Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

no longer sees the public squares; he makes out the path of the streets with difficulty; but his eyes follow more easily the contours of the city, and for the first time he grasps its form. It seems to me that I too discover before me the whole future of the English race in the New World. The details of this immense tableau have remained in shadow; but my eyes take in the entire view, and I conceive a clear idea of the whole.34

      Predictably, Tocqueville also ascribed to himself Montesquieu’s understanding of writing and books.

      Montesquieu wrote: “But it is not always necessary to exhaust a subject and leave the reader with nothing to do. I write, not so much to make people read, but rather to make them think.”35

      In a letter to Corcelle, analogously, Tocqueville explained:

      I believe that the books that have made men think the most and have had the greatest influence on their opinions and actions are those in which the author hasn’t attempted to tell them dogmatically what had to be thought, but rather those where he has placed their

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      minds on the road that goes toward the truths, and has made them find these, as if it were, by themselves.36

      It is this understanding of the task of the writer as a type of literary author that guides the reader through a labyrinth of clues, disguises, and appearances that also singularizes Democracy in America. The book is much more than a rhetorical exercise; it tries to elicit an emotional response from the reader, seducing him, establishing with him an intimate and personal relation.

      This form of close, almost autobiographical, dialog between reader and author based in self-scrutiny and confession is in the opposite pole of an Aristotle, a Thomas Hobbes, or a John Stuart Mill. It would be hard to find, barring to a certain degree Montesquieu, anything similar in the political theory tradition.

      Hidden in Print

      Alexis de Tocqueville’s manuscripts offer an enormous wealth of information about the trappings behind Democracy in America, but there is no need to use them to find Tocqueville’s obsession with the uncovering of truth. The published text itself also abounds in hidden laws, concealed passageways, and secret principles that Tocqueville attempts to unveil.37

      Tocqueville’s obsession with removing veils and bringing secrets into light is not unexpected. It associates him clearly to Jean-Jacques

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      Rousseau’s ideal of transparency38 and to the whole Enlightenment project of using reason to explain and construct the world. Very fittingly, on the frontispiece of Diderot’s Encyclopedia drawn by Cochin, reason removes the veil of truth.

      It also recalls Montesquieu’s own attempt at a mechanical and see-through vision of the workings of political power.39

      Rousseau and Montesquieu are two of the authors Tocqueville confessed he lived with every day of his life. The third, as is well known, is Blaise Pascal.

      It is the Pascalian streak in Tocqueville’s thought that explains his calculated skepticism at ever being capable of really discovering the complete truth and his not sharing into the idea of the Enlightenment being the end result of universal human reason.

      At the heart of his explanation of the world we find Tocqueville’s own approach to the problem of his two main themes, aristocracy and democracy.

      The world is a book entirely closed to man.

      So there is at the heart of democratic institutions a hidden tendency that carries men toward the good [v: to work toward general prosperity] despite their vices and errors; while in aristocratic institutions a secret inclination is sometimes uncovered that, despite talents and virtues, leads them to contribute to the miseries of the greatest number of their fellows.

      If a hidden force independent of men did not exist in democratic institutions, it would be impossible to explain satisfactorily the peace and prosperity that reign within certain democracies.40

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      Tocqueville faces, consequently, his object as if struggling against a complex and multifaceted mystery. Hidden laws, secret instincts, veiled41 relations people the pages of both his drafts and his notes, and the final printed version of the work.

      Without the aim of being exhaustive or repetitive in the enunciation of the many underground processes found in the book, the reader can find the following many different mysteries.

      To begin with, God’s grand designs are secret to common man. Chance is the form under which God’s hidden will42 appears to the immense majority of mortals. Only the extraordinary mind of a Pascal could “have been able to summon up, as he did, all the powers of his intelligence to reveal more clearly the most hidden secrets of the Creator.”43 We do know that Providence has the secret design to divide the world between America and Russia44 and that the movement toward equality is also divinely inspired.

      If God’s projects are inscrutable, so are events to come. The future is, according to Tocqueville, a hiding place for human will,45 for the

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      passions of the New World,46 for the results of the American population moving toward the West,47 for the forces secretly gathering in New England48 or the American forests,49 as well as for the unstoppable power of the majority.50

      When we descend to the study of democratic society, we find ourselves in the midst of multiple invisible processes. Originally, national character is defined as an unseen force that struggles against time.51 Aristocracy and democracy are themselves secret tendencies to be found under all political parties.52 The benefits of democracy are initially hidden and will only be discovered after the passage of time.53 It is also an unnoticed tendency that brings democracies toward prosperity.54

      Furtive affinities exist between the Native Americans and the

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      French,55 as between liberty and industry,56 or, mistakenly, between equality and revolution.57 Surreptitious connections also exist between military mores and democratic mores,58 democratic ideas and pantheism,59 material enjoyment and restlessness,60 and equality and servitude.61

      Secret or hidden instincts abound among political factions,62 majorities,63 the human heart,64 democratic governments,65 French

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      democracy,66 the lower classes,67 political bodies,68 religious men,69 or democratic citizens.70

      Even while traveling through the wilderness, among hidden streams71 and animals concealed in the woodland,72 to the author of Democracy the noises of the American wilderness sound as a “secret warning from God.”73

      It is not surprising then that, for the Frenchman, one of the traits that best defines democracies is that these underground processes are much more complex and difficult to comprehend than in all previous forms of society.

      I am very persuaded that, among democratic nations themselves, the genius, the vices or the virtues of certain individuals delay or precipitate the natural course of the destiny of the people; but these sorts of fortuitous and secondary causes are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complicated, less powerful, and consequently more difficult to disentangle and to trace in times of equality than in the centuries of aristocracy, when it is only a matter of analyzing, amid general facts, the particular action of a single man or of a few men.74

      It is typical that authors of mystery novels present their cases to the reader as the most difficult and complicated ever. Tocqueville places

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      himself avant la lettre in the position of the detective who will solve the tangle of democratic obscure secrets and concealments.

      I have yet to make known by what paths this power, which dominates the laws, proceeds; what its instincts, its passions are; what secret motivating forces push, slow or direct it in its irresistible march; what effects its omnipotence produces, and what future is reserved for it.75

      Similarly,