Tocqueville's Views Research Articles

FISCAL PESSIMISM IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: TOCQUEVILLE'S CROSS REVISITED

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Alexis de Tocqueville's thought on fiscal political economy as a forerunner of the modern school of preference falsification and rational irrationality in economic decision making. A good part of the literature has misrepresented Tocqueville as an unconditional optimist regarding the future of fiscal moderation under democracy. Yet, although he initially shared the cautious optimism of most classical economists with respect to taxes under extended suffrage, Tocqueville's view turned more pessimistic in the second volume of his Democracy in America. Universal enfranchisement and democratic governments would lead to higher taxes, more intense income redistribution and government control. Under democracy, the continuous search for unconditional equality would eventually jeopardise liberty and economic growth.

“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness

AbstractIn volume 1 ofDemocracy in America, Tocqueville argues that the energy unleashed by democracy is one of democracy's greatest benefits. In volume 2, his portrait of democracy turns darker, and he recasts the dynamism of American society as an expression of an underlying restlessness. In this paper, I argue that restlessness (inquiétude) is a key element of Tocqueville's mature view of democratic man. Whereas previous scholarship on Tocqueville's view of restlessness either treats the theme instrumentally, by subordinating it to other themes, or seeks to illuminate Tocqueville's debt to other thinkers, this paper examines Tocqueville's treatment of restlessness as an important theme in its own right. Treating this theme in full requires examining his discussions of materialism, envy, democratic morality, and democratic peoples’ experiences of literature and art. Through this examination we see how, in Tocqueville's view, democracy, for all its merits, obstructs the path to human happiness.

A Bible, an Ax, and a Tablet: Tocqueville's Newspapers and Everyday Political Discourse

ABSTRACTThe relationship between the free press and democracy is at the core of much modern political theory. With the advent of digital media and the decline of newspapers, there is a need to reexamine this relationship. Tocqueville was an astute observer of the importance of newspapers to democratic life and the drawbacks of the medium. This article examines the central features of Tocqueville's view of newspapers, the issues he saw with the tone of newspapers in Jacksonian America, and the value of newspapers. I argue that this analysis shows the importance of a free press to democratic life but that digital media often lacks the local element that Tocqueville saw as an essential feature of newspapers, and this deficiency is problematic for maintaining democratic liberty.

Hawthorne on the Paradox of Popular Sovereignty

This essay looks at the form of sovereignty that Alexis de Tocqueville saw as uniquely American in relation to the form of self-sovereignty that had developed in eighteenth-century England and France. By 1840, American democracy had, in Tocqueville's view, become the perfect breeding ground for the new form of sovereignty he called “the will of the majority” or “public opinion.” This popular rule worked against the very form of self-sovereignty coveted by European liberalism and cultivated by the English novel to transform such individuals into an irresistibly powerful political body. A Hawthorne story from the same period as Tocqueville's study shows the new collectivity paradoxically requiring the constraints of classical liberalism just as liberalism in turn seemed to require the popular energy unleashed by democracy to justify its constraints and exclusions. Hawthorne thus helps me argue that where theory, being theory, necessarily drives toward a point where the emerging nation becomes incoherent, fiction tells us that this point is where affect takes over and holds a liberal democracy together.

Tocqueville on Poverty in Industrial Democracies

In this paper I explore Tocqueville's views on poverty and pauperism in democratic times. Tocqueville's explanation of economic and social phenomena linked to the raise of equality, show the difficult dilemmas he foresaw with the consolidation of democracy and increasing industrialization. New social classes and the unequal access to wealth would generate a social problem which could, eventually, threaten freedom.

French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society?

