Democracy in America

He begins his book by describing the change in social conditions taking place. He observed that over the previous seven hundred years the social and economic conditions of men had become more equal. The aristocracy, Tocqueville believed, was gradually disappearing as the modern world experienced the beneficial effects of equality. Tocqueville traced the development of equality to a number of factors, such as granting all men permission to enter the clergy, widespread economic opportunity resulting from the growth of trade and commerce, the royal sale of titles of nobility as a monarchical fundraising tool, and the abolition of primogeniture.[5]

Tocqueville described this revolution as a "providential fact"[5] of an "irresistible revolution," leading some to criticize the determinism found in the book. However, based on Tocqueville's correspondences with friends and colleagues, Marvin Zetterbaum, Professor Emeritus at University of California Davis, concludes that the Frenchman never accepted democracy as determined or inevitable. He did, however, consider equality more just and therefore found himself among its partisans.[6]

Given the social state that was emerging, Tocqueville believed that a "new political science" would be needed, in order to:

[I]nstruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its motives, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true instincts for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.[7]

The remainder of the book can be interpreted as an attempt to accomplish this goal, thereby giving advice to those people who would experience this change in social states.

Tocqueville's message is somewhat beyond the American democracy itself, which was rather an illustration to his philosophical claim that democracy is an effect of industrialization. This explains why Tocqueville does not unambiguously define democracy and even ignores the intents of the Founding Fathers of the United States regarding the American political system:

To pursue the central idea of his study—a democratic revolution caused by industrialization, as exemplified by America—Tocqueville persistently refers to democracy. This is in fact very different from what the Founding Fathers of the United States meant. Moreover, Tocqueville himself is not quite consistent in using the word 'democracy', applying it alternately to representative government, universal suffrage or majority-based governance:

The American institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives directly, and for the most part annually, in order to ensure their dependence. The people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society. In the United States the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all the countries in which the people is supreme. Democracy in America, Book I, Ch IX

Such an ambiguous understanding of democracy in a study of great impact on political thought could not help leaving traces. We suppose that it was Tocqueville’s work and not least its title that strongly associated the notion of democracy with the American system and, ultimately, with representative government and universal suffrage. The recent 'Tocqueville renaissance', which enforces the democratic image of the United States and, correspondingly, of other Western countries, also speaks for the role of Tocqueville’s work.

— Andranik Tangian (2020) Analytical Theory of Democracy, pp. 193-194[8]

The primary focus of Democracy in America is an analysis of why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other places. Tocqueville seeks to apply the functional aspects of democracy in the United States to what he sees as the failings of democracy in his native France.[13]

Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the risk of developing a tyranny of the majority. He observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. He contrasts this to France, where there was what he perceived to be an unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious, which he relates to the connection between church and state. Recent scholarship has pointed out that Tocqueville did not speak to or attend to any African American women in the course of his study, though their views on democracy, autonomy, and freedom largely aligned with his, if slavery were abolished.[14]

Insightful analysis of political society was supplemented in the second volume by description of civil society as a sphere of private and civilian affairs, mirroring Hegel.[15]

Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve".[16] He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself.

Tocqueville's views on the United States took a darker turn after 1840, however, as made evident in Craiutu and Jennings' Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings.[17]

Democracy in America was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the other in 1840. It was immediately popular in both Europe and the United States, while also having a profound impact on the French population. By the twentieth century, it had become a classic work of political science, social science, and history. It is a commonly assigned reading for undergraduates of American universities majoring in the political or social sciences, and part of the introductory political theory syllabus at Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton and other institutions. In the introduction to his translation of the book, Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield calls it "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America."[18]

Tocqueville's work is often acclaimed for making a number of astute predictions. He anticipates the potential acrimony over the abolition of slavery that would tear apart the United States and lead to the American Civil War, as well as the eventual superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, which exploded after World War II and spawned the Cold War.

Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy, Tocqueville, some scholars have argued, also correctly predicted that an industrial aristocracy would rise from the ownership of labor. He warned that 'friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times', observing that the route of industry was the gate by which a newfound wealthy class might potentially dominate, although he himself believed that an industrial aristocracy would differ from the formal aristocracy of the past.

On the other hand, Tocqueville proved shortsighted in noting that a democracy's equality of conditions stifles literary development. In spending several chapters lamenting the state of the arts in America, he fails to envision the literary renaissance that would shortly arrive in the form of such major writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. Equally, in dismissing the country's interest in science as limited to pedestrian applications for streamlining the production of material goods, he failed to imagine America's burgeoning appetite for pure scientific research and discovery.

According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals.

Democracy in America was interpreted differently across national contexts. In France and the United States, Tocqueville's work was seen as liberal, whereas both progressives and conservatives in the British Isles interpreted his work as supporting their own positions.[19]

• Henry Reeve, translated 1835.[20] This translation was completed by Reeve and later revised by Francis Bowen. In 1945, it was reissued in a modern edition by Alfred A. Knopf edited and with an extensive historical essay by Phillips Bradley.[21]
• George Lawrence, translated in 1966 with an introduction by J. P. Mayer[22]
• Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, translated circa 2000[23]
• Gerald Bevan, translated circa 2003[24]
• Arthur Goldhammer, translated circa 2004[25]
• James T. Schleifer, edited by Eduardo Nolla and published by Liberty Fund in March 2010.[26] Bilingual edition based on the authoritative edition of the original French-language text.

• The Alexis de Tocqueville Tour: Exploring Democracy in America
• Economic sociology
• Tocqueville effect

• Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1996)
• Morton, F. L. "Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville's Democracy in America," Canadian Journal of Political Science (1984) 17#2 pp. 309–324 in JSTOR
• Schleifer, James T. The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville's Democracy in America (U of Chicago Press, 2012)
• Schneck, Stephen. "New Readings of Tocqueville's America: Lessons for Democracy," Polity (1992) 25#2 pp. 283–298 in JSTOR
• Welch, Cheryl B. ed. Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (2006) excerpt and text search
• Zetterbaum, Marvin. Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (1967)

English Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Democracy in America

French Wikisource has original text related to this article:

De la démocratie en Amérique

• 1831 Notes of Alexis de Tocqueville in Lower Canada
• Democracy in America, the full book text (Note: this is public domain)
• Democracy in America, Volume 1 at Project Gutenberg
• Democracy in America, Volume 2 at Project Gutenberg
• Democracy in America public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Booknotes, February 26, 1995 – Interview with Alan Ryan on the writing of the introduction to the 1994 edition of Democracy in America. (Page includes transcript)
• Booknotes, December 17, 2000 – Interview with Harvey Mansfield on the 2000 University of Chicago Press edition of Democracy in America, which he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated and edited. (Page includes transcript)
• Audiolivre : De la démocratie en Amérique. Première partie. (7h 31min) (en français)
• Alexis de Tocqueville: Tyranny of the Majority EDSITEment from the National Endowment for the Humanities
• Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.