present surrender all ability to build a future. As a result, Tocqueville thought that a free political order manages to inspire citizens with a love of the future, with a love of some goal that they might achieve.

There exist more family ties than are supposed between political passions and religious passions. On both sides general goods, immaterial to a certain degree, are in sight; on both sides an ideal of society is pursued, a certain perfecting of the human species, the picture of which raises souls above contemplation of private interests and carries them away. For my part, I more easily understand a man animated at the same time [by both] religious passion and political passion than [by] political passion and the passion for well-being, for example. The first two can hold together and be embraced in the same soul, but not the second two. ¹¹⁴

Tocqueville thought that religion was extremely important in forcing one's gaze on the future, often enabling a person to act with principle and even nobility. This is just one more reason he thought that doubt and disbelief were so useful to despotism; once religious faith declines, people "lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity" and "seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires." The new despotism, however, will welcome subjects who give no thought to the future and have no wish for political movements that will disturb the present.

Amid the ruins which surround me shall I dare to say that revolutions are not what I most fear for coming generations? . . . 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. ¹¹⁵

In his notes, we find a passage that Tocqueville eventually decided not to use and crossed out, but it illustrates his distaste of a world out of touch with its past and indifferent to its future. "For the American, the past is in some way like the future: it does not exist." ¹¹⁶

At bottom Tocqueville's fear of a new despotism was a rejuvenated, even if far more elaborate and analytical, expression of the ancient conviction that luxury induces decadence and destroys popular government. As Montesquieu said, "with possessions beyond the needs of private life it was difficult to be a good citizen."¹¹⁷ Montesquieu was in fact restating the maxim of many of the great Roman historians that "the less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect"—a maxim that led to the belief that the early Roman Republic multiplied its strength with its poverty, while Carthage dissipated its virtues with its opulence.¹¹⁸ But from monarchists like Fénelon to radicals like Rousseau, Montesquieu was only one among many of Tocqueville's French predecessors who held this view.¹¹⁹ Diderot, for example, gave an ironic warning to the fledgling United States that it must "prevent the enormous increase and unequal distribution of wealth and luxury" and "bear in mind that it is neither gold, nor even by the multitude of arms, that a state is upheld, but by morals." ¹²⁰

In fact, until the end of the eighteenth century, few in the French tradition questioned the belief that republican government rested on a foundation of public virtue that scorned luxury. Conservatives followed Bossuet and Fénelon in asserting as much, and everyone in eighteenth-century France who might merit being called a political radical—for example, d'Argenson, Meslier, Mably, and Morelly—insisted on republican virtue and an end to luxury. Only with thinkers like Condorcet—who belittled asceticism, lauded the productive power of the commercial classes, and promised "each successive generation will have larger possessions"—did this axiom about republican government vanish.¹²¹ In the nineteenth century both liberals such as Guizot and Constant, who enjoyed their position in the new commercial world, and radicals such as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, who sought to harness the new productive powers of industry to an historical carriage that would transport working people to a new age, discarded this time-honored critique of luxury—a critique that rapidly became an oddity of earlier times.

Tocqueville, however, still had one foot in the past and was too fond of his French mentors. Although he certainly never advocated an ascetic, subsistence-level existence, he did warn that the unchecked luxury that seemed to be the inseparable companion of bourgeois society might very well bring a new despotism rather than a golden age. The very prosperity that accompanied bourgeois society might, in Tocqueville's opinion, give birth to the conditions that make this new despotism possible, like a plant whose flowering moment also signals its demise. "One must take care," wrote Tocqueville, "not to confuse political liberty with certain effects it sometimes produces." Political liberty leads to prosperity, but prosperity leads to "the taste for material well-being" and to a "passion for making fortunes"; these in turn threaten to "extinguish" the very political liberty that gave them birth." ¹²²

Notes

¹ Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, p. 92.

² Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 170; Democracy, 2: 101.

³ Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, p. 127.

⁴ Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, p. 75.

⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 336. (I have translated the word définir as "describe" rather than "define"; it has the sense of depicting something by drawing it.)

