Entries by Jorne Gilbert

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Essay 90: Honor In The United States And In Democratic Societies (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 18)

During his nine month tour of America, De Tocqueville analyzed the virtue of honor and how it strengthens a democratic society. He observed, “honor…rules the will more than belief….” It towers over the mortal human, infusing the spirit with energy and purpose. He reminds us that all people are united by their quest for honor: “The human race feels permanent and general needs that have given birth to moral laws; all men have naturally attached in all places and all times the ideas of blame and of shame to the nonobservance of them.” The pursuit for honor evolves, but it remains a potent force which beckons constantly to all people as they strive “to do good.”

Focusing his attention on honor in the antebellum South during his 1831 visit, De Tocqueville attempts to dissect honor in the relationship between slave owners and enslaved people. Tensions and pressures are spewing worth as ethnic groups interact. He tells us, “to debauch a girl of color hardly harms the reputation of an American; to marry her dishonors him.” Omitted, unfortunately, is concern for the debauched female’s predicament but clearly defined is the preservation of the southern elite’s position of personal honor. His honor must always be maintained.

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Essay 89: How American Society Appears Both Agitated And Monotonous (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 17)

In his masterpiece, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville interrogates the currents that shape American democratic society. One feature he investigates concerns how American society can simultaneously appear monotonous and agitated.

De Tocqueville describes the agitation as a constantly changing landscape of shifting laws, fortunes, and ideas. It is a society constantly in motion and seemingly unsettled, driven by a restless pursuit of something else, something more. This shifting is so constant that, in the long term, it becomes rather predictable and, in De Tocqueville’s words, boring.

It is freedom that leads to this predictable restlessness. And the shared engagement in this restlessness makes men alike in their habits, values, and actions. 

This differs from an aristocratic society. Nothing changes in an aristocratic society grounded as it is on accidents of birth, not of individual choice. Life is dictated by tradition, inheritance, and family rather than opportunity or choice. However, all men in it are different, pursuing individual passions, interests, and ideas that have no material impact on society.

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Essay 88: Why The National Vanity Of The Americans Is More Restless And Quarrelsome Than That Of English (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 16)

Alexis De Tocqueville’s mission to North America was to study the new case of American democracy.  De Tocqueville analyzed the living standards and conditions of individuals with particular attention to their relationship to the new political state.  In volume 2, part 3, chapter 16, De Tocqueville examined how an individual sense of pride, fashioned by the absence of a heredity-based aristocracy, formulated a new collective identity. Fundamentally, De Tocqueville observed that the Americans’ intense love for country is restless because it has a tendency to be forward, public, out loud, and indefatigable, which some international observers and allies find to be exhausting. While De Tocqueville’s observations might be interpreted as a criticism toward American hubris, he also explains why it reflects the exceptional nature of the American experience. 

De Tocqueville’s analysis of a new American, yet restless, national identity contributes to the notion of American Exceptionalism. The idea asserts that the American experience is an exceptional one and that the American institutions and practices are distinctive, and in this case, are distinctive from England. What is purportedly unique about the American experience can be traced to its political and ideological origins. Very few nations have simultaneously invented themselves both politically (physical territory, borders, and institutions) and conceptually in the manner that the United States did. Furthermore, the exceptional American experience is also attached to notions of “newness” meaning the novel aspects of the lived experiences in the new America. 

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Essay 87: The Serious Attitude Of Americans And Why It Often Does Not Prevent Them From Ill Considered Actions (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 15)

This section of De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America highlights a unique paradox in how democratic peoples, generally, and Americans in particular, approach their daily economic and political lives. De Tocqueville makes two critical observations about our very American frenetic energy. First, he observes that Americans spend their days in business and politics more fervently than in an aristocratic or monarchial society. However, he secondarily notes that this fervency leads to quick and constant changes that may render us more foolish in our judgments than in these other political systems. 

In the first sense, De Tocqueville argues that Americans are always busy but attentive, moving constantly from one serious task to another. Accordingly, our American approach to government and economics prioritizes productivity over frivolity and wasted time. Even today, many of our leisure activities mix satisfaction of our goals with enjoyment. In short, we combine our “side hustles” with our hobbies. De Tocqueville notes this saying: “[M]en who live in democratic countries do not prize the sorts of naïve, unruly, and coarse entertainments that the people give themselves over to in aristocracies […]; they must have something more productive and substantial in their pleasures, they want to mix satisfaction with their joy.” Democratic institutions inspire citizens to believe their involvement can improve their lives and country. Since citizen activity can impact policy and one’s financial well-being, Americans consider all their activities in this light. They choose how they spend their time and seek to maximize its productivity rather than waste it. De Tocqueville notes that they “want to mix satisfaction with their joy” because they know production comes with both good effects and pleasure. He argues here that people who live under democratic systems want to see productive, positive results from how they spend their time.

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Essay 86: Some Reflections On American Manners (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 14)

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat and historian who endeavored to understand more concerning the United States of America’s distinct culture. The Frenchman wrote Democracy in America, rather it was published, in 1835. Remaining true to his noble identity, he traveled to America and traveled its landscape and observed its sub-cultures. To him, the experience was intellectually inspiring yet challenging.

His beginning question, more or less, was the following: Are people born refined or taught to be so? It was a conundrum for him. Some people are born so wealthy that they don’t care for others with less economic means. Those not at the “foremost” of society yet have means of wealth continually strive to move up the social ladder. Therefore, their public manners often include nothing more than envy of the higher level and contempt of the lower class.

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Essay 85: “How The Equality Of Social Conditions Helps To Maintain Good Morals In America”, “How The American View The Equality Of Men And Women” & “How Quality Naturally Divides Americans Into A Multitude Of Small Private Societies” (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Chs. 11-13)

As a regular guy who once had a big job, I’m grateful to have this opportunity to once again take part in Constituting America’s 90-Day Study, with this year’s focus on Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It was the honor of my life to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives; a position that required me to serve simultaneously as my party’s leader and as leader of the institution itself. The direct and frequent election of our representation in the lower chamber makes it unique in that it allows for more engagement and responsiveness to the will of the electorate. It’s why we call it the People’s House, as our Founders believed it should have “an immediate dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people.” 

