The Grammar of Indifference: Tocqueville and the Language of Democracy

Liens and Encumbrances

In 1978, François Furet dropped the gauntlet and challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of French historians—methodological and substantive Marxism. ⁴ For Furet, French historians had abandoned the narrative method of history and introduced a “problem-oriented history.” This Marxist methodology, he argued, rejected what had always been considered heterogeneous periods of history and aimed to interpret all “human experience with the aid of a theory or idea.” ⁵ In the French academy, this theory was almost exclusively historical materialism. In other words, as a discipline, history had been reduced to nothing more than a Procrustean application of Marxism to history. For the study of French history, which in Furet’s reckoning includes her future, this orthodoxy ignored the long struggle the French had fought to maintain both individual and institutional liberty.

This dogmatic approach to history was most egregious in the interpretation of the French Revolution. The “‘Marxist’ vulgate of the French Revolution,” he says, was based on a “myth of a revolutionary break: before the Revolution, feudalism; after, capitalism; before, the nobility; after, the bourgeoisie.” ⁶ Put otherwise, the Revolution was made to fit the Marxist idea of “a linear notion of human progress” punctuated by periodic ruptures that yield entirely new beginnings. ⁷ The French Revolution thus become “the zero point of French history” and was either viewed as “a culmination or as a point of origins,” both of which are “informed by an identical desire to abolish time (an aim inseparable from the revolutionary ideology).” ⁸ The desire to abolish time is bound up with the desire to ignore certain realities of history—or more precisely, to ignore history itself. Marxist history eliminates contingency from the course of human affairs and, as Furet puts it, this “neo-Jacobin history” ⁹ rests on “the illusion that nothing was possible except what took place.” ¹⁰ The problem is that one cannot reject contingency and properly understand history; understanding history “is possible only when we free ourselves from the illusion of necessity . . . and reassert its unpredictable character.” ¹¹ In other words, the French Revolution must be understood as just one possibility in the course of human history. Of course, the Revolution took place, but not as the inevitable conclusion of an ineluctable historical trajectory. Had different actors stepped up, had there been bad weather that week, or even if there had been an eclipse of the sun that morning—it might not have happened at all. History is full of contingency and Furet rejected the deterministic approach to history not only because it violated this reality of history but especially because it was used to justify evil violations of human liberty and rights by various criminal regimes in the twentieth century. History, Furet argues, must not be “deployed as a mechanism that justifies the present by the past, which is the hallmark of teleological history.” ¹²

It is thus that Furet turned to Alexis de Tocqueville, not only as a model for historians in general, but also for rethinking the French Revolution and the history of liberty in France. In Tocqueville, he found a thinker for whom “political history is primarily a narrative of human freedom,” ¹³ and for whom the French Revolution was but another act in the continuing drama between equality and liberty. For Tocqueville, Furet argues, “prior to this revolution, a different force but one comparable in its effect had worked toward the same end and laid the groundwork both in reality and in people’s minds.” ¹⁴ What exactly this force is, Furet never says. His intuition, however, is correct that for Tocqueville history is the struggle to discover and to uncover this force that links people together—to shed light on the engine that drives what Furet calls the “logic of evolution.” ¹⁵

Following Furet’s intuitions, the central purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the history of this mysterious force can be expressed by following what Tocqueville calls an “application of linguistics to history.” ¹⁶ Early in Democracy in America, Tocqueville claims that “language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link (lien) which unites men.” ¹⁷ Readers have long established the importance Tocqueville ascribes to associations and religion for creating links between people, but relatively little attention is afforded to the force of language in this socio-historical drama. ¹⁸ This is unfortunate because in Tocqueville’s view, to understand both the historical direction of a people and its ordering principles, one must consider language. ¹⁹ This claim is deeper than the politics of speaking English, Spanish, or French in North America, both in Jacksonian America and our own time. Languages have an internal set of rules—a grammar—that puts words in relation to one another, thereby yielding coherent and meaningful wholes. For the purpose of this essay, I will call this the “gathering-together” force of language. For Tocqueville, social and political life are governed by an analogous internal logic that gathers not words, but people, into coherent and meaningful wholes. In other words, and to borrow from linguistics itself, social and political life have their own “syntactic structure,” their own grammar linking people to one another. ²⁰ And, as Tocqueville suggests, this grammar has its own history, a history full of contingency with an indeterminate future. A central aim of this essay is to demonstrate that for Tocqueville, as part of our human world, the mysterious and evolving force of this grammar both reflects and begets changing regime types, cultures, and social states.

In what follows, then, I will argue that many of the misgivings Tocqueville has regarding the development of democratic social conditions are paralleled in his view of language. While it is true that Tocqueville laments the state of democratic literature and poetry ²¹ and democratic language, ²² what is being suggested here is prior to these concerns. For Tocqueville, the evolution of the internal logic of language is correlated with the erosion of the unspoken rules that both precede and beget the ineffable and meaningful bonds (liens) between people. ²³ Thus, while the French Revolution marked the destruction of the political and social apparatus of the ancien régime, for Tocqueville it also illuminates a crucial moment in the history of language because it coincided with a breakdown of the internal, gathering-together force of language. In his view, the old regime had a grammar that bound different sorts of people into meaningful relationships, relationships both liberating and encumbering. The Revolution, however, ran roughshod over this good grammar and replaced it with its own. And because language, like society, cannot bear perpetual revolution, when the dust settled the language of democracy, with its own grammar, emerged.

