Alfred E Smith, the much-loved governor of New York state for most of the 1920s, was famous for his unpretentious way with words; it authenticated him as a man of the people. So it is easy to see why he blue-pencilled a certain press release that was to be issued in his name: "People might think I could quote Thomas Jefferson, but De Tocqueville, never!"
This anecdote does more than illustrate Al Smith's character: it also pinpoints the position of Alexis de Tocqueville in American culture. He is remembered as a wise man who wrote a glowing book about democracy in the United States, a book which can conveniently be ransacked for impressive quotations (though occasionally pundits just invent them); but he is also considered too highbrow for everyday use, and his book is more praised than read. Of late he has been taken up by the neoconservative right as a sort of 19th-century Leo Strauss, and even more by the "civil society" left, worried about the declining sense of trust and community. But the truth is that his work has few lessons for either.
Tocqueville remains, however, an enjoyable and important writer. He was born in 1805 and died relatively young, of tuberculosis, in 1859. His father's family belonged to the ancient French nobility, whose duty and purpose in life was to fight for the king when ordered. His mother's family belonged to the legal nobility: among its recent members was Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who had been one of Louis XVI's ministers, and was his chief counsel at his trial, for which services he was guillotined in 1794. This background, and especially the influence of his father, who was a prefect and then a peer of France during the Bourbon restoration (1814-30), helps to explain why Tocqueville felt the call to govern France as a political vocation. But in this he was by no means unusual in his class and time. In post-Napoleonic France, politics was widely regarded as a profession for gentlemen, and there was deep reluctance among the nobility and the grande bourgeoisie to share power with lesser mortals.
Tocqueville was not a philosopher: he was bad at defining his terms, and the notions that he put forward were seldom much more than rationalisations of his own interests and experience. Thus in the first part of his Democracy in America (1835), he made much of what he thought was the real danger of "tyranny of the majority," but was never able to show that if equality were attained—if no class, race, religion or sex was privileged—the danger truly existed, and by the time he published his book's second part, in 1840, he had forgotten all about it. (Unfortunately the idea had meanwhile been picked up by John Stuart Mill, who had his own elitist anxieties.) The truth is that Tocqueville, a scion of a defeated oligarchy, regretted his caste's loss of power, and was too easily alarmed by the idea that the newly triumphant commons would avenge themselves on their former masters—as indeed they had done before he was born, in the great French revolution. But it is to his credit that he broadly accepted that the overthrow of the aristocracy was final, in the west at any rate, and was prepared to make the best of it. On the whole, he thought that the coming of democracy was not only God's will, as demonstrated by French history for 400 years, but was just. Guizot, the conservative statesman, got it right when he said to Tocqueville: "You paint and judge modern democracy as a conquered aristocrat convinced that his conqueror is right.''
So far so good. But "tyranny of the majority" is a phrase which has since been taken up by all too many minorities (segregationists in the American south, for instance) who are anxious to defend their unjust privileges. A similar fate has befallen Tocqueville's remarks in Democracy in America on "associationism." Travelling to America from France where, notoriously, all important political and administrative decisions were taken at the centre, Tocqueville was immensely impressed by the voluntary activity of civic groups in the US. Such groups undertook most of the public works which in France would have been the work of the state—prisons, hospitals, schools and so on. The public spirit displayed by such groups seemed to Tocqueville to demonstrate the essence of liberty, and he was anxious to encourage emulation in his own country. This was fair enough, but he did not notice the role of city and state authorities, and of the federal government, in launching and fostering schemes of public benefit, such as the canal, road and railway networks. And he nowhere thought seriously about the rise of the modern state, although it was happening all round him; he just dismissed it as "centralisation," like any other aristocrat anxious to preserve his local political influence.
All this can be forgiven him. What is less easy to pass over is the belief of writers like Robert Putnam, the American political scientist and populariser of the idea of "social capital," that Tocqueville can have any very helpful bearing on the dilemmas of today. He enunciated the value of spontaneous civic activity very eloquently. Local institutions were important, he believed, because they helped to inculcate the habits of democratic citizenship—"they are to liberty what primary schools are to science… they put it within people's reach." But he has nothing useful to say about the decline of such civil society institutions in the vastly changed society of the 21st century.