In Volume 2, Part 3 of De Tocqueville’s book, morality and equality take center stage in Chapters 11 through 13. His foresight on the gradual journey for equality as it applied to women’s rights was profound, and was likely met with skepticism by the society of his time, but his prediction was based on the laws and how our Founders described our rights. As you’ll recall, the Founders wrote that every individual possessed fundamental rights, even before these rights were ever put into writing. They were described, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, as ‘unalienable’ and their existence was a ‘self-evident’ truth. This notion affirmed this equality De Tocqueville is discussing, as well as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While the societal times may not have shown us to be there yet, the truth was clear and thus, our gradual growth to reach equality would continue as long as we the people continued to support this grand experiment in democratic governance.

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Essay 84: “Education Of Girls In The United States” & “How The Girl Can Be Seen Beneath The Features Of The Wife” (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Chs. 9 & 10)

Nearing the end of his brilliant study of American democracy, in which De Tocqueville has shared an account of the many strengths of American democracy and its national character, De Tocqueville tells his readers that if they want to know which factor most accounts for America’s success, for its “singular prosperity and growing force of this people, I would answer that it is to the superiority of its women.” De Tocqueville’s acknowledgment of women as the source of America’s strength may come as a surprise. How could women – who back in the 1830s were not considered citizens, and were not allowed to hold jobs, speak in public meetings, inherit property, or go to college, be the decisive factor explaining the flourishing of America? 

De Tocqueville’s praise of American women needs to be considered within the context of his political science. De Tocqueville thought that America was such a successful democracy chiefly because of its unique ‘mores’ which he defines as “habits of the heart.” (275) Mores are the habits and practices that constitute American culture – how Americans think, feel, and interact not only with each other but with the rest of the world.  The mores De Tocqueville observed in the US – its religiosity, innovation, strong marriages, enterprise, high levels of civic engagement, and overall freedom-loving disposition – served to stabilize  America’s democratic polity.  But where did these mores come from? De Tocqueville stressed that in the United States they are cultivated primarily by women: “There have never been free societies without mores, and…it is woman who makes these mores. Therefore, all that influences the condition of women, their habits, and their opinions has great political interest in my eyes.” 

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Essay 83: “How Democratic Institutions And Customs Tend To Raise The Cost And Shorten The Eleventh Of Leases”, “Influence Of Democracy On Wages” & “Influence Of Democracy On The Family” (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Chs. 6, 7 & 8)

Alexis De Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s. At that point industrialism had already made significant progress in Europe. In the United States, industrialization would not really explode until after the Civil War in the 1860s. In the first two chapters considered here De Tocqueville seems to be anticipating American industrialization. De Tocqueville ponders how, as a democracy, America’s economy will develop differently than that of aristocratic Europe. 

Economically, America was distinct from Europe in two important ways, according to Tocqueville. First, America had vast expanses of undeveloped land. Land was relatively easy to acquire. Also, America had rejected the aristocratic practice of primogeniture, the notion that all land is inherited by the eldest son. Put these two notions together, you get an America without enormous estates that pass undivided from one generation to the next. Any grand estates in America get divided amongst all children (at the least the males, in this era) and anyone seeking land can acquire it cheaply. 

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Essay 82: How Democracy Alters The Relations Between Master And Servant (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Ch. 5)

De Tocqueville in this chapter continues his investigation of social customs and mores in America, but he uses his description to support his larger point about the contrast between aristocratic society and democratic society. His analysis here reinforces his on-going contention that democracy in America means much more than simply having large numbers of citizens voting. When it comes to employment and working for others, De Tocqueville asserts, “Democracy does not prevent these two classes [masters and servants] from existing; but it changes their spirit and modifies their relations.”

In describing the aristocratic view, De Tocqueville describes a society in which servants accept and endorse hierarchy of both authority and social standing. Because servants are permanently in a lower class, they cannot change their standing. They accept the commands of their master and often come to identify their interests with their master’s interests. They also accept a hierarchy amongst themselves. De Tocqueville observes, “Whoever occupies the last step in a hierarchy of valets is base indeed.” This reality has been captured for Americans by depictions of service in the period drama Downton Abbey. While all those in service acknowledge the superiority of the Grantham family, there exists “downstairs” among the servants a rigid hierarchy that extends from the Butler Mr. Carson all the way down to the newest footman. The youngest footman can dream of nothing more than over many years ascending within this household hierarchy.

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Essay 81: “How Customs Become Softer As Social Conditions Become More Equal”, “How Democracy Makes The Normal Relations Between Americans Easier And Simples”, “Why Americans Are So Difficult To Offend At Home Yet So Easily Offended In Europe” & “Consequences Of The Three Preceding Chapters” (Vol. 2 Pt. 3 Chs. 1-4)

One of the running themes throughout Democracy in America is De Tocqueville’s contention that the equality of conditions exerts a moderating influence on American culture. Compared to the various European powers with entrenched social hierarchies, vast wealth disparities, and undemocratic political systems, Americans appeared egalitarian in their social relations, material prosperity, and politics. 

In these chapters De Tocqueville asks a series of questions: Why do customs become milder as conditions become more equal? Why are Americans excited when they encounter their fellow citizens when travelling overseas? Why are Americans so difficult to offend at home yet easily insulted abroad? 

The first chapter builds upon his earlier arguments by proposing that as conditions become more equal, tastes and preferences become milder. Whereas a huge gulf existed between elite culture and peasant culture in nineteenth-century Europe (between ballet and boxing), Americans generally preferred simple and popular entertainment. 

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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)

“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.

