Striking is its openness, its willingness to entertain paradoxes and juggle opposites, its powerful sense of adventure constructed from extensive field notes gathered by means of a grand adventure.
Democracy in America brilliantly captures and mimics in literary form the growth of an open, experimental society, a dynamic political order deeply aware of its own originality. It opened his eyes, widened his horizons, and changed his mind about democracy. In , for nine short but action-filled months, the year-old young French aristocrat travelled through the United States. Accompanied by his colleague and friend Gustave de Beaumont , he ventured almost everywhere.
Like a well-briefed tourist, he rode on steamboats one of which sunk , found himself trapped by blizzards, sampled the local cuisine, and slept rough in log cabins. He found time for research and for rest, and for conversation, despite his imperfect English, with useful or prominent Americans, among them John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster.
Setting out from New York, he travelled upstate to Buffalo, then through the frontier, as it was then called, to Michigan and Wisconsin. He sojourned two weeks in Canada, from where he descended to Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Next he went west, to Pittsburgh and Cincinatti; then south to Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans; then north through the south-eastern states to the capital, Washington; and at last back to New York, where he returned by packet to Le Havre, France.
At the beginning of his journey, in New York, where he sojourned from May 11th for some six weeks, Tocqueville was openly hesitant about this bustling market society whose system of democratic government was still in its infancy.
Talk of the God-given nature of things appears from time to time between the lines of Democracy in America. Sometime during his stay in Boston 7 September - 3 October, , Tocqueville became a convert of the American way of life.
The future was America. It was therefore imperative to understand its strengths and weaknesses, he thought. And so, on January 12th , just before boarding his packet for France, he sketched plans to bring to the French public a work about democracy in America.
Consider his claim in Democracy in America that the political form known as democracy, all things considered, extinguishes the aesthetic dimension of life. It produces no lasting works of art, no poetry, no fine literature. Lacking a leisure class, he reasoned, the young American democracy cultivated people with practical minds.
Democracy in America is arguably a great work of modern democratic literature, a highly engaging and thought-provoking text that markedly stands at right angles to the dull-witted science of politics that is today dominant in the American academy, and elsewhere.
The point can be put in a different way: Tocqueville positively contradicted himself. He failed to foresee the many ways in which the young American democracy, with its palpable ethos of equality with liberty manifested in simple body language, tobacco-chewing customs and easy manners, would give rise to self-consciously democratic art and literature.
It is in fact their progenitor. The four-volume work is still regarded, justifiably, as one of the great books about the subject, in no small measure because at a crucial moment in the democratic experiment in America Tocqueville managed to put his finger on several sources of its dynamic energy.
For Tocqueville, it is not just capitalism and the law-enforcing territorial state that define modern times. Democracy is a sui generis but seemingly irreversible feature of the modern age.
Tocqueville emphasises to his readers that democracy challenges settled ways of thinking and speaking and acting. It reveals that humans are capable of transcending themselves. For him, democracy is the twin of contingency. It tutors their sense of pluralism. It prods them into taking greater responsibility for how, when and why they act as they do. In other words, democracy promotes something of a Gestalt switch in the perception of power. What are the wellsprings of this shared sense of contingency?
Why does democracy tend to interrupt certainties, impeach them, enable people to see that things could be other than they presently are? Tocqueville might have been expected to say that because periodic elections stir things up they are the prime cause of the shared sense of the contingency of power relations.
Not so. Tocqueville actually thought that elections trigger herd instincts among citizens. Tocqueville reminds us in Democracy in America that the core principle of democracy is the public commitment to equality among its citizens. The reminder seems lost these days on most politicians, political parties and governments. Equality is for him not the equal right of citizens to be different. Equality is sameness semblable. Proof of its allure was the way the new American democracy unleashed constant struggles against the various inequalities inherited from old Europe, thus proving that they were neither necessary nor desirable.
Democracy, argued Tocqueville, spreads passion for the equalisation of power, property and status among people. They come to feel that current inequalities are purely contingent, and so potentially alterable by human action itself. Tocqueville was fascinated by this trend towards equalisation. In the realm of law and government, he noted, everything tends to dispute and uncertainty.
The grip of sentimental tradition, absolute morality and religious faith in the power of the divine weakens. They also look upon the power of politicians and governments with a jealous eye. Government structured by the good blood of monarchs is anathema.
They are prone to suspect or curse those who wield power, and thereby they are impatient with arbitrary rule. They come to be regarded as simply expedient for this or that purpose, and as properly based on the voluntary consent of citizens endowed with equal civil and political rights.
