- Length
- 992 pagesMansfield and Winthrop, Democracy in America, Chicago, 2000
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Democracy in America
A young French aristocrat spent nine months in America and wrote the book that democratic societies have been arguing with ever since. Its subject is not America but equality - what a society becomes when rank disappears - and its predictions have aged better than almost anything in political writing.
- Date
- 1835-1840
- Author
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Region
- France and the United States
- Language
- French
- 1835 English, Henry Reeve Public domain; standard for a century and a half and criticised for colouring the sense Attested
- 2000 English, Mansfield and Winthrop Current scholarly standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Continuously in print in French and English since publication, and quoted by every American political persuasion, usually selectively.
What the book says
The report of a nine-month journey, expanded into an argument about where the world was going. Tocqueville went to the United States in 1831 with a commission to study prisons and used it to look at everything else. What he found was not a set of institutions to be copied but a condition - what he calls equality of conditions, the absence of fixed rank - which he took to be advancing irreversibly everywhere and which America had reached first. The first volume describes how the Americans manage it: township government that gives ordinary people the habit of deciding things, an independent judiciary, a free press, religion kept out of politics and therefore politically powerful, and above all the extraordinary density of voluntary associations through which Americans do together what a European would expect the state to do. The second volume asks what equality does to people, and is much less reassuring. It produces restlessness, a preoccupation with material comfort, and a withdrawal into private life that leaves individuals isolated and the state unopposed. Two dangers recur: the tyranny of the majority over opinion, and a mild, orderly, all-providing power that keeps people in perpetual childhood.
What it argues
That the levelling of ranks is an irreversible historical fact, that it is neither good nor bad in itself, and that everything depends on what a society does with it. Tocqueville's method is to hold two things apart that his contemporaries ran together: equality of condition, which is coming whatever anyone thinks, and liberty, which is not guaranteed by it and may be destroyed by it. The threats he identifies are not tyrants. They are the pressure of majority opinion, which does not need to imprison anyone because it can make dissent socially impossible; and a form of despotism he says has no name, in which a benevolent administrative power relieves people of the trouble of governing themselves and they are content to let it. Against both he sets local self-government, associations, law, and religion - habits rather than mechanisms.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
By observation organised into causes. Tocqueville is not doing history and not doing theory; he watches something - jury service, the way Americans form a committee, the manners of servants - and asks what condition produces it. The generalisations are the point and are also the weakness, since the evidence is nine months of travel, conversation and reading. The prose is aphoristic and quotable to a fault, which is why he is cited so often and so selectively; almost every position in American politics can find its sentence.
The moment
Tocqueville was born into a Norman noble family whose members had gone to the guillotine, and served an uneasy France that had had three regimes in his lifetime. He and Gustave de Beaumont obtained a government commission to study American prisons in 1831, produced the prison report, and each wrote a book. Tocqueville later sat in the Chamber, served briefly as foreign minister in 1849, and withdrew from politics after Louis-Napoleon's coup - which he had, in a sense, described in advance.
How it travelled
As a mirror that different readers used differently. The first volume made him famous immediately; Mill reviewed both volumes admiringly and took the tyranny of the majority from him into On Liberty. In America the book became a national institution, quoted in inaugural addresses and school textbooks, generally from the optimistic first volume rather than the anxious second. In France it was read as a warning. The twentieth century found the account of soft despotism newly relevant, and the passages on associations became a foundation of the literature on civil society.
The strongest objection
That the equality he describes was constructed by excluding most of the people in the country, and that he sees this and files it separately. Tocqueville devotes a long and unflinching chapter to the three races - he predicts that slavery will end in conflict, that emancipation will not produce equality because prejudice will outlast the institution, and that the removal of the native peoples is being carried out with a legalism that will leave the perpetrators feeling blameless. Having said all this, he does not revise the account of American equality that the rest of the book is built on. The society he analyses is one whose democratic character depended on who was outside it, and the analysis does not absorb its own evidence.
Why read it
Selectively and in both volumes, because reading only the first gives the sunny Tocqueville everyone quotes. The chapters on associations, on the tyranny of the majority, on individualism and on the new form of despotism in the second volume are the ones that matter. It is long, and it is also one of the most readable books in this section - he writes like a novelist.
- First printed
- 1835
- First in English
- 1835
- Digitised
- Yes
The two volumes of 1835 and 1840 are often printed as one work; the difference in tone and method between them is the central fact about the text and is flattened by continuous pagination.
Reeve's 1835-40 English, revised by Bowen, is public domain and was the standard for a century and a half. Lawrence, Mansfield-Winthrop and Goldhammer are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in political science as much as in philosophy. The account of associations underpins work on social capital, the tyranny of the majority is standard in constitutional theory, and the description of a mild administrative power that infantilises its citizens is quoted in every argument about the modern state, usually by people who have not read the sentences around it.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Reeve's English is too, but the passages most often quoted circulate in modern in-copyright translations, and Reeve was criticised in Tocqueville's own lifetime for colouring the sense. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the two volumes represent one argument or a change of mind is the central scholarly question. How accurate the reporting is has been challenged in detail - nine months is not long, his English was poor at the outset, and he read as much as he saw. Whether he is a liberal, a conservative or an aristocratic critic of both is argued in every generation and is partly a function of which volume is being read. And the relation between his American conclusions and his positions as a French politician, particularly on Algeria, where he supported colonisation in terms hard to square with this book, is a substantial and uncomfortable line in recent scholarship.