Introduction

When Alexis de Tocqueville returned to France after his nine-month journey through the United States, he carried with him not merely a notebook full of observations but the seed of a question that would occupy him for the rest of his intellectual life. The first volume of his great work, published in 1835, had examined the political institutions of the young American republic—its laws, its constitution, its mechanisms of self-government. It made him famous almost overnight. But Tocqueville knew that he had only completed half of his task. The political machinery of democracy, however ingeniously constructed, could not by itself explain the strange new world he had witnessed. Something deeper was at work in America, something that touched not only how people governed themselves but how they thought, felt, married, worshipped, conducted business, and imagined their own futures. This second volume, which appeared in 1840, is the fruit of that deeper inquiry. It is a book less about America’s government than about the American soul—and, by extension, about the soul of every society moving toward the great leveling that Tocqueville believed was the destiny of the modern world.

To read this volume today is to encounter a mind of extraordinary subtlety wrestling with a phenomenon that had no precedent and no name. Tocqueville did not invent the word “democracy,” but he used it in a way that was uniquely his own. For him, democracy meant far more than a form of voting or a system of representation. It meant the gradual, irresistible, and providential equalization of conditions—the slow dissolution of the rigid hierarchies that had structured human life for centuries. In the aristocratic world from which he came, a man was born into his place. His occupation, his beliefs, his relationships, and his sense of self were largely determined before he drew his first breath. In the democratic world that was being born in America and spreading inexorably across the West, those fixed positions were melting away. Each individual stood, in principle, on the same level as every other, free to rise or fall by his own efforts, unmoored from the inherited certainties of the past. This transformation, Tocqueville understood, was not merely political. It reached into the most intimate recesses of human experience, reshaping the way people think, the way they feel, and the way they live together. The second volume is his attempt to trace those reshapings, to follow the influence of equality as it spreads from the public square into the mind, the heart, and the home.

What makes this undertaking so remarkable—and so enduringly valuable—is that Tocqueville approached it not as a partisan but as a kind of seer. He was an aristocrat by birth and temperament, a man who felt a genuine attachment to the world that was passing away. Yet he had concluded, with a clarity that few of his contemporaries possessed, that the democratic revolution was both inevitable and, in some profound sense, just. To resist it was futile; to lament it was childish. The only worthy task for a thoughtful person was to understand it, to discern its dangers as well as its promises, and to learn how a free and dignified life might be lived within it. This double vision—the capacity to see democracy from the outside, with the critical eye of one shaped by another world, and yet to embrace it as the unavoidable future of mankind—gives the book a peculiar power. Tocqueville is neither a flatterer of democracy nor its enemy. He is its most honest friend, the kind who tells you the truth precisely because he wishes you well.

The structure of this volume reflects the breadth of Tocqueville’s ambition. He moves through the influence of equality on the intellect, on sentiment, on manners and customs, and finally on the relationship between citizens and the state. Each of these movements opens onto questions that remain startlingly alive for readers nearly two centuries later. Consider his treatment of how people in a democratic age form and hold their ideas. In an aristocratic society, Tocqueville observed, individuals look upward for authority. They accept the beliefs handed down by tradition, by their superiors, by the institutions that have always commanded respect. But when conditions are equal, no one is naturally disposed to accept another person’s word as superior to his own. Each individual is thrown back upon his own reason, encouraged to think for himself, suspicious of inherited dogma. This is, in one sense, a triumph of intellectual independence. Yet Tocqueville saw the paradox lurking within it. The very same equality that frees a person from deference to particular authorities makes him peculiarly vulnerable to a new and more anonymous master: public opinion. When all men are equal, the opinion of the mass acquires an almost irresistible weight. Who am I, the democratic citizen reasons, to set my single judgment against the combined judgment of millions of my equals? And so a society that prizes independent thought may, without noticing it, surrender to a tyranny of the majority over the mind itself—a soft, invisible pressure that discourages dissent not by force but by the sheer crushing presence of consensus.

This insight alone would justify the book’s reputation, but it is only one of many. Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic relationship to general ideas, to language, to philosophy, and to the sciences is consistently illuminating. He noticed that democratic peoples are drawn to broad, sweeping generalizations because such ideas allow them to grasp many things at once without the labor of examining each individually—a tendency that has both intellectual advantages and intellectual perils. He observed that they tend to prefer the practical applications of science over its pure theoretical foundations, because a restless, commercial society values what produces immediate results. He explored why democratic literature tends toward a particular kind of restless energy, why democratic poetry turns away from legends and ancestors toward the destiny of mankind as a whole and the inner life of the individual, why the very vocabulary of a democratic people shifts and expands and grows abstract. Throughout these chapters, Tocqueville is doing something that had never quite been attempted before: he is constructing a sociology of the imagination, demonstrating that the deepest features of a culture’s intellectual life are shaped by its underlying social condition.

