Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform

Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform Michael Drolet

Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform

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Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform Michael Drolet Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London

© Michael Drolet 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1567–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drolet, Michael, 1962– Tocqueville, democracy, and social reform/by Michael Drolet. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1567–9 (cloth) 1. Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805–1859. 2. United States – Politics and government. 3. United States – Social conditions. 4. Democracy – United States. I. Title. JK216.T7193D766 320.973–dc21

2003 2003048063

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my father and Catherine and in memory of my mother

You have accomplished a great achievement: you have changed the face of political philosophy. John Stuart Mill to Alexis de Tocqueville, 11 May 1840

Contents List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

Part I Society, Economy and Democracy 1 The American Journey and Tocqueville’s Intellectual Awakening

19

2 Embracing Liberal Political Economy and then Rejecting it: Tocqueville’s Reading of Say and Malthus

36

3 Equality, Liberty and the Problem of Self-Interest: Democracy in America (1835)

54

4 Legitimism and Political Economy: The Influence of Villeneuve-Bargemont

95

Part II Democracy and Social Reform 5 Tocqueville and Beaumont on Prison Reform

115

6 The Investigations into the Causes of Poverty and the Ways to Remedy it

135

7 The Investigations into Abandoned Children

161

Part III Democracy and Revolution 8 Democracy and the Threats to Liberty: Democracy in America (1840)

177

9 Administrative Centralisation and the Threats to Liberty: The Composition of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution

202

Conclusion

231

Notes

238

Bibliography

282

Index

302

vii

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the many friends and institutions for helping me to write this book. My first debt is to David McLellan who, as my doctoral supervisor many years ago, set me to work on Tocqueville. His inspiration, guidance and generosity of spirit I can never adequately repay. I owe special thanks to François Houle, André Vachet, Douglas Moggach and Koula Mellos for introducing me to the study of the history of political thought. The late Jack Lively answered the many questions I had on Tocqueville, as has Larry Siedentop from whom I have learned much. Gregory Claeys helped me a great deal in the early stages of this project and his encouragement was invaluable. For comments on various chapters I wish to thank John Burrow, Lyndal Roper, Michèle Riot-Sarcy, Nick Stargardt, Cheryl Welch, Donald Winch and Richard Whatmore. I have benefited from conversations with Istvan Hont, Joanna Innes, Lucien Jaume, Colin Jones, Pierre Manent, Françoise Mélonio, Mark Philp, Michael Quinn, John Robertson and Georgios Varouxakis. Pamela Pilbeam, Justin Champion and William Thomas read large portions of the manuscript. Their exacting questions and constructive comments helped me improve this text considerably and their enthusiasm for this project proved uplifting at difficult junctures. Deborah Thomas helped me improve my style at a crucial stage of revision. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Democracy and Political Economy: Tocqueville’s Thoughts on J.-B. Say and T.R. Malthus’ in History of European Ideas, 29, 2, Spring 2003. I thank Elsevier Science for their permission to reproduce this material. The staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale and Library of Congress did a great deal to make my visits both productive and pleasant. The staff of the British Library have been wonderful in every respect. I am particularly grateful to Nina Evans for all the help she gave me. Many thanks to Oren Ben Dor, Marie-Hélène Baneth-Jakob, Richard Bett, Pierre Boyer, Alison Brown, Jimmy Burns, Jeremy Cater, Richard Cockett, Janet Coleman, Pene Corefield, Vince Geoghegan, Geraldine Henchy, Andrew Gow, Mary Hickman, Patrick Hill, John Hope Mason, Margaret Humphrey, Michael Levin, Scott Lewis, Richard Jay, Fionnula Jay-O’Boyle, Gerd Jakob, Harvey Mansfield, Debby Murphy, Alan Neil, Richard Noble, Francis Robinson, Tony Stockwell and José Luis Valdés-Ugalde for advice and encouragement. viii

Acknowledgements ix

Thanks to Luciana O’Flaherty for being such a superb editor and to Daniel Bunyard and my copy-editor Keith Povey for shepherding this book through production. My greatest debts are to my family and to Rosalind to whom I owe more than I can say. MICHAEL DROLET

List of Abbreviations AR

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (Stuart Gilbert, trans.) (New York: Doubleday, 1955)

CCEP

J.-B. Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique; ouvrage destiné à mettre sous les yeux des hommes d’état, des propriétaires fonciers et des capitalistes, des savants, des agriculteurs, des manufacturiers, des négociants, et en général de tous les citoyens, l’économie des sociétés (Paris: Rapilly, 1828–1829), 6 vols.

CW

John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (J.M. Robson et al., eds) (Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963– 1991)

DA

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (George Lawrence, trans.) ( J.P. Mayer, ed.) (New York: Doubleday, 1969).

DA, Nolla edition

De la démocratie en Amérique. Edited by Eduardo Nolla. Paris: J. Vrin, 1990.

ECP

Alban de Villeneuve-Bargemont, Économie politique chrétienne, ou recherches sur la nature et les causes du paupérisme en France et en Europe, et sur les moyens de la soulager et de le prévenir (Paris: Paulin, 1834), 3 vols.

HCE

François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe (William Hazlitt, trans.) (Larry Siedentop, ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997).

OC

Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes. Definitive edition prepared under the supervision of the Commission nationale pour la publication des Oeuvres d’Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Gallimard, 1950–). I i–ii. De la Démocratie en Amérique. Introduced by Harold Laski with a preliminary note by J.P. Mayer (1951). II, i. L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Introduced by Georges Lefebvre with a preliminary note by J.P. Mayer (1952). x

List of Abbreviations xi

II, ii. L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Edited and annotated by André Jardin (1953). III, i. Écrits et discours politiques. Edited and annotated by André Jardin. Introduced by J.-J. Chevallier and André Jardin (1962). III, ii, Écrits et discours politiques, Edited, annotated, and introduced by André Jardin (1985). III, iii. Écrits et discours politiques. Edited, annotated, and introduced by André Jardin (1990). IV, i–ii. Écrits sur le système pénitentiaire en France et à l’étranger. Edited and introduced by Michelle Perrot (1984). V, i. Voyages en Sicile et aux États-Unis. Edited and prefaced by J.P. Mayer (1957). V, ii. Voyages en Angleterre, Irelande, Suisse et Algérie. Edited and annotated by J.P. Mayer and André Jardin (1958). VI, i. Correspondance anglaise: correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec Henry Reeve et John Stuart Mill. Edited and annotated by J.P. Mayer and Gustave Rudler. Introduced by J.P. Mayer (1954). VI, ii. Correspondance anglaise: correspondance et conversations d’Alexis de Tocqueville et Nassau William Senior. Edited and annotated by Hugh Brogan and A.P. Kerr. Introduced by Hugh Brogan. Notes by J.P. Mayer. Preface by Lord Roll (1991). VII. Correspondance étrangère d’Alexis de Tocqueville: Amérique, Europe Continentale. Edited by Françoise Mélonio, Lise Queffélec and Anthony Pleasance (1986). VIII, i–iii. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Gustave de Beaumont. Edited, annotated, and introduced by J.P. Mayer (1967). IX. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et d’Arthur de Gobineau. Edited and annotated by M. Degros. Introduced by J.-J. Chevalier (1959). X. Correspondance et écrits locaux. Edited by Lise Queffélec-Dumasy. Preface by André-Jean Tudesq (1995).

xii List of Abbreviations

XI. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec P.-P. Royer-Collard et avec J.-J. Ampère. Edited and annotated by André Jardin (1970). XII. Souvenirs. Edited, annotated, and introduced by Luc Monnier (1964). XIII, i–ii. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergorley. Edited by André Jardin. Introduction and notes by Jean-Alain Lesourd (1977). XIV. Correspondance familiale. Edited by Jean-Louis Benoît and André Jardin. Preface by Jean-Louis Benoît (1998). XV, i–ii. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Françisque de Corcelle. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Madame Swetchine. Edited by Pierre Gibert (1983). XVI. Mélanges. Edited by Françoise Mélonio (1989). XVIII. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville avec Adolphe de Circourt et Madame de Circourt. Edited by A.P. Kerr. Revised by Louis Girard and Douglas Johnson (1984). OC, I, Pléiade edition Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres. Edited under the direction of André Jardin with the collaboration of Françoise Mélonio and Lise Queffélec (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). OCB

Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres et correspondance inédites (Gustave de Beaumont, ed.) (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1861).

OCBT

Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville (Marie Mottley Clérel de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, eds) (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1861–1877).

SL

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

TEP

J.-B. Say, Traité d’économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment, se distribuent, et se consomment les richesses (Paris: Crapelet, 1803).

Introduction

This book deals with the writings of a remarkable man whose thoughts continue to exert a powerful grip on the imagination of political theorists, historians and sociologists. Alexis de Tocqueville’s brilliant and prescient Democracy in America is considered one of the most comprehensive books on democracy ever written. In a time when contemporary democracies are in a state of crisis, with electors distrusting their elected representatives, low voter turnouts in the world’s most advanced democracies and an accelerating citizen disengagement from community associations and local institutions, Tocqueville’s work is turned to for the lessons and possible answers it might provide in facing these problems. The extent of the work’s importance has prompted within the last few years one new English translation with another in progress.1 In the same period, two journals have devoted special issues to Tocqueville and democracy.2 Both Left and Right claim Tocqueville’s blessing whether in search of a renewal of community and civic politics, attempts to theorise a new public philosophy of democracy, or endeavours to explore whether freedom is still possible in the modern world. Democracy in America is clearly acknowledged as the theoretical inspiration for a great deal of contemporary reflection.3 Yet because of its thoroughness, intellectual rigor and imaginative power, political theorists and sociologists have tended to look to this one work alone for inspiration, and have less often ventured to examine Tocqueville’s historical writings such as the Souvenirs and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.4 These works, like Democracy in America, are also comprehensive, intellectually brilliant and beautifully written. They too have exercised a powerful hold over the minds of their readers, but they have been mostly studied by historians who have paid less attention to Tocqueville’s social and political writings.5 The ability of Tocqueville’s major works to mesmerise has resulted in an artificial separation between his social and political writings and his historical works, but it has also caused his less well known official and semi-official reports and extensive correspondence to fall into semi-obscurity.6 This is unfortunate because 1

2

Introduction

Tocqueville’s great works were closely wedded to his other intellectual, political, and personal preoccupations.7 This book’s central contention is that in order to understand Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution fully it is necessary to examine how they relate to his other writings and to understand their historical and intellectual context. This is essential not least because Tocqueville’s personal and political life illuminated his ideas and stimulated his imagination; his theory was not divorced from the observations of practice. By contextualising Tocqueville’s work in this way what this book will show is not only just how novel his thoughts were but how they evolved over time, reflecting a subtle shift in political perspective from legitimism to an idiosyncratic liberalism of the left of centre. Tocqueville was writing at a time in the history of France where political power seemed no longer firmly tethered to one social class. Economic and cultural transformations had resulted in the collapse of an old order, but the establishment of a new one was contested and France was plunged into a series of revolutions throughout the nineteenth century. The preoccupations of Tocqueville and his contemporaries clearly resemble certain modern anxieties about the role of the state, communities, and individuals. Today, changes to economy and society appear to have resulted in what some proclaim to be the decline of modern order and the rise of a new and strange postmodern age.8 Globalisation has altered fundamentally the way nation states can now exercise power. It has also resulted in new class, gender and ethnic relations which are emerging and transforming the nature of politics and society itself. To stress these broad economic, social, cultural and political affinities between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is not to contend that history is repeating itself, a patently absurd proposition. Rather it is to suggest that the issues Tocqueville responded to in his epoch resonate with issues encountered today by political theorists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, philosophers and historians. Tocqueville’s reflections in Democracy in America illuminate discussions in modern political theory on how best to renew democracy. But his lesser known considerations on social issues such as prison reform, poverty and unwanted children, or his thoughts on political economy, may also illuminate modern-day thinking on these issues. Much of what Tocqueville had to say on these topics bears a striking resemblance to the terms of today’s discussions in political and social policy circles. His considerations on the nature of political economy and its relation to a dynamic democratic polity are echoed in current discussions on democracy and the new world economic order. His reflections on how poverty can be alleviated and abandoned children cared for through community-based initiatives are reminiscent of current rethinking on the role of the state and communities in welfare provision. His thoughts on juve-

Introduction 3

nile crime, prison reform, and the reintegration of ex-convicts into the community are echoed in debates today – then, as now, a central question was whether character could be reformed.9 Tocqueville continues to have contemporary relevance, but this aptness has a wider scope than contemporary disciplinary divisions might suggest. Tocqueville believed his empirical investigations into prisons and poverty in France, America and elsewhere, and his explorations in political economy were integral to his theorisation of democracy (he always maintained that the science of politics required that theory had to be informed by practice and vice versa). So our own understanding of the problems modern-day democracies face, including that of the reanimation of democratic culture and politics, can be informed by Tocqueville’s empirical research into social issues. This has been acknowledged recently, but only vaguely. Because of the authority commanded by Democracy in America some of Tocqueville’s thoughts and lesser known works have been called upon to influence social and political practitioners. On the Right, Tocqueville is understood to have believed that economic liberty brings about political liberty, that unfettered capitalism is the foundation to democracy. He is seen as a critic of administrative centralisation and big government, and his 1835 report on pauperism is called upon to show that he rejected any legal entitlement of welfare for the poor.10 On the Left, Tocqueville is used for different reasons. His stress on associations is viewed as a powerful defence of civil society and taken to be an endorsement of a new politics of the ‘Third Way’. His 1835 travel diaries from England and Ireland are cited for his shocked reaction to the inhuman conditions in which industrial workers in Birmingham and Manchester found themselves, thereby confirming his antipathy toward laissez-faire economics and industrial capitalism.11 All of these individual details are correct, but when taken on their own, in isolation from their contexts and from Tocqueville’s other ideas and convictions, they give a partial, one-sided, and distorted picture of his thought. The aim of this book is to correct this deformed portrayal by presenting a full account of Tocqueville’s ideas and their relation to those of his contemporaries in France, America and Britain. In contextualising his ideas in this way, this book reveals not only how Tocqueville was influenced by his contemporaries but also just how novel his thoughts were. This uniqueness defies modern attempts to pigeonhole his ideas into specific ideological categories, or to view them within the narrow confines of modern-day disciplines. His work bridged the old political order and the new, the old agrarian economy and the new industrial one, the Old World and the New. It is this quality that allows the nineteenth-century Tocqueville to maintain such a powerful hold on the modern imagination.

4

Introduction

Life and work Alexis de Tocqueville was born into an old Norman noble family during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. From an early age he was keenly aware of the peculiarity of his family situation. The French Revolution left a black mark on the family. Nearly all his relations had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror. His parents were imprisoned for many months and awaited execution themselves. Tocqueville’s father, the Comte Hervé de Tocqueville, was visibly transformed by the Terror: his hair turned white at twenty-four. His mother, Louise-Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosambo, suffered more cruelly, and was left a nervous invalid for the rest of her life. The images of the Revolution and the Terror remained with Tocqueville for the rest of his life, and they were to have the most profound influence on his thoughts about the future of France and Europe. From an early age Tocqueville rejected the prejudices of his class. With the fall of Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration of 1814, many French aristocrats worked to recreate the society of the ancien régime and restore their ancient privileges. They believed the changes to French society brought about by the Revolution and under the Empire were merely accidental and reversible. The Restoration presented them with the chance to return France to her ancient glory. But Tocqueville disagreed. He was convinced the ancien régime was finished, the era of aristocracy over. He believed those who sought to restore absolute monarchy and the old order had learned nothing from history; they were motivated by their narrow class interests,12 and he despaired that their actions would plunge the nation into civil war. Despite believing the era of aristocracy to be over, Tocqueville remained a royalist, although he was also a liberal. He believed in the legitimacy of the Bourbon monarchy, but he also thought absolutism anachronistic. He was convinced of the need for royal power to maintain high moral standards, a love of religion and ensure peace and security, but he also thought monarchy had to be limited by a constitution that guaranteed rights and liberties. What struck and disheartened him was that the last years of French Restoration politics guaranteed that France continued to be a nation divided against itself. Aligned on one side were those ‘men who prize morality, religion, order; and on the other those who love liberty, equality before the law’. The spectacle of Frenchmen ordered one against the other in this way was, for him, one of the ‘most extraordinary and deplorable that could ever have presented itself to the eyes of men’; for Tocqueville was convinced that those values separated by Frenchmen were, as he put it, ‘united indissolubly in the eyes of God’.13 In this uncompromising political climate Tocqueville’s beliefs seemed out of place. Tocqueville had an instinctive love for liberty, a genuine and passionate desire to wish for its development in all French political institutions. But he also professed a profound respect for justice, a love of order and the rule of law and an attachment to morals and religious

Introduction 5

beliefs ‘so profound and so considered’ that he acknowledged that he could not believe that his contemporaries did not ‘perceive in him a new species of liberal’.14 Tocqueville sustained a deep faith in the legitimacy of the Bourbon monarchy throughout the reign of Louis XVIII (1814–24), the former comte de Provence. He believed the monarch’s reign was the embodiment of the kind of legitimate constitutional monarchy which could best serve the needs of modern-day France.15 It maintained high moral standards at the same time as serving the interests of liberty. It sought both to safeguard freedom and guarantee peace and security. Tocqueville esteemed Louis XVIII’s political acumen and leadership. The king understood the extent to which French politics and society had been fundamentally transformed by the Revolution and the Empire. He knew how weak initial support for the Bourbon Restoration was, and understood he could not achieve a firm basis for rule without acknowledging and accepting those profound changes. He agreed to a constitutional order in which his power was constrained by a bicameral parliament and a Constitutional Charter which enshrined individual and civic rights.16 He resisted the demands of the ultra-royalists’ famous ‘Unthinkable Chamber’ (Chambre introuvable), its members bent on restoring the ancien régime. He favoured moderate ministries dominated by a group of liberal intellectuals known as the Doctrinaires who sought to steer a middle course between the ultras, Bonapartist sympathisers and republican revolutionaries. He was, as Tocqueville opined many years later, the ‘only French sovereign who had the good sense, or the patience, to govern constitutionally’.17 The elevated principles that governed the reign of Louis XVIII, however, were scorned by his brother Charles X (1824–30). This ‘king of the émigrés and the clergy’ desired nothing less than a return to the ancien régime. Whereas his brother accepted the profound changes France had undergone and worked to bring about national reconciliation by uniting the nation under his reign, ‘Charles le Simple’ rejected them, and, as a result, presided over a divided nation. Believing in his divine right to rule, Charles X opposed the constitutional order agreed to by his brother. The new Bourbon king was not only, as Tocqueville declared in 1830, championed by ‘fools in raptures’,18 but also, as he continued to maintain twenty years later, ‘impermeable to constitutional ideas’.19 Charles X embodied everything Tocqueville feared most for France. Rather than sustain the high ideals of a monarchy wedded to the cause of liberty and national unity, Charles X brought about an extreme weakening of royal power.20 He endorsed the narrow interests and reactionary policies of the ultra-royalist government of the comte de Villèle. He presided over legislation which brought the clergy back to the centre of French politics and society, including the 1825 law against sacrilege which made the profanation of the Eucharist punishable by torture followed by death. He favoured the restriction of the franchise,

6

Introduction

the indemnification of émigrés, the dismantling of the revolutionary land settlement guaranteed by the Constitutional Charter, and the return of primogeniture and consolidation of noble power in the countryside. When the last ultra ministry under his close friend, the prince de Polignac, could not impose its will on a liberal parliament, he invoked emergency powers and governed by decree. When Charles X was finally overthrown at the end of July 1830, Tocqueville was not sorry to see the monarch flee Paris. By now a junior magistrate in the law courts at Versailles he assessed the royal family harshly: ‘As for the Bourbons, they have conducted themselves like cowards and do not deserve even the thousandth part of the blood which has flowed as a result of their quarrel.’21 The outcome of the Three Glorious Days resulted in Charles’s younger cousin the duc d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe, acceding to the throne. For a young legitimist like Tocqueville this was difficult to accept. Yet France had been subject to such internal division and had undergone such a lengthy period of political instability that he saw no alternative but to do what he ‘must for his country which [was] incapable of finding its salvation except through the domination which [arose] out of saving [it] from anarchy.’22 This he did by swearing allegiance to the new regime, an act he found ‘deeply wounding’.23 While he was prepared to accept the political settlement which resulted in the July monarchy, he continued to believe a Bourbon king would have been best placed to heal internal divisions and maintain France’s standing among the European powers. Yet the kind of monarchy Tocqueville had in mind was neither absolute nor ill-considered as Charles X had been, rather, he longed for the Bourbons under Charles X’s grandson, the duc de Bordeaux, to learn that ‘the general principles of government should be liberal’. A ‘democratic people in whom the social force is more diffused than in an aristocracy’ required a strong monarch who would spur central government to be ‘energetic in its own sphere of action’,24 but at the same time, in order for that people to be free, central government had to leave a social sphere of action to individuals and their ‘personal initiative’.25 Tocqueville’s hopes for a Bourbon renewal proved to be in vain. Swearing the oath of allegiance to Louis-Philippe entailed paying a very heavy price: aristocrats like him were both immediately excluded from society and regarded with suspicion by the new régime. His ‘pride was wounded by the idea that others might think that ambition made [him] act against his convictions’, but he was also apprehensive that he would be removed from his post, as the law courts were being purged of known legitimists.26 Tocqueville could see no way out of his predicament other than to leave France and remain abroad until the impassioned atmosphere dissipated. This he did in the spring of 1831. The journey he undertook with a close friend, fellow legitimist and magistrate, Gustave de Beaumont, was to America. It is the subject of Chapter 1. Tocqueville was fascinated by America and eager to learn about the organ-

Introduction 7

isation and workings of the American republic. This sentiment was widely shared by many Frenchmen, who, since the days of the American Revolution, felt a close bond to the young republic. Writers like Tocqueville’s cousin, Chateaubriand, nourished this feeling with his romantic novels René and Atala. Republicans, such as Armand Carrel established the Revue américaine in order better to inform the French of America’s history and political institutions, and thereby promote republican ideas. Famous Idéologues such as the political economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, looked to America as an example of a successful modern republic.27 Tocqueville shared many of their opinions, believing a serious study of America could offer the French valuable lessons that might deliver them from an enduring state of political strife. He hoped too that if he were fortunate to write a good study on America, he might restore his own political fortunes.28 But the way he approached his study of America was markedly different from what any of his compatriots had undertaken, and the comparison is most instructive. A repeated theme here and throughout this book is that Tocqueville’s ideas and works can be best understood through a study of his own intellectual background and studies, and indeed that they had a sophisticated and complex relationship to earlier and current discussions in France, as well as England and America. The official intention of his and Beaumont’s journey was to study and assess America’s various penitentiary systems. The young Frenchmen chose the subject of their investigation with care, believing, like the great philanthropist and statesman the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, that it could tell them a great deal about the nation’s laws and constitution and offer them profound insights into the customs, traditions, manners (moeurs) and attitudes of Americans. The insights they gained and the way they linked their joint investigation on prisons to their individual studies of American society and politics were striking. After spending nearly a year in America, Tocqueville and Beaumont arrived back in France in late March 1832 and set about writing their official report on American prisons and completing investigations necessary to it. Tocqueville seems to have suffered from occasional bouts of manic depression throughout his life, and soon after his return from America fell into a state of lethargy. What he described as being ‘struck by imbecility’ took on the ‘character of a chronic illness’.29 It severely impeded his work on the prison report, and Beaumont had to take responsibility for writing most of the first draft of the text. Eventually, however, Tocqueville was able to free himself from his ‘culpable inertia’, and began working in earnest on the report, drafting and annotating numerous sections of the manuscript, writing the lengthy appendices which made up a third of the text, and ordering and composing a commentary on voluminous supporting documents.30 The results of their efforts appeared in January 1833 under the title The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France. The work was

8

Introduction

hailed as a masterpiece and was awarded the Montyon prize by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. It represented a definitive study of American and European prisons; at the vanguard of prison investigations, its recommendations overturned conventional wisdom on prison reform. How it was written, why it was so novel, altering debates on prison reform throughout Europe and America, and how it related to Tocqueville’s other writings are discussed in Chapter 5. Throughout 1833 and 1834 Tocqueville devoted his time to writing a book on American institutions, and Beaumont to writing on American manners. Tocqueville believed his own work could best profit the French if it were comparative, highlighting elements that were distinct to America and ones it shared with France. In order to write a thorough study along those lines, however, he thought it necessary to explore the foundation of America’s culture and her political and legal institutions. This, he considered, lay in England. He was supported in his belief by the works of anglophiles like Montesquieu and the historian François Guizot, who championed ‘English liberty’. As a student Tocqueville had profited from reading A History of England by the English Catholic John Lingard, and in preparation for his American investigation he studied William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jean de Lolme’s The English Constitution. However, when he visited England for the first time in August 1833, he was struck by how different it was from the United States. Whereas he and Beaumont were impressed by the extent to which the ‘spirit of democracy’ permeated American society, in England he was fascinated by how the ‘aristocratic spirit’ had penetrated all social classes. America and England were two entirely different countries. In England, he was unable to ‘recognise in any way’ the America he and Beaumont visited.31 Nonetheless, England proved instructive in ways he had not originally anticipated. He reasoned that the enlightened ‘aristocratic spirit’ that governed English society, if it were described and analysed, might prove instructive to a narrow-minded French nobility and bourgeoisie. He also thought that conveying something to the French about England’s system of decentralised administration might teach them something about, as Jeremy Bentham’s amanuensis John Bowring put it to him, ‘the chief cause of the substantial material progress we have made in civilization’.32 Tocqueville’s journey to England was motivated by two other reasons. He believed it to be useful to promote his and Beaumont’s prison report, using the investigation as a ‘passport’ to intellectual circles.33 But by far the most important reason for the journey was to see Marie Mottley, whom he had known since 1828, and ask for her hand. Tocqueville was deeply attached to Marie who had been raised, from an early age, by her aunt and lived in Versailles for some time. Being a foreigner and middle class, she was detached from the usual French class prejudices. Both this and her taste for ideas appealed to Tocqueville. Their relationship had great depth, his love

