Methodologically, then, it is easy to fault Tocqueville. But to be content with such criticism would be to miss the deepest point. His problem was psychological as much as, or more than, it was philosophical. He explains himself in a document written in 1841 entitled ‘My Instinct, My Opinions’.
Experience has proved to me that almost all men, and I most assuredly, ultimately rely more or less on our fundamental instincts and that one does nothing well except in conformity to those instincts. So let me ask myself sincerely what are my fundamental instincts and my serious principles.
I like democratic institutions with my head, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is to say I despise and fear the mob.
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
I do not belong to the revolutionary party, or to the conservative party. But, however, and after all, I support the latter more than the former. For I differ from the latter rather about means than about ends, while I differ from the former both about means and ends.
Liberty is the first of my passions. There is the truth.21
Tocqueville was uncomfortable in the new era. His instincts collided with his ambition, and he could renounce neither. The 1840 Démocratie may be read as his attempt to think his way through to an ideological posture that would resolve his dilemma, which was as much a matter of the emotions as of the intellect. Undoubtedly he hoped to carry his readers with him, but his prime concern was to satisfy himself. In his book he would relieve his feelings, even at the expense of logic and consistency, and having done so would feel able to assert his final doctrine, even if it was not erected on philosophically solid foundations. This explains one of the book’s most striking features: that for most of its course it denounces the weaknesses and dangers of democracy, only to end with splendid affirmation. It may have struck Tocqueville that he had gone too far in his tirades (his frequent insistence to his friends that he was also the friend of democracy was quite sincere), but essentially the pattern was dictated by his personal difficulty, as sketched in the ‘Instinct and Opinions’. He desperately needed to have it both ways, for otherwise he would either have had to retire to the bocage, like his brothers, or sacrifice his sense that he was an honest man.
Almost all the theoretical peculiarities of the book can be explained in this way. Thus, if the problem with Tocqueville’s model of ‘democracy’ was too little empirical evidence, the problem with ‘aristocracy’ was the reverse: European society had been dominated by aristocracies of various kinds throughout its history, and to elicit their common essence, if there was one, was difficult. But Tocqueville wrote as a Frenchman for Frenchmen: the only aristocracy he bothered with was that of his own country, and his reckless generalizations were derived exclusively from that specimen. The British nobility might have served as a corrective, but to Tocqueville’s infatuated eyes it was simply an improved and luckier variant of the French model. Worse, he forgot his own warning in his article for John Stuart Mill, that the pre-revolutionary noblesse was far from homogeneous,* and wrote in the Démocratie as if it consisted entirely of feudal lords. The essence of the aristocratic centuries, he said, lay in hierarchy and stability: every man knew his place, every man fulfilled his duties, especially the nobility, and no-one contemplated or desired change of any kind. Democratic society was just the opposite, egalitarian and dynamic. Tocqueville succumbed to a danger that he had avoided in the 1835 Démocratie: he let himself drift into nostalgia for the lost world, most conspicuously, perhaps, when discussing aristocratic and democratic manners.† Aristocratic manners, he says, vanished at the Revolution, and their light touch, their delicacy, have left no trace even in memory. ‘We need not attach much importance to this loss, but I may be allowed to regret it.’ For:
If an aristocracy’s manners emphatically did not lead to virtue, they sometimes ornamented it. It was emphatically no ordinary spectacle, a large and powerful class, of which all the conventions seemed to reveal at every moment natural loftiness of feelings and ideas, delicacy and decency of taste, urbanity of behaviour. Aristocratic manners induced beautiful illusions about human nature, and although the picture was often deceptive, there was a noble pleasure in looking at it.22
Tocqueville does not always give so wistful a picture of ‘the aristocratic centuries’: in spite of himself, he knew too much. So when, dipping into Mme de Sévigné’s letters, he came across evidence of her callous and uncomprehending attitude to the lower orders (when some of them dared to riot against a stamp tax, she thought you could hardly hang too many), he quoted the documents in his book and went on to make intelligent speculations about the improvements in human sympathy that came with democracy.23 But these insights are hardly sufficient compensation for the misleadingly rosy picture that he generally paints of the noblesse in its days of power, a picture which the slightest acquaintance with the historical record (to be found, for example, in Michelet, who was going to receive a presentation copy of Tocqueville’s new book24 ) would prove to be false. Tocqueville was not yet systematically interested in that record, or in archives; he was not yet a historian; his aristocracy was as much a deduction from first principles as his democracy. He was so schematic that without intending it he sacrificed the historical vision which had been the mainspring of the 1835 Démocratie. His aristocratic society cannot change, by definition; he lays it alongside his conception of democracy, and except for frequent references to the will of God, and one perfunctory passage alluding to revolution,25 he makes no attempt to show why or how the one condition gave way to the other. He becomes the prisoner of his definition, and by his deliberate blindness to the turbulence of European history in all epochs, other than the latest, makes sure that his concept of aristocracy is quite unreal, for the European nobilities not only played a full part for good or bad in the process of historical change, they were themselves incessantly altered by it: the French noblesse of 1789 was not the same as that of 1066. Just as bad, from a historian’s point of view, is Tocqueville’s nearly complete elimination of monarchy from his tableau. He never thinks to ask if the noblesse had not, in large part, been the creation and tool of the monarchy in every century; nor did he notice that the monarchy had been the chief architect of centralization in France.*
He was equally imprisoned by his definition of democracy.
