Alexis de Tocqueville and the Moeurs of the Masses

82 Pages·2008·0.23 MB·English

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Chapter 1 - Alexis de Tocqueville and the Moeurs of the Masses

Paraphrasing, quoting, and citing Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) have long
been a part of American political argument. Tocqueville’s name has a peerless cachet
when it comes to bolstering claims about the United States, and the sum of this secondary
literature - especially that pertaining to Democracy in America - is astonishing. But
considering these stakes, Tocqueville has, surprisingly, rarely been the subject of
rancourous debate. While there certainly are different appropriations of Tocqueville’s
work, many of them converged around a reading which achieved a cultural permanence
in the post-World War Two period. In no other era did Tocqueville more forcefully serve
as a unifying figure than in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was seen to speak directly to
the issue of democratic vulnerability brought into view by wartime fascism and postwar
communism and, thereby, to gather intellectuals around shared analyses of
authoritarianism and democracy in his name.
Tocqueville served as a keystone for the era’s prolific pronouncements on “mass”
politics: a mode of political analysis that found wide circulation in postwar American
intellectual circles. According to these theorists, mass politics was a product of the
particular sociological conditions engendered by democracy which, for lack of a better
term, were gathered under the gloss: “mass society.” A mass society - of which America
stood as a prime example - was afflicted by despotic tendencies that emanated from an
equality (the democratic social condition) which tended to corrode healthy associative
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relationships and the lattice “of political and social authority characteristic of stratified
communities” that oriented individuals around consensual norms.1 As a result, people
become atomized - unconnected to the “central value system” - and were then vulnerable
to mass political mobilization. Drawing on Tocqueville, those who developed the mass
politics paradigm found democratic “activism” to be particularly appealing to these
“alienated” individuals in modern society who were not subject to binding social ties, or
mores. Having become “available” for political action and radicalization, these
individuals contributed to an activist or participatory form of democracy which was
singled out as one of the major threats of modernity; here political extremism was seen
not as a legitimate expression of discontent, but a symptom of mass or “populist”
engagement.2
This discourse was reliant upon a sociological analysis of those social and cultural
linkages that pull people together in system-stabilizing associations. Again, drawing from
Tocqueville, mass politics theorists used the separation of the social (non-political
associations, religion, values, status) and the political to explain people’s political drives
as products of underlying sociological causes. In attending to the “secret” sociological
causes of human conduct, American intellectuals fastened upon a shared set of social
values which, they claimed, ought to serve as the touchstone for legitimate political
agreement (and disagreement) and therefore as the substructure for a moderate politics

1
Joseph R. Gusfield, “Mass Society and Extremist Politics,” in the American Sociological Review, Vol. 27,
No. 1 (Feb., 1962), pg., 20.
2
Gusfield, pgs., 19-21, 26-28.
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devoid of extremism of the left or right. This approach to political theory also yielded
great results in the effort to undercut Marxist notions of class conflict. Political
radicalism, these theorists claimed, could only be understood as a product of social
causes and accordingly they viewed the political conflicts that emanated from divergent
economic interests as episodes in “social alienation.”
The result was a political theory grounded in an effort to redefine democracy so
as to insulate the masses from political mobilization and to incline politics towards a
quietist middle. This regnant postwar view rested on an often explicit belief that popular
democracy constituted a threat to the making of responsible political decisions, a belief
made unquestionable by a postwar characterization of the mass as incompetent and
manipulable by external forces and made unassailable by way of the authority of
Democracy in America.

I

Tocqueville’s celebrated call for a new “science of politics” in Democracy in
America was itself a statement about an entire generation in France attempting to forge a
new understanding of social equality and its inevitable corollary - political democracy.
His bid for a more usable and relevant discipline was conceived in the tumultuous
atmosphere of post-Revolutionary France in which a succession of ruling interests, from
the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) to the July Monarchy (1830-1848), failed to
establish broad appeal and social cohesion. During this period, the Crown did little to
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recognize the popular disaffection that was manifesting itself in calls for broader political
inclusion and labor reform. Stability and liberty seemed incommensurable, and though
attempts were made to reclaim pre-Revolutionary order, there was no going back. The
Revolution had created a new political consciousness, and an expanding and variegated
political community emerged with a taste for political mobilization. The eventual result
was the revolution of 1848. France’s political culture now seemed wedded to extremes:
despotism or revolution. Here, 1789 stood as that immutable object lesson of politics:
democracy could itself be dangerous.3
Alexis Charles-Henri-Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville was born in 1805, into a
well-connected, Norman family. Son of Hervé de Tocqueville and Louise de Rosanbo,
young Alexis had lost close relatives to the guillotine and almost lost his parents as well.
Recovery from political misfortune was robust for Alexis’ father who eventually became
a royal prefect during the Bourbon recrudescence. Tocqueville too, in 1827, and at the
minimum age of twenty one, entered public service as juge auditeur at Versailles. There
he met Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866), a colleague and eventually his lifelong friend.
Thanks to extraordinary ability and propitious connections, Tocqueville rose through the
ranks of royal service and in 1839, he was elected to the Chambre de Deputés, serving
continuously until 1848. There, Tocqueville made a prophetic speech on January 27th,
1848, claiming that the Orleanist regime and the French people “were slumbering now on