Introduction 9

for her, as he later confessed to his close friend Louis de Kergorlay, approximating an ardent passion.34 It was Tocqueville’s letters to her, however, that reveal most about their passion and his own character.35 She had, as he confessed to her, the gift to ‘reconcile me with the world and with myself’.36 They were married in October 1835. In August 1834 Tocqueville completed the manuscript of his book on American institutions. Published in January 1835, Democracy in America became an instant success. The prominent intellectual and elder statesman Royer-Collard hailed Tocqueville as the ‘new Montesquieu’, and the progovernment Journal des débats acclaimed him ‘the Blackstone of America’. The work provoked great excitement and heated debate. Reviews in the press covering the entire political spectrum praised the author’s ‘wisdom’, his ‘gift for observation’, and the text’s profound ‘philosophical nature’. Tocqueville’s publisher, André Gosselin, who had refrained from reading the manuscript and anticipated the work might win some esteem within a small circle of people, was startled by its success. ‘Well!’, he declared to Tocqueville, ‘It seems you’ve written a masterpiece!’37 The members of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences agreed, awarding it the Montyon prize, and eventually electing Tocqueville himself to the Academy. Tocqueville’s account of America struck a cord with his French readers. He adopted an approach and style of writing that was easily identified with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, and he chose a topic that, because of France’s historic ties to America, fascinated the French. But he undertook something truly ambitious in Democracy in America, the scale of which has not been fully appreciated. He integrated into his study new scholarly developments from the disciplines of history, political economy, geography and statistics. He adopted an analytical method that was both powerfully informed by the work of Guizot and Idéologues such as Destutt de Tracy and Jean-Baptiste Say. As a young student Tocqueville attended Guizot’s famous lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe and The History of Civilization in France, and was transported by what the historian had to say. He understood at once the importance of Guizot’s method of ‘philosophical’ history. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, for his own study of American democracy Tocqueville adopted Guizot’s analytical method, but he improved on it by complementing it with new innovations in political economy, another aspect of Tocqueville’s method which has been underestimated. In 1828 Tocqueville began a serious study of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique. Say worked with key concepts employed by Guizot. The complementary nature of their respective approaches attracted Tocqueville. But he was also drawn to Say’s political economy because it both illuminated issues surrounding national character, and explained clearly the ‘spirit’ of American democracy through the concept of enlightened self-interest in a way that older works such as Montesquieu’s Spirit of

10

Introduction

Laws could not.38 The first volume of Democracy in America (1835) shows the extent to which he was influenced by Say, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3. Ironically, Say’s political economy may have furnished Tocqueville with ideas and insights that would later cause him to reject important aspects of the political economist’s work. In the opening section of Say’s Cours complet, the political economist stressed the scientific and independent character of political economy.39 Whereas moral philosophers like Adam Smith had always argued that political economy was but one branch of a wider science of morals and legislation, Say believed political economy to be a science in its own right, distinct from other disciplines. At the same time, however, he also emphasised that political economy was based on experience and should be practical; it should, as the subtitle of his Traité d’économie politique asserted, serve to explain the economic working of society to statesmen and citizens, and thereby ensure that society conformed to the natural laws that governed it. Say’s insistence that political economy was distinct from other disciplines encouraged other political economists, particularly David Ricardo and John Ramsay McCulloch, to stress its formal and theoretical character at the expense of practical considerations. Say was critical of this development, believing the overabstraction of political economy made it very difficult ‘to explain the economic workings of society’ to citizens.40 Ironically, it was Say himself who set in train this development by separating political economy from moral and political considerations. This point was made by T.R. Malthus, but it was an opinion shared by other political economists like the French legitimist administrator Alban Villeneuve-Bargemont. Both Malthus and Villneuve-Bargemont were to exercise a profound and lasting influence on Tocqueville after he completed the first volume of Democracy in America, something that has not been well understood. Their works would bring about his gradual estrangement from important aspects of Say’s economic thought. How Tocqueville came to embrace Say and then later reject him is the subject of Chapter 2. The role Villeneuve-Bargemont’s work was to play in Tocqueville’s later considerations on democracy, thoughts that made up the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), is the topic of Chapter 4. When Say attacked Ricardo and McCulloch for overformalising political economy he harboured the fear that by rendering the science too abstract citizens would be deprived of knowledge that could sustain the vitality of free institutions and prevent moral corruption. On the whole, however, he was sanguine about the positive benefits to be derived from political economy. This had an important effect on Tocqueville’s assessment of democracy in the first volume of Democracy in America, giving the work an optimistic tone. But what is not widely recognised is that once Tocqueville started to examine in detail the internal elements of democratic society, the

Introduction 11

ideas, outlooks, customs and manners of their populations, and relate the effects of commercial and industrial developments to them, he discerned worrying tendencies that suggested political economy was not as effective in preventing moral corruption as its proponents suggested. This influenced the more pessimistic tone of the second volume of 1840. Other considerations, however, also influenced the tone of that work. As soon as he completed the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville began to investigate the issue of poverty. As an aristocrat with a powerful sense of obligation and duty to those less fortunate than himself, he was naturally inclined to study this issue. Some scholars have rightly pointed out that his own interest in understanding the causes of poverty, and his efforts at improving the condition of the poor, placed him within the context of a broader humanitarian movement led by aristocratic and bourgeois intellectuals: Tocqueville’s membership of numerous charitable organisations, including The Society of Christian Morality (La société de la morale chrétienne ), The French Society for the Abolition of Slavery (Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage), and the Annals of Charity (Annales de la charité), certainly confirms this.41 But what is less well known is the full extent to which his social investigations informed his thoughts on democracy. In his studies on prisons, pauperism and the plight of abandoned children, Tocqueville used the latest empirical research to supplement the analytical method he employed in the 1835 and 1840 volumes of Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. What was then known as moral statistics served to broaden his knowledge of basic social facts and thereby gave greater depth to his understanding of society. His social investigations also gave him important insights into the interaction between various elements of society. When placed alongside his reading of Malthus and Villeneuve-Bargemont, they helped him to understand better, as we shall see, how economic developments transformed people’s outlooks, habits and ideas. They also assisted him in assessing how changing attitudes on poverty and crime and punishment affected political and social institutions. These studies informed the ideas of the second volume of Democracy in America, which were, as John Stuart Mill remarked, ‘brought from a much greater depth in human nature itself’, than those of any other work that century.42 Chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine those investigations. One point, however, does require mentioning here: Tocqueville attached great importance to his writings on the abolition of slavery.43 In 1839 he was made secretary to a parliamentary committee on slave emancipation and wrote its report. In 1843 he wrote a series of articles on slave emancipation for the left-leaning newspaper Le Siècle. These writings are exemplary both of Tocqueville’s lofty humanitarianism and of his political realism, but their importance cannot be conveyed justly in one chapter, and a thorough examination would distract us from the main concern of this book. There is also an important theoretical consideration: Tocqueville believed slavery

12

Introduction

was inconsistent with modern democracies. It was, as one commentator put it, an issue that ‘stood outside of democracy entirely, marking its fixed limits’.44 It is for these reasons that I have excluded from this book any detailed discussion of this issue.45 Democracy in America was never intended to be a work of narrow theory. Rather, it was sustained by high political ideals and had a clear political purpose. It gave a new configuration to an idea the Doctrinaires introduced before him: the struggle between aristocracy and democracy, the struggle between the old France and the new. Like the Doctrinaires, Tocqueville believed the French Revolution succeeded in accelerating developments ‘determined by blind forces or, if one prefers . . . the work of Providence’.46 These changed the social order, making it democratic; it was the ‘striking result of the Revolution’. A consequence of these developments, however, was that the French became divided between those who loved and idealised democracy and those who loathed it, believing it akin to anarchy.47 The struggle that ensued led to division, the atomisation of society, and the destruction of local institutions, resulting in a nation governed by a powerful bureaucratic central power. Tocqueville expanded on Royer-Collard’s declaration that the French were ‘an administered people, under the hand of irresponsible civil servants, themselves centralised in the power of which they are agents’.48 He believed a powerful central authority was always prone to become allied to vested interests. This was an unholy alliance which led inexorably to factionalised politics. As the nation became ever more fractured, individuals lost their fundamental respect for their fellows and held opinions of them which bordered on contempt. In this atmosphere of political division, liberty withered and despotism flourished.49 The central power, in ruling over society, divided it. But, he argued, because the French had been deprived of civic and political experience, they could only overcome this division by contemplating a more powerful central authority to end it. This was the problem that marked French politics in Tocqueville’s lifetime, and it was the one to which he devoted most of his energies to solve. With society divided between those who prized morality, religion and order, and those who loved liberty and equality before the law, the French became incapable of finding salvation from anarchy except, as he commented on the 1830 Revolution, through domination.50 Yet this nineteenth-century problem could be resolved only if its distant origins were laid bare. Tocqueville thought he might begin that work of historical archaeology in answering a question that applied to the French Revolution of 1789: why was it that this great Revolution, one embodying the elevated principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, gave way to despotism? His answer, which appeared in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, and is explored in Chapter 9, was that the political inexperience of the French left them with no better resources than theory to make their revolution. Doctrinal difference leading to political division, violence and the extinguishing of liberty were the consequences of this lack of experience.

Introduction 13

Tocqueville worked hard to convince his compatriots of the need for greater civic and political participation, and his writings on social issues, far from being marginal, were, I believe, an important part of this effort. He thought this greater civic participation was one way in which antithetical social and political groups in France might be reconciled and the long series of revolutions and uprisings stopped. He believed France’s political parties no longer adequately represented the French, such that ‘the largest party is made up of men who have no party’.51 This ‘floating mass’ he thought characteristic of democracies because within them ‘the social force’ was dispersed. Whilst potential benefits could be derived from this condition, not least the dissipation of political passions, there were important disadvantages, he thought, among the most significant being the potential to dominate society. Though he hoped the nation might be galvanised to the cause of liberty, he thought successive French governments ‘manipulated’ the ‘diverse elements’ of society to the advantage of their own narrow class interests. This stood in stark contrast to what he encountered in America (see Chapter 3). There, though party interests had developed to an extent which made the political manipulation of a diffuse society possible, these were checked by deep-rooted customs and robust political institutions which sustained an active political community. In France, however, it was much more difficult to hinder party interests because the customs and institutions of the ancien régime had been overturned and the institutions that replaced them were flawed and weak. Yet in the 1820s the advent of an active commonwealth emerged as a distinct possibility from a coherent and effective opposition strategy developed by the liberal opponents of Charles X. Denied an effective voice in the nation’s established political fora, liberals expanded the number of political arenas by establishing new political associations and reviews or using established ones to new political ends. Liberal political associations such as Guizot’s aide-toi le ciel t’aidera or liberal newspapers like Paul-François Dubois and Pierre Leroux’s the Globe became powerful forces in the struggle between the old France and the new. These associations and newspapers fostered the conditions under which politics and society could be thought anew, and they became instrumental to what became known as the Great Debate. Tocqueville’s intellectual and political development owed much to the culture spawned by that debate, although the accession of the July Monarchy (1830) proved severely disillusioning for him. Liberals, like Guizot, who were brought to the centre of political power, abandoned their high ideals; as Tocqueville put it, ‘the leaders of the liberalism of 1828, those makers of 1830, put to the sword the first principles of civil liberty which we, former royalists, would never have abandoned at any price’.52 Tocqueville, however, remained true to his principles. He drew on his earlier political education and experiences and set out from the 1830s to establish a political review that sought to give a new direction to French politics by bringing about national reconciliation. He believed governments

14

Introduction

which sought to manipulate the diverse social elements to their advantage by driving a wedge between the advocates of liberty and the defenders of religious faith were becoming less successful at sustaining this cynical and base ambition because the ranks of the allies of liberty and the champions of religious faith were becoming more and more difficult to discern. Experience had taught those who divorced politics from religion that the freest societies were those that had most need for religious faith, and those who believed religion incompatible with freedom had also, through experience, come to learn the two were complementary.53 He believed the review might act as a force for reconciliation of these two groups. He thought this aim to be noble, for he was convinced that rights and freedoms could not endure without uniting the spirit of liberty with the spirit of Christianity.54 His early education under the Jansenist abbé Lesueur and lifelong love of Pascal’s work convinced him that religion sustained an elevated and aristocratic love of liberty by tempering the democratic love of material gain. It directed an individual’s attention away from immediate and material interests toward eternal and sublime considerations. If the review achieved its goal it would have fulfilled what the ‘friends of liberty’ had long understood: ‘in order to safeguard the rights the nation had gained and ones she might gain in future, it is necessary to introduce into the heart of all classes and particularly the lower classes the ideas of order, economy, and finally morality’.55 Tocqueville’s plans for the review were not fulfilled in the 1830s, however, and it was not until 1844, when he led a group to purchase the business newspaper Le Commerce, that his earlier ambitions were achieved. He directed the paper’s editorial policy away from narrow business concerns to the cause of noble beliefs and high ideals in the hope that they might lead individuals away from their preoccupation with material gain: a malady that, he believed, contributed to the atomisation of society, exacerbating the divisions within it. Yet his efforts seemed fruitless in the face of individuals’ obsession with acquiring material possessions. French political life seemed to be reduced to narrow and antagonistic class politics; society itself was levelled down, he thought, and rendered mediocre. The beliefs Tocqueville brought to Le Commerce he upheld in the Chamber of Deputies, to which he was elected in 1839, positioning himself between Adolphe Thiers’s centre–left and Odilon Barrot’s dynastic left. He maintained the profound conviction that politics should be raised to an elevated purpose: the safeguarding of liberty and human dignity.56 In order to achieve this goal within the democratic age, he believed politics needed to be thought out anew, stressing, as he had done in his introduction to Democracy in America (1835), the importance of enlightened politics to democracy and the advance of civilization: The first duty imposed on those who now direct society is to educate democracy; to put, if possible, new life into its beliefs; to purify its

Introduction 15

manners; to control its actions; gradually to substitute understanding of statecraft for present inexperience and knowledge of its true interests for blind instincts; to adapt government to the needs of time and place; and to modify it as men and circumstances require.57 To this end a ‘new political science [was] needed for a world itself quite new’. But the new political science did not rest on a separation between theory and practice. Rather, it could fulfil its wider purpose of advancing civilization only if it was informed by experience, and this could be gained only through an active participation in civic and political life. Only freedom could safeguard that experience – and only freedom could make the science of politics possible.

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Part I Society, Economy and Democracy

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1 The American Journey and Tocqueville’s Intellectual Awakening

The journey to America was a decisive and formative experience for Tocqueville and Beaumont. The idea for the trip was inspired in part by a desire to escape personal and social circumstances in France. As young magistrates, Tocqueville and Beaumont were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Orléanist government of Louis-Philippe. This they did, but not out of any sense of loyalty to the new regime. Tocqueville was very critical of Charles X and certainly did not regret his fall. Though he wished the Bourbon monarchy to continue to rule the French, and hoped that the duc de Bordeaux, Charles X’s grandson, would accede to the throne, this proved a futile hope. Political conditions in France would not permit it. Fearing that France would collapse into anarchy, Tocqueville and Beaumont saw no alternative but to swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe; the new regime seemed the only credible and durable obstacle to revolution and anarchy.1 Those who swore allegiance to the Orléanist regime, however, were excluded from society, such was the hostility and bitterness between the old aristocracy and the new regime. The salons of the Saint-Louis and NotreDame quarters no longer welcomed them,2 and in the ‘impassioned atmosphere of the period following the Three Glorious Days, young magistrates who had sworn the oath were accused of having sordid ambitions that violated their families’ tradition of honour.’3 Tocqueville and Beaumont found themselves in an unenviable position. They were shunned by society for having taken the oath, but they were also distrusted by the new regime because they were perceived as being legitimists at heart. The dilemma was acute, and Tocqueville and Beaumont decided to leave France and remain abroad until the hostile mood dissipated and hatreds became less intense. Going to America offered a way to restore their political fortunes. If put to good effect, the trip would ensure that both could be freed ‘from the crowd’ of those who swore to serve the regime loyally. If they worked on ‘some sort of publication’, as Tocqueville put it, they could ‘alert the public to [their] existence and turn the attention of parties’ toward them upon returning to France.4 To that end Tocqueville and Beaumont arrived at a professional 19

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Society, Economy and Democracy

excuse for a trip to America that would justify a long absence from France. It was to examine an issue that had dominated political debates in France for many years: how best to reform France’s prison system. On this issue America was an important case study for the French. Numerous travel accounts and other books discussed the American penitentiary system.5 What none of these works offered, however, was a thorough analysis of either that system or of how it might contribute to modernising France’s antiquated prison regime. Tocqueville and Beaumont proposed to undertake just such a study. The outcome of their investigations, The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France, was a brilliant success, winning the Montyon prize of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1833 and setting the standard throughout Europe for all subsequent prison studies. But the journey to America had a second, unstated and unofficial purpose. This was to study ‘exactly what a vast republic is’. Here, too, America was an ideal case study.6 Its constitution was entirely republican, and, as all travel accounts emphasised, its citizens were animated by a deep love of equality and liberty: freedom and equality united to make an ideal democratic republic. This unauthorised enquiry resulted in Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America, and Beaumont’s popular, Marie, ou de l’esclavage aux États-Unis.

Tocqueville and Beaumont in America: society, politics and philanthropy Tocqueville and Beaumont left France on 2 April 1831 and landed in New York on 11 May. Their arrival was announced in the American papers, and to their astonishment Americans seemed to attach considerable importance to their mission.7 Americans of ‘every class’ competed with each other in their attempts to assist their investigations. Every courtesy was given them, and every useful document that could be obtained was procured for them. America’s leading prison reformers were, to a man, anxious to meet Tocqueville and Beaumont; the interviews the young magistrates conducted produced a wealth of information. It was not just America’s prison reformers who were eager to meet Tocqueville and Beaumont; social reformers, legal and political thinkers, and important politicians were also keen to meet them. A former President, John Quincy Adams, welcomed the opportunity to discuss with them the nature of the American federation and President Andrew Jackson himself was happy to give them a private audience. As a way to gain access to important individuals and acquire knowledge and insights into America, the study of that country’s penitentiary system was an inspired choice. Their itinerary followed the ‘fashionable tour’ or ‘promenade à la mode’ described in Gideon Minor Davison’s The Fashionable Tour: A Guide to Travellers Visiting the Middle and Northern States, and the Provinces of Canada,8 but

The American Journey 21

it also took in many less fashionable destinations, from America’s great Eastern State Penitentiary outside Philadelphia to the lugubrious house of correction in Cincinnati. Their first impressions of the young republic shaped much of what they later observed. They began their sojourn in New York, staying in lodgings at 66 Broadway, the city’s most fashionable neighbourhood. They were enthusiastically welcomed by New York society, so much so that they had ‘great difficulty . . . from getting confused between all the engagements and invitations’ they had each day.9 They spent a good deal of time with Edward Livingston, author of what were generally agreed to be some of the most important works on prisons and penal codes. They were assisted in their investigations by the Mayor of New York, Walter Bowne, and the aldermen of the city. They were welcomed by the Governor of New York State, Enos Throop, at a Tammany celebration.10 Though they were overwhelmed by New York society, the city itself was singularly uninspiring, its architecture giving the place a very ‘monotone’ air.11 Of New Yorkers themselves, Tocqueville’s judgement was equally harsh. They had ‘commercial habits’ and a ‘money conscious spirit’ that rendered them remarkably ‘vulgar’.12 During their time in New York, Tocqueville and Beaumont engaged in their official business with zeal, visiting the House of Refuge for delinquent minors and the penitentiary at Blackwell’s island. On 29 May they visited the famous Sing Sing, or as it was also known, Mount Pleasant, penitentiary. The prison was 25 miles from New York and a visit to this institution was high on their list of prisons to see. Having described it as ‘the most perfect penitentiary in the United States’, Tocqueville and Beaumont planned to spend a couple of days observing its workings. In the end they spent nine days there, such was their fascination with it. Upon returning to New York, they spent a further three weeks investigating the various prisons and houses of detention in the immediate vicinity. From New York they travelled north to Albany, the capital of New York State. Travelling through the wilderness they visited one of the most important and impressive penitentiaries in America at Auburn. They interviewed its former governor, the noted disciplinarian, Elam Lynds. From Auburn they travelled overland to Detroit. They then crossed into Upper Canada. Here Tocqueville and Beaumont observed a very different society. Though Canadians, like Americans, had a deep love for liberty, they were much more reserved than their southern neighbours; their chaste morals may have had something to do with this.13 Lower Canada was something of a revelation for Tocqueville and Beaumont. Here they discovered a place ‘beyond comparison, of those parts of America which we have visited so far, that which bears the greatest analogy to Europe and, especially to France’.14 In Lower Canada the society of ancien régime France continued to exist. The inhabitants of Lower Canada, though they lived alongside the English and were subject to English laws, were French, ‘trait pour trait’. According to

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Society, Economy and Democracy

Tocqueville the clergy generated a strength of religious feeling which maintained manners that were entirely French.15 French Canadians may have been ‘a conquered people’, but, according to Tocqueville, they had a deep love of equality and were fiercely independent in spirit; they bore a striking resemblance to French peasants.16 Tocqueville concluded that the Canadiens’ independence of spirit ensured Lower Canada’s prosperity,17 even if they lacked the ‘mercantile spirit which obtrudes in all the actions and sayings of an American’. It was this relation between independence of spirit and prosperity that would later appear as an important theme in both Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.18 For Tocqueville believed individual liberty to be the foundation of durable economic prosperity. After their week in Lower Canada, Tocqueville and Beaumont spent almost one month in Boston. The city was very much to their liking, conforming admirably to their aristocratic temperaments. They were honoured guests of Boston society, one Tocqueville described as ‘the best’, the most ‘like that of the upper classes in Europe’. Here they were in daily contact with men who played an important part in American life. But though their role was important, this American élite was at odds with the nation’s government. Dominated by intellectual preoccupations, the Bostonian élite was a rich ‘source for general views of the people, the social life, and the government of America’.19 The members of this group, most of whom were Whigs, distrusted President Andrew Jackson and feared the populist, demagogic, politics of the Jacksonian Democrats, the direct heirs of Jeffersonian Republicans. Representing aristocratic and important manufacturing and financial interests, the Bostonian Whigs attached less importance to more traditional community relationships and were more comfortable with rational, formal and more self-interested human relations premised upon inward restraint – precisely the kind of relations essential to a manufacturing and commercial society and ones necessary to individual advancement in a competitive world.20 In Boston ‘luxury and refinement prevail[ed]’. People’s manners were ‘distinguished’ and their conversation ‘turn[ed] on intellectual subjects’,21 prison discipline featured prominently. Tocqueville and Beaumont met officials of various prisons, houses of correction and members of the Boston Prison Discipline Society, the ardent defenders of the Auburn penitentiary system. With Edward Everett and the New England historian, Jared Sparks, whom Tocqueville already knew from previous meetings in Paris in 1828, their discussions centred on the subject of local self-government. Tocqueville was clearly fascinated with the issue of local self-government. Though his own ideas on the subject were not clear and needed much more development, he was already aware of the relation that existed between local self-government and individual liberty from his reading of both Montesquieu and Rousseau, but more particularly from diligently following

The American Journey 23

François Guizot’s fourteenth Sorbonne lecture on The History of Civilization in Europe where that relationship was thoroughly analysed.22 Tocqueville and Beaumont’s conversations with Sparks on this topic were of very great interest to them. They looked for points of comparisons with France in order to understand fully how local self-government secured liberty. But having neither a sophisticated knowledge of administrative law nor any experience in public administration, they sought assistance from other quarters. Tocqueville wrote to his father, a once distinguished administrator and prefect of several departments, and to his friends Ernest Chabrol and Ernest de Blosseville for more information on the subject. Before leaving Boston, Tocqueville and Beaumont compiled for Sparks a list of thirty-three questions on the general principles regulating town governments, on the role of central administration and the functions of local government.23 As their travels continued they sent more questions to him. In answer to their queries the New England historian wrote a small book he entitled Observations on the Government of Towns in Massachusetts (1832). This work was complemented by studies from Chabrol and Blosseville and most significantly from Tocqueville’s father, who had already written on the issue in an 1828 pamphlet, Pour la charte provinciale. These four essays served to inform those chapters in Democracy in America on the government of the Union, and most importantly on the American system of townships. During a formal dinner organised by Alexander Everett, Edward Everett’s brother, Tocqueville found himself sitting beside former President John Quincy Adams. Their conversation, which Tocqueville carefully recorded, dealt with the differences between the societies of the different states and territories, on the role of manufactures in American society and on the importance of religion to the vitality of the nation’s polity. The relation of religion to politics was also an important theme of conversations with America’s leading representatives of the Unitarian church, William Ellery Channing and Joseph Tuckerman, and with leading Quakers in Philadelphia such as Roberts Vaux. These proved useful to Tocqueville. Not only did they influence much of what he had to say in the volumes of Democracy in America published in 1835 and 1840 on religion in democracies, but they also served to inform his later political ambition of uniting religion and politics.24 Tocqueville’s conversations with the Unitarians Channing and Tuckerman, and Quakers like Vaux were also important because, as leading philanthropists, they had sophisticated thoughts on prison reform and philanthropy.25 As we shall see, Tocqueville soon engaged with the views they expressed. Both groups stressed the individual virtues of self-discipline, self-reliance and hard work. Channing, for instance, advocated the cultivation of an ethic of self-help which would free the poor from a dependence which, he believed, bred ‘servility’ and ‘want of self-respect [the] preparation for every evil’.26 These values were integrated into a philanthropy which, accepting the new and important role of manufactures in