⁶ N. A. Boulauger, Oeuvres, vol. 3, Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme (Geneva, 1971), pp. 19, 100-105, 155-61; Irving Louis Horowitz, Claude Helvétius (New York, 1954), p. 58; Arthur Wilson, Diderot, 2 vols, in one (New York, 1972), p. 379; Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (London, 1955), pp. 31-38.

⁷ For a good discussion of the varied meanings Tocqueville gave to the word democracy, see Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," ch. 19. Lamberti illustrates quite well that Tocqueville's fears for the future of democracy relate to his mistrust of the bourgeoisie. Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux démocraties, pp. 47-54, 189-98, 288-89.

⁸ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.c, Paquet No. 5, p. 18.

⁹ Ibid., C.V.b. Paquet No. 13, p. 29.

¹⁰ For this and the following quotations in the text, see ibid., C.V.c., Paquet No. 5, pp. 16, 26, 14. See also pp. 2-4, 10-11, 15.

¹¹ Ibid., C.V.a., Paquet No. 8, p. 50.

¹² Ibid., C.V.c., Paquet No. 5, p. 32.

¹³ Ibid., C.V.a., Paquet No. 8, p. 5.

¹⁴ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 7, Nouvelle correspondance, p. 110.

¹⁵ Tocqueville, Correspondence . . . Senior, 1: 134; Recollections, p. 6.

¹⁶ Tocqueville, Correspondence . . . Senior, 1: 102.

¹⁷ Tocqueville, Democracy, 1: 6.

¹⁸ Voltaire, The Portable Voltaire, trans. H. I. Woolf et al., ed. Ben Ray Redman (New York, 1963), p. 518 (from The English Letters); W. H. Lewis, The Splendid Century (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. 62.

¹⁹ Tocqueville, Memoir, l: 230-31. (From "France before the Revolution.")

²⁰ Tocqueville, Selected Letters, p. 97.

²¹ Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 192.

²² Tocqueville, Correspondence . . Senior, 2: 126.

²³ Tocqueville, The Old Regime, pp. 128-31, 281. If he admired the aristocracy of his ancestors, he had only contempt for those who dreamed, rather pathetically, that they could maintain an ancient aristocracy in the new world of industry and commerce. "In their obscene repose, they no longer cultivate the intellectual tastes that used to embellish their leisure. But they complain in their crass well-being and console themselves, with horses and dogs, for no longer being able to govern the state." (Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.d., Paquet No. 6, p. 54.)

²⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 37.

²⁵ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.h., Paquet No. 3, Cahier No. 4, p. 23.

²⁶ Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 271.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 290.

²⁸ Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, p. 152.

²⁹ Quoted in Pierre-Marcel, Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 369. (From unpublished notes.)

³⁰ Tocqueville, Selected Letters, p. 188.

³¹ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 6, pt. 1, Correspondance anglaise, pp. 320-21.

³² Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.j., Paquet No. 2, Cahier No. 2, pp. 16-17.

³³ Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, pp. 183, 182; Recollections, p. 205.

³⁴ Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 6; Journey to America, p. 274.

³⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 219, 239-40, 137-38 (my emphasis).

³⁶ Quoted in Levin, The Gates of Horn, p. 287.

³⁷ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 328-29.

³⁸ Ibid., 102-3. See pp. 319-20 for the quotation that follows in the text.

³⁹ Tocqueville, Selected Letters, p. 100.

⁴⁰ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 3, Écrits et discours politiques, p. 117. (From Abolition de l'esclavage.)

⁴¹ See Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, pp. 69-73; Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 34-38; Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 21-22, 89-90; Lipset, Political Man; Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship. For a very good discussion of the relation between freedom and equality in Tocqueville's thought, see Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux démocraties, ch. 2.

⁴² Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.h., Paquet No. 3, Cahier No. 4, p. 36.

⁴³ Boesche, "The Prison: Tocqueville's Model for Despotism."

⁴⁴ Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System, p. 47.

⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 32, 187-98, 40.

⁴⁶ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 9, Études économiques, politiques, p. 341; On the Penitentiary System, pp. 5-7.

