Abstract
Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac (eds) American through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings (eds) Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Jon Elster , Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
In the opening sentence to L’ Ancien Régime et la Révolution Tocqueville presented his readers with a paradox: ‘No great historical event is better calculated than the French Revolution to teach political writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations; for never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.’ 1 Tocqueville was fond of using paradoxes, and he appreciated their important rhetorical function. They engaged the reader into thinking about a puzzle, drawing him into the text. This had a deeper purpose which was to cause the reader to ponder a profoundly troubling matter about how individuals and communities, in failing to grasp history, and the subterranean forces that set its course, lose their capacity to shape those forces and ultimately their own destiny. For Tocqueville this was nothing less than asking the reader to consider the puzzle of how individual free will could be exercised in a world where the course of history was providentially ordained.
Twenty years before completing the first volume of L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution Tocqueville posed the same question in the introduction to volume 1 of Democracy in America. There, he confessed to ‘a kind of religious dread inspired by contemplation of [an] irresistible revolution advancing century by century over every obstacle’. This revolution was so profound, so pervasive, so inexorable that, he warned, ‘the Christian nations of our day present an alarming spectacle; the movement which carries them along is already too strong to be halted, but it is not yet so swift that we must despair of directing it; our fate is in our hands, but soon it will pass beyond control’. 2
What L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution revealed was how long that revolution had been in train. It also showed just how few recognized its existence or understood its course in the decades leading up to 1789. The sad result was that the movement that carried humanity had in those fateful years passed beyond the control of Frenchmen.
Tocqueville’s use of paradox was important for another reason. Paradoxes acted like a kind of self-questioning. The contemplative form of reflection it stimulated acted in a manner akin to a Socratic dialogue. The kind of questioning and reflection that Tocqueville sought to elicit in his readers revealed a dichotomy between surface appearance and a deeper hidden reality. And this duality was at the heart of his own outlook, of his intellectual orientation and of his methodological approach. What he sought to do in investigating America and France was to understand how political and social institutions were marked by phenomena not immediately intelligible to the casual observer. He focused on the role customs, traditions, manners and outlooks played in shaping those institutions. Tocqueville’s method involved an exploration of the interaction between the external manifestations of a given society, its institutions and its less obvious internal elements.
Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac’s collection of excellent scholarly essays America through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present focuses largely on these internal elements. Three of the contributions to this book explore specific aspects of Tocqueville’s analysis of internal elements, his treatment of slavery and its morally corrosive effects on a slave society, a topic explored in Nick Nesbitt’s illuminating ‘On the Political Efficacy of Idealism: Tocqueville, Schoelcher, and the Abolition of Slavery’, in Christine Dunn Henderson’s equally insightful ‘Tyranny and Tragedy in Beaumont’s Marie’, and in Jeremy Jennings’s marvellously clear panorama of ‘French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War’. The other contributions to this collection of essays, which were first presented at an international colloquium at the University of Indiana in 2005, reveal the extent to which the internal elements of American society were the object of detailed examination by other 19th- and 20th-century French and British travellers. How they viewed America’s cultural, intellectual and moral landscape is the focus of the volume. While English travellers such as Frances Trollope came away from America disenchanted and embittered – her attempt to establish a dry goods emporium in Cincinnati in the late 1820s was a failure – and wrote on Americans’ manners in her patronizing 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans, (the topic of Richard Boyd’s fascinating and sharp ‘From Aristocratic Politesse to Democratic Civility, or, What Mrs Frances Trollope Didn’t See in America’), 20th-century postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard have been smug and ‘self-indulgent’, offering observations on 9/11 which lack moral seriousness, as Alan Levine narrates in his ‘The Idea of America in the History of European Political Thought, 1492 to 9/11’, a chapter that takes several important European intellectuals to task. Other contributions to this book, from Costica Bradatan’s scholarly ‘Notes on Bishop Berkeley’s New World’, through to Guillaume Ansart’s excellent ‘From Voltaire to Raynal and Diderot’s Histoire des deux Indes: The French philosophes and Colonial America’, reveal the extent to which America was perceived by European enlightened opinion to represent the future, the successful union of freedom and equality. This view of America endured for a little more than 50 years, as Aurelian Craiutu shows in his illuminating portrayal of Victor Jacquemont, whose 1826–7 travels through America yielded many observations of that young republic that would echo Tocqueville’s own. Jacquemont’s observations on Americans’ obsession with making money, their single-minded pursuit of material enrichment and their lack of concern for their spiritual or intellectual development was a preoccupation that he shared with Tocqueville, Michel Chevalier and most other European observers of America. The sheer frenetic quality of American life was something that struck Europeans. It was as if Americans were constitutionally incapable of repose. This ubiquity of movement, the ceaseless need to get ahead in the world, to constantly improve one’s situation, led many, including Jacquemont, Tocqueville and Chevalier, to reflect on a kind of uniformity underlying this constant restlessness. While America was seen as a land of individual opportunity it was also, Europeans observed, a land of social conformity.
