The Lives of a Democratic Aristocrat

“Yet another book on Tocqueville!” This was the opening line of Delba Winthrop’s review of Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life in 2002. In the twenty or so years intervening, the books on Tocqueville just keep on coming, covering pretty well any and every aspect of Tocqueville along the way. Many books on Tocqueville, such as Larry Siedentop’s Tocqueville in the Past Masters series, or Harvey Mansfield’s Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction, provide a brief introduction and overview of him as a political philosopher. Some, such as Jon Elster’s, Alexis De Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist, make the case for Tocqueville’s methodological contribution to our understanding of social and political life. It is not uncommon, as Lucien Jaume does in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty, to extrapolate on the more classical and aristocratic vision that informs Tocqueville’s interest and understanding of liberty. But by far most books on Tocqueville, like Wolin’s Tocqueville between Two Worlds, focus on his understanding of America and of democracy, and more often than not they approach the topic through Tocqueville’s life as well as his writings. Apart from the numerous collections of essays such as Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, edited by Ken Masugi, Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd, and The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, edited by Cheryle Welch, among the more notable books that take this focus and approach, are Alan Ryan’s On Tocqueville: Democracy and America, James Schleifer’s The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”, followed up by his Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Hebert Danoff, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of Democratic Statesmanship, Leo Damrosch’s Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, Pierre Manent’s, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville of 2022 is the most recent extensive biography in English that also navigates this territory, as does Hugh Brogan’s Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, written in 2006, which is even more extensive. There is also the brisk and brief, but very readable biography by Joseph Epstein, Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide, which appeared shortly before Brogan’s, as well as Arthur Kaledin’s Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon, an excellent work, which I find the most satisfying as a work of political theory, and which I think most neatly sums up the connection between Democracy in America and Tocqueville’s biography: Democracy in America acts, he writes, “as a bildungsroman in which he transforms what began as a fact-finding expedition, an adventure, and also a flight from political difficulties and personal anguish into a historical and sociological study that was on some level a search for himself” (xvi).

All of these biographies have merit, and all cover the essential events in Tocqueville’s life—the aristocratic family into which he was born and raised; his travels to America with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, initially to examine the penal system there, where he starts writing Democracy in America, his travels to England, Ireland, and Algeria; his marriage; his life as a politician in the Constituent Assembly of 1848; his siding with the Party of Order against the socialists; and his opposition to the coup of Louis Napoleon. None render André Jardin’s Tocqueville: A Biography (the English version of which appeared in 1988) obsolete, or even add that much more to the story. What the respective biographies reveal is not so much a range of different personalities concealed within the life of Tocqueville, far less some great crime hitherto kept secret, but the different emphases the biographers bring to bear on their subject.

None could deny that Tocqueville is an interesting subject for a biography. He travelled widely, thought deeply about the new world that was being made and applied his fine and open mind to various issues of the day. He was also not just a theorist but a practitioner of politics, and his fondness for facts, even when he was too quick to make judgments on the basis of insufficient facts, meant he was always willing to change his mind. With Tocqueville one is always on an educational adventure, a hunt to get at the truth—he is a guide driven by curiosity rather than an already settled conviction, a kind of historical and sociological botanist, with a gift for astute theoretical insights qualified by an openness for any new information that might elicit a better judgment. Anyone who spends time in his company will be rewarded and certainly in the cases of Zunz, Brogan, and Jardin, each devoted several decades of their adulthood to researching and writing on Tocqueville.

