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"Theories hitherto unknown..." — Continuity and Change in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
HISTORICAL & IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born on the 29th of August, 1805 in Paris to a Norman aristocratic lineage of Tocquevilles, which had historical affiliations with the monarchic House of Bourbon. Although his grandfather had been killed during the French Revolution; his father had been persecuted under the Jacobian regime; and his mother had remained a staunch supporter of the Ancien Régime, in his youth the inexperienced Tocqueville has disassociated himself from his historical class and their ideological sentiments, or rather — shared those sentiments only to the extent he still believed to be rational after the Revolution (only to realize the contrary and become a conservative in his mature years). Having graduated from the philosophical Collège Royal in Metz and having received a Bachelor of Arts degree in law in Paris, Alexis de Tocqueville has completed an education in the traditional, aristocratic ethos. Of note is his knowledge of classical political thinkers from Plato onwards, although despite such interests Tocqueville believed the Western civilization is ready for a new, modern theory of politics and would pursue a career which would enable him to be the one to formulate it. In 1827 he became an assistant in the Versailles Tribunal. The Revolution of 1830 and the fall of the House of Bourbon has launched France on a long process of democratization and Tocqueville has begun to see in the government of United States a model possible to be implemented under the House of Orléans in France. In subsequent years he would pursue a political path which would result in his journey to the United States to witness true democracy in its infancy.
Tocqueville's political upbringing took place when France was undergoing changes launched by the Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent period of Napoleonian Restoration. In his lifetime he would witness the political revolution of the bourgeoisie and the birth of the social revolution of the proletariat with its egalitarian postulates. In his scholarship Tocqueville will reveal an evolving approach towards the Revolution, revolutions in general and the underlying changes reflecting the social and political Zeitgeist of the 19th century. Despite being witness to the world changing around him, he believed this change to be constant — he believed change to be the continuous, stable process of social history. Tocqueville's tendency to generalize will ultimately lead him to the conclusion that both revolutions — of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — are just natural acts in one, continuous revolution, or, as Marx would later have it, acts of a continuous process of class struggle.
Nevertheless, studies on revolutions — both the American Revolution and the French Revolution; as well as abstract mechanisms of revolutions in general — never lead Tocqueville to share his sentiments with one side of the conflict, one particular class. Due to his aristocratic upbringing he did believe in the leading role the aristoi should play in governing a society, yet he remained distanced and objective enough to realize that the aristoi are no longer the aristocracy and that the core of modern societies shifted to the middle class. In other words, Tocqueville connected the welfare of a country to its bourgeoisie:
It is no doubt of importance to the welfare of nations that they should be governed by men of talents and virtue; but it is perhaps still more important that the interests of those men should not differ from the interests of the community at large; for, if such were the case, virtues of a high order might become useless, and talents might be turned to a bad account. I say that it is important that the interests of the persons in authority should not conflict with or oppose the interests of the community at large; but I do not insist upon their having the same interests as the whole population, because I am not aware that such a state of things ever existed in any country. (5)
From Democracy in America emerges a Tocqueville who believed in egalitarian values, although at the time of writing his later scholarship — The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) and Recollections (1893) — he had matured as a conservative politician and theorist. In the aforementioned writings he defended aristocracy not as a class with its particular interests, but as a vehicle of values which Tocqueville believed to be of utmost importance in a society, and which were diminishing in societies with the bourgeoisie or the proletariat at the core. Despite such political inclinations and biases, Tocqueville would most rather avoid ideological extremes altogether and instead see himself as an individual shaped by moderate ideas. His identity is best characterized in a letter:
Others ascribe to me alternately democratic or aristocratic prejudices; perhaps I might have had one or the other if I had been born in another century and in another country. But as it happened, my birth made it very easy for me to guard against both. I came into the world at the end of a long revolution which, after having destroyed the old order, created nothing that could last. When I began my life, aristocracy was already dead, and democracy was still unborn. Therefore, my instinct could not lead me blindly toward one or the other. I have lived in a country which for forty years had tried a little of everything and settled nothing definitively. It was not easy for me, therefore, to have any political illusions... I had no natural hatred or jealously of the aristocracy and, since that aristocracy had been destroyed, I had no natural affection for it, for one can only be strongly attached to the living. I was near enough to know it intimately, and far enough to judge it dispassionately. I may say as much for the democratic element... In a word, I was so nicely balanced between the past and the future that I did not feel instinctively drawn toward one or the other. It required no great effort to contemplate quietly both sides. (6)
Tocqueville therefore could be best described as a man of moderation. Suspended between an old European world diminishing and a new American world being born, Tocqueville had found and enjoyed the perfect perspective to observe the crossroads of continuity and change in the American and European projects of the 19th century.
(5) de Tocqueville A., Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter XIV.
(6) To Reeve, 22 Mar. 1837, Cited in Mayer J.P. et al., Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1951, VI (1), pp. 37–38.
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