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Tocqueville on democracy, obligation, and the international system

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

David Clinton
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Extract

The name of Alexis de Tocqueville is not generally associated with the study of international relations. Social analyst, political thinker, and informed commentator on the fundamental intellectual currents of his age, he left to others the illumination for posterity of the states-system in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet, while he was not primarily concerned with foreign affairs, he did not ignore them. Some of the most famous passages in Democracy in America point to the capacities, or incapacities, of democracies in conducting foreign policy. His service in the Chamber of Deputies under the Orleanist Monarchy and in the Legislative Assembly under the Second Republic from 1839 to 1851 brought him into contact with the foreign and colonial questions of the day; it was he who largely wrote the reports of two committees on which he served during those years, dealing with the abolition of slavery in France's West Indian possessions and French military and colonial policy in Algeria. The highest post—and sole Cabinet responsibility—he attained in this world of practical politics was that of Foreign Minister in 1849.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 227 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1993

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References

1 On Tocqueville's political career, see Jardin, André, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (New York, 1988);Google ScholarLawlor, Mary, Alexis de Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies: His Views on Foreign and Colonial Policy (Washington, DC, 1959)Google Scholar.

2 The quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are taken from Tocqueville's introduction to Volume One of Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence. Wherever possible, use has been made of previous translations of Tocqueville's work, with citation being made to the Tocqueville Oeuvres Complètes, where the corresponding volume has appeared. In the remaining cases, translations are by the present author.

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8 Tocqueville's attitude toward political refugees may be seen in his dealings as Foreign Minister with the revolutionaries from across Europe who had taken refuge in Switzerland in 1849. Sec Tocqueville's own account in his Souvenirs (Tocqueville, , Oeuvres Complètes, XII, pp. 245–6)Google Scholar, and Gargan, Edward, Alexis tie Tocqueville: The Critical Years 1848–1851 (Washington, DC, 1955)Google Scholar.

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12 Letter of 18 December 1840, ibid. VI.1, pp. 330–1. See also the letter of 18 March 1841, ibid. VI.1, pp. 334–6. Cf. Mill's letters to Tocqueville of 30 December 1840 and 9 August 1842, ibid. VI.1, pp. 331–3, 337–8.

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25 Tocqueville, , Memoir, Letters, II, p. 310Google Scholar. See also his description of the failure of the coalitions against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France before 1813, in Tocqueville, Alexis de, ‘The European Revolution’ and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. Luckacs, John (Westport, Connecticut, 1959; reprint edn, 1974), p. 113Google Scholar.

26 Tocqueville, , Oetivres Complètes, I.1, pp. 164–5Google Scholar. Playing a great, and necessary, role in the shifting conditions of the states-system—knowing when to choose peace and when to accept war—might demand as well a tempering of democratic control over the conduct of foreign affairs. Tocqueville's remembrances written in political retirement concluded that democracies, ‘as a rule, have only very confused and very erroneous ideas on external affairs …’ (Oeuvres Complètes, XII.1, p. 246)Google Scholar.

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28 Letter to Reeve, 22 May 1836, in Tocqueville, , Oeuvres Complètes, VI. 1, p. 32Google Scholar. See also letter to Senior of 22 January 1855 in Tocqueville, , Memoir, Letters, II. p. 289Google Scholar. As we have seen, of course, Tocqueville was not always uncritical of Great Britain. See Lawlor, , Tocqueville in the Chamber, pp. 67–99Google Scholar; Boesche, , Strange Liberalism, p. 216Google Scholar.

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45 Letter to Reeve, 26 March 1853, in Tocqueville, , Oeuvres Complètes, VI.1, p. 143Google Scholar; Democracy in America, in ibid. I.1, pp. 174, 238.

46 Democracy in America, ibid. I.1, pp. 133, 238–9.

47 Democracy in America, I.1, p. 174Google Scholar; letter to Eugene Stoffels, 5 October 1836, in Tocqueville, , Selected Letters, p. 113Google Scholar.

48 Tocqueville, , Oenvres Complètes, IX, pp. 120–1Google Scholar (sec n. 31 above).

49 Gargan, The Critical Years, p. 144.

50 ‘Alexis de Tocqucville's Concept of Citizenship’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 108 (February 1964), p. 52Google Scholar.

51 Tocqueville, , Memoir, Letters, I, pp. 120–121Google Scholar; Tocqueville, , Oenvres Complètes, III.2, pp. 344–5, 375–83, 433Google Scholar.

52 Tocqueville, , ‘European Revolution’, p. 113.Google Scholar Cf. Tocqueville, , Oenvres Complètes, III.2, p. 319Google Scholar.

53 Souvenirs, in Tocqueville, , Oeuvres Complètes, XII, p. 246Google Scholar.