In 1831, for nine short but adventurous months, a 26-year-old French aristocrat traversed America with his colleague and friend Gustave de Beaumont, a young French lawyer and prison magistrate. Officially commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system, the two young Europeans used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead.
The young nobleman’s name was Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). The slightly built son of a count from Normandy would undergo a change of heart regarding democracy, becoming a convert to the American way of life.
Nearly thirty-years after the two men returned to France in 1832, Tocqueville’s compatriot, Beaumont, would note in the preface to a two volume work titled, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (1861), “It has been said with truth, that Tocqueville was a thinker. A thinker whose curiosity and active mind was always at work. The depth and seriousness of his mind, combined with an almost feminine grace and delicacy, breathes in nearly every sentence that he wrote.”
Tocqueville was blessed with a remarkable sixth sense for probing the difference between appearances and realities and, although he had no memory for words nor for figures, he possessed the strongest possible remembrance of ideas; once grasped his mind retained them forever.
Alexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume Democracy in America (1835-1840) is commonly said to be among the greatest works of nineteenth-century political writing. “A highly engaging and thought-provoking text that markedly stands at right angles to the dull-witted science of politics that is today dominant in the American academy, and elsewhere,” writes John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney; renowned globally for his creative thinking on the subject of democracy.
Tocqueville wasn’t the only nineteenth-century visitor to be charmed by the new democracy. Defined one observant traveller, shortly after Tocqueville had published his great work, “The United States is a free land, essentially because its sons drink together the milk of respect for each others’ opinions …this is what makes them beautiful, and their air more easily breathable for us who are thirsty for freedom from old Europe, where the liberties we have gained with so much blood and pain have for the most part been suffocated by our mutual intolerance.”
“Tocqueville expected government intervention and meddling in the affairs of civil society would eventually choke the spirit of civil association,” points out Keane. “‘It might well lead,’ Tocqueville argued, ‘to a new form of state servitude, the likes of which the world had never before seen.’”
“Peacefully, bit by bit,” Keane reveals, “by means of democratically formulated laws, government would morph into a new form of tutelary custodial power dedicated to securing the welfare of its citizens–at the high price of clogging the arteries of civil society, thus robbing citizens of their collective power to act.”
When approached one hundred and eighty-five years after its first publication, Democracy in America teaches us more than a few things about the subject of democracy.
Professor Keane, in his full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009) writes, “The fabled distinction between what people can see with their eyes and what they are told about the emperor’s clothes breaks down. ‘Reality,’ including the ‘reality’ promoted by the powerful, comes to be understood as always ‘produced reality,’ a matter of interpretation–and the power to seduce others into conformity by forcing particular interpretations of the world down others’ throats.”
Tocqueville envisioned this: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.
“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
“For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates [causes someone to feel drained of energy or vitality; weakened], extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Tocqueville detected, “Peoples, like individuals, need to become educated before they know how to act. It did not depend on the passions of disorder.”
Keane concludes, “When we look back at the long crisis that gripped democracies a century after Tocqueville wrote, wasn’t the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and Pol’s Cambodia marked by more than a few democratic features in this sense? And when we look today at the new despotisms of the Eurasian region, Russia and China for instance, shouldn’t we ask whether these regimes are simulacra [an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute] of Western democracies now bogged down in various dysfunctions and pathologies [mental or social abnormality or malfunction]? Don’t they make us wonder where our own so-called democracies are heading? Might they be signals of the emerging fact, unless something gives, that despotism is once again fated to play center stage of our political lives in the coming years of the 21st century? Do we not have to thank Alexis de Tocqueville for warning us that they may well be the future of democracy?”
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