Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

notably religious faith, the drive toward participation in public life, and the sense of interest well understood—that could correct some of the worst flaws and weakness of the democratic character.

      From one perspective, Tocqueville offered readers two possible democratic scenarios: one, healthy; the other, toxic. As we have seen, his portrayal of the democratic character was largely anticipated by and even modeled on his depiction of the American character. But where the mores of “democratic man” seemed especially toxic, Tocqueville

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      looked to what was distinctive about the American example in order to find healthy corrections. For him, the peculiar features of the American character served as important remedies for particular dangers presented by democratic mores. Once again Tocqueville found in the American experience reasons for hope about the democratic future.

      This brief discussion of democratic dangers, democratic remedies, and the democratic character serves once again as a powerful demonstration of the unity between the 1835 and the 1840 portions of Democracy. Not only does Tocqueville’s political program—his suggested remedies for democratic dangers—remain constant, but also we have seen several important examples of how chapters in the 1840 text grew out of a few sentences or paragraphs in the 1835 Democracy, including such important concepts as individualism and interest well understood, and such psychological features of democratic man as envy, discontent, restlessness, and anxiety. A careful reading of the Liberty Fund edition, with its rich presentation of materials from the drafts and other working papers of Tocqueville’s masterpiece, reveals the way in which the 1840 volume grew almost organically out of the seeds first put down in 1835 (or earlier). This characteristic of Democracy reflects Tocqueville’s habit of constantly turning and returning ideas in his mind: an inescapable feature of his method of thinking and writing.

      We have also repeatedly followed the ideas of Tocqueville, the moralist. If the fundamental threat from democratic dangers is the narrowing of the human heart (due to materialism, excessive privatism, and withdrawal from public life), the most basic benefit of democratic remedies is its feeding and expansion (due to reciprocity, involvement with others, and focus on the larger public good). Tocqueville’s effort to grasp the democratic character was essentially an attempt to understand democratic mores. We have already noted that his primary concern as a political analyst was mores rather than laws, institutions, or circumstances. As a moralist, Tocqueville believed that mores—ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors—ultimately held the key to liberty and to the future of democratic societies.

      Finally, our discussion showed Tocqueville drawing on American lessons to teach his readers how to use the habits of liberty and particular democratic mores to counteract the dangers in modern societies,

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      or, if the necessary habits were weak or absent, how to use the art of liberty—the establishment of proper laws and institutions—to address those dangers. Here at its most basic is the new science of politics that Tocqueville urged upon the citizens and legislators of the new democratic world.46

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       4

       Tocqueville’s Journey into America

      JEREMY JENNINGS

      All Tocqueville scholars are familiar with Garry Wills’s charge that Tocqueville did not “get” America.1 “A fact usually omitted in discussions of Tocqueville,” Wills contends, “is the shallow empirical basis of his study.” “It is,” he continues, “as if [Tocqueville] ghosted his way directly into the American spirit, bypassing the body of the nation.” In Tocqueville’s account, Wills further reminds us, there is virtually nothing about American capitalism, manufactures, banking, or technology. During their nine months in America, Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont spent around two months “narrowly focused on prison life.” In addition, they devoted time on trips “only remotely connected, or not connected at all, with what went into Democracy.” These included a trip to Lower Canada, where, as Tocqueville wrote to the Abbé Lesueur, “we felt as if we were at home, and everywhere we were received like compatriots,”2 and the now-famous “Two Weeks in the Wilderness,” where he and Beaumont saw only “the still empty cradle of a great nation.”3 Most of the remaining seven months, Wills tells us, were spent in the North, where “almost all of Democracy’s conclusions” were “formed while Tocqueville was fresh in the country and seemed particularly impressionable.” Wills further contends that Tocqueville was also extremely selective—not to say snobbish—about those with

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      whom he chose to converse, showing little interest in “ordinary people.”4 Wills is likewise less than charitable in his assessment of the impact of these meetings with the superior minds of the East Coast. “Tocqueville,” he writes, “took many of his views from the last remnants of the Federalists, who supplied him with what he thought necessary to democracy, a moderating counter to extreme egalitarianism.” Accordingly, Wills affirms, Tocqueville “parroted” the views of the Federalists in his “scathing” comments on Andrew Jackson and upon populist leaders such as Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. The implication of Wills’s comments is that not only were these views of dubious worth—damned, as they were, by their lofty social origin—but also Tocqueville would have discovered an altogether different America had he chosen occasionally to mix with his social inferiors.

      The criticism does not cease there. “In his erratic traversing of the country,” Wills writes, “what Tocqueville did not see is often more interesting than what he did.” Tocqueville, it seems, never visited a New England town meeting. He never saw an American university. He made no efforts to become familiar with American intellectual life. The only state capital he visited was Albany.5 His journey through the South to New Orleans was hasty in the extreme and diminished as a source of potential information by Tocqueville’s debilitating illness.

      The conclusion is clear. Tocqueville “would probably not have benefited by a longer stay in America.” His ideas were formed upon the basis of first encounters and rarely changed afterward. He had a propensity to form “instant judgments.” He “concluded things about America because of the prejudices he brought with him from France.” He was not seeking to write “an objective account of what he saw in America.” His pronouncements were made “de haut en bas.” The whole book, like

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      Tocqueville’s work in general, was characterized by “the taste for grand simplification.”

      The surprise is that these conclusions find an echo in what would normally be regarded among Tocqueville scholars as a friendly source, namely, George Wilson Pierson’s reconstruction of Tocqueville’s stay in America. At the end of his magisterial volume, Pierson devoted a set of four chapters to a consideration of the overall character of Tocqueville’s achievement.6 Let us first be clear that Pierson was of the opinion that Tocqueville drew “some useful conclusions” from his American experiences. In particular, Pierson wrote, Tocqueville saw that “there seemed to exist in the United States certain habits, certain institutional practices, that increased the good effects obtainable from self-government at the same time that they mitigated or even altogether eliminated the dangers inherent in mass control.”7 Second, Pierson acknowledged that Tocqueville “had carried some prejudices to America,” but he countered this by asserting that “the Americans themselves had again and again supplied the corroborating information.” To take but one example, Tocqueville no longer saw the Native American “through the romantic haze of a tale by Chateaubriand, but in terms of personal contact and experience.”8

      Yet Pierson did not seek to disguise or hide the “defects” to be found in Democracy in America. Of these, Pierson suggested, the principal deficiency was to be found in Tocqueville’s philosophical method. Tocqueville was “neither a historian nor a scientist but a philosopher, and a philosopher whose concepts and whose habits were not well calculated, if he wanted, rigorously,