Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Folio Society, 2002

Description: A beautiful edition from the Folio Society! From an excellent overview in the New Criterion highlighting Mansfield/Winthrop as the preferred edition (https://newcriterion.com/article/tocqueville-today/): ... Men do not receive the truth from their enemies, and their friends scarcely offer it to them; that is why I have spoken it. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville was about a month shy of his twenty-sixth birthday when he and his friend and fellow French magistrate Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866) landed in Newport, Rhode Island, in May 1831. Both were so to speak refugees from French politics. When the Bourbon dynasty fell the previous summer, the two men swore fealty to the new government of Louis Philippe. But neither felt in sympathy with the heavy-handed policies of the “citizen king” whom Daumier parodied to such hilarious effect. The lack of sympathy was reciprocated. Tocqueville was demoted and required to take the oath of allegiance a second time. It was then that he hit upon the scheme of going to America. He and Beaumont petitioned the government for an eighteen-month leave to travel to the United States and study its penal system. After much red tape (there is a reason that “bureaucracy” is a French word), permission was granted, though in the event their trip was cut short and they were obliged to return after only nine months. Their work on the American penal system and its application to France was duly published in 1833. But from the beginning, as Tocqueville noted in a letter, the penal system had been merely a “pretext.” The real reason that he and Beaumont went to America was to see firsthand “what a great republic is”: to immerse themselves in the world’s preeminent democratic regime and ponder its lessons. They were indefatigable travelers. After disembarking at Newport, Tocqueville and Beaumont went by steamer from Providence to New York City. From there, they traveled to Buffalo, traversed the Great Lakes to what was then the frontier in Michigan and Wisconsin. They spent two weeks in Canada, then wended their way down to Baltimore, stopping along the way in Boston and Philadelphia. They went to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, to Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans. The final leg of their journey brought them back through Washington to New York. They rode on horses, in coaches, and in steamboats (one of which sank); they stayed in a log cabin; they observed many plain folk and met many eminent personages, including John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Sam Houston. They devoured newspapers and broadsheets, and Tocqueville, at any rate, absorbed the lessons of The Federalist and Judge Story’s famous commentaries on the Constitution... ... It is, as Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop note in the introduction to their sparkling new translation, “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.” [1] High praise. But Tocqueville inspires superlatives. Lord Acton wrote that “of all writers, [Tocqueville] is the most widely acceptable, and the hardest to find fault with. He is always wise, always right, and as just as Aristides.” Well, Tocqueville was wrong about some things. Not all of his predictions have come to pass. One is amazed, for example, at his judgment that the influence of lawyers forms one of “the most powerful barriers today against the lapses of democracy.” Still, one may endorse the spirit of Lord Acton’s remarks. John Stuart Mill wrote in a review that Democracy in America had “at once taken its rank among the most remarkable productions of our time.” And in our own day, Russell Kirk praised Tocqueville as “the best friend democracy has ever had, and democracy’s most candid critic.” The two go together, friend and critic. In his classic study, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1982; English trans., 1996), the French philosopher Pierre Manent noted that democracy has always had two sorts of enemies: the declared enemies who wish to abolish democracy outright and restore aristocracy or some other regime that enshrines political inequality; and the “immoderate friends” who seek to extend the central democratic imperative of equality into every realm of life, thus assuring oppressive new inequalities. Both are dangerous; the activities of both shackle freedom, one by design, the other unwittingly. Manent is right that, today, the immoderate friends of democracy are “incomparably more numerous than its enemies.” To love democracy well, he concludes, “it is necessary to love it moderately.” It is a paradox—I almost said a “Tocquevillean paradox”—of human life that the highest excellences are almost always achieved through moderate, not extreme, zeal. There is something blinding about zealousness, something that overshoots the mark. Eagerness attracts; over-eagerness repels. “Moderation”—what the Greeks called sophrosune—is an aristocratic as well as an ancient virtue. It is not, Tocqueville thought, a virtue native to democracy, though he hoped that it might become, by art, democracy’s second nature. That, I believe, is part of what he meant when he said that “a new political science is needed for a world altogether new.” Democracy in America is the basic textbook of that new political science. ...Yet if Tocqueville was a passionate democrat, he was also a circumspect one. He knew what enormities could be perpetrated in its name. His own father had been imprisoned during the Terror, that irrational access of immoderately rational egalitarianism. He was one of the lucky ones: he escaped with his life, though his experiences in prison are said to have turned his hair snow-white at the age of twenty-two. The key to the new political science that Tocqueville envisions is the binocular insight that the democratic revolution is 1) irresistible and 2) “not yet rapid enough to despair of directing it.” There was still time to “attenuate its vices and make its natural advantages emerge.” To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; . . . such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day. Democracy in America is an attempt to instruct those entrusted with directing society in the rudiments of that duty. The book, Tocqueville explicitly says, is not a “panegyric” to democracy; but it is an invitation to rethink democracy, to make the inevitable palatable. Tocqueville spoke like Edmund Burke when he noted that “it seems that in our day