Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

that it undoubtedly contains.”9 We might further note that Pierson was also of the view that Tocqueville was “unscientific in his use, or rather in his failure to use, contemporary literature” and that he was “not sufficiently inquisitive.”10

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      So, too, Tocqueville was guilty of “errors of observation.”11 Here is a shortened version of the lengthy list highlighted by Pierson. Tocqueville misread the American inheritance laws. He neglected American material development, in the process ignoring “the one great factor that was going to transform his chosen civilization almost overnight.” He failed properly to acknowledge the nationalizing influence of American commerce and underestimated the centralizing tendency in American politics. He did not foresee the rise of American cities and therefore did not appreciate the strain that would be placed upon institutions of local self-government. In his appraisal of American institutions, he failed to obtain “sufficient knowledge of their historical background,” and so he was unable correctly to discuss the dispute over slavery and the bitterness between North and South. In the field of politics, he made “two considerable errors of omission”: he failed to notice the growth of a two-party system and he neglected the intermediate unit of American politics, the state, thus closing his eyes to “its significant possibilities as a balancing force and experimental laboratory.” “Both of these mistakes,” Pierson concluded, “can be traced to his visit to Albany and his failures of observation there.”12 More than this, because of his experience with Andrew Jackson, Tocqueville “underestimated the power of the executive branch in American government.” Most alarming of all given its centrality to the argument of the text and its subsequent notoriety, Tocqueville “perhaps overestimated the tendency of democracy, at least as practiced in the United States, to degenerate into tyranny by the majority.”

      Having got this far, we might pause to consider the justice and substance of some of the critical remarks cited above. There is, indeed, no shortage of evidence to support the view that Tocqueville quickly made up his mind about what he saw in America. Letters to his two close friends Ernest de Chabrol and Louis de Kergorlay, written shortly after his arrival, gave a strong intimation of what would in due course form the content of his famous book.13 Likewise, Tocqueville’s chosen

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      pattern of social interaction was also quickly evident. Once on dry land, Tocqueville and Beaumont soon found themselves the toast of New York society and later found the doors of the Bostonian elite opened to them. A reading of Tocqueville’s notebooks reveals just how much he learned from his eminent acquaintances. It was, for example, Alexander Everett who informed Tocqueville one evening that “[t]he point of departure for a people is of immense importance.”14 It was this idea, as Tocqueville was later to inform readers of Democracy in America, that provided “the key to nearly the whole book.”15

      But what of the more serious, and most often repeated, charge that Tocqueville showed no interest in and failed to perceive the growing industrialization of the American economy? This assertion can often figure as part of a broader argument alleging that Tocqueville knew nothing of economics and displayed a near total indifference to the social issues and problems of his day. That this general contention is largely false has been amply shown by the recent work of Michael Drolet and Richard Swedberg,16 but does it hold true for the specifics of Tocqueville’s examination of America? This is the manner in which the evidence has been presented by one of the most perceptive of commentators upon Tocqueville’s work, Seymour Drescher. Tocqueville and Beaumont, he writes,

      visited prisons until they felt themselves imprisoned by their own mission. They sacrificed comfort, and almost their lives, to view the American West at first hand. But though they knew of the world famous industrial experiment at Lowell, Massachusetts, they simply

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      passed it by. Their one hour in Pittsburgh … was spent catching up on correspondence. They were deeply impressed by Cincinnati’s throbbing industry but spent their extremely rationed time there with its lawyers rather than its industrial classes.17

      How, on Tocqueville’s behalf, might we respond?

      The failure to visit Lowell was undoubtedly a notable omission. Despite its recent creation, after 1821 it had already achieved notoriety as a purpose-built mill town and regularly received foreign visitors, including some from France. Among these was Michel Chevalier, who devoted considerable space to Lowell and its factory girls in his own account of his journey across America.18 Chevalier also discoursed at some length on the towns of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, both cities evoking his admiration and enthusiasm.19 With regard to Tocqueville’s visit to Pittsburgh, however, Drescher is perhaps unfair. Beaumont and Tocqueville arrived there only after an arduous journey fraught with considerable difficulty and in blizzard conditions. Moreover, following a request from the French Ministry of Justice, they were obliged to cut short their visit to America and were now hurrying in order to return to France within a year.20

      A similar observation might be made about their four-day stay in Cincinnati. While it is undeniably true that Tocqueville used his letters of recommendation in order to secure interviews with lawyers—and also Supreme Court Justice John McLean—these conversations were wide ranging and led Tocqueville to reflect extensively upon the character of the rapidly expanding American West. “More than any other part of the Union,” Tocqueville confided to his notebook, “Ohio strikes me as a society totally occupied with its own affairs, and, through work, with

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      rapid growth.”21 The whole of society, he observed, is an industry, and everyone has come there to make money. Of Cincinnati, in particular, Tocqueville remarked:

      It is always difficult to know exactly why cities develop and grow. Chance always plays a part. Cincinnati is situated in one of the most fertile plains of the New World, and because of this it began to attract settlers. Factories were built to supply the needs of these settlers and before long the whole of the region of the West, and the success of these industries attracted new industries and more settlers than ever. Cincinnati was, and I believe still is, a transit point for many shipments to and from the Mississippi and Missouri valleys to Europe and for trade between New York, and the northern states and Louisiana.22

      From this, and other similar observations in his notebooks, it would be difficult to conclude that Tocqueville did not either observe or appreciate the importance of the rapid industrial and commercial progress that was transforming America and pushing its population ever westward.

      Nevertheless, this does not appear in Democracy in America. Indeed, in his printed text, this part of Tocqueville’s journey into America figured largely as the occasion for him to reflect upon how, when traveling down the Ohio River, the “traveller … navigates so to speak between liberty and servitude.” “The white on the right bank,” Tocqueville commented, “obliged to live by his own efforts, made material well-being the principal goal of his existence.… The American on the left bank scorns not only work, but all the enterprises that work brings to success.… So slavery not only prevents whites from making a fortune; it turns them from wanting to do so.”23 These remarks were anticipated in his notebooks and in a letter to his father.24 Yet, if one looks a little closer at the printed text, one also sees a curious footnote in which Tocqueville

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      makes reference to the efforts of the state of Ohio to ensure the building of a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, thanks to which “the merchandise of Europe that arrives in New York can descend by water as far as New Orleans, across more than five hundred leagues of the continent.”25 This observation is also prefigured in his travel notes.

      I draw particular attention to this reference to the American canal network because, when comparisons are made between the accounts provided by Tocqueville and the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, it is usually to suggest that Tocqueville ignored the transport revolution that was turning an agrarian society into an entirely different kind of economic order. According to Wills, for example, Tocqueville “rides around on steamboats without noticing how crucially they were changing American life.… He also ignores the infant railroad industry and the burgeoning