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Essay 79: Why Americans Consider All Honest Occupations As Honorable (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 18)

Alexis de Tocqueville made detailed observations about the American work ethic in his travels through America. De Tocqueville noted during his time studying democracy in America, that rich people, maybe not all, found that work was owed by them to the general public. This is largely because heredity wealth wasn’t prevalent during the early American era. Today, heredity wealth is more prevalent in our society and has possibly altered the attitudes toward some “honest occupations” as being always honorable or worthwhile. However, Americans generally have kept the attitude of “giving back,” especially in times of emergencies, travesties, and holidays. 

In Democracy in America, De Tocqueville brings to light how honest work is viewed in America compared to Europe. He notes the idea of profit and work being seen as separate identities in Europe, but openly connected in America. This may be obvious as to why for many readers, but as one looks to the beginnings of America, work, often farming, led to regular citizens being able to create wealth that was handed down from one generation to the next in Europe. It took Americans a few generations to create “old money.” Since many of our country’s early American founders and builders, from Stephen Girard to John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford, among others, built their fortunes mostly from the ground up, it was a given that honest professions would be an accepted path to upward mobility in America.

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Essay 78: How In Ages Of Equality And Doubt It Is Important To Move The Goal Of Human Endeavor Beyond Immediate Concerns (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 17)

In his 1796 Farewell Address resigning from the presidency after two terms, George Washington advised his fellow Americans to understand the link between religion, virtue, and self-government. Washington wrote, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” 

Washington continued to elaborate, explaining with a syllogism that, “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” He reasoned, along with most other founders, that religion was the basis of virtue and morality, and that virtue and morality were necessary foundations of republican self-government. This is because republics needed citizens and leaders who practiced patriotic self-sacrifice, moderation, self-control, and the public good over private interest. 

During the 1830s and 1840s, the Second Great Awakening was a time rife with religious revivalism and expansion of Protestant denominations focusing on a personal and emotional relationship with Christ. The Second Great Awakening had profound social effects as it promoted widespread moral and social reforms including abolitionism, temperance, prison reform, and women’s suffrage. 

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Essay 77: How An Excessive Love Of Prosperity Can Harm That Very Prosperity (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 16)

In the preceding chapter, De Tocqueville argued that religion serves to moderate materialism in democratic societies. Here in chapter 16, he again explored the social utility of religious beliefs, but it almost seems that he wished to give a word of caution to the reader, as if to say that while democratic cultures have a natural drift toward materialism, material goods are still desirable and necessary.

We may summarize the argument of the chapter as follows.  De Tocqueville explains that the ability to promote the goods of the body is closely connected to the health of the soul. Indeed, human beings differ from the lower animals in that we use our souls and our rational faculties to create material goods. We do not use only instinct, as with beasts.  Moreover, with the soul, we multiply these enjoyments of the body. One can provide for the needs of the body in proportion as the soul is strong; as the soul is weakened, it is less able to provide for the needs of the body.  In a healthy political community, the souls of citizens must remain strong, if only to put its force behind the necessary activity of providing for the needs of the body.

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Essay 76: How Religious Belief Sometimes Diverts The Thoughts Of Americans Toward Spiritual Pleasures (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 15)

While generally positive, De Tocqueville’s analysis of the relationship between religion and democracy contains both complexity and tensions. He notes that religion will be shaped by a democratic society and that it must be so shaped in order to be sustainable and suitable for a democratic age. At the same time, he maintains that a democratic society should be shaped by religion in order to thrive. In Vol. 2, Pt. 2, Ch. 15 of Democracy in America, De Tocqueville outlines one sense in which he thinks that religious belief improves both the lives of democratic individuals and democratic societies. 

Just two chapters earlier, De Tocqueville describes how intensely Americans pursue material well-being. On the one hand, they are so obsessed with material goods that one would think that they must believe that their earthly existence will never come to an end. On the other hand, they are in such haste to acquire and enjoy as many of those goods as possible that it appears as though they live constantly driven by a fear of imminent death. To illustrate this characteristic of Americans, De Tocqueville remarks, “In the United States, a man carefully builds a dwelling in which to pass his declining years, and he sells it while the roof is being laid.”    

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Essay 75: How In America The Taste For Physical Pleasures Is Combined With Love Of Freedom And Concern For Public Affairs (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 14)

In Democracy in America, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville provides a comprehensive account of the nature of democracy based on observations made while in America. He examines the qualities of the American people that enable its free society to persist, and he describes what could lead to its decline. He argues that a movement toward democracy is inevitable in a commercial society, and this is borne out in the industrial growth that enabled the foundation of America. The development of industry enabled a greater diffusion of material goods among the mass of the people. In a democracy the people rule, and the institutions of government and manners of the people must both be ordered in a way that is conducive to a free society.

In this particular chapter, De Tocqueville describes how a free society is uniquely suited to long-term prosperity. While a monarchy ruled by a king with the elevation of the few initially enables material prosperity for a small group, De Tocqueville argues it would not endure. It is free societies which continue to prosper throughout history. He concludes that freedom and prosperity are intertwined, most particularly within democratic nations.

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Essay 74: Why Americans Are So Restless In The Midst Of Their Prosperity (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 13)

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a Frenchman, and one of the most important European social and political thinkers of the nineteenth century. Yet his most famous work was about America, which he visited for nine months in 1831, and then analyzed in his book Democracy in America (1835-40). He saw the United States as a pioneering nation moving in the front ranks of human history. In America, one could gaze upon “the image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions”—and having so gazed, could perhaps take away lessons that would allow leaders in his own country to deal more intelligently and effectively with the democratic changes coming to Europe. 

He was firmly convinced that the movement toward greater social equality—which is what he meant by the word “democracy”—represented an inescapable feature of the modern age. And he was in favor of it. There would be no going back. But he also saw some downsides to democracy and insisted on pointing them out. His chapter on “Why the Americans Show Themselves so Restive in the Midst of Their Well-Being” is a perfect illustration of his position. 

