Essay 52: “Why The Americans Show More Aptitude And Taste For General Ideas Than Their Forefathers The English” & “Why The Americans Have Never Been Enthusiastic As The French For General Ideas In Political Matters” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 3-4)

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 411 – 416 of this edition of Democracy in America.

Any society, De Tocqueville explains in Part I of the Second Volume of Democracy in America, must be “brought and held together” by some shared ideas. This implies that people must accept a great many ideas on the authority of others. Intellectual authority there must be; the questions concern its source, its extent, and what one might call its tenor or tone.

The answers, De Tocqueville writes, will depend on political conditions. Members of aristocratic societies—England’s “ancient constitution,” pre-revolutionary France—will be drawn to the opinions and prejudices of their own class or estate. Not so in democratic societies, whose members suppose that no one is very different from, let alone better than, anyone else. Folks will want to make up their own minds. But they cannot do so all the time, and on everything, for sheer lack of time. There is something liberating about thinking for oneself, but also something dangerous. “As citizens become more equal and alike, the penchant of each to believe blindly a certain man or class diminishes.” Correspondingly, “the disposition to believe the mass is augmented.” Public opinion—what the mass of citizens believes and propounds without much thought—will rule. What begins as man’s liberation from “self-inflicted immaturity” (Kant, not De Tocqueville) may prove a “new face of servitude.”

The important Chapter 3 of De Tocqueville’s characteristically paradoxical, ambivalent inquiry begins on a startling sentence: “God does not ponder the human race in general.” He perceives, “at a single glance,” all members of humanity in all their similarities and differences. Mortals, in contrast, must order a messy world with the aid of “general ideas.” That general condition is a weakness in one way because unlike God, we must resort to generalizations; it is a strength in another way, because we can do so. However, people’s propensity to think and converse in generalities will depend on varying social conditions. Americans, De Tocqueville avers, have more “aptitude and taste for general ideas than their English fathers.” But they are far less “passionate” about those ideas than the French when it comes to “political matters.”

The notion that the “aptitude and taste” for general ideas should differ so greatly even among enlightened nations is sufficiently heterodox to “astonish” even De Tocqueville himself. He traces it to aristocratic or democratic conditions. Under aristocracy, what we now call “class consciousness” will block people’s sight of “the general bond that brings all together in the vast bosom of the human race.” By way of dramatic example, even the most “profound geniuses” of antiquity could see nothing wrong with slavery.

Aristocratic societies share the scorn for abstractions; democratic societies do not. Just as equality of conditions will prompt “each to seek the truth by himself,” so it will “imperceptibly make the human mind tend to general ideas.” Other factors also produce among democratic peoples a taste and passion for general ideas. Some such ideas are the “slow, detailed, conscientious work of intelligence.” Others, though, are the products of intellectual laziness or distraction; and in democratic societies, those ideas will tend to prevail. People’s lives are “so agitated, so active that little time remains to them for thinking.” Thus, while aristocratic societies shortchange general ideas, “democratic peoples are always ready to abuse these sorts of ideas and indiscreetly to become inflamed over them.”

How inflamed? The passion for incendiary ideas, De Tocqueville writes, is much more pronounced among the French than in America because it will prevail “only in matters that are not habitual and necessary objects” of one’s thoughts. Businessmen, for example, readily accept facile ideas on politics, philosophy, or the arts—but not on commercial concerns. Likewise, people will be thoughtful and moderate about politics to the extent that they are actively engaged in it. Thus, unlike France’s notoriously centralized system, America’s “democratic institutions, which force each citizen to occupy himself practically with government, moderate the excessive taste for general theories.”

De Tocqueville’s analysis and his reassuring conclusion may leave many contemporary Americans somewhat uneasy. De Tocqueville warned of a great, homogenous mass of people gravitating mindlessly to a single, stifling “public opinion.” In contrast, our public debate is deeply fragmented; and, just as in De Tocqueville’s aristocracy, large numbers of people propound “their” truths and -isms in accordance with their identity as members of one group or another. Many citizens would surely welcome a bit more cohesion and common sense.

One wonders, moreover, whether Americans drift toward general ideas of the wrong, lazy kind because they are just too busy with their quotidian concerns—or whether the disturbingly numerous venues that amplify ideological abstractions (TikTok, say, or certain college campuses) are practically built for people with way too much time on their hands. And is it really (still) true that our democratic institutions force us to engage with politics at a practical level—or has the nationalization of our politics triumphed over a localized, parochial but practical politics that would teach engaged citizens a healthy distrust of grand schemes and ideological cant? Could these things be related, such that an excess of leisure, coupled with a lack of meaningful opportunities to engage with the humdrum tasks of making public affairs work, pulls otherwise sensible people into enthusiasms and half-baked “general ideas”?

Michael Greve is the author of The Upside-Down Constitution (Harvard UP, 2012), as well as several other books and numerous law review articles, editorials, book reviews, and blog posts. He is a frequent speaker for professional and scholarly organizations and has made many appearances on radio and television. Before joining the law school faculty, Professor Greve served as John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specialized in constitutional law, courts, and business regulation. Prior to joining AEI, Greve was founder and director of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm specializing in constitutional litigation.

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