Democracy in America

• 1. Introduction

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  Democracy in America arrived in Paris bookshops in 1835, written by a thirty-year-old French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville. The book asks one of the most persistent questions in modern political life: why does democratic self-government survive in some places and collapse in others? Tocqueville had watched democracy fail, spectacularly and repeatedly, in his native France. He wanted to know what America had figured out that France had not. What he found was stranger and more troubling than a simple success story. He found a society that had solved certain ancient problems of tyranny while quietly growing new ones. The questions he planted in 1835 are still alive today.

• 2. A Pretext for Something Bigger

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  In 1831, the French government sent Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont to the United States on a specific, bounded mission: to study the American prison system. Tocqueville later admitted, in letters to friends and colleagues, that the prisons were really a pretext. What the two men actually wanted to study was American society itself.

  They arrived in New York City in May 1831 and spent nine months traveling across the country. They examined prisons, as promised, but they also gathered observations on American religious life, political culture, and economic habits. They even crossed briefly into Canada, spending a few days in what was then Lower Canada, the region that is now Quebec, and Upper Canada, now Ontario.

  Back in France by February 1832, Tocqueville and Beaumont dutifully filed their prison report the following year. Its title translates as On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. That was the official deliverable. But Tocqueville had already begun building something far more ambitious from the notes and impressions he had accumulated on the road.

• 3. The Providential Fact

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  Tocqueville opens Democracy in America not with America specifically, but with a sweeping historical observation. Over the previous seven hundred years, he writes, the social and economic conditions of men had been gradually equalizing. Aristocracy was in retreat across the modern world.

  He traced this shift to several concrete forces: the admission of all men to the clergy, the expansion of trade and commerce, the royal practice of selling titles of nobility as a fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture, the inheritance rule that concentrated family wealth in the eldest son. Each of these changes eroded the old hierarchy from a different angle.

  Tocqueville called this equalization an "irresistible revolution" and a "providential fact," language that led critics to accuse him of crude historical determinism. Marvin Zetterbaum, Professor Emeritus at the University of California Davis, examined Tocqueville's private correspondences and concluded that Tocqueville never actually believed democracy was inevitable in any mechanical sense. He thought equality was more just than aristocracy, and he counted himself among its supporters. But he also believed that the transition required guidance. His phrase for what was now needed was a "new political science," one designed to instruct democracy, regulate its movements, and substitute, as he put it, "the science of affairs for its inexperience." The rest of the book is his attempt to provide exactly that.

• 4. Puritan Roots and Federal Architecture

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  Tocqueville traces the specific character of American democracy back to the Puritans. He argues that the Puritan settlers arrived in America as equals in education, all of them middle class, and that they fused religious life with political liberty in a way that had almost no parallel in Europe, least of all in France. He calls the Puritan founding the "seed" of his entire work.

  From there, he tracks how the sovereignty of the people moved from the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which he credits to Puritan political thinking, through the American Revolution, and into the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Tocqueville admired the Constitution, but he did not think formal institutions were the main reason American democracy held together. He placed greater weight on what he called mores, or "habits of mind," the informal customs and assumptions that governed daily life. His list of these mores is long: township democracy, the role of religion in private life, family structure, a particular kind of individualism, voluntary associations, what he called "self-interest rightly understood," and a pervasive materialism.

  Tocqueville was also candid about a key conceptual ambiguity in his own work. He used the word "democracy" to mean, at different moments, representative government, universal suffrage, and majority-based rule. He was not consistently defining the same thing. Scholars have argued that this inconsistency, built into a book of enormous influence, helped permanently bind the concept of democracy in Western thought to the American system specifically.

• 5. Women, Equality, and Dependence

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  "In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes," Tocqueville wrote in the second volume. He devoted an entire section of that volume to the situation of American women, making him one of the earliest social critics to analyze what later scholars would call the doctrine of separate spheres.

