Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings (review)

Tocqueville in America after 1840 is a compilation of documents illuminating Alexis de Tocqueville's attitudes toward and ties to the United States during the last two decades of his life. Tocqueville scholars Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings edit (and sometimes translate) these post-Democracy in America documents with care and explanatory helpfulness.

Although Tocqueville's ideas are more richly presented in sections on his public writings and speeches, the largest section highlights Tocqueville's correspondence with Americans that emphasizes the Frenchman's steady kind helpfulness to Americans and his unflagging interest in the nation he saw as the best exemplar of democracy. These documents often deal with insignificant matters, but they enrich our understanding of Tocqueville's views. Especially strong is his detestation of the "horrible plague" of slavery, whose extension anywhere was, according to Tocqueville, "an unpardonable crime against humanity" (224). Tocqueville accepted the national compromise of permitting slave states their favored institution, but, like the Republicans of the 1850s, he labeled slavery's expansion an abomination. Several things that other Europeans blamed on American democracy, such as violence and imperialism, Tocqueville tended to see as the fruits of slavery. He rejected equally vigorously Arthur de Gobineau's racist theories as coarse, pernicious, and anti-Christian, destined to please only slaveholders and hatemongers.

Christianity threads through some of Tocqueville's most thoughtful economic reflections. Perhaps most interesting is his 1848 speech to the Constituent Assembly. In response to a proposal that the French government guarantee work to all, Tocqueville attacked the communism-socialism implicit in the idea and vigorously defended individual liberty and private property. These conservative positions angered assembly radicals, but their response changed as Tocqueville offered his positive proposals. The French Revolution, he claimed, aimed not at controlling people but at freeing them in a society undivided by class. American democracy had become the freest and most egalitarian the world had known, and nowhere was there less interest in socialist ideas. Yet desirable liberty had to be tied to political willingness to aid all those "who suffer" and who "would be reduced to poverty if the state did not hold out its hand." Radicals shouted that this was their program, but Tocqueville insisted his ideas would not substitute state for individual responsibility but represented the ideal of "Christian charity applied to politics" (404). Tocqueville was committed to a society at least as hostile to accumulating capital as to dictating socialism.

In Tocqueville's most revealing letter, he explains that he wrote Democracy in America less to give "a complete picture" of the United States than to highlight subtly "the contrasts and resemblances" with Europe (321). Stressing the mutual supportiveness of religious and political commitments, Tocqueville believed that both could counteract souland society-destroying materialism and the single-minded pursuit of personal fortune. Unlike Adam Smith or Karl Marx, he was not doctrinaire and did not see the interlocked virtues of religion and politics as "absolute truth[s]" but generalizations that would always shift under "particular circumstances" (323).

Craiutu and Jennings do excellent editorial work, but there is reason to question some of their claims about these documents. The Poussin Affair, a diplomatic teapot tempest when Tocqueville served as France's foreign minister, hardly suggests that war was "not improbable" (411) from this spew of diplomatic tactlessness and egoism. Nor do the documents well support the editors' theme of Tocqueville's growing pessimism about the American experiment in the 1850s. He worried sensibly about growing sectional hostility but saw slavery's nonexpansion as representing the best of the country's virtues. And he never responded favorably to alarmist accounts from some correspondents. He was most enthusiastic about letters from an obscure American merchant, N. W. Beckwith, who argued with rigorous clarity that most American problems were not the product of democracy but of slavery, whose power popular feeling was beginning to curb. Tocqueville's public statements all vigorously argue...