The following, then, attempts to outline this linguistic history. By drawing from what may seem a scattering of Tocqueville’s work, a remarkable constancy will be revealed that not only traverses his sociological work (Democracy in America) and historical work (The Old Regime and the French Revolution) but also his confessional writings (Recollections) and private letters. ²⁴ By following the historical movement from what Tocqueville considered the good grammar of aristocracy through the grammar of revolution to the grammar of democracy, it will become evident that for Tocqueville this movement is one of degeneration. With good grammar, fine distinctions can be made; particulars, be they words or people, find their proper homes. Without good grammar, nuanced articulation, be it social or linguistic, is much more difficult. Without good grammar, the unwritten rules that bind individuals in reciprocal relations of duty and obligation are obscured. For Tocqueville, such an outcome yields the most common criticisms of democratic social life—anomie, isolation, and indifference between fellow citizens. The outline of this history will thus begin with a description of aristocratic language and an internal logic I will call the grammar of difference. The next section examines the social and literary origins of revolutionary language and an internal logic I will call the grammar of concurrence. It will demonstrate that unlike the fine distinctions maintained by the grammar of difference, with revolutionary language difference is blurred; particulars, be they words or people, are uprooted from their formerly fixed places and everything seems to run together, that is, to concur. In the third act of this socio-historical drama, I will describe Tocqueville’s vision of democratic language and what will be called the grammar of indifference. This grammar not only yields bad literature and shoddy poetry, but renders language mute, such that loneliness and indifference become the hallmark of the human condition. Simply put, with the grammar of indifference, language loses its gathering-together power. The links are broken and it is every word for itself. In the conclusion, I will suggest that Tocqueville remains hopeful because grammar, that is, good grammar, can always be taught. Language, like history, is full of contingency; although he regarded anomie, isolation, and indifference as the hallmark of the democratic age, the age is also full of contingency, and thus possibility.

The Grammar of Difference and Aristocratic Language

For Tocqueville, aristocratic language and the grammar of difference are the products of a long historical process. By way of example, Tocqueville invokes the language of the indigenous peoples of America: “The languages spoken by the Indians of America, from the North Pole to Cape Horn, are all said to be formed on the same model and subject to the same grammatical rules, and this makes it highly probable that all the Indian nations spring from one stock.” ²⁵ That the various languages are, strictly speaking, a network of dialects following regular rules of grammar, demonstrates that the indigenous peoples enjoyed a history different from the Europeans. Usually, if a people are of ancient origin, ruptures of language are likely because of a larger probability of “great revolutions” or upheavals in the prevailing order. When, for example, a nation is conquered, or conquers another, there is a mingling of difference. The indigenous peoples of North America, with their grammatical uniformity, “have not yet experienced great revolutions and have not mingled, willingly or otherwise, with foreign nations, for it is usually the combination of several languages into one that produces grammatical irregularities.” ²⁶ The American Indians, like the Europeans who were then beginning to populate the continent, enjoyed the privilege of continental insularism. Their linguistic history was not punctuated by transfigurative foreign invasions that begin grammatical irregularities.

The Europeans, however, did not enjoy this insularity, which is why one finds these grammatical irregularities that mark the beginning of real difference between languages—the kind of difference that make meaning difficult to translate and to export. This is precisely why Tocqueville made efforts to learn English, which he did well, and German, which he did not so well. While one might translate French poetry into English, the grammar that is both interior and anterior to understanding can be missed. Shortly after the publication of his The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, for example, Tocqueville expresses concern that his ideas are not being read in their appropriate language. In a letter to an American friend, Francis Lieber, he writes: “Thank you very much for the interest you have taken in advance in the book that I have just published. I am very eager to know what you will think of it once you have read it. I entreat you to read it in French. You know our language well enough for me to be interested in showing you my ideas in their national costume. The best translation is never more than a poor copy.” ²⁷ In other words, there are two ways of regarding language. On the one hand, language is a collection of words that can be translated to other languages. But deeper than this “national costume” character of language, one finds “grammatical irregularities” that house an internal logic resistant to export.

Language can thus be exported by emulating the wagging of the native speaker’s vocal cords. As the movement of mouth, tongue, and larynx particular to a people, this national-costume character of language is superficial. ²⁸ However, in Tocqueville’s understanding, language in this sense can be meaningful by illuminating caste difference. In a hieratic society such as Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century France, though the words spoken are similar and familiar, and though facility with these words varies greatly, language reveals difference. Tocqueville puts it this way:

It is true that my birth and the society in which I had been brought up gave me great facilities for this which the others did not possess; for, although the French nobility have ceased to be a class, they have yet remained a sort of freemasonry, of which all the members continue to recognize one another through certain invisible signs, whatever may be the opinions which makes them strangers to one another, or even adversaries. [This bond (lien) which still exists between all its members is so close that I have found myself a hundred times more at ease in dealing with aristocrats who differed from me entirely in their interests and opinions than with bourgeois whose ideas and instincts were analogous to mine. With the former I was in disagreement but I knew what language I had to speak, and I felt instinctively what I had to say and when to keep silent.] ²⁹

His point is that language expresses difference not merely by what is spoken, but by creating unspoken bonds between speakers. In other words, language can deliver facts, but can, tacitly even, gather-together by bringing difference to light. This unvoiced aspect of language can, however, put one ill-at-ease in one’s situation. Though one speaks French, it is possible to speak a language unintelligible to other French speakers. Language reveals that one can be not-at-home in one’s own language; that one can be out of tune with others, despite speaking the same language. Simply put, though language can be shared, it is possible to have a different grammar. Grammar cannot always be translated.