Tocqueville is misread if he is turned into a prophet. The triumph of democracy in France and America is too old a story, and most of Tocqueville's warnings about such things as dictatorship, centralisation and class hegemony, although still valid, are too specific to his own time to be of much use to ours. During the cold war, Americans tried to use him for propaganda purposes against Soviet communism, but even if their efforts were legitimate, which is doubtful (he is not really a counterweight to Marx), the issue has been moot since the destruction of the Berlin wall. No, to understand Tocqueville's abiding importance we have to adopt different terms of reference. We have to look at him as a social observer and travel writer, as a historian, and even as a social anthropologist.
Throughout his life, Tocqueville loved to travel, although his bad health and that of his wife meant that his journeys were neither many nor far-reaching (he consoled himself by reading travel books avidly). Still, besides travel in France, he went to Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, England, Ireland, Algeria, Canada and, above all, the US, and recorded penetrating observations about most of them. Even if he was not a philosopher, he was a philosophical traveller. Wherever he was, he tried to understand the political society in which he found himself, and as he was intelligent and hard-working (and also, in person, charming—nobody ever refused to talk to Tocqueville) he always made valuable discoveries. The famous voyage to America best demonstrates these points.
In 1831 Tocqueville was an unpaid junior prosecutor in the French legal system. He had taken the oath of loyalty to Louis-Philippe, who had become king of France as a result of the July revolution in 1830, but because of his family's conspicuous record of loyalty to the deposed Bourbon kings, his career was going nowhere. At the same time, the 1830 revolution had confirmed his long-held belief that democracy was the wave of the future; he decided to travel to the US, the world's only functioning modern democracy, to write a book about it. For nine months he criss-crossed North America, interviewing every authoritative lawyer, politician, merchant, academic or other professional person whom he could track down, filling a succession of notebooks with his findings, and a large trunk with books and documents. Readers of the notebooks today can see Democracy in America steadily emerging as Tocqueville scribbled and reflected, but what is astonishing is that at the same time he was pursuing an investigation into the American prison system, which was his official reason for being in the US. This too resulted in a book, written in collaboration with his close friend and travelling companion, Gustave de Beaumont.
On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France was published in 1833, the first part of Democracy in 1835, and between them they made Tocqueville famous. For he established to his own satisfaction and that of his anxious readers, to whom democracy had so far been synonymous with revolution, that a democratic republic might be a pacific, law-abiding, viable system in the modern world. It was an important point, but hardly needs demonstrating today. Nor was Tocqueville's analysis without its omissions: the US presidency baffled him, for example, and he had nothing to say about congress. However, his patient exploration of the mechanisms of American political life was in its day unprecedented: no one else had made such an impartial, empirical study of any current state, and certainly not of America. The disdainful travel writings of such British travellers as Mrs Trollope were a very different matter. Democracy in America deserves to be studied as one of the first classics of modern political science—"A new political science is needed for a wholly new world," said Tocqueville. Its method is instructive, both in its strengths and its weaknesses; and the picture of US democracy which he paints is so vivid that it is easy for us to register how much the country has changed since 1835, and also how difficult it is to assess the changes for good or bad. For example, slavery is dead, but the farmers' republic has become a doubtfully competent superpower (a development, by the way, which Tocqueville predicted).
The 1835 Democracy enabled Tocqueville to find himself, as both writer and political thinker. He devoted the rest of his life—as author and politician—to propagating his creed of liberty under the law, of democracy modified by education. He entered the French parliament in 1839 and served until 1851, when the second republic was overthrown by its president, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, later Napoleon III. The second part of Democracy in America was less successful than the first: it had a weaker empirical basis and was, more than anything, an expression of the anxieties of the French elite in the face of the strengthening state and the rising challenge to its hegemony from the common people. This is what makes the book attractive to reactionaries, although Tocqueville's purpose was to affirm that, in spite of everything, democracy was acceptable and safe.