That so many books keep being written on Tocqueville is indicative of the perspicacity and endurance of Tocqueville’s analysis of the social and political culture and requisite sentiments that shaped the modern democratic form of government. While Marx and Nietzsche have found no shortage of enthusiastic disciples in their role as “prophets of modernity,” Tocqueville’s sagacity is of a more modest and sober style. He appreciates democracy, and the value-underpinnings of equality and liberty that were the gravediggers of the old world, but his diagnosis and prognosis of the modern is as steeped in hesitancy and caution as Marx’s and Nietzsche’s are steeped in visions of perfectibility. Tocqueville is a social and political thinker who has no “radical chic” bona fides amongst philosophers nor literary theorists—while something of a providentialist about liberty and equality, there is nothing of the utopian nor eschatologist about him—and even in more traditional political theory/history of political thought courses—outside of American Studies—he is typically sidelined not only by Marx and Nietzsche but, in the liberal tradition, by Hobbes, Locke, and Mill (who was influenced by him). Further, Tocqueville’s ideas are not difficult to digest, and they were always presented with admirable clarity and economy. Nor are there the kinds of philosophical or hermeneutical conundrums that spawn so many doctoral theses and academic scholarly articles and tomes. Although, it is true, as one of his more recent North American biographers, Joseph Epstein, writes in Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy’s Guide:

[P]eople have been quoting Tocqueville, relentlessly, for nearly two centuries. Nowadays he pops up in earnest letters to the New York Times: It behooves us, however, to remember that Tocqueville warns … He is brought in to defend or argue against all sorts of arrangements in which he himself is likely to have had less than passionate interest; in college sports, for example, “Tocqueville and College Football” was the title of an article in the December 29, 2003, issue of the Weekly Standard. Sociologists, political scientists, and American presidents are fond of quoting him on behalf of their own arguments and positions: “Tocqueville might also have agreed with my claim,” the sociologist Herbert Gans recently wrote, “that in a corporate-dominated America, the journalists’ approach to informing citizens can do little to keep our democracy representative.” Benedict XVI, early in his papacy, has already cited Tocqueville. For all one knows, God himself may have quoted Tocqueville. (1–2)

As Epstein’s comment indicates, Tocqueville has the kind of venerable authority that few educated readers would wish to deny, even if they don’t much know him. Of course, in the United States the book he wrote whilst visiting America, Democracy in America (in two volumes) is a book that everyone with any education has heard of. With The Federalist Papers, it remains the most important work on American society and politics, in spite of its many limitations and errors. Kaledin’s stark claim that “[w]e are living in the Age of Tocqueville” (xiv) may or may not be true (though his book does a very good job of trying to demonstrate that that is the case), but the following observations he makes about Tocqueville do indicate how prescient Tocqueville was about the troubles facing modern democracy:

His views about the power and hazards of public opinion in democratic societies have found new meaning in the era of mass culture. His analysis of the alienating, socially isolating tendencies of the hyper-individualism bred by democracy is ever more relevant as the United States plunges on into the historically unprecedented affluence which has become a hothouse of dreamy individual utopias. (xiv)

And:

Though Tocqueville saw numerous countertendencies to the fragmenting forces of equality, it was democracy’s potential for weakening the social bond that seemed greatest to him. He thought that the disaggregative tendencies of democracy, its antipathy for fixed social boundaries, in fact for any fixed social order, would increasingly isolate individuals socially and psychologically. As their attachments one after another were broken, individuals would begin even “to think of themselves in isolation.” Preoccupied with comfort and security, focused tightly on their private affairs, they would increasingly be shut within the narrow confines of their immediate interests. To escape the dreadful anonymity of mass society, they would withdraw into “a multitude of small private circles,” little intentional communities the fundamental purpose of which was to establish some kind of distinctiveness by excluding others. This they would do by active choice. What would seem most real to such people would be their immediately experienced private worlds. Their self-centered emotional commitments would leave little room for more than fleeting concern for public affairs. The radical shift of psychic energy from public or communal to private affairs and the atrophying of social consciousness caused by the egalitarian transformation of society would produce a massive social and even political indifference. Even those most powerful engines of community, intentional associations, were expressions of individual, private interests. They were devoted to special interests, not to the general good. (360–62)