This said, language can also put one at ease. Language brings to light attunements that express bonds within castes. For Tocqueville, it is important to note, a caste is more than an identifiable political or social group. While a caste might come to be associated with shared sympathies, party affiliation, or wealth, caste membership is given by birth. ³⁰ These differences, of course, are socially constructed and the construction begins in the cradle where one learns one’s mother tongue. There is neither scientific nor mystical justification for this difference. The Europeans, he says, were very similar but through various social machinations, people became “alien and indifferent to each other” and language, for better or worse, developed an internal logic that housed this deep difference. Through “invisible signs” and unspoken language, the ruling caste established links that ensure “anyone not born noble was outside this peculiar and closed class and occupied a position more or less important in society but always subordinate in the state.” ³¹ The grammar of difference confirms and affirms one’s place in a social order. It creates ineffable bonds both within and across castes.

Is it, of course, possible to don various national costumes. One can become bilingual or even a polyglot, but it seems less likely that one can participate in multiple grammars. The grammar of difference can house diverse feelings, ideas, and instincts. It is more primordial than sounds passing one’s barrier of teeth, as Homer might put it. ³² For example, while in Michigan Tocqueville encountered several “half-castes.” Traveling from Flint to Saginaw, he and Beaumont found themselves in a clearing in the forest. In this clearing, they entered “a rustic hut more comfortable than the savage’s wigwam but ruder than the civilised man’s house. That is the half-caste’s (métis) dwelling.” ³³ In the hut “seated cross-legged on a mat in the middle of the room, a young woman was making some moccasins; with one foot she rocked an infant whose copper colour and whose features made its double origin clear. This woman was dressed like one of our peasants except that her feet were bare and her hair fell freely on her shoulders.” ³⁴ She was, in the patois of the time, bois-brulés. Tocqueville’s interpretation of the moment is telling:

We asked her if she was French. “No,” she answered smiling.—“English.”—“Not that either.” she said; she lowered her eyes and added, “I am only a savage.” Child of two races, brought up to use two languages, nourished in diverse beliefs and rocked in contrary prejudices, the half-caste forms an amalgam as inexplicable to others as to himself. ³⁵

The young woman, it appears, was at least bilingual. Her national costume was of two peoples. But more importantly, Tocqueville is suggesting that while she might speak two languages, her linguistic dwelling is in-between two grammars. Rather than bilingualism in this sense, the amalgam of her existence is “inexplicable.” Language in this sense reaches down into the existential categories of beliefs (croyances) and prejudices (préjugés). Put otherwise, while we use different languages, we dwell in but one grammar. The somber character of the encounter is owed to Tocqueville’s impression that the Métis women had no such dwelling. Lost between two worlds, at home in no grammar, she had no people with whom to share the unspoken language of recognition and belonging. It is precisely this sort of silence and loneliness that gives Tocqueville most pause—that inspires in him, as he puts it, “religious terror.” ³⁶

The encounter with the Métis woman, as Tocqueville puts it, was “on the border of the old and new world.” ³⁷ That Tocqueville and Beaumont found this clearing in the forest was no coincidence. While venturing through this part of the United States, Tocqueville was adamant they experience the “wilderness.” They deliberately went off the beaten trail into the forest and mosquitoes to experience this frontier, this borderland. His desire to see the wilderness, however, stemmed not from some romantic European idea of virgin forests or fountains of youth. What he sought was to experience the time and place where European meets Indian. This encounter, however, ought not to be interpreted in racial terms, but sociological. At the edge of civilization, Tocqueville hoped to experience that which had passed him by in Europe, namely, aristocracy in its pure form—which is how he viewed the North American Indian. ³⁸ After all, the French Revolution was a collision between the old world and the new, temporally speaking. It was a collision between aristocracy and democracy. The new world to which he refers is not America, per se. It is neither a spatial nor temporal reference. ³⁹ For Tocqueville, “new world” refers to a new way of thinking, a new internal logic. Hence, to be at the collision point of the new world and the old world in the American wilderness is to experience first-hand the mingling of two grammars.

In Michigan, in a clearing in the forest, Tocqueville found himself between two worlds—the new and democratic and the old and aristocratic. The irony here should be clear. The old world, which was only available to Tocqueville in the various archives in which he later did so much research for his Ancien Régime and the Revolution, could still be experienced with the Indians living beyond the boundaries of American expansion. This is not to say, of course, that Tocqueville would be able to speak Algonquin with the indigenous peoples he encountered. For Tocqueville, however, the native had in common with the European aristocrat the language that speaks without speaking; they have in common the basic epistemological principles of the old, pre-revolution French noblesse. The inexplicable amalgam of the Métis women, then, is neither a statement on race nor ability with English, French, or her native tongue. It is inexplicable because she dwells between democracy and aristocracy. In this in-between, she represents a world without canvas for the art of mutual duties and obligations. Alone in the forest, dwelling at the point of collision between historical moments, she represents a world where the grammar that begets those important “bonds of human affection” ⁴⁰ has been destroyed—where the grammar of difference is being transliterated and transformed into the grammar of indifference.

