Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

me to be the abolition of slavery.≠”97 The message was, he probably thought, too negative, and the fragment was definitely eliminated.

      The author of Democracy also often suppressed expressions that could have reminded the reader of his aristocratic origins and the French aristocracy or that could have been read as too much of a critique of popular sovereignty or public opinion. “No influences except intellectual ones [{a kind of intellectual patronage}] could ever be established there.”98 Patronage was too much of a prerevolutionary word to be used and was removed. Similarly, he limited his criticisms of the people: “In this way, the upper classes did not incite [{implacable}] popular passions against themselves.”99

      Tocqueville also felt the need to conceal his belief that some peoples are incapable of being free, that they will never even understand the origin of their miseries and that “≠it is necessary that experience hits

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      them a thousand times with its ruthless hammer to tailor them a bit to liberty.≠”100

      He must also have felt that putting too much emphasis on social division could be read in France as being too liberal and thus suppressed the following paragraph:

      ≠When in the same society one finds very enlightened individuals and others who are very ignorant or very rich and very poor, very strong and very weak, the second readily abdicate the use of their reason in favor of the first.≠101

      Even a direct statement of the book’s purpose seemed too risky to include in the text: “<Far from wanting to stop the development of the new society, I am trying to produce it.>”102 This phrase, which appears in a draft, will not make it to the printing press.103

      Nor could Tocqueville appear clearly in favor of a peaceful and well-regulated republic, as he is in his manuscript: “{For me, I will have no difficulty in saying, in all countries where the republic is practical, I will be republican.}”104

      Many other points of Tocqueville’s theory will also have stronger and clearer expression in the manuscript, only to be toned down in the final version of the book. For example, the lack of society in the West will be bluntly stated: “{There are men but there is no society.}”105 So, too, the destructive force of the law of inheritance will be washed down in the process of drafting the final manuscript, perhaps because the idea could have had a different reading for a French audience. A first version of the phrase “The law of inheritance completed the dismantling of local influences” read “the law of inheritance completed the constitution of democracy.”106

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      Likewise, a large number of things that Tocqueville greatly admired in America appear much more clearly in the manuscript.

      The practical experience of Americans and their ability to organize themselves in towns and in associations were very highly praised by Tocqueville: “≠In the political world. Equal education. Experience. Usage. Habit.≠”107

      “Isn’t doubt the final stage of the common people in everything./

      Make it felt the advantages of liberty in associations for the members, and for the purpose of the association.”108

      In another note: “≠Americans undertake a multitude of initiatives on the margin of the administration, initiatives that the administration would not even have contemplated accomplishing.≠”109

      Something similar happened with the importance of towns: “Without town institutions, a nation can pretend to have a free government, but it does not possess the spirit of liberty,” wrote Tocqueville. But a first version read was more assertive: “≠[W]ithout town institutions, a nation can pretend to have free institutions but it will not have the spirit of liberty.≠”110

      The same admiration for American improvement appears in other places:

      ≠Nothing prevents him from innovating.

      Everything leads him to innovate.

      He has the energy to innovate.≠111

      Equally, Tocqueville probably thought that his wholehearted praise of innovation and entrepreneurship in America were not going to be well received in Europe. To give but one example, he leaves out of the final version the following phrase: “So the idea of the new, ≠which in

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      the mind of the European is so easily associated with that of the worst, is liked in his to that of the best.≠”112

      Tocqueville’s ideas of the American Indians will also be edited in the process of refining his thoughts and presentation for the final version. “Isolated in their own country, the Indians no longer formed anything except a small colony of inconvenient foreigners in the midst of a numerous and dominating people {and they discovered for themselves that they had exchanged the evils of savage life for all the miseries of civilized peoples}.”113

      Curiously, and maybe due to the influence of Gustave de Beaumont, the author of Democracy is initially more optimistic about their future: “[{The Indians today share the rights of those who conquered them and one day perhaps will rule over them}].”114

      The importance of both liberty and equality for a real and well-organized democracy is also poignantly evident in the manuscript: “≠Political liberty is the great remedy against almost all the evils with which equality threatens men.≠”115

      But this is not to despise the effectiveness of equality for the workings of a free democracy. In a thought that he later excised, probably because he found it too favorable to equality, Tocqueville states:

      ≠I have just pointed out great dangers. I add that they are not inevitable. At the same time that equality suggests the idea and the taste of social omnipotence, it provides the idea and taste of individual independence.≠116

      A very similar idea is presented in Tocqueville’s explanation of the object of the book, particularly the second volume of Democracy, which could not be stated as clearly in the printed version as in the preparatory notes:

      Danger of democratic peoples without liberty.

      Need of liberty greater for these peoples than for all others.

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      Those who yearn for liberty in democratic centuries must not be enemies of equality but only try to take advantage of it.

      That a more centralized government will be needed in those centuries more than in others. This is not only necessary but also desirable.

      Means of preventing excessive centralization. Secondary bodies. Aristocratic persons.

      If these means do not work, others are to be found, but some must be found in order to protect human dignity.

      To find these means, to direct towards them his attention, the most general idea of the book.117

      It would be tempting to read Tocqueville’s democratic mystery novel as a modern version of the Enlightenment project of bringing into the light the hidden processes of human behavior and history.

      Admittedly, the Middle Ages are frequently represented by Tocqueville, careful reader of Guizot, as a moment of darkness and barbarism.118 “Europe left to itself managed by its own efforts to pierce the shadows of the Middle Ages,”119 he wrote, for instance. In this regard, Tocqueville seems to follow the ideas of his time. Congruently, he also saw the period before the French Revolution as a movement forward characterized by the fact that “the peoples of Europe left the shadows and barbarism in order to advance toward civilization and enlightenment.”120

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      But Tocqueville’s Democracy is something else than a late product of the century of Enlightenment. It is also much more modern than the Enlightenment endeavor because modernity for Tocqueville, as first introduced by René Descartes and Francis Bacon, was not necessarily and always associated to the light. Individualism,121 obsession with material well-being, and reliance on the state could send human beings back into darkness.122