Although among English-speaking readers Democracy in America takes central place in Tocqueville’s writings, he has written two other modern classics. His The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), though not without oversights and occasional errors, is an enormously important book on the French Revolution. Its attentiveness to the socioeconomic issues of the day would foreshadow the kind of work undertaken by Alfred Cobban and François Furet, and would disclose how much more complicated and contradictory the social interests involved in the Revolution were in comparison to the dashing accounts of heroes and villains in whiggish and Marxist histories. Along with Marx’s writings on the 1848 Revolution and the formation of the Second Empire, Tocqueville’s posthumously published and political insider’s account of 1848 and of the machinations and character of Louis Napoleon, Recollections (1896), remains essential reading for anyone interested in the events of the period. But as both these books, when taken together with Democracy in America, illustrate, the emergence and prospects of democracy—its social and cultural underpinnings, its virtues, its fragilities, its darker aspects, and his sense of foreboding about the dangers it could unleash—are ever on Tocqueville’s mind.

Tocqueville’s sense of foreboding about modern democracy tends to irk the more radically minded democrats who see democracy as the political solution to the big problems of the day. This is the case with Wolin’s Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, which is part biography, and part theoretical encounter by way of a dialogical conjuration involving Tocqueville’s spirit. It is a work that illustrates how the more enthusiastic believers in radical democracy see in Tocqueville something of a failure to comprehend the collective wisdom and vision of collective civic action. Wolin’s Politics and Vision was something of a minor modern classic of the 1960s pre-Rawlsian political theory. The title reflected Wolin’s faith in political activism that would come to define the change of direction within the university and society at large—which in so many ways has contributed to the plurality of conflicting self-seeking (self-emancipating) identities that Kaledin sees as confirming Tocqueville’s alarms about the future of democracy. A similar kind of political disdain for Tocqueville can also be detected in periodic outbursts of frustration in Hugh Brogan’s lengthy biography Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. For Brogan “Tocqueville is a legitimist who does not support the Bourbons (he assumed that they were finished), just as he was a Catholic who did not believe in the Church” (359); “His ideal society was a larger version of the Cotentin. Intelligent peasants would defer to educated gentlemen, and both would combine to keep the dangerous town under control. ‘Liberty under law’ was the slogan and the law was the one protecting property” (443). “He was extremely bitter about what had happened, and blamed it all on the February Revolution, which had generated socialism and the terror of socialism that had given Louis Napoleon his opportunity. He still did not recognize that his own commitment to obsolescent economic theory, his obsessive cult of property and his fear of revolution made him a part of the problem which he analysed” (523).

Having spent almost four decades working on Tocqueville, Brogan can be forgiven for writing a work which Alan Ryan described in “Tocqueville: The Flaws of Genius,” as not so much the record of a friendship, “but a marriage—written with the mixture of deep affection and acute exasperation that successful marriages generate if they last long enough.” Brogan is very self-assured in his political convictions and, like others who are self-assured, tends to think there must be something wrong with someone who does not see political issues in the way he does. And as someone who does not like authors to presume what we should think about politics, I find this aspect of his biography as irksome as he often finds Tocqueville, yet of all the biographies, Brogan’s is probably the most engaging account of the stages of Tocqueville’s life. He certainly writes with great verve and wit, as for example: “When it came to infinite conceit Harriet Mill knew what she was talking about” (604). There is nothing in Brogan of the caution, self-doubt, and grimmer predicaments that are part of Tocqueville’s demeanour and tone—a tone and demeanour which may well be the result of his aristocratic breeding, but none the less indebted to the experience of having had many members on both sides of his own family perish in the ferocity of the Revolution. That aspect of Tocqueville’s personality is certainly better appreciated in Zunz’s account. As far as I can see, this is probably the main issue that separates Zunz and Brogan. For apart from that, and leaving aside Kaledin’s biography which is thematic rather than chronological and focused upon Tocqueville in America, it is not altogether clear why a major biography on Tocqueville would follow so relatively closely to Brogan’s. For his part, Zunz does not tell us why he felt compelled to write a new biography on a man on whom so much has already been written—he gets straight to his subject without tarrying on the achievements of other biographers, and where he will set a record straight or open up new lines of investigation. Nevertheless, Zunz’s book has received largely favourable reviews, even if it remains to be seen whether it will become the definitive biography in English, though it is being greeted in some quarters as being just that. Thus Jeremy Jennings (the author of the superb Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America, which also studies Tocqueville’s ideas through part of his biography), has said it is a work “far surpassing the achievements of earlier biographers such as Hugh Brogan.” Unfortunately, Jennings does not tell us why he thinks it is so much better—I can only suspect that, like me, he finds Brogan’s chastisements irritating. Zunz’s tone is more staid—which also comes at a cost; his book never reaches the more elegiac heights of Brogan, who when not carping about Tocqueville, also writes: “a man like Tocqueville enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. He does this through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance, so long as he is not wilfully perverse, which Tocqueville never was” (566).