the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs has been broken . . . the laws of moral analogy have been abolished.” But he sounds more like one of Burke’s opponents when he warns against those men, even noble souls, whose “idea of evil is indissolubly united with the idea of the new.” Like Tocqueville himself, Democracy in America is irretrievably Janus-faced, which is one reason that it speaks to people across the ideological spectrum. As the editors note, “it is striking that both Left and Right appeal to Democracy in America for support of” their contrary policies. The Left sees in Tocqueville a critic of the bourgeois addiction to material well-being and an apostle of civic engagement (at the very end of the book, in his last endnote, Tocqueville names “general apathy” the greatest danger of the age); the Right sees in him a prophet admonishing us about the dangers of big government and doctrinaire egalitarianism. Both are right, but wrong to think they tell the whole story. Tocqueville’s wide appeal, the editors conclude, “should not mask the controversial and unsettling character of the work.” Of course, “controversial” is a debased word today; it encompasses little more than a certain species of headline-making clichés. Tocqueville is controversial and unsettling in a more permanent sense. He does not shock or outrage us, like the latest “cutting-edge” art offering; on the contrary, like all thinkers who ask fundamental questions, he induces a mood of calm solicitude. If he is “unsettling” it is because he poses important questions for which there are no pat, no settled, answers. What Tocqueville wrote was not a manifesto but an essential reflection on political life—which is to say our life in so far as we exist as social creatures. The questions he asks remain our questions: “On What Tempers the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States,” “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom,” “How the Americans Understand the Equality of Men and Women,” “Why the Americans Show Themselves So Restless in the Midst of Their Well-Being.” At the end of his introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes that his book is not precisely in anyone’s camp; in writing it I did not mean to serve or contest any party; I undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties; and while they are occupied with the next day, I wanted to ponder the future. His success in that endeavor accounts for what the editors describe as the “discomfiting sagacity of Tocqueville, always more sensitive than reassuring.” The first volume of Democracy in America was published, to great acclaim, in 1835; Tocqueville wrote it very rapidly, some 180,000 words in under a year. The second volume—which was less of a public success—was not published until 1840. The delay was caused by many things, including Tocqueville’s courtship of and marriage to Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman, and several bouts of illness. (Tocqueville was sick much of his adult life; he died, probably of tuberculosis, in 1859, in his fifty-fourth year). The first volume of Democracy in America describes the physical situation of the United States, traces the origins of American democracy in Puritan New England, analyzes the Constitution and the powers it sets forth, and warns about the “tyranny of the majority,” a leitmotif in Tocqueville’s discussion of democracy. Along the way, Tocqueville has many sobering things to say about the sad fate of the American Indian (“the ruin of these peoples began on the day when Europeans landed on their shores”) and blacks under slavery. (Tocqueville is not so much condemnatory as rueful; and his ruefulness is not confined to the whites of America: “Would not one say,” he asks, that “the European is to men of other races what man himself is to the animals? He makes them serve his use, and when he cannot bend them, he destroys them.”) In the second volume, Tocqueville is more meditative. He steps back to describe the way democracy has affected intellectual life, manners and morals, and political society. In the famous opening section, “On the Philosophic Method of the Americans,” he writes that although there is “no country in the civilized world where [people] are less occupied with philosophy than in the United States,” one can nevertheless descry a distinctively American—and by implication, distinctively democratic—outlook and “philosophic method.” To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and, up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through that to the foundation: these are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans. “America,” he concludes, “is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.” Tocqueville is by turns impressed and made anxious by this unwitting “Cartesianism”; it helps account for the vitality of American democracy; perhaps it also helps to account for its roughness, superficiality, and lack of communal spirit. Much of the second volume is concerned with the implications of this tension. ...The new translation by Professors Mansfield and Winthrop (who, incidentally, have also collaborated on marriage) strikes just the right balance between the demands of literal accuracy and readability. They have given us a Tocqueville for today; but what they have given us today is Tocqueville, with all his richnesses and stylistic idiosyncrasies (his penchant for short paragraphs, for instance, which was not respected by earlier translators). The editors have also provided a detailed subject index and have intelligently annotated the text. Especially in his second volume, Tocqueville tended to let his thoughts spill forth without bothering to enumerate his sources; this gives his text a peculiar brilliancy, but it obscures the vast amount of scholarship that went into Democracy in America. The editors discreetly supply the lack, not only citing Tocqueville’s sources but also noting important marginal notes in the author’s drafts. (The manuscript given to the printer has not survived, but Tocqueville’s working manuscripts, these two Harvard professors tell us, “are preserved at the Beinecke Library at a university located in New Haven, Conn.”) The Mansfield-Winthrop work will henceforth be the preferred English version of Democracy in America not only because of the superior translation and critical apparatus, but also because of its long and masterly introductory essay, itself an important contribution to the literature on Tocqueville. ... PHX5/0ut7

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