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America’s economy, sought to eliminate or reduce its deleterious side effects, urban poverty, alcoholism, increasing numbers of illegitimate births, crime and disease, by drawing on ideas formulated in Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. Channing, Tuckerman and Vaux had written extensively on prisons and conducted serious studies into the causes of criminality, particularly poverty and urban deprivation. They had established considerable reputations in Europe among philanthropists, theologians and political economists such as Edward Coplestone and Richard Whately.27 Vaux was admired by European prison reformers and opponents of slavery such as Zachery Macaulay. Tuckerman was esteemed by the Baron de Gérando for his translation of the latter’s Visiteur du pauvre and the stimulating introduction to that translation. Channing, whose influence was important in French liberal circles,28 established his philanthropic credentials with the 1829 publication of his Remarks on Associations, a work firmly anchored in the belief that both rich and poor were capable of moral and physical improvement. Neither Vaux’s nor Tuckerman’s nor Channing’s interest in the issue of poverty and its prevention, however, was purely academic. Vaux had founded many charitable institutions and was the founder of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of the Public Prisons. Channing had long been engaged in ministering to the poor and had established a large following, and Tuckerman was one of the most vigorous advocates of Channing’s brand of Unitarian philanthropy rooted in an ethic of self-help that emphasised the themes of individual moral and ethical renovation. He too ministered to the poor and his efforts at remedying their plight soon developed into a comprehensive and influential philosophy combining principles of political economy with an ethic for poor-relief.29 This philosophy was rooted in his opinions about individual discipline and self-mastery,30 and it was put into practice with the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in 1834.31 Tuckerman, like Channing and Vaux, believed political economy and poor relief were most effective when attached to Christian principles. Like his French counterpart Gérando, he attacked the culture of greed spawned by unfettered market relations. He thought this culture was bolstered by new doctrines that sought to elevate political economy to a purely scientific status, divorcing it from politics and morals. Like Malthus, he believed political economy could not be considered independently of politics and morals, and had to be rooted in Christian principles. Only in this way could it animate a public ethic based on duty and responsibility, one central to a dynamic community and democratic polity. In his attack on new ‘scientific’ doctrines of political economy and the ethos of greed they cultivated, he focused on a particular change in individual and social manners. Individuals, he believed, slowly lost sight of their duties and responsibilities to others at the same time as they vigorously

The American Journey 25

defended their entitlements. His examination of the system of poor relief which operated in the state of Massachusetts, Report of the Commissioners on the Pauper Laws (1833), served to illustrate his point. In it he marshalled evidence proving the system of workhouses and compulsory labour were baneful both to the poor and other social classes. The system fostered the expectation among the poor of immediate relief. Among the better off it encouraged a surrendering to the state of individual duties and responsibilities to the poor; it furthered the abandonment of individuals’ moral and Christian duties to those in distress.32 To safeguard these duties Tuckerman argued that public relief should be done away with gradually and be replaced by private charity. Private charity, in fostering a spirit of association between rich and poor by being directed toward housing the homeless, promoting education among the poor and the values of hard work and thrift through the creation of savings banks, would reinforce social cohesion and help the poor to help themselves. It was a belief he argued with conviction in Letters on the Principles (1826), his reports to the American Unitarian Association from 1828 to 1832, and his prizewinning essay attacking wage-exploitation of women in which he saw the root-cause of female prostitution.33 His arguments were remarkably Malthusian and were shared by other American philanthropists like Channing and the German–American Francis Lieber, translator of Tocqueville and Beaumont’s The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France. Just like Malthus, Channing argued, in his two most prominent works, Ministry for the Poor (1835) and Self-Culture (1838), that Christian political economy was central to any legitimate doctrine of private charity. In viewing economic activity in its wider relation to morality and politics rather than through the narrow focus of its relation to immutable metaphysical laws, he understood Christian political economy as emphasising both the individual and social commitment to duty and responsibility. In this way it embodied an ethos by which the wider society could help the poor to help themselves. Lieber was also inspired by Malthus’s ideas and in his introduction to Tocqueville and Beaumont’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France he emphasised the link between individual discipline, virtue, and community.34 His Constitution and Plan of Education for Girard College for Orphans (1834) drew on these ideas and stressed the importance of educating children in Christian virtues and social discipline; the book may have influenced Tocqueville’s own thoughts on measures which could be adopted to prevent juvenile crime and improve the lot of abandoned children, themes which appeared in reports he wrote in the 1840s for the general departmental council of the Manche. These philanthropists’ firm belief in uniting private charity to religious instruction and political economy to Christianity grew naturally out of their fear that political economy without any firm religious foundation would give licence to a culture of greed35 which in turn would shatter humanity’s

26

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relation to God.36 Their ideas on political economy, urban poverty and the causes of crime were instructive to Tocqueville and Beaumont. The young Frenchmen, aware of the growing importance of manufactures to the French economy and their repercussions on social relations, were receptive to many of the ideas advanced by these philanthropists. From Boston Tocqueville and Beaumont travelled to Philadelphia and Baltimore. They stayed in Philadelphia almost three weeks. As in Boston, they saw an earnestness of spirit among the Quaker and Unitarian reformers of the city. These individuals had a single-minded devotion to good works. Alleviating the miseries of the poor, reforming the character of criminals, educating the ignorant and caring for the sick were high on their agenda. Tocqueville and Beaumont were enthusiastically greeted by members of the numerous philanthropic societies, particularly the members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. In Philadelphia, more than any other American city, Tocqueville and Beaumont’s mission was treated with the highest degree of seriousness. As we shall see in Chapter 5 the rivalry between supporters of the Auburn penitentiary system – communal labour under a strictly controlled regime – which included groups in New York and Boston, and those of the Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia, penitentiary system – solitary confinement – was intense. The supporters of the Philadelphia system were eager to leave Tocqueville and Beaumont with a very favourable impression of their system. In their eagerness to promote its virtues, members of the Philadelphia society, James J. Barclay, George Washington Smith and Roberts Vaux, organised an ambitious number of visits to various institutions of detention, including the famous Eastern State Penitentiary. Vaux and other zealots of philanthropy furnished Tocqueville and Beaumont with so many books, pamphlets and other documents on the beneficent effects of the Philadelphia penitentiary system that the young magistrates feared the sheer volume of material would make it difficult to take back to France.37 Philadelphia, however, was important to Tocqueville for other reasons. It was here that he felt obliged to respond to questions about America’s banking system from his brother Édouard. He also felt bound to work on an essay on the organisation of civil and criminal justice in America he had promised his friend Chabrol. To this end he obtained the assistance of a young lawyer who would later become Attorney General of the United States, Henry Gilpin, and the Recorder of the city, Joseph McIlvaine. Gilpin responded to Tocqueville’s detailed questions on civil and criminal law by offering him a detailed exposition on common law, statute law, equity law, inferior and superior courts, and the functions of judges and juries. McIlvaine assisted Tocqueville and Beaumont in their inquiries by writing three long essays, a small book in fact, on the history of the penal code in Pennsylvania. In addition to these essays he wrote two others on the judicial organisation of the state, detailing every aspect of the judiciary. Of particu-

The American Journey 27

lar importance, however, was McIlvaine’s long and detailed account of the jury system. For Tocqueville and Beaumont, junior magistrates at a time when the French had been debating the usefulness of juries, this material was very important. Much of it would appear in that famous chapter of Democracy in America (1835), ‘What tempers the tyranny of the majority in the United States’, Tocqueville’s own brilliant contribution to those intellectual debates of the 1830s on the role and composition of juries.38 In all those discussions Tocqueville was able to explore in greater detail the role of the private citizen in a democratic republic; the issues of suffrage and right of assembly were analysed. But what caught his interest most was the role associations, particularly philanthropic ones, played in a democratic republic: how they were an expression of the individual citizen’s liberty and how associations bolstered that liberty. From the reports of those philanthropic societies in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, from Tuckerman’s Letter to the Mechanics of Boston, or Vaux’s Notices of the original and successive efforts to improve the discipline of the prison of Philadelphia, Tocqueville was able to arrive at a clear idea of the importance of associations to cultivating and safeguarding liberty in democracies. While in Philadelphia he began work on some of the most important chapters of Democracy in America (1835), those featuring in the second part of that work. From Philadelphia Tocqueville and Beaumont made their way west into the interior of America. Here they observed a coarse and vulgar populace, one prone to the demagoguery of Jacksonian democrats. They spent five days in Cincinnati, a ‘town which seems to want to get built too quickly to have things done in order’.39 They travelled south by steamboat on the Mississippi through Kentucky and Tennessee. In contrast to Lower Canada or the New England States, where farmers’ fierce spirit of independence ensured the economic prosperity of their farms, in the south they were struck by how much slavery undermined enterprise and corrupted the manners of even the poorest farmer.40 The consequence was that agriculture was far less productive than either in Lower Canada or the non-slave states of the Union41 – an observation Beaumont reiterated in speeches he gave first in 1835 in Paris to the société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage and then to a large abolitionist assembly hosted by Lord Brougham that same year in London.42 But these states exposed dangerous characteristics of democracy. Society seemed almost primitive, in no way resembling ‘the high civilisation of New England’. The inhabitants were coarse and driven by an almost uncontrolled desire to make their fortunes. The consequence of this was that these same individuals seemed ‘to foresee nothing’.43 This, Tocqueville later observed, was characteristic of the habitual inattention endemic to American democracy, one of its worst failings.44 Arriving in New Orleans on 1 January 1832, Tocqueville and Beaumont were struck by its inhabitants who had ‘faces with every shade of colour’, and conversed in French, English, Spanish and Creole. Tocqueville and

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Beaumont were also taken aback by the distinct lack of morality here, the practice of concubinage, the only observable link between the different races.45 The contrast with the moral purity of New England could not have been greater. They stayed three days in New Orleans and from there they went overland to Charleston, South Carolina. After travelling overland through Georgia and Virginia they arrived in Washington on 16 January 1832 and spent a little over two weeks in the capital. This enabled them to observe the workings of Congress, to speak to politicians and to meet briefly with President Andrew Jackson, ‘a successful as well as a desperate political gangster’, as one of Tocqueville’s diary entries described him.46 Tocqueville and Beaumont’s stay in Washington was full of activity. They spent most evenings as party or dinner guests at Edward Livingston’s official residence. They were honoured guests at a large ball hosted by the Secretary of the Treasury, Louis McLane and they dined for a second time with John Quincy Adams, returning once more to the issue of the durability of the American federation, the theme of the concluding chapter of Democracy in America (1835). Their days, however, were devoted to serious studies, observing the workings of America’s political institutions. They attended sessions of the House of Representatives and Senate, and when they were not attending sessions of Congress they spent their remaining hours with Edward Livingston discussing issues related to the workings of American government.47 These discussions, and Livingston’s advice, played a crucial role in informing ideas expressed in Democracy in America. Tocqueville thought Livingston’s contribution to his own understanding of America very important; he would be the only American of all those individuals Tocqueville met to be thanked by name in the pages of Democracy in America. By the time of their departure on 20 February 1832, Tocqueville had observed a great deal of America, though he felt his knowledge of the southern states lacking.48 Nonetheless, he had accumulated an important number of books and other documents. His own written observations were extensive.49 His interviews and conversations with statesmen, judges, lawyers, prison officials, social reformers and leading philanthropists were meticulously recorded and annotated. This considerable body of material contributed to his sophisticated understanding of the nature and workings of democracy, and served as an important foundation to what he believed would be a ‘passable book’ on the subject.50 ‘Passable’ it certainly was.

Prison investigations and the study of democracy It is generally accepted that Tocqueville and Beaumont were interested principally in their unauthorised enquiries into American society and democracy. The official reason for their journey, to study America’s penal system, was of little significance to them and a mere pretext to their wider enquiries.51 Certainly there is important evidence to support that claim.52

The American Journey 29

Whilst investigating American prisons served to inform important political debates in France, observing the workings of American democracy and writing about them, Tocqueville believed, could serve a more important purpose: to offer the French important lessons explaining why France since 1789 experienced so many revolutions and how these could be avoided.53 It would later become Tocqueville’s ambition for Democracy in America.54 This does not mean, however, that Tocqueville and Beaumont’s investigations into American prisons should be divorced from their wider studies.55 To separate them would be a mistake. Simple practical considerations ensured a link between these different investigations. Because prison reform was such an important issue to the French and the Americans, Tocqueville and Beaumont believed any serious study of American prisons would act as a passport to wider social enquiries. Investigating prisons would allow them to meet important social and political thinkers and politicians in America, and give them access to an enormous number of documents on prisons, but also on other political and social issues.56 These benefits Tocqueville readily acknowledged.57 But there were five important methodological and theoretical considerations that ensured the two studies were more intimately related than modern-day scholars have considered them to be. The first was that the study of American prisons influenced Tocqueville’s selection of topics for Democracy in America (1835). Chapters on judicial power, analyses of the legal profession, American’s respect for the law, the effects of demography on public morality, the effects of private morality on public manners and the effect of laws on private morality are just some of the most obvious topics that related directly to the investigation of prisons.58 Investigating prisons gave Tocqueville insights into individual and social perceptions on private morality. This was something well understood by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers to America, the classic statement of it appearing in the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s, Des prisons de Philadelphie, vues par un Européen. What individual or group acts a society permitted and forbade or punished were central to any penal investigation. Where these insights served a wider social and political study and served a second consideration was in how they revealed the complex relation between private morality, public manners and types of political regime. Tocqueville learned both from his reading of Montesquieu and by diligently following from 1828 to 1830 François Guizot’s lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe and The History of Civilization in France,59 that understanding the relation of individual private morality to public manners gave insight into both the nature of a given political regime and its core principle – virtue for republics, honour for monarchies, and fear for despotisms – what Montesquieu defined as its essence and dynamic. Understanding a country’s penal system, its laws and how it punished individuals who transgressed them, was a first step to understanding the relation between private morality and public manners, the social foundation to any political regime.

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Aside from those two elements, the investigation into prisons and the study of American democracy were rooted in three related theoretical and methodological considerations. The first had to do with the method adopted by the geographers Tocqueville studied, including the comte de Volney, Thomas Cooper, Edme Mentelle and Conrad Malte-Brun. As early as 1829 he acknowledged geography to be ‘absolutely essential’ to the study of politics and society.60 Whether from Volney’s Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis, Cooper’s Reseignemens sur l’Amérique, or Mentelle and MalteBrun’s massive and famous Géographie universelle, Tocqueville extracted details which highlighted the importance of classification of types of national character. This was a taxonomy he was familiar with from his much earlier studies of Bodin and Montesquieu. The results of his own investigations, the way he used this taxonomy, appeared in the second and third chapters of the first part of Democracy in America (1835). From these geographers Tocqueville derived important lessons on the importance climate and physical geography had in contributing to the form of political society.61 Here too, these works served to remind him of Bodin and Montesquieu. And once again Democracy in America (1835) revealed these influences, highlighting the importance of America’s geographical position, its rich soil and abundance of virgin lands, validating the naturalness of its agricultural economy and the beneficent effect this had in ensuring a robust democratic government.62 The second of these considerations had to do with the historical method of Guizot’s Sorbonne lectures, particularly what Guizot called ‘philosophical’ history. Tocqueville learned from Guizot that every social organisation could be treated like a fact, akin to any other fact and hence open to analysis.63 This idea originated in Scottish moral philosophy and was adopted at the end of the eighteenth century by the philosophe Condorcet and the physiologue Cabanais whose own ideas were applied to political economy by the ex-priest Talleyrand and later refined by Jean-Baptiste Say.64 These optimists understood facts as constituting the ‘general fact’ of perfectibility. As empirical proof of progress, ‘facts’ became central to history, the key human science and ‘fount of certain information about the creation of the ideal republic’.65 Whilst Guizot may have accepted Condorcet’s claim that ‘as facts accumulate men learn to classify them’ and through this gain a more exact knowledge of their history and themselves, he would have been sceptical of the philosophe’s optimistic claims about human progress. Tocqueville adopted Say’s and Guizot’s understanding of facts. As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, he followed both the political economist and the historian closely by breaking down social organisations into their smallest constituents. Nevertheless, he disentangled their respective characterisations of facts. Like Say and Guizot, Tocqueville distinguished between general facts and particular facts. But whereas Say focused on general facts as the underlying universal regularities of economy and therefore the privileged domain

The American Journey 31

of political economy, Guizot correlated them with society and civilization. Say believed particular facts to be compilations of evidence which called for an exact science of their own: statistics.66 Guizot, however, had a more general understanding of particular facts, seeing them as constituent elements to the general fact of society or civilization. Say’s distinction between general and particular facts appears to have been motivated by the desire to justify political economy’s independent and scientific status, divorcing it from other social, political and moral studies. Tocqueville rejected political economy’s independent and narrow scientific status. He was also more closely drawn to Guizot’s characterisation of particular and general facts, using the particular facts of social issues to inform his broader understanding of the general fact of democracy. In this way the particular facts of crime and poverty revealed something about the general fact of society. Here, and this point will be analysed in greater detail in the chapters to follow, the distinction between particular and general facts was linked to a further differentiation between the internal and external elements of society. Whereas Guizot had previously used this distinction to describe civilization, classifying the internal elements as ideas, outlooks, attitudes and beliefs, and the external elements as the political and social institutions and economic organisation, Tocqueville applied it to society and his analysis of democracy. What he did with this approach was stunningly original, and would later mark an important difference between the first and second volumes of Democracy in America. Where Tocqueville was influenced by Say was in the political economist’s equating particular facts with statistics. Here lay the third link between the study of prisons and study of democracy. Tocqueville would have seen at once that by equating particular facts not only with the constituent elements of society, but also with statistics he could make use of a new approach to social investigations. This approach was concerned with unearthing statistical connexions between various social phenomena, particularly poverty, crime, disease and death: ‘moral statistics’ as it was called by its originators, Adolphe Quetelet and A.M. Guerry. Both men were highly esteemed by Tocqueville; he knew Guerry personally and was full of admiration for the statistician. Tocqueville found Guerry’s work stimulating and instructive. He regarded the new discipline so highly that he was reported to have said of it ‘that were it not a dishonour to be cast into prison, [I] would like nothing better than to spend [my] years locked up, condemned to study une pareille chiffrerie’.67 Statistics was a discipline that clearly fascinated Tocqueville. When combined with the method of ‘philosophical’ history, the possibilities offered by the two approaches seemed endless. Tocqueville and Beaumont used the latest statistical techniques in their investigation of American prisons. The use of statistics enabled Tocqueville to create a large body of particular facts that could then be integrated into his analysis of the wider general fact of democratic society. This novel combi-

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nation of the method of ‘philosophical’ history and statistics was one of Tocqueville’s great innovations. The examination of prisons and American democracy are also related because they both comprise philanthropy and political economy. The theory and practice of philanthropy in America was an important topic in all the great travel accounts of America Tocqueville read, including La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt’s, Chateaubriand’s, Basil Hall’s, and Felix de Beaujour’s.68 Philanthropy was also the concern of most of the Americans he met, particularly those in Boston and Philadelphia. Highlighted by the writings of philanthropists like Vaux, Tuckerman and Channing the theory and practice of philanthropy in America received a rigorous analysis in The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France. What is less widely acknowledged, however, is that it was treated in many chapters of both the 1835 and 1840 volumes of Democracy in America. While these volumes examined the theory and practice of philanthropy, their significance to Tocqueville’s understanding of democracy have not been immediately apparent to modern-day readers. Yet philanthropy was important for two reasons. First, philanthropy highlighted the relation of private morality to public manners. Observing the form of this relation in a given society, understanding its many facets, was the key to acquiring insight into, and understanding of, a given society. Because philanthropy was tied to religious practices and beliefs, to perceptions of human nature and ideas on the perfectibility of man, it offered a way into understanding a people’s philosophic ideas and their perceptions of themselves. Philanthropy was significant for another reason: it was integral to discussions in political economy, and this discipline was tremendously important to Tocqueville. In his early studies of the famous political economist Say, Tocqueville gained not only a basic understanding of the workings of the market, but learned that political economy was an important medium to explore the most basic questions surrounding national character, or national identity.69 In this way it served to inform his understanding of American democracy; and the extent to which political economy informed Democracy in America (1835) will be apparent in subsequent chapters. Though Tocqueville never saw himself as a political economist, he understood how political economy could be used to explore questions about democracy. And the study of Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique during the crossing to America was a clear indication of that. But this understanding long predated Tocqueville’s American travels, as his diary of a trip to Sicily in 1826 revealed.70 Tocqueville’s American letters and his travel diaries reveal the considerable extent to which he thought about how Americans’ commercial spirit influenced their democracy.71 His thoughts mirrored considerations that featured prominently in discussions within intellectual circles in America, discussions made all the more animated because of issues

The American Journey 33

surrounding tariffs and banking. Though these debates served to nourish his thoughts, there were important works that shaped his opinions too. Travel accounts such as Beaujour’s, Hall’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Notions of the Americans: picked up by a travelling bachelor,72 examined the relation between commerce and democracy. An indirect knowledge of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population may also have been very influential. They, along with Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, informed Tocqueville’s understanding of how commerce shaped people’s perceptions and expectations of justice. The Spirit of Laws, however, also influenced Tocqueville.73 He was drawn to The Spirit of Laws, particularly Book 20, because of the way in which Montesquieu explored how commerce influenced laws and the principle of political regimes.74 Through his observations on commerce in America and its effects on the nature and principle of democracy, Tocqueville may have believed that he could provide answers to how France could make commerce serve the interests of liberty rather than those of revolution.75 On this point, however, Montesquieu’s analysis required greater depth; a more sophisticated political economy was needed, and Say provided it. By using Say’s Cours complet as a guide to understanding the influence of commerce on society and polity, Tocqueville gained significant insight into American democracy. This was certainly the case when, in analysing the nature of commercial activity in America, he explored the effects of its growing manufacturing sector. This was a relatively new phenomenon in America, discussed but not seriously analysed in the travel accounts he read. Its appearance worried some Americans, particularly old republicans and Jacksonian democrats, many of whom were opposed to the introduction of the tariff for fear of the effects it would have on agriculture. Among more privileged Americans, mostly Whigs, manufactures were welcomed and seen as important to the country’s overall economic development. Their defence of the tariff was robust.76 But some in those more privileged sections of the population, though welcoming the benefits brought by manufactures, worried about their deleterious effects, particularly among the poor. American philanthropists, particularly those in Boston and Philadelphia, highlighted those concerns. Their thoughts on manufactures served to enlighten Tocqueville, later inspiring his own considerations on industry and its relation to democracy – thoughts that appeared in Democracy in America (1840). Tocqueville’s American discussions on manufactures encompassed an important number of related issues, including the importance of international trade, the role of tariffs in protecting nascent manufactures from large foreign competitors,77 and the necessity of an efficient banking system to manufactures. Conversations he had with old republicans, however, stressed how manufactures developed naturally out of what was for decades highly commercialised agriculture. These republicans had long lamented this overcommercialisation, believing it posed too many risks to the wider polity of

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the democratic republic.78 For them, agriculture had an elevated theoretical status: the ancient defenders of republics emphasising its naturalness and its beneficent effects in sustaining the purity of citizens’ manners. The increasing commercialisation of agriculture threatened to undermine the pure manners of the citizenry. This was because commerce directed men toward the accumulation of wealth and material comforts, pursuits that were at odds with the virtues of citizenship, and ones that would ultimately undermine the institutions that secured individuals’ liberty and equality. In America, debates on these developments long predated the founding of the Republic. The defenders and promoters of commerce marshalled arguments from Montesquieu and Hume. Though commerce might pose some dangers, it also offered many more benefits, they claimed. Montesquieu had also shown that commerce ‘cured destructive prejudices’. He even contended that ‘it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores’.79 Commerce promoted both refinement and enlightenment, and where it presented dangers these could be safeguarded against by political and social institutions. European travel writers Tocqueville read, including Basil Hall and Felix de Beaujour, recorded their thoughts on these issues.80 American statisticians such as Adam Seybert, whose work Tocqueville studied in detail, emphasised their importance,81 and American philanthropists from Tuckerman to Vaux expressed their opinions on these issues.82 Jacksonian Democrats, in elevating the virtues of the rural way of life, criticised large manufacturing and commercial interests, particularly advocates of the tariff and banks. For Democrats the tariff impeded the sale of agricultural products and banks drove smallhold farmers and petty merchants in need of credit into debt bondage. The issue for them was simple: the tariff and the banks threatened the liberties of America’s citizens. The Democrats’ opponents, the Whigs, argued that such criticism was unfounded and ideologically motivated. For them a secure banking sector and the tariff were essential to a robust manufacturing sector which contributed to the growth of national wealth and increased employment. Through manufactures luxuries would become more widely accessible and with this development citizens’ manners would become more refined. Wealth and refinement would not only assure the vitality of America’s democracy, they would also contribute to America’s greatness. Philanthropic opinion on these issues tended to divide along party lines, but most philanthropists were members of the élite, and so tended to be Whigs; this was certainly the case of Bostonian philanthropists whose influence on Tocqueville, particularly on issues of poverty, was important. Tuckerman, for instance, was concerned with the destructive effects of the accentuation of the division of labour which caused the classes to be increasingly distanced from each other, weakening the ties which bound society

The American Journey 35

together. This was one of the principal themes of his introduction to Gérando’s Visitor of the Poor. The remedy he offered was to rethink the principles of political economy in the light of Christian ethics. His brand of Christian political economy sought to unite the elevated virtues of Christian charity with principles of political economy, and thereby strengthen the bonds between social classes.83 This idea also appeared in Channing’s 1835 Ministry for the Poor, a spirited attack on the ‘idolatry of wealth’ and forceful defence of the Christian principle of individuals’ ‘solemn obligation to the less favored’.84 Tuckerman gave Tocqueville and Beaumont a large number of pamphlets and reports setting out his beliefs.85 These became useful to Tocqueville’s own critique of poor relief in the state of Maryland which appeared in The Penitentiary System in United States and its Application in France,86 and to his later reports on pauperism. While the way American philanthropists understood poverty and the wider tripartite relation between poverty, economics and politics may not have been apparent to Tocqueville immediately, for he always considered poverty a providential element of the human condition, the thoughts of American philanthropists caused him to pause and think about how manufactures contributed to an increase in the number of poor in society. Although his thoughts on this issue were often vague and even contradictory at times, he was aware of a number of dangers: the deleterious consequences of the division of labour and its relation to landed property, the basis to individual liberty87 – though on this latter point he, like most American Whigs, believed manufactures furnished skilled workers with high wages which in turn allowed them and their children to acquire land.88 Industry seemed to foster a growth of the middle classes. Yet at the same time, particularly for the unskilled and poor, it made upward social mobility more difficult. In this way, within a democracy industry appeared to spawn a paradox: it created more rigid inequalities in a society governed by equality of conditions. Tocqueville was unable to understand fully this development, but he was conscious that it needed further exploration. As we shall see later, it was immediately upon completing Democracy in America (1835) that he grappled with the issue when he embarked on his own serious studies on poverty; it was through these studies that he was able to appreciate fully the significance of this paradox. Before we can appreciate fully the significance of his investigations to his wider considerations on democracy, however, we must turn to his studies of the principles of political economy.