The theme of majority tyranny is a topic that marks many of these pieces. Russell Hanson’s subtle and interesting contribution on James Bryce’s 1888 The American Commonwealth compares Bryce’s analysis of what he called ‘the fatalism of the multitude’ with Tocqueville’s understanding of ‘the dynamics of opinion formation’ and the social pressures for individuals to conform. Anxieties about social conformism also marked G. K. Chesterton’s 1904 The Napoleon of Notting Hill with its critique of ‘cosmopolitan uniformity’ and his 1922 What I Saw in America, the topic of Patrick Deneen’s considered and thought-provoking essay.
These scholarly studies will make America through European Eyes an indispensable starting point for anyone wishing to understand how British and French attitudes to America have changed, and yet, paradoxically, have remained consistent since at least the early 19th century. Though more could be said about the European context to such reflections on America, this collection offers remarkable insights into how Americans themselves understand what Europeans had to say about their own country.
These considerations are also central to the letters, essays, speeches and diplomatic documents that Tocqueville wrote on American matters after the 1840 publication of the second volume of Democracy in America. They are assembled for the first time by Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings in their handsome edition, Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings.
The introductory essay that accompanies these letters continues the dialogue begun by America through European Eyes. This should not come as a surprise given Craiutu’s and Jennings’s contributions to that volume and their important work in the history of French political thought. The judicious introduction situates Tocqueville’s fascination with America within the context of how other French luminaries, who were equally captivated by developments in the young republic, wrote on it. Yet what it reveals is just how long-lasting Tocqueville’s interest in the young republic was. His fascination with the United States was not merely academic, the curiosity of the detached observer; it was motivated by parochial concerns, a committed engagement to the politics and destiny of France. These letters show the extent to which Tocqueville never departed from the conviction that the future of western civilization was bound up in what he saw in America.
These letters and documents also constitute what Craiutu and Jennings justly call Tocqueville’s third Democracy in America. They bear all of the hallmarks of Tocqueville’s earlier investigations which treated both what was readily observable and the inner workings of the American soul. Whereas other French observers such as Michel Chevalier marvelled at America’s scientific and technological progress, Americans’ spirit of enterprise, their drive, ingenuity and irrepressible optimism, Tocqueville – equally captivated by those aspects of American life – was driven to probe more deeply and to think more expansively. For in studying America he saw more than America; he saw, as he observed in his introduction to Democracy in America, ‘equality of conditions as the creative element from which each particular fact derived, and all my observations constantly returned to this nodal point’. 3
What Tocqueville’s ‘third Democracy’ reveals is just how much gloomier he had become about Americans’ ability to sustain a free democracy. Craiutu and Jennings trace Tocqueville’s changing mood. They stress what is widely recognized, which is how optimistic the first volume of Democracy in America (1835) was. In that work Tocqueville showed how America had achieved what political theorists had always thought impossible: a free and stable democracy. Rousseau believed such a government was ‘not suited to men’ because it was so perfect. Democracy, he believed, was for Gods and not mortals. 4 But Democracy in America revealed otherwise. Its lessons were salutary for Europeans, for as equality of condition advanced ‘rapidly toward power in Europe’, Tocqueville showed his compatriots how American institutions moderated equality’s worst excesses and safeguarded liberty.
