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Tocqueville: Neutrality and the Use of History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Marvin Zetterbaum
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis

Extract

It is not uncommon for a major writer to be seen by his critics in widely divergent, even contradictory terms; Alexis de Tocqueville shares this fate. To the familiar causes of controversy, Tocqueville added his own—a veil of neutrality or objectivity concealing his deepest views. The publication in 1835 of the first part of Democracy in America thus gave rise to an effort, still continuing, to discover Tocqueville's true intent: behind the façade of neutrality does he favor one social system, aristocracy or democracy, over the other?

On the one hand, does he not reveal in his writings the ineradicable bias of his aristocratic origins? Was he not hostile to the openended, unformed, and unforeseeable consequences of the democratic revolution? Did he not intend by his criticisms of the democratic system to “carry the reader to the point of wishing for its destruction?” Was not the liberty he defended a “restricted liberty, protecting a small group of privileged people who were really independent so far as economic circumstances went?” Was it not “a liberty for believers, [a] liberty for owners…an aristocratic liberalism?” Did he not believe that “the mass of men should remain bereft of political power?”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1964

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References

1 Leroy, Maxime, “Alexis de Tocqueville,” in Ebenstein, William, Political Thought in Perspective (New York, 1957), p. 489Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 482.

4 Keeney, James, “Tocqueville and the New Politics,” New Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1962), p. 62Google Scholar.

5 Schapiro, J. S., “Alexis de Tocqueville, Pioneer of Democratic Liberalism in France,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 57 (1942), pp. 550–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Salomon, Albert, “Tocqueville, 1959,” Social Research, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Winter, 1959), p. 465Google Scholar.

8 Ibid. See, in addition, Lewis, Wyndham, “De Tocqueville and Democracy,” Sewanee Review, Vol. 54 (1946), pp. 557–75Google Scholar, and reply by Edward Gargan, ibid., Vol. 55 (1947), pp. 6–7 (sup.).

9 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, ed. Bradley, Phillips (2 vols.; New York, 1958), II, 351Google Scholar. All references to the Democracy are to this edition.

10 Ibid., I, 6.

11 Ibid., ix.

12 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Gilbert, Stuart (Garden City, 1955), p. xiiGoogle Scholar. Tocqueville precedes this by remarking that “there can be no certainty about the future.” The significance of this acknowledgment of the limits of prediction is discussed below.

13 Mill, John Stuart, “De Tocqueville on Democracy in America,” republished in de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (2 vols.; New York, Schocken Books, 1961), I, viGoogle Scholar.

14 Lively, Jack, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 33Google Scholar.

15 Salomon, Albert, “Tocqueville's Philosophy of Freedom: A Trend Towards Concrete Sociology,” Review of Politics, Vol. I, No. 4 (October, 1939), p. 410Google Scholar. In a later article, “Tocqueville 1959,” cited above, Salomon notes (pp. 467–68) that after 1848 Tocqueville “began to question the truth of providential history.”

16 Gargan, Edward T., “Tocqueville and the Problem of Historical Prognosis,” American Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 2 (January, 1963), p. 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, see Marcel, R. P., Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris, Alcan, 1940), pp. 8687Google Scholar; Aron, Raymond, Les Grandes Doctrines de Sociologie Historique (Paris, Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1961), p. 202Google Scholar; Faguet, Emile, Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteen Century (Boston, Little, Brown, n.d.), pp. 7980Google Scholar.

17 Tocqueville, , Democracy, I, 6Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 3.

19 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

20 At the end of the Democracy (II, 351), Tocqueville emphasizes God's justice.

21 Ibid., I, 7.

22 Lively, p. 33.

23 Tocqueville, , Democracy, II, 171Google Scholar. Whether the new social order will feature a traditional class structure is not clear; but it will be a condition of inequality and of aristocracy.

24 Ibid., I, 433.

25 Ibid., p. 166.

26 Ibid., pp. 390–91.

27 See, e.g., ibid., p. 371 and especially p. 397 “Slavery, now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as prejudicial, and now contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, cannot survive.”

28 Tocqueville to Mrs. Grote, July 24, 1850, in Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (2 vols.; Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1862), II, 105Google Scholar.

29 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. de Mattos, Alexander (New York, Meridian Books, 1959), p. 81Google Scholar.

30 Tocqueville to Gobineau, Nov. 17, 1853, in de Tocqueville, Alexis, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. Lukacs, John (Garden City, 1959), pp. 228–29Google Scholar.

