Alexis de Tocqueville, Part 3: Democracy in America, Volume Two

Read the episode (Narration script)

The first volume of Democracy in America was about institutions: towns, courts, juries, newspapers and the power of the majority. The second volume, published in 1840, goes somewhere less obvious. Tocqueville wanted to know what living among equals does to the inside of a person: how people think, what they want, what they fear, how they spend their time. America is still the main exhibit, but for long stretches it becomes a laboratory rather than a destination.

Many readers find this the stranger and more prophetic of the two volumes. It is also more abstract. Tocqueville is reasoning from a single fact, equality of conditions, toward its consequences, and he is often reasoning about a future that had not happened yet.

He opens with a joke that is also an argument. America, he says, is one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied. Americans did not read Descartes. They did not need to. In a society without inherited authorities, each person is told to judge everything for himself. No priest, lord or family tradition settles the question in advance.

Then comes the twist. Nobody can actually work out everything alone. A person who trusts no superior ends up trusting the one authority left standing, which is the opinion of everybody else. Independence of mind turns, by an easy slope, into deference to the public. This connects directly to the tyranny of the majority from volume one, but now it is a habit of thought rather than a political arrangement.

The book's most influential idea follows. Tocqueville says that individualism is a new expression for a new idea. Older societies knew egotism, a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which he calls a vice as old as the world. Individualism is different. It is, in his words, "a mature and calm feeling" that disposes each person to draw apart with family and friends, form a little circle, and leave society at large to itself.

This is not selfishness in the ordinary sense. An individualist may be kind, decent and devoted to his own people. The trouble is the shrinking of the circle. In an aristocracy, everybody had a fixed place in a chain of obligations that ran from peasant to king. Democracy breaks the chain. Each person becomes free and also alone, with public life left to someone else. Tocqueville warns that individualism at first weakens only the public virtues, but over time it eats the others too.

What saves the Americans, in his account, is a set of counter-habits. The most famous is association. Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions, he writes, constantly form associations. They form them to give entertainments, to found schools, to build inns and churches, to distribute books and to send missionaries to the other side of the world. Where in France you would find the government at the head of a new undertaking, and in England a man of rank, in the United States you find an association.

He treats this as a skill. People who have no lord to organize them must learn to organize themselves, and they learn it by doing it, starting with small things. A temperance society or a library committee is training for political liberty.

The second counter-habit he calls self-interest rightly understood. Americans, he noticed, rarely explained good conduct in terms of sacrifice or virtue. They said that helping the neighbor, paying for the school or serving the town was in their long-term interest. Tocqueville is half amused by this. He says Americans are more anxious to do honor to their philosophy than to themselves. But he defends the principle. It is not lofty, he admits, but it is clear and sure, and within reach of everyone. It produces few heroes and many orderly, sensible citizens.

He is not a cheerleader. A chapter on American restlessness may be the most modern pages in the book. In America, he writes, he saw the freest and most enlightened people, in the happiest circumstances the world could offer, and they seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. A man builds a house to spend his old age in, and sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and rents it out just as the trees come into bearing. He takes up a profession and drops it. When equality makes everything seem possible, every unrealized possibility becomes a reproach.

He also notices a new danger in industry. Factory work, he argues, makes the worker narrower and the owner richer, and the two have frequent dealings but no real partnership. He calls the emerging manufacturing aristocracy one of the harshest that ever existed, though also one of the most confined. He advises friends of democracy to keep an anxious eye on it.

Readers often stop at his chapters on American women. Tocqueville admired the education and confidence of young American women, and near the end of the book he says that if asked to explain America's prosperity, he would credit "the superiority of their women." He also approved of the sharp line that confined married women to the household. The praise and the limits come in the same breath, which tells you a good deal about the observer.

The book's climax is its darkest vision. Tocqueville asks what despotism would look like in a democratic age, and he decides it would not look like a tyrant. He imagines a crowd of equal, similar people absorbed in small private pleasures, and above them "an immense and tutelary power" that takes care of their comfort and watches over their fate. That power, he writes, is "absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild." It would be like a parent, except that a parent prepares children for adulthood, and this power seeks to keep people in perpetual childhood.

It does not break the will. It softens, bends and guides it. It covers society with a network of small, complicated rules. It seldom forces anyone to act, but it constantly restrains people from acting, until a nation becomes a flock of timid and industrious animals with the government as shepherd. And he adds the unsettling part: this kind of servitude could coexist with the outward forms of freedom, including elections.

Volume two has weaknesses. It moves from a single cause to many effects with too much confidence, and some chapters feel like an elegant essay looking for evidence. But it gave modern politics a vocabulary it still uses, and it located the danger in comfort and isolation rather than in terror.

Tocqueville soon had to test his ideas against events. In 1848 France had another revolution, and he was in the middle of it. His private account of that year, written for no one but himself, comes next on Book Report.