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Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (July 29, 1805 – April 16, 1859) was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in western societies.
Democracy in America (1835), his major work, published after his travels in the United States, is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
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Quotations
Despotism may govern without faith, but Liberty cannot.
Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.
Socialism is a new form of slavery.
Notes for a Speech on Socialism, 1848.
What is not yet done is only what we have not yet attempted to do.
We are sleeping on a volcano...A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.
Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies just prior to to outbreak of revolution in Europe (1848)
As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can't have it both ways.
Notes for a Speech on Socialism, 1848.
Encyclopedia
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (July 29, 1805 – April 16, 1859) was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in western societies.
Democracy in America (1835), his major work, published after his travels in the United States, is today considered an early work of sociology and political science. An eminent representative of the classical liberal political tradition, Tocqueville was an active participant in French politics, first under the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and then during the Second Republic (1849–1851) which succeeded the February 1848 Revolution. He retired from political life after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup, and thereafter began work on The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I.
Life
After obtaining a law degree, Alexis de Tocqueville was named auditor-magistrate at the court of Versailles. There, he met Gustave de Beaumont, a prosecutor substitute, who collaborated with him on various literary works. Both were sent to the United States to study the penitentiary system. During this trip, they wrote (1832). Back in France, Tocqueville became a lawyer. He met the English economist Nassau William Senior in 1833, and they became good friends and corresponded for many years. He published his master-work, , in 1835. The success of this work, an early model for the science that would become known as sociology, led him to be named (Knight of the Legion of Honour) in 1837, and to be elected the next year to the . In 1841 he was elected to the .
Tocqueville, who despised the July Monarchy (1830–1848), began his political career in the same period. Thus, he became deputy of the Manche department (Valognes), a position which he maintained until 1851. In parliament, he defended abolitionist views and upheld free trade, while supporting the colonization of Algeria carried on by Louis-Philippe's regime. Tocqueville was also elected general counsellor of the Manche in 1842, and became the president of the department's between 1849 and 1851.
Apart from Canada, Tocqueville also made an observational tour of England, producing . In 1841 and 1846, he traveled to Algeria. His first travel inspired his , in which he criticized the French model of colonization, based on an assimilationist view, preferring instead the British model of indirect rule, which did not mix different populations together. He went as far as openly advocating racial segregation between the European colonists and the "Arabs" through the implementation of two different legislative systems (a half century before its effective implementation with the 1881 Indigenous code).
After the fall of the July Monarchy during the February 1848 Revolution, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly of 1848, where he became a member of the Commission charged with the drafting of the new Constitution of the Second Republic (1848–1851). He defended bicameralism (two parliamentary chambers) and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the laboring population of Paris, universal suffrage was conceived as a means to block the revolutionary spirit of Paris.
During the Second Republic, Tocqueville sided with the against the "socialists" and workers. A few days after the February insurrection, he believed a violent clash between the workers' population agitating in favor of a "Democratic and Social Republic" and the conservatives, including the aristocracy and rural population, to be inescapable. As Tocqueville had foreseen, these social tensions eventually exploded during the June Days Uprising of 1848. Led by General Cavaignac, the repression was supported by Tocqueville, who advocated in favour of the "regularization" of the state of siege declared by Cavaignac and others measures leading to the suspension of the constitutional order.
A supporter of Cavaignac and of the , Tocqueville, however, accepted an invitation to enter Odilon Barrot's government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 3 June to 31 October 1849. There, during the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Jules Dufaure, Interior Minister, for the reestablishment of the state of siege in the capital and approved the arrest of demonstrators. Tocqueville, who since February 1848 had supported laws restricting political freedoms, approved the two laws voted immediately after the June 1849 days, which restricted the liberty of clubs and freedom of the press. This active support in favor of laws restricting political freedoms stands in contrast of his defense of freedoms in Democracy in America.
Tocqueville then supported Cavaignac against Louis Napoléon Bonaparte for the presidential election of 1851. Opposed to Louis Napoléon's December 2, 1851 coup which followed his election, Tocqueville was among the deputies who gathered at the Xe arrondissement of Paris in an attempt to resist the coup and have Napoleon III judged for "high treason". Detained at Vincennes and then released, Tocqueville, who supported the Restoration of the Bourbons against Bonaparte's Second Empire (1851–1871), quit political life and retreated to his castle . There, he began the draft of , publishing the first tome in 1856, but leaving the second one unfinished.
Democracy in America
In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville wrote of the New World and its burgeoning democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through America in the early 19th Century when the market revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the fabric of American life. He saw democracy as an equation that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual as well as the community.