31 Tocqueville, , Recollections, p. 64Google Scholar. The same sentiment is expressed in the Democracy, II, 9093Google Scholar.

32 Tocqueville, , Democracy, II, 352Google Scholar.

33 This chapter (II, Bk. 1, Ch. xx), in which Tocqueville criticizes tendencies in other writers from which he himself is not altogether free, is illustrative of a characteristic trait, perhaps deliberate, inducing the reader to reflect upon Tocqueville's own procedures. In the Old Régime (p. 161), for example, Tocqueville rebukes those who, following the fashion, see the hand of providence in everything, a fashion he had already foreseen in the Democracy (II, 79). He is similarly critical of the French addiction to general ideas (ibid., p. 15), and even casts some doubt upon his own (i.e., democratic) usage of the term “equality,” (ibid., pp. 73–74).

34 Tocqueville, , Democracy, II, 92Google Scholar.

36 Cf. the following footnote, ibid., pp. 386–87, “Men place the greatness of their idea of unity in the means, God in the ends; hence this idea of greatness, as men conceive it, leads us to infinite littleness. To compel all men to follow the same course towards the same object is a human conception; to introduce infinite variety of action, but so combined that all these acts lead in a thousand different ways to the accomplishment of one great design, is a divine conception.” (Italics mine.)

37 Ibid., p. 93.

40 Tocqueville to Mill, Oct. 27, 1843, in de Tocqueville, Alexis, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Mayer, J. P. (Paris, Gallimard, 1951—), vol. VI, part I, p. 345Google Scholar.

41 Mill, John Stuart, System of Logic (London, Longmans, Green, 1919), p. 549Google Scholar.

42 Tocqueville, , Democracy, I, 7Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., p. ix. (Italics mine).

44 In the Old Régime (pp. xiv–xv), after reproducing views he held at the time of the Democracy, Tocqueville adds, “Such were my views and thus I wrote twenty years ago, and nothing that has taken place in the world since then has led me to change my mind.” If he had changed his mind, at least he was not anxious to publicize that fact.

45 Mill, , “De Tocqueville on Democracy in America,” p. xiiiGoogle Scholar.

48 Tocqueville to Gobineau, Dec. 20, 1853, in The European Revolution, p. 232.

49 Tocqueville to M. de Corcelle, July 22, 1854, in Memoir, II, 260.

50 Tocqueville to Mrs. Grote, July 24, 1850, in Memoir, II, 105.

51 Tocqueville to M. de Corcelle, Oct. 23, 1854, in Memoir, II, 271.

52 A demonstration that Tocqueville regarded democracy as the only just regime cannot occupy us here. In addition to what is offered below, consider, among others, the chapter on “honor” in the Democracy (II, 242–255), and e.g., the following from Tocqueville's, France Before the Revolution,” (Memoir, I, 246)Google Scholar:

“According to the modern concept, the democratic, and, I venture to say, the true concept of liberty, each man, being presumed to have received from nature the neceaaary intelligence to conduct hia own life, derives from birth an equal and indefeasible right to live uncontrolled by his fellows in all that concerna hia own affairs, and to regulate as he wishes his own destiny.

From the moment when this notion of liberty has penetrated deeply into the minds of the people, and has solidly established itself there, absolute and arbitrary power is thenceforth but a usurpation or an accident; for, if no one is under any moral obligation to submit to another, it follows that the sovereign will Can rightfully emanate only from the union of the wills of the whole.” (Translation slightly amended.)

53 See, e.g., Lively, p. 199, and the present writer's “Alexis de Tocqueville,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, and Cropsey, (Chicago, Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 674–75Google Scholar.

54 Tocqueville, , Democracy, I, 196Google Scholar.

55 Ibid., II, 44. (Italics mine.)

56 Tocqueville to Eugène Stoffels, Feb. 21, 1835, in Oeuvres Complètes, pub. par Mme. de Tocqueville, , ed. Beaumont (9 vols.; Paris, Michel Levy, 18641867), V, 426–27Google Scholar. The original is perhaps stronger than the translation conveys: “J' ai cherché à diminuer les terreurs des seconds et à plier leur volonté sous l'idée d'un avenir inévitable.” (Italics mine.)

57 Janet, Paul, “Alexis de Tocqueville et la science politique aux xixe siecle,” Revue des Deux Mondes, Vol. 34 (1861), p. 117Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., p. 118.

59 Tocqueville, , Democracy, I, 438Google Scholar. (Italics mine.)

60 Ibid., II, 351.

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