This contribution to the history of French liberal thought focuses on what the author calls—but defines differently from Alan Kahan in his 1992 book—‘aristocratic liberalism’, a variant which she distinguishes from ‘classical laissez-faire liberalism, and the democratic, republican-influenced brand of liberalism’ (p. 5). Montesquieu, the originator of this variant, insisted on the necessity of preserving, in order to avert the risk of despotism, des corps intermédiaires (an aristocracy, local governments) between the central government and the people. The author argues that Montesquieu's pluralistic theory of liberal government remained influential in France throughout the nineteenth century, and that Tocqueville was by no means his only political heir. To buttress her argument, Annelien de Dijn examines an impressive number of writers, some of whom remain well known (Constant, Guizot, Staël), while most of the rest have been largely forgotten. They are evaluated in the context of the recurring constitutional transformations in France (from monarchy to republic to empire) and in terms of how they assessed the lasting social and political consequences of the 1789 Revolution. In an illustration of the proverb, nul n'est prophète en son propre pays, Montesquieu has traditionally been viewed as more influential in the United States (particularly in terms of his theory of the separation of powers) than in France. By highlighting the continuity of Montesquieu's influence within French political thought, de Dijn convincingly asserts that aristocratic liberalism, which had originally been conceived as a reaction against royal absolutism, remained a valid conceptual framework for the critique of despotism under a revolutionary or imperial regime. The societal model of intermediary bodies or powers between the government and the general public took on many variations, which spread beyond the predictable constituent group of moderate (or constitutional) royalists. However, proponents of the model during the nineteenth century were faced with the obvious fact of the demise of the landed aristocracy as a functioning class and with the emergence of an ‘equalized, levelled society’ (p. 88) in post-revolutionary France. The goal of preserving liberty in the new and irreversible social order led some liberal journalists and pamphleteers to advocate the creation of ‘new intermediary bodies, a new elite’ (p. 127) that would serve as a buffer between an increasingly powerful central government and an atomized population. The author provides an insightful comparison of Benjamin Constant's ‘neo-republican’ approach to the issue of liberty in a levelled society with Prosper de Barante's reformulation of Montesquieu's aristocratic liberalism, which posited the emergence of new local elites through a decentralized system of elected administrators (pp. 95–110). This book does include a surprising mistake: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected as President of the Second Republic in 1848 to a four-year term, not in 1849 to a two-year term (p. 156). Also, the discussion of the royalists' championing of primogeniture (pp. 49–57) in order to concentrate property could have been contrasted with Tocqueville's views on succession laws (pp. 138–39). Overall, however, this meticulously documented study sheds light on an important and relatively neglected strain of French political theory.

FROM THE SOCIAL CONTRACT TO THE ART OF ASSOCIATION: A TOCQUEVILLIAN PERSPECTIVE

In the United States, the debate on civil associations has coincided with the revival of interest in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, particularly Democracy in America (1835; 1840) in which he praised the Americans' propensity to form civil and political associations. Tocqueville regarded these associations as laboratories of democracy that teach citizens the art of being free and give them the opportunity to pursue their own interests in concert with others. Tocqueville's views on political and civil associations cannot be properly understood unless we also take into account the larger intellectual and political background of his native France. The main sections of this essay examine Tocqueville's analysis of civil and political associations in America. Special attention is paid to the strong relationship between democracy and civil and political associations and the effects that they have on promoting democratic citizenship, civility, and self-government.

Origins of the French Revolution

AbstractThere is at present no comprehensive interpretation of the origins of the French Revolution. Because of the fragmented state of the argument, this article explores several perspectives that have influenced research on the Revolution's origins including Alexis de Tocqueville's view of the state; research on the politics of the court at Versailles and the parlements; fiscal origins by institutional economic historians; and cultural approaches, including the analysis of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas. It concludes that the collapse of the Old Regime was the result of a variety of converging causes, many of which had deep roots in the institutional structure of the old regime. The state itself generated institutional contradictions by both reinforcing privilege and implementing policies that undercut privilege in the quest for greater administrative efficiency. Ministerial incompetence combined with new forces, including enhanced international pressure from efficient British war finance and the growing appeal to public opinion, made reform increasingly difficult and created conditions favorable to revolution when the state went bankrupt in 1789.

Individualism and Intellectual Liberty in Tocqueville and Descartes

This paper seeks to clarify Tocqueville's view that a political order premised on the primacy of individual reason over moral authority can be detrimental to genuine intellectual liberty. Beginning with Tocqueville's famous comment that Americans are Cartesians without having read Descartes, I compare Tocqueville's assessment of American intellectual life to Descartes' hopes for future political societies. I describe their disagreement about the effect that moral authority and rational individualism have on the development of the mind and locate its source in two competing theories of mind. This reveals a debate about our human needs with echoes in contemporary political discontent.