2 Embracing Liberal Political Economy and then Rejecting it: Tocqueville’s Reading of Say and Malthus

In 1828 Tocqueville read Jean-Baptiste Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique. By now a junior magistrate, Tocqueville had successfully completed three years of legal studies two years before, in 1826. Had Royer-Collard’s 1820 reforms to the law curriculum survived the conservative government of the Comte de Villèle, Tocqueville would have formally studied political economy as part of his legal training. But the ultras scrapped Royer-Collard’s reforms and political economy was dropped from the curriculum, and did not appear as an obligatory course of study until 1871.1 Despite the absence of a formal academic study of political economy Tocqueville did, however, acquire a good knowledge of its axioms from conversations with his father, a former prefect, and his brother Édouard, who was very knowledgeable in the subject. He also developed an understanding of new economic theories and innovations in the discipline from reading the liberal paper the Globe. Founded in 1824 by Paul-François Dubois and Pierre Leroux, the Globe was the most influential paper of liberal opinion, until it became the voice of the Saint-Simonians after they purchased it in 1831.2 From 1824 to 1830 it was committed to the education of ‘generations brought up since the Restoration and tormented with the desire to educate themselves’, young liberals opposed to the Villèle ministry.3 It had an important number of France’s most talented minds writing for it, including the philosophers Théodore Jouffroy and Jean-Philibert Damiron, the journalist and writer Charles Rémusat, the literary great Saint-Beuve and a host of other individuals who would go on to occupy high office under the July Monarchy. Opposed to the policies of the ultras’ reactionary regime and by way of contrast with its conservatism, the Globe embraced liberal values, particularly political and economic liberty. The classic expression of this was found in Duvergier de Hauranne’s credo for the Globe: ‘Laissez faire, laissez passer: here is the fundamental maxim of the nineteenth century; it is the remedy to all ills, and the source for all improvements.’4 Liberal political economy was the embodiment of this credo and the Globe sought to enlighten its readers to the latest developments in this field. To this end it employed the talents 36

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of one of Théodore Jouffroy’s star pupils, the young and brilliant liberal aristocrat, Charles Tanneguy Duchâtel. From 1824 Duchâtel wrote an important number of articles on the latest theories in political economy. He wrote extensively on the works of Smith, Say and Malthus; he also introduced the French to Ricardo’s latest writings.5 Duchâtel’s expositions of the doctrines of liberal political economy were considered classics by his contemporaries. In his defence of liberal political economy he attacked the conservative economic doctrines of the Villèle ministry which were rooted firmly in the outmoded doctrines of physiocracy and inherited prejudices of mercantilism.6 At the same time, however, he attacked socialist economic theories promoted by Prosper Enfantin and other Saint-Simonians in the pages of the Producteur.7 Against the conservatives, Duchâtel presented a robust defence of economic liberalism based on the doctrines of Say and Ricardo. Against the socialists, he called on the works of Malthus and Malthus’s disciple, Thomas Chalmers. Duchâtel’s articles on Say and Ricardo served to promote the interests of free trade and industry. Against old economic doctrines that argued for the maintenance of rental income from land, Duchâtel reiterated Say’s critique of the physiocrat Dupont de Nemours from the Traité d’économie politique and drew on Ricardo’s famous contribution to the English Corn Law debates, Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. Here Ricardo declared that rent was ‘never a new creation of revenue, but always part of a revenue already created’.8 The implication of this statement was that rent was unproductive and hence iniquitous. Rental income did not serve the interest of the whole economy, it served the interest of a particular class. Ricardo declared bluntly that: ‘the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class of society’.9 Duchâtel agreed. In five long articles he presented to the French for the first time Ricardo’s theory on rents. Like Ricardo, he argued that by protecting rents the price of food would remain high. This would drive up wages which would in turn hinder capital accumulation and the progress of industry. Like Ricardo and Say, Duchâtel sought to promote Industrie, as synonymous with not only industriousness and productivity but also with manufacturing and commerce.10 He portrayed industrie in a favourable light and contrasted it to agriculture, which he associated with the vested interests of large estate owners whose consumption of luxuries did not contribute to an increase in the capital stock of society. In this way he equated industry with the general social interest.11 Duchâtel’s attack on landlords was not the only attack on a vested interest. According to him any class that sought to secure its own interest at the expense of the social interest was acting unjustly. This was certainly true of landlords but it was true of workers too. Here, Duchâtel offered a robust critique of Saint-Simonians and other socialists who argued for workers to be granted a right to employment. Rather than provide employment for all, such a right would cause the increased pauperisation of the working classes.

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This was because in contradicting the laws of political economy, a right to employment would ultimately constrain the operations of the economy, impede its development, and adversely affect those it initially sought to assist. Duchâtel employed the same argument against those who demanded both greater regulation of, and more state intervention in, the economy. He argued against the creation of a form of economic corporatism which would see the state intervene in all aspects of economic life. According to Duchâtel such an economy could serve only a particular interest, that of the state and its administrators. Against this nineteenth-century version of Quesnay’s enlightened despotism, in which economy and society were organised by the state, from above, Duchâtel argued that economy and society only could be organised by individuals, from below. Only in allowing individuals to exercise their own self-interest without hindrance could society’s interest be attained. Not only this, but society itself would prosper. Here Duchâtel introduced his own version of an idea of association which was first discussed by Alexandre de Laborde, Louis-Philippe’s aide-de-camp and influential Orleanist Comte whose ideas ironically became influential within legitimist circles.12 When applied to material interests and industry, the ‘spirit of association’, like the workings of the invisible hand, brought together enterprise and capital, ‘l’intelligence qui invente’ and ‘la force qui exécute’.13 It assured both harmony of interests and the greatest prosperity for society. It served society’s general interest. In his drive to promote the most important interests of society, Duchâtel sought to make known to the French the works of Malthus. In 1825 he wrote a series of four articles on Malthus’s work and in the following year he wrote three articles on Malthus’s most important disciple, Thomas Chalmers. Duchâtel’s interest in Malthus lay in the clergyman’s account of the population principle. Duchâtel believed that the singular most important advance in the sciences of society and political economy was Malthus’s discovery that working-class poverty was a direct result of increases in population that outstripped food supply. Like Malthus, Duchâtel argued that the cause of working-class misery was its large population. The way to eliminate or lessen this was for workers to exercise moral restraint. Only by delaying marriage and restricting numbers of births could the condition of the working classes be improved. These were the ‘inflexible principles of political economy’, according to Duchâtel.14 Like Malthus, Duchâtel also criticised those forms of philanthropy which supplemented workers’ every need. Such assistance was misplaced. It ran counter to the rigid laws of political economy. It encouraged both a lack of individual responsibility and foresight, and ultimately it promoted vice. Duchâtel accepted the need to help the poorest of the poor: orphans, the very elderly and the physically and mentally ill; he even accepted the need for temporary assistance for the poor. But, like Malthus, he argued that only the poor could really help themselves. Here, the principles of political economy served the interests of modern

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philanthropy. Philanthropy should work to enlighten the poor to their selfinterest. It should teach them the importance of moral uprightness, hard work and thrift. Only in this way could the poor improve their lot. Tocqueville read Le Globe and was familiar with Duchâtel’s articles for it.15 They were sure to have impressed him. The Globe was the most influential paper among liberals of Tocqueville’s generation, and its cause was actively promoted by Doctrinaire liberals including Royer-Collard, the young Rémusat, and Tocqueville’s ‘guide and teacher’, François Guizot.16 Guizot, who considered Say’s writings to have had a salutary influence on French liberal thought and ensured Say’s promotion to the first chair of political economy at the Collège de France,17 believed the Globe was instrumental in extending the scope of the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood beyond economics to politics. He, like Say, believed that with knowledge of the economy one could discover the ‘regulating mechanisms’ of politics.18 Unlike Say, however, he did not believe political economy to have the same status as a ‘natural science’. Tocqueville was strongly influenced by these beliefs, as we shall see in the following chapter. Many of Tocqueville’s friends were closely associated with the Globe. Some, like the lawyer and conservative deputy, Eugène Janvier, were among Duchâtel best friends.19 Others, like the celebrated jurist and liberal André-Marie Dupin and his younger brother, the political economist and philanthropist, Charles Dupin, had their own writings published in the Globe. André Dupin helped Tocqueville in his studies of the classics of political economy, answering many of Tocqueville’s questions on the writings of Jean-Baptiste Say.20 Charles Dupin’s important statistical study on the relation between education, economic prosperity and public morality for the whole of France’s departments, widely commented on in the Globe,21 was, along with the articles devoted to it, important in shaping Tocqueville’s own views on this relation as they would later appear in The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France.22 Tocqueville’s early ideas on political economy agreed with many of Duchâtel’s own, though as we shall see later there are a number of significant differences. Tocqueville’s critique of modern philanthropy which would appear in all his writings on social problems from prison reform to the care of abandoned children was, in every detail, Malthusian. Here too, Duchâtel’s four articles devoted to Malthus exercised an important influence on Tocqueville. Duchâtel’s attack on conservatives and socialists created a climate favourable to liberal economic ideas, particularly those of Jean-Baptiste Say. As one of Say’s most able proselytes, Duchâtel’s own essays for the Globe attracted such interest in Say’s writings, that when Say presented the lectures that made up his Cours complet d’économie politique at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in 1828, it was to a large international audience. Tocqueville was swept along by the enthusiasm for Say’s lectures.23 It was in this atmosphere that he and Beaumont began their own serious study of Say’s Cours complet d’économie politique.

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The Cours complet d’économie politique Tocqueville’s notes on Say’s Cours complet are largely descriptive. Organised in alphabetical order, beginning with a description of money (argent) and ending with a description of value and sale (vente), these notes contain a number of points of interest. For instance, the entries on agriculture and commerce refer the reader to the entry on industry. And the entries on industry, production and value are the longest. This type of classification, in which agriculture and commerce were subsumed under a definition of industry, was significant. Say contended that the working of land, whether it was agriculture or mining, was a form of industrial activity. This was equally true for commerce, also a form of industry. His justification for this classification was his principal departure from the work of his mentor Adam Smith. Smith treated agriculture, commerce and manufactures as separate entities. He did so in reaction to what he believed an erroneous assumption of the physiocrats. For the physiocrats, it was possible only in agriculture to achieve a net surplus in the form of rent. For Smith it ‘followed from this error that commerce and manufacturing were barren or unproductive because they were capable of yielding a return only in the form of wages and profits that repaid the original expenses of production’. Smith was prepared to acknowledge ‘that agriculture was more productive and should occupy the topmost position in any natural hierarchy of employments for a nation’s capital. Nevertheless he could not accept that the application of capital and labour in commerce and manufacturing was merely a useful but unproductive appendage to agrarian pursuits.’24 According to Smith commerce and manufacturing were activities that yielded a net surplus which, like rent, was available for future accumulation. Because each of these branches produced their respective surpluses they were classified separately. Say, however, reiterating an earlier argument from the second edition of his Traité d’économie politique (1814), believed such a classification outmoded because it was rooted in the belief that agriculture should occupy the highest position in the natural hierarchy of uses for a nation’s capital.25 Say shared Ricardo’s belief that rent ‘was never a new creation of revenue, but always part of a revenue already created’,26 though he was critical of aspects of Ricardo’s argument.27 For this reason agriculture could not possibly occupy the highest position in the hierarchy of uses for national capital. Rather, as rent did not create revenue, agriculture had to be subsumed into that branch which produced a genuine surplus: industry.28 Say’s classification of the branches of an economy was the exact opposite of the physiocratic classification. Instead of understanding agriculture as the genuine source of all surplus, Say argued that industry was that source. By subsuming agriculture and commerce under industry, he not only affected the decisive break with the physiocrats, challenging accepted economic wisdom in France, but he also attacked the status of large landlords, and by implica-

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tion, the old political order. Say’s classification was adopted by his followers, particularly liberals who understood the political ramifications of his arguments. Duchâtel was one of them, and he offered the strongest defence of Say’s theories in the pages of the Globe. Tocqueville’s notes indicate that he endorsed Say’s classification. In the concluding paragraph of his entry on industry he states: ‘Thus, a farmer who harvests his wheat, makes bread from it and takes this bread to market, is obviously at the same time, farmer, manufacturer, and merchant.’29 This is revealing. Tocqueville appears to have understood both the economic and political implications of Say’s classification: that it challenged the principal role of agriculture in the French economy and the power of the landed aristocracy. This was shown a second time in Tocqueville’s entry on the composite elements of all industry (Travaux constitutifs de toute industrie). In that entry he endorsed Say’s account that all industry is composed of three elements: science, enterprise and physical labour. He went on to agree with Say by stating that these three branches are united under enterprise, and that the entrepreneur is ‘the centre of action’.30 Here Tocqueville was united with Say in placing enterprise, industry itself, at the root of economic activity, and the source of value. He revealed the political implications of this when under the entry for wealth (richesse) he reiterated Say’s arguments: that all exclusive property, all large landholdings, ‘assume a state of society where social pressure constrains the great majority of society to bear the privileges of a few’.31 This was a powerful argument against primogeniture and in support of equality. That Tocqueville would later emphasise the beneficent consequences the absence of primogeniture had for equality of conditions in Democracy in America (1835) is indicative of Say’s influence.32 Tocqueville’s assessment of large landholdings was also informed by Guizot’s fourth lecture on the History of Civilization in Europe, which dealt with feudal society.33 Guizot, who endorsed many of Say’s ideas, gave a harsh assessment of the relation of large landlords to the majority of the populace, declaring that the privileges of the few were obtained at the expense of the majority: the majority being smallholders.34 Tocqueville was influenced by Guizot here, but also, in following Say, he appeared to endorse a new liberal political economy that reflected the growth of industry and challenged the preeminence of large landed interests, though he did not accept unequivocally all that was new. While Tocqueville accepted Say’s assessment of industry, his judgement on commodities differed significantly. Unlike Say and Duchâtel who believed that intellectual services, such as medicine, administration, education, or law were commodities exchangeable against other commodities, Tocqueville maintained that commodities could be only material objects capable of being accumulated. He did not view intellectual services as exchangeable commodities; they might be services which could be bought and sold, but they were not strictly speaking commodities.35 In this,

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Tocqueville openly sided with Smith in arguing that services could be exchanged like commodities but not accumulated like them.36 Nevertheless, he was somewhat uncertain on this issue and his notes indicate that he wished to seek clarification on this matter from André Dupin.37 There is no record of Dupin’s response. While Tocqueville rejected Say’s observations on commodities, he endorsed significant aspects of Say’s political economy, particularly, as we shall see in the following chapter, Say’s stress on the importance of self-interest rightly understood to good government and an egalitarian society. Certainly, he and Beaumont thought Say’s work of great importance to their study of American society, and this had much to do with Say’s assessment of America as a large-scale republic whose inhabitants through a judicious combination of laws, customs, manners and civic education successfully united virtue with self-interest. Both men read the Cours complet for a second time during their journey to America. This time the first part of the work, the considérations générales, which discussed the purpose and method of political economy and which did not appear in Tocqueville’s 1828 notes, influenced the method adopted in Democracy in America (1835), serving as a model to understand a republic on a large scale.38 Say’s analytical method and ‘general fact’ approach to political economy, was, as we saw earlier and as we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, also used by Guizot in his sociological and historical method. It proved critical to Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy. Say’s influence, however, went well beyond Democracy in America (1835). Say vigorously attacked physiocracy. His critique of the physiocrats’ speculative method which ensured that political economy was conflated with the study of politics, and speculative politics with the art of governance, appeared in the concluding section of the Cours complet d’économie politique,39 and, along with Smith’s earlier criticisms of physiocracy, marked Tocqueville’s own powerful critique of the physiocrats in the third part of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Despite these influences and deep affinities in outlook, Tocqueville later came to reject significant aspects of Say’s thought and in the end he advocated a more traditional political economy rooted in the belief that small and medium scale agriculture rather than industry should occupy the highest position in the natural hierarchy of uses for a nation’s capital. Such a view had greater affinities with Smith and Malthus than with Say. So how did this change come about?

Politics, morals and political economy Tocqueville never saw himself as a political economist.40 While his interest in the study was great, the focus of his attentions lay elsewhere. Where Tocqueville believed political economy to be important was in its capacity to serve a larger purpose: the understanding of society and government.41

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Though Say himself argued this,42 the scientific status he assigned it – political economy considered akin to physiology43 – along with its epistemological distinctiveness from other disciplines would not have been endorsed by Tocqueville. Whilst advances in political economy and other moral sciences like statistics excited him, he maintained a healthy scepticism toward some of the more overly optimistic claims made by the advocates of these disciplines. His ideas on political economy were more in tune with those of eighteenth-century thinkers, particularly Smith and Malthus. Smith defined political economy as ‘a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator’. To this end his Wealth of Nations was part of a much larger project promised at the beginning of his Theory of Moral Sentiments on the ‘theory and History of Law and Government’.44 Whilst Smith’s political economy was part of a grand theory and history of law and government, for Malthus political economy was part of a Christian version of a wider science of morals and politics.45 These approaches to political economy corresponded better with Tocqueville’s own understanding of the subject than the new theories offered by Say, Ricardo and Duchâtel. These theories emphasised political economy’s uniqueness, stressing its separation from politics and morality. Say was the first to formally announce the ‘divorce between politics and political economy’,46 arguing first in the Traité d’économie politique and then in all his subsequent works that politics and political economy were distinct subjects with different concerns, laws, and objectives.47 He was followed closely by Ricardo, who as a Cambridge-trained mathematician, argued that political economy, a science grounded in deductive reasoning, should be strictly separated from moral issues and ‘the art of legislation’. Ricardo, the ‘archetypal economists’ economist’, was, as Nassau Senior described him, ‘the first English writer who produced Political Economy in a purely scientific form’.48 Duchâtel gave voice to this strict separation in the pages of the Globe. In commenting on Sismondi’s 1826 reedition of Nouveaux principes d’économie politique, he argued that morality and political economy were entirely distinct and should not be confused.49 While Tocqueville was intellectually inclined to an older understanding of political economy, there was much in Say that he found attractive. It was his love of liberty that caused him to assess favourably important aspects of the new approach. Tocqueville believed, like most liberals, that political liberty could not exist without economic liberty. Though this belief was substantially refined before the composition of Democracy in America (1835), he probably thought that the dominant and old-fashioned political economy in France was too tightly wedded to physiocracy. Because physiocracy emphasised the rational character of the state and its ability to organise economy and polity through the agency of ‘legal despotism’, he believed it deprived individuals of both their political and economic freedom. Though physiocracy as a political and economic movement was dead by the nineteenth century, it had shaped the work of some of the Idéologues like Volney,

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Condorcet and Sieyès,50 and conservative political economists interested in maintaining the privileged status of agriculture, and by implication, large holdings. In these different ways physiocracy influenced the issues considered, and direction taken, by political economy in nineteenth-century France.51 Tocqueville may have been attracted to aspects of Say’s new political economy for this reason. By contrast, however, he would have been repelled by Say’s adherence to many of the Idéologues’ optimistic opinions about the emerging social sciences, his conviction that the natural sciences were the model for social and historical studies, his belief in the truth of utilitarianism, and his attempt to make political economy the principal foundation to a new republicanism for the post-revolutionary world.52 A few months after studying Say, Tocqueville began following Guizot’s lectures on The History of Civilization in France. In these lectures given in 1829 and 1830, Tocqueville may have discovered an important weakness in Say’s political economy. As with his 1828 lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe, Guizot’s lectures on The History of Civilization in France emphasised the importance of individual and political liberty.53 According to Guizot, liberty was ‘the result of the variety of the elements of civilization, and of the state of struggle in which they have constantly existed’.54 This idea emerged from Montesquieu’s account of political liberty and its relation to moderate governments found in book eleven, Chapter four, of The Spirit of Laws. Here, Montesquieu famously argued that for political liberty to prosper ‘power must check power’.55 In his account of the constitution of England in Chapter Six he revealed how the three sorts of power, legislative, executive and judicial, checked each other in such a way as to ensure the flourishing of political liberty. Montesquieu was not alone among eighteenth-century thinkers in holding this belief. Both Smith and Malthus also adhered to it, though they altered its focus: making it ‘the basis for modern conceptions of civil as opposed to political liberty’.56 Smith in his Wealth of Nations and Malthus in the Essay on the Principle of Population shifted Montesquieu’s division of political powers toward social and economic powers, or interests, and here the parallels with Guizot are striking. Just as Montesquieu believed political powers had to be checked to protect political liberty, Smith and Malthus believed economic interests had to be balanced one against the other in order to safeguard both civil and individual liberty.57 Like these eighteenth-century thinkers, Tocqueville believed liberty could be safeguarded only if various social and political interests checked each other. Certainly, his defence of liberty in Democracy in America makes that clear. What Tocqueville may well have recognised from Guizot’s lectures was that Say’s political economy did not subscribe to the idea of balance of powers. Rather, the whole of Say’s political economy which stressed the beneficent effects of industry, its ability to soften manners and strengthen social ties,58 lent a powerful theoretical argument behind the promotion of

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industry and industrial interests. His typology of the branches of an economy was singularly instructive here, for commerce and agriculture, as we saw, were subsumed within industry; liberal and utopian opinion reinforced this belief. The launching in 1817 of the Saint-Simonian journal L’Industrie, for instance, had done much to bolster this view, as had the work of Say’s disciples, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. This may have prompted Tocqueville to wonder about important aspects of Say’s political economy, causing him to reassess, after completing the first volume of Democracy in America, his initial favourable opinion.59 Whereas Smith and Malthus understood political economy as part of a wider study, whether of the theory and history of law and government or a Christian version of a science of morals and politics, Say saw it as divorced from other disciplines. This narrowed its focus to the issues of wealth creation and capital accumulation. Where political economy could serve politics was in showing how, by maximising the possibilities for creating wealth, individual independence could be bolstered and with it civil and political liberty. For Say and the advocates of the new political economy, prosperity guaranteed liberty.60 All that was needed here was to follow the natural laws of the economy.61 Political economy revealed those laws, and following them guaranteed liberty. Tocqueville may have recognised something was wrong here. He may have understood that whereas the physiocrats went to one extreme believing individual liberty could be secured by the state, through enlightened despotism, Say and his followers went to a different extreme believing industry secured liberty. In both cases the check on powers that safeguarded liberty was removed in favour of one power, a power which in operating without obstacle ultimately threatened liberty. Though Say believed industry brought prosperity which in turn secured individual independence and liberty, Tocqueville may have felt that such a doctrine, in having wealth creation at its core rather than liberty, ultimately could not secure liberty. Perhaps this explains why there is a certain confusion in Democracy in America about whether economic prosperity assured liberty or liberty assured prosperity. As we shall see in the following chapter, Tocqueville sometimes accepted Say’s proposition that prosperity led to liberty but at other times he inverted the proposition, contending instead that it was liberty that led to prosperity.62

