LOA: Tocqueville, Democracy in America

This is my first post since arriving in Taiwan. I attended a conference last week and have had little time to work on this blog.

As far as I know, Alexis de Tocqueville is the only writer who has an entire volume in the Library of America, but who never became an American (legally or via personal identity). One could not imagine the exclusion of Democracy in America from the collection.

I found this edition of Tocqueville at the book exhibit at the conference. It was on sale for $10.00. Having given my old copy to a promising student, I took advantage of the deal. I think it was a good decision. When I am abroad I find I think much more about the meaning of being an American and throughout my studies I have found no writer with more rich insights into this question than Tocqueville.

While re-reading Democracy in America, I could not help but wonder why the History Channel wastes so much time on Nostradamus. The predictive qualities of Tocqueville are immensely more interesting and are actually grounded in real history.

As most of you know, Tocqueville came to the United States in 1830 to study prisons but would spend the next ten years writing Democracy in America to come to terms with his observations of a social he saw as defined fundamentally by its "equality of conditions." (We need only make the obvious point that he was referring to white men, although he did have separate sections exploring enslaved men and women, white women, and Amerindians. None of these groups were included within American democracy at the time, either in reality or in Tocqueville's analysis.)

My intention was to read Tocqueville to explore who early nineteenth century Euro-Americans looked at the non-Western world. I could certainly have developed this question but I will instead simply identify some interesting passages that have contemporary relevance.

On the New England town:
"Yet it is at the local level that the strength of a free people lies. Local institutions are to liberty what elementary schools are to knowledge; they bring it within reach of the people, allow them to savor its peaceful use, and accustom them to rely on it."

On the formation of an industrial working class:
"As the principle of division of labor is more thoroughly applied, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art progresses, the artisan regresses. Furthermore, as the scale of manufacturing and capital investment increases, products improve and become cheaper, and as people begin to realize this, very wealthy and very enlightened men move in to exploit industries that had previously been left to ignorant or hard-pressed artisans. These men are attracted by the magnitude of the effort required and the immensity of the result to be obtained. Thus as industrial science steadily debases the class of workers, it raises the class or masters."

On the same issue:
"Nevertheless, friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times. For if permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are ever to appear in the world anew, it is safe to predict that this is the gate by which they will enter."

What would be wrong with that? Well first:

"Equality of conditions makes men aware of their independence but at the same time points up their weakness. They are free but vulnerable to a thousand accidents, and experience is not slow to teach them that although they do not usually need the help of others, they will almost inevitably come a time when they cannot do without it."

Here we can direct out attention to later nineteenth century evolutionary thinking. Mutual aid, for Kropotkin was part of our revolutionary heritage, not a particular form of empathy that emerges from a specific social arrangement.

I want to end this with one last passage that struck me during this reading of Tocqueville. This one regards the impact of the employee-employer relationship in the context of the "equality of conditions."

"Obedience then loses its moral standing in the eyes of the person who obeys. He no longer sees it as an obligation that is in some sense divine, and he does not yet see it under its purely human aspect. In his eyes it is neither holy nor just, and he submits to it as a degrading utilitarian reality. . . . We then see in each citizen's home something analogous to the sad spectacle we behold in political society. Unremitting intestine warfare pits two suspicious rival powers against each other in smoldering conflict. The master is malevolent and mild, the servant malevolent and intractable. One is forever seeking by ignoble subterfuge to evade his obligation to protect and remunerate, while the other shirks his duty to obey. Each tries to seize the reins of domestic administration, which lie dangling loose somewhere between them. The lines that divide authority from tyranny, liberty from licensee, and right from fact strike them as jumbled and confused, and no one knows precisely what he is or what he can do or what should do. Such a state is not democratic, but revolutionary."

These are not very important insights but it strikes me that Tocqueville identifies a sharp dilemma between industrial society and American democracy. The United States, as far as I am concerned, has not yet resolved this.