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Essay 73: Why Certain Americans Display An Exalted Form Of Spirituality (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 12)

De Tocqueville frequently draws attention to the ways in which American religion has conformed itself or been conformed to the habits of thinking and acting within the democratic social state. In general, one would expect American religion to support bourgeois virtues and to inoculate the people against fanaticism that would draw them too far away from the goods of this world. At the same time, a sharp-eyed observer of American religion could not help but be struck by the proliferation of small and zealous sects that constituted a contrast with the dominant religious ethos. In this chapter, De Tocqueville tries to make sense of these paradoxical phenomena.

In the preceding chapters, De Tocqueville considers the passion for material well-being, which he takes to be a general and even dominant passion among the American people. Despite the public advantages of this passion, De Tocqueville nevertheless expresses regret that it entirely absorbs Americans and distracts them from more noble or leisurely pursuits that are praiseworthy for a human being. In Chapter 12, De Tocqueville notes that the “taste for the infinite” is an instinct grounded in the “immovable foundation” of human nature. Though it is weakened, it has not been extinguished by the advent of the democratic social state. It is therefore quite understandable that as the general American population narrows its focus on material goods, some will rebel against that circumscription of human life. “There are moments of respite,” says De Tocqueville, “when their souls seem all at once to break the material bonds that restrain them and to escape impetuously toward heaven.”

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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)

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.

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Essay 71: How Americans Apply The Doctrine Of Self-Interest Properly Understood To Religious Matters (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 9)

De Tocqueville has already explained the danger of individualism in the democratic social state as well as the likelihood that these dangers are mitigated in America by the doctrine of self-interest well understood. Why does De Tocqueville now apply the doctrine of self-interest well understood to matters of religion? He has already emphasized the importance of religion in America, and the reader can easily begin to imagine the potential utility of religion in further protecting the people from individualism. De Tocqueville’s framing of this chapter suggests that his contemporaries often regarded religion as a support for duty, which they pitted against utility or interest, so it may have been important to show how religion and self-interest are harmonized. De Tocqueville also raises the possibility that a conventional understanding of self-interest sans religion would fail to sufficiently remind those tempted to timidity or motivated only by self-preservation that death is not the worst outcome.

In the first part of the chapter, De Tocqueville reconciles the doctrine of self-interest to religion, or, rather, he shows how Christianity has long reconciled itself to the doctrine as a means to bring the mass of people into its ranks. For the adherent, according to De Tocqueville, it would satisfy self-interest well understood to persevere in belief despite doubts, as “he will judge that it is wise to risk some of the goods of this world to preserve his rights to the immense inheritance that he has been promised in the other.”

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Essay 70: How Americans Counteract Individualism By The Doctrine Of Self-Interest Properly Understood (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 8)

Virtue, Individualism, and Self Interest Rightly Understood

Much could be said about the prescience of Alexis De Tocqueville, reflected especially in his classic work, Democracy in America. De Tocqueville’s two volume work is not called the most insightful work on American political culture and institutions ever written by a foreigner for nothing. One of the key reasons why historians and political theorists have placed De Tocqueville’s Democracy in such a lofty position is that the book is more than just political science. De Tocqueville based his political insights on human nature itself.

De Tocqueville saw human nature as complex, yet as being broadly two-fold. On the one hand, persons were self-centered, prone to concentrating and abusing power, and greedy for material wealth. On the other hand, persons yearned for freedom, were disposed to direct their thoughts and actions toward virtue and the eternal world, innately religious, and communal. Persons were always looking to secure the common good. 

Thus, De Tocqueville saw a conflict in human nature between the tendency toward individualism (which fed greed, isolation, and despotism) and the longing for virtue (which fed public spirit, religious faith, and freedom). 

The founders of our republic are well-known for insisting on the indispensability of virtue for the success of a republic. Republics cannot survive if the citizenry lacks virtue, that is, moderation, courage, justice, and wisdom. When De Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he did not consider Americans a virtuous people. However, he did think they had mastered the art of channeling the vice of selfishness in a virtuous direction. He thus described Americans as having l’interêt bien entendu, or self interest rightly understood. 

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Essay 69: Connections Between Civil And Political Associations (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 7)

Imagine living in a community with the following problems: the senior living center needs $1 million for updates, Main Street needs to be revitalized, and debates need to be organized to elect a new mayor. Now imagine a community where these problems are solved, not by government, but by the voluntary association of citizens: the chamber of commerce organizes local business owners to invest in the senior living center, churches of various denominations hold a day of service to revitalize Main Street, and delegates from both political parties form a debate commission.

According to De Tocqueville, communities like this are not only good because they may be effective at addressing political and civic problems (in truth, one can imagine that such “free labor” comes in various degrees of quality). Far more important is that the citizens in such communities are, through association with their fellows, developing the skills and habits necessary for democracies to remain happy, prosperous, and free.

In considering chapter 7, it may be helpful to step back and recall one of the major questions De Tocqueville is asking and the thesis he proposes in response: Question 1: When all citizens are free and equal, how do they learn to self-govern in exercising liberty, putting aside their own good for the common good?

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Essay 68: Connection Between Associations And Newspapers (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 6)

Modern readers who turn to any number of media options other than newspapers might find De Tocqueville’s focus on print to be archaic. But his thesis remains valid today when applied to those alternative forms of news and information gathering.

“Only a newspaper can come to deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at the same moment,” he wrote in the 1830s.

He wrote at the very moment when newspapers were beginning to boom, and just before the revolution in communication and transportation that accompanied the invention of the telegraph and the spread of railroads.

De Tocqueville tied the importance of newspapers in developing and fostering associations to his work’s main focus, the centrality of civil society to American culture.

Where groups of ordinary but active citizens matter more than elites, their ability to communicate with each other – in dependable forums with regular publication and an agreed upon idiom – was essential.

For him, this was not simply a matter of politics – of being a critical voice in defending the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Newspapers, De Tocqueville asserted, “maintain civilization.”

In the classic construction, newspapers have never been very good at telling people what to think, but have been quite successful in telling people what to think about. “If there were no newspapers,” he wrote, “there would almost never be common action.”