Zunz’s biography patiently builds the picture of a man grappling with the times and the forces that were running from the past and toward a future that he was trying to discern so that we may be better prepared for its offerings, some of which he saw as involving the betterment of the human condition, others as posing severe threats. In his travels and personal life, he was ceaselessly trying to understand what was going on, especially with respect to the dangers to liberty and equality, as well as the dangers that they themselves facilitated, especially the dangers of provincialism and what we would now call “group think.” For Tocqueville, liberty, at its best, is never to be cut off from independent mindedness, and it was the threats to independent mindedness that he saw taking root in the new world, and which, if unnoticed, could easily destroy the very pillars of the modern political project which made it such a decisive improvement over a political body in which the crown and aristocracy have to be good, wise and just, if the kingdom is to be at peace. The Bostonian loyalist Reverend Mather Byles is reported to have quipped about the revolution, “Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?” and, though I cannot recall if Tocqueville ever cites Byles, it is the kind of idea that hangs like a great cloud over the experiment in democracy undertaken by the Americans. It is an idea about liberty that simply does not fit the romantically inclined view of democracy, which confuses a process of conflict resolution between classes and persons with different interests attempting to broker a deal to achieve civic order so that people can navigate themselves through the mundane processes of earning a living, going about one’s business, having recourse to the police and laws if one’s property or person is assailed, dealing with the kids and school fees, paying off a mortgage, and saving for/living in retirement life and such like, and a view of democracy as a weapon to take down oppressors. That Brogan can say of that most romantic of all visual “representations” of liberty—Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—that it “is more profoundly wise than anything Tocqueville wrote on the subject” (354) is indicative in which camp he sits in politically, and hence why he, like Wolin, simply does not compute why Tocqueville’s hesitations and warnings should be taken seriously. Like Wolin, Brogan wishes Tocqueville was less aristocratic in personal temperament and political sentiment. I, though, am of the party of admirers of Tocqueville, which sees his work and his insights as greatly benefitting from an inside knowledge of aristocratism—both its virtues and its weaknesses.

Zunz is sufficiently sensitive to how Tocqueville sees the problem of democracy and liberty not to merely dismiss his insights. He also makes a good case for the importance of Tocqueville’s theory of associationism being at the heart of the American experience of democracy, in spite of Tocqueville having failed to understand the significance of parties and much else about the specific associations that were so decisive in shaping nineteenth-century America. Zunz also points out how Tocqueville understood almost nothing of the religious groups in America, while recognizing how important religion was to democracy in America. He also notes that Tocqueville only belatedly realized the importance of the rise of poverty accompanying industrialization, and he is as full of admiration for Tocqueville’s support of abolition, as he is disappointed in Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for French colonialism.

As concerned as Tocqueville was about the prospects of democracy, his experience and his time represented democracy as the alternative to the old regime. In that respect, democracy did indeed represent the potential unleashing of individual energies that when tempered by equality could provide a social order in which the forces that led to revolution could be assuaged, as improvements in living standards and opportunities arose. While he saw that socialism and the despotism of Louis Napoleon were opening up darker political forces, the threats that came to pass in the twentieth century turned out to be far more diabolical than Tocqueville had foreseen, and the elements that would be intrinsic to their making combined modern ideas with cruel and savage energies and dispositions as old as the human heart.