As has already been hinted, this term, as used by Tocqueville, has always given his readers great difficulty.† Even when, in the 1840 Démocratie, he tried hard to be exact and consistent in his usage, he did not always succeed. But on the whole he wrote as if it were synonymous with equality, and not just a label for popular government. So he felt free to describe any society where ‘equality of status’ was coming to prevail as a democratic one. This in itself plunged him into difficulties: it is far from clear that the senses in which France and America were democratic (egalitarian) in 1840 (he offers no other instances) are equivalent. Worse still, he was so desperate for illustration that he fell into the trap of assuming, indeed asserting, that equality is always and everywhere the same thing, and when he was hammering home his message that democracy could lead to a new kind of despotism he produced the following:
The Pasha who now reigns in Egypt‡ knows that his countrymen are all very ignorant and very equal, and so he has adopted, for their governance, the science and intelligence of Europe. The personal enlightenment of the sovereign being thus combined with the ignorance and democratic weakness [emphasis added] of his subjects the last degree of centralization has been achieved without difficulty, and the monarch has been able to turn his country into his factory and its inhabitants into his workmen.26
At which the reader must revolt, and exclaim, with Alice, ‘a hill can’t be a valley, you know.’ In no way could the word ‘democracy’ be used accurately of Egypt in 1840; Tocqueville’s usage shows that something has gone badly wrong with his thought.
His tendency to use the terms ‘equalit
y’ and ‘democracy’ interchangeably was made worse by his inability to arrive, any more than he had with ‘democracy’, at a settled definition of ‘equality’. (This difficulty had also arisen in the 1835 Démocratie.) When trying to sketch his Utopia, his idea of what the future might and should be like, he clearly envisaged equality in something like its fullest, most modern sense:
great fortunes will disappear, the number of small ones will increase; desires and gratifications will alike multiply; there will be no more exceptional wealth or irremediable poverty ... Each individual will be weak and isolated while society as a whole will be active, forward-looking and powerful; private citizens will achieve only small things, the State, immensities.27
Yet elsewhere the equality which he envisages is clearly no more than the triumph of envy, the state of affairs that will result simply from the abolition of all noble privileges; it is the affair solely of the notables, who will and should continue to rule over the lower classes, by right of property and education, for the good of all. Equality of status, he asserts, is the ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion of democratic nations: ‘they will endure poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy’ – by which he meant hereditary power and privilege.28 To Tocqueville the most palpable trait of the democratic revolution, and its most dangerous achievement, was the abolition of the intermediate bodies (parlements, provincial estates, the noblesse itself ) which, according to Montesquieu, defended the people against despotic kings. This myth, essentially a rationalization of the régime of privilege, had been dear to families of the robe ever since it was first propounded. Tocqueville in his nostalgic vein still professes to take this thesis seriously, but the shallowness of his commitment to it is shown by the fact that he completely fails to mention the Church in this connection, although Montesquieu explicitly identifies it as one of the most important of the intermediate bodies.29 Tocqueville never showed any tenderness towards the interests and privileges of the First Estate, and blamed the 1830 Revolution on its pretensions.30 What matters is not his Romantic regret for a fancied feudal past, which he repeatedly acknowledged was gone for ever, but his interpretation of post-revolutionary history and politics; for on the accuracy of that would depend not only the fate of his book but success or failure in his political career.
After the 1848 Revolution he would for a time go much further towards republicanism, towards being something like a democrat in the modern sense, than he expected to previously. But the 1840 volumes are dominated by the conviction that democratic politics is the politics of envy and resentment. It is necessary to ask, not only whether Tocqueville was right or wrong in this belief, but why he held it.
