The French aristocrat whose Democracy in America and Old Regime and the Revolution analyzed the democratic transformation of modern societies with a depth no subsequent observer has matched, and whose diagnoses of equality, individualism, and the soft despotism of mass democracy have continuously framed political reflection on modern political life.
tocqueville
French aristocrat, magistrate, and political writer (1805–1859) whose Democracy in America (1835, 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) produced the deepest nineteenth-century analyses of the transformation of European and American societies by the equalizing logic of democracy.
Life
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel, Vicomte de Tocqueville, was born on 29 July 1805 in Paris into a Norman aristocratic family whose recent history had been shaped by the French Revolution. His parents, Hervé de Tocqueville and Louise Le Peletier de Rosanbo, had both been imprisoned during the Terror; his maternal great-grandfather Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes — the famous magistrate who had defended Louis XVI at his trial — had been guillotined on 22 April 1794. The family's restoration after Thermidor and its prominent position under the Bourbon Restoration after 1815 shaped Tocqueville's lifelong sense of standing between the old aristocratic France that had been destroyed and a new democratic order whose shape was not yet clear.
Tocqueville was educated by the family priest Abbé Lésueur until 1820, when his father, then prefect of Metz, enrolled him in the local lycée. The crisis of religious belief he experienced at sixteen — reading skeptical literature from his father's library — was a permanent rupture; he would remain a believer in some sense for the rest of his life but never recovered the integrated Catholic faith of his childhood. He studied law in Paris (1823–26), then was appointed juge auditeur (a junior judicial position) at Versailles in 1827.
The political revolution of 1830 — in which the senior branch of the Bourbon dynasty was overthrown and Louis-Philippe of the Orléans branch installed as constitutional monarch — created the personal crisis that produced Tocqueville's first great work. As a Bourbon legitimist by family loyalty, Tocqueville was expected to refuse the oath of allegiance to the new July Monarchy; as a magistrate, he was required to swear if he wished to keep his position. He swore, in considerable conflict, and immediately conceived the project of escape from a French situation that had become intolerable to him. With his close friend Gustave de Beaumont — also a Versailles magistrate — he proposed and secured a government commission to study American penitentiary systems with a view to French prison reform.
The two men sailed from Le Havre on 2 April 1831 and arrived in New York on 9 May. They spent nine months traveling through the United States and Lower Canada, visiting penitentiaries from Sing Sing in New York to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, conducting interviews with American political leaders (including former President John Quincy Adams, Chief Justice John Marshall, and Secretary of State Edward Livingston), and traveling as far west as Green Bay, Wisconsin Territory, and as far south as New Orleans. They returned to France in February 1832.
The official prison report (Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France, 1833) was a competent piece of comparative penology, jointly composed by Tocqueville and Beaumont. The more ambitious project that the trip had inspired — the analysis of American democracy as the manifestation of the deeper democratic transformation Tocqueville saw underway across the Atlantic world — became De la démocratie en Amérique, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1835 and the second two in 1840.
The political career followed. Tocqueville was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Valognes (Manche) in 1839 and held the seat through the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. He served briefly as Foreign Minister in 1849 under the presidency of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, opposing both the conservative reaction and the Bonapartist drift; the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 ended his political career and produced a personal disenchantment with French political life he would never overcome. He died at Cannes on 16 April 1859 of tuberculosis, aged 53, having recovered Catholic faith on his deathbed.
Democracy in America
De la démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840) is the most extensive analysis of an actually existing democratic society produced in the nineteenth century. The two volumes have different characters. The first volume (1835) is more focused on American political institutions — federalism, decentralization, the judiciary and the role of the Supreme Court, the press, the political parties, and the system of voluntary associations. The second volume (1840) is more philosophical, examining how democratic equality shapes American mores, intellectual life, family relations, religious belief, and aesthetic culture — and projecting what these patterns will look like as the democratic revolution spreads to Europe and elsewhere.
The central theoretical claim: democracy in Tocqueville's sense is not a particular form of government but a comprehensive social condition characterized by equality of conditions (égalité des conditions). The democratic age, which has been advancing in the Western world for seven hundred years (since the medieval emancipation of the serfs and the rise of the urban third estate), has now reached its full institutional expression in the United States. Wherever it has advanced, equality has dissolved the inherited hierarchies (estates, corporations, religious authorities, family lineages) that characterized aristocratic societies and produced a new social condition in which individuals stand as roughly equal units in relation to the state and to each other.