As a politician, Tocqueville was overwhelmed by the revolution of 1848, which he saw as nothing but a violent attack on the rights of property; rather more persuasively, he feared that it would lead to dictatorship, as indeed it did with the rise of Louis-Napoleon, whose overthrow Tocqueville did not live to see. The whole experience deeply disheartened him; he decided that his career in politics had been a mistake, and turned back to authorship. The result was his Ancien Régime and Revolution, published in 1856.
This book showed that he had become a historian, and a highly competent one: his study of pre-revolutionary France was as much a pioneering example of scientific investigation as Democracy had been. He was the first person to exploit the rich administrative archives of the 18th century, and liked to think that he was investigating modern times as scientifically as others had studied the middle ages. His Ancien Régime has been a model to researchers ever since, although many, perhaps most, of his findings have since been questioned or refuted. Just as he had once brought contemporary America to life, so now he evoked the ancien régime, and when all allowances have been made it is still a lively and convincing picture, still an excellent place to start investigating the causes of the French revolution. Few historians can expect to have as much said of their work after a lapse of 150 years.
But Tocqueville regarded his Ancien Régime as much more than a historical monograph: for him it was also a call to arms. Its proposition was that liberty is the only right political order for modern man, and the purpose of the book was to rouse his countrymen to claim it. It was for this reason that John Stuart Mill, just about to publish his famous tract, On Liberty, particularly welcomed it. Tocqueville's affirmations give his book its dynamism; but it must be said that his message presents some of the same difficulties to modern readers as does his earlier study of democratic equality. Tocqueville grasps the essential point—which even Isaiah Berlin missed—that liberty is a process, a system, as well as an idea; the trouble is that he seems to expect his readers, once liberty is established, to devote all their time to maintaining it. Tocqueville's free citizen is rather like himself: someone with the leisure to devote every day to the effort of making liberty work. Participation, he implies, must involve more than voting in occasional elections and following the news; liberty requires a full-time commitment, which those of us with our livings to earn cannot really make. Tocqueville did not see this as a problem because he thought that the point of liberty under the law was to put power in the hands of men like himself, a cultivated country gentleman with a private income. His language about liberty may still move us, but it will not do to look to him for a definition of the term; we must do that for ourselves, in the conditions of our own time.
Tocqueville would not have minded; he knew that the historian's subject is the ineluctable changes which govern human affairs, from which nothing is exempt. In his Recollections of 1848, published after his death, he denounces what he takes to be the mistaken ideology of the revolutionaries, but then suddenly pulls up: "Will socialism remain buried under the contempt which so rightly covers the socialists of 1848? I raise the question without answering it. I do not doubt that the constituent laws of modern society will be much modified in the long run; it has happened already to many of their chief clauses, but will they ever be destroyed and others put in their place? I think it impracticable, but I say no more, because the more I study society in former times, and the more I learn in detail how society operates now, and when I consider the prodigious diversity that one comes across, not only of laws, but of the principles of laws, and the different forms which they have assumed and which the right of property assumes, whatever men say, here on earth, I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often only those to which we are accustomed, and that where the organisation of society is concerned, the field of possibility is much vaster than men who live in particular societies ever imagine."
This passage, perhaps, gives us the essence of Tocqueville. He was an earnest inquirer who was not afraid to follow his thought to the brink of overturning one of his most strongly held convictions. He encourages, even forces his readers to do likewise. His vivid portrayal of the US compels us to consider in what respects it is, and is not, like America today. His portrayal of that other society, the old order in France, exacts the same response, while compelling us to reflect on the folly of governments, the causes of revolution ("the most dangerous moment for a bad government is that in which it begins to reform"), and the possibility of peaceful progress under law—all of them perennially important topics. Above all, by his care for detail, relevance and justice, he extends our human sympathies, as his own were (however imperfectly) extended, whether to American citizens, British lords, Irish peasants or the people of France. It is in these ways that he is still a teacher, still a moralist, and still worth reading.