Though Tocqueville showed Americans had achieved the impossible, he sought not to repudiate Rousseau. Rather, he heeded much of what he had to say about inequality, and harboured important anxieties about its development. In particular Tocqueville was struck by Rousseau’s account of amour propre and understanding of envy. He was alert to what Rousseau had to say about how extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes spawned jealousy and hatred among men, and how this led to social strife. And he was haunted by the concluding paragraphs of the Second Discourse where Rousseau showed how extreme inequality was the root cause of revolutions which concluded in despotisms. This was his nightmare vision of human history: an endless cycle of revolution and despotism. 5
These anxieties about inequality grew as Tocqueville began exploring various aspects of the social question from 1834 onwards. Paradoxically his disquiet about equality also grew from this time. Democracy’s corrosive effects on intellectual movements, manners and sentiments were only analysed in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), along with industrial society’s tendency to give rise to extreme inequality in the age of equality. Rousseau’s alarming prophecy of an endless cycle of revolutions and despotisms was never far from Tocqueville’s considerations on democracy in the years before and after 1840, which helps to explain the more sombre tone of the 1840 Democracy in America and Tocqueville’s more pessimistic outlook on the future. Yet, despite his pessimism, his faith in the human spirit sustained him in the belief that individuals might, in heeding the lessons he proffered, curb democracy’s excesses, and avoid revolution and tyranny.
What the letters and documents reveal in Tocqueville on America After 1840 is the extent to which Tocqueville’s hopes for Americans and humanity were challenged. As he was to confess to Jared Sparks near the end of 1852: I often turn my eyes with great pleasure, mixed sometimes with a certain anxiety, toward your America, whose citizen I almost consider myself to be, so much do I desire its prosperity and greatness. It has nothing to fear but from itself, from the excesses of democracy, the spirit of adventure and conquest, the sentiment of and the excessive pride in its strength, and the passions of youth. I could not recommend moderation enough among such great good fortune. Nations need it no less than individuals.
6
While Rousseau’s works were critical to shaping Tocqueville’s understanding of amour propre, another group of thinkers known as the Doctrinaires moulded his understanding of both the long history and the way equality marked social institutions, manners and individuals’ outlooks, how it affected society and individual psychology – how it imprinted itself on existential considerations. That the Doctrinaires were harsh critics of Rousseau’s thought may appear ironic as they shared his anxieties about amour propre. But their disquiet sprang from a divergent epistemological perspective. This background is important. It helps us to understand many of Tocqueville’s complex responses to issues bound up with democracy, such as the social question or slavery. It also offers insights which help us to make sense of Tocqueville’s increasing pessimism which is documented in Tocqueville on America After 1840 but less effectively explained. Finally, Tocqueville is widely acknowledged as a brilliant thinker, often seen as towering above his contemporaries. While there is little doubt about his brilliance, his method of analysis and the questions that preoccupied him in his study of democracy owe more to his contemporaries than is commonly recognized.
The Doctrinaires’ principal theorist, the historian and statesman François Guizot, focused his attention and considerable intellect on the dynamic interaction between society’s social and political institutions, what he described roughly as its ‘external’ elements, and its ‘internal’ elements: customs, manners, outlooks, sentiments. Political philosophers such as Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet have repeatedly stressed the importance of the distinction between external and internal in Guizot’s considerations on society and politics. They have also remarked on how Guizot was to influence Tocqueville. 8 What is also now recognized is the extent to which Guizot was not alone in drawing this distinction, nor how his account of the ‘internal’ life of a society was mirrored in the inner world of the individual, in the psychology of the human mind itself. 9 How he came to this view owed much to his and other Doctrinaires’ discussions with Maine de Biran, who was one of 19th-century France’s great philosophers of the relationship between psychology and the human sciences. 10 The focus of the volumes by Craiutu, Isaac and Jennings on customs, manners and sentiments is an important first step – though this reviewer believes they could have gone further – towards taking us where Tocqueville ultimately ends up, which is a deep understanding of human psychology and its relationship to politics (Elster, as we will see, understands the importance of that relationship, but his anachronistic reading of Tocqueville means that he fails to appreciate how Tocqueville saw it).
In the closing years of the 18th century Maine de Biran was widely seen as one of the leading idéologues. But the first years of the 19th century saw his disillusionment with that movement. By 1813 when he began writing Rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie his rupture with idéologues was complete.
In the two years it took Biran to compose this work he started an informal discussion group which he called his société philosophique. 11 The société met every second Thursday and its members included Guizot and other Doctrinaires such as Royer-Collard. The meetings of the société were critical to helping Biran move away from a natural science of man, limited to observable regularities of behaviour, towards a distinction he came to make between science of nature (science de la nature), which concerned itself with first order causes or external facts, as they were called, and psychology, which was concerned with second order causes, or internal facts. By 1815 when Biran completed Rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie he believed he had established the groundwork for a complete science of man (science de l’homme), for in that work he united the objective perspective of a science of nature with the subjective perspective of psychology.
Guizot was an important participant in the société, and what he learned from discussions with its participants became crucial to how he understood history, society and politics. He integrated Biran’s science of man into his own way of thinking about the past and the present, and the result was a series of stunning lectures from his 1821 History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe to his famous 1828–9 History of Civilization in France and History of Civilization in Europe.
Tocqueville began attending those 1829 lectures in the spring. Their effect on him was immediate. He was transported by what Guizot had to say, exclaiming that the lectures were ‘prodigious in their analysis of ideas and choice of words, truly prodigious’. 12 Guizot’s distinction between external and internal elements, the way internal elements, and human psychology in particular, marked a people’s past, present and future, imprinted itself permanently on Tocqueville’s mind.
The other aspect of Guizot’s lectures that was to give Tocqueville pause for thought was that European societies had for many hundreds of years been subject to a gradual and nearly imperceptible levelling tendency. 13 What Guizot also evoked in his account of social levelling was the kind of society and polity that accompanied it: democracy. Guizot was careful to emphasize what political thinkers going back to Plato and Aristotle had always stressed about democracy: that it was a society whose members’ desire ‘to rise socially, by the taste for equality’ made them envious of the rich and powerful, and plunged the society into turbulence and ultimately into civil strife. 14 It was on this point that Guizot concurred with Rousseau’s conclusion to the Second Discourse.
The psychological mechanism that underpinned the taste for equality and spawned envy and conflict fascinated Guizot and other Doctrinaires such as Royer-Collard and Philibert Damiron. What they all realized – and it was a profound existential insight and one that departed radically from Rousseau’s worldview – was that the taste for equality created an acquisitive and superficial character who ceased to be interested in anything other than material advancement. Damiron examined this phenomenon in his 1828 Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle. There he came close to the ancient philosopher and critic of democracy, Plato, in portraying democracy as creating the conditions for the agitation and fracturing of the human mind. Democracy, he thought, fostered individuals who lived a shallow and appetitive existence whose sole preoccupation was with obtaining material possessions. The democratic individual in having nothing more than, in Damiron’s words, ‘materialism as the goal of morality’ lacked self-assurance and inner peace. 15 Such a person was neither tranquil nor had intellectual and psychological depth. Their intuitive and mental powers were greatly diminished, and they were subject to perpetual agitation whose consequence was a profound state of enervation. This kind of person, Damiron concluded, could not reach beyond their restricted and shrinking universe.
Tocqueville took on this cultural critique, and he gave his own account of it in Democracy in America when he described the phenomenon of individualism. What he understood about individualism was that the shrinking of an individual’s social horizons, and his withering desire to engage with others, was part of a contracting of that person’s imaginative spirit and his ability to empathize. Individualism was a form of amour propre. Its accompanying vive – envy – would, if left unchecked, result in either revolution or a new form of despotism – administrative centralization – according to Tocqueville.
While Tocqueville agreed with much of the Doctrinaires’ cultural critique, he rejected their elite politics, what Rosanvallon called the politics of the ‘citoyen capacitaire’. 16 Not only did Tocqueville believe that this kind of politics left too great a scope for the development of centralized administration, he also feared that it would create political inequalities in a society becoming more and more equal, threatening revolution.
The twin threats of revolution and administrative centralization were among Tocqueville’s greatest fears concerning democracy. In the French context these threats were bound up with the social question and the rise of a new industrial aristocracy. In America slavery harboured both. What Tocqueville on America After 1840 shows is the degree to which slavery fed Tocqueville’s anxieties about the future of the United States. The expansion of the Union was accompanied by the extension of slavery to new territories, and Tocqueville’s correspondence from the 1850s reveals the extent to which he was hostile to this development. As he made clear to Edward Vernon Childe in April 1857 I passionately desire to see the success of the great experiment of Self Government that is currently taking place in America. If it fails, that will be the end of political liberty on earth. What makes me despair is what is going on with the issue of slavery. I have always been very opposed to the abolitionist party, as far as that party wanted to bring forth the premature and dangerous abolition of slavery in those districts where this abominable institution has always existed. But introducing it into new states, spreading this horrible plague onto a large portion of the earth which has been free from it until now, imposing all the crimes and miseries accompanying slavery on millions of future people (masters or slaves) who could otherwise be spared it, all this is a crime against mankind and seems to me to be both dreadful and unpardonable.
17
Whereas Tocqueville’s objections to slavery are understandable, his hostility to the abolitionist party appears surprising. However, if we recall his anxieties about revolution, his criticisms make more sense. Tocqueville saw American abolitionism as unyielding and overzealous. And he thought the abolitionist party’s demands and political strategizing would ultimately lead to civil strife. It was this fear of civil strife, a fear fed by Tocqueville’s own experience of revolution and despotism, that shaped his view on American abolitionism. It is all too easy to forget, as Nick Nisbett does in his ‘On the Political Efficacy of Idealism’, that Tocqueville’s attacks on slavery were always made against the backdrop of his fear of revolution.
Tocqueville understood that slavery’s corrupting influence was particularly pervasive within democratic society, and this is why he lamented its introduction into new territories. By the 1850s Tocqueville expressed grave concerns about the general coarsening of American manners. In a letter to Francis Lieber of 1857 he reported learning from Americans and some Europeans that ‘the part of the population in the States that still has violent mores and uncouth habits increasingly sets the tone for the rest’. Politics became more volatile and a civil and private life less tranquil, with ‘acts of personal violence … becoming more and more common’. This was a corruption that had penetrated to ‘the very foundation of mores and political customs’. 18 Its spread was most alarming.
What the letters and other writings that make up Tocqueville on America After 1840 reveal is just how concerned Tocqueville had become for the future of liberty in the democratic world. They narrate his growing pessimism for the future not only of America and of her great political experiment, but of humanity itself.
Tocqueville’s pessimism grew out of a complex understanding of the relation between human psychology and democracy. This is the ostensible object of Jon Elster’s Alexis de Tocqueville, The First Social Scientist. Elster’s observations on the subject endeavour to open an entirely new perspective on how Tocqueville should be understood. Whereas Craiutu, Isaac and Jennings offer historically informed readings of Tocqueville, Elster engages in an entirely different enterprise. He seeks to read Tocqueville exegetically, looking for contradictions and lapses of logical reasoning. Elster denies what the other two books under review here seek to show: that Tocqueville was one of the most profound political philosophers or political theorists of the 19th century. Rather, he asserts that Tocqueville is not a political theorist at all, and this is because his work is riddled with aporias and inconsistencies. It is a body of writing that, in Elster’s words, is ‘hugely incoherent’, thoroughly unsystematic and entirely undisciplined.