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Essay 67: The Use Americans Make For Public Associations In Civil Life (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 5)

This is the part where De Tocqueville famously argued that Americans of all types voluntarily associated to carry on “commercial and industrial” enterprises and also a “thousand” other types of endeavors “religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.” Over twenty years ago, I set out to put quantitative bones on his insight and concluded that he did not exaggerate.

A decade ago, I published in Corporation Nation detailed data regarding the formation of for-profit corporations in each of the U.S. states, territories, and District of Columbia from the formation of the nation until the outbreak of the Civil War. The “commercial and industrial” enterprises given legal life by special act of incorporation numbered over 23,000 and included banks, bridges, canals, ditch drainage companies, insurers, lumber companies, manufacturers, mining companies, railroads, telegraphs, tunnels, and turnpikes. Many thousands more chartered under general incorporation laws but could not be counted as comprehensively due to records destruction and bureaucratic barriers to access in states like New York and Michigan.

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Essay 66: How Americans Combat The Effects Of Individualism By Free Institutions (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 4)

De Tocqueville continues his discussion of the effects of equality. The great vice promoted by equality is individualism, the idea that one can withdraw from society and only tend to himself. Equality, when misunderstood, can make people think that they have no need of each other. De Tocqueville is offering a friendly warning so that democracy can be made to work. In this chapter, he points to an answer to the challenges posed by the doctrine of equality. It turns out that Americans have found a very American solution to a very American problem.

The danger is that individualism, the vice bred by equality, is the lifeblood of despotism. Individualism allows despotism to thrive because isolated individuals do not care what the government does as long as they can remain isolated. Despotism asks people to abstain from public life. The natural meaning of words becomes inverted in a despotism. The good citizen keeps to himself while bad citizens want to work together for the common good. De Tocqueville is not necessarily speaking of the classic despotism of a cruel tyrant, but is foreshadowing the possibility of a new, “soft” despotism that can develop in democracies. Democratic despotism is less obvious but more dangerous as all it requires is for citizens to ignore public affairs.

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Essay 65: How Individualism Is Greater At The End Of A Democratic Revolution Than Any Other Period (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 3)

De Tocqueville turns his sights to France in the third chapter. In this discussion, he notes that Americans had “the great advantage” of “being born equal instead of becoming so.” Because of this advantage, he thinks, the U.S. was able to escape some of the childhood diseases of the democratic condition. In particular, the American institutions that help to check the results of individualism are more likely to be successful than those in Europe.

Yet this chapter is not really written for or about Americans. It gives us an important clue, however, to the political science and political psychology that De Tocqueville is describing in the book. Classical political philosophy taught that each form of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and so on – created a distinct psychology in the citizens. The classical ideal was an aristocracy composed of liberally educated, moderate gentlemen who provided the solid base of virtuous citizens. In the middle ages, the ideal was the beneficent prince. De Tocqueville (along with J.S. Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among many others) thought that the changes created by “equality of conditions” demanded a new psychology. “Individualism” is a key finding of this new psychology. The democratic citizen is hard working, practical, and concerned with the well being of himself and his family, but he lacks the concern for others born of aristocracy.

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Essay 64: Individualism In Democratic Countries (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 2)

Individualism is an idea that was not known in the English speaking world until Democracy in America, and De Tocqueville’s first translator is credited with the first use of the word in the English language. The new word is a part of the new politics ushered in by the spread of democracy, and is one ground of De Tocqueville’s claim that America demonstrates the need for a new science of politics. The society created by the first generations of Americans resulted in this entirely new social condition, and De Tocqueville sets out to document its nature and its progress.  

The first thing he makes clear is that individualism is not selfishness, even though it looks like selfishness and can lead to selfishness. Selfishness is not confined to democratic society, in the way that individualism is, but is a vice that affects humans in general. A selfish person does not concern himself with society and its standards, but measures all social relations by his own desires.  This can happen anywhere. Individualism comes from the structure of democracy.  Aristocratic societies lead people to consider the needs and desires of those around them, but rarely think about humankind. Democracy leads people to care about mankind, but lose a sense of obligation to the particular people nearest them.  

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Essay 63: Why Democratic Nations Display A More Passionate And Lasting Love For Equality Than For Freedom (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 1)

“Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and more Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom” is a short, vital chapter with a long title. It exposes the basic thought behind many of De Tocqueville’s various fears for the future of democracy. Democratic citizens have a great passion for both freedom and equality, De Tocqueville argues. But their love for equality threatens always to become exclusive and excessive, eclipsing and destroying freedom.

In making this argument, De Tocqueville implies that over the long-run democratic order is threatened far less by its failures to live up to democratic ideals, than by an excessive or one-sided attachment to one of those ideals. This was surely an unwelcome lesson for the French and American democrats of De Tocqueville’s day, and it’s scarcely likely to be more easily accepted today. Human beings generally have an understandable predisposition to resist the notion that their ideals could be a source of danger. If one fails in realizing one’s ideal, one can simply do better next time. But if one’s ideal is to blame, one must take on the more difficult and daunting work of changing direction.

Perfect equality together with perfect freedom “is the ideal toward which democratic peoples tend.” Perfect freedom and perfect equality, however, is logically possible only under the very unlikely circumstance that “all citizens concur in the government and each has an equal right to concur in it.” De Tocqueville means that the democratic ideal of perfect freedom and equality is contradicted by democratic experience; in reality, dispute characterizes democracy, a voting majority decides, and the rest must follow whether they like it or not. The only way of achieving true equality and perfect freedom would be the fundamental sameness of everyone. If, for instance, everyone voted the same way, then everyone would be politically equal and everyone would likewise be free to live just as they like.

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Essay 62: Parliamentary Eloquence In The United States (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Ch. 21)

Modes of political behavior run along the grooves of the larger habits of the social organism. Call it culture, if you will. De Tocqueville, in his chapter on political eloquence in the United States, compares the European aristocratic mode to the  American democratic mode. Before we examine De Tocqueville’s discussion, two digressions.

