ALAN D.HODDER TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1805–59)

ALAN D.HODDER TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1805–59)

Alexis de Tocqueville, politician, historian and sociologist, could trace his ancestors back to the time of William the Conqueror. The ancestral home was Tocqueville in Normandy though Alexis was born in Paris, the centre of the revolution that had broken out 16 years earlier. Though very much an aristocrat, Tocqueville was fated to live in the country where aristocracy had suffered its most spectacular defeat. Here, then, in the contrast between aristocracy and democracy we find the polarity that informs all his major writings.

The French Revolution of 1789 had culminated in the great terror of 1793–4 when, among many others, half a dozen of Tocqueville’s immediate relatives had been guillotined. His mother had watched her parents and grandfather being led to their deaths. Both Tocqueville’s parents had been imprisoned but were saved by the fall of Robespierre in July 1794. The next French revolution, that of July 1830, replaced the restoration monarchy of Charles X with the constitutional one of Louis-Philippe. It was less significant and violent than its predecessor yet still met with Tocqueville’s disapproval. He reluctantly swore allegiance to the new regime but took the opportunity to leave France for the USA. His nominal purpose was to inspect US penal institutions

Entries A-Z 673

and, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, a report was produced in 1833. His real concern, however, was to investigate democracy in its most advanced form and thereby understand a trend already influential in Europe. Tocqueville was in the USA for less than a year, from May 1831 to February 1832. It was a short visit but one put to distinctly good effect. His report, Democracy in America, appeared in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. It won him instant celebrity and remains his most influential work.

France was now experiencing revolution almost in each generation and, more explicitly than anyone else, Tocqueville saw the 1848 outbreak approaching. By then he had been closely involved in political affairs, having been a member of the Chamber of Deputies since 1839. The February 1848 revolution rid France of monarchy for the last time. In May Tocqueville was elected to the new legislative assembly and in June he became Minister of Foreign Affairs. Of those granted a personal entry in this Encyclopedia only BOLIVAR, DISRAELI, GUIZOT, LENIN and LINCOLN attained higher political office. Tocqueville’s elevation, however, was followed by rapid and self- induced decline. He resigned from ministerial office after just five months. Then, three years later he opposed Louis Napoleon’s coup of December 1851, was arrested and held for one day, and left public life for the tranquillity of his study.

Tocqueville, clearly, lived through a time of important political events and the revolutions in France were stark indicators of the wider egalitarian trend. Yet the most egalitarian society was the USA. It had emerged with a weaker and less historically entrenched aristocracy than those of Europe and so had advanced without generating formidable counter-movements. Though the USA might display the foremost egalitarian condition, a young society, necessarily, could not furnish evidence of long-term historical trends. For this Tocqueville looked to France. Contemplation of 700 years of French history confirmed its direction of social change. In France the importance of aristocracy had gradually declined. At one time nobility could only be inherited; by the thirteenth century it could be purchased or conferred. In the conflicts of attrition between the crown and the nobility either side might grant the common people influence in order to tip the scales of power in a desired direction. In this way even the kings had unwittingly become constant levellers. Gradually printing and the spread of education created opportunities for all classes. It seemed to Tocqueville that from the Crusades through to the introduction of municipal corporations, firearms, Protestantism, commerce, manufacture and the discovery of America, the egalitarian trend had been consistently advanced. He presumed that in time inherited class distinctions would disappear.

It was this process that Tocqueville termed ‘democracy’. We must emphasize that for him democracy was much more than what it is today, the name for a political system. Indeed the system itself, democratic politics, seemed to Tocqueville merely one aspect of the wider egalitarian trend. Democracy, then, was the movement that challenged the aristocratic society enjoyed by his forebears. This long-term development was far too deeply rooted in the character of society for any politicians or statesmen to alter it. The movement was all-powerful and inevitable. The only rational response was to accept it. Those of his class who still resisted were labouring in vain.

