Alexis de Tocqueville, Part 2: Democracy in America, Volume One

Read the episode (Narration script)

The first sentence of Democracy in America tells you what Tocqueville thought he had found. In Henry Reeve's 1835 translation, it says that among the new things that caught his attention in the United States, nothing struck him more forcibly than "the general equality of conditions."

That phrase is easy to misread. Tocqueville did not mean that Americans had equal wealth. He says plainly that he knew of no country where the love of money had a stronger hold. He meant equality of status. There were no hereditary ranks. Inheritance laws split estates among children instead of passing them whole to an eldest son, so family fortunes broke up within a generation or two. Wealth moved quickly from hand to hand. A rich man in America did not belong to a different order of humanity from his neighbor, and nobody expected him to.

Tocqueville called this the fundamental fact from which everything else seemed to follow. And he wrote volume one with France in mind. He says in the introduction that in America he saw more than America: he was looking for the image of democracy itself, so Europeans could learn what to fear and what to hope from it. He describes the spread of equality across centuries as a "providential fact," something that every king, noble and rebel had pushed forward, often without meaning to. He says he wrote the whole book under "a kind of religious dread." And he gives the book its motto: "A new science of politics is indispensable to a new world."

So the book is a report, and it is also a warning addressed to the people back home.

Tocqueville starts at the bottom. In New England, he notes, the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the Union. Town meetings elected officials, assessed taxes and repaired roads. To a Frenchman raised on the idea that order flows outward from Paris, this was startling. Americans did not learn self-government from theory. They practiced it on bridges, schools and local disputes until it became a habit. Tocqueville thought habits like these mattered more than any written constitution.

He then works through the larger machinery: the federal system, the president, the courts. He is especially interested in American judges, who could refuse to apply a law that conflicted with the Constitution. He observed that scarcely any question arose in the United States that did not sooner or later become a subject of judicial debate. Readers who follow the American Supreme Court will recognize the pattern nearly two centuries later.

The jury impressed him for an unexpected reason. He cared less about verdicts than about jurors. Serving on a jury, he argued, trained ordinary people to judge, to weigh evidence and to take responsibility for public decisions. He called it "a gratuitous public school ever open." The same logic runs through his praise of the free press and of political associations. Each one gave citizens practice in acting together without waiting for the government.

Then the book turns darker. The most quoted section of volume one concerns what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority. In a democracy, the majority makes the laws, controls the officials and shapes opinion. There is nowhere to appeal. A European king could censor a book, but a writer could flee to another court or another country. In America, the pressure came from everyone at once.

His sharpest sentence on this is still uncomfortable to read: "I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America." He was not describing prisons or censors. He was describing social exile. A person who crossed the majority might keep his rights and lose his neighbors, his customers and his career. Tocqueville thought this kind of power was more effective than a dungeon because it acted on the will as well as on behavior.

This is where readers often stop and argue. He spent nine months in the country, mostly talking to educated and prosperous people, many of whom distrusted the popular politics of Andrew Jackson's era. Some of his gloom about majority rule came from them. Still, his observation about conformity has held up well enough that people across the political spectrum keep reaching for it.

The longest chapter of volume one is about what Tocqueville called the three races of the United States: white Americans, Native Americans and enslaved Black Americans. Here the reporting becomes personal. At the end of 1831, near Memphis, he watched a band of Choctaws trying to cross the Mississippi in midwinter, on their way to land the American government had promised them. The river was full of ice. They had their sick, their newborns and their old people with them, and no tents or wagons. He writes that no cry or sob was heard, that all were silent, and that the sight would never fade from his memory.

On slavery, he compares the two banks of the Ohio River. On the Kentucky side, a slave state, work was associated with slavery and degraded. On the Ohio side, a free state, everyone worked and the land prospered. He condemned slavery as both cruel and economically ruinous. But he was also deeply pessimistic about the future. He doubted that white Americans would accept freed Black Americans as equals, and he predicted lasting conflict. The prediction was grim, and in large part it was right.

Volume one ends with a famous forecast. There are two great nations in the world, Tocqueville writes, the Russians and the Americans. They began from different points: one relies on freedom, the other on servitude. Yet each seems marked out to sway the destinies of half the globe. He wrote that in 1835.

The book has real limits. Tocqueville generalizes boldly, leans heavily on New England, and sometimes treats an impression as a law of history. But his central move still works. He looked past the formal rules to the daily habits that make rules function or fail: town meetings, juries, newspapers, voluntary groups and the pressure of neighbors. That is why the book continues to read like a description of something alive.

Five years later he published a second volume that set America aside for long stretches and asked what equality does to the mind itself. That is where he meets individualism, restlessness and a new kind of soft despotism. That is next on Book Report.