Democracy in America and Two Essays on America

1452 Pages·2003·4.17 MB·English

by  Alexis de Tocqueville

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE was born in 1805 into an aristocratic French family
with connections to both the Church and the Bourbon monarchy. He
acquired his liberal sympathies from intensive study of French and
English Constitutional history, which was to prove formative to his
lifelong concern with liberty and the availability of choice. Impressive
academic achievements led to a legal career in government service in
1827. It was as a junior magistrate at Versailles that he met Gustave de
Beaumont, the man with whom he would travel to America to prepare a
study of their penal system for the French government.
After a lengthy journey around the United States with his companion,
Tocqueville left the report on penal reform for Beaumont to complete,
and turned his attention to other work. The result of this was his hugely
influential two-volume Democracy in America, the first volume of which
was published in 1835 (at which point he also married Mary Mottley, an
Englishwoman) and the second in 1840. The book secured both his
reputation as a writer and thinker, and his election to the prestigious
Académie Française in 1841.
In 1839 Tocqueville was elected to the Chambre des Députés, a post
he held until the 1848 revolution when he abandoned politics after a
brief period as foreign minister to Louis Bonaparte.
His last, and arguably most significant, work, L’Ancien Régime and the
French Revolution, was partially published in 1856. Tocqueville died in
1859 prior to its completion.
GERALD BEVAN was educated at King Edward’s School, Five Ways, in
Birmingham, St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied Modern
and Medieval Languages, and Balliol College, Oxford. His career in the
teaching of French, Latin and Religious Studies ended in 1993 at St
Albans School, as Director of Studies and Head of Modern Languages. He
specializes in French literature from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries. He collaborated in a translation of Cassiodorus’ De
Anima during the 1970s and retirement is now allowing him to expand
his interest in translation.
ISAAC KRAMNICK is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government and
the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. His writings in political theory include studies of
Bolingbroke and Burke, and Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism. He
is the co-author (with Barry Sheerman, MP) of a biography of Harold
Laski and a co-author (with R. Laurence Moore) of a book on church and
state in America, The Godless Constitution. He has also edited The
Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for Penguin Classics
and the Portable Enlightenment Reader for Viking.
ALEXIS DE
TOCQUEVILLE
Democracy in America
and Two Essays on America
Translated by GERALD E. BEVAN
with an Introduction and Notes by
ISAAC KRAMNICK
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These translations of Democracy in America, “Two Weeks in the
Wilderness”, and “Excursion to Lake Oneida” first published in 2003.
1
Translations and Translator’s Note copyright © Gerald Bevan, 2003
Introduction and Notes copyright © Isaac Kramnick, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the editors have been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
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Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
Translator’s Note
Democracy in America
Notes
Two Essays on America
TWO WEEKS IN THE WILDERNESS
EXCURSION TO LAKE ONEIDA
Chronology
1805 Born in Normandy, France, on 29 July to Hervé, the Comte de
Tocqueville, and Louise-Madeline, Comtesse de Tocqueville, French
Catholic aristocrats
1809 James Madison elected American President
1812 War of 1812 breaks out between Great Britain and the United
States
1814 Napoleon falls and the Bourbon monarchy restored with the
crowning of Louis XVIII
1817 James Monroe elected American President
1823–7 Tocqueville studies law in Paris
1824 Charles X succeeds to the French throne
1825 John Quincy Adams elected American President
1827 Tocqueville granted an appointment as a minor judicial officer in
the Versailles court of law
1829 Andrew Jackson elected American President
1830 Charles X’s edicts restricting suffrage and censoring the press spark
a revolution on 29 July which brings his reign to an end
1830 The “July” monarchy of Louis-Philippe begins on 7 August
1831 Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont arrive in
Newport, Rhode Island, on 9 May, for their ninemonth visit to
America
1832 President Andrew Jackson vetoes a bill on 10 July to extend the
charter of the Bank of the United States
1833 Tocqueville publishes Du Système pénitentiare aux Etats-Unis with
co-author Beaumont
1835 Tocqueville publishes Part I of Democracy in America
1835 Tocqueville elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Science
1837 Martin Van Buren elected American President
1839 Tocqueville elected to the French Chamber of Deputies; writes
“Report on the Abolition of Slavery”
1840 Tocqueville publishes the two volumes of Part II of Democracy in
America
1841 Tocqueville inducted into the Académie Française
1841 William Henry Harrison elected American President and dies after
one month of service
1841 John Tyler takes over the American presidency
1845 James Polk elected American president
1848 Louis-Philippe abdicates the French throne on 24 February amidst
growing popular demands by republican and socialist reformers for
change
1848 Tocqueville elected in May to the new Chamber for the Second
Republic, as well as the Constituent Assembly; later appointed French
foreign minister by Louis Napoleon
1848 Revolution on the streets of Paris (“Bloody June Days”)
1848 Louis Napoleon, nephew of Louis Bonaparte, elected President of
the French Second Republic in December
1849 Zachary Taylor elected American President. He dies after only
sixteen months in office
1850 Millard Fillmore succeeds Taylor in the American presidency
1850–51 Tocqueville writes Souvenirs
1851 Louis Napoleon seizes power and declares himself Emperor
Napoleon III
1851 Tocqueville protests the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, is arrested
and briefly imprisoned
1853 Franklin Pierce elected American President
1856 Tocqueville publishes The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
1857 James Buchanan elected American President
1859 Tocqueville succumbs to tuberculosis on 16 April at the age of
fifty-three; buried three weeks later at his chateau in Normandy
Introduction
I
If the number of times an individual is cited by politicians, journalists,
and scholars is a measure of their influence, Alexis de Tocqueville—not
Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln—is America’s public philosopher. Since
the 1950s, Tocqueville has been a towering presence in American life.
Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has quoted Democracy in
America, which Tocqueville wrote after his ninemonth visit to America in
1831. During the Cold War, while the Soviet Union had the German Karl
Marx as its official philosopher, America had Tocqueville, the
Frenchman who in the nineteenth century saw the democratic future in
America.
Not that his influence and visibility have declined with the end of the
Cold War. In summer 1996, both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich cited
Tocqueville in speeches to their party conventions. Indeed, a year
earlier, in his first address to the nation as Speaker of the House,
Gingrich claimed Tocqueville’s book as a prophetic anticipation of the
Republican’s “Contract with America”. He put it on a list of “required
reading” for the members of Congress. Not to be outdone, Hillary
Clinton offered the same text in 1996 as the best place to find the caring
civil society she envisioned in her book It Takes a Village.
Tocqueville is everywhere in the United States, pervading its public
discourse. In 1978, Eugene McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin and