Educating Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and Leadership in America

Chapter 2. The Antifederalists and Tocqueville on Democratic Leadership and Democratic Authority

39 The Antifederalists and Tocqueville Chapter 2  The Antifederalists and Tocqueville on Democratic Leadership and Democratic Authority In this chapter, I examine the Antifederalists in the light of Tocqueville’s theory of leadership. I focus on the Antifederalists rather than the Federalists in part because I believe that the Antifederalists articulated a theory of leadership that has not been explored sufficiently by scholars. We shall see that on the subject of leadership there are important affinities between Tocqueville and the Antifederalists. Along with these affinities, we shall also see that in certain respects the Antifederalists depart from Tocqueville, in ways that are instructive to those who seek to understand the nature of democratic leadership. In her seminal critique of the Antifederalists, Cecilia Kenyon asserts that, “What the Antifederalists lacked was a theory of leadership. . . . [T]hey [did not] produce anything comparable to The Federalist on the function of leadership in a representative government.”1 I will argue, though, that the Antifederalists did, in fact, offer an important theory of leadership. Kenyon is certainly correct to suggest that the Antifederalists disagreed with the authors of The Federalist on the subject of leadership, but this should not lead us to conclude that the Antifederalists did not have their own positive vision of leadership. The interpretation of the Antifederalists that is offered here is in large part a new one. In my view, the Antifederalist rejection of the Constitution was rooted to a significant degree in their conviction that the Constitution 39 40 Educating Democracy posed a threat to democratic leadership and, more broadly, to authority in America. My claim that the Antifederalists believed in the importance of leadership and authority might come as a surprise, given that many leading commentators have viewed them as hostile to both leadership and authority. Just as Kenyon has argued that the Antifederalists were hostile to the principle of leadership, Jackson Turner Main has suggested that they were opposed to the principle of authority. As Main puts it in his admiring study of the Antifederalists, “From the broadest point of view, the issue [during the ratification debate] was whether authority or liberty should be emphasized”; the Antifederalists, Main suggests, came down on the side of liberty, whereas the Federalists came down on the side of authority.2 But in my view, this characterization of the Antifederalists is misleading. It is true that there were some libertarian Antifederalists who did believe that the relationship between liberty and authority was one of simple opposition. These Antifederalists did want to choose liberty over authority, as Main suggests. However, there was another important strand of Antifederalism that had a far more nuanced view of the relationship between liberty, on the one hand, and leadership and authority, on the other. By trying to combine liberty with leadership and authority, these Antifederalists had much in common with Tocqueville. Critics of the Constitution such as Mercy Warren and Charles Turner believed, as did Tocqueville, that authority was in fact necessary to prevent liberty from degenerating into mere license. These Antifederalists believed in the importance of internalized authority, and thus they believed in the importance of moral, political, and religious education. Of course, anyone who writes on the Antifederalists must acknowledge that they were a diverse group of thinkers who often disagreed with one another regarding both theoretical and practical questions. As Main has rightly pointed out, “Antifederalism was not a single, simple, unified philosophy of government.”3 Given their large and varied output, my interpretation of the Antifederalists is necessarily selective. What I have done here is focus on those Antifederalists (probably representative of the majority) who reject libertarianism and who thus articulate a nuanced understanding of leadership and authority as necessary and healthy for democracy. Main suggests that the Antifederalists wanted to “continu[e] the struggle for . . . individual freedom from restraint.”4 Although this is true for some Antifederalists, many others believed, like Tocqueville, that moral and religious authority were necessary to restrain the passions and to guide liberty toward what John Winthrop called the “just and good.” These Antifederalists were indeed suspicious of strong centralized politi- 41 The Antifederalists and Tocqueville cal authority, but at the same time they believed, as Mercy Warren put it, that “Authority and obedience are necessary to preserve social order, and to continue the prosperity or even the existence of nations.”5 No mere rebels against authority, the Antifederalists, like Tocqueville, thought deeply about the...