This condition has both promise and danger. The promise: equality before the law, the dissolution of unjustified privilege, broad-based prosperity, the possibility of political participation by ordinary citizens. The danger: the tyranny of the majority over individual judgment and minority opinion; the rise of mediocrity as the culture leveled to mass tastes; the erosion of the intermediate associations that protect individual liberty against the increasingly centralized state; individualism (Tocqueville's coinage, distinct from the older égoïsme) — the withdrawal of the citizen from civic life into private domestic and economic concerns; and finally the soft despotism of the famous final chapter, in which a vast centralized administrative state, providing for the material needs of an atomized population, reduces citizens to a condition of permanent infantilization. The famous prediction of America's and Russia's mid-twentieth-century positions as the two great powers, made in 1835 in the final pages of the first volume, is the most famous single political prediction of the nineteenth century.
The analytical framework is comparative throughout: Tocqueville reads America through France, France through England, England through medieval Europe. The aristocratic France that had been destroyed by the Revolution is the constant counterpoint to the democratic America he observes. The book's purpose, stated in the Introduction, is not to praise or condemn American democracy but to allow his French readers to see what democracy fully realized looks like, so that France's own democratic transformation can be undertaken with greater intelligence and less violence than the Revolution had displayed.
The standard modern critical edition is Eduardo Nolla's 1990 French text (translated by James Schleifer in the Liberty Fund 2010 bilingual edition). The Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation (University of Chicago Press, 2000) is the standard scholarly English access; Arthur Goldhammer's Library of America translation (2004) is the most accessible.
The Old Regime and the Revolution
L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) is Tocqueville's second major work — the first part of a projected longer history of the French Revolution that was incomplete at his death. The work is based on extensive archival research in provincial administrative records of pre-revolutionary France, particularly in Tours, where Tocqueville spent extended periods examining the records of the intendancy of Touraine.
The central historical argument: the French Revolution did not break with the trajectory of the Old Regime in the most fundamental respects but completed it. The administrative centralization that the Revolution and Napoleon perfected had been steadily advancing throughout the eighteenth century under the Bourbons; the Revolution destroyed the intermediate institutions (parlements, provincial estates, corporate bodies) that had moderated royal authority, leaving the centralized administrative state confronting the atomized individual citizens. The Revolution's transformations of property and law were preceded by long-developing patterns; the moral and intellectual transformations had been gathering for a century in the salons and the philosophical literature.
The argument has shaped modern French historiography permanently — the continuity-versus-rupture debate between Tocquevillian readings (continuity dominant) and the Marxist tradition (rupture as the basic fact) has continued for a century and a half. Francois Furet's Penser la Révolution Française (1978) is the most prominent modern Tocquevillian reading; the Marxist tradition through Albert Soboul represents the principal counter-position.
Reception
Tocqueville's reception in his own lifetime was extensive but mixed. Democracy in America established his reputation immediately; he was elected to the Académie Française in 1841 at thirty-six. His political career put him in the front rank of French parliamentarians of the period. The American reception was particularly enthusiastic and continuous; Democracy in America has been continuously in print in English since the first translation (Henry Reeve, 1838).
In the late nineteenth century Tocqueville's reputation declined in France with the rise of positivist sociology under Comte and his successors and the dominance of Marxist categories on the left and conservative Catholic categories on the right. The mid-twentieth-century recovery was driven by Raymond Aron's reading of Tocqueville as a fundamental thinker of modern political sociology (Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, 1967), by Hannah Arendt's engagement, by the American sociology of Robert Bellah and others. The publication of the Pléiade edition of Tocqueville's complete works (3 vols., 1991–2004) and the ongoing Yale University Press edition of his complete works have made the full corpus available for scholarly engagement.
The Tocquevillian revival in American political thought of the 1980s and after — in the work of Robert Bellah and his collaborators on Habits of the Heart (1985), Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000), and the broader civil-society discourse — has continued. Pierre Manent's Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (1982) and Sheldon Wolin's Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton University Press, 2001) are major recent interpretive works.
Significance
Tocqueville's importance lies in his combination of historical-sociological method with normative political judgment, applied to the central political question of the modern world: how should free societies respond to the irreversible advance of democratic equality? The diagnoses — of the tyranny of the majority, of individualism as a danger distinct from selfishness, of the importance of voluntary associations as the school of self-government, of the soft despotism of the administrative state, of the religious basis of free institutions, of the role of the press and free institutions in resisting concentrated power — are the conceptual repertoire within which subsequent political reflection on modern democracy has largely been conducted. His method — disciplined historical comparison, attention to mores as well as to institutions, willingness to project trends decades into the future on the basis of structural analysis — became the model for what twentieth-century social science would call comparative-historical sociology.