He might have been disconcerted had he noticed how many of his countrymen were still firmly committed to inequality of status, attaching the noble particule to their names and masquerading as counts and marquises when they could get away with it.* Instead he was influenced by his experience as a candidate in the Manche, when he constantly had to refute allegations that he was nothing but an aristo, intent on restoring noble privileges. And indeed, hatred of the ancien régime and dread of its revival was to be a major theme in French politics for at least the next generation. To that extent, then, Tocqueville characterized ‘democracy’ correctly. But even in Orleanist France non-nobles were less preoccupied with the question of the ‘aristocracy’ than were the nobles (perhaps I should write ‘the ex-nobles’) themselves. Over time, anti-clericalism was to prove a far more persistent strain in French politics than anti-aristocratism, perhaps because the Church was a far more potent and durable force than the old nobility. It could be argued that this was simply another form of the war on privilege, but that was an argument which Tocqueville never made. Undoubtedly, equality was a cherished and well-understood value, but so was fraternity, and problems such as ill-health, unemployment and not getting enough to eat bulked even larger in the popular imagination (if the history of food riots is any guide). Nationalism, in various forms, was a central and dangerous passion (1840 was the year when the July Monarchy rashly sponsored the transfer of Napoleon’s body from St Helena to the Invalides, thus stimulating the revival of Bonapartism). Above all, the value of liberty was not forgotten or unclaimed. Tocqueville himself was a passionate advocate: ‘I would, I think, have loved liberty in any age; but I feel inclined to worship it in the age in which we actually live.’31 It was the guiding star of his life; but in 1840 he seems to have understood it even less than he did equality. He never seriously asks what it might mean to anyone except people like himself. He seems to conceive of it as merely negative (not-dictatorship) and as existing when a man like himself can choose a political career and can read, say or do whatever he wishes. To some extent this works: Tocqueville on freedom of the press, for instance, is always excellent, and his anxiety about the over-mighty State was reasonable. However, he sees liberty as a precious but feeble thing, whereas, as a matter of historical fact, it is more potent than equality itself. His mistake was the one made, even more egregiously, by Isaiah Berlin in a famous discourse:32 he understood liberty only as a proposition, an abstraction, at best as a legal arrangement: he did not consider it as a process with consequences, always important and sometimes unalterable (he did not follow up his observation, already quoted, that ‘he who travels in the United States feels involuntarily and instinctively so convinced that the institutions, taste for and spirit of liberty are bound up with every custom of the American people that he can’t conceive of any government for it except a republic’).* Delacroix’s energetic picture Liberty Leading the People is more profoundly wise than anything which Tocqueville wrote on the subject. Liberty can be, and often must be, destructive; but she clears the way for rebuilding, and what is built in liberty endures. This, as Tocqueville sometimes admitted, was what the French Revolution demonstrated, and it was to be proved again in the West in the twentieth century by such dramas as the defeat of fascism, the feminist movement, the civil rights revolution in the United States, and the collapse of communism. But Tocqueville was usually far too nervous of revolution to advocate anything like it.
This was no incidental weakness. The overpowering impression made by the 1840 Démocratie is of intense anxiety. Gone is the buoyancy which, in the first volumes, marked the discussion of painful or worrying topics. Behind the formal analysis in terms of aristocracy and democracy lies another painful dichotomy: between revolution and peaceable reform. In one of the most remarkable chapters in the whole Démocratie Tocqueville argues that great revolutions will become rare in democratic times because, equality having been achieved, there will be no need for them, and although men will have greater freedom to undertake radical change, they will desire it less because they will have more to lose; but for all its brilliance* the chapter seems to be the work of an author who is not quite convinced by his own arguments.33 By now Tocqueville was finding it difficult to say anything good of democracy, as is shown by the two most important ideas put forward in the new volumes. The first was his theory of individualism, perhaps the most purely original notion that he ever formed. It is also one of the most triumphantly perverse, deriving, once more, from nostalgia for ‘the aristocratic centuries’. In those happy times, according to Tocqueville, when families enjoyed the same status and lived in the same places for generations, men were equally loyal to their dead ancestors and to their unborn descendants: ‘a man ... felt he could already perceive his great-grandsons, and he loved them.’ Not so in democratic times, which beget individualism – in other words, the retreat from public life into privacy. Ceaselessly families ‘rise from nothing’ (a characteristic phrase) and revert to it, so their members have no interest in each other, except for their very nearest; the same is true of classes, which come to resemble each other and then merge. There is no longer any class solidarity. ‘Aristocracy formed all citizens into one long chain, leading from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks the chain and leaves each link to fend for itself.’34
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