Educating Democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville and Leadership in America

Chapter 5. The Vocation of the Democratic Moralist: Putnam, Tocqueville, and the Education of Democracy Today

141 The Vocation of the Democratic Moralist Chapter 5  The Vocation of the Democratic Moralist Putnam, Tocqueville, and the Education of Democracy Today We have seen in this book that the Antifederalists, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson all suggested that a central task of leadership in America is to educate democracy. In making this argument, they each offer their own variation on a Tocquevillian theme. Like Tocqueville, these American thinkers suggest that leadership—and authority—should be understood not simply as dangerous to democracy, but rather as crucial for its fulfillment. In this final chapter, I seek to demonstrate that Tocqueville’s ideas on leadership remain deeply important today. I make this argument primarily through a critical examination of Robert Putnam’s influential ideas on American civil society. Since the late 1980s, the role of civil society in American political life has been a major concern of social scientists, public intellectuals, and policy analysts.1 The precise definition of “civil society” is often contested, but it is most commonly defined as the realm of associational life that is separate from both the state and the market. In the 1830s, Tocqueville concluded that American democracy was successful in part because of the extraordinary vitality of its civil society. In recent years, a great number of authors have followed in Tocqueville’s footsteps by insisting on the importance of a healthy civil society for a healthy democracy. Perhaps 141 142 Educating Democracy the most widely known of these authors is Putnam. In Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that American civil society has eroded in recent decades. According to Putnam’s data, Americans are not participating in civic, political, neighborhood, and family activities nearly as much as they did before the 1960s. Living largely isolated lives, Americans, according to Putnam, are not generating the amount of “social capital” that is necessary to sustain an efficient and vibrant democracy. In Bowling Alone, Putnam calls Tocqueville “the patron saint of contemporary social capitalists,” thereby invoking Tocqueville’s authority for his own project.2 A number of scholars, however, have asked the question: To what extent are Putnam’s ideas genuinely consistent with Tocqueville’s thought? Many of these scholars deny Putnam the status of a true “Tocquevillian,” criticizing him for a skewed or truncated or simplistic view of Tocqueville’s theoretical legacy.3 Although I, too, ask whether Putnam is following in Tocqueville’s footsteps, my focus in this chapter is quite different. My argument is that one of Putnam’s primary rhetorical strategies in Bowling Alone is a remarkable example of “the doctrine of self-interest properly understood,” a doctrine that Tocqueville found prevalent among “American moralists.”4 According to Tocqueville, instead of teaching Americans that they should involve themselves in their communities because this is the morally correct thing to do, American moralists teach their fellows that this involvement is actually in their own self-interest, properly understood. I argue that Putnam employs precisely this strategy in Bowling Alone; in other words, Putnam is a modern incarnation of the democratic “moralist” analyzed in Democracy in America. Putnam thus reveals his Tocquevillian pedigree not only in his conceptualization of civil society, but also in his enthusiastic use of “the doctrine of self-interest properly understood.”5 However, can exhorting fellow Americans to act in their self-interest (properly understood) really repair the associational deficits and civic decline that Putnam identifies in his empirical work? As discussed in chapter 1, Tocqueville is actually ambivalent toward the “doctrine of self-interest properly understood.” Because he held out some hope for the doctrine, Tocqueville would likely welcome Putnam’s argument, and wish it success . Yet, because Tocqueville had not only hope but also fear when he considered the doctrine of self-interest properly understood, Tocqueville would likely retain some reservations about Putnam’s approach, and he would ultimately have his doubts that Putnam’s strategy could succeed in the task of restoring a healthy civic life to America. In this chapter, then, I use Tocqueville’s writings to critically interpret Putnam’s rhetorical strategy for revitalizing civil society. By considering him to be a modern version of the American moralist discussed by Tocqueville, new light can be shed on the merits, but also the limits, of Putnam’s achievement. To 143 The Vocation of the Democratic Moralist help see the insufficiencies of Putnam’s approach, I contrast Putnam’s Bowling Alone with another work of scholarship...