The Grammar of Concurrence and Revolutionary Language

The movement from the grammar of difference to the grammar of indifference maps nicely onto Tocqueville’s application of linguistics to history. The grammar of indifference, however, emerges only after the Revolutionary dust settles. In between the ancien régime and “the world itself quite new,” Tocqueville senses a politics and language with an interior logic that might best be characterized as the grammar of concurrence. To concur is, literally, “to run together.” Just as various colors of paint, when poorly applied, run together and blur what were once distinct lines and hues, the internal logic of language can also run together. And this is precisely how Tocqueville describes the use of language leading up to, and following, the French Revolution. Running alongside the seven-hundred-year history that describes the advent of the dogma of equality, one can also follow the grammar of concurrence. Like egalitarian thinking, the grammar of concurrence began to congeal during the Enlightenment and came fully to light in what Tocqueville calls “the literary spirit in politics.” ⁴¹

Tocqueville discovered this literary spirit while conducting research for his Ancien Régime. While reviewing local documents from pre-Revolutionary times, he discovered that the language officials used was not too different from his present day. “On both sides,” he says, “the style is equally colourless, smooth, vague and lifeless. The personality of each writer is removed and disappears into a common mediocrity. Were you to read a present-day prefect, you would be reading an Intendant.” ⁴² This style of language, however, was interrupted a little before the Revolution in France. Official documents, he discovered, became replete with sentimental language. For example, Tocqueville tells us that “the official style, with its normally dry tone, became after that sometimes unctuous and almost caring. A sub-delegate complained to the Paris Intendant, ‘that, in the course of his duties, he often experiences a grief which is harrowing to a sensitive soul.’” ⁴³ This sentimental language was not unique to the political class. Tocqueville also noticed the employment of similar language ranging from peasants all the way to the monarchy:

Fostered by the political passions which used it, this style infiltrated all three classes and moved with unusual rapidity even down to the lowest class. Well before the Revolution, the edicts of Louis XVI spoke often of natural law and the rights of man. I came across peasants who, in their petitions, called their neighbours fellow citizens; the Intendant, a respectable magistrate; the parish priest, the minister of the altars; God, the Supreme Being. ⁴⁴

Sentimental, verbose, and abstract, this literary spirit had lasting effects in political life. After the Revolution, he writes, the literary habits became part and parcel of the new political culture and social state. As Tocqueville writes, in the years following the Revolution,

the governing revolutionary party kept up in its official language all the rhetoric of the Revolution. Likewise the last thing that a party will abandon is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the rules of language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas instilled into them than the words that they have learned. When one reads the harangues of the time, it seems as if nothing could be expressed simply. Soldiers are called “warriors,” wives “faithful companions,” children “pawns of love.” Duty is never mentioned, “virtue” always; no one ever promises less than to die for his country and for liberty. ⁴⁵

In other words, there is a tendency to eschew language that references specific people, specific places, and specific instances in revolutionary periods. For Tocqueville, the problem with this is almost self-evident. To think of one’s neighbor as “fellow citizen” reduces the neighbor to an abstract other. Such abstraction opens the way to treating another human being as merely an idea, rather than a unique individual with whom one experiences all the liens and encumbrances of decent political and social life. Abstractions cover over the canvas on which human beings paint relations of mutual duty and obligation. For Tocqueville, reality is full of contingency, difference, and complexity; abstraction and false sentimentality do not adequately address these. The propensity to such language leads to what Ralph Hancock calls “a dislocation of theory and practice” and severely curtails the development of the practical wisdom needed for the arts of neighborliness and government. ⁴⁶

Tocqueville is unambiguous on the source of this transition: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Writers like Rousseau worked under an unnatural impulse “to replace the complex and traditional customs which guided society of their time with simple and elementary rules borrowed from reason and natural law.” ⁴⁷ In other words, the universalist tendencies of the Enlightenment are bound up with the grammar of concurrence. On this point, Tocqueville is consistent. In one of the last things he wrote, he is deeply critical of the sentimentalism Rousseau introduced to the average language of French life:

The inflated sentimentalism, the exaggerated expressions, the incoherence, and the ungainly images, those constant citations from antiquity which were to be characteristic of the language of the Revolution were already habitual at this time. Tranquility or moderation was completely absent. The overwhelming inclinations of all minds were to commonplaces; nor was it permissible to express anything simply; it was necessary that the expression should overflow beyond the original idea or sentiment. ⁴⁸

In other words, the language and politics of the era reflected a grammar without boundaries. In the realm of literature, this may be a fine thing because literature is the home of imagination. In literature, one has license to go places closed to the real world of politics. The world of literature need not contend with the empirical realities of human relationships and, for that matter, the empirical boundaries of the physical human being. Literature has no boundaries and, qua literature, does not need them. In short, abstractions have a comfortable home in literature. ⁴⁹

This said, Tocqueville is neither rejecting linguistic abstractions tout court, nor claiming they are exclusive to revolutionary periods. As he puts it, “The languages of all peoples have a base of generic and abstract terms, and I do not make out that they are only found among democracies. I only assert that the tendency of men in times of equality is to increase the number of words of this type and in particular to use them detachedly and with the most abstract possible meaning and to use them on every conceivable occasion, whether needed or not.” ⁵⁰ Abstract terms are needed for the same reason dogmas are needed in thought. In our average everyday lives, certain dogmas (opinions) are taken without question. Augustine calls this “the usefulness of belief,” suggesting that, existentially speaking, human beings need to take certain facts as given, lest they fall into a quagmire of doubt. ⁵¹ For example, most people are told by their parents who their father is, and they take this information on trust, without discussion. To doubt all things that cannot be empirically verified by every person every time the issue arises would beget an inescapable existential impasse. For Tocqueville, abstractions function in a similar way, providing shortcuts for thinking so that the epistemological wheel need not be reinvented daily. ⁵²