Like Marx (see MARX AND MARXISM) and COMTE, Tocqueville decided that society was advancing in an ascertainable direction, thought quite unlike them he believed that the moving force was God’s providential plan. Furthermore the God of Christianity favoured only the Christian nations. They alone were advancing in a

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 674

democratic direction. They would thus increasingly come to resemble each other while simultaneously becoming more distinct from the rest. Here again Tocqueville was a man of his time in the belief that only Western nations contained any social dynamism. From one perspective his notion of providence suffers the disadvantage of not being open to proof. However, it eminently suited Tocqueville’s purpose of winning over his own class of Catholic aristocrats to the new social order. The Church itself might have been closely linked to the ancien régime and the revolution to anti-clericalism, yet Tocqueville was reassuring his countrymen that God had not abandoned them. Modern society was part of God’s design and, therefore, Christians should reconcile themselves to the democratic order.

Conciliation, however, as Tocqueville wanted it, was far from resigned acceptance of all democracy’s tendencies. As a historian and aristocrat he saw modern society from a comparative perspective. Unlike today’s political science, where comparative politics usually indicates comparison between different contemporary states, Tocqueville chose to compare his own society’s past with its present. Though he accepted the latter, he was well aware of its dangers. In modern society equality of opportunity had removed many barriers to ability and effort, but the chance to rise also produced an equal chance to fall. Society, then, was more fluid and mobile. It became more restless and individualist, marked by what Tocqueville termed ‘unquiet passions’. The class solidarities that derived from a fixed position were in decline. Now no one knew their place nor on whom they could rely. In this situation the individual was weaker than before and more vulnerable to the social and political pressures that modern society created. Class implied a stratified hierarchy and this democracy seemed to destroy. Indeed it was definitional for Tocqueville that democracy was the broad egalitarian process. It seemed possible that a counter tendency might develop in the new ‘manufacturing aristocracy’. Its advantage was that talent from any source might ascend to great heights. This benefit scarcely compensated for what had been lost. Former classes had given their members a sentiment of solidarity. The highest class, the landed aristocracy, had also, at their best, felt a sense of responsibility for their social inferiors. It seemed unlikely that any new commercial class would match them in this respect.

We see intimations in Tocqueville of what were later termed ‘anomie’, ‘the lonely crowd’ and ‘the fear of freedom’. It seemed to him that democracy left individuals isolated while simultaneously exposing them to awesome new dangers. These were constituted by an old institution, the state, and a new sociological phenomenon, mass society. When protected from one, freedom could easily be lost to the other. Its survival was the greatest danger that modern societies faced. By the nineteenth century the state as such was not a new institution. What was novel was its current situation. In aristocratic societies a whole range of regional, occupational and religious organizations stood between the individual and the state. Tocqueville referred to these as ‘secondary powers’ or ‘intermediate associations’. Their own powers curtailed, filtered and distanced those of the state. In providing countervailing institutions of power, wealth, influence, privilege, expertise and control they furnished the space within which a modest but vital amount of liberty had been attained. Their number and diversity meant that general liberty benefited greatly from the impossibility of any one group achieving predominance.

Modern society provided a marked contrast. The secondary powers were getting weaker. The nobility was losing its privileges, the cities their independence and the

Entries A-Z 675

various provincial bodies had lost out to the increasingly centralized state. The danger now was that the type of participatory citizenship that Tocqueville so admired in New England might eventually fall under the sway of a centralized class of public officials. In this situation the scrutiny of public officials, the watchful suspicion and vigilance that was so central to the preservation of liberty, would be sacrificed. Public needs would no longer be met by the public themselves but by a growing band of officials upon whose shoulders tasks were willingly transferred and gratefully accepted. The power of the state might thus be fatally augmented by the complicity of both sides—an apathetic public happy to spare themselves the burden of participation and a Government intoxicated with the delights of unlimited control.

