Democracy in America — themes & analysis

Tocqueville opens the book with a sentence that does the structural work of everything that follows. Among the new objects that, during my stay in the United States, attracted my attention, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions. Equality, in his usage, is not chiefly a matter of wealth or formal rights, though it includes those. It is a fundamental fact about how a society is organised — whether some people are born into recognised social superiority over others, with the deference, the manners, the inherited differences of station that follow, or whether everyone meets everyone else on the assumption of basic similarity.

The aristocratic order Tocqueville was raised in took inequality for granted as the natural shape of any human society; the democratic order he is observing in America takes equality for granted in exactly the same way. He insists that this is not one feature of America among others but the generative fact from which almost every other feature of the country can be derived. The shape of the family, the form of religion, the structure of the language, the relations between the sexes, the character of literature, the conduct of war, the use of leisure — all of these, on his account, take a recognisably different form once equality of condition becomes the basic premise of social life.

He is not making a moral judgment. He is describing a state of society and asking the question that follows: what kind of political and social order is possible on this foundation, and what kind of human being does it produce? The old supports for liberty — corporate bodies, hereditary classes, established churches, regional immunities — are weakened by equality; the question is whether new supports can be built. Tocqueville thinks this is the central political question of the next several centuries, and he is not yet sure of the answer.

The argument runs through both volumes. In Volume I it generates the analysis of institutions; in Volume II it generates the analysis of psychology. The restlessness of the American character, the passion for equality over liberty, the tendency toward individualism, the susceptibility to soft despotism — all of these, for Tocqueville, flow from the same source. To understand equality of condition is to understand the book.

Where to follow it: Ch 1 (the opening argument), Ch 4 (social conditions), Vol II Ch 1 (equality vs liberty), Vol II Ch 2 (individualism).

The chapters on local government in Volume I are the foundation of the whole political analysis, and Tocqueville is emphatic about it. The township is to liberty what primary schools are to science; it brings it within the people's reach; it teaches men how to use and how to enjoy it. He has just spent weeks in New England, particularly in Massachusetts, watching the town meeting at work — the assembly of all adult male citizens, gathered annually to elect officers, set the tax rate, fund the school, fix the roads, hire the constable. The institution is older than the federal government, older than the state government, older than the United States.

The contrast with France is the implicit theme of every page. France in the 1830s is heir to Napoleon's centralised administration, in which every prefect, every mayor, every schoolmaster is appointed from Paris and answerable upward. The French citizen has political opinions but very few political habits; he expects the state to act for him because that is what the state has always done. The American expects nothing from the state and a great deal from himself and his neighbours. The township is where this expectation is formed.

Strip it out, transfer its functions to a distant capital, and the citizen who has not learned to govern his own road and his own school is the citizen who, when democracy comes to him as a national affair, will not know how to keep liberty alive within it. Tocqueville's argument is not that local government is charming; it is that local government is the mechanism by which citizens become capable of self-government at any level. Without the habit, the rest is hollow.

The doctrine shapes the whole book. In Part 4 of Volume II, when Tocqueville warns against soft despotism — the schoolmasterly state that reduces citizens to timid animals — the danger he is naming is precisely the disappearance of the habits the township builds. The solution, in Volume I, is the same as the problem in Volume II: the question is always whether the citizen retains the capacity to govern himself.

Where to follow it: Ch 6 (the township), Ch 10 (the people govern), Vol II Ch 4 (free institutions), Vol II Ch 1 (taste for free institutions).

The phrase that became famous comes from the closing chapters of Volume I and has been quoted, contested, and absorbed into political language ever since. Tocqueville's argument is precise and not what casual readers assume. He does not mean simply that majorities can pass bad laws, though they can. He means that in a democratic society, where the majority is taken to be the source of all legitimate authority, the moral force of majority opinion can become so overwhelming that it leaves no real room for dissenting thought.