The problem is when these epistemological abstractions work their way into the day-to-day practical lives of people. To abstract is, literally, to draw away. It means to withdraw from the situated world, away from specifics. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville invokes the term to contrast the sovereignty of the Union with the sovereignty of the states. “The sovereignty of the Union,” he writes, “is an abstract entity (un être abstrait) connected with a small number of external concerns.” ⁵³ This sovereignty, because it is abstract, is only loosely felt by the people and only dimly understood. It is a power that is removed, or drawn away, from the daily experience of the average person. It is not palpably present. The sovereignty of the states, on the other hand, “strikes every sense; it is easily understood and is seen in action constantly. The former is an innovation, but the latter was born with the people themselves.” ⁵⁴ In other words, in contrast to being abstract, state sovereignty shares a kind of natality with people. In a sense, it is rooted in the very soil from which the people spring. It is organic. The sovereignty of the union is abstract and inorganic. Like the imaginative creations of writers like Rousseau, “the sovereignty of the Union is a work of art. That of the states is natural; it exists on its own, without striving, like the authority of the father in a family.” ⁵⁵ The abstract being is “huge and distant . . . a vague, ill-defined sentiment.” The non-abstract being “affects every detail of life.” It is organically linked to things, to places, to people. State sovereignty carries the “duty of guaranteeing property, liberty, and life.” The non-abstract “is supported by memories, customs, local prejudices, and provincial and family selfishness.” ⁵⁶ In short, when abstraction as a habit of heart remakes itself in the practical lives of people, it draws them away from one another. It discourages epistemological habits that beget the enduring links that rather people in a world of shared duties and obligations.

Had this impulse remained in the domain of the writers, it would have been fine. In fact, one might find merit in this way of thinking and the expression thereof. The problem, however, is that the language of these writers spread beyond its proper place. Writers like Rousseau were read in all walks of life in French society, including the administrative apparatus of the state. ⁵⁷ More alarming for Tocqueville, however, is that not only did local functionaries adopt it in their reports, it became de rigueur for politicians. As Tocqueville puts it, “Political language itself then adopted something of the language spoken by authors, packed with generalizations, abstract terms, pretentious vocabulary and literary turns of phrase.” ⁵⁸ Thus whereas abstractions are a necessary part of human existence, they are only salubrious if confined to their proper domain. When the false sentimentality of Rousseau and his ilk infect the language of politicians, their language becomes immoderate and imprecise—precisely the sort of language that admits of no difference and fails to respect the proper boundaries of situated existence.

This is what Tocqueville saw happening in France. The dogma of equality brought with it a proclivity for abstractions, generalizations, and homogenization—both grammatically and politically speaking. Tocqueville puts it thusly:

When we study the history of our Revolution, we realize that it was prompted by precisely the same outlook which inspired so many books on the theory of government. They reflected the same attractions for universal theories, comprehensive systems of legislation and an exact symmetry in the laws; the same contempt for existing facts; the same faith in theory; the same taste for the original; the ingenious and the novel in reshaping institutions; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution at one and the same time following the rule of logic and according to a single plan instead of seeking to reform it in its separate parts. ⁵⁹

The impulse to eliminate the complex and differentiated aspects of human existence is part and parcel of the new political dogma. Difference is eschewed because it runs contrary to the universalist tendencies of the Enlightenment and, practically speaking, to recognize difference—to dwell in the grammar of difference—requires time, effort, patience, and moderation. The impulse to the universal and the homogeneous, however, preoccupied the writers of the pre-Revolutionary period so much that Tocqueville could only conclude that “what we call political philosophy in the eighteenth century consisted, properly speaking, of this single notion.” ⁶⁰

Tocqueville’s misgivings about the literary spirit in politics are clear. To dwell in this grammar is to overlook the differentiated character of political and social life. It is to play fast and loose with the realities of the lived world. It is to obscure the fact that we live in a world with other real, non-abstract human beings with whom we share relationships of duty and obligation. In language that parallels Plato’s critique of the Sophists, Tocqueville’s view of the literary spirit in politics is telling:

What I call literary esprit in politics consists in seeking for what is novel and ingenious rather than for what is true; in preferring the showy to the useful; in showing one’s self very sensible to the playing and elocution of the actors, without regard to the results of the play; and, lastly, in judging by impressions rather than reasons. ⁶¹

Reason, clear and analytical, aims at the truth by marshaling and cataloging the universal facts that constitute the greater reality of human existence. The literary spirit, on the other hand, aims at the affective and spectacular. For Tocqueville, in this evolutionary logic of language, the grammar of difference becomes the grammar of concurrence and everything seems to run together. This running together evokes colorful language from Tocqueville: the grammar of concurrence, with its concomitant revolutionary politics, is a “frightening spectacle!” ⁶²

The Grammar of Indifference and Democratic Language

While the grammar of concurrence and revolutionary language might be a frightening spectacle, it is the grammar of indifference and the language of democracy that inspires Tocqueville’s most serious misgivings. As we have seen, his analysis of the move from the grammar of difference to the grammar of concurrence focuses largely on France. To look at language in democracy, his attention necessarily turns to America because for Tocqueville, right up to the time of his death, the social condition of France was one of revolution. In America, however, his application of linguistics to history could be continued because there one finds the dogma of equality taken to its limit. In America, scant remnant of aristocracy could be seen clinging to the grammar of difference and the internal logic governing both language and the relations between men was democratic through and through.