The idea behind Alexis de Tocqueville, The First Social Scientist, Elster narrates, emerged from many years of teaching Tocqueville and specifically from a course taught at Columbia University in 2007. 19 This course may well have been the immediate spur to this book, but the arguments have a history going back to earlier works such as Political Psychology (1993), Alchemies of the Mind (1999), Ulysses Unbound (2000) and Explaining Social Behavior (2007). Elster’s claim that Tocqueville’s work is unsystematic is hardly original. Scholars have long lamented Democracy in America’s lack of analytical rigour, but few have felt the urge to venture where Elster does. Harvey Mitchell’s 1996 critique of Elster’s imposition of an analytical standard on Democracy in America that was overly ‘harsh, almost surrealistic’ 20 applies equally to the extension of Elster’s judgement to the Souvenirs and L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, where Elster’s reading is just as anachronistic.
Elster’s use of exegesis to show failures in Tocqueville’s reasoning is put to a more positive purpose in locating what Elster calls ‘exportable causal mechanisms’. Tocqueville’s failures of reasoning may, if we are to believe Elster, disqualify him from being considered a political theorist, but his successful use of causal mechanisms means that he is strikingly recognizable to 20th- and 21st-century social scientists. Tocqueville may be a bad political theorist but Elster tells us that he was a ‘good social scientist’ because he ‘formulated basic insights of game theory’. 21 Yet Elster goes further. Tocqueville was not only a good social scientist he was the first social scientist.
What is stunning and breathtakingly arrogant about this claim is that Elster never feels the need to demonstrate it. Why Tocqueville should have a stronger claim to the title of first social scientist than someone like Condorcet is never shown. At no point does Elster explore the development of the social sciences in the 18th century. He is utterly unconcerned with important philosophical discussions which took place in France in the first two decades of the 19th centuary on causality and its importance to social and political analysis. The idéologues, particularly Destutt de Tracy, who were instrumental in initiating these discussions, and Maine de Biran, whose long and detailed exchanges with Guizot on causality 22 took these reflections to new heights, are not part of Elster’s purview.
Elster’s especially narrow attention to detail means that he all too often fails to understand Tocqueville’s concerns. While it is a salutary exercise to examine passages in detail, Elster all too often takes passages out of their immediate textual context and their wider intellectual and historical context – a context I have been at pains to discuss here. Too often he ascribes affinities or instances of influence where the historical evidence shows there are none. Yet he ignores those influences which were singularly profound. In his discussion on the invisible hand, morality and enlightened self-interest, he draws on Descartes’s correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia in order to explain why enlightened self-interest is capable of ‘mimicking morality’. Tocqueville understood this relation from his readings of Montesquieu, Pascal and Rousseau – authors he returned to repeatedly throughout his life – yet Elster offers an unsubstantiated and altogether less convincing claim that the answer is to be found in Descartes’s correspondence, though he admits that he ‘cannot prove’ this. 23 It is odd that a book which makes such demanding claims about analytical rigour should adopt such a lax attitude towards scholarly precision. It is odder still that an author Tocqueville turned to time and again for inspiration such as Montesquieu is referred to a mere three times; Pascal once; and Rousseau not at all. This is a pity, for all three authors offered observations on psychology and human motivation that marked Tocqueville’s own reflections in ways that remain under-explored.
Whereas Craiutu, Isaac and Jennings have performed a salutary service in deepening our understanding of just how profoundly Tocqueville reflected on the relation between human motivation, social mores and political institutions, Elster’s all too narrow reading cannot sustain the weight of the extravagant claims he makes.