3
Roger Price, A Concise History of France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chap., 5;
Roger Magraw, France 1800-1914 (New York: Longman, 2002), Chap., 1; André Jardin, Tocqueville: A
Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), Chap., 5.
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a volcano.”4
Tocqueville’s public service in a time of precipitate change suggests that he was
not a reactionary. Despite having been part of the “defeated,” Tocqueville wanted to
participate in the thoughtful future development of the French polity and was unwilling
to endorse any artless return to authoritarianism as a shortcut to social peace. He was
equally concerned about the specter of revolution as a means of political change. Finding
this juste milieu was difficult enough, but that Tocqueville tried, despite his legitimist
past, has enamored him to critics. He recognized the need for a shared public philosophy
as the rivet that could secure the sensible democratization of French political life and his
trip to the United States was conceived in this moment of acknowledgment that French
democracy badly needed conscious direction. He and Beaumont, therefore, prepared for a
trip to the United States amidst political discontinuity and inchoate reform. Their stated
purpose was to survey the American penitentiary system - a topic of concern among
reformers - but Tocqueville’s real interest was an analysis of American democracy and
what it could teach France.5

4
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America trans., George Lawrence, ed., J. P. Mayer (1966; New
York: HarperPerennial, 1969), pg., 753; Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pgs., 4-6; Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), pgs., 8-12. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., André Jardin, (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), Introduction.
5Welch, 8,12; Roger Boesche, “Why Did Tocqueville Think a Successful Revolution was Impossible?” in
Liberty, Equality, Democracy ed., Eduardo Nolla (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pgs.,
165-185.
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Tocqueville and Beaumont reached New York on May 10th, 1831, and spent a
total of nine months in the United States with fifteen of those days spent in Canada.
They were eager to see the newest areas of settlement as well as the oldest and their
voyages, therefore, brought them to the margins of white settlement in Michigan and to
the centers of American privilege in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. They
survived a close call on the Ohio River, a nuisance on the Mississippi; they made it to
New Orleans, loved Québec and were, in the end, profoundly moved by the spectacle of
American democracy at work. The two travelers eventually returned to New York and
embarked for Le Havre on February 20th, 1832, a little over nine months after their
arrival. On their return to France, with copious notes in hand, Tocqueville and Beaumont
set to work. Retirement from the magistracy assisted the completion of their official work
- The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France - which was
published in 1833. This was Beaumont’s book though; Tocqueville contributed some
notes and other small details, but his thoughts and efforts were already taken with De la
démocratie en Amérique.6

II

There is a suggestive resemblance between Tocqueville’s France and Cold War
America. Tocqueville found himself caught between the despotism of the Crown and the
chaos of revolutionary politics. American intellectuals, writing in the 1940s and 1950s,

