Tocqueville’s Democracy in America : Some key themes reconsidered

Abstract

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: Some key themes reconsidered James T. Schleifer (bio) This paper1 focuses on Democracy in America, certainly the most famous and probably the most important of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. It is an effort on my part to re-examine and to rethink the making of Tocqueville’s classic book, based largely upon my work over the past seven years as translator of the forthcoming English language version of Eduardo Nolla’s critical edition of the Democracy 2. My work as translator has required an especially close and careful rereading of Tocqueville’s text and many of the early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments and other working papers for the writing of the Democracy; the task of translating this body of material has engaged me in a thorough and on-going reconsideration of Tocqueville’s work. My reexamination of Democracy in America has touched inevitably on Tocqueville’s style and use of imagery, on his methodology and habits of thinking, his self-awareness and self-criticism as a writer, his efforts to maintain an impression of impartiality, his sources, and on the significant contributions of his friends and family. But here I will focus on a reconsideration of some of Tocqueville’s important themes and a few of the fundamental characteristics of his book. As a translator, I was brought back once again, for example, to the old issue of “How Many Democracies?” 3 Are the two halves of the Democracy, the first published in 1835, the second published in 1840, essentially different books? From a translator’s perspective, the dissimilarities between the two segments of Tocqueville’s book are certainly striking. The 1840 portion presents word use and a [End Page 165] considerable amount of vocabulary not encountered in the 1835 half. Even sentence structures are somewhat different in the two parts. Most significantly, the high incidence of abstract words in the 1840 Democracy reflects the much more abstract character of the second portion. But I continue to believe that parts one and two remain two segments of the same work. The working papers demonstrate that, during the approximately eight years when Tocqueville was writing the Democracy, he was wrestling with essentially the same fundamental issues. Of course, degrees of importance, levels of emphasis shifted; some new concepts and terms emerged; and certain issues or ideas either disappeared or blossomed rather late in the creative process. But by and large, the same questions, problems and dilemmas garnered Tocqueville’s attention as he wrote and thought. Numerous outlines and early sketches written for the 1835 Democracy and many sentences or brief discussions in the 1835 text itself contain seeds of concepts and chapters that would become important in 1840. Even more strikingly, the solutions to democratic dilemmas that Tocqueville offered in the 1835 and 1840 portions of his work are identical. The drafts and other unpublished materials presented in the Nolla critical edition offer no evidence to support the traditional arguments for a radical disjuncture between 1835 and 1840: for a basic shift in the relationship either between democracy and centralization or between democracy and revolution. My work as translator did suggest a different question however. Is it time for readers of the Democracy to reconsider which of the two parts, 1835 or 1840, is the greater? In the nineteenth century, the usual judgment was that 1835 was the better and more impressive portion. In the twentieth century, common wisdom chose 1840, the second half, as more profound and less dated. Perhaps in the twenty-first century, readers need to return to the earlier appreciation of 1835 as the superior effort. The argument would rest on the weakness of 1840 as the far more speculative and abstract portion, which means that it is less grounded, more dubious and sometimes strangely obscure. Certain chapters in the second half seem, in particular, to overreach and to fall into doubtful speculation. In some ways, 1840 is also less strikingly original than 1835 (in part because 1840 grows so organically out of intellectual seeds laid down in 1835). And certainly, the extraordinarily close reading required for translation exposes the [End Page 166] repetitive and sometimes...