Religion and political economy: Jansenism If Tocqueville did indeed recognise this weakness in Say’s political economy, what influences apart from Montesquieu’s and Guizot’s enabled him to? One important authority here may have been Jansenism, something he shared with other independent liberals, including the Doctrinaire statesman, and later Tocqueville’s mentor, Royer Collard.63 Though it is well known that Tocqueville at this time, and until the end of the 1840s, had serious doubts about his own religious faith,64 experiencing a genuine crisis of faith,65 he

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was not only prepared to accept the existence of God and a future life,66 but he also believed religion necessary to politics and liberty – a belief he shared with other Jansenist liberals including Royer-Collard and Jean Denis Lanjuinais,67 who had been attacked by Say for linking religious considerations to economic ones.68 This motivated him in his attempts to wed the spirit of politics and the spirit of religion. Plans for a new journal, drafted at the end of 1833, reveal the extent to which he considered the matter important. He believed the journal’s editorial policy which had to ‘bring together the spirit of religion . . . [and] the spirit of liberty’,69 would incite prominent liberal Catholics like Montalembert to collaborate in running it.70 Throughout the 1830s he was very interested in how religion could be allied to liberty. He attended and commented on Henri Lacordaire’s famous 1835 Conférences de Notre-Dame,71 and some years later would follow in the pages of the Catholic monthly, Le Correspondant, Lacordaire’s Conférences de Toulouse (1856–7).72 In these lectures given before large audiences, the liberal Catholic sought to accommodate fundamental liberties, such as education, the press and association, within the spiritual sovereignty of the Catholic Church. This attempt to reconcile the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty established a real and fully acknowledged affinity between Tocqueville and liberal Catholics.73 By the end of the 1840s Tocqueville appeared to devote more time to religious thought, as his correspondence with Francisque de Corcelle testifies. By the 1850s, after he developed a close friendship with the Russian and religious mystic Madame Swetchine, who became his spiritual advisor, he may have renewed his Catholic faith. Certainly this was the claim made by prominent Catholics like Lacordaire and Armand de Melun,74 but its validity was contested by Beaumont who, in meeting with Nassau Senior in August 1860, said: ‘We all know that Tocqueville was a Christian, but a philosophical Christian [un chrétien philosophe]. He never followed the rules of the Church. His faith would never have satisfied a confessor.’75 Whether Tocqueville died reconciled to the Church and its doctrines is a question to which there probably is no definitive answer. What is clear, however, is that he was never able, nor ever sought, to reject fundamental opinions about human nature and the human condition he acquired as a boy and young man under the instruction of his personal tutor, the Jansenist abbé Lesueur.76 The origins of Jansenism lay in the work of Cornelius Jansenius, a Flemish professor of theology at the University of Louvain and later Bishop of Ypres. Jansenius’s massive Augustinus (1640), an exegesis of Saint Augustine’s writings, came, along with the works of the Augustinian Pierre de Bérulle, to influence the Cistercian community at the convent and monastery of PortRoyal-des-Champs. It was from here that Jansenism became an important religious, moral and political force. Through the writings of three individuals attached to Port Royal, Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole and Blaise Pascal,

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Jansenism emerged as one of the most controversial and powerful forces within Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though it lost influence in the nineteenth century, succumbing to a hostile attack from the combined forces of church and state, it remained important for much of the century.77 Even though Jansenists agreed with other sections of the Church on a significant number of issues, they were Gallican and very Augustinian. Jansenists attached enormous importance to original sin. They emphasised the corruption of humanity and the importance of grace. Here, they opposed grace to nature, mistrusted natural processes leading to salvation, and furnished a powerful critique of sacramental and ritual automatism. They proposed a Christian rigorism directed to behaviour and consciousness of ‘the risks involved to any concession to nature and the world’.78 The result was a rigorism and moral austerity that involved both the elevation of the interior life, the life of the mind and the soul, as the true life and the renunciation of the material world. In this way Jansenism embodied the themes of personal austerity, simplification of ritual and a return to the doctrines of the early church.79 It was known for its emphasis on personal integrity, humility and charity. As a political force, Jansenism was identified with the defence of conscience against arbitrary power. It was associated with ‘Richerisme’, the movement advocating democracy within the Gallican church. Under the influence of abbé Lesueur, Tocqueville came to acquire a deep respect and love for Pascal’s work. From Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, a work much in vogue in the liberal press,80 and his Pensées Tocqueville learned the importance of scepticism and the impossibility of both creating a logical order and achieving equitable justice on earth. The religious and moral implications of these beliefs were obvious to him, but they had political ramifications which were also apparent to him. Pascal’s belief in the impossibility of creating a logically ordered society and fulfilling equitable justice lay at the heart of Jansenist resistance to central religious and political authority. In religious matters, Jansenists resisted encroachments by Rome. In political matters, they resisted Louis XIV’s attempts to usurp the powers of the local parlements. For the Jansenists, particularly Pascal, all attempts to impose a unique central authority were rooted in the misguided belief of the righteousness of a central power and its ability to fashion an equitable and just order. For this reason, and because they were attacked by the established religious and political powers, Jansenists were an important force in encouraging groups striving to maintain local independence against the encroachments of an absolutist state. Their influence was felt in the post-1789 works of a number of important liberals including the abbé Grégoire, J.-D. Lanjuinais, Royer-Collard, and Saint-Beuve. For these authors Jansenism justified a strict personal morality which secured moral constancy

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in a constantly changing political environment and it was a powerful motive justifying associations and the role of religion in reinforcing social bonds and maintaining national peace.81 Pascal’s ideas, by the nineteenth century associated with patriotism, religious and political freedom, purity in morals and authentic conviction, marked Tocqueville’s outlook on politics, influenced his harsh and critical assessment of idealist philanthropists in his 1830 and 1833 reports on prisons, his reports on pauperism of 1835 and 1837 and his reports on the plight of abandoned children of the 1840s; it served, too, his severe judgement of the philosophes and the physiocrats in part three of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Pascal’s attack on attempts to adapt morals to social circumstances, his rigorism and moral austerity, may well have influenced Tocqueville’s understanding of legal punishment and his assessment of prisons in The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France. His insistence on personal morality, humility and charity also marked Tocqueville’s beliefs on the role of private charity in combating pauperism. But it was Pascal’s moral rigorism and his exhortations against excessive attachment to material goods and comforts that, combined with his rejection of the possibility of creating a logical order, may have influenced Tocqueville’s assessment of Say, causing him to reject an important number of Say’s ideas.82 While Tocqueville’s early Jansenist education may have contributed to his reassessment of Say’s economics, other sources might have also had a significant influence here. For instance, Tocqueville may well have been swayed by the work of geographers, even though some of them, like Volney, shared Say’s Idéologue credentials. Certainly, he understood that geography was ‘absolutely essential’ to the study of economics, history and politics,83 but what was special about geography in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was that it emphasised the importance of agriculture and the land to history, historical memory and the manners of a people.84 Tocqueville’s Sicilian diaries of 1826–7, American correspondence, and remarks on primogeniture in Part One, Chapter Three, of Democracy in America (1835) show how he understood this.85 In this context geography played an important role in bolstering economic ideas that agriculture should occupy the highest position in the natural hierarchy of employments for a nation’s economic capital. These ideas were espoused by individuals like Alexandre de Laborde and L.-F. Huerne de Pommeuse, and legitimist organisations such as the Association Religieuse pour les progrès de l’Agriculture en France.86 Tocqueville accepted some of these ideas, though he understood agriculture’s relation to commerce and industry much more like Smith or Malthus than legitimists did. Certainly by the time he wrote Democracy in America (1835) he recognised legitimist claims about the moral benefits derived from agriculture: historical memory and a social peace emerging from man’s proximity to nature.87 He also understood its potential political benefits, though

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Say also emphasised these. Small-scale agricultural production could assure the productive capacity of individuals, promoting their self-esteem and ensuring their financial independence. In this way agriculture assured individual liberty.88 From legitimist economic theories, but more importantly from his own investigations into philanthropy and prisons before and during his sojourn in America and his brief journey to England in 1833, and certainly as he made clear in Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville recognised how manufacturing, when allowed to develop unchecked, spawned social problems.89 In industrial cities like Paris or Lyon working-class neighbourhoods were crowded, unsanitary and morally corrupt.90 Industry spawned political problems too. The ‘spirit of association’ of which Duchâtel and other liberals were so fond of speaking, was spawned by an association between enterprise and capital. Its compass was much narrower than the ‘spirit of association’ referred to by de Laborde or the American philanthropists Channing and Tuckerman, which served as the foundation to a moral and social consensus and was distinct from the association between enterprise and capital which was attacked as serving the interests of industry to the detriment of wider social interests.91 For Tocqueville this was to have revolutionary consequences. But there were other problems with industry he would later highlight in Democracy in America (1840).92 Because of the way industry was organised, and because a large proportion of manufactured goods were for export, Tocqueville believed it was ‘subject to very unexpected and formidable industrial crises’.93 This observation was, as we shall see in later chapters, allied to a harsh assessment of how industries improved their competitive advantages by cutting costs and increasing productivity, particularly through accentuating the division of labour. An important consequence of this was that industry pauperised vast numbers of labourers, subjecting them to a new form of servitude.94

Religion and political economy: Malthus Though Tocqueville was swayed by arguments from legitimist economists, especially Villeneuve-Bargemont and his brother Édouard, who would later publish a number of works extolling the virtues of the rural economy,95 his beliefs were most strongly influenced by Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Tocqueville probably studied Malthus seriously after finishing Democracy in America (1835) and just before writing his first report on pauperism (1835): a work which, as we shall see later, bears a number of striking similarities with the Essay. Certainly, the first indication we have of him having studying the Essay is in a letter to Count Leon von Thun-Hohenstein of 2 February 1835.96 Even if he only finished studying seriously the Essay by the beginning of 1835, he demonstrated clearly a sophisticated understanding of Malthus’s ideas well before that date, and this suggests he was sufficiently familiar with Malthus before he wrote the first volume of

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Democracy in America. His familiarity with Malthus’s ideas may date from 1825 when Duchâtel published four important essays on Malthus for the Globe. He would also have become sufficiently familiar with Malthus’s ideas from studying Say’s Cours complet, in which Say praised Malthus’s population principle and analysed in detail Malthus’s theses.97 Besides possible French influences, there are also an important number of American sources on Malthus’s ideas. As we saw in the previous chapter, Tocqueville’s prison investigations, the large number of pamphlets he obtained from individuals and philanthropic groups, and his conversations with Tuckerman, Channing, Lieber and other leading American philanthropists would have also exposed him to many of Malthus’s ideas: certainly his account of poor-relief in the state of Maryland in The Penitentiary System in the United States demonstrated a broad knowledge of the Essay.98 Another significant source for Malthus’s ideas before 1835 was Tocqueville’s trip to England in 1833. His correspondence with his father and Beaumont indicate the importance of Malthus’s ideas in his assessment of the English Poor Laws.99 The people he met, Lord Radnor, John Bowring and in particular Richard Whately and Nassau Senior, were keen to discuss Malthus’s ideas with him; Tocqueville’s diaries record this.100 Those diaries also reveal a number of astonishing parallels between Malthus’s theses on population and Tocqueville’s observations on poverty in England, particularly on the deleterious effects of an established system of Poor Laws and on the relation of women to morals and population.101 Similar remarks would appear in the 1840s in Tocqueville’s reports on abandoned children for the general departmental council of the Manche. Whenever Tocqueville read Malthus’s Essay it is clear that the clergyman’s views had a significant effect upon Tocqueville’s thoughts on political economy. Tocqueville probably read Pierre Prevost’s 1823 translation of the 1803 edition of Malthus’s An Essay on the Principles of Population.102 The 1803 edition of the Essay was substantially altered from the original 1798 version. Not only was the work far less polemical, it used statistics derived from Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s The State of the Poor (1797) and the 1801 census to prove the population thesis. Despite these changes, Malthus maintained the core theses of the earlier work. He retained earlier criticisms of the radical philosophers William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet who believed in the perfectibility of human society. He believed their speculations on the unlimited improvement of mankind were fantasy. Facts pointed to the conclusion that the unlimited improvement of humanity was an illusion; population science indicated the limits to human improvement. Against Godwin and Condorcet, Malthus argued that ‘as by that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, population can never actually increase beyond the lowest nourishment capable of supporting it; a strong check on population, from the difficulty of acquiring food, must be constantly in operation.’103 According to Malthus population

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increased at a geometric rate when food production increased at an arithmetic rate.104 If a population grew unchecked it would be unable to feed itself. At this point nature variously checked population growth. Its ‘positive’ restraint included ‘every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of human life’. The list of those causes included many ills, ‘the whole train of diseases and epidemics, wars, pestilence, plague, and famine’.105 This was nature’s way of restraining population. But society also had ways of checking population growth. These Malthus called preventative checks. When considered as an innocent restraint on individuals’ ‘inclination’ to procreate, this preventative check was called ‘moral restraint’, but when this check resulted in practices such as abortion or infanticide because of ‘promiscuous intercourse to such a degree as to prevent the birth of children’, it was called vice. For Malthus vice lowered ‘in the most marked manner the dignity of human nature’. Its ultimate consequence was misery. Though moral restraint ‘produce[d] a certain degree of temporary unhappiness’ this was ‘slight, compared with the evils which result from any of the other checks to population’.106 As this point, Malthus sought to present an account of the relation between economy and population which showed that moral restraint prevented misery.107 For Malthus the insurmountability of real and relative economic scarcity emphasised the importance of self-discipline and individual duty. He believed the perfectibilists ignored this because they believed all individual and social ills were rooted in social institutions and their improper organisation. According to Malthus individual and social ills could not be eliminated simply by reorganising and changing these institutions. The perfectibilists made a ‘great error’ in attributing ‘almost all the vices and misery that prevail in civil society to human institutions’.108 Though Malthus recognised that some institutions contributed to vice and misery, the principal cause of these ills lay in the ‘inevitable laws of nature’. Wellbeing could be achieved only if individuals recognised these natural laws and led a moral existence within their limits. According to Malthus the perfectibilists’ over-zealous assessment of the power of scientific progress created conditions in which individuals discounted natural limits and ignored their moral duties, believing instead that advances in science could push back the boundaries to human action or rectify any errors of conduct. This improper understanding of science effectively removed the beneficent power of scarcity. It cultivated an unwarranted optimism which prompted individuals to live imprudently, and ultimately, immorally. In believing that scarcity could be removed, the perfectibilists created the conditions in which an individual was no longer stimulated ‘to remove evil from himself, and from as large a circle as he can influence’. Perfectibility undermined a powerful and efficient moral force. Malthus saw the laws of nature, far from being a restraint upon society, as the stimulus to individual and social

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improvement.109 The natural law of scarcity and the institution of property were powerful driving forces in the refinement of mind and manners. They were the foundation to individuals’ recognition of duty to themselves, others and community. Malthus’s ideas gained a wide following in France among both legitimist and liberal political economists. Among the liberal political economists, Say and Duchâtel shared Malthus’s ideas on population. Like Malthus, they argued that the tendency for individuals to multiply was infinite whilst means of subsistence were limited. They shared Malthus’s understanding of positive and preventative checks. Like him, they argued that the poor could improve their lot by acknowledging and then discharging their duties to themselves and their families. Liberals like Say differed from Malthus on important issues, however, and Tocqueville recognised this. Though Say argued that the principle of population imposed duties on individuals that they ignored at their peril, he had a faith in industry, science, and the progressive efficiency of the market that were as optimistic as the perfectibilist speculations of Godwin and Condorcet. According to Say, entrepreneurial skill and the refinement of scientific know-how were constituents of a model of society in which supply created its own demand.110 This argument hinged on both Say’s belief that industry was constantly innovating, forever creating new markets and that the entrepreneur generated this greater prosperity by innovating and becoming more specialised. The more prosperous a society became, the greater the distinction between entrepreneurship, scientific knowledge and manual labour, with entrepreneurial knowledge taking on more and more prominence as it contributed ever more greatly to the creation of wealth. Tocqueville shared Malthus’s rejection of perfectibilist speculations; no doubt in this he was influenced by Pascal’s belief in the impossibility of creating a logically ordered society. But Jansenism influenced Tocqueville’s gradual estrangement from Say’s political economy, and his acceptance of Malthus’s own version only after completing Democracy in America (1835). Jansenist moralism, a rigorism and moral austerity that involved embracing the interior life as the true life and disregarding the material world, was hostile to economic doctrines that promoted unrestrained self-interest and the pursuit of wealth.111 As Tocqueville’s American diaries and correspondence reveal, he disdained the uncontrolled desire for accumulating wealth and material comforts he observed there, but thought they could be restrained by enlightened self-interest. Say’s political economy which ascribed such an important role to self-interest, also gave licence to the kind of unfettered financial and material pursuits Tocqueville scorned. From reading Malthus, Tocqueville realised industry could well become the driving force behind this greed, particularly, as Say’s remarks on this issue were thoroughly naïve, cupidity being associated with ill-gotten gains only.112 Like Malthus he also realised the corrosive effects this had on indi-

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vidual morality and public manners. Malthus would have reminded Tocqueville of Montesquieu’s observations on the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury on democracies and aristocracies;113 remarks Say dismissed believing Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws ‘sowed the most brilliant errors’.114 In this way Tocqueville would have been brought back to his principal concern: the safeguarding of liberty. He would have understood that Say’s political economy, the new liberal political economy, though attractive in an important number of ways, particularly in its assessment of selfinterest rightly understood and as using a method easily adaptable to a sociological and political analysis of democratic society, focused on the concern for wealth creation, privileged the interests of industry above all others, and divorced itself from moral or ethical concerns by adopting a singular scientific character. The new liberal political economy in becoming formalised in this way was fundamentally separated from morality, the spirit of liberty, and important principles of justice. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, justice, whose realisation could never be complete, nevertheless became a key concept for Tocqueville. That the new liberal political economy could not sustain such a concept had important implications for Tocqueville’s assessment of democracy.

3 Equality, Liberty and the Problem of Self-Interest: Democracy in America (1835)

Tocqueville had been interested in writing a book about a republic on a vast scale well before setting off for America.1 His resolution to write such a work became a burning ambition shortly after his arrival in the young republic,2 although he was far from certain about the form it would take.3 America presented a problem for any analyst. The nation’s geography, the sheer size of the territory, the character of its inhabitants, the particular nature of its political and social institutions and many other factors conspired to make writing a political and social analysis that went well beyond the detailed travelogues of previous writers, complex and difficult. But such an ambitious work was what Tocqueville had in mind. To facilitate his task he sought to find those elements or characteristics which were distinct to America and those it shared with France. This approach would give him points of reference, or comparison, to ask the questions that his work on the new republic would set out to answer.4 The result of his enquiries, Democracy in America (1835), was frequently and favourably compared to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws.5 Tocqueville’s approach to his subject matter and his style of writing lent credence to this assessment.6 He scrutinised the effects of historical circumstances on a nation and its institutions. He was careful to stress the balance of powers between aristocratic and democratic elements in his examinations of the political and civic institutions of America. He concentrated on the institutions, laws, manners, and habits of the citizens of the young republic and he was attentive to the importance of climate and geography. All of these elements bore a striking resemblance to themes in Montesquieu’s famous work. Like Montesquieu, he also adopted the comparative approach. It was an approach he judged to be instructive. In examining America, Tocqueville was able to shed new light on France’s political, social and economic circumstances, and in using France as a point of reference, he was helped in understanding and evaluating America. Its great strength was in giving him the insights with which to analyse and evaluate American democracy, 54

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making that analysis comprehensible and instructive to the French,7 using it to show them the dangers associated with democracy and how best to avoid them.8 These were important aspects of Democracy in America noted by its earliest reviewers. Tocqueville was keenly aware of his debt to Montesquieu. He knew readers would see immediately the influence The Spirit of Laws exercised on Democracy in America, yet he warned them that if they paid ‘more attention to the form than to the substance’ of the work they would fail to grasp its full meaning and significance.9 Many of them did. Early reviewers used the work and its allusions to Montesquieu as ammunition in political feuds.10 This was certainly the case in the heated debate that was conducted in the pages of the Orléanist Journal des débats and the moderately republican Le National. The legitimist press, the Gazette de France and L’Ami de la religion et du roi, was more interested in settling old political scores with liberals than in being mindful of the work’s content. Its assessments of the book were generally malevolent. Though Democracy in America’s ‘lofty significance’ was stressed by Le National and its author hailed as ‘the Blackstone of America’ in the Journal des débats, Tocqueville thought only two reviews conveyed a real understanding of the substance of his work: Saint-Beuve’s article for the liberal Le Temps and Francisque de Corcelle’s essay for the Revue des deux mondes.11 These writers understood the extent to which his work was original. They appreciated, like Tocqueville himself, the extent to which the works of republicans and liberals of the immediate post-Revolutionary period were outdated. The ideas of those who maintained the mantle of republicanism in the beginnings of the nineteenth century, such as Destutt de Tracy, were too closely associated with the optimistic, naïve, and discredited theories of eighteenth-century Idéologues such as Condorcet and the abbé Sieyès. Liberals like Mme de Staël and Constant were also out of favour among the generation of young liberals of the 1820s and 1830s; they were preoccupied with different things and had come to see themselves self-consciously as a generation apart.12 The task for Constant and his generation was to neutralise the effects of ideology which politically polarised French society, rendering the nation both politically and socially unstable. Through the judicious combination of institutional reforms and the encouragement of commercial relations, Constant believed France could achieve political stability and economic prosperity. The task for Tocqueville and his generation was different. They sought to explore the complexity of social relations in order to understand how they might be responsive to free institutions, and they returned to thinkers like Montesquieu to do that.13 Even though Tocqueville and his generation were engaged in a different political enterprise, they assimilated more of the ideas and theories of the older liberals and Idéologues than is generally recognised. At the same time, however, they consciously sought to distance themselves from that older generation and

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this meant that their works acquired a distinctiveness that made difficult the attribution of intellectual debts.14 The focus of Tocqueville’s work meant he returned to Montesquieu for his principal source of inspiration. There was a natural affinity between Montesquieu’s preoccupation with the spirit of a people and its political regime, and Tocqueville’s concerns with the relation between social intercourse and free institutions. Reviewers of Democracy in America saw this at once, but this resemblance obscured the less glaring connexions with other works. Reviewers did not appreciate fully the extent to which Tocqueville, a young, clever, and ambitious man with political aspirations, sought to enhance Democracy in America’s political impact by integrating into his study new scholarly developments in the disciplines of history, political economy, geography and statistics. They also failed to notice the extent to which he had, consciously or not, assimilated the Idéologue conviction that the social and historical sciences were theoretically unified, thereby lending his work a scientific status: but then, as Francisque de Corcelles’ uncle, the liberal deputy François de Corcelles, concluded, in his 1831 Documents pour servir à l’histoire, the influence of the Idéologues was both pervasive and profound, but seldom acknowledged.15 Even distinguished philosophers like Royer-Collard, who hailed the young author as the new Montesquieu, did not comprehend the full extent he made of these new approaches. So what were they?