The spell of absolute monarchy is forever broken. Political rights are extended gradually from the lucky privileged few to those who once suffered discrimination; and government policies and laws are subject constantly to public grumbling, legal challenges and alteration.
Garden City, N. Journey to America. Reeves, Richard. New York: Simon and Schuster, De Tocqueville's Democracy in America includes numerous observations, criticisms and even predictions about democracy and American life.
Many of de Tocqueville's views are as accurate and relevant today as they were years ago; others are not. In this activity each student should work with a partner.
After reading one of de Tocqueville's statements listed below, each pair of students should evaluate it using the steps described below. Patriotism: "Nothing is more annoying A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.
Equality of the Sexes: "It is easy to see that The President: " He loves what it loves and hates what it hates; he sails ahead of its desires, anticipating its complaints and bending to its slightest wishes Electing Leaders: "The people never can find time or means to devote themselves to such work. They are bound always to make hasty judgments and to seize on the most prominent characteristics. Free Press: "The more I observe the main effects of a free press, the more convinced am I that, in the modern world, freedom of the press is the principal The Courts: "There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Racial Equality: "I do not think that the white and black races will ever be brought anywhere to live on a footing of equality. War and Government: "War Expansion: " Anglo-Americans alone will cover the whole immense area between the polar ice and the tropics, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Return to Election Central. Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Curriculum Materials. Add Event. Main Menu Home. After traveling thousands of miles over a period of nine months, the young men returned to France.
De Tocqueville spent the next eight years writing two volumes on his observations. In the two volumes became one book which de Tocqueville titled Democracy in America. Much more than a mere record of his travels, Democracy in America, in the words of one modern historian, turned out to be "perhaps the greatest commentary ever written about any culture by any person at any time.
American Equality During his travels which took him from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, de Tfocqueville filled 14 notebooks with his observations, thoughts, and interviews with over Americans. Politics in de Tocqueville's America "No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult," de Tocqueville wrote in his book.
He wrote: Long before the appointed day arrives, the election becomes the greatest, and one might say the only, affair occupying men's minds Law and Citizenship De Tocqueville found a deep respect for the law in America. The Future of Democracy In Europe, most critics of democracy believed that America would sooner or later descend into anarchy.
Describe the different ways citizens in de Tocqueville's America participated in democracy. Do you agree with de Tocqueville's opinion about Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson as political leaders? Research their political careers, and write your own evaluation. What did de Tocqueville mean by the "tyranny of the majority"?
Can you find any evidence of this in the United States today? According to de Tocqueville, what is the greatest threat to a democracy? Who could prevent this threat from occurring? Thus Tocqueville holds in focus a political story in which, as he sees it, things are likely to get better and worse at the same time. On the one hand, future democracies will probably be milder and more mediocre than aristocratic societies: there will be less brutality and brilliance, as we all drift toward a vast, undemanding median.
Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just. Tocqueville and Beaumont diligently visited American prisons the most famous of which were Sing Sing and the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia , but the official project was a pretext for a much larger, private endeavor: Tocqueville wanted to see what the future looked like, and to write a great book about it.
They set off immediately for New York, in a steamboat of intimidating size and sophistication. Leo Damrosch is well qualified to do the renovation. Tocqueville amassed thousands of pages of drafts as he worked on his book, and kept voluminous notes in little books that he folded and stitched by hand.
Damrosch contagiously enjoys himself, and happily enters into the enthusiasms of the two young Frenchmen, as they let the strange, loud, free, placeless society disturb and excite them. Tocqueville noted that servants here acted like neighbors who have come in to lend a hand, and was frustrated by the committed chastity of American women.
Barbarically, there was little or no wine at meals, and oysters were served not at the start but at the end. He thought the country relatively unagitated by intense political questions, and was astounded by the freedom of the press. The roads were in an atrocious condition.
After six weeks in New York City where the drinking water was extremely dicey and pigs roamed the streets , Tocqueville and Beaumont took a steamboat up the Hudson.
At Albany, they were guests of honor at a Fourth of July celebration, and Tocqueville was at once amused by the bareness and impressed by the sincerity of the event.
In his notebook, he recorded that perfect order prevailed:. No police, no authority anywhere. Orderly presentation of trades. Public prayer. The flag present, and old soldiers. Real emotion. After travelling to Michigan, Wisconsin, Quebec, and back to Boston, the two young men went south.
Tocqueville jokily called the South le Midi. It was an arduous journey, because the winter of was unprecedentedly harsh, and the Ohio River froze over. Eventually, they reached Memphis, where the initial impression was bathetic. The agent stopped and arranged onward passage with a steamboat captain.
In this great throng no sobs or cries were heard; they were silent.
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