The royal courts of pre-democratic Europe had given offence to philosophers and dissenters in many ways, but they had at least been one source of authority among others, and the dissenter could move to a different city or country and find shelter. In a country governed by the majority, Tocqueville argues, this kind of escape becomes much harder, because the majority's reach is everywhere. I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. The individual learns, very early, to read the room and trim his views accordingly.

Borrowed by Mill in On Liberty, the phrase travelled into the English-language tradition as the standard name for one of the central dangers of democratic society. But Tocqueville's chapters are not purely diagnostic; they are followed immediately by chapters on the institutional restraints that America had built to contain the danger: the courts, the lawyers as a quasi-aristocratic profession, the federal structure, religion. The tyranny of the majority is a tendency of democracy, not an inevitability — if the right habits and institutions are in place.

Volume II revisits the problem from a different angle. The danger there is not that the majority will oppress a minority by law but that the very uniformity of opinion in an equal society will gradually extinguish the independent thought that makes liberty possible. The two analyses belong together: the tyranny of the majority in Volume I is the political form; the pressure toward conformity in Volume II is the social and psychological form.

Where to follow it: Ch 16 (unlimited power of the majority), Ch 17 (causes mitigating tyranny), Vol II Ch 1 (philosophical method), Vol II Ch 2 (principal source of belief).

Tocqueville is a Catholic from a Catholic country writing about a largely Protestant society, and one of his most surprising findings is the depth and political importance of American religion. In Europe, in the 1830s, religion and democracy are at war; the church is the ally of the old order, and the partisans of liberty are typically anticlerical. In America, Tocqueville reports, the situation is precisely reversed. Religion is the first of America's political institutions, even though it takes no direct part in the government of society.

The crucial discovery is disestablishment. Because no church is established by law, no church is dependent on the state; because no church is dependent on the state, no church has any reason to fear democratic change. Clergy of every persuasion told Tocqueville that the wall between church and state was the source of the church's strength, not its weakness, and that the European pattern of state-supported religion was, in the long run, suicidal for religion itself.

From this observation comes one of the book's most influential concepts, the mores — habits of the heart, in the famous phrase — the unwritten dispositions that hold a society together and on which laws and institutions ultimately depend. Mores, for Tocqueville, are at least as important as constitutions. A good constitution among a people without the right mores will not produce a free society; a sound set of mores can hold a free society together even under defective institutions.

The doctrine has run through American political thought ever since. In Volume II, Tocqueville extends the analysis: equality tends toward pantheism, toward a preoccupation with material well-being that crowds out the spiritual, toward an unmoored restlessness that religion can sometimes steady. The relationship between religion and democracy is not simple, but Tocqueville's consistent argument is that a democratic society without the restraints that religion provides on the passions is more, not less, vulnerable to despotism.

Where to follow it: Ch 18 (principal causes maintaining the republic), Vol II Ch 5 (religion and democratic tendencies), Vol II Ch 9 (religion and self-interest), Vol II Ch 15 (religious belief and immaterial pleasures).

The final part of Volume II, published in 1840, turns prophetic, and the prophecy is the part of the book that has most haunted later readers. Tocqueville is asking what kind of tyranny a democratic age might produce. The classical tyrannies of antiquity were brutal and personal; the modern despotisms of earlier centuries were extensive but still external. The new democratic despotism will look like nothing yet seen on earth.

Its citizens will not be flogged or imprisoned; they will be soothed, regulated, provided for. He pictures an immense and tutelary power that takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. It is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if its object were to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules through which the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannise, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. It is the most influential single passage in the second volume and probably the most influential prophecy in the book.

Twentieth-century readers have argued ever since about whether the welfare state, the regulatory state, the surveillance state, or some combination is what Tocqueville saw coming. What is not in dispute is that the page was written by someone who had thought harder than almost anyone of his century about what democracy could become if it lost its habits of self-government. The two volumes are connected by this anxiety: Volume I identifies the habits that keep liberty alive; Volume II traces what happens when those habits erode.

Where to follow it: Vol II Ch 2 (concentration of power), Vol II Ch 4 (causes of centralisation), Vol II Ch 6 (the new despotism), Vol II Ch 7 (what can save us).