The European Roots of Canadian Identity (review)

Reviewed by: The European Roots of Canadian Identity Allan Smith The European Roots of Canadian Identity. Philip Resnick. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005. Pp. 125. $24.95 Building on his informative explorations of the state, the nature of Anglophone Canadian identity, and the position of Quebec in Confederation, Philip Resnick uses this little book to add to and extend the work he has already done in these important areas. The main concern is to revisit both old and new formulations of the idea that Canada is an [End Page 341] essentially North American society. Confronting all those who, from Goldwin Smith to the early twenty-first century defenders of deep Canadian-American integration, take Canada to be intelligible mainly in terms of its continental situation, Resnick insists that the picture has been – and remains – much more complicated. The nation's North American – and even its American – character is not set aside: Canada's place as 'a North American state, sharing the northern part of the continent with its powerful neighbour' (65) is, indeed, fully conceded. One chapter is wholly devoted to the theme of the American relationship, and the intimacy of the American link receives attention throughout. The book's insistently articulated sense that too much has been made of all this, that Canada needs to recover other dimensions of its past and experience, and that the European especially needs attention, nevertheless dominates. Tocqueville's view that 'Canada was identical with the United States' (74) is, in consequence, rejected in favour of ways of seeing associated with H.A. Innis, J.B. Brebner, Gad Horowitz, S.M. Lipset, Charles Taylor, and Will Kymlicka. Much material concerning Canada's similarity to Europe is drawn from work on the European Union. The result is a depiction of Canada as 'a Euro-American state, situated on the doorstep of the most unabashedly American of New World states, a state that would fit remarkably well into the European Union, were it to be located on the European continent, but which finds itself instead on the North American' (96–7). Elaboration of this design proceeds along two main tracks. Some chapters explore broad themes and conceptions: 'Particularist and Universalistic Identities' and 'The Metaphysics of Canadian Identity' are examined, notions of citizenship, self-orientation, and public space come under review, and there is much attention to the argument that Canada's acceptance of group-based understandings of society has played an especially important part in putting it closer to Europe than the United States. More focused matters form the second path, on which the role of the state, the place of multiculturalism, the importance of the globalization effect, the significance of religion, and the nature of North American continentalism appear in especially high profile. There is attention throughout to differential use of government power, to comparative levels of government expenditure, to highly specified versus diffuse patterns of national identity, to the place of small states in relation to large, and to techniques and methods of position-taking and negotiation. Canada's experience with federal-provincial diplomacy is seen as making it sympathetic to the European model of 'multi-level government' (94). Canada's 'Europeanness,' the book insists, is exhibited institutionally and behaviourally as well as culturally. [End Page 342] Sometimes argument is underdetermined; readers may occasionally feel that too many extraneous allusions are being brought in, and – despite the author's best efforts to be even-handed – the balance between European and North American seems too relentlessly struck in favour of the former. In general, though, the book offers an exceptionally useful reminder of the measure in which Canada is structured and dynamized by something other than North American lines of force. Pointing to old associations, emphasizing Canadian-European commonalities, and showing how Canadian society continues to display European patterns and forms, it works towards recapture of an element in Canada's evolution and history that no properly stated view of that evolution and history can do without. Allan Smith University of British Columbia Copyright © 2006 University of Toronto Press

Tocqueville's Paradoxical Moderation

This essay examines in detail Tocqueville's paradoxical moderation by focusing on his rich correspondence and notes forDemocracy in America. As Tocqueville's critique of the politics of the July Monarchy shows, he was a political moderate and an immoderate mind, and this uncommon combination explains the ambiguities and contradictions in his view of democracy. After exploring Tocqueville's views on moderating democracy, the essay examines the main elements of his new science of politics at the heart of which lies the idea of a wise balancing of various social elements, principles, and ideas. The final section comments on Tocqueville's elusive moderation and his search for greatness in modern politics.