  His observations sit in tension with each other. On one hand, he argued that the decline of aristocracy had weakened patriarchal control over daughters, meaning that unmarried women retained a genuine degree of independence. On the other hand, he was blunt that married women lost all independence, describing American conjugal bonds as very strict while paternal discipline was very relaxed. Women passed, in his telling, from one kind of constraint into another.

  And yet Tocqueville's ultimate verdict was unexpectedly admiring. He wrote, in a passage he attributed to his own direct observation, that he had nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position than in America. He added that if asked to identify the single cause of American prosperity and strength, he would answer: the superiority of their women. He believed American women would be active contributors to the country's future, even within the domestic constraints of the time, and he noted that American law offered more formal protections for women than French law did.

• 6. Soft Despotism and the Tocqueville Effect

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  The second volume of Democracy in America, published in 1840, takes a noticeably darker turn than the first. Tocqueville's central anxiety in this volume is not violent revolution but something quieter and harder to resist: what he called "soft despotism."

  His concern was that democratic societies, precisely because they prized equality and material comfort, would gradually allow power to concentrate in the state. Citizens, absorbed in private life and personal prosperity, would trade political engagement for security. No tyrant would need to seize power; the public would simply stop exercising its own.

  He also identified what he called the tyranny of the majority, the risk that democratic opinion would become a new form of coercion, suppressing dissent not through law but through social pressure. Alongside this, he observed a mechanism that later social scientists would name the Tocqueville effect: social frustration tends to increase as social conditions improve. A population that is getting better off, he argued, grows more resentful of the privileges that remain, not less. This growing resentment, he believed, pushes citizens to demand that the state absorb more power in order to flatten remaining inequalities.

  His views darkened further after 1840, a shift documented in the collection Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings, edited by Craiutu and Jennings.

• 7. Predictions That Held and One That Did Not

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  Tocqueville's reputation rests partly on two predictions that proved accurate. He anticipated the catastrophic conflict over slavery that would split the United States, anticipating the Civil War decades before it began. He also foresaw a superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, a forecast that materialized after World War II in the form of the Cold War.

  His third major forward-looking argument concerned industrial aristocracy. Watching the industrial sector grow in the American economy, he warned that ownership of labor would produce a new wealthy class with the potential to dominate society as thoroughly as the old hereditary nobility had. He urged friends of democracy to keep, in his phrase, "an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times." He distinguished this industrial aristocracy from the formal aristocracy of the past, but the warning itself was pointed.

  Where his judgment fell short was in his assessment of American culture. He spent several chapters cataloguing what he saw as the impoverished state of the arts in America, and he dismissed the country's scientific ambitions as confined to practical applications. Both assessments were overtaken quickly by events. The literary generation of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman arrived shortly after his visit. American appetite for pure scientific research would prove equally robust.

  Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield, writing in his introduction to a later translation, called Democracy in America "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America."

• 8. Reception and Lasting Reach

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  Both volumes of Democracy in America found readers immediately, in Europe and in the United States alike. By the twentieth century, the work had been absorbed into the standard curriculum of political science, social science, and history. It is now a commonly assigned text for undergraduates in political and social sciences at American universities, and it appears on the introductory political theory reading lists at Cambridge, Oxford, and Princeton.

  The book's reception has never been ideologically tidy. In France and the United States, Tocqueville's arguments were read as liberal. In the British Isles, both progressives and conservatives claimed the book as support for their own positions. That ideological promiscuity is itself a sign of the text's complexity.

  Scholar Henry Reeve produced the first English translation in 1835, which Francis Bowen later revised; Alfred A. Knopf reissued it in a modern edition in 1945 with an historical essay by Phillips Bradley. George Lawrence translated the book in 1966. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop produced a translation around 2000, Arthur Goldhammer another around 2004, and James T. Schleifer edited a bilingual edition published by Liberty Fund in March 2010, based on the authoritative French-language text edited by Eduardo Nolla. The steady production of new translations across nearly two centuries is itself a measure of the book's continued hold on readers trying to understand what democracy is, and what it costs.