New approaches to the study of American democracy When Tocqueville was a student he appears to have read Volney’s Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791). He imitated this work in recording his own impressions about Rome, Naples, and Sicily in a journey he undertook in 1827 with his brother Édouard.16 Before setting off for America he read Volney once again, but this time the famous Idéologue’s Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis (1803). Both this and Les Ruines reinforced the lesson Tocqueville learned from Guizot’s lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe and The History of Civilization in France that through the analysis of historical facts one could unearth general historical principles. Volney, in his 1795 Lectures on History at the École Normale, showed the extent to which he, like other Idéologues, was convinced of the value of analysis. By reducing all ideas to their basic elements and then reassembling them into complex ideas, analysis became the central element to his historical method. Say shared Volney’s confidence in the value of analysis, but rather than make it the central tenant of an historical method, he made it the central principle of political economy. Yet Say interpreted facts in a subtly different way from Volney. As we have already seen, in Say’s Traité d’économie

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politique and then later in the Cours complet d’économie politique, he distinguished between general facts and particular facts. General facts revealed underlying universal regularities, the concern of political economy, and particular facts, understood as compilations of evidence, the concern of statistics.17 Tocqueville endorsed Say’s distinction between particular and general facts. The initial approach he took to studying America also showed his faith in analysis. For as he put it in a letter to his father in 1831: ‘We have, in truth, one overriding idea since we have arrived here: that idea is to know the country we are travelling through. To achieve our aim we are obliged to deconstruct [décomposer] a priori the society, to look for those elements it shares with our own in order to formulate useful questions and to forget nothing.’ But as he confessed too, analysis had its limitations: it transformed those who adopted it into ‘machines à examen’ whose findings were often nothing more than ‘sterile impressions’.18 Say’s influence extended well beyond Tocqueville’s use of analysis and assessment of facts. Like Volney’s understanding of geography, Say’s political economy served to reveal the most basic questions surrounding national character.19 It was important too because it stressed Say’s conviction that poverty was one of the greatest threats facing European societies.20 On this theme he joined ranks with Malthus. Malthus was important because his Essay stressed the importance of poverty and social exclusion as threats to individual and political liberty. These themes were central to Tocqueville and Beaumont’s The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France because they related to issues of individual and public morality, the fulfilment of individual and social duties, and their relation to liberty. In Democracy in America they served a more indirect function. They focused Tocqueville’s attention on individual and public morality as particular facts which were central to the general fact of democracy, but the issues of poverty and social exclusion would come to play important roles in informing Tocqueville’s thoughts on concepts like enlightened self-interest which featured prominently in his work. Poverty and social exclusion were also important because they highlighted the role political economy might serve in assisting Tocqueville to evaluate the emergence of a certain sentiment of exact justice as commercial society eroded the traditional bonds of community – an issue that preoccupied both Montesquieu and Adam Smith.21 Above all, Say’s work inspired the method Tocqueville adopted in his study of American democracy. Say’s political economy, which placed such a high explanatory value on the concept of enlightened self-interest, offered a better explanation of the ‘spirit’ of American democracy than Montesquieu’s more abstract and old fashioned concept of virtue. Tocqueville’s written impressions of America, taken when he was travelling down the Mississippi river, confirm this:

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Another point which America demonstrates is that virtue is not, as has long been claimed, the only thing that maintains republics, but that enlightenment, more than any other thing, makes this social condition easy. The Americans are scarcely more virtuous than others; but they are infinitely more enlightened (I speak of the masses) than any other people I know.22 Perhaps one of the most important, and now widely acknowledged, influences on Tocqueville’s analysis of America was that of François Guizot.23 Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for Guizot’s lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe and The History of Civilization in France knew no bounds. As he excitedly proclaimed in a letter to Beaumont, Guizot’s work was ‘prodigious in its analysis of ideas [décomposition des idées] and choice of words, truly prodigious’.24 Like Volney and Say, Guizot placed a high value on analysis. The distinction he made between particular and general facts served as the foundation to what he called ‘philosophical’ history. But Guizot also emphasised the dual character of general facts, particularly that of civilization. In this he followed in the footsteps of many prominent Idéologues who improved on the work of the philosophes and liberals like Constant who stressed the external features of civilization. Guizot emphasised how the philosophes and the post-Revolutionary liberals focused on the ‘state of society’, stressing how it was ‘better regulated’, how ‘rights and property [were] more equitably distributed’; they were concerned to show how ‘the aspect of the world becomes purer and more beautiful, the action of government, the conduct of men in their mutual relations, more just more benevolent’.25 He was also interested, however, in the internal factors of civilization. He emphasised the development of ‘man himself, of his faculties, his sentiments, his ideas’. In Guizot’s mind civilization was the complex interaction between internal and external. As he put it in his first lecture on The History of Civilization in Europe: ‘the inward is reformed by the outward, as the outward by the inward; [. . .] the two elements of civilization are closely connected the one with the other’.26 Guizot’s thoughts on the internal and external factors of civilization had been shaped by the philosopher Maine de Biran.27 The principal disciple of the Idéologue Destutt de Tracy, Maine de Biran became one of the leading critics of eighteenth-century empiricist philosophy. In a critique of sensationalist theories of the mind associated with Locke and Condillac, Biran argued that the self, or will, was essentially active. Voluntary experience was the product of the self and not, as the sensationalists believed, the consequence of external causation. According to Biran voluntary experience, the intentional action of the self, was intrinsically different from externally caused or, as he called it, ‘passive’ experience. His critique of sensationalism appears to have been influenced by Kant’s philosophy, but it was Tracy’s Eléments d’idéologie that had the greatest effect on his thinking. For in this work Tracy distinguished between the two modes of existence which constituted

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individual personality: the organic, or, interior life, and the animal, or, exterior life.28 Tracy’s considerations on personality, themselves derived from Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800) by the celebrated anatomist Xavier Bichat, served to inform a complex analysis of private property as the expression of individual will. In this way they represented the underlying basis to his considerations on political economy, thoughts that became central to Say’s conception of industrie.29 But it was their potential to revolutionalise philosophical considerations on the mind which attracted Biran. Tracy’s distinction between two modes of existence was the premise to Biran’s dynamic, or active, conception of mind, which in turn shaped French liberal ideas on freedom, and Guizot’s Histories. Tocqueville was drawn towards this kind of historical writing, but he applied Guizot’s dual conception of civilization to American society,30 and, as we shall see, it also became crucial to Tocqueville’s study of political economy and social issues after 1835. At first, the task he had set himself was to examine the external factors of democratic society and then show how they relate to internal factors, but as his research progressed his ‘urge to carry out this plan . . . cooled off’.31 Instead, the first volume of 1835 focused mostly, though not exclusively, on the external factors of democratic society: climate, geography, laws, institutions and commercial relations. Naturally, Tocqueville did not focus on external factors alone. The important ninth chapter of the second part of the work, ‘the main causes tending to maintain a democratic republic in the United States’ explored the relationship between internal and external elements. His account of the effects of the absence of primogeniture also stressed the interaction between those elements, but generally, as later critics acknowledged and as he himself confessed, the first volume was concerned with external elements.32 It is not entirely clear why Tocqueville’s urge to fulfil the original plan for the work ‘cooled off’. He certainly found writing the second part of Democracy in America (1835) difficult; he complained to Beaumont that mastering the topics it encompassed caused his ‘head to spin’.33 No doubt he grasped the enormity of the task he had set himself and thought it wiser to limit the scope of his work. Certainly, he was justified in this. Guizot himself had limited his History of Civilization in Europe to the ‘history of external events’.34 As Tocqueville made clear in letters written just after the publication of the first volume, however, he thought much more needed to be done and was contemplating how best to do it.35 When he began work on the second volume of 1840 he set out to complete his original plan. That work concentrated much more on internal factors such as ideas, manners and sentiments. Tocqueville’s focus on external elements of American democracy gave the 1835 volume an optimistic tone. He started his study of America with the belief that ancien régime society was dead and that its place was being taken by democracy. In this, he reiterated a conviction held by the Idéologues and Doctrinaire liberals like Guizot. Their works emphasised the progressive

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nature of this development. They stressed the rise of liberty and equality, of civilization itself. And they focused on the positive role external elements had in transforming ideas, sentiments and beliefs, and how these in turn exercised a salutary change on external elements. As we have seen, Tocqueville embraced these ideas. He also adopted the Idéologues’ and Doctrinaire liberals’ favourable outlook on commerce and industry. These two external elements were important to the progressive development of civilization, but Tocqueville was not as sanguine in his assessment of them as Say’s students Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, to go by his pessimistic remarks about the pervasiveness of market values in America. Yet, like Say, he thought that the deleterious effects of these values could be checked by social and political institutions. Tocqueville believed his assessment of democratic society to be both fair and, on the whole, positive. It was an assessment at odds with the judgement of pessimists, and it placed him, as he put it, in a ‘different category’ from them.36 Once he began to focus on the internal elements of democracy, however, his outlook became more pessimistic. As we shall see in later chapters, his study of the political economists Malthus, who viewed human nature sceptically, and Villeneuve-Bargemont, who was scathing in his attacks on the apologists of the unfettered development of market relations, influenced his judgement considerably on the effects commerce and industry had on ideas, manners and sentiments. His thoughts were further influenced by his own studies into the social problems of pauperism and child abandonment. All of these elements, I believe, came to diminish his faith in the power of social and political institutions to check the morally corrosive aspects of commerce and industry. They would darken the tone of the second volume of Democracy in America. In the first volume, however, Tocqueville was firmly in the camp of the optimists. In his efforts to grasp the role of external elements in the evolution of democracy, he remained close to Guizot’s work. He drew on the historian’s categories of atomisation and centralisation in trying to understand the decay of aristocracy and the development of democracy in Europe. He heeded Guizot’s appeal to the generation of the 1820s to undo the excessive centralisation of French government, the main argument of his 1822 Origins of Representative Government in Europe and one of the central messages of his Histories. He was receptive to that message and learned the value of contrasting the development of English and French institutions as a way of illuminating the issue of centralisation. In a revealing and long letter to Beaumont in 1828, he discussed his studies of the English historian John Lingard’s A History of England and showed the extent to which he endorsed Guizot’s thesis that local autonomy in France had been the unintended victim of a weak crown’s struggle to destroy aristocratic power, whereas in England a more powerful crown drove the feudal aristocracy to organise and ally itself with leaders of the Commons in order to check its ambitions. The

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result, Tocqueville wrote, was that ‘the Lords nearly always sought out the Commons and supported them on all occasions, which served slowly to unite the two orders which were irreconcilable enemies elsewhere in Europe’.37 In Guizot he found a more rigorous assessment of English institutions than what was presented by Montesquieu whom he believed went too far when he painted ‘the English constitution as the model of perfection’. For Montesquieu to describe the English constitution thus revealed, as Tocqueville lamented, ‘the limits to his genius’.38 Guizot’s historical assessment of the decentralised English state would later serve Tocqueville’s own historical analysis of the French Revolution. But initially it prompted Tocqueville to consider another decentralised state: America. Here, Guizot’s influence was also reinforced by Say’s. For the political economist believed that American federalism was a worthy model for Europe to study.39 Tocqueville was also drawn to Guizot’s understanding of the principle of antagonism as the dynamic force to history and progress. The principle lent Guizot’s Histories a complexity and rigour which enlivened historical writing. Guizot’s Histories had an analytic and explanatory power that was absent from progressive histories modelled on the work of the philosophes. He was able to disentangle complex webs of historical events and reveal their hidden meaning. Yet he never simplified nor made history sterile. His accounts stressed history’s dynamic and complex nature. Tocqueville was enthralled by Guizot’s ‘philosophical’ history. He saw at once how the principle of antagonism, so central to it, could be applied to a study of society, but also a defence of individual and political liberty.40 Here he combined Montesquieu’s political analysis of power checking power with Guizot’s concept of antagonism.41 Tocqueville saw at once how the institutional focus of Montesquieu’s analysis of power checking power could be strengthened by the more social, historical and internal focus of Guizot’s concept of antagonism. He saw too how it would correct shortcomings in other parts of Guizot’s famous History of Civilization in Europe. Whilst Tocqueville enthusiastically embraced Guizot’s analysis of the second lecture which stressed that the principle of antagonism resulted in liberty,42 he rejected an overall conclusion of the History which celebrated the demise of ‘the traditional liberties’ and the rise of a ‘new and more concentrated and regular’ power in the form of the state.43 He thought this legitimised excessive centralisation, the very thing Guizot appealed to the generation of the 1820s to undo. Tocqueville believed the break on centralisation existed in Montesquieu’s thesis on power checking power. Adopting Guizot’s concept of antagonism enabled him to give a portrayal of society and history that was both dynamic and complex. Retaining Montesquieu’s thesis that power checked power allowed him to depict political institutions in a like manner. The combination of both assured that liberty remained at the centre of his work. In support of liberty, Tocqueville was naturally brought back to Montesquieu’s sublime defence of that value in The Spirit of Laws, but he was also

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drawn to the work of earlier moralists such as Pascal, and, to a lesser extent, Montesquieu’s near contemporary, Rousseau. He attached special relevance to how their ideas on individual morality and social discipline were important to a rigorous defence of human freedom. He also found inspiration in Say’s works, not only in the political economist’s advocacy of economic freedom and the ethical value he attached to individual industriousness and thrift as critical to individual independence, but also in Say’s assessment of middle-class moderation as important to political liberty.44 Tocqueville held liberty to be a sacred value, but one under threat. He judged the danger to be real but hidden from view. The providential rise of democracy overturned the ancien régime where liberty was revered as a sacred value but one enjoyed only by a few. While democracy allowed all individuals to benefit from equal liberty, paradoxically, it was the equal right to freedom that undermined its lofty status. What Tocqueville observed was that the hidden threat to liberty in democracy was from the very value that allowed for its universal enjoyment: equality. In order to understand how this came to be we must direct our attention to his analysis of democracy, and for that we must return to Democracy in America.

Equality, the principle of democracy Tocqueville began his study of American democracy with a recollection. In it he emphasised the concept that both anchored his analysis and around which orbited all other concepts that emerged from that analysis. Equality of conditions was the ‘nodal point’ of democracy and of Democracy in America: No novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions. It was easy to see the immense influence of this basic fact on the whole course of society. It gives a particular turn to public opinion and a particular twist to the laws, new maxims to those who govern and particular habits to the governed. I soon realized that the influence of this fact extends far beyond political mores and laws, exercising dominion over civil society as much as over the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to feelings, suggests customs, and modifies whatever it does not create. So the more I studied American society, the more clearly I saw equality of conditions as the creative element from which each particular fact derived, and all my observations constantly returned to this nodal point.45 That Tocqueville should find equality of conditions the central concept of the American republic was not surprising; after all, thinkers well before Montesquieu argued that republics were based on egalitarian organisation. Nor was it particularly surprising that he should conclude that equality exer-

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cised dominion over all aspects of political and social life in America. Say had already shown in the Traité d’économie politique that republican manners ultimately depended on the egalitarian distribution of wealth, which enabled citizens to live above a level of poverty and below that of excessive affluence.46 Moreover, Guizot’s historical method, which emphasised the interrelationship between the internal and external elements of civilization, had shown that every social organisation stamped on the human spirit a certain direction, gave it a body of general ideas that reflected its broad principles and underlay and sustained it throughout its existence.47 Tocqueville also learned from both Say and Guizot that societies could be treated like facts, akin to other facts and therefore open to analysis. Just as Guizot considered civilization a general fact, and European civilization as entering ‘into the eternal truth, into the plan of Providence’,48 so Tocqueville understood democracy.49 But if the general fact of democracy was providential, what of its particular elements: were they providential too? To answer to this question was easy, and Tocqueville began his response by analysing democracy’s central concept, equality. In this he imitated Guizot, who had traced equality’s development in the introduction to his Histories. Tocqueville followed suit by sketching equality’s development from the beginning of the first millennium, through the Crusades and the English wars. Equality of conditions developed slowly but steadily. As the principal characteristic of democracy, at times synonymous with democracy itself, equality of conditions affected all classes and all the nations of Christendom. Now universal and permanent, it was the singular characteristic, the discernible trait, in democracy’s ‘irresistible revolution advancing century by century over every obstacle’.50 Despite the striking similarities between Tocqueville’s and Guizot’s sketches of equality’s historical development, Tocqueville’s understanding of democracy and equality of conditions was distinctive in a number of important ways. First, he transformed Montesquieu’s understanding of the relation between equality to its corresponding form of political regime, democracy. Second, he altered the way Guizot characterised civilization. He selected and combined the strongest elements from both thinkers. Just as Guizot understood civilization, so Tocqueville conceived of democracy as a social condition. At the same time, however, he recognised it as a political regime, just as Montesquieu had done. By using democracy to describe, on the one hand, a social state, and on the other, a political regime, he was able to draw the distinction between the political and social meanings of the term and thereby emphasise its external and internal elements. While, as we have already seen, there were important methodological reasons for this, there was also an important ideological reason. Democracy as a political regime was understood as equating political right with sovereignty of the people. However, the failure of the French Revolution meant democracy became equated with anarchy and despotism, perverted forms of popular sovereignty. Democracy was feared for its revolutionary potential and acquired pejorative connotations, but

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Tocqueville believed in the high ideals of 1789. He believed political right sprang from popular sovereignty. He shared these ideals with liberals like Benjamin Constant and Doctrinaire liberals like Royer-Collard. For this reason he sought to dispel the pejorative connotations democracy acquired.51 His strategy here was first to follow the Doctrinaires by highlighting the social meaning of democracy, like them, he characterised democracy as a new egalitarian society. With it came a new configuration of manners, sentiments, customs, laws and institutions. This new society, defined by equality of conditions and equality before the law, was radically different from the small democratic republics of the ancient world. Ancient democracies were rooted in the sovereignty of the people, but modern democracy was defined by equality of conditions and equality before the law, not as sovereignty of the people.52 The great advantage of defining democracy sociologically, as a new type of society, was that the fundamental criticism marshalled against political democracies by reactionary conservatives such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, that popular sovereignty led to anarchy or despotism, was not relevant to modern democratic societies.53 Yet Tocqueville’s method required that he not abandon a political definition of democracy. And for that he returned to Montesquieu. Though Tocqueville drew much from the Doctrinaires, he did not imitate them. He went further than them in the way he understood both the social and political meaning of democracy. His initial analyses of social issues which featured in The Penitentiary System in the United States contributed to deepening his understanding of the social meaning of democracy and, therefore, of its internal elements. This served to enhance his understanding of the relation between private and public morals and political virtues, thereby contributing significantly to his understanding of the political meaning of democracy.54 His analytical method and early investigations into social issues served to justify his use of Montesquieu’s older concept of popular sovereignty over the Doctrinaire theory of representative government based on the concepts of the sovereignty of reason and political capacity.55 He thought these latter concepts were too closely wedded to the state, a state which would ultimately corrupt private and public morals, undermining political virtues, an idea he expressed in his judgement of the events of the 1830 Revolution and one he would later point to as the cause of France’s long series of revolutions.56 The kind of link Tocqueville established between democracy’s social and political meanings was an important departure from Doctrinaire liberals like Guizot whose own sociological definition of democracy had enabled him both to subsume democracy to the wider social state of civilization,57 and later, upon becoming Louis-Philippe’s chief minister, to advance a conception of a rational state able to transform, and ultimately organise, society on rational principles.58 Tocqueville, as we have seen, sensed the theoretical possibility of this in Guizot’s work. He was sure to have noticed that Guizot failed at crucial points in his Histories to distin-

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guish clearly between political and administrative centralisation. This was the case in Guizot’s eleventh lecture on The History of Civilization in Europe in which the historian argued that administrative and political centralisation were crucial to the civilising process. Tocqueville certainly agreed that political centralisation was important to civilization,59 but he believed excessive administrative centralisation eroded local liberties, undermined individual independence, and ultimately destroyed political virtues by eroding individual and public morality.60 It was in this that he was closer to Montesquieu’s work. Montesquieu had argued that all political regimes were governed by a particular principle: tyrannies by fear, monarchies by honour, and republics by virtue. Tocqueville understood this but, in drawing on Guizot and the method set out in Say’s Cours complet, he showed how the governing principle of a particular political regime could be better understood if one ascribed greater relevance to social conditions that governed social states than Montesquieu had done. In America Tocqueville observed the way political institutions and laws combined the political principle of republics, virtue, with the political principle of monarchy, honour. America showed how both virtue and honour were combined in democracy. Whereas Montesquieu contended that virtue in the republic was most strongly displayed in a passionate love of country, and that honour in monarchy was attached to codes of conduct defined by rank, Tocqueville showed how social conditions influenced political principles. He argued that in a democracy, because of equality of conditions, honour lost its association with rank and virtue became less passionate. Honour became generalisable throughout society. At the same time it became vague and was reduced to general maxims. It lacked the kind of very strong influence it possessed in monarchies. Virtue was affected no less differently. Equality of conditions ensured it became softer, less passionate.61 This softening of virtue and honour, the softening of the principles of political regimes, was a consequence of the development of commercial relations which eroded class barriers and promoted equality and individual liberty. This was something described by Montesquieu,62 but it was an important point made by Say who, in making it the focus of political economy, used it in defence of modern republicanism.63 As we discussed earlier, Tocqueville learned a great deal from studying Say and the extent of the political economist’s influence in shaping Democracy in America (1835) is significant. Tocqueville’s description of American democracy resembled uncannily Say’s description of the market economy in the Cours complet. America embodied the spirit of commerce and industry, it permeated the whole society and marked the entire population.64 Americans, were, as Tocqueville described them, heroic traders.65 The spirit of commerce and industry was an important element in ensuring that individual Americans were capable of governing themselves and resisting attempts to be governed by a central authority. This went some way to

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explaining why the young republic was ‘the land of provincial or township government’, par excellence.66 It was an astonishing example of a nation whose citizens governed their own affairs, and where public administration was extraordinarily decentralised. Like the movements of an invisible hand, America appeared to work of its own accord.67 Say’s political economy was tailor-made to Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy. In Say, however, Tocqueville would not have found, as he was later to do in Malthus and Villeneuve-Bargemont, that Montesquieu’s thesis on political checks and Guizot’s sociological principle of antagonism extended into political economy. Say’s influence would at first eclipse what Tocqueville later recognised in Montesquieu, Malthus and Villeneuve-Bargemont. This was that liberty could be secured in a context where the branches of the economy, agriculture, commerce and industry, were checked one against the other.68 Say’s early influence ensured that Tocqueville failed to make significant use of this idea until he began work on Democracy in America (1840). Once he had begun writing it he realised that the assumptions about political economy he had been working with had serious limitations when applied to an industrial society that he judged to be different from Say’s idea of industrie. Democracy in America (1840) used concepts and a framework of analysis that took account of that transformation, and it made important use of Malthus’s and Villeneuve-Bargemont’s analyses of the branches of the economy and their relation to liberty. In Democracy in America (1835), however, it was Say’s influence that was determinant. His method and description of the market economy were perfectly suited to an study of America. His political economy, which focused on the general underlying principles to the nation’s economy, also directed Tocqueville’s attention to the external factors of American democracy. These factors ensured both the commercial prosperity of the young republic and its political and social achievements. It is to an analysis of these that we must now turn.

The institutions of American democracy In Chapter Nine of the second part of Democracy in America (1835) Tocqueville summarised the three principal causes that made American democracy great; it was a distillation of the central themes of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws. The first causes were geography and climate. The second was the particular nature of America’s laws and political institutions. The third was the customs and manners of the Americans. The ‘accidental situation’ in which ‘providence’ had placed Americans referred to the nation’s geography, climate, and natural resources. He stressed the importance of her geographic position: territories bordering on America had no hostile intentions and America itself was a vast and ‘empty land’. The ‘limitless continent’ gave Americans both the means to remain ‘equal and free’ and it also freed the nation from the pressures of population growth which haunted European states which Malthus so vividly described in his Essay. Easy access to land

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insured Americans were ‘continually leaving their birthplace and going forth to win vast far-off domains . . . into the central solitudes of America’.69 The ready access to land and wide distribution of property contributed to Americans’ fierce spirit of independence and their liberty. In addition to being blessed with a vast territory, America had no great capital city to speak of. This, for Tocqueville, was a great advantage for any federal republic. A weak capital ensured that its direct or indirect influence could not be ‘felt through the length and breadth of the land’. With a weak capital city public administration could remain very decentralised, guaranteeing that ‘every village is a sort of republic accustomed to rule itself’.70 A feeble capital city was one of the principal reasons why republican institutions were so vigorous throughout the United States. This contrasted sharply with his assessments of Paris in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.71 Whilst Tocqueville repeatedly emphasised that providence had blessed America with physical circumstances conducive to republican government, he was keen to stress the important role laws, the constitution and political institutions played in maintaining the vitality of the republic. This occupied most of Part One of Democracy in America. His analysis revealed the extent to which he made use of Montesquieu, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jean-Louis De Lolme’s The Constitution of England. The chapters of Part One indicate the extent to which he understood how the tension between liberty and equality was mirrored in a tension between aristocratic and democratic elements in a nation’s constitution. For Tocqueville, as for Montesquieu and De Lolme, the political success of any just regime depended on the proper balance between aristocratic and democratic elements within it. In this he was also influenced by The Federalist Papers and James Kent’s Commentaries on American Law.72 He was impressed by Kent’s account of how the founding fathers of the American republic were careful to achieve the exact balance between aristocratic and democratic elements in fashioning the republic’s laws and constitution.73 This successful balancing was crucial in his analysis of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, and was one of the great strengths, as he saw it, of American democracy. Tocqueville found instructive the way democratic and aristocratic elements were balanced in the legislative branch. His analysis of the relation between the two houses of congress in Chapter Eight of Part One and Chapter Five of Part Two offered an unflattering portrait of the House of Representatives. He was ‘struck by the vulgar demeanor’ of this assembly of ‘obscure people whose names form no picture in one’s mind’, and lamented its ability to make laws, but in contrast to the democratic House of Representatives, Tocqueville praised the aristocratic Senate. It contained ‘a large proportion of the famous men of America . . . eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and noted statesmen. Every word uttered in this assembly would add luster to the greatest parliamentary debates in Europe.’74 The genius of the American constitution lay in the way it com-