The ThirdDemocracy:Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840

Tocqueville'sDemocracy in Americaoffered the image of an accomplished and successful democratic regime. Although Tocqueville never wrote a third volume, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends after 1840. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? The paper answers these questions by examining Tocqueville's unduly neglected correspondence with his American friends. It seeks to reconstruct what Volume Three ofDemocracy in Americamight have looked like if it had ever been written. In these letters, Tocqueville addressed important topics such as the instability of the market and the immaturity of American democracy, issues that didnotloom large in the two published volumes. The paper shows that in the last years of his life Tocqueville became very disenchanted with American political life and reassessed some of his previous views of American democracy.I, who am half Yankee.Tocqueville (1986, 185)

Notes from the Editor

For more than a century and a half, Democracy in America has been an indispensable starting point for understanding American politics. After the second volume of Democracy was published in 1840, Tocqueville continued to monitor political developments in this country and committed many of his thoughts to paper, in letters to friends in America. Unfortunately, his epistolary ruminations have never been translated into English, and their very existence seems to have largely been ignored until now. In “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840,” Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings use the post-1840 letters to tell the rest of the story—or, as they put it, to “reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy might have looked like if it had ever been written.” (The portrayal of party canvassing on the cover of this issue commemorates that period in American politics.) Craiutu and Jennings's creative reconstruction reveals a significant change in Tocqueville's perspective, and more specifically a growing disenchantment with America occasioned by his sense that such problems as corruption, slavery, imperialism, and the encroachment of the economic sphere upon the political would jeopardize freedom and stability in America. Thus, rather than the relatively sunny picture that emerged from the first two volumes of Democracy, Craiutu and Jennings argue that the excesses of democracy in America would have been the central focus of the final volume of Tocqueville's seminal work.

The Tocqueville reader: a life in letters and politics

Introduction. Chronology. Part I: The Discovery of Democracy in America: Preliminary Note. Illustration: Map of the American Voyage. 1. Travel Letters: First Impressions of America and Important Sketches of Democracy in America, 1831. 2. Excerpts from American Notebooks: Tocqueville's Conversations with His American Informants Travel Impressions on the Road. 3. Volume One of Democracy in America, 1835. Part II: Great Britain, France, and the United States: Preliminary Note. 4. Discovery of England, Poverty, Pauperism, and Social Policy, 1835-1837. 5. Ambitions, Marriage, and Tocqueville's Views of His Own Brand of Liberalism, 1833-1840. 6. Volume Two of Democracy in America. Part III: The Years in Politics: Preliminary Note. 7. Tocqueville's Political Philosophy. 8. Tocqueville the Colonialist. 9. Tocqueville in 1848. 10. Tocqueville Retires from Political Life and Returns to Writing. Part IV: The Return to The Old Regime and the Revolution: Preliminary Note. 11. The Old Regime and the Revolution Volume One. 12. The Old Regime and the Revolution Volume Two. 13. Last days. Suggestions for Further Reading. Note on Sources and Translations. About the Editors.

Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville

The implications of Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of democracy for current debates about social citizenship and the welfare state are explored. Systematizing accounts of Tocqueville's views on public relief have been one-sided and have facilitated efforts by the New Right to appropriate his legacy to justify New Right policies. A closer reading of Tocqueville, attentive to both his marginal and more central works, reveals good reasons for opposing the reforms that critics of public assistance have proposed in Tocqueville's time and in our own. The historicist view that Tocqueville's social and economic thought was incoherent, backward-looking, and increasingly irrelevant following capitalist industrialization is also criticized. While Tocqueville's theory of democracy requires revision in important respects, its potential has not been exhausted. In fact, a reconstruction of Tocqueville's theory of democracy goes well beyond the discourse of the New Right, pointing instead to the possibility of reforming the welfare state in a creative and innovative way through social policies that are enabling rather than tutelary, universalistic rather than targeted, preventive rather than compensatory, and associative rather than atomizing.