Eloquence conventionally means “fluent or persuasive speaking” and is used today to indicate objective oratory talent. If now we say “The Congressman spoke eloquently” we tend to mean finely. But the origin of the word is the Latin “e” for out [as in “exit”] and “loqui” to speak. The French word is “éloquence”, and the English word is borrowed from this mother language. In French, “éloquence” can also mean raw loquacity and volubility. I take De Tocqueville’s meaning to be mainly the method of speaking out rather than the finer quality of it.

In the 1986 hit comedy “Back to School” the protagonist, Thornton Melon, fumbling for words to ask his professor — who at least sounds European — out on a date, says “Call me sometime when you have no class.” This joke is funny precisely because America, in its prohibition of titles of nobility, is, in more ways than one, a classless society. 

Few things show this more clearly than a common American method of fraud, which is to assume the air of European class structure to gain some advantage. A fine illustration of this comes from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. 

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Essay 61: Characteristics Peculiar To Historians In Democratic Ages (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Ch. 20)

Vol. II Part 1 Chapter 20: On Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries
The second volume of Democracy in America is divided into four parts, the first of which is devoted to the “Influence of Democracy on Intellectual Movement in the United States.” De Tocqueville is here interested in understanding the ways democracy shapes and forms the minds, and so the mental activities, of democratic peoples.

In chapter 20 he takes up the topics of historians, who are often intellectuals, and the writing of history (or historiography), an important exercise of the intellect, which influences how people perceive themselves and their times. There is no single or definitive account of the past; nor is the best method of historiography a settled matter. The way historians approach the facts of the past is itself affected by factors beyond the individual historian, including the social state and period in which they write. One of the most intellectually influential activities of the human mind is itself subject to influences outside the intellect. Thus, in this chapter De Tocqueville discusses the kinds of causes in history and the different practices in writing history, while he likewise provides guidance to historians about intellectual errors of grave social and psychological consequence. The chapter is therefore both descriptive and evaluative of the tendencies of historians in aristocratic and in democratic ages.

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Essay 60: “A Few Sources Of Poetry In Democratic Nations”, “Why American Writers And Speakers Are Often Bombastic” & “A Few Remarks On The Theater Of Democratic Nations” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 17-19)

“Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and more Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom” is a short, vital chapter with a long title. It exposes the basic thought behind many of De Tocqueville’s various fears for the future of democracy. Democratic citizens have a great passion for both freedom and equality, De Tocqueville argues. But their love for equality threatens always to become exclusive and excessive, eclipsing and destroying freedom.

In making this argument, De Tocqueville implies that over the long-run democratic order is threatened far less by its failures to live up to democratic ideals, than by an excessive or one-sided attachment to one of those ideals. This was surely an unwelcome lesson for the French and American democrats of De Tocqueville’s day, and it’s scarcely likely to be more easily accepted today. Human beings generally have an understandable predisposition to resist the notion that their ideals could be a source of danger. If one fails in realizing one’s ideal, one can simply do better next time. But if one’s ideal is to blame, one must take on the more difficult and daunting work of changing direction.

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Essay 59: “Why The Study Of Greek And Latin Literature Is Particularly Useful In Democratic Communities” & “How American Democracy Has Modified The English Language” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 15-16)

What kind of education should people receive in a democratic society like the United States? Tocqueville has a characteristically nuanced answer to this question. One part of that answer reflects his understanding that Americans, as democratic citizens, are educated—or formed—by various sources beyond formal schooling. A second element derives from his willingness to tailor his prescriptions to the circumstances and character of a democratic people. A third piece exemplifies his commitment to pushing back against the regrettable tendencies of democratic life and thereby channeling it in salutary directions.

We might be initially surprised that, in Vol. 2, Pt. 1, Ch. 15 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville makes no mention of civics—education for citizenship—in his brief commentary on education in a democracy. That surprise will dissipate, though, if we remind ourselves that Tocqueville observes an array of sources of civic formation at work in the United States in the 1830s. Local political institutions, he says, “are to freedom what primary schools are to science,” habituating citizens to self-government; the institution of the jury is akin to “a school, free of charge and always open,” wherein jurors are the students; and political associations amount to “great schools, free of charge” for “all citizens” to learn about associational life. Religion fosters a sense of moral limits on democratic majorities, and Americans grow accustomed to a peaceful and orderly way of life. through their families In short, Tocqueville contends that all of these aspects of Americans’ lives contribute to an education for self-government.

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Essay 58: “How Literature Appears In Democratic Times” & “The Literature Industry” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 13-14)

Literature hews to standards outside of the democratic logic. A canonical work does not attain that status by majority consent. Claims of merit do not require a reader’s consent to be authoritative. And the pursuit of sublimity, literature’s proper object, reveals that men have always been created unequal in their intellectual endowments.

Literary excellence is not inherently political, and its claims need not raise a direct challenge to democracy. Yet in a society that exalts equality and promotes self-expression for its own sake, literature stands uneasily at the margins—tolerated, perhaps ignored.

As part of his seminal survey of America, Alexis de Tocqueville lingers for a few chapters on the reciprocal influences running between democracy and literature. By the time he reaches literature, De Tocqueville has toured through adjacent subjects such as Americans’ pursuit of arts and sciences. He has been critical, but the professed friend of democracy takes pains to convince readers that the “irresistible” democratic revolution does not trail cultural poverty in its wake.

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Essay 57: “In What Spirit The Americans Cultivate The Arts” & “Why The Americans Erect Both Insignificant Monuments And Others Which Are Very Grand” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 11-12)

A friend once remarked to me that he disliked visiting our nation’s capital because it had come to remind him of imperial Rome. He had in mind the plethora of massive office buildings most constructed to house the large Federal bureaucracies that developed owing to the expansion of the government’s domestic responsibilities beginning in the 1960’s. Through the comparison with the Roman Empire, he was suggesting the incompatibility between massive government and the spirit of genuine republicanism, or self-rule.

