Essay 102: Continuation Of The Preceding Chapters (Vol. 2 Pt. 4 Ch. 7)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 666 – 673 of this edition of Democracy in America.

In Chapter 7 of Part 4 of the Second Volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville rounds out a thought he has been developing in preceding chapters. In Chapter 6, De Tocqueville has told us that democracies have to fear a particular kind of despotism. While the language of “despot” and “despotism” recalls the Caesars and oppressive tyrants, De Tocqueville says that “if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day… it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them” (662). In other words, in a democracy, the despotism most likely to emerge is one of a schoolmaster-like despot, exercising “tutelary power” over a mass of people “who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls” (663). The democratic spirit risks creating a mass of disconnected individuals, each pursuing petty pleasures, and in so doing opening the door for a “paternal power” that “seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood” (663). 

It is important to retread this ground going into chapter 7, because as De Tocqueville tells us, “I believe it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government in a people where conditions are equal than in any other, and I think that if such a government were once established in a people like this, not only would it oppress men, but in the long term it would rob each of them of several principle attributes of humanity” (666). This introduces two questions: Why are democratic societies particularly vulnerable to despotism? And what are these “principal attributes of humanity” that are lost under such a thoroughgoing despotism? 

Chapter 6, as a preface to Chapter 7, helps us understand the vulnerability of democracies, where conditions are equal: the mass of people are incentivized to pursue petty pleasures at the expense of civic engagement. A political leader in such a circumstance can make his people happy simply by efficiently providing those petty pleasures that they desire, while slowly taking over the reigns of civic life from the people. “So it is,” De Tocqueville says, “that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen” (663). This “free will,” then, seems to be part of the “principal attributes of humanity” that De Tocqueville fears democratic citizens will be robbed of, echoing his earlier concerns from Volume two, Part Two, Chapter 20 on the mental harms done to industrial laborers. 

This process of encroachment by a democratic despot, described in Chapter 6, illuminates De Tocqueville’s concern over a centralized political leadership described in Chapter 7: “It results from the very constitution of democratic nations and their needs that the power of the sovereign must be more uniform, more centralized, more extended, more penetrating, and more powerful in them than elsewhere” (666). In the absence of great persons taking up civic leadership, such as De Tocqueville expects aristocracies to produce, the government takes a more heavy and thoroughgoing administrative hand to ensure the peace and safety of the people. This naturally opens the door for the “absolute and despotic government” that De Tocqueville fears. 

What can be done to both resist tyranny and preserve the “principal attributes of humanity” in such a condition? If hereditary aristocrats are anathema to the democratic condition, perhaps, De Tocqueville reasons, one could “artificially create something analogous” to an aristocratic person (667). Perhaps a pseudo-aristocratic person could be constructed through voluntary association of democratic individuals. De Tocqueville writes, “I firmly believe that one cannot found an aristocracy anew in the world; but I think that when plain citizens associate, they can constitute very opulent, very influential, very strong beings—in a word, aristocratic persons” (668). 

De Tocqueville’s reasoning here mirrors the reasoning Aristotle employs in the Politics when discussing the advantages of rule by the many. True, Aristotle and De Tocqueville together concede, any one person chosen at random may lack the high virtues we might hope for from an educated aristocrat. However, in combination, the weaknesses of any given individual may be buoyed up by the strengths of the many, and the advantages of combined resources will become evident, like everyone pitching in financially for a dinner party better than any one person could purchase. These voluntary associations bring with them a kind of political strength: “A political, industrial, commercial, or even scientific and literary association is an enlightened and powerful citizen whom one can neither bend at will nor oppress in the dark, and who, in defending its particular rights against the exigencies of power, saves common freedoms” (668). This is thus some ground of hope for readers in a generally pessimistic section of the text: associations act as bulwarks against democratic despots, replicating the “greatest political advantages of aristocracy without its injustices or dangers” (668). 

Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and American Political Thought, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The Review of Politics, Plough Quarterly, Current, and The University Bookman, among other publications.

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