Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville a French political thinker, historian and statesman (1805-1859), best known for Democracy in America, a two-volume study of the United States in which he analysed the character of democratic society, its promise and its dangers, with a penetration that has made the book a foundational text of political science.

Family and Early Career

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville was born in Paris on 29 July 1805 into an old Norman aristocratic family that had suffered during the Revolution; his parents had been imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution, and the memory of that upheaval shaped his lifelong preoccupation with the forces that had undermined the old order in France and with the possibility of establishing liberty upon secure and durable foundations rather than upon the shifting sands of revolutionary enthusiasm and the passions of the crowd.

He studied law and in 1827 was appointed a magistrate, but he found the legal profession narrow and was drawn to politics and to the study of society on the widest scale. He was a man of delicate health and a certain reserve, formed by the traditions and the disappointments of his class, and he combined a genuine sympathy for the old world with a sober recognition that democracy was the irresistible direction of the modern age and that the task before thoughtful men was not to reverse it but to guide it.

In 1831 he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American penal system, partly as a convenient pretext for observing the political institutions of the young republic at first hand. The official object of the journey was the reform of prisons, but Tocqueville took the opportunity to examine the whole of American society, its manners, its laws, its religion and its principles, gathering the material that would occupy his mind for the rest of his life and fill the pages of his greatest book.

Democracy in America

The first part of Democracy in America appeared in 1835 and was met with immediate acclaim in France, Britain and the United States; the second part followed in 1840 and turned from institutions to sentiments and ideas. Tocqueville argued that the gradual spread of equality of conditions is a providential fact, an irresistible movement that had been advancing for centuries and could not be checked or reversed, so that the task of the age was not to resist democracy but to educate and moderate it.

He examined the mechanics of American self-government, the town meeting, the administration of justice, the freedom of the press and the role of religion, and he sought to explain why a society without a hereditary aristocracy could yet remain free and orderly. He saw in the United States a laboratory in which the future of the whole Western world could be studied before it arrived in Europe, and he used the American example as a mirror in which the peoples of the continent might examine their own prospects.

He identified both the virtues and the dangers of democratic society. He admired the energy, the mobility and the public spirit of the Americans, but he warned against the tyranny of the majority, the tendency of democratic peoples to sacrifice the long term for the satisfaction of immediate wants, and the risk that a multitude of small and equal citizens, absorbed in private concerns, might surrender their freedom to a mild and tutelary despotism that asked of them little more than obedience and the payment of their taxes.

Centralisation, Associations and Civil Society

Tocqueville distinguished between administrative centralisation, which he regarded as a threat to liberty, and government centralisation, which gives a nation unity and strength in its dealings with other states. He believed that the concentration of all local affairs in the hands of a single authority was the natural tendency of democratic states and the surest path to a new form of servitude, and he looked for countervailing forces capable of checking it without destroying the legitimate authority of the whole.

Among those forces he counted the numerous voluntary associations of citizens, which he regarded as the schools of democracy, in which people learn to combine, to pursue common ends and to manage their own affairs. He saw in religious faith, in the legal profession, in trial by jury and in an independent press a set of institutions and habits that temper the power of the majority and preserve the spirit of liberty, and he thought that the vigour of these intermediate bodies was the chief guarantee of free government.

He believed that liberty is not a natural inheritance but an art that must be learned and practised, and that the strength of free institutions depends upon the active participation of citizens in the conduct of their common affairs. His analysis of the relation between equality and freedom gave later writers a vocabulary for discussing the social conditions of democracy, and his idea of a pervasive and benevolent state anticipated modern arguments about soft despotism and the erosion of civic life.

Political Life and The Old Regime

Tocqueville returned to France and entered political life, serving as a deputy from 1839 and briefly as minister of foreign affairs in 1849, during the troubled days of the Second Republic. He was a cautious and independent parliamentarian who sought to defend constitutional government against the twin dangers of revolution and despotism, and he took part in the drafting of the constitution of 1848 and in the debates on the future of Algeria, a country he had visited and studied at first hand during his years of travel and reflection.

The revolution of February 1848 and the subsequent rise of Louis Napoleon deepened his fear for the future of liberty, since he saw in the enthusiasm of the crowd and in the ambition of the prince alike the signs of a society losing its balance. In 1851 he was imprisoned for a short time for his opposition to the coup d'etat, and thereafter he retired from public life and devoted himself to the historical work for which he had long been preparing and to the writing of the books that would carry his fame to posterity.

The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856, examined the state of France before 1789 and argued that the Revolution did not represent a complete break with the past but rather the culmination of a long process of centralisation carried forward by the monarchy itself. In this book he sought to explain why the drive toward equality in France had so often undermined the freedom it promised, and he prepared the ground for a study of the Revolution and the empire that he did not live to complete.

Illness, Death and Legacy

Tocqueville's health declined throughout the 1850s, and he suffered from tuberculosis of the lungs, which slowly sapped his strength even as his mind remained active and his interest in the great questions of politics undiminished. He continued to work on a projected sequel to The Old Regime and gathered notes for a history of the Consulate and the Empire, but he died at Cannes on 16 April 1859 before the work could be completed. He was buried beside his wife in the village of Tocqueville in Normandy.

His influence upon political thought has been deep and enduring. Students of democracy have returned again and again to his account of the American republic as an analysis of the perennial tensions between equality and liberty, and his warnings about the tyranny of the majority and the passivity of democratic citizens have been cited in debates about mass society, public opinion and the growth of the modern administrative state and its capacity to shape the lives and the thoughts of its citizens.

He is remembered as a subtle and humane observer of modern society, neither a reactionary lamenting the past nor a naive enthusiast for pure democracy. He held that the coming of equality was beyond human power to prevent and that the fate of free nations would depend upon how well they could reconcile the passion for equality with the love of liberty, a question that remains central to political life in every democratic age and place and that his writings did more than any others to illuminate.

See also

• Democracy in America
• Tyranny of the majority
• Civil society
• The Old Regime and the Revolution