BOOKS
The Image of Democracy
By JAMES JOLL N May, 1831, two young French lawyers arrived in New York, ostensibly on a mission from the French Government to study the American penal system. Both of them wrote books on their return from a nine months' stay in the United States. Gustave de Beaumont's novel about slavery,Marie cu l'Esclavage aux Etats-Unis, is now forgotten; but Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is not only still important for anyone interested in American history and life; it is also a work which suggested a new way of writing about political institutions and of studying societies.
Although Tocqueville was conscientious about collecting material on prison conditions—his American notebooks* contain accounts of long conversations with the governor of Sing-Sing (who 'looks like a very common man') and of other prisons—his real purpose in going to America was far more important. 'I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclina- tions, its prejudices and its passions, were it only to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.' Tocqueville has often been represented as an enemy of democracy; and there are plenty of passages in his work where his fear of the tyranny of the masses and of a general lowering of the standards of civilised life reinforce the natural scepticism and pessimism of his tempera- ment. In fact, however, what emerges from Democracy in America and still more from the Journey to America, which contains the notes on which the finished work was based, is how open- minded Tocqueville was. A young aristocrat, b.afn while the memories of the Terror were still fresh, whose father had made a successful career under the Restoration, he was remarkably free from prejudice. True—like so many subsequent fas- tidious European travellers—he occasionally complained of a certain crudeness. 'The tradition of cultivated manners is lost . . . the Society is less brilliant and more prosperous.' But he at once went on to put these criticisms in perspec- tive. 'These various effects of the progress of civilisation and enlightenment, which are only hinted at in Europe, appear in the clear light of day in America. From what cause do they derive?'
What interested him was how the new society was developing; and, as he went over his notes and reflected on his observations, he began to see some of the answers to his questions. Above all, he realised that the standards of the old Europe could not be applied to the United States. Indeed, it is hard now to imagine just how sur- prising and even shocking American political in- stitutions in the 1830s must have seemed to a French aristocrat, and it is all the more creditable that Tocqueville should have understood and appreciated them so well. 'There is one thing which America demonstrates invincibly and of which I had been in doubt up till now; it is that • JOURNEY TO AMERICA. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer. (Faber, 42s.)
the middle classes can govern a state.' It is this conclusion that is important in Tocqueville, what- ever reservations he may have felt about it.
In the preface to Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote that the notes on his various conversations during his tour 'will never leave my writing case.' It is these notebooks which have now been published in a readable English trans- lation from the French text established by Mr. J. P. Mayer. It is perhaps a pity that Mr. Mayer has not made more concessions to the ordinary reader by providing more information about the characters mentioned in the text, instead of just giving a reference to George Wilson Pierson's Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, a full and fascinating account largely based on copies of the notebooks now published in Mr. Mayer's defini- tive text. However, the notebooks are revealing and important because they show how Tocque- ville collected his impressions and therefore illustrate his method of work. At the same time they contain many pieces of shrewd detailed observation that were inevitably omitted from the more generalised and philosophical Demo- cracy in America. Indeed, so many of Tocque- ville's observations remain true of the American scene today that it is startling to be reminded that Tocqueville was there nearly 130 years ago and to come across suddenly a sentence like 'Detroit is a little town of two or three thousand souls.' There is, for example, the same suspicion of State action which crops up today in the innumerable interrogations about ',socialised medicine' to which every British visitor is subjected. 'Every individual,' so Tocqueville summarises this atti- tude, 'being the most competent judge of his own interest, society must not carry its solicitude on his behalf too far, for fear that, in the end, he might come to count on society, and so in turn a duty might be laid on society which it is incapable of performing.' Then there is the gregariousness of American life: 'The last word in the way of association seems to me to be the temperance societies, that is to say, an association of men who mutually agree to abstain from a vice.' And, alongside this foretaste of Alcoholics Anony- mous, there is a vision of the disadvantages of 'open plan' living—'the construction of the houses which makes the secret of an illicit liaison almost impossible to hide.'