Such a society was one in which individual freedom finds no refuge. Democracy had so flattened out personal differences and peculiarities that anyone distinctive was endangered by the pressures of the conformist mass. Here, then, was democracy in its worst incarnation. The decline of intermediate powers that facilitates the emergence of an irresponsible, all-powerful state simultaneously results in the creation of what Tocqueville termed ‘mass society’. Now individual liberty is assailed on both sides, from the state above and the mass below, for where all are the same the majority is dominant and each is bound by its will. Democracy, then, threatens the very liberties it sought to secure. If the people are passive they become subservient to an all-powerful state; if they are collectively active they produce the ‘tyranny of the majority’ that crushes individual freedom. The US experience already exhibited these dangers, but it was in his own country that Tocqueville found still greater cause for concern.

Tocqueville had gone to the USA to see the future faced by France, for both were subject to the same overall plan. Yet frequently the particular seemed to disrupt Tocqueville’s general outline and nowhere more poignantly and depressingly than in the peculiarities of the French. In France it had not required modern democracy to produce centralized Government; that had already come about through Louis XIV. Furthermore France had moved to democracy through revolution while the USA had achieved it peacefully. In 1847 Tocqueville noted that the French Revolution of 1789 had destroyed all privileges except that of property. This it left as an isolated and exposed advantage in an otherwise egalitarian society. Tocqueville thus predicted the political battle between ‘haves and have-nots’ that resumed in the following year. He took socialism to be the essential feature of the revolution of 1848 and the one he disliked most. Tocqueville viewed socialism as the worst aspect of democracy. It set one class against another, glamorized violence, exalted materialism and confirmed state centralization. It thus seemed basically incompatible with the preservation of freedom. Democracy gave power to the lower classes but could not guarantee how they would be used. All it ensured was an equal society. It remained a fundamental yet still open question as to whether the people would be equal in liberty or equal under tyranny.

John Stuart Mill wrote long reviews of both volumes of Democracy in America, which did much to make Tocqueville known in Great Britain. Both writers shared a sense that their own commitment to liberty was insufficiently matched by others. Tocqueville’s analysis fundamentally influenced the important Chapter 3 of On Liberty, where Mill argued that the growth of mass society threatened to bring Western progress to a halt. On Liberty was published in 1859, the year of Tocqueville’s death. Tocqueville’s last major publication, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, had been published three years

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 676

earlier and was intended as the first volume of a more extended study of the revolution. Some of its themes, such as the slow decline of inequality, are already familiar to us, but here Tocqueville was concerned to show how a trend common to all countries had in France produced a revolution of unparalleled rapidity and violence. He noted how over the previous three centuries the French kings had detached the nobility from the people by drawing them into the court at Versailles. Gradually the local functions of the nobility ceased while their privileges continued, a disparity that created particularly strong resentment. Meanwhile the peasantry were being released from serfdom and many other antiquated restrictions. What the revolution destroyed, therefore, were merely the remnants of feudalism. Serfdom in Germany had survived much longer than in France, yet the revolution occurred not where oppression was greatest but, rather, where conditions were rapidly improving. This is Tocqueville’s famous and counter-intuitive revolution of rising expectations. He believed that ‘it is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary’ the most dangerous moment for an oppressive government is when it relaxes the pressure. It is then that popular protest is likely to begin. Consequently ‘the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways’. This analysis was made in respect of the fall of the Bourbons but has recently been applied to the fall of communism. Thus in his analysis of democratic tyranny Tocqueville has sometimes been regarded as an analyst of modern totalitarianism. In a strict sense this is obviously impossible. It’s better to say that Tocqueville’s analysis of the social basis of freedom later provided the basis for an analysis of totalitarianism, particularly through an understanding of the significance of ‘intermediate powers’. Without such institutions a society is in danger of totalitarianism; with them if fortifies freedom by creating a strong ‘civil society’. This latter term, much in vogue in respect of post-communist societies, is usually associated with Hegel, but the way it is now used exactly captures Tocqueville’s sense of the importance of having powerful, independent social institutions through which the strength of the state can be countered.

We end here with Tocqueville as sociologist, though he is hard to place under modern classificatory labels, whether as between the academic disciplines of sociology and politics or between the ideological movements of liberalism and conservatism. In the French Chamber of Deputies he sat as an independent between Government and opposition. He thus remained his own man, an example of the very independence and individuality that it was his life’s work to preserve.