Essay 47– “On Republican Institutions In The United States: What Are Their Chances of Longevity?” (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Subch. 4)

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 379 (Start at heading “On Republican Institutions”) – 384 (Stop at heading “Some Considerations…”) of this edition of Democracy in America.

What Is The Difference Between the U.S. Republic and Others? 

There is an intriguing passage in this essay about the difference between the American understanding of republican government and the European approach. De Tocqueville describes contrasting assumptions about the nature of rights and political accountability and affirms the connection between republican government and permanent and transcendental norms. Americans of his time defined a republic as based on majority control. This is the classic “republican principle” of the vote and rule by the majority. Of course, the delicate question is “majority of whom”? This is where republics over the millennia have differed, often profoundly.

That majority control is typically not exercised directly, as might occur in a townhall meeting, but through designated bodies of representatives.
“What one understands by republic in the United States is the slow and tranquil action of society on itself. It is a regular state really founded on the enlightened will of the people. It is a conciliating government, in which resolutions ripen for a long time, are discussed slowly and executed only when mature.”
James Madison, among many other supporters of the Constitution, had offered a similar description of American republican government during the ratification debates in the late 1780s.

Presumably addressing his remarks to the intellectual and political heirs of Rousseau and of various radicals of the French Revolution, De Tocqueville acidly describes the European version of republicanism. “But we in Europe have made strange discoveries. A republic, according to some among us, is not the reign of the majority, as has been believed until now, it is the reign of those who are strongly for the majority ….”

Note the difference. American republicanism manifests itself in gradual change, based on the people’s felt needs. The process starts organically with the reality of life’s conditions experienced by many people at the time and is realized and refined through a deliberate and consensus-seeking political structure. It is broad-based, practical, and incremental, befitting the American character as DeTocqueville appraised it in various essays.

European, here meaning French, republicanism is that of a gnostic elite or a collection of individuals which arrogates to itself the legitimacy to represent and speak for the people. “It is not the people who direct these sorts of governments, but those who know the greatest good of the people …” That political elite rules and decrees in the name of the people but is driven by ideology to remake society. It is a top-down government. As has been said mockingly, in such a system, if reality conflicts with ideological orthodoxy, it is reality which is in error.

American republicanism starts with the rights and dignity of the individual, as professed in the Declaration of Independence. Even a political majority must stay within certain limits. “What one calls a republic in the United Statuses is the tranquil reign of the majority. The majority, after it has had the time to recognize itself and to certify its existence, is the common source of powers. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights.” Such limits are expressed in the federal Bill of Rights and its counterparts in state constitutions. More significantly, these limits are part of a cultural patrimony that was passed through generations, having been forged in the genesis of the various colonies and refined by the experience of life in a new world far from Europe. Self-government within the British constitution, the transition to independence, and the post-Revolutionary War constitutional turmoil produced vigorous and intellectual disputations about the nature and role of government and the protection of individual rights.

While they disagreed about some important particulars of economic and political policies, American republicans, whether New England Puritan, Southern Agrarian, or National, shared a belief in certain, to them self-evident, points about what makes republics successful. As De Tocqueville accurately details “Republicans in the United States prize mores, respect beliefs, recognize rights. They profess the opinion that a people ought to be moral, religious, and moderate to the degree it is free.” Not only sermons of well-known preachers, but speeches of political leaders and letters and other writings even of ordinary citizens, attested to those convictions.

Not so European republicans. De Tocqueville derides their sophistries, such as the people’s “general will” represented in an all-powerful legislative body controlled by a small coterie of demagogues, as a “happy distinction that permits one to act in the name of nations without consulting them and to claim their recognition while riding roughshod over them. [For, elitist European republicans, a] republican government is, furthermore, the only one in which one must recognize the right to do everything, and which can scorn what men have reported up to the present, from the highest laws of morality to the vulgar rules of common sense.”

The term republic has long defied easy definition, and De Tocqueville provides no simple resolution. However, the contrast between the essence of American republicanism and his description of the First French Republic and its ideological heirs rings true. Those heirs include the former USSR, in which acronym the “R” signified it as a union of “republics.” Communist China styles itself a “People’s Republic.” When even a cultish regime as totalitarian as that in North Korea can assume the designation of “republic,” one has traveled far from the American founding generation’s understanding of the term. At least some Americans sense unease at the direction American culture and politics have taken over the past decades and wonder whether their republic is moving towards the elitist European conception. It is, in the end, not the self-applied label which makes a republic, but a culture of morality, religion, and political moderation, along with a nurtured spirit of liberty among the people.

An expert on constitutional law, and member of the Southwestern Law School faculty, Professor Joerg W. Knipprath has been interviewed by print and broadcast media on a number of related topics ranging from recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions to presidential succession. He has written opinion pieces and articles on business and securities law as well as constitutional issues, and has focused his more recent research on the effect of judicial review on the evolution of constitutional law. He has also spoken on business law and contemporary constitutional issues before professional and community forums, and serves as a Constituting America Fellow.

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