Tocqueville was the first European to take America seriously—an example that some French and English intellectuals would still do well to follow—end he had a true historical sense of what America would mean for the future of the world. There is a well-known prophecy at the end of part I of Democracy in America where he says Of America and Russia : 'Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.' HP -sed that this would mean a new kind of
soc and a new set of political values, and he realised, for all his apprehensions about the a liberal democracy based on universal suffilf Rolm would imply. 'If you are of the opinion that tbl 1 principal object of a Government is not to con A Itt
the greatest possible share of power and of gla I of misery to each of the individuals who compol IN an greatest degree of enjoyment and the least dee` means of satisfying them than by equalising t), k tlii. upon the body of the nation, but to ensure lb IS:enildi it—if such be your desires you can have no soil / I 7, conditions of men and establishing democraalt: \p‘cearteei institutions.'
he misunderstood about American politics
history, and Sainte-Beuve's comment 71 a calAi mann' Tocqueville has been criticised for the thint tiv,iraittidhiscet attack members of the old New England upper class W. 1,111 0. resented the brashness of Jacksonian democradz differe '1 am convinced,' one of them told him, 'that th4;.(lescrii is not a man of distinction in the Union but fed' l27. that a very extended suffrage is a fatal thing.' 'ill although echoes of sentiments of this kind find "ell f( place in the finished work, Tocqueville realise oils ui that the old society of the. eastern seaboard 0 series i already losing its importance, and he was enol lions ( mously impressed and excited by what he saw 4 lerestii the movement to the West. It is true, too, that Ill the art observation of the South was less thorough th31 hooks. of Massachusetts or Connecticut; yet he aired', ings ol saw that the introduction of negroes into ti %tho p: United States had provided the country with it chievoi most lasting and most intractable problem. It it, spite 0 incidentally, the negro question which provide' estraor Tocqueville with the opportunity for one of Ilt If th profoundest moral observations: 'Man is lic' the ai„ made for slavery : that truth is perhaps even bet0 i, 'art proved by the master than by the slave.' And t" behavic saw, too, how the existence of slavery was pro cons". foundly (and permanently) to influence til; °r ever American attitude to domestic service-1 feel it' to mak, is degrading the human race to have wh!'seciate i table.' Equality, self-government, enterpris I- tendht 'When one of them comes to change my platel,.;naabibetiliotitf. am always tempted to offer him my place - ' emarIc ejcmen for servants,' a Southern congressman sa these were the qualities Tocqueville found al hut but Ste respected in the United States. The price to v', are kep paid for them was an increase in materialism att4good v, a loss of taste; and it is something that America01taly ar in their search for 'gracious living,' have beet slot), ga regretting ever since.
Tocqueville was, in spite of his mistakes :ill'in owr rare errors of judgment, the inventor of °But the humane, empirical and at the same time creativtand int, study of politics and society, in which observa served t tion was supplemented and transfused by imagirl$tiN e say, tion and insight. The notebooks show what the was I careful observer he was, and how he began assess a less a ing and assimilating his impressions as soon as 11.iand de( had formed them. 'Note: the bearings of lbdded: fact are immense,' he jots down at one point; ankyond co at another, 'This observation needs confirmatio140gie,d , The conclusions of Democracy in America ludgmel based on the human observations in the notgt - hat edr books; and it is this fact which makes Tocquevtf the s so important a figure in the history of politic mires Hi studies. He is not the speculative philosophki st. F creating a political system in his study, or drafiSialt,e., ing an ideal constitution, as most of the eighteenth'e, p,,,,, century political theorists had done. Unlike sl'of i '
many twentieth-century sociologists, he is not jtt the collector of statistics unwilling to draw an, conclusions of general interest from the assembled facts and figures. He belongs to t small class of students of society, such as Bageh and Max Weber, who go straight to the sign' , cant facts and from them draw the significa0 conclusion. menet.; a penser avant d'avoir rien appris typical of one line of attack on Tocquev work. It is true that many of his informants w
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