⁴⁷ Quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, p. 101.

⁴⁸ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 9, #x00C9;tudes économiques, politiques, pp. 321-22, 329.

⁴⁹ Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System, p. 5.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 58.

⁵¹ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 9, Études économiques, politiques, pp. 320-21.

⁵² Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, p. 84; Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 9, Études économiques, politiques, p. 365.

⁵³ Tacitus, The Complete Works, p. 206. (Annals, VI, 19.) Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, III, 7, p. 106.

⁵⁴ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, IV, 3, 1: 32; Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 108.

⁵⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 109.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 334.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 336.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 150.

⁵⁹ Tocqueville, The Old Regime, p. xiii.

⁶⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 109.

⁶¹ Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 338-39.

⁶² Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 11, 269, for this and the preceding quotations in the text.

⁶³ Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, pp. 25, 48.

⁶⁴ Tocqueville, Correspondence . . . Senior, 2: 206-7.

⁶⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 1: 100.

⁶⁶ Tocqueville, The Old Regime p. 45.

⁶⁷ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.c., Paquet No. 5, p. 50.

⁶⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 337, 339.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 1: 368-69.

⁷⁰ Tocqueville, The Old Regime, pp. 223-24.

⁷¹ Rousseau, Émile, pp. 420-21; also p. 436.

⁷² Tacitus, The Complete Works, p. 185. (Annals, IV, 69-70.)

⁷³ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 39.

⁷⁴ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.c., Paquet No. 5, p. 4.

⁷⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 323-24.

⁷⁶ Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 475.

⁷⁷ Tocqueville, Democracy, 1: 274, 2: 275.

⁷⁸ Tocqueville, Memoir, 1: 205. (From "France before the Revolution.")

⁷⁹ Tocqueville, Correspondence . . . Senior, 2: 160.

⁸⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 119.

⁸¹ See Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 8, Correspondance . . . Beaumont, pt. 2, p. 24; pt. 1, p. 564.

⁸² Tocqueville, Democracy, 1: 193.

⁸³ Tocqueville, Memoir, 1: 377; Oeuvres (M), vol. 8, pt. 3, Correspondance . . . Beaumont, p. 228.

⁸⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 335.

⁸⁵ Tocqueville in Richard Laurin Hawkins, ed., Newly Discovered French Letters of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), p. 199.

⁸⁶ Tacitus, The Complete Works, p. 690. (Agricola, 21.)

⁸⁷ Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, XCVI.

⁸⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 336; see also p. 335.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 337; see also p. 168.

⁹⁰ See Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, pp. 132-33.

⁹¹ Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, pp. 374-75.

⁹² Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 12, 189-90.

⁹³ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, V, 18, 1: 66.

⁹⁴ Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, XCVI.

⁹⁵ Rousseau, Eloisa, 4: 116; Balzac, A Harlot High and Low, p. 191.

⁹⁶ Drescher, ed., Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, pp. 9-10; see also p. 5.

⁹⁷ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 3, Écrits et discours politiques, pp. 291, 146. (From L'Algérie.)

⁹⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 325.

⁹⁹ Tocqueville, Journey to America, p. 249.

¹⁰⁰ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, XVIII, 4, 1 : 273.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., V, 6, 1: 46.

¹⁰² Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.e., p. 4.

¹⁰³ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.b., Paquet No. 13, p. 30.

¹⁰⁴ Pascal, Pensées (Br), 131, 139; see also Mesnard, Pascal: His Life and Work, pp. 188-89.

¹⁰⁵ Pascal, Pensées (Br), 171, also 146.

¹⁰⁶ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (B), vol. 9, Etudes économiques, politiques, p. 11.

¹⁰⁷ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 262. Pierre Manent also notes Tocqueville's use of Pascal's ideas in describing the relation between the obsession with wealth and pervasive doubt. See his Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris, 1982), pp. 82-91.

¹⁰⁸ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.c., Paquet No. 5, p. 14.

¹⁰⁹ Balzac, Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet, p. 381.