When he turns from the intellect to the sentiments, the book becomes, if anything, even more penetrating. Here Tocqueville introduces one of his most famous and most haunting contributions to political thought: his analysis of individualism. The word was relatively new in his time, and he used it with precision. Individualism, as he defined it, is not the same as selfishness, which is an ardent and exaggerated love of self that has existed in all ages. Individualism is something more modern and more insidious—a calm, considered tendency that disposes each citizen to withdraw from the mass of his fellows, to draw apart with his family and friends into a small private circle, and to leave the larger society to take care of itself. In an aristocratic world, every individual was bound by visible chains to those above and below him; he could scarcely imagine himself apart from the long chain of generations and obligations into which he was born. Equality severs those chains. It makes each person feel that he owes nothing to anyone and expects nothing from anyone. It throws him back forever upon himself and threatens to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

Tocqueville saw in this tendency one of the gravest dangers of the democratic age. A society of isolated individuals, each absorbed in his private concerns, indifferent to the fate of his neighbors and the destiny of the whole, is a society ripe for despotism—not the loud, bloody tyranny of the past, but a new kind of mild, methodical, all-encompassing administrative power that takes charge of every citizen’s welfare and, in doing so, gradually relieves him of the trouble of thinking and acting for himself. The passages in which Tocqueville imagines this new form of servitude are among the most prophetic in the entire history of political writing. He describes an immense, tutelary power that watches over the fate of its citizens with the solicitude of a parent, that seeks to keep them in perpetual childhood, that provides for their needs and manages their affairs and softens and guides every aspect of their lives until their own will atrophies from disuse. It does not break men’s wills, he wrote, so much as it softens them, bends them, and directs them. Such a power does not destroy; it prevents existence. It does not tyrannize; it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people. Reading these lines today, one feels the chill of recognition. Tocqueville was describing a possibility, not a certainty—and the remainder of the book is largely devoted to identifying the forces within democracy that might prevent that possibility from becoming reality.

Chief among those countervailing forces is the practice of free association. Tocqueville was endlessly fascinated by the American genius for forming associations of every conceivable kind—civic, commercial, religious, charitable, recreational. Where a European aristocrat might accomplish some public purpose through his personal wealth and authority, and where the French were inclined to demand that the government do everything, Americans simply banded together. When a road needed building, a school needed founding, a moral cause needed advancing, or a hospital needed staffing, the citizens did not wait for a great man or a central bureaucracy; they associated. Tocqueville understood that this habit of voluntary cooperation was not a quaint feature of American life but the very antidote to the isolating tendencies of equality. In learning to act together for common purposes, citizens learn to look beyond their private circles. They discover that their own interest is bound up with the interest of others. They acquire the arts of self-government in miniature, and in doing so they preserve their capacity for freedom on the largest scale. The art of association, he wrote, is the mother of all other arts in a democratic country. This is among the book’s most consequential lessons, and it is one that has shaped how generations of thinkers have understood the meaning of civil society.

The Doctrine of Self-Interest and the Restless Spirit

Closely connected to his analysis of association is Tocqueville’s exploration of how democratic peoples understand virtue and self-interest. He noticed that Americans rarely spoke of sacrificing themselves for others out of pure, disinterested nobility. Instead, they were fond of explaining that virtue is useful, that helping one’s neighbor ultimately serves one’s own welfare, that a well-understood self-interest leads naturally to good citizenship. To an aristocratic sensibility, this might seem a degraded, calculating, even ignoble way of speaking about goodness. But Tocqueville, with characteristic acuteness, saw that the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood was perhaps the most appropriate ethical foundation for a democratic age. It did not produce great acts of heroic devotion, but it formed a steady multitude of citizens who were orderly, temperate, self-controlled, and habitually attentive to the common good. It did not aim at making men virtuous, but it made them habitually disposed toward the behaviors that virtue requires. In a world where the old aristocratic ideals of glory and honor were losing their hold, this modest, accessible, democratic ethic might be the surest safeguard of social cohesion. Here again, Tocqueville refuses easy judgment. He sees both what is lost and what is gained, and he insists that we reckon honestly with both.