Social Citizenship and a Reconstructed Tocqueville

The implications of Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of democracy for current debates about social citizenship and the welfare state are explored. Systematizing accounts of Tocqueville's views on public relief have been one-sided and have facilitated efforts by the New Right to appropriate his legacy to justify New Right policies. A closer reading of Tocqueville, attentive to both his marginal and more central works, reveals good reasons for opposing the reforms that critics of public assistance have proposed in Tocqueville's time and in our own. The historicist view that Tocqueville's social and economic thought was incoherent, backward-looking, and increasingly irrelevant following capitalist industrialization is also criticized. While Tocqueville's theory of democracy requires revision in important respects, its potential has not been exhausted. In fact, a reconstruction of Tocqueville's theory of democracy goes well beyond the discourse of the New Right, pointing instead to the possibility of reforming the welfare state in a creative and innovative way through social policies that are enabling rather than tutelary, universalistic rather than targeted, preventive rather than compensatory, and associative rather than atomizing.

Land Inequality: A Comparison of Census Data and Property Records in Twentieth-Century Southern Costa Rica

A T least since the time of Aristotle, inequality has been seen as the cause of revolution and social unrest.' James Madison supported his argument for the U. S. Constitution with this premise, while it strongly influenced Alexis de Tocqueville's views of the strength of democracy in America.2 And using its modern form, John Rawls has articulated a theory of fairness that rests on redistribution as the basis for what he terms distributive justice.3 Most twentieth-century revolutions have been linked to a particular

Tocqueville's Passionate "Beast": A Linguistic Analysis of The Concept of American Democracy

In this article I argue that Tocqueville's view of democracy in Democracy in America (1835/1987) is in large measure given content and structure by the metaphor theme "DEMOCRACY IS A (PASSIONATE) PERSON." The analysis of Tocqueville's metaphors reveals that he saw American democracy as a highly defective system in which a dangerous social force needs to be controlled by other social forces. This result goes against the commonly held view that Tocqueville had a very positive opinion of American democracy. issues that the "PERSON" metaphor allows us to examine include: What is the relation between the body politic and the "PERSON" metaphor? Was Tocqueville an essentialist or an environmentalist in his position regarding American democracy? To what degree did the "PERSON" metaphor enable Tocqueville to come up with an adequate conceptualization of American democracy? I suggest that the "PERSON" metaphor is a much more complex idea than that of the body politic, that Tocqueville is both an essentialist and an environmentalist, and that the "PERSON" metaphor, although an improvement on the body politic, does not work for democracy.

The restless mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the origin and perpetuation of human liberty

Offers an account of Alexis de Tocqueville's thought and life. Lawler attempts to make clear the understanding of the human condition that is at the foundation of Tocqueville's mixed view of human liberty, and provide an understanding of liberty that does justice to human existence.

The Penitentiary and Perfectibility in Tocqueville

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE'S first book, co-authored study of American penitentiary system, is little-known work which is nevertheless of considerable theoretical interest. It represents Tocqueville's initial statement of his views concerning issues with which he was to deal throughout his career, such as political roles of religion and of intellectuals, and relation of theory to practice. Not only does book serve as useful introduction to Tocqueville's views, however; more importantly, it helps to answer various questions to which Tocqueville's later, better-known works do not fully respond. In particular, The Penitentiary System offers us thoughtful presentation of Tocqueville's analysis of problems and prospects of democratic reformism practical expression of democratic belief in human perfectibility. In view of claims that I make for work, relative oblivion into which it has been cast by political theorists, and specifically by Tocqueville scholars,1 may be matter of some surprise. Two reasons account for lack of attention paid work. First, main text of book was written not by Tocqueville himself, but instead by Gustave de Tocqueville's close friend and companion on his voyage to America; Tocqueville's own contribution was limited to notes and appendices (Drescher 1968: 130-31). Secondly, I believe that scholars have assumed that book about penitentiaries must be narrowly technical, perhaps of interest to penologists, but at any rate devoid of material relevant to Tocqueville's serious concern, study of democracy. With regard to first reason, one can observe that Tocqueville's notes and appendices consisted of more than two hundred pages, and have with reason been described as a small encyclopedia of information and surprises (Pierson 1938: 705). In addition, even if main text is Beaumont's, was Tocqueville's closest friend and intellectual collaborator throughout his life. The most fundamental considerations, however, are following: in course of presenting A Rationale for [the] Collective Study [of] Tocqueville and Beaumont, Drescher notes that the identity of [Beaumont and Tocqueville's] views [on penitentiary reform] was never broken (Social Reform 210). To this Boesche (1980: 550) adds that Beaumont and Tocqueville had unique relationship in