Dilemmas of Democracy, Tocqueville, and Modernization (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 341 tion of the Christian gospel, although it is unquestionable that it is the interpretation which came to obsess Kierkegaard after the end of his pseudonymous writings. FREDERICK SONTAG Claremont, California Dilemmas of Democracy, TocqueviUe, and Modernization. By Seymour Drescher. (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1968. Pp. ix+ 302. $6.95) Dilemmas of Democracy is the second of the three books in which Seymour Drescher reports his recent studies of Alexis de Tocqueville. The first, Tocqueville and England, was published in 1964, and the third, Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform, is a republication and editing of essays that dealt with French problems. Dilemmas of Democracy gives evidence of thorough acquaintance not only with the twelve volumes of the collected works of Tocqueville but also with surviving manuscripts , with the controversies of the time, and with commentaries on Tocqueville's theories. The "dilemmas" axe not stated in dilemmatic form. The book's title, therefore, creates expectations to which there is no neat response in the text. The author does deal with difficulties which he calls "tensions," "ambiguities," and "problems." These difficulties are usually presented as troubles that Tocqueville himself experienced in maintaining his belief in a gradual progress of equality as a universal and necessary social trend. Drescher's book is not, however, simply a study of Tocqueville. His introductory chapter clearly indicates that he is trying to make a modest contribution to contemporary sociological and philosophical discussions. Drescher is issuing a caveat to theorists who are interested in nonMaxxist or antiMarxist views of the process of industrialization. He singles out Raymond Aron and Reinhard Bendix for special comment, but he mentions dozens of authors who have participated in the recent revival of interest in Tocqueville. Drescher's concern is that these writers are placing too much reliance upon a few passages in Democracy in America. Democracy in America was a byproduct of the commission which Tocqueville and Beaumont had from the French government to study American prisons. The dramatic generalizations that make the first part of that book exciting gave Tocqueville considerable trouble and caused perhaps a year's delay when he was trying to complete the treatise. But Drescher does not rest his case on the evidence of these difficulties in the manuscript drafts. The most extensive evidence of Tocqueville's difficulties is drawn from Tocqueville's historical and critical writing during the last ten or eleven years of his life. From this material Drescher collects the exceptions, qualifications, and pm,~les in Tocqueville's thesis of modernization as a progression from a permanent aristocracy to an egalitarian society. Although Tocqueville rejected de Gobineau's theory of race, he excluded Negroes, Indians, and some Europeans from the coming egalitarian order. He failed in his efforts to reconcile his thesis to the facts of increasing class hostility (in 1848, for example). He had paid little attention to industrialization during his American tour; in later years, although he recogniTed the antiegalitarian trends among industrialists, bureaucrats, and military elites, Tocqueville tried to treat them as reversions or temporary pathologies. Among the most interesting sections of Dilemmas of Democracy is the chapter on 342 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY prison reform. Drescher contends that Tocqueville saw in poverty and crime, not primarily a denial of the rights of the poor but rather a moral obligation of the rich. The main theme of the study, however, is the difficulty in maintaining the belief in inevitable democratization. WAYNEA. R. LEYS Southern Illinois University Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy. By Edward H. Madden. (Seattle: Univ. of Wash. Press, 1968. Pp. 214. $7.50) This volume contains considerably more material for the history of American philosophy and politics than the title indicates. It is not a continuous story but a series of narratives and philosophical portraits many of which introduce us to little known but decidedly worth knowing characters and minds. And taken together they give us precise information about important movements of rebellion and reform. The first two chapters (after Edward H. Madden's introductory survey) tell the relatively familiar but very timely story of Francis Wayland's conversion to civil disobedience. As president of Brown University and author of...