This, precisely, is De Tocqueville’s point in his chapter on “Why the Americans at the Same Time Raise Such Little and Such Great Monuments.” Despite having observed in the previous chapter that in democratic times “the monuments of the arts tend to become more numerous and less great,” he immediately adds the exception to that rule. In democracies the size of public monuments tends towards the gigantic, reflecting the fact that while “individuals are very weak …. The state, which represents all” of them and “holds all in its hand, is very strong.”

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Essay 56: Why Americans Are More Attracted To Practical Rather Than Theoretical Aspects Of The Sciences (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Ch. 10)

In this chapter, De Tocqueville gives an account of the problem of science in democratic times. Science, he says, may be divided into three parts: the first and most fundamental is the purely theoretical part, which “contains the most abstract notions, those whose application is not known or is very distant.” The second part contains “general truths” that are derived from pure theory but which “lead by a direct, short path to practice.” The third and least fundamental part contains “the processes of application and the means of execution.”

America, which De Tocqueville takes for his model of democracy left to its natural instincts, shows that democracy strongly favors practice over theory. There is no leisured nobility or propertyless peasantry in a democracy. In a democracy, nearly everyone works for a living and nearly everyone can lose what wealth they have. Everyone is therefore striving for material wellbeing. Science is therefore prized not for its power to reveal the most fundamental truths of nature but for its power to conquer nature. Not knowledge for its own sake but for the sake of relieving man’s estate, not the satisfaction of the mind but the comfort of the body, is the goal of science in democratic times. De Tocqueville singles out the steamboat as a representative example of what human intelligence aspires to achieve in democratic times. In our own time, we may say this aspiration looks to the next generation of computers, rocket ships, and medical therapies. These projects doubtless require a monumental effort of theoretical intelligence. De Tocqueville would not deny this. But he would stress that only such theory as is required to achieve the next leap in technology will be regarded as an object of high intellectual concern in democratic times. There is ample room for theory in democratic times, but it is the type of theory that corresponds to the middle part of science. It is not pure theory. It is theory in the service of application, rather than theory for the sake of contemplation.

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Essay 55: How The Example Of The Americans Does Not Prove That A Democratic People Would Have Neither The Aptitude Nor The Taste For The Sciences, Literature, And The Arts (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Ch. 9)

In Volume 2, Chapter 9 of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville challenges the beliefs of some European cynics of democracy that America’s equal political system suppresses or destroys interest in, and indeed the development of, sciences, literature, and arts.

De Tocqueville opens with the presumption “that among the civilized people of our day there are few in whom the advanced sciences have made less progress than in the United States, and who have furnished fewer great artists, illustrious poets, and celebrated writers.” The presumption, based on his observations in 1840, warrants additional scrutiny.

The presumption glosses over the then-contemporary and significant contributions of Americans such as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Morse to science; Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore (Fen-i-moore) Cooper, and Washington Irving to literature; and Morse, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Wilson Peale (peel), and John Trumbull to art.

Second, the presumption ignores the fact that the population of the U.S. was then only about seventeen million people, about 10 percent of Western Europe’s population, and less than 2 percent of the world’s population.

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Essay 54: How Equality Suggests To Americans The Idea Of The Indefinite Perfectibility Of Man (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Ch. 8)

Volume Two of Democracy in America is divided into four parts: how democracy shapes the intellectual movement, sentiments, mores, and ideas of Americans. Chapter Eight is of unique importance to the whole of Volume Two because it offers an account of what seems to be American democracy’s most hopeful intellectual movement, a belief in “indefinite perfectibility” or progress.

De Tocqueville tells us that the notion of indefinite progress is a product of the equalization of conditions, which is central to democracy’s “irresistible revolution.” Equality, displayed by the leveling of social hierarchy and the rise of economic or material equality, suggests new intellectual currents to democrats, which De Tocqueville contrasts with those of the previous regime. For aristocratic nations with definite stratifications, man could progress definitively toward a limited ideal. The clarity with which aristocratic nations could view the limits of politics prevented them from “judg[ing] [perfectibility] to be indefinite.” The idea of indefinite perfectibility belongs to democratic peoples who are “mixed tumultuously” by equalizing conditions so that “the image of an ideal and always fugitive perfection is presented to the human mind.” In the tumult, man sees repeated success and failure in all his efforts to progress—never can he be satisfied that anyone has the absolute truth. The democrat is thus someone who “tends ceaselessly toward the immense greatness that he glimpses confusedly at the end of the long course that humanity must still traverse.” The democratic revolution overturns aristocratic practice and establishes new modes and orders that befit this restless pursuit of perfection.

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Essay 53: “How Religion In The United States Makes Full Use Of Democratic Tendencies”, “The Progress Of Catholicism In The United States” & “What Causes The Minds Of Democratic Nations To Include Toward Pantheism” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 5-7)

Upon visiting the United States, De Tocqueville was enamored of the fact that lovers of liberty and democracy were not enemies of religion, but rather its sincere friends. This was not the case in France, where religion was so bound up with the aristocracy and the monarchy that the French revolutionaries sought to topple the church along with disfavored hereditary institutions. In America, religion and liberty—faith and democracy—found themselves on the same team.

This is important because De Tocqueville believes that religious beliefs are profoundly determinative of human action. Such beliefs influence nearly everything about a person’s conduct: “There is almost no human action … that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them.” For De Tocqueville, politics is downstream from theology.

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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)

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.”

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Essay 51: “The Americans’ Philosophic Method” & “The Principal Source Of Beliefs Among Democratic Nations” (Vol. 2 Pt. 1 Chs. 1 & 2)

Democracy in America: What We Learned from a French Aristocrat Long Ago

“I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Volume II Chapter 1, Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville, the son of French aristocracy, journeyed to America at the ripe old age of 25 originally to assess its prison system that was considered a new progressive approach to criminal justice. His real interest, however, was in America itself, the birth of the new Republic, how it was faring and what distinguished it from the events in European nations.