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bined within the legislative branch a coarse, untutored, democratic House of Representatives with an elevated, enlightened, aristocratic Senate. That these two regimes should exist side by side in the legislative branch was the result of the genius of an electoral system that ensured members of the House of Representatives were chosen by direct universal suffrage, while members of the Senate were elected indirectly, chosen in two stages: ‘All citizens together appoint the legislature of each state, and then the federal Constitution turns each of these legislatures into electoral bodies that return the members of the Senate’.75 Though both assemblies were the result of universal suffrage, the senators elected were the result of an indirect choice, one mediated through state legislatures. According to Tocqueville this was the beauty of the American electoral process. In choosing senators the popular will ‘passed through’ the state assemblies. This ensured it became ‘in some sense refined’, emerging ‘clothed in nobler and more beautiful shape’. The result was ‘the men elected always represent exactly the ruling majority of the nation, but they represent only the lofty thoughts current there and the generous instincts animating it, not the petty passions which often trouble or the vices that disgrace it’.76 The workings of the judiciary as an aristocratic check on democratic assemblies, particularly the federal judiciary’s ability to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional, was another characteristic of the American constitution that attracted Tocqueville’s attention. It was ‘one of the most powerful barriers ever erected against the tyranny of political assemblies’.77 The workings of the jury system in civil and criminal law, discussed in Part Two Chapter Eight, was also important to Tocqueville’s analysis of the relation between democratic and aristocratic elements in America’s laws and institutions. It may also have been important to him as a lesson to the French for whom the jury, subject to many changes from the time of the Revolution, was the most unstable element in their system of justice.78 Whereas his analysis of the legislative and judicial branches praised the judicious balancing of aristocratic and democratic elements, however, his assessment of the executive branch was critical. Here he highlighted how the balance was lost. Tocqueville’s analysis of the Presidency underscored a weakness of the office. He showed how the role of head of state was increasingly subject to the will of the majority. It was severely undermined because it anticipated the majority’s ‘complaints’ and bent ‘to its slightest wishes’. This development contrasted sharply with what the founding fathers had envisaged for the Presidency. They believed the office would act as an aristocratic check on the democratic impulses of the nation. The President would guide the majority. He would fulfil the aristocratic role of leader and educator. Instead, the President had become ‘a docile instrument in the hands of the majority’. This loss of an important aristocratic check on the democratic majority ‘exposed the country to dangers every day’.79 Whilst much of Part One of Democracy in America dealt with geography,

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laws, and political institutions, the second part was concerned with the customs and manners of the Americans. This section was important to Tocqueville’s analysis for two reasons. First, because the customs and manners of a people mark their political and social institutions; internal elements influence the external ones. Second, because he perceived that there was an intimate connexion between customs and manners, and ideas and beliefs. In this way the preliminary analysis of internal elements he began in 1835 he later deepened in 1840, customs and manners being more readily observable than ideas and beliefs. Whilst Americans were a democratic people who, like all democratic peoples, loved equality before liberty, Tocqueville discovered that Americans shared a number of characteristics which were more commonly associated with aristocratic peoples than with democratic ones. He observed that America was a nation whose surface was ‘covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through’.80 Why was this? And what were those characteristics America shared with aristocracies? In the second chapter of Part One Tocqueville contended that the early English settlers of America had a much more developed ‘acquaintance with notions of rights and principles of true liberty than most European nations at the time’. From the time of the first immigrants the institutions of local government, ‘that fertile germ of free institutions’, were cherished by America’s settlers.81 He noted that puritans were among the largest group to emigrate to America, and he thought their religious convictions embodied the ‘most absolute democratic and republican theories’.82 He concluded that the American colonies, particularly those in New England, acquired a homogeneous population that resulted in a democracy ‘more perfect than any of which antiquity had dared to dream’.83 The results of this were twofold: first, New England ensured that the principle of liberty was applied more completely than anywhere else on the globe; and second, the application of the principle of liberty was one of the main reasons for the prosperity of these colonies. Ensuring that the principle of liberty was thoroughly applied in New England was not difficult. The puritan settlers had a fierce love of independence, but one that did not verge on anarchy, nor one that precipitated a fear of being alone; in this they were unlike the French, as he had already observed in The Penitentiary System in the United States.84 American independence was tempered by strong religious conviction.85 Anarchy was avoided because religion led to ‘enlightenment and the observance of divine laws which leads men to liberty’. And religion ensured that men transcended their fear of being alone because it focused their minds on another world, offering them peace and inner strength. Two distinct elements ‘which elsewhere have often been at war with one another’ had somehow become incorporated into each other, ‘forming a marvellous combination’. Here Tocqueville was reminded of Montesquieu’s account of the English ‘who ha[d]

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best known how to take advantage of . . . religion, commerce, and liberty’ by marrying the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.86 It was a union Tocqueville believed instructive to the French. He had sought to promote it in 1833–4 when, in contemplating establishing a new review, he set out his thoughts on its editorial policy which was to ‘promote the spirit of Christianity in politics’.87 Though this enterprise failed he remained faithful to this idea, which was to become one of the most important ambitions of his political career.88 This powerful combination of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom ensured that the liberty Americans enjoyed was more akin to a fierce individual independence, the kind of liberty Tocqueville ascribed to aristocracies rather than democracies. Here Guizot’s fifth lecture on the History of Civilization in France could not have been far from his thoughts. In Guizot’s discussion on the fierce spirit of independence among feudal lords and their life of isolation, he stressed that in their solitude the feudal lords acquired a singularity of spirit that erupted with energy.89 Tocqueville asserted the same of the Americans of New England. But whereas the feudal lords of the Middle Ages spent their energies in grandiose enterprises, for instance the construction of castles or cathedrals, or in destructive engagements, such as war, Americans expended their energies in the much more mundane, but decidedly democratic, pursuits of commerce and industry. New England presented a clear picture of the origins of a market society, and this was of great interest to Tocqueville. Understanding the origins of market economies was a way of comprehending their development and attendant difficulties.90 In a move that owed a great deal to Pascal and Rousseau, Tocqueville added a significant dimension to liberal analyses of the relation between liberty and commerce. Liberals like Smith or Say argued that commerce prepared men for liberty. Tocqueville endorsed that opinion but he also endowed liberty with the autonomous power to create the conditions for commercial prosperity. Here, liberty was conceived as independent of its associations with manners, customs, modes of thought, and laws. At the same time, however, Tocqueville never abandoned the belief that commerce was the foundation of liberty. He frequently reiterated Montesquieu’s dictum that commerce prepared men for freedom;91 he also agreed with its principal conclusion: the middle classes were the body of the nation in which its liberty, public spirit and good government was rooted.92 But he also believed, like Rousseau, liberty to be a value independent of market society.93 He frequently understood liberty ‘in the same spiritual terms’ Rousseau ‘reserved for virtue’. As he put it: ‘Liberty is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one other thing that merits more that designation: that is virtue. But then again what is virtue, if not the free choice of what is good’.94 By thinking of liberty as a supreme moral value, Tocqueville endowed it with an evaluative potential it did not have in the works of liberals like Smith or Say. Societies which did not have liberty as their supreme value were, in Tocqueville’s

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mind, judged harshly. And as we shall see in the chapters to follow, this idea drove him to assess the very society that prepared men for liberty more critically than either Smith or Say could have imagined. This would prove to be one of the most original and innovative aspects of Tocqueville’s thought. It enabled him to stress presciently dangers attendant in democracy.

Liberty and commerce Liberty and commerce were the source of America’s prosperity. Liberty ensured commercial activity and prosperity, and commerce prepared men for liberty.95 It was this mutually reinforcing relationship that featured so prominently in the pages of Democracy in America (1835), ensuring the work was judged optimistic and classically liberal in its assessment of democracy. However, Tocqueville’s exposition of this relation was not without problems. He frequently worked with the arguments put forward by liberal political economists like Say that commerce and industry secured liberty, but, as we have just discussed, at other times he presented liberty as an independent value which alone secured commerce and industry.96 His frequent declarations that he loved liberty above all other values, that he was ‘disposed to worship it’, are indications of this.97 Important influences contributed to elevating liberty to a supreme value. Pascal and Rousseau ensured that he regarded liberty like virtue. They believed commerce corrupted virtue, that it was a threat to liberty. Yet Tocqueville continued to contend that commerce prepared men for liberty. This oscillation between understanding liberty as independent of commerce and liberty as stemming from commerce reveals the extent to which Tocqueville struggled to unite aspects of pre-Revolutionary liberal thought with the new doctrines of liberal political economy. That he was unable to effect this union satisfactorily was perhaps the result of his letigimist beliefs which made it difficult for him to embrace fully the kind of liberal-republicanism so powerfully shaped by the Idéologues. Nevertheless, he did try to formulate a way in which liberty and commerce formed a virtuous and reinforcing relationship. In order to do this he began by breaking down the relationship into its constituent elements, employing the analytical method he applied to the whole society, deconstructing a priori that relationship. Tocqueville set out to develop an account of how commercial activity ensured the vitality of liberty by highlighting both the puritan and middle class origins of the American colonies, particularly New England. Just as Montesquieu and Say had done before him, Tocqueville worked with the assumption that property guaranteed personal independence and hence was fundamental to individual liberty.98 Property ownership was widespread in America. The easy accessibility to land, intelligent laws on inheritance, and widespread acceptance of puritan morals which elevated industriousness and shamed idleness, all coalesced to ensure both that property was put to productive use and ownership was widespread: providing the conditions for

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liberty and equality. The analysis not only drew on important elements from Say’s Cours complet, it also endorsed Say’s political and social ideal.99 That liberty and equality were enjoyed by the majority made the United States unique among nations. America represented something entirely new. Never before had citizens of a nation enjoyed the high degree of liberty and equality Americans did. It was a context very different from that which eighteenth-century thinkers like Montesquieu and Smith were familiar with. They could not conceive of this level of liberty and equality. Indeed, Smith had almost no ‘place for equality within his frame of reference’.100 But it was a context and argument of which Idéologues like Tracy and Say were fully cognisant. Tocqueville attached great importance to Say’s thoughts on manners and wealth as being ultimately dependent on a certain degree of egalitarian distribution, which in turn was the consequence of individual industriousness. Say believed Smith’s Wealth of Nations was the key work and inspiration to toil and industry. What aspect of Smith’s work was so attractive to Say and Tocqueville? It was emulation as the driving force behind the desire for individuals and classes to improve their condition. Emulation served as the foundation to an egalitarian commercial society characterised by affluence generated by toil. According to Smith the middle classes were driven to become highly industrious in their desire to emulate the wealth and status of the aristocracy. This, in turn, created the conditions for human improvement and extended civility. Despite important negative consequences attached to class emulation, a positive principle was clearly discernible: the middle classes were the driving force behind social improvement and general civility, or, as Malthus later put it, they were ‘that body on which the liberty, public spirit, and good government of every country must mainly depend’.101 Whereas Smith dealt with societies marked by significant class divisions, Tocqueville observed something different in America. There, the principle of emulation worked differently. Because America was governed by equality of conditions, the divisions between classes were neither fixed nor insurmountable. Democratic ‘laws and habits hinder[ed] the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few individuals’.102 While there were important inequalities of wealth between Americans, there was no particular class which could hinder the advancement of others, nor were there unbreakable social barriers preventing individuals from seeking their personal advancement. The whole society was directed to accumulating riches. The ‘road to riches and fortune [was] open to everybody no matter from where they start[ed]’. A ‘restlessness of spirit and a greed for wealth’ drove all Americans.103 In America emulation was narrowed to the accumulation of wealth. Tocqueville, like Say, acknowledged that there were important economic and social benefits to be derived from the accumulation of wealth. Unlike the political economist, however, he worried about a society driven by the narrow consideration of accumulating riches.

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Tocqueville understood, as Smith had recounted in The Wealth of Nations, and Say in both the Traité d’économie politique and the Cours complet, that private parsimony and capital accumulation were key ingredients to human progress.104 He also recognised, however, just as Pascal and Rousseau had, that individuals’ single-minded quests for wealth corrupted individual and civic virtues. Yet by the time he started writing the second volume of Democracy in America he gave this moral and political critique greater impetus than either of them by linking it to Guizot’s sociological concept of antagonism, but in a way unimaginable to the historian. Whereas Guizot believed the principle of antagonism was the dynamic force behind the forward movement of history, Tocqueville thought the principle could be extinguished if a single element came to dominate all others. This, he concluded, was what happen to the middle classes. In their triumph over other classes – and Tocqueville believed the Revolution of 1830 was the sign of their definitive triumph105 – their ambition to accumulate wealth would become a universal social value, and thereby narrow the human spirit. Tocqueville feared this development would render society mediocre. The end of the historical process, as he saw it, would be the triumph of mediocrity over greatness.106 Remarks in the first volume of Democracy in America suggested that the United States showed signs of this development.107 At the same time, however, there existed a sufficient number of constitutional and legal barriers embodying aristocratic principles that acted as a check on this development. The union of religion and liberty was also an important obstacle. However, as early as 1831 Tocqueville expressed in a letter to Kergorlay his anxieties about greed’s corrupting power over public morality. As the desire for wealth increased, the aristocratic, legal and religious checks on middleclass power would gradually weaken.108 The issue reappeared frequently in Tocqueville’s writings, and was the overriding theme of his 1847 essay The Middle Class and the People. As we have already seen, Tocqueville highlighted the egalitarian and middle-class origins of the American colonies. What presented itself as confirmation of Montesquieu’s remarks on the spirit of commerce within democracy was the fact that for Tocqueville the society had neither become entirely mediocre nor dominated by an aristocracy. Earlier writers like Volney had offered theories to explain this. Their accounts were far from satisfactory, resting on ideas about Americans lack of conviviality, or the nation’s climate, or, more intelligently, her laws.109 Tocqueville thought the answer lay not only in the characteristics singled out by Montesquieu or Say, the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order and rule,110 but also elsewhere. With the large numbers of European immigrants arriving daily no dominant aristocracy could emerge in America; the society remained overwhelmingly middle class. How was this egalitarianism and middle-class homogeneity sustained? There were a number of important factors, some of which I have enumerated; others

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cannot be explored in depth here, but will be dealt with later.111 As we have already seen, the country’s geography, Americans’ strong Protestant work ethic, and laws which made inheritance easy, were important to the wide distribution of property in America. All of these contributed to ensuring property was both widely distributed and put to productive use, but another factor, one relating to America’s geography, was also crucial. In Chapter Nine of Part Two, Tocqueville highlighted an important cause which maintained democracy in the United States. Migration westward whose ‘ultimate results’ might be ‘hidden in the future’ created ‘immediate consequences’ that were ‘easily seen’.112 Migration was the valve that released population pressures and assured a wide distribution of landed property. The analysis Tocqueville proposed here was perfectly in tune with what had been discussed by Malthus in his Essay. Tocqueville dismissed the claim made by previous visitors to America that ‘the wildernesses of America are peopled by European immigrants arriving annually on the shores of the New World, while the American population grows and multiplies on the soil occupied by their fathers’. Instead, he contended that it was Americans themselves who were inhabiting the interior whilst European immigrants were acquiring industrial employment ‘in a half-filled country where industry is perpetually short of manpower’. Where the European immigrant ‘becomes a comfortably off workman, his son goes to seek his fortune in an empty land and turns into a rich landowner. The former accumulates the capital which the latter puts to good use, and neither foreigner nor native suffers poverty’.113 Tocqueville was eager to show that this was a practice widespread throughout the republic. Though laws in the United States favoured as wide a division of property as possible, a powerful motive influenced beliefs and customs that favoured primogeniture. According to Tocqueville ‘providence’ had re-established primogeniture ‘without complaint from anybody, and just for once it does not offend equity’.114 The consequences of this, as Montesquieu made clear in his analysis of commercial republics, was a wide distribution of useful property which ensured a father’s children were ‘led to flee luxury and work as he did’.115 This desire for Americans to move westward, sustained by their fierce spirit of independence and psychological fearlessness in the face of extreme solitude, was a phenomenon entirely new to Tocqueville: ‘Nothing in history is comparable to this continuous movement of mankind except perhaps that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire’.116 But what incited and maintained it? The answer was remarkably simple, although what it implied was both complex and new. Americans flocked to the interior of the country to make their fortune: Millions of men are all marching together toward the same point on the horizon; their languages, religions, and mores are different, but they have

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one common aim. They have been told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west, and they hasten to seek it.117 Though there was nothing new in individuals seeking their fortune, what was novel for Tocqueville was the extent to which the whole of the society seemed to be directed to that enterprise.118 In European societies with which Tocqueville was familiar, the single-minded pursuit of wealth was usually confined to the middle classes. At the bottom of the social scale there were the poor and at the top the aristocracy. The poor, ignorant and oppressed by their condition, found themselves locked in a kind of stupor from which they could not emerge. The consequence was that their material conditions hardly improved. At the other extreme, however, the aristocracy was much too concerned with maintaining its honours and status than to be driven to accumulate fortunes. Thus it was the middle classes, desirous of emulating the aristocracy, who were driven to accumulate fortunes – and they directed all their energies to that end. America, however, presented something entirely new. Americans lived with a rate of circulating wealth that was rapid and constant. This ensured that most fortunes were equal. Though there might be a ‘few rich men in America’ wealth circulated ‘with incredible rapidity’. The consequence was ‘that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favours’.119 This ensured society remained characterised by equality of conditions. Tocqueville observed that in emerging democratic societies, such as England and France, where social conditions were still marked by caste and class divisions, wealth operated to some extent as a lubricant for social ascent. In America, however, these kinds of divisions did not exist. One could not ‘trace any family or corporate influence’ to which the lower classes might aspire. The result was that all individuals were ‘more nearly equally powerful, than in any other country of the world or in any other age of recorded history’.120 He concluded that all individuals concentrated their efforts in a single direction, that of acquiring wealth.121 The result was that in America emulation was more akin to imitation. Americans’ incessant quest for wealth Tocqueville found unsettling.122 Whilst his Jansenist inspired beliefs and his aristocratic sensibilities ensured that he regarded with disdain the unrestrained pursuit of wealth, he was unable to formulate exactly what it was about the relentless acquisition of wealth that was so threatening; after all, Say positively welcomed it, and Montesquieu himself believed the spirit of commerce ensured that the wealth it produced had ‘no bad effect’.123 What worried Tocqueville was that those admirable elements of the spirit of commerce – frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order and rule – were corrupted by a spirit of greed. But how? It became one of Tocqueville’s most important

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concerns and one which took up much of his intellectual energies after completing Democracy in America (1835). While he understood a number of the difficulties that accompanied Americans’ relentless quest for wealth, Pascal, Montesquieu and Rousseau having helped him appreciate its dangers, he was not entirely satisfied with lessons he drew from these thinkers, nor was he entirely content with his own analysis. There appeared to be so much more that escaped his framework of analysis, and this made him uneasy. Yet his understanding of democracy as a social state enabled him to see where the limitations to his framework of analysis lay. Already by the autumn of 1834, when he continued to be engaged with Beaumont and Kergorlay in establishing a political review, he insisted that the paper should attack financial greed and the narrow materialism to which commercial democracies were prone.124 Most importantly, understanding democracy as a social state drove him to examine those issues that eroded individual and public morality. By the beginning of 1835 he applied himself fully to examining social issues. The knowledge he acquired from these studies he used to overcome the shortcomings of the first volume of Democracy in America. In 1834 and 1835 he studied Malthus and Villeneuve-Bargemont. The latter’s Économie politique chrétienne was a devastating attack on liberal political economy, particularly Say’s; it was also one of the most robust nineteenthcentury critiques of unfettered capitalism. In 1835 Tocqueville wrote his first report on pauperism, and he travelled to the industrial cities of England to better understand the effects of industry and the conditions of the poor. These studies enabled him to theorise the relation between democracy, social justice and revolution, a theme central to his 1836 essay The Social and Political Condition of France Before the Revolution. They contributed significantly to a more thorough understanding of the threat posed by materialism and greed to democracy. His observations appeared in the pages of Democracy in America (1840), his political writings of the 1840s and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.125 Whilst the differences between the earlier and later volumes of Democracy in America are great, it is clear that in the early work Tocqueville struggled to reach a firm conclusion about democracy. His method, which stressed the external elements of that social condition, made any conclusion impossible. It was not until 1840, after he studied the internal elements of democratic society, that he was able to offer a clear judgement. Nonetheless, in 1835 he singled out an important element that would assist him in linking the two works, and that was self-interest rightly understood. This point needs emphasising, for though scholars have focused on the concept of selfinterest rightly understood, they have not readily acknowledged that Tocqueville, through his studies of political economy and social issues, was able to show how self-interest rightly understood could be perverted. In this way he was able to stress with remarkable prescience and clarity the hidden dangers within democracy.

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Instinct and reason: self-interest and safeguarding liberty As we have already seen, Tocqueville emphasised those internal and external elements that made America a successful republic. The strength of religious belief among Americans was successfully allied with their spirit of liberty and the vitality of religion and liberty were assured by an important number of other elements. America’s constitution, the administrative organisation of the national and state governments, the legal organisation of the nation, the role of a free press and the large number of active associations all contributed to both a highly developed public spiritedness, a spirit of association, among Americans and active individual participation in the political process at all levels. These elements also coalesced in a way that allowed Americans to live by a doctrine of self-interest rightly understood.126 Tocqueville’s understanding of this doctrine can be traced directly to his study of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws and Say’s Cours complet. Like them, he understood how individuals’ perceptions of their own interests were frequently faulty. Conceit, love of dominance and the love of ease were the most important factors that rendered individuals’ understandings of their interests flawed. This was a working assumption throughout Democracy in America (1835), made explicit in a number of instances.127 And though it was not until 1840 that he gave the doctrine a thorough treatment in Chapters Eight and Nine of Part Two, it did receive a serious examination in the earlier work. There is therefore at the bottom of democratic institutions some hidden tendency which often makes men promote the general prosperity, in spite of their vices and their mistakes, whereas in aristocratic institutions there is sometimes a secret bias which, in spite of talents and virtues, leads men to contribute to the afflictions of their fellows. In this way it may come about that under aristocratic governments public men do evil without intending it, and in democracies they bring about good results of which they have never thought.128 Tocqueville’s understanding of the unintended consequences of pursuing self-interest was an inventive adaptation of Montesquieu’s principle of false honour in a monarchy.129 While virtue, the love of law and community, the principle of the republic, was Montesquieu’s favoured value, it was not a value required of subjects of a monarchy. In direct reference to Aristotle’s discussion on the perfect state,130 Montesquieu contended that well-regulated monarchies ensured that almost every citizen was a good citizen, but they could almost never ensure that good citizens were good men.131 Rather, the monarchical state subsisted ‘independently of the love of our country, of the thirst of true glory, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of our dearest interests, and of

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all those heroic virtues which we admire in the ancients’.132 Its principle, honour, was the feeling of what each man knows he owes his rank and station, ‘the prejudice of each person and each condition’. Honour was tied to codes of conduct attached to rank, but false honour involved the clever manipulation of these codes to the ends of the state. What was peculiar about false honour was that in manipulating the true honour useful to private persons, false honour became useful to the public. False honour acted in a manner akin to ‘gravitation’ drawing every individual ‘toward the public good, while he was thinking only of promoting his own interests’.133 The emergence of false honour and its beneficent effects showed how the qualities of private morality could be turned to public benefit. False honour was a conscious manipulation of individual ambition to the ends of the state. Here the monarch and his advisors made use of individual ambition in a way that benefited the state; they could even manipulate the character of courtiers, ‘ambition in idleness, meanness in arrogance . . . desire to enrich oneself without work’ to the public good.134 Tocqueville’s inventive adaptation of the principle of false honour lay in the way he linked it to commercial society. Montesquieu contended that commerce evened out differences between manners, debasing pure ones but polishing and softening barbarous ones.135 He also argued that it was ‘against the spirit of monarchy for the nobility to engage in commerce.’ For commerce corrupted the principle upon which monarchy rested: honour. This in turn weakened monarchical government.136 In undermining honour, it also weakened the monarch’s ability to manipulate honour; it eroded the potential for false honour. At the same time as the monarch’s ability to manipulate honour to public benefit was weakened, however, it was replaced by a providential, or mysterious, force. In this way private interest was directed to public benefit but without the intervention of the monarch or state. Through reciprocal dependence and the satisfaction of mutual need, the spirit of commerce according to Tocqueville, but not for Montesquieu, united individuals.137 Thus Tocqueville used Say’s description of self-interest and its unforeseen consequences in the workings of the invisible hand to complete his innovative interpretation of false honour: The common man in the United States has understood the influence of the general prosperity on his own happiness, an idea so simple but nevertheless so little understood by the people. Moreover, he is accustomed to regard that prosperity as his own work. So he sees the public fortune as his own, and he works for the good of the state, not only from duty or from pride, but, I dare almost say, from greed.138 Just as Say had recognised, so Tocqueville also understood there were limits to self-interest. Say believed self-interest was one passion that could be taken

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for granted. He shared this conviction with Smith.139 They believed self-interest to be entirely natural. Tocqueville accepted this idea uncritically, but like his predecessors he understood that there were severe limits to the uncontrolled exercise of this natural passion. This primitive instinct that ‘comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave’, as Smith described it,140 created important difficulties for any society which placed a high value on liberty.141 An individual driven by this natural passion might, if he were powerful or crafty, secure his independence, but self-interest could not safeguard the liberty of all individuals in a society. As a natural passion self-interest might, as Smith recognised, be the seed of individual liberty but nothing more. In order for a free society to emerge from individuals’ pursuit of their own interests, their conduct needed to be tempered. Reason was the faculty that ensured this. According to Say self-interest could secure liberty but it could do so only if it was allied to reason, if it was rationally pursued. Tocqueville understood this immediately. He recognised self-interest could act as the foundation to liberty only if it was informed by enlightenment and experience.142 He appeared to have discovered this rational pursuit of selfinterest in America. Its citizens avoided anarchy, secured liberty, ensured peace and order, and achieved prosperity for the nation: Nothing strikes a European traveller in the United States more than the absence of what we would call government or administration. One knows that there are written laws there and sees them put into execution every day; everything is in motion around you, but the motive force is nowhere apparent. The hand directing the social machine constantly slips from notice.143 What was it that ensured Americans rationally pursued their self-interest? Why did self-interest in America take the form of a rationally informed passion rather than an uncontrolled natural passion? Tocqueville believed the answer lay in the origins of the republic. Americans had, by the time of their revolution, acquired the experience and enlightenment necessary to ensure self-interest was rationally informed. A long apprenticeship in the exercise of liberty with its love of order and legality had guaranteed that Americans had the maturity necessary to ensure the rational rather than instinctually informed fulfilment of their self-interest: The Revolution in the United States was caused by a mature and thoughtful taste for freedom, not by some vague, undefined instinct for independence. No disorderly passions drove it on; on the contrary, it proceeded hand in hand with a love of order and legality.144 There were, however, other factors that caused self-interest to be rationally informed among Americans. What were they?