Tocqueville wrote of the Americans, "Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."
A critic of individualism, Tocqueville thought that association, the coming together of people for common purpose, both public and private, binds Americans to an idea of nation larger than selfish desires, thus making both a self-conscious and active political society and a vibrant civil society functioning independently from the state. The main purpose of Tocqueville was analysis of functioning of political society and various forms of political associations, although he brought some reflections on civil society too (and relations between political and civil society). For Tocqueville as for Hegel and Marx, civil society was a sphere of private entrepreneurship and civilian affairs regulated by civil code .
Tocqueville's penetrating analysis sought to understand the peculiar nature of American political life. In describing America, he agreed with thinkers such as Aristotle and Montesquieu that the balance of property determined the balance of political power, but his conclusions after that differed radically from those of his predecessors. Tocqueville tried to understand why America was so different from Europe in the last throes of aristocracy. One of his most enduring and powerful observations, when asked why America was so great a country, was his answer "America is great because America is good". America, in contrast to the aristocratic ethic, was a society where hard work and money-making was the dominant ethic, where the common man enjoyed a level of dignity which was unprecedented, where commoners never deferred to elites, and where what he described as crass individualism and market capitalism had taken root to an extraordinary degree.
The uniquely American morals and opinions, Tocqueville argued, lay in the origins of American society and derived from the peculiar social conditions that had welcomed colonists in prior centuries. Indeed, the basis of much of the colonization was the search for religious freedom, the right to worship the Almighty in one's own way. Unlike Europe, venturers to America found a vast expanse of open land. Any and all who arrived could own their own land and cultivate an independent life. Sparse elites and a number of landed aristocrats existed, but, according to Tocqueville, these few stood no chance against the rapidly developing values bred by such vast land ownership. With such an open society, layered with so much opportunity, men of all sorts began working their way up in the world: industriousness became a dominant ethic, and "middling" values began taking root.
This equality of social conditions bred political and civilian values which determined the type of legislation passed in the colonies and later the states. By the late 18th Century, democratic values which championed money-making, hard work, and individualism had eradicated, in the North, most remaining vestiges of old world aristocracy and values. Eliminating them in the South proved more difficult, for slavery had produced a landed aristocracy and web of patronage and dependence similar to the old world, which would last until the antebellum period before the Civil War.
Tocqueville asserted that the values that had triumphed in the North and were present in the South had begun to suffocate old-world ethics and social arrangements. Legislatures abolished primogeniture and entails, resulting in more widely distributed land holdings. Landed elites lost the ability to pass on fortunes to single individuals. Hereditary fortunes became exceedingly difficult to secure and more people were forced to struggle for their own living.
This rapidly democratizing society, as Tocqueville understood it, had a population devoted to "middling" values which wanted to amass, through hard work, vast fortunes. In Tocqueville's mind, this explained why America was so different from Europe. In Europe, he claimed, nobody cared about making money. The lower classes had no hope of gaining more than minimal wealth, while the upper classes found it crass, vulgar, and unbecoming of their sort to care about something as unseemly as money; many were virtually guaranteed wealth and took it for granted. At the same time in America workers would see people fashioned in exquisite attire and merely proclaim that through hard work they too would soon possess the fortune necessary to enjoy such luxuries.
But, despite maintaining with Aristotle, Montesquieu, and others that the balance of property determined the balance of power, Tocqueville argued that, as America showed, equitable property holdings did not ensure the rule of the best men. In fact, it did quite the opposite. The widespread, relatively equitable property ownership which distinguished America and determined its mores and values also explained why the American masses held elites in such contempt.
More than just imploding any traces of old-world aristocracy, ordinary Americans also refused to defer to those possessing, as Tocqueville put it, superior talent and intelligence. These natural elites, who Tocqueville asserted were the lone virtuous members of American society, could not enjoy much share in the political sphere as a result. Ordinary Americans enjoyed too much power, claimed too great a voice in the public sphere, to defer to intellectual superiors. This culture promoted a relatively pronounced equality, Tocqueville argued, but the same mores and opinions that ensured such equality also promoted, as he put it, a middling mediocrity.
Those who possessed true virtue and talent would be left with limited choices. Those with the most education and intelligence would either, Tocqueville prognosticated, join limited intellectual circles to explore the weighty and complex problems facing society which have today become the academic or contemplative realms, or use their superior talents to take advantage of America's growing obsession with money-making and amass vast fortunes in the private sector. Uniquely positioned at a crossroads in American History, Tocqueville's Democracy in America attempted to capture the essence of American culture and values.
