Educating Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and Leadership in America

Chapter 1. Tocqueville on Leadership and the Education of Democracy

9 Tocqueville on Leadership and the Education of Democracy Chapter 1  Tocqueville on Leadership and the Education of Democracy In this book, I explore the concept of democratic leadership, using Tocqueville’s ideas not as a source of definitive answers, but rather as a starting point and source of inspiration. To set the stage for the rest of the book, this chapter offers an analysis of Tocqueville’s views on leadership in democratic times. As noted in the introduction, Tocqueville asserted that the “first duty” of modern leaders “is to educate democracy; to put, if possible, new life into its beliefs [and] to purify its mores. . . .”1 By arguing that a key task of leadership is the moral education of the citizenry, Tocqueville invokes an idea that reaches back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, the leader should be a kind of “moral artist” who improves the souls of his fellow citizens. The leader should be concerned with “the engendering of justice in the souls of his fellow citizens and the eradication of injustice, the planting of self-control and the uprooting of uncontrol, the entrance of virtue and the exit of vice.”2 As I will discuss later in this chapter, Tocqueville does, to be sure, share with many other modern liberal theorists the fear that governmental efforts to shape the souls of citizens may end up violating individual rights. But, on the whole, Tocqueville agrees with the ancients that every political regime must concern itself with shaping “the character of human souls,” as Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop put it in an article that links Tocqueville’s ideas to those of Aristotle.3 9 10 Educating Democracy Tocqueville and the “Democratic Turn” in Leadership Studies But if Tocqueville’s ideas on educative leadership point back to the ancients, they also point forward, to the influential theory of leadership offered by James MacGregor Burns. Indeed, one of my primary claims in this book is that Tocqueville anticipated many key aspects of what one might call the “democratic turn” in recent leadership studies. By the “democratic turn,” I refer to the work of such scholars as Burns, Bruce Miroff, Sidney Milkis, and Marc Landy. All of these authors argue that political scientists should cease to understand leadership primarily as command, coercion, manipulation, or domination; rather, leadership should be viewed as a process through which leaders help to empower, educate, and invigorate citizens.4 Tocqueville, I suggest, deserves to be viewed as a key precursor to this contemporary understanding of leadership. This contemporary understanding of leadership was inaugurated largely by Burns’s Leadership. In this work, Burns famously distinguishes between two types of leadership, transactional and transforming. According to Burns, “transactional leadership” involves mere brokerage; it seeks to satisfy the self-interest of leaders and followers through an exchange of such goods as “jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions.” Although Burns believes that transactional leadership has its proper place, he far prefers “transforming leadership.” Transforming leadership is “elevating .” It leads “people upward, to some higher values or purpose or form of self-fulfillment.” Transforming leaders try to foster “moral development;” ultimately, the transforming leader inspires people to pursue “the universal values of freedom, equality, democracy, and justice.” Through transforming leadership, “people can be lifted into their better selves. . . .”5 Tocqueville understood leadership in similar terms, for he often criticized what one might call the transactional leadership that was prevalent in France during his lifetime. Tocqueville complained that French leaders were concerned solely with gaining political office, and in order to win elections they simply exchanged patronage for political support. Clearly, Tocqueville hoped that a kind of transforming leadership could inspire people to pursue higher values and purposes. The transforming leader, according to Burns, “looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower.”6 In his famous speech of 1848 in the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville denounced his fellow French leaders precisely for abandoning this noble conception of leadership. Tocqueville complained that French politicians only engaged the citizenry’s “evil, not their honest side, appealing to their passions, weaknesses, interests, and often to their vices.” Instead of elevating people, as Burns suggests leaders should do, French politicians 11 Tocqueville on Leadership and the Education of Democracy simply “play on the chord of private self-interest in men.”7 According to Burns, “The result of...