What, then, is the character of this grammar? We have seen, in aristocratic times, terms had clear, specific, and stable meanings. “The language of aristocracy,” Tocqueville writes, “ought to be as at rest as are all its other institutions. But few new words are needed, as few new things are made; and even when something new is made, people are at pains to describe it in familiar words whose meaning is fixed by tradition.” ⁶³ And the tradition that informs neologisms in an aristocratic milieu is the classical. If a moment of novelty emerges and existing language is insufficient, “the new expressions invented always have a learned, intellectual, and philosophic character, sure signs that they are not children of democracy.” ⁶⁴ In democratic times, however, there is much more agitation and innovation and thus an “endless change of language.” ⁶⁵ Words lose their fixedness and specificity, without which they lose their power of differentiation.

While this fluidity of language gives Tocqueville serious pause, he also sees a kernel of good amidst these shifting linguistic horizons. In fact, he goes so far as to say there is genius in this capacity: “the genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.” ⁶⁶ This genius, as with most of the positives that Tocqueville sees in the democratic age, is derived of the fact that any movement in language, like any political movement, reflects the liberty of the majority. Tocqueville predicates the good of this on what he calls the “theory of equality applied to brains.” ⁶⁷ It is, essentially, an application of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem to the world of ideas—the probability that the new ideas are correct rises with increased participation. The problem, however, is not in the factual veracity of the new ideas, but rather in their form. Because most people in democratic times are engaged in trade rather than reading philosophy and studying the classics, “most of the words coined or adopted for its use will bear the marks of these habits; they will chiefly serve to express the needs of industry, the passions of politics, or the details of public administration. Language will spread out endlessly in that direction, but metaphysics and theology will slowly lose ground.” ⁶⁸ While democracies are ever producing new ideas, the words coined to express them are outside their own tradition. They are stripped of their links with the past, they are incomplete participants in the linguistic history that is bound up with a people’s identity. Democratic neologisms, while expressing the genius of innovation, are, at best, gauche participants in the grammar of difference.

For Tocqueville, there is a certain irony to this. Because the typical citizen of a democratic country has no classical education, she knows no Latin or Greek. Hence, she has neither the inclination nor the ability to derive her coinages from the traditional canon. Yet many novel words have classical roots. The reason, Tocqueville suggests, is not a natural inclination. There is no poetic inspiration. Instead, the penchant is much baser:

If they do sometimes make use of learned etymologies, it is generally vanity that sends them rooting among dead languages, and not learning that naturally suggests them to the mind. It can even happen that the most ignorant people among them use such derivations most. The very democratic wish to rise above their station often leads them to want to dignify a very mean occupation by a Greek or Latin word. The lower the calling and the more remote from learning, the more pompous and erudite the name found for it. Thus rope-dancers are turned into acrobats and funambulists. ⁶⁹

The inclination to euphemize low occupations reveals a recurring characteristic of democratic language—the impulse to realize the love of equality. Just as there can be no hierarchy of birth, there can be no hierarchy of endeavor. The garbage collector is no lower, socially speaking, than, say, the professor. All positions are morally equal, and if they seem distasteful, they are ascribed “pompous” names to level them. ⁷⁰ Hence, garbage collectors become sanitation engineers, lumberjacks are sylviculturalists, and prostitutes are sex workers.

For Tocqueville, this disconnect with the history and tradition of one’s own language raises some problems. Recalling that language is perhaps the strongest and most enduring link that unites people, when the meanings of words shift constantly and seemingly arbitrarily, the gathering-together character of language can be lost. This is especially possible when the neologisms are themselves abstractions—a problem democratic language inherits from revolutionary language. To demonstrate this problem, Tocqueville gives a few examples. Democratic peoples, he says,

have this passion for generic terms and abstract words because such phrases broaden the scope of thought and allow the mind to include much in few words. A democratic writer will freely put “the capabilities,” meaning capable men, without going into details as to what these capabilities are to be applied to. He will speak of “actualities,” thereby including everything taking place before his eyes in one word, and he will use “eventualities” to cover all that can happen in the universe after the moment at which he is speaking. ⁷¹

Put otherwise, abstractions distance the speaker from particular people, at particular times, engaging in particular acts. This problem of abstraction is compounded by a problem more specific to democratic language—personification. Whereas abstraction allows for simplification, personification opens the way to removing agency from the human actor altogether. To say, for example, that “society does this,” or in Tocqueville’s example, “the force of things wills that capacities govern,” allows for specific, responsibility-bearing individuals to be sheltered from and indifferent to the lived reality of their particular community. ⁷² It allows for abstract “society” to bear the blame for a criminal’s action rather than, say, the poor parenting skills of a particular mother and father. Thus, while democratic language provides words for distinguishing new ideas from old, it is not the same as the grammar of difference. There are bonds, but no “bonds of affection.” They connect, but these connections inspire little diligence, no reliance, and no sacred sense of duty between individuals. The words are lifeless and the internal logic of the language opens the way to general social and political indifference.

As a participant in this linguistic history, Tocqueville admits that he too has been infected. While he might resist the tendency for abstractions—which the grammar of indifference shares with the grammar of concurrence—the pernicious problem of personification is more difficult to avoid. In Tocqueville’s words,

I have often used the word “equality” in an absolute sense, and several times have even personified it, so that I have found myself saying that equality did certain things or abstained from others. Frenchmen in the reign of Louis XIV would never have spoken that way; it would never have entered the head of any of them to use the word “equality” without applying it to some particular thing, and they would have preferred not to use the word at all than turn it into a living being. ⁷³

The problem with the personification of words is two-fold. First, as with abstractions, it allows for the removal of agency. If, for example, one is able to say that “history” demands this or that, then any failure of our duties and obligations to other people can be blamed on the movement of history—precisely the problem Furet raised with the Marxist historians dominating the French academy.