A man of frail voice, fragile body but clearly of expansive mind and taste for adventure traveled to America with Gustave de Beaumont, described as his best friend, who he met at the Court of Law at Versailles. That’s where he also met his future wife, Mary Motley. The French political scientist, sociologist and historian and his friend Beaumont stayed in America for six months on their first visit in 1834 and four months on their second a year later.

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Essay 45: De Tocqueville– “A Few Remarks On The Present Day State And The Probable Future Of The Three Races Which Live In The Territory Of The United States” (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Subch. 2)

Alexis de Tocqueville uses his keen insights and talents for observation to focus on the question of slavery and blacks in the newly created United States of America.

Near the end of his essay on this topic he once again demonstrates the prescience and perception that he has revealed throughout the book “Democracy in America”. In this essay, he predicts slavery’s demise.

He explains at the end of the essay, “… whatever the efforts of Americans of the south to preserve slavery, they will not succeed at it forever….in the midst of the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age [slavery] is not an institution that can endure.”

Indeed, slavery ended in the US. It proved incompatible with the remarkable ideas of our founders including the foundational principle that “All Men are Created Equal.” The end came about as the result of the most consequential war that this nation had ever experienced. Greater and more deadly for Americans than World War I and World War II. Certainly, greater than the losses of the Revolutionary War. The Civil War cost more American lives than any war the US has ever been involved in.

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Essay 44: De Tocqueville: “A Few Remarks On The Present Day State And The Probable Future Of The Three Races Which Live In The Territory Of The United States” (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 10, Subch. 1)

Democracy in America recounts Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections on his extensive travels in America. In the chapter under discussion (Volume 1, Part Two, Chapter 10), he considers the present and probable futures of the three races [the white man, the Negro and the Indian] that inhabit the territory of the United States. De Tocqueville found the three races to be naturally distinct and inimical to each other. Fortune had gathered them together and mixed them without the ability to intermingle, to the end that each pursued its own destiny. My focus is De Tocqueville’s answer to the question, vis a vis the Indian, “What is to be the future of the Indians?” He saw it as bleak. Very bleak. To the point of extinction.

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Essay: 43 The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 10)

Founding a democratic republican regime is one thing. The American founders had done that. Maintaining it is another, as Benjamin Franklin famously remarked upon emerging from the final session of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and as a sober young American attorney named Abraham Lincoln saw and considered in his “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois in 1838, some two generations later.

Writing a couple of years before Lincoln, Alexis de Tocqueville understood that his fellow Europeans hesitated to found democratic republics because they did not see how such regimes could sustain themselves in Europe, where geopolitical, constitutional, and civil-social circumstances differed substantially from those prevailing in North America. By then, Americans faced no formidable enemies, needed to fight no major wars, and consequently afforded no opportunities for a native Napoleon to hunger for military glory and move against republicanism. The American capital was no Paris, no Rome; a centralized government can fall prey to mobs, with ‘the democracy’ threatening the government, whether monarchic, as in 1789 and again in 1848, or republican, as the Romans had seen in the military coup of Julius Caesar. And North America is much bigger than Europe; on a large continent, “nature itself works for the people,” giving them an outlet for their restless ambitions. Dissatisfied with your lot in life? If you’re an American, go West, young man; set yourself up as a farmer, not as a revolutionary.

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Essay 42: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 9)

The Way We Were (And Could Be Again)

“The Americans have no neighbors and consequently no great wars, financial crisis, ravages, or conquest to fear; they need neither large taxes, nor a numerous army, nor great generals; they have almost nothing to dread from a scourge more terrible for republics than all those things put together – military glory.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The late Ronald Reagan after losing his party’s nomination for president in 1976, spoke of a time capsule that he had the opportunity to write a letter for that would be later opened for the American Tricentennial 100 years later in 2076.

“And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now … will know whether we met our challenge,” Reagan explained. “Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.”

Reagan then went on to say:

“Will they look back with appreciation, and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later, free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all, because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it. This is our challenge and this is why we were here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been but we carry the message they’re waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined, and what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.”

History both repeats and rhymes, and the challenge and battle that Reagan had spoke of for the soul and future of America is the same struggle that every American has been fighting since The Shot Heard Round The World on April 19, 1775 and maybe even earlier.

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Essay 41: The Main Causes Which Tend To Maintain A Democratic Republic In The United States (Vol. 1 Pt. 2 Ch. 9, Subch. 8)

It is widely acknowledged that Democracy in America, written in 1835 and 1840, is the greatest book on that topic—a period of America long gone and never to return. De Tocqueville offers an optimistic chapter describing the forces working to preserve a democratic republic. Conjoining those two words obscures the traditional philosophical opposition between republics and democracies. In so doing, De Tocqueville offers several explanations that, while accurate for his time, are as dead as a dodo bird in ours.

His first explanation is that “The Americans have no neighbors and consequently no great wars,” except, of course, with themselves (the Civil War of 1861-1865 was at the time the bloodiest and most sophisticated war fought anywhere in the world). We still have quiet borders with our northern and southern neighbors (putting aside the problem of illegal immigration). But today, new technologies that span oceans call for military interactions with countless nations, both friend and foe—China, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and many others. Our current military budget, foreign policy, defense capabilities, intelligence sources, and foreign aid programs never crossed De Tocqueville’s mind. But to read him as a blind isolationist would draw exactly the wrong inference. Today, he would know that the question is not only whether to interact with these formidable world powers but also how to do so. Do we sign bilateral or multilateral treaties? Can we continue to follow a constitutional system that requires, except in emergencies, the Congress to declare war before the President as commander-in-chief can intervene in Kosovo or Libya? These all present tough issues. And if De Tocqueville was right to attack General Andrew Jackson when he ascended to the presidency, should we say the same about Dwight Eisenhower? Don’t blame De Tocqueville for not seeing the future. Don’t rely on him as if he did.

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