6
Drolet, 20-35. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., André Jardin (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), pgs., XIX-XXII
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found themselves caught between totalitarianism abroad and the threat of mass politics at
home. Not surprisingly, Tocqueville’s search for the juste milieu - a middle ground of
moderate politics - found a receptive home with American intellectuals seeking to occupy
a similar “vital center” between Manichaean opposites. The postwar Tocquevillian
revival was therefore rooted (much like the concurrent popularity of Max Weber) in an
appreciation of political sociology and its uses for a politics of democratic moderation.
Political sociology was a product of the European social theorists of the nineteenth
century among whom Weber, Tocqueville and Marx stand as its most distinguished
practitioners. A key element in the birth of political sociology was the delineation of the
difference between the social and the political out of which emerged new ideas about
democratic stability. For Tocqueville, such a mode of analysis was itself borrowed from
intellectual mentors seeking to understand and control the uncertainty of
post-Revolutionary French politics.
The crisis of political legitimacy that had been gathering strength in France since
the Revolution set in motion an intellectual effort to compass and characterize the
political and social discordances brought about by the gap between the people and their
leaders. French intellectuals developed a “science of the social” which was designed to
set in authoritative relief the social needs around which politics ought to be organized. To
some, the post-Revolutionary upheaval revealed how those in authority, enamored only
of their own political survival, neglected to address prevailing social demands.
Concerned only with its own incumbency, the Crown had proven unresponsive to popular
calls for reform and the resulting political instability led French intellectuals in search of
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a lattice of social laws that could help order politics. This nexus encompassed a body of
beliefs, experiences and cultural practices that were also reflected in official creeds, laws
and principles of the state.
At the forefront of this intellectual development were the Doctrinaires, a small
fraternity of French liberals who attempted to construct an intellectual grounding for a
stable, centrist politics amid the tumult of post-Revolutionary France. The Doctrinaires
raised fundamental questions about the nature of political analysis and human action, and
their efforts led them to develop new explanations of the relationship between politics
and the social structure. Specifically, they claimed that authority and legitimacy were
constituted within the social domain, which thereby determined, or ought to determine,
politics. In post-Revolutionary France, the ideological function of articulating a coherent
sociological approach to political theory that highlighted the dependence of political
institutions on a prior social order was not immediately clear - it could be used in an
number of ways - but, in all cases, it served to mitigate the capriciousness of state rule
and mass mobilization.7

7
There is some debate about Tocqueville’s assimilation of Doctrinaire ideas, especially those concerning
the primacy of the social sphere. For a perspective that suggests this assimilation to be substantial see
Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville and the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires,” in The Journal of
Political Thought XX, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pgs., 456-493 and his Liberalism Under Siege: The Political
Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). For an account that
claims Tocqueville never fully accepted the social determinism of the Doctrinaire paradigm see Welch,
“Tocqueville’s Resistance to the Social,” in The History of European Ideas 30 (2004), pgs., 83-107and
Welch, De Tocqueville, 15-17.
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A key figure here was François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) the
dominant minister in France during the July Monarchy, the leader of the influential
constitutional monarchists, and the author of, among other works, The General History of
Civilization in Europe (1828); The History of Civilization in France (1829-1832); and
The History of France from the Earliest Times to the Year 1789 (1872-1876). It was as a
historian - a Doctrinaire historian - that Guizot exercised the most profound influence on
Tocqueville. From 1828 to 1830, Tocqueville attended Guizot’s lectures on the history of
civilization in Europe and the history of civilization in France. Guizot’s History of
Civilization in Europe was the only book that Tocqueville asked a friend to send him
from France, a week after his arrival in the United States, and whose ideas in a letter to
Beaumont he described as “truly prodigious.”8

8Oeuvres complétes, ed., J.-P. Mayer VIII, (I), pg., 80. Hereafter as O.C. Craitu, 474; Drolet, 8-10.
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Guizot was a historian most interested in the philosophy of history and politics. In
Tocqueville’s hands it would become known as political sociology; Guizot described it as
the “physiology of history,” or the search for those clandestine laws which constituted
“the secret” of a nation’s “political destiny.”9 This “secret” turned out to be a complex
array of social and moral undercurrents that were closely connected and self-reinforcing
and culminated in a form of national fate. As such, Guizot’s intellectual purpose was to
couple a description of the progressive history of civilization with an analysis of those
opaque and axiomatic laws which determined or ought to determine a nation’s political
structure. “At the very instant in which society forms itself and by the very fact of its
formation, it calls forth a government, which proclaims the common truth, the bond of
the society, which promulgates and maintains the precepts which that truth originates.”
The power of government, Guizot continued, “is implicated in the fact of existence of the
society. And not only is the government necessary, but it forms naturally . . [it]
establishes itself in the society in general.”10 This “common truth” was a natural
equilibrium, which, developing out of the free association of its citizens and under the
influence of these “secret” laws, determined a country’s political forms. Such was a
political theory grounded in the primacy of social relations.
Guizot also described a “a certain universal spirit, a certain community of

9François Guizot, Essais sur L’Histoire de France (Paris: Charentier, Libraire-éditeur, 1847), pg., 1.
10
François Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization En Europe (Paris: Perrin et Cie, Libraires-éditeurs, 1856).,
pg., 132. François Guizot, History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe trans.,
Andrew R. Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), pgs., 1-12.