The second problem is not unrelated. For Tocqueville, words in the language of aristocracy can have an ontological status that comports with a general aristocratic cosmology. The aristocratic view of the world is, in Max Weber’s language, “enchanted.” Just as ancestors have an “enchanted” presence in the present world, so too can words. This view is similar to that of St. Augustine, who also suggests two kinds of words. There are words that, when spoken, cease to exist as the next is uttered. Once this following word is spoken, it too becomes past before the next, and so on. ⁷⁴ The other kind of word does not pass from existence once uttered. It is a word that, upon being uttered, is inserted into the world and perseveres. Such a word, Augustine says, “is spoken eternally and by it all things are uttered eternally.” ⁷⁵ Put otherwise, while some words come into being and pass away, other words are thrown into existence and continue to participate in this existence. In his Recollections, Tocqueville hints at this vision of words. Recalling a conversation he had with Louis-Napoleon, he says that words can “be like stones thrown down a well; their sound was heard but one never knew what became of them.” ⁷⁶ Like Augustine, Tocqueville is suggesting that a word does not always come into being and pass immediately out of existence. Once uttered, a word can also dwell in the great well of being, ready to be drawn forth. Though words might be uttered and dropped into a well, “I believe,” Tocqueville says, “that they [are] not entirely lost.” ⁷⁷ Words perdure by hanging around, so to speak. They create moods, sometimes in rooms, sometimes in eras. They can hang around as reminders of injustice and tyranny. By way of example, Tocqueville mentions the taille, the hated seigniorial tax of feudal France:

When in the year 1831 in Canada, I was talking with farmers of French origin, I found that in their language the word taille was synonymous with misery and evil. They called any great misfortune “a real taille.” The taille, I believe, never existed in Canada; at any rate, it had been abolished for more than half a century. No one remembered its real meaning; the name alone remained in the language as a lasting proof of the hatred that it had inspired. ⁷⁸

In this understanding, although words come into being on our breath, they return the favor by inspiring enduring bonds that unite men across time and space. In the grammar of difference, words are animated, but not personified. They have spirit, but no agency of their own. With democratic language, words lose this spirit. The spirit of the word is often severed with its past. The bonds created by the spirit of the word are forgotten. ⁷⁹

For Tocqueville, this dereliction of meaning does not arise ex nihilo. Instead, it creeps up. ⁸⁰ As a result, everybody is using the same language (i.e., French), but no one knows what anyone is saying. There is communication, but no community. And when there is no community, there is neither time nor space for the bonds of affection; the grammar of difference is squelched and, in its place, a grammar of indifference. For Tocqueville, this is most troublesome. His taste for clear and stable words is obvious:

I would rather have the language decked out with Chinese, Tartar, or Huron words than let the meaning of French words become doubtful. To be harmonious and homogeneous is but a secondary beauty of language. Convention plays a great part in that sort of thing, and if need be, one can do without it. But you cannot have a good language without clear terms. ⁸¹

In other words, community requires good language; good language requires good grammar. Whereas the grammar of concurrence betrays bad grammar, the grammar of indifference may be fully ungrammatical.

By way of example, Tocqueville presents the word “gentleman.” For Tocqueville, a gentleman (un gentil-homme) is, by birth and mother tongue, a member of the nobility (la noblesse), and the nobility had for centuries regarded itself as servants of the people and the nation. The English, presumably sometime after 1066, adopted the word for their own nobility, but the meaning of “gentleman” deviated from this differentiating usage in a way that paralleled the transformation of the English social state. Tocqueville recounts the transformation thusly:

If you wish to make yet another application of linguistics to history, follow through time and space the fate of the word “gentleman,” which is born from the French word “gentil-homme.” You will observe its meaning broaden in England as social classes draw together and close ranks. In each century it is used for men placed a little lower down the social scale. ⁸²

His point is clear. Whereas “gentleman” once circumscribed, restricted, and defined a particular people, its meaning became more expansive, less differentiating. The distinctions of the word were muddied and, simultaneously, the social distinctions described by the word ran together. Castes in England had long ceased to be based strictly on birth. Rather than a stable grammar made manifest in a steady tradition of noblesse oblige, Tocqueville notes a shifting ground of social relations. Rather than a nobility, properly speaking, difference in England came to be based on money—which is fluid, portable, flexible, and ephemeral.

Continuing this history, Tocqueville turns to the use of “gentleman” in America. Gentleman, he writes:

moves across to America where it is employed to describe vaguely all citizens. Its history is the very history of democracy. In France the word “gentil-homme” has always remained closely tied to its original meaning; since the Revolution it has practically disappeared from use but that use has never changed. The word has been preserved intact to indicate the members of a caste because the caste itself has been preserved as separate from all other classes as it had ever been. ⁸³

In America, class distinctions never existed as in the old world. As such there was no need to invoke “gentleman” for the sake of differentiation. For this reason, the two most common places we see the word gentleman are on the door of toilets and at Gentlemen’s Clubs—spaces open to all men (and women) in democracies.

