An Anatomist of Democracy

Joseph Epstein faced a daunting task as he sifted an abundance of materials concerning the life and achievements of Tocqueville into the brief format of the Eminent Lives series. That he does so with panache is tribute to his intellectual command of the sources, together with a sympathetic awareness of the interior, personal qualities that influenced Tocqueville's public career. As members of the lesser French judiciary, Count Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and his lifelong friend, Gustave de Beaumont, arrived at New York in May 1831, their mission to study the American prison system. Provided with letters of introduction, the pair not only surveyed prisons, but also traveled widely, from the eastern cities to the Michigan wilderness, for a mere 271 days, travels that provided the materials for Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835; second part, 1840).

Widely read in his time and in ours, the work was thought by American readers to have been written for them. It was not. As Epstein quotes Tocqueville, "I did not write one page without thinking of [France] and without having her, so to speak, before my eyes." By birth he was a member of the minor Norman aristocracy, and his achievement was to see clearly what lay before his eyes, uninfluenced by his social position. He did not set out with a thesis or set of prejudices as he observed American manners and procedures; he was a rare figure in the history of nineteenth-century thought in his accuracy of observation unencumbered by personal irrelevancies. That he possessed abundant temper is beyond doubt: he once threw a plate to the floor in response to his wife's leisurely consumption of pâté. In surveying American as well as French politics and social ways, however, Tocqueville's temperament and temper had no place. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, to be a member for nine years, he found politics shoddy, second-rate, and remote from his high ambitions for the public good. In this connection it seems obvious that his analyses of the American scene influenced his later political career in France.

Tocqueville was of two minds concerning democracy. The memory of the French Revolution was still vivid: members of his family had narrowly escaped the guillotine; hence a visceral suspicion of mob rule was inevitable. Despite that history Tocqueville remained levelheaded as he surveyed democracy—American style—and as he considered the benefits of 1789 to the French populace. Epstein observes that in the introduction to Democracy in America Tocqueville writes that nothing in America "struck me more forcefully than the general equality of conditions among the people." Equality was central to other American facts concerning liberty, centralization, religion, manners—politics in its fullest meaning.

No reader of Tocqueville fails to remark the prophetic nature of his conclusions, though Tocqueville was no mystic, no religious fanatic; nor did he set up to prophesy. While analyzing the phenomenon, Epstein quotes Santayana: "causation isn't a law, but an observable derivation of fact from fact in particular instances." One example is Tocqueville's views of American elections. He concluded that the pervasiveness of equality meant that voters are hostile to brilliance in politicians. Voters are inclined to elect people like themselves, possibly well meaning but at base average. Tocqueville remarked that once elected, politicians devoted themselves not to the public benefit but to their own reelections. We may think of the parade of recent American presidents, amongst whom any rare brilliance was (and is) excoriated. That in turn is allied to the dominance of the middle class with its "passion for well-being." Aristocrats are accustomed to the material well-being in which they were born and need not assign such status to goods and services as the middle class does. We look about us and sigh. Self-interest is paramount in the business culture dominating American politics, hence revolution is highly unlikely. "I know of nothing more opposed to revolutionary mores than commercial mores," he writes.

Epstein finds that Tocqueville...