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 403-410 of this edition of Democracy in America.
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.
“He was shocked by what he saw,” Pete Peterson of Pepperdine University, recently told a Constituting America audience. Peterson also says he found freedom, equality of conditions, people starting from nothing, gaining wealth and back again, opportunities to improve their station in life. De Tocqueville, he said, was impressed by American individualism but also by the sense of good that comes from collective enterprise. Americans were joining together to build roads and schools, join civic organizations, establish churches and aid one another, without the intrusion of government.
What came of the journey was a two-volume tome entitled Democracy in America published in 1835 and 1840. The first volume is mostly about the land itself, the people, how they lived and collaborated in the governance of their larger cities and small towns. The second volume is more a study of the cultures and philosophies underpinning the new Republic and the unique character of the people and their application of democratic rule, using Europe as the base of comparison.
It was an important literary achievement in the 19th Century. More than another century later, it is considered a masterful, panoramic view of the new nation, its culture, social order and its people. The new nation’s boundaries then stretched East to West from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and North to South from Maine to Florida.
The adventure took the traveling duo as far west as Saginaw, Michigan along crude and rugged, at times impassible roads, untamed wilderness and bad weather, sometimes requiring Indian guides. American settlers were still carving a new life out of the wilderness. They were taken by the dichotomy of Eastern cities and Western wilderness. They had similar observations first exploring the Northern states and later crisscrossing the rural South, where they were disturbed by slavery.
De Tocqueville’s observations of political life are especially poignant. The colonists who planted the seeds of democracy had rare and expansive opportunities to experiment with forms of government and social order without the baggage of old-world Europe’s deeply embedded monarchial rule, caste systems, dogmatic religious orthodoxy, and staid and constrictive family traditions. The Founding Fathers borrowed a good deal from Europe’s period of enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, as De Tocqueville observed, brought the the new ideas of Voltaire, John Locke, John Stuart Mill and other philosophers to the drawing table as they formed their own philosophy for establishing the new nation.
Yet De Tocqueville said what he discovered to his surprise 60 years after the founding was little pre-occupation with philosophy. Let him explain:
“The Americans have no philosophic school of their own and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names. It is easy to see, nevertheless, that almost all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds on the same manner and conduct them by the same rules; that is to say, they possess a certain philosophic method, whose rules they have never taken the trouble to define… [they] take traditions only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means…these are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans.”
What De Tocqueville found in America was a system of governance founded on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the virtues of individualism, egalitarianism, secularism, Lassez-Faire, and populism. He saw those precepts manifested in limited, representative government, civil liberties, the protection of individual rights, general ownership of property, and what he called “self-interest rightly understood.”
Self-interest is not selfishness, according to De Tocqueville. His references indicate that individuals exercising reason can determine what is in their best interests when dictated by virtue and that rightly understood, self-interest encompasses the good one can do for another and the binding good that comes from social interaction, charity, fellowship and mutual security.
Virtues, he cautioned, can be turned into vices if abused and misapplied. In America he believed there is that risk if, for example, majority rule becomes the tyranny of the majority or if citizens through the dereliction of their civic inclination toward interdependence become too dependent on government for their needs.
So much of what De Tocqueville saw in America is still America today yet so much is different.
That may be a simplistic observation, but it has profound meaning. It speaks to the genius of the Founding Fathers who created a government and inspired a way of life that did not just endure, but became a catalyst for change around the world. It was an experiment that has never stopped being experimental, always changing, always unleashing more of the promise of people who have the freedom to pursue their self-interest, rightly understood.
Johnson is a former journalist, member of the White House staff under President Gerald Ford, Chief of Staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel. He has been active in a number of non-profit organizations and served as a media consultant, lobbyist and co-author of two books: Fixing Congress and Surviving Inside Congress. He is married to Thalia Assuras, has five children and four grandchildren.
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