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The cultivation of self-interest rightly understood Americans’ political maturity, their love of law and order, their common sense, were all part of their long apprenticeship in the exercise of liberty which, in turn, was sustained by a number of important elements. When these elements were combined judiciously they ensured individuals pursued their self-interest rationally.145 Tocqueville’s choice and analysis of these elements did not vary considerably from what had been done before him. From Montesquieu and Say he used the idea that democracies founded on commerce could temper coarse egotism because the spirit of commerce, as we have already seen, ‘brings with it the spirit of frugality, economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order, and rule.’146 Equally, according to Montesquieu, religion cultivated between individuals sentiments of fellow feeling, sympathy, and benevolence. It also directed individuals’ attention to spiritual concerns, obligations and considerations, and these took them beyond their daily and material preoccupations. In this way religion acted as a foundation for association.147 But above all Tocqueville thought religion led to ‘enlightenment and the observance of divine laws’ and this led ‘men to liberty.’148 Like his predecessors, especially Smith and Say, Tocqueville stressed the role of education in fashioning the manners and customs of a people. Like religion, it acted as a break on commerce’s unwanted effect at undermining the civic bonds of association. Along with teaching the importance of civility, good manners and public spiritedness, Tocqueville found education in America within everyone’s reach. It created a middling standard for all human knowledge, and served to foster ‘a vast multitude of people with roughly the same ideas about religion, history, science, political economy, legislation, and government’.149 Though this kind of uniformity in belief Tocqueville judged oppressive, he was heartened by the extent to which education prepared individuals for public life and good citizenship.150 This, for him, was one of its chief benefits. Like education, associations also served to draw individuals into public life and away from their private concerns.151 The marrying of these elements – religion, reason, education and association – ensured that in America ‘every village is a sort of republic accustomed to rule itself’.152 Tocqueville believed the spirit of association important, and that the spirit which emerged from associations was akin to a social bond, an interclass fellowship. His observations here may have been intended to influence political debates during the early years of the July Monarchy on the nature and importance of associations to social and political life.153 Along with emphasising the importance of reason, education and association, Tocqueville also signalled the role personal introspection, patriotism and civic virtue served to curb the instinctive character of self-interest, rendering it more moderate and rational. In directing self-interest toward rational ends all of these factors were part of the Jansenist canon. That they

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should be rigorously examined in Democracy in America is not surprising. What is interesting in Tocqueville’s treatment of them is the extent to which he never lost sight of his aim: to show how the instinctive passion of selfinterest could be made rational, mature and moderate, thereby serving the ends of liberty. What was new in his analysis was the way he saw liberty itself as something that could transform self-interest into a rational pursuit.

Liberty and self-interest rightly understood The extent to which liberty ensured a rational pursuit of self-interest was emphasised in Tocqueville’s analysis of the American system of townships, particularly in Part One Chapter Five. Making important use of essays by Chabrol and Blosseville, but particularly Jared Sparks’ Observations on the Government of Towns in Massachusetts and his father’s Coup d’œil sur l’administration française, Tocqueville focused on the concept of local, or communal, liberty.154 He began his account of local liberty by stressing its origins in communal society or the township. These forms of association were both natural and providential: The township is the only association so well rooted in nature that wherever men assemble it forms itself. Communal society therefore exists among all peoples, whatever be their customs and their laws; man creates kingdoms and republics, but townships seem to spring directly from the hand of God.155 After observing that communal society was natural, providential and ‘coeval with humanity’, he went on to comment on how local liberty was ‘a rare and fragile thing’.156 As an ancient value, local liberty was embraced by the freest peoples of the globe, the English and Americans, but as society became less natural and more civilised the difficulties safeguarding local liberty increased rather than diminished. He believed a ‘very civilised society finds it hard to tolerate attempts at freedom in a local community; it is disgusted by its numerous blunders and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is finished’.157 This impatience of older and enlightened peoples with communal or local liberty was entirely understandable. Local liberty needed the participation of all individuals in society. This ensured that the coarsest and most uneducated elements were given a voice in public affairs. The consequences of this, as Tocqueville noted, were frequently disheartening; republican governments ‘frequently behaving badly’.158 Individuals in democracies were driven by self-interest which interfered with their ability to discern the public interest. Habitual inattention to such things was ‘reckoned the great vice of the democratic spirit’ and this led the republic to make mistakes.159 Individuals in democracies were easily susceptible to flattery and demagoguery, they were frequently seduced by despots eager to dis-

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pense with their liberties. Yet despite these concerns and the frequent misadventures of local liberty, Tocqueville firmly believed that it was a value to be cherished above all others. Local liberty ensured the prosperity, durability and ‘strength of free peoples’. Above all, it spawned the spirit of liberty: Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty.160 Local liberty was interesting and instructive. It served to direct self-interest but at the same time acted in accordance with it. It rendered self-interest rational, but was aided in doing so by appealing to self-interest itself. The curious nature of local liberty Tocqueville stressed in his discussions on the principle of sovereignty in townships and on administrative decentralisation in America. He showed that as each individual shared equally in exercising political power he learned to obey society because he benefited directly from that participation and obedience. Each person obeyed ‘society not because he is inferior to those who direct it, nor because he is incapable of ruling himself, but because union with his fellows seems useful to him and he knows that union is impossible without a regulating authority’.161 Having shown that local liberty was useful to individuals, Tocqueville showed the extent to which it served as an ideal as well. Local liberty, anchoring itself in individual self-interest, tended to make individuals more altruistic. Starting with, and appealing to, individuals’ self-interest, local liberty acted to create a socially beneficial outcome. As with false honour, individuals’ attention, though firmly tied to their personal concerns, was subtly, cleverly, and almost mysteriously directed toward the interests of others and society at large: In the United States the motherland’s presence is felt everywhere. It is a subject of concern to the village and to the whole Union. The inhabitants care about each of their country’s interests as if it were their own. Each man takes pride in the nation; the successes it gains seem his own work , and he becomes elated; he rejoices in the general prosperity from which he profits. He has much the same feeling for his country as one has for one’s family, and a sort of selfishness makes him care for the state.162 Local liberty was able to direct self-interest to wider social, altruistic, ends. This was its great strength, but Tocqueville believed local liberty also offered other important benefits. It worked to educate individuals in their own independence. With individuals participating in matters of state and the administration of their own affairs, local liberty revealed how Americans had

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shown that ‘the collective force of the citizens will always be better able to achieve social prosperity than the authority of the government’.163 Local liberty also worked to strengthen individuals’ independence of spirit and at the same time their adherence to the laws. As each participated in government, the law and the public officials who administered it were seen by individuals as the people’s servants whose powers were bestowed through consent rather than imposed by authority or power. The contrast to continental Europe could not have been greater. There, the ‘public official stands for force’, but in America he stood for right and it was ‘fair to say that a man never obeys another man, but justice, or the law’.164 This gave the law an almost sacred quality. Local liberty strengthened individuals’ obedience to laws because the laws sprang from the individuals themselves. It made individuals’ spirit of independence strong. It imbued all of their undertakings with ‘striving and animation’. Extinguishing local liberty by subjecting it to a rational and centralising administration, what Tocqueville later ascribed to the way in which Roman law served the interests of European states,165 might ensure a more refined orderliness and ‘check slight disorders and petty offences’ but it also detached individuals from their own fate and rendered them indifferent to everything around them. Subject to ‘those little details of social regulations which make life smooth and comfortable’ and deprived of the right to shape one’s destiny, the individual, under ‘administrative tutelage’, was rendered both helpless and indifferent such that, as Tocqueville put it, his ‘detachment from his own fate goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is in danger, instead of trying to ward the peril off, he crosses his arms and waits for the whole nation to come to his aid’.166 Deprived of the power to govern himself and participate in the governance of his community, this same individual is reduced to the status of an infant who, deprived of enlightenment and reason, knows only his narrow self-interest: this same man who has so completely sacrificed his freedom of will does not like obedience more than the next man. He submits, it is true, to the caprice of a clerk, but as soon as force is withdrawn, he will vaunt his triumph over the law as over a conquered foe. Thus he oscillates the whole time between servility and licence.167 Tocqueville believed administrative centralisation, which deprived individuals of their communal freedom, might ensure they remain subjects but it did not make them citizens. Worse, administrative centralisation created ignorant and indifferent subjects governed by passion and force alone. It was for him a form of despotism that could ‘maintain nothing durable.’168 Tocqueville’s praise for local liberty was an appeal to the French to consider seriously its value, a concept and practice now ‘contrary to our ideas and opposed to our habits’169 but one, as he would later show in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, held dear by the French in the distant past.170

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His critique of administrative centralisation was informed by his Jansenism and Malthusian attacks on the English Poor Law and its imitation in the state of Maryland. Tocqueville, like the Malthusians Channing and Tuckerman, believed a Poor Law system deprived individuals of the habits of self-reliance, prudence and industriousness. His ideas may also have been informed by his observations of prison regimes. Prisons, in disciplining and ensuring order and regularity in every aspect of a convict’s life behind bars, strove to break the prisoner’s will and were systematic in depriving individuals of every opportunity of exercising their own initiative. While this may seem an extreme form of centralised and disciplined regime, it must be remembered that Tocqueville all too often spoke of administrative centralisation and despotism as though they were synonymous.171 Tocqueville’s assessment of administrative centralisation was made harsher than it might have been because centralisation contrasted so starkly with the clear benefits offered by the local liberty he observed in the New England system of township government. Sparks’ assessment of township government clearly appealed to Tocqueville. New England was a useful model for him, though it was frequently conflated beyond its bounds, Tocqueville more than once mistaking what was specific to New England as generally American. Whilst local liberty offered numerous and clear benefits, there were also severe limitations to it. If left reliant upon unenlightened and undisciplined self-interest, local liberty posed considerable dangers. Yet these hazards were more the consequence of unenlightened and undisciplined self-interest than natural outcomes of local liberty itself. Local liberty was a value that needed to be preserved, for it spawned the spirit of freedom, the root of individual liberty itself. As Tocqueville made very clear: ‘Those who fear license and those who are afraid of absolute power should both, therefore, desire the gradual growth of provincial liberties.’172 It was an opinion he reiterated throughout all of his work, including his Souvenirs and particularly The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Nonetheless, local liberty was anchored in individual self-interest and this was its weak point; it could be easily swayed, corrupted and undermined. As we shall see, Tocqueville foresaw a number of causes weakening enlightened self-interest, rendering it immoderate and undisciplined. Over all, however, Democracy in America (1835) offered a positive assessment of the relation between self-interest and local liberty. If the favourable assessment of that relation was to endure, however, the hazards threatening freedom had to be pointed out.

Instinct and self-interest: the threats to liberty America presented the spectacle of a country in which local and state legislative assemblies were ‘constantly absorbing various remnants of governmental powers’ and appropriating them ‘all to themselves, as the French Convention did’. This meant that the power of society, the authority of the

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majority, not only became more centralised, but also, because it was invested in representatives and therefore ‘subject to the people’s power’, more fluid because it was ‘constantly changing hands’.173 The consequences were both numerous and dangerous. The first was the way citizens’ opinion of themselves and their own judgements moved from being ‘often exaggerated but almost always salutary’ to becoming exaggerated and damaging. Tocqueville was aware that there was a fine line between a people’s healthy opinion of themselves and one that was pernicious. Two factors in particular contributed to rendering that conviction deleterious, but a fuller discussion will have to follow later. Briefly, as the ancients had shown, demagogues overinflated a people’s opinion of itself by constantly flattering and manipulating it. In such a case people then came to see its interests as the same as the interests of politicians. Related, though different from demagogic flattery, was the emergence of the courtier spirit. This spirit, salutary in monarchies, was entirely destructive in democracies. It came to penetrate the minds of the great mass of the population, creating the conditions that ‘put the spirit of a court within reach of the multitude and let it penetrate through all classes at once’; this planted the seeds of despotism.174 The other corrosive influence, and this was much newer, although it had been highlighted by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century moralists, was that of wealth and material comforts. By equating their self-interest with prosperity and material comforts, citizens came to see their civic duties and obligations as irritating intrusions into what was really important to their lives: acquiring wealth and possessions. The long-term consequence of this was that citizens began to neglect their civic duties leaving more space for their representatives and the state to acquire greater functions and act with greater impunity. There was another danger associated with this. Montesquieu argued that the pursuit of wealth and material comforts undermined the bonds of community and created a condition whereby ‘traffic in all human activities and all moral virtues, the smallest things, those required by humanity, are done or given for money’.175 The consequence of this was that individuals developed a ‘certain feeling for exact justice’, directing their attention to the state in order to settle disputes. This was confirmed by Tocqueville in his observations of the American judicial system.176 But where the quest for wealth and material comforts threatened democracy itself was when, as Montesquieu had shown, the interest of commerce and industry coalesced with the interest of the state.177 In ‘countries of liberty’ commerce and industry found ‘innumerable obstacles’, but in ‘countries of servitude’ the ‘laws never thwart[ed]’ them.178 It was a conclusion Tocqueville endorsed.179 When self-interest ceased to be rational and moderate, the lawmaking authority became unstable, representatives changed frequently and the laws themselves were constantly altered. These were clear signs indicating the corruption of a democracy. They were features Montesquieu singled out,180

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and ones Tocqueville emphasised. The state of France during the Revolutionary period was a classic example of a democracy becoming corrupt. American democracy revealed the ‘difficulty in conquering the passions and silencing momentary requirements in the interest of the future’.181 While Tocqueville believed Americans had mastered this problem thus far, the French had not. For this reason it was important to show how instability in the law-making authority resulted in increased administrative centralisation. To this end he focused on weaknesses and developments within American democracy that might be instructive to the French. With political power in America concentrated in the hands of the people, its representatives were subject to its changing opinions. Tocqueville observed that representatives who looked forward to the community’s long-term future and enacted legislation that was far-sighted seldom remained representatives for long and their legislative enactments were quickly reversed. Worse, he saw that judicial power in several states tended to fall into the hands of the general populace. Judges, subject to election and the interference of the electorate, lost their independence. Driven to maintain their jobs, they based their legal opinions less on the principles of justice than on the demands, perceived or real, of the electorate; an important aristocratic check on democracy was lost. Whilst these American developments were worrying and analogous to changes in France, what concerned Tocqueville most was the principal issue discussed at length in Chapter Seven of Part Two: ‘The omnipotence of the majority in the United States and its effects’. This chapter, one of the most famous of Democracy in America, is also the least rigorous.182 Tocqueville treated a number of diverse elements. His analysis oscillated between factual and legal issues, and between political concerns and sociological considerations. This required the reader to work hard to discern whether he was speaking of the faults and failures of democracy in general or whether he was dealing with the observable excesses in certain states of the American republic.183 These limitations were almost certainly due to inadequacies in a framework of analysis rooted in Montesquieu’s work, but they were also due to his attempts to combine such a framework with elements he derived from the sociological approach of the Doctrinaires. It is clear that his analysis of the omnipotence of the majority revealed the extent to which he exceeded the bounds of Montesquieu’s framework which could not help him understand fully what was qualitatively new about a form of tyranny that was long understood as an ancient phenomenon. What is not clear is the extent to which Tocqueville was fully aware of that by the time he completed Democracy in America (1835); he certainly recognised those limits well before the completion of the second volume in 1840.184 Despite these limitations, Tocqueville offered one of the most far-reaching and prescient accounts of the dangers posed by, and inherent within, democracy. In his account of the omnipotence of the majority, Tocqueville described it as having ‘gone even beyond the laws’. It had grown to such strength that

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it weakened the constitutional and legal barriers erected against it by the founding fathers: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This threatened liberty and all that made America great: ‘A custom is spreading more and more in the United States which will end by making the guarantees of representative government vain.’185 Tocqueville examined all of the facets of the omnipotence of majority rule, from its effects on the law to its repercussions on individuals’ ideas and thoughts. In every instance he described how the majority had ‘degraded’ itself, its enlightened self-interest reduced to a coarse, untutored passion. His analysis of the omnipotence of the majority was startling and innovative. He began by characterising it as a custom, a social phenomenon, an internal element of democracy. This was an important consideration because it enabled him to move beyond more traditional accounts of majority rule which focused exclusively on majority political power or authority. By identifying the omnipotence of the majority as a social phenomenon, he was able to examine its moral authority upon individuals and society at large. He justified this consideration thus: The idea that the majority has a right based on enlightenment to govern society was brought to the United States by its first inhabitants; and this idea, which would of itself be enough to create a free nation, has by now passed into mores and affects even the smallest habits of life.186 In revealing how majority right had passed into ‘the smallest habits of life’, Tocqueville was able to direct the reader’s attention to the complex relation between private and public morality and the laws and institutions of democratic government, and between the internal and external elements of democracy. It was in this way he made an original adaptation of Montesquieu, Say and Guizot. Though Tocqueville and Guizot understood democracy as a social state, the historian tended to neglect the role of the individual in society, and failed to discern the important relation between individual and public morality. Tocqueville never lost sight of this important relation. The influence exercised by eighteenth-century moralists like Montesquieu and Rousseau upon his thought ensured that. But the way in which he adapted Guizot’s historical method and that of Say’s political economy to society meant that he was able to give real depth to the relation between the spirit of a people, which placed a considerable emphasis on individual morality, and the principle of its government. This was the first step in defining a liberal spirit within democracy. After the publication of Democracy in America (1835) it would help Tocqueville to distinguish between what the writer Charles de Rémusat already characterised in his 1818 La Révolution française as the two spirits within democracy: liberal and revolutionary.187 Already in Democracy in America (1835) we can discern in Tocqueville’s analysis of the omnipotence of the majority a vague awareness that there

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was more to the phenomenon than what he was able to describe. Lapses in his argument, but more importantly a lack of clarity at crucial points in his discussion, reveal that there was more to the phenomenon than he then recognised. Perhaps this was the origin of the conceptual distinction he made in 1836 between revolutionary spirit and the noble spirit of the Revolution.188 At important points in Democracy in America Tocqueville described the omnipotence of the majority in terms similar to the way he described revolutionary fervour: an unstoppable power. The institutional guarantees limiting majority power, guarantees he spent so long describing and praising, seemed impotent against this new social power. In his chapter on the omnipotence of the majority, and contrary to earlier and later pronouncements, Tocqueville asserted that in the face of majority power there were no institutional checks, a vast and revolutionary force having swept them away.189 Where he was normally careful to distinguish between the governments of individual states and the federal government, the two were confused in this chapter, the crucial distinction relegated to a footnote at the end. In that note he contended that in the governments of the individual states ‘a despotic majority is in control’. The federal government, however, offered sufficient institutional guarantees against despotic power.190 The lack of clarity and the lapses in his argument here may indicate he believed these federal checks would also succumb to majority power. Tocqueville’s thoughts on the French Revolution could not have been far from the front of his mind. For he would, within a year of Democracy in America’s publication, make that link between extreme equality and the revolutionary ‘spirit which is very easily combined with the love of an absolute government’.191 Having determined the historical origins of majority rule, Tocqueville proceeded to argue that its political and ethical legitimacy lay in ‘the principle that the interest of the greatest number should be preferred to that of those who are fewer’.192 He contended that this principle was reinforced by the general condition of equality that existed amongst the inhabitants of the United States. As individuals were roughly equal, there was ‘no natural or permanent antagonism between the interests of the various inhabitants’;193 nor was there a powerful minority, such as an aristocracy, that could oppose and effectively resist the power of the majority – though as we shall see in Democracy in America (1840), Tocqueville revealed how a new aristocracy and powerful minority would emerge from conditions of equality, and, in perfecting the courtier spirit, a spirit that was both ‘vile’ and ‘corrupt’, ensure that majority rule served its exclusive aims.194 Having determined the immense political power and authority of the opinion of the majority, Tocqueville was quick to show how this power was also capricious. Americans were restless, in a constant state of agitation; when allied with an omnipotence of majority rule the consequences for the lawmaking authority and the laws themselves were entirely predictable. So, too,

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were the effects upon public administrative activity. As the majority in America acted in a rapid and absolute manner, Tocqueville noted the extent to which Americans undertook certain improvements with a zeal and energy that was unparalleled anywhere else. But he also noted that as soon as the majority’s attention turned to something else, its previous vigorous efforts ceased and energies were directed to something new. Administrative authority, which had no independent existence in relation to the legislator, the majority itself, was constantly subject to this kind of changing preoccupation. So, in presenting the example of prison reform in America, with the American public roused by the exhortations of various prison reforming societies to reform criminals, resulting in a ‘happy revolution in which the public cooperated with such eagerness and which the simultaneous efforts of the citizens rendered irresistible’, Tocqueville presented the striking paradox of a ‘majority preoccupied with the idea of founding a new establishment’, forgetting the already existing ones which continued to be used housing a great number of the guilty. The resultant spectacle was startling: ‘beside some prison that stood as a durable monument to the gentleness and enlightenment of our age, there was a dungeon recalling the barbarities of the Middle Ages.’195 Instability in the legislative authority, the laws and administrative execution of the will of the majority all pointed toward one possible outcome of the omnipotence of the majority: anarchy. It was an alarming conclusion. According to Tocqueville anarchy stemmed from either tyranny or democracy. This was an ancient and undisputed opinion. But what Tocqueville also concluded, and it was reminiscent of Montesquieu’s analysis of corruption of the principle of democracy, was that anarchy was not the consequence of a deficiency of political power but was the result of too much political power.196 In the case of democracy it was the result of too much power concentrated in the hands of the majority. Whereas ancient democracies collapsed because of conflicts between various factions or the ill use of their wealth and resources, America could be seen as an example of the dangers that threatened modern democracies. In this case, anarchy was a potential consequence of majority rule because the majority was both powerful and too capricious. Constantly changing the focus of its attention, its undertakings, and its laws, the American majority rendered politics, law and administration all unstable. Rather than leading to anarchy as a possible outcome, however, Tocqueville believed another outcome possible – administrative centralisation, or even despotism itself: ‘Moreover, I am convinced that no nations are more liable to fall under the yoke of administrative centralization than those with a democratic social condition.’197 How would this administrative centralisation come about in a nation which had neither perfected the art of administration nor ensured that administrative undertakings were free of legislative interference? Tocqueville considered a number of points here. For example, he examined the extent to which public officials in America were given much more freedom than

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their European counterparts to fulfil their duties within the sphere marked out for them, and frequently with the majority’s consent to go beyond those limits. Their scope was so wide that they were able ‘to do things which astonish a European’. There was, however, a deeper and more important consideration that attracted his attention. This was to show how the omnipotence of the majority touched individuals’ perceptions of their rights and liberties; how it undermined their ‘independence of mind and true freedom of discussion’, and how this created the conditions for the ‘general lowering of standards’ so that self-interest was divested of its enlightened and moderate character and reduced to a passion. In this way Tocqueville gave voice to an ancient criticism of democracy, but also warned of future dangers. In a remark all too reminiscent of Machiavelli or Montesquieu, he asserted that ‘nothing is more absolute than the authority of a prince who immediately succeeds a republic’.198 In a radical departure from both of them, he believed that prince to be the modern-day state. In his discussion on the omnipotence of the majority, Tocqueville showed the extent to which majority rule refused to recognise any limits to its power or authority. What was both striking and worrying about this was the extent to which the omnipotence of the majority undermined that ‘boundary to each people’s right’; how it undermined justice. His account of the tyranny of the majority revealed the extent to which he understood justice both in the non-utilitarian terms of natural right and as the embodiment of liberty. Utility, which anchored the ‘moral authority of the majority’, was ‘founded on the principle that the interest of the greatest number should be preferred to that of those who are fewer’.199 It served as the justification for the majority’s power which found ‘no obstacles that can restrain its course and give it time to moderate itself’.200 This placed freedom in danger. The great threat here was that majority rule contradicted the very principle upon which it originally rested, for individuals’ participation in the making of the laws, in their own governance, was anchored in the right of freedom and independence. Liberty, founded in right, was threatened by the very thing it spawned, majority rule. In placing itself above right and justice, majority rule disregarded the principle of individual independence, and in consequence developed in such a way as to undermine its own foundations. From this, it was a short step to administrative centralisation and despotism. By undermining right, individual independence and local liberty, the roots of the spirit of liberty were destroyed. The majority, having overrun individuals’ rights, extinguished their independence of spirit, and, in consequence, extinguished the source of its own vitality and power. Tocqueville thought this was why majority rule led to administrative centralisation. Deprived of their independence of spirit, individuals lost the initiative to engage in those undertakings which did not serve their narrow self-interest. While administrative centralisation was ‘almost unknown’ in America because of the nation’s size and constitutional and administrative arrangement which saw so many municipal bodies and county administrations acting

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‘like so many hidden reefs retarding or dividing the �