¹¹⁰ Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 3, #x00C9;crits et discours politiques, p. 120. (From Abolition de l'esclavage.)

¹¹¹ Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, p. 292.

¹¹² Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 139.

¹¹³ Ibid., 1: 197; see also Oeuvres (M), vol. 11, Correspondance . . . Royer-Collard . . . Ampère, p. 112.

¹¹⁴ Tocqueville, Selected Letters, p. 192.

¹¹⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy, 2: 158-59, 277.

¹¹⁶ Yale Tocqueville Collection, C.V.h., Paquet No. 3, Cahier No. 2, p. 47.

¹¹⁷ Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, p. 98.

¹¹⁸ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, VII, 2, 1: 96; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, p. 45. Lamberti notes the passages in which Montesquieu praised commerce, but he fails to see how Montesquieu was frequently critical of its political and moral effects. He does point out how Tocqueville feared the deleterious effects of commerce and of an obsessive love of material well-being. See Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux démocraties, pp. 237-38.

¹¹⁹ Fénelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, pp. 368-69; Rousseau, The Government of Poland, p. 18.

¹²⁰ Quoted in Crocker, The Embattled Philosopher, pp. 399-400.

¹²¹ Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, pp. 180-81, 32, 130, 187-88.

¹²² Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), vol. 13, pt. 2, Correspondance . . . Kergorlay, p. 211.

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Available English Translations

Where possible, I have used primary sources available in English translation. These include the following:

Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior, From 1834 to 1859. Ed. M.C.M. Simpson, 2 vols. in one, 2d ed. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. (Reprint of 1872 ed.)

Democracy in America. Ed. Phillips Bradley. Trans. Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, and Phillips Bradley. 2 vols. New York: Vintage Books (Alfred A. Knopf. Inc., 1945).

The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau. Trans. and ed. John Lukacs. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968.

Journey to America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. Rev. ed. in collaboration with A. P. Kerr. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.

Journeys to England and Ireland. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer. Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.

Memoir, Letters, and Remains. No. trans. given. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862. The first volume includes Beaumont's Memoir and Tocqueville's article "France before the Revolution," trans. John Stuart Mill. When this article first appeared in the London and Westminster Review in April 1836, it was titled "Political and Social Condition of France." (These two volumes are a translation of Oeuvres et correspondance inédites, ed. Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1861. Eventually they were included as Volumes 5 and 6 in Oeuvres complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860-66. This edition of Tocqueville's works is discussed below.)

The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955.

On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. Written with Gustave de Beaumont. Trans. Francis Lieber. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970.

Recollections. Ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr. Trans. George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.

"Report Given Before the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on January 15, 1848, On the Subject of M. Cherbuliez' Book Entitled On Democracy in Switzerland." Appendix 2 to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Selected Letters on Politics and Society. Ed. Roger Boesche. Trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

"Speech Pronounced in the Chamber of Deputies on January 27, 1848, During the Proposed Answer to the Speech from the Throne." Appendix 3 to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform. Essays selected, ed. and trans. Seymour Drescher. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

The Beaumont Edition of Tocqueville's Complete Works

There are two editions of Tocqueville's "complete" works, neither of which is complete. The first was published by Madame de Tocqueville and edited by Gustave de Beaumont. 9 vols. (Oeuvres complètes d'Alexis de Tocqueville. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860-66.) Throughout the book, this edition has been referred to as Oeuvres (B). The first three volumes contained De la démocratie en Amérique, the fourth L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, and the fifth and sixth contained letters that are available in the English translation listed previously. I have used volumes 7, 8, and 9, as listed below:

7. Nouvelle correspondance entièrement inédite d'Alexis de Tocqueville (1866).

8. Mélanges, fragments historiques et notes sur l'Ancien Régime, la Révolution et l'Empire: voyages, pensées entièrement inédits (1865).

