Essay 80: “What Gives Almost All Americans A Preference For Industrial Occupations” & “How An Aristocracy May Emerge From Industry” (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Chs. 19-20)

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 526 (start at chapter 19 heading) – 532 of this edition of Democracy in America.

“It has been remarked several times that industrialists and men of commerce are possessed of an immoderate taste for material enjoyments, and commerce and industry have been blamed for that; I believe that here the effect has been taken for the cause.” 

In this rather remarkable chapter, What Makes Almost All Americans Incline Toward Industrial Professions, Alexis de Tocqueville offers a sociology of homo economicus. Conditions of equality he asserts make men industrious. Equality makes him “active, enlightened, free, at ease, full of desires” and thus he begins to conceive “the taste for material enjoyments.” Industry and commerce, De Tocqueville insists, are democratic man’s natural inheritance. In addition, because man’s natural inclinations make him restless, appetitive, and fearful these qualities, too, turn him toward commerce and industry as well as its corollary – wealth accumulation.

Agriculture, on the other hand, is static and more often the purview of those who already have wealth and can tolerate the slow process of accumulation it provides, “one is enriched by it only little by little and with difficulty.” For De Tocqueville, this explains, as well, why aristocratic societies, the landed gentry, so to speak, are agrarian rather than industrial.

There is a psychology as well to De Tocqueville’s homo economicus. Although there is no mention of families, or of women (not wives, sisters, or mothers) it is the relationship between fathers and sons which also animates the industrial impulse: men work because they are both competitive with their fathers and fearful for their sons, “In democratic countries a man, however opulent one supposes him, is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds himself less wealthy than his father and he fears that his sons will be less so than he. Most of the rich in democracies therefore dream constantly of means of acquiring wealth.” 

Commerce fills “the imagination of the crowd…Those who live amid democratic instability constantly have the image of chance before their eyes, and in the end they love all undertakings in which chance plays a role.” Because democracies make everything or anything possible (De Tocqueville calls it instability) democratic citizens are enthralled by all things in which chance is involved. Perhaps, De Tocqueville was right. It is one way to account for the American obsession with lottery tickets, with draft kings and all other forms of gambling. He elaborates, it is not just the gain that it promises, it’s the “emotions that it gives them.” Taking chances, then, is a democratic impulse. 

These paragraphs are quickly followed by a celebration of the rapid progress that Americans have made, “they form the second maritime nation in the world…the greatest industrial enterprises are executed without difficulty…Americans arrived only yesterday on the soil they inhabit, and they have already overturned the whole order of nature to their profit.” In notes on this chapter, De Tocqueville cautions that because of this focus on industry, “their minds become accustomed to substituting in everything the idea of the useful for that of the beautiful.” (pg. 978, Yale Manuscript) * And, it is this critique which begins to help explicate the rather unexpected, next chapter.

Chapter 20 How Aristocracy Could Issue from Industry seems to unravel what the previous chapter so enthusiastically commended. 

It is a warning for how democratic equality can become undone. Echoing Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, De Tocqueville notes how economies of scale are a font of freedom for the worker “the general production of the work comes more easily” as well as the source of inexpensive goods. Yet, there is a cost to the worker, as Smith notes as well, “that the man in him is degraded as the worker is perfected.” Ironically, it is also like what Karl Marx will name alienation, “he no longer belongs to himself, but to the profession he has chosen.” As the worker is diminished, so the master as De Tocqueville names him, is extended and he becomes the “administrator of a vast empire.” 

The cheapness that puts these inexpensive objects within the reach of “mediocre fortunes” becomes a greater impetus in striving for success by  the master. Thus, more opulent and more enlightened men devote their wealth and their science to industry while the multitude of workers remain trapped in their dependence; it is an aristocracy that develops by “a natural effort from within the very heart of democracy.”  

This aristocracy is different than the European model, according to De Tocqueville, because it has no common spirit or object, no shared traditions or hopes. “There are then members, but no corps.” De Tocqueville notes this aristocracy founded by trade is not interested in governing the worker, only in making use of him. Further in contrast to the European model which felt obliged by mores and sometimes law to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries, “the manufacturing aristocracy of our day, after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis.” 

  De Tocqueville ends the chapter with a rather prescient alarm, “for if ever permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are introduced anew into the world, one can predict that they will enter by this door.” This analysis dovetails with De Tocqueville’s well-known anti-materialism. It is a worry that the focus on wealth will also cause the gradual loss of traditional religious faith – another important bulwark in democracy, as De Tocqueville details elsewhere in Democracy. It is a worry also embedded in his assessment of the ideal democratic statesman as one who will show how what is just can also be useful rather than merely that the useful can be right. It is a wise recommendation in our time, as well. 

*Note: In 1954 Yale University acquired the quasi- totality of De Tocqueville’s manuscripts as well as the final draft of Democracy in America. This collection holds original manuscripts as well as copies of lost originals. Of interest to readers of the edition used for this short essay, the Yale manuscript also includes drafts of the second part of the Democracy, to which De Tocqueville gave the title “rubish” (referring to the English rubbish, meaning debris, remnants; notably misspelled by De Tocqueville throughout) A full chronicling of the manuscripts’ loss and retrieval and piecing back together can be found in the Foreword to the Democracy in America edition edited by Eduardo Nolla and translated by James T Schleifer.

Dr. Melissa Matthes is a full professor in the Department of Government at the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT.  She teaches courses in religion and politics, ethics, and the history of political philosophy. She is the author most recently of When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, published by Harvard University Press in 2021. She holds a PhD from the University of California and a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School. 

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