Though a supporter of colonialism, Tocqueville could clearly perceive the evils that blacks and Indians had been subjected to in America. Tocqueville notes that among the races that exist in America:
Tocqueville contrasted the settlers of Virginia with the middle-class, religious Puritans who founded New England, and analyzed the debasing influence of slavery:
Tocqueville concluded that removal of the Negro population from America could not resolve the problem as he writes at the end of the first Democracy:
In 1855, he wrote the following text published by Maria Weston Chapman in the Liberty Bell: Testimony against Slavery
According to him assimilation of blacks would be almost impossible and this was already being demonstrated in the Northern states. As Tocqueville predicted, formal freedom and equality and segregation would become this population's reality after the Civil War and during Reconstruction — as would the bumpy road to true integration of blacks.
Assimilation, however, was the best solution for Native Americans. But since they were too proud to assimilate, they would inevitably become extinct. Displacement was another part of America's Indian policy. Both populations were "undemocratic", or without the qualities, intellectual and otherwise, needed to live in a democracy. Tocqueville shared many views on assimilation and segregation of his and the coming epochs, but he opposed Gobineau's scientific racism theories as found in The Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855).
The 1841 discourse on the Conquest of Algeria
French historian of colonialism Olivier LeCour Grandmaison has underlined how Tocqueville (as well as Michelet) used the term "extermination" to describe what was happening during the colonization of Western United States and the Indian removal period. Tocqueville thus expressed himself, in 1841, concerning the conquest of Algeria:
Tocqueville thought the conquest of Algeria was important for two reasons: first, his understanding of the international situation and France’s position in the world, and, second, changes in French society.
Tocqueville believed that war and colonization would "restore national pride, threatened," he believed, by "the gradual softening of social mores" in the middle classes. Their taste for "material pleasures" was spreading to the whole of society, giving it "an example of weakness and egotism"." Applauding the methods of General Bugeaud, Tocqueville went as far as saying that "war in Africa" had become a science: "war in Africa is a science. Everyone is familiar with its rules and everyone can apply those rules with almost complete certainty of success. One of the greatest services that Field Marshal Bugeaud has rendered his country is to have spread, perfected and made everyone aware of this new science."
Tocqueville advocated racial segregation in Algeria with two distinct legislations, one for each very separate communities. Such legislation would eventually be enacted with the Crémieux decrees and the 1881 Indigenous Code, which gave French citizenship to the European settlers only, while Muslim Algerians were confined to a second-grade citizenship.
Tocqueville's opposition to the invasion of Kabylia
In opposition to Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Jean-Louis Benoît claimed that given the extent of racial prejudices during the colonization of Algeria, Tocqueville was one of its "most moderate supporters." Benoît claimed that it was wrong to assume Tocqueville was a supporter of Bugeaud, despite his 1841 apologetic discourse. It seems that Tocqueville changed viewpoint in particular after his second travel to Algeria in 1846. Hereafter, he criticized Bugeaud's desire to invade Kabylia (home of the Berbers) in a 1847 speech to the Assembly. Tocqueville, who did advocate racial segregation between Europeans and Arabs, judged otherwise the Berbers. In an August 22, 1837 proposal, Tocqueville distinguished the Berbers from the Arabs. He considered that these last ones should have a self-government (a bit on the model of British indirect rule, thus going against the French assimiliationist stance).
Tocqueville's views on the matter were complex, and evolved over time. Even though in his 1841 report on Algeria Tocqueville admitted that Bugeaud succeeded in implementing a technique of war that enabled him to defeat Abd al-Qadir's resistance and applauded him on one hand, he opposed on the other hand the conquest of Kabylia in his first Letter about Algeria (1837). In this document, he advocated that France and the French military leave Kabylia apart to preserve a peaceful zone so as to try and develop commercial links. In all his subsequent speeches and writings he kept on being against any attempt towards intrusion into Kabylia.
During the debate concerning the 1846 extraordinary funds, Tocqueville denounced Bugeaud's conduct of military operations, and succeeded in convincing the Assembly of not voting the funds in support of Bugeaud's military columns. Tocqueville considered Bugeaud's will to invade Kabylia, despite the opposition of the Assembly, as a seditious move in front of which the government opted for cowardice.
Report on Algeria (1847)
In his 1847 Report on Algeria, Tocqueville declared that Europe should avoid making the same mistake they made with the European colonization of the Americas in order to avoid the bloody consequences. More particularly he reminds his countrymen of a solemn caution whereby he warns them that if the methods used towards the Algerian people remain unchanged, colonization will end in a blood bath. The 1847 caution went unheeded and the heralded tragedy did happen.