Prima facie, it would seem that with this linguistic history Tocqueville is merely lamenting the lost privileges of his caste. In general, however, Tocqueville is resigned to the providential progress of equality. What gives him most pause is the shifting of grammars—from a grammar of difference that undergirds a stable foundation of social relations that gathers people together in a complex matrix of duties and obligations, that gathers people together into coherent and meaningful wholes, to a grammar that releases people from these bonds of affection, that opens the way to habits of indifference to our neighbors. As Tocqueville puts it, in democracies “the origin of words is as much forgotten as that of men, and language is in as much confusion as society.” ⁸⁴ When words constantly shift meanings, language itself ceases to house the links between people; it ceases to be the canvas on which to inscribe relations of duty and obligation. Without such canvas, man finds himself alone in the world, without community and human connections. And for Tocqueville, this kind of solitude inspires as much religious terror as does physical isolation in the forests of the New World.

Conclusion: Grammar School Lessons

The central purpose of this essay has been to shed light on what Tocqueville calls the application of linguistics to history. It has been to demonstrate that, for Tocqueville, the erosion of language parallels the erosion of meaningful and reciprocal relationships of duty and obligation in the modern, democratic world; that although people still talk, the bonds that gather people together have lost their valence. And this is precisely how Tocqueville espied the human condition in fully democratic circumstances. A letter to his mother after visiting Ohio provides no better description of this dislocation and indifference. In Cincinnati, he tells his mother, he found

a people absolutely without precedents, without traditions, without habits, even without foundational ideas [that] has cleared a new path for itself in its civil, criminal, and political legislation, and plunged ahead, indifferent to the wisdom of other peoples and all memory of the past. It is shaping its institutions the way it has built roads straight across the forests, secure in the knowledge that it will encounter no limits or impediments; a society that does not yet have any bonds (liens), be they political, hierarchical, religious or social; where each individual is what it pleases him to be, regardless of his neighbor; a democracy devoid of limits or measures. ⁸⁵

In the democratic world, despite speaking the same language, and despite pursuing the same goal, there is “no common tie that binds them together. There is not one among them who could talk about his life to people who would understand him.” ⁸⁶ Though democratic life might be equal and prosperous, it can also be marked by anomie, isolation, and indifference. For those accustomed to dwelling in the grammar of difference, the thought of life in Cincinnati is, so to speak, disconcerting. Such an objection to democratic life cannot be taken lightly.

It is, however, with the invocation of language that Tocqueville infuses history with contingency. Language—and the grammar at its heart—is, after all, inseparable from the community it forms and the community that forms it. In other words, despite this nonrecursive relationship, grammar is ultimately a human phenomenon and, as such, can be free of the “illusion of necessity,” as Furet puts it. ⁸⁷ In short, just as bad grammatical habits can be formed, good grammar can be taught. In America, Tocqueville glimpsed such a “grammar school” in two places: the liberal education and the legal profession.

Though not restricted to America, Tocqueville found hope in the study of literature in general, and classical texts in particular. With the Greeks and Latins, he says, “no other literature puts in bolder relief just those qualities democratic writers tend to lack, and therefore no other literature is better to be studied at such times. This study is the best antidote against the inherent defects of the times, whereas the good qualities natural to the age will blossom untended.” ⁸⁸ Those who spend time reading the ancients, he says, will be inclined to an orderly, rule-driven life, especially if their ancestors gave the grammatical rules. “Their code,” Tocqueville writes, “will be both strict and traditional. . . . [Everything will] be regular and carefully prepared. The slightest work will be polished in every detail; everything will bear witness to skill and care; each genre of writing will have its special rules which must not be broken and which distinguish it from every other genre.” ⁸⁹ To engage the classics, one must slow down and immerse oneself in the perfection of the texts. For the ancient author, distinction and difference are the order of the day—and it is Tocqueville’s hope that studying such grammar will inculcate the otherwise frantic democratic mind with the habits missing from the average everyday democratic milieu.

In the legal profession, Tocqueville also espied a kind of grammar school. The British, but especially the American, legal system is based on the law of precedent. When people make a special study of this kind of law, he argues, they “derive therefrom habits of order, something of a taste for formalities, and an instinctive love for a regular concatenation of ideas.” The legal mind (l’ésprit légiste) is therefore “naturally strongly opposed to the revolutionary spirit and to the ill-considered passions of democracy.” ⁹⁰ American lawyers, he argues, are in the habit of seeking links between themselves and others, and especially to generations past. This is precisely why Tocqueville says that “hidden at the bottom of a lawyer’s soul one finds some of the tastes and habits of an aristocracy. They share its instinctive preference for order and its natural love of formalities.” ⁹¹ The centrality of this grammatical education cannot be understated because this legal language naturally spills over into the language of average Americans through the jury system. Though today one might bemoan the litigious character of Americans, Tocqueville would be heartened. ⁹² To be schooled in legal language is to be well equipped for the preservation of liberty.

One might imagine other grammar schools, but what is important is that for Tocqueville, just as individuals can be schooled and participate in determining their own futures, so too can society. History is full of contingency. Personal and collective histories are not predetermined, and even less amenable to interpretation according to a singular theory or ideology. Monumental events occur, great tragedies take place—but not by necessity. For Tocqueville, the democratic age might be characterized by isolated individuals quietly withdrawing into the pursuit of private interests, indifferent to their neighbors, avoiding associational life, lonely amongst crowds, immersed in the soliloquy of social media—but it can be otherwise. If the internal logic of language is bound up with the internal logic of political and social life, and habits of language can learned and relearned, the gathering-together force of language remains at the ready, standing by to free people from indifference in democratic times.