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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Tocqueville at 200
He'd recognize much about America today.
Friday, July 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
When Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, arrived in Newport, R.I., in May 1831, the country was barely 50 years old--and Tocqueville wasn't yet 26. Andrew Jackson was president and John C. Calhoun was vice president. Politically, the event of the year was Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. Steamships existed and a primitive rail system had just come into service, but the first of the wagon trains had yet to cross the Rockies. In faraway Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, then 22, gave his first political speech (atop a beer keg) on the subject of "the navigation of the Sangamon River."
This protean nation seems irretrievably distant. Yet the chief measure of Tocqueville's greatness--which we celebrate today on his 200th birthday--is that, in reading his "Democracy in America," we instantly recognize ourselves.
Tocqueville's theme was the effect of equality on the manners of man. Of course, 1830s America was far from being an equitable place: Women couldn't vote, and there were two million slaves out of a total population of 12 million. Yet even then democracy had taken sufficient root to make its enduring characteristics clear, at least to Tocqueville's observant eye. And what he saw in America was the future of all mankind: "To attempt to check democracy," he wrote, "would be . . . to resist the will of God."
Unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, however, Tocqueville did not confuse historical inevitability with utopia. He understood that the notion of equality was as compatible with tyranny as it was with freedom, a truth made plain by the experience of communist "people's republics" in the 20th century.
Tocqueville also understood that even liberal democracies were prone to a host of vices: mediocrity of taste and expression; a sameness of thought; a mindless pursuit of physical comfort; social atomization. Contemporaneous European visitors such as Fanny Trollope often saw these vices as proof of American inferiority. Tocqueville knew better: What America was, Europe, in its laggard way, would be too, and the task for serious political thinkers wasn't to condescend but to find within democratic life the resources by which it could be sustained and improved.
What resources? Local government, for one, which transforms rugged individualists into citizens and counteracts the democratic tendency toward bureaucratic centralization. Civic associations, for another, which create communities of interest, taste and conviction and thus check the potentially tyrannical power of the majority. Religious belief, for a third, which elevates men above their material fixations and furnishes democracy with the public morality it requires.
America has undergone vast changes since the 1830s. It is a freer country now, and infinitely richer, although the size and reach of the federal government would surely have frightened Tocqueville. Still, we're confident that today's America is one that he would have no trouble recognizing. No doubt, too, the cures he would prescribe would be the same. They are as salutary as ever.
These are not the best of times for that most thoughtful of admirers of the United States, the French sage Alexis de Tocqueville, whose birth 200 years ago this week is being celebrated at academic conferences on both sides of the Atlantic.
Until quite recently, his reputation rested securely on two extraordinarily perceptive observations. The first was his prediction that Russia and America were "marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe," a forecast that he made back in the 1830s. This worked extraordinarily well for most of the 20th century but looks rather sickly now as Russia tries fitfully to recover from seven decades of communism.
The second was that while Russia`s approach to that future would be based on servitude and on man as a communal animal, the American drive to global leadership would be based on liberty and on man acting as an individual -- "relying on personal interest and allowing free play to the reason and the powers of individuals, without seeking to direct them."
For this pioneering social scientist from Normandy, America was not the main focus of his work, though he was to produce the first and most enduring masterpiece of analysis on the country. His real obsession was democracy itself, which he suspected was likely to be the inevitable fate of most prosperous European countries.
I had no idea. I always assumed it was a post-WW2 coinage.Kathianne said:Not to mention he coined the word, 'superpowers'.
Sad, isn't it?He had a grasp on the 'essence' of American culture, that even most American observers here or removed, still fail to understand.