Tocqueville includes in his report on Algeria that the fate their soldiers and finances depended on how they treated the natives and established a sound government. Creating peace in the country would reduce the number of soldiers. However, by treating the inhabitants of Algeria as an obstacle then the two sides would be subject to much conflict and strife.
See also
Further reading
- Allen Barbara : Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. — Lexington : Lexington Books, 2005.
- Audier Serge: Tocqueville retrouvé : Genèse et enjeux du renouveau tocquevillien. — Paris : Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 2004.
- Benoît Jean-Louis : Comprendre Tocqueville, Armand Colin/Cursus, Paris 2004.
- Benoît Jean-Louis : Tocqueville : un destin paradoxal. — Paris : Bayard, 2005.
- Benoît Jean-Louis : Tocqueville moraliste, Honoré Champion, Paris 2004.
- Benoît Jean-Louis et Keslassy Eric : Alexis de Tocqueville Textes économiques Anthologie critique, Pocket/Agora, Paris 2005.
- Benoît Jean-Louis : Tocqueville, Notes sur le Coran et autres textes sur les religions — Paris : Bayard, 2005
- Boesche Roger Tocqueville's Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution, And Despotism, 2006)
- Boudon Raymond: Tocqueville aujourd’hui. — Paris : Odile Jacob, 2005.
- Brogan Hugh: Alexis De Tocqueville, Profile Books, 2006.
- Drescher Seymour : Dilemmas of Democracy : Tocqueville and Modernization, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964.
- Drescher Seymour : Tocqueville and England , Harward University Press, 1964.
- Drescher, Seymour. Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968.
- Epstein Joseph : Alexis De Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide, 2006.
- Gannett Robert T.: Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for the Old Regime and the Revolution, The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
- Guellec Laurence : Tocqueville : l'apprentissage de la liberté. Michalon, 1996.
- Guellec Laurence : Tocqueville et les langages de la démocratie. — Honoré Champion, 2004.
- Kahan Alan : Aristocratic Liberalism : The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, Johns Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Keslassy Eric: Le libéralisme de Tocqueville a l'épreuve du paupérisme. — Paris : L'Harmattan, 2000.
- Lively, Jack. The Social and Political Thought of Alexis De Toqueville. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
- Manent Pierre : Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie. — Fayard, 1993. — 181 p. — ISBN 2-213-03036-7, Tel-Gallimard, 2006
- Mélonio Françoise : Tocqueville and the French, University of Virginia Press, 1998.
- Mélonio Françoise : Tocqueville et les Français. — Paris : Aubier Montaigne, 1993.
- Mitchell Harvey : Individual Choice and the Structures of History — Alexis de Tocqueville as an historian reappraised, Londres : Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Pierson George : Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, — Oxford University Press, New-York, 1938, réédition, 1996.
- Pitts Jennifer : A Turn to Empire, Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Richter Melvin and Baehr Peter : Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism, Publications of the German Institute, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Schleifer, James : The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, — Chapell Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
- Shiner Larry : The Secret Mirror: Literary Form and History in Tocqueville’s Recollections, Ithaca & Londres, Cornell University Press, 1988.
- Welch Cheryl : De Tocqueville, Oxford University Press, 2001.
- Welch Cheryl : The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Wolin Sheldon : Tocqueville between two Worlds, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Works
- (1833)—On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, with Gustave de Beaumont.
- (1835/1840)—Democracy in America. It was published in two volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840. English language versions: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and eds., Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000; Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.; Olivier Zunz, ed.) (, 2004) ISBN 978-1-93108254-9.
- (1856)—The Old Regime and the Revolution. It is Tocqueville's second most-famous work.
- Recollections (1893)—This work was a private journal of the Revolution of 1848. He never intended to publish this during his lifetime; it was published by his wife and his friend Gustave de Beaumont after his death.
- Journey to America (1831–1832)—Alexis de Tocqueville's travel diary of his visit to America; translated into English by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer, Yale University Press, 1960; based on vol. V, 1 of the of Tocqueville.
- L'Etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789 —Alexis de Tocqueville
External links
- Works in the original French.
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- A review by Ferdinand Mount in the , February 21, 2007.
- A C-SPAN website about Tocqueville's journey through the United States.
- A hypertext with a gallery of related projects describing America ca. 1820–1840.
- Information and resources about Alexis de Tocqueville.
- A website, by the American Studies Programs at The University of Virginia, focusing on the historical context of Democracy in America.
- Links to the Henry Reeve translation of Democracy in America.
- A website about Tocqueville produced by the French Ministry of Culture.
- A contrarian assessment of Tocqueville's intellectual stature and legacy in the , Fall 2007.
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