9. Etudes économiques, politiques, et littéraires (1866).

The Mayer Edition of Tocqueville's Complete Works

The second edition of Tocqueville's "complete" works is in the process of publication under the general direction of J. P. Mayer (Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1951-.) Throughout the book, this edition has been referred to as Oeuvres (M). The first volume contains De la démocratie en Amérique, and the second volume contains L Ancien Régime et la Révolution, as well as notes about the French Revolution and the First Empire. The twelfth volume contains Tocqueville's Souvenirs. For all of these, I have used available English translations, as indicated above. In this book, I have referred to the volumes listed below, all of the volumes—other than Volumes 1, 2, and 12—published to date.

3. Écrits et discours politiques (1962), ed. André Jardin. (This includes works under the subheadings of Abolition de l'esclavage, L'Algérie, and L'Inde; references in the text have included these subheadings, where appropriate.)

5, pt. 1. Voyages en Sicile et aux États-Unis (1957), ed. J. P. Mayer.

5, pt. 2. Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie (1958), ed. J. P. Mayer and André Jardin.

6, pt. 1. Correspondance anglaise: Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville avec Henry Reeve et John Stuart Mill (1954), ed. J. P. Mayer and Gustave Rundler.

8, 3 pts. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Gustave de Beaumont (1967), ed. André Jardin.

9. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et d'Arthur de Gobineau (1959), ed. M. Degros.

11. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard: Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Jean-Jacques Ampère (1970), ed. André Jardin.

13, 2 pts. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergorlay (1977), ed. André Jardin.

15, 2 pts. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Francisque de Corcelle et correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et de Madame Swetchine (1983), ed. Pierre Gibert.

18. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville avec Adolph de Circourt et avec Madame de Circourt (1983), ed. A. P. Kerr.

Unpublished Sources

Over the last several decades, Yale University has acquired large numbers of manuscripts, notes, and letters relating to Tocqueville's journey to North America. These are available to scholars in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. In footnotes, I have referred to this material as "Yale Tocqueville Collection."

RELATED PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 2d rev. ed. New York: World, 1958.

Balzac, Honoré de. A Harlot High and Low. Trans. Rayner Heppenstall. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970.

——. Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet. Trans. E. K. Brown, Dorothea Walter, and John Watkins. New York: Modern Library, 1950.

Bendix, Reinhard. Nation-Building and Citizenship. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Boesche, Roger. "The Prison: Tocqueville's Model for Despotism." Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980): 550-63.

Boulanger, N. A. Oeuvres, Vol. 3, Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme. Geneva: Skatkine Reprints, 1971. (Réimpression de l'Edition d'Amsterdam, 1794.)

Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Trans. June Barraclough. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955.

Crocker, Lester G. The Embattled Philosopher: A Biography of Denis Diderot. [East Lansing, Mich.]: Michigan State College Press, 1954.

Fénelon, Meffire François de Salignac de La Mothe. The Adventures of Telemachus. No trans. given. 3d ed. Dublin: n.p., 1777.

Lamberti, Jean-Claude. Tocqueville et les deux démocraties. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983.

Levin, Harry. The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.

Lively, Jack. The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.

Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie. Paris: Julliard, 1982.

Mesnard, Jean. Pascal. Trans. Claude Abraham and Marcia Abraham. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1969.

——. Pascal: His Life and Works. Trans. G. S. Fraser, London: Harvill Press, 1952.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. Trans. David Lowenthal. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965.

——. The Persian Letters. Ed., trans., and introduced by J. Robert Loy. New York: World, 1961.

——. The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. Thomas Nugent. 2 vols. in one. New York: Hafner, 1949.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. (Brunschvicg ed.) Trans. W. F. Trotter. Introduced by T. S. Eliot, New York: Dutton, 1958.

Pierson, George Wilson. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Eloisa. No trans. given. 4 vols. London: T. Becket, 1776.

——. É mile. Trans. Barbara Foxley. London: J. M. Dent, 1911.

——. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre. Trans., ed., and introduced by Allan Bloom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968.

The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma. Trans. Margaret R. B. Shaw. Baltimore: Penguin, 1958.

Tacitus. The Complete Works. Ed. Moses Hadas. Trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. New York: Modern Library, 1942.

Zetterbaum, Marvin. Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.