Essay 72: “The Taste For Material Prosperity In America” & “Particular Effects Of The Love Of Physical Pleasures In Democratic Times” (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Chs. 10-11)

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 506 (start at chapter 10 heading) – 509 of this edition of Democracy in America.

Starting roughly in the 17th century, Europe found itself moving from an agricultural economy to one based on trade, banks, and industry. Aristocratic society consisted of a few wealthy, aristocratic landowners and the many who worked the land. In the emerging commercial society, there were various avenues of access to a comfortable living. In short, we were starting to see the rise of the middle class. Wealth went from being based on family and landownership to something that one could gain from hard work, knowledge, and thrift. 

Many people connect the rise of the middle class to the ascent of democracy. The essential notion is that if people of a non-aristocratic background could acquire wealth, which included paying taxes, they deserved some say in how government operates. Government was not the plaything of people who happened to come from the right family. Free markets and a budding commercial class promoted various democratic principles such as the rule of law, the notion of consent, the right to property, and basic liberties.

America was no different. If anything, America’s democratic ethos was more advanced than in Europe as aristocracy never really had a hold in America. We might think of Ben Franklin’s famous essay “The Way of Wealth” and his aphoristic advice regarding how to get ahead in the world.  “A penny saved is a penny earned” and “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” put gaining material comfort at the heart of happiness. In the early 19th century Americans developed the idea of the “self-made man,” the notion that through hard work, sound habits, and frugality a person could rise from meager circumstances to relative success. The biographies of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln illustrate this theory well.

These concepts undergird De Tocqueville’s discussion of American “taste for well-being” and “the love of material enjoyments”.  As is typical of Tocqueville’s style, he makes a distinction between aristocratic and democratic times. Throughout Democracy in America, De Tocqueville notes that aristocratic times tend to be characterized by the love of virtue, an appreciation of beauty and grandeur, an elevation of mind, and building things of enduring value. Democracy, by contrast, tends to aim for what is useful. It elevates the notion of material comfort to a key virtue, to the neglect of public affairs and noble enterprises. 

In these two chapters, De Tocqueville posits that aristocrats do not generally focus on deriving pleasure from material things. Recall that what makes an aristocrat is not the possession of great wealth. The key features of aristocracy are the possession of inherited wealth, especially land, and the fact that the aristocrat is at leisure, i.e., does not work for a living. He uses his leisure to pursue goals more elevated than mere money making. Businessmen may have great wealth, more even than some of the nobility, without being members of the aristocracy.

However, De Tocqueville notes that some aristocrats do find immoderate pleasure in worldly goods. In his other major work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, his meditation on the French Revolution, De Tocqueville criticizes the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy. He argues that French nobility had all the trappings of aristocracy, namely wealth and privilege, without serving a public function. They were merely decadent. The resentment of the people toward such an aristocracy is one of the causes of the Revolution, De Tocqueville claims. In these two chapters, one encounters De Tocqueville’s description of such a corrupt aristocracy. 

In these chapters De Tocqueville is a friendly critic of democracy. He believes democratic citizens are too materialistic. Because fortune is uncertain in America, regularly gained and lost, everyone thinks more about material things. The wealthy know their riches may be evanescent while the poor have sufficient examples to believe that wealth just might be within their grasp if they work hard enough and get a little lucky. The rigid class structure of aristocracy causes rich and poor alike to think less about money, as the aristocracy knows it cannot lose it and the poor know they cannot gain it. In contrast, the fluid nature of democratic society causes nearly everyone to think about money and well-being, i.e., acquiring relative comfort. 

The concern for well-being amongst democrats undermines virtue. Unlike virtue, De Tocqueville argues, well-being can be purchased. This makes well-being attractive to democratic people; anyone can make enough money to be comfortable while only some are able to be truly virtuous. Money-making is more democratic than moral excellence. Further, the love of comfort may render democratic people complacent. If they have material well-being, they may forget about defending their liberty. As long as I can afford various pleasures, why do I care if I have the right to vote or free speech? A despot may take advantage of a lack of virtue and the peoples’ lack of vigilance to subvert democracy. 

Jon D. Schaff is Professor of Political Science at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he has taught since 2001. He teaches classes in American political thought, American political institutions, as well as politics in literature and film. He is author of multiple articles and book chapters as well as two books: Abraham Lincoln and the Limits of Liberal Democracy and Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st Century Literature and Film (co-authored with Anthony Wachs). He co-edited Humanitas History of America II: From Revolution to Reconstruction, 2 Vols for Classical Academic Press.

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