The Malaise within the Democratic Soul
Alexis de Tocqueville's prophetic picture of American Life
Books, even great books, rarely achieve unquestioned supremacy in more than one subject of inquiry.
Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in the mid-19th Century, is a singular example of such an achievement. Tocqueville’s book remains both the best book about Democracy, and the best book about America.
In the closing Chapters of Democracy in America (1840), Tocqueville paints a despairing picture of the United States’ future. Tocqueville believes it probable that a despotism may come to rise within the Democratic Age, but famously, believes this despotism will necessarily take a different form to the tyrannies of Antiquity. In parsing his argument throughout his book, Tocqueville gives voice to several expressions of the likely nature, form and function of this new (and as-yet-unseen) democratic despotism. There is one such phrase which, by its stark severity of expression, seems to cut prophetically and uncomfortably close to the problems we grapple with in 21st Century Western Democracies:
“I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.”
Of Tocqueville’s several expositions on despotism in democracy, it is this phrase which brings us closest to a reckoning with its devastating personal effects. Read today, Tocqueville strikes a prophetic quality in highlighting the problems that ‘democratic man’ encounters in navigating modern life. But how closely does Tocqueville’s predicted future align with the world that actually exists today? Clause by clause, we can investigate the saliency of his claim;
“I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose…”
‘The innumerable crowd of like and equal men’ seems to be a straightforward observation, emergent in Tocqueville’s time, and predictable to him in assessing the future. Tocqueville saw that equality itself has an evangelical quality for Democratic peoples, and suggests that this appetite for the equalization of society, will necessarily breed its likeness as well. Tocqueville’s observations are borne out by the relative homogeneity of mores and interests shared across society today. Take for example two staples of our common cultural life, music and sport. Would it be fair to say that as the consumption of each has been progressively ‘democratized’, so too has each influenced a lasting homogeneity of affect upon the broad swathe of society which partakes in the consuming? I think so. There is little difference, fundamentally, in the passions of football fans from the highest to lowest ranks of today’s society, and today’s rich kids formulate the same musical tastes as their less-well-off peers. They may attend different nightclubs, but they are dancing to identical beats, and carrying themselves with equal abandon to precisely the same debauchery of character! As an aside, Tocqueville seems to have predicted this as well, when he pincered the fate of fine arts in a Democratic social state in Volume 2, Part 1, Chapter 11. As he says, “Many of those not yet rich are beginning to conceive a taste for fine arts by imitation, the quantity of consumers generally increases, and very rich and very refined consumers become rarer.”
The idea of these men ‘revolving on themselves without repose’, is a more nuanced argument. I think though, that it finds its resonance in Tocqueville’s observation that Democracy ‘breaks’ the chains which bind men to a teleological certainty within the Aristocratic world. In contradistinction, the Democratic Age unmoors men from these restraints, freeing them to move with greater liberty in society at large. This manifests internally as well. Democratic man not only acts with greater liberty, but sees his own interior life with greater liberty. There is for Tocqueville, more potential for internal fluidity to one’s identity: External constraints once dropped are metaphorical for a concomitant ‘release’ of the soul to its own self-defined identity. But this self-definition begets a responsibility, and in turn, a busyness in the midst of which Democratic man can not forget himself. His lack of ‘repose’ comes from the churn of his self-duty to be master of his own destiny, author of his own malleable identity. This accords with the world we see around us today. With opportunity for the ‘unlimited’, man has become burdened by the responsibility of realizing (or at least, reaching-for) that unlimited. The busy cities, the intolerable anxieties, the rampant fashionability of everything today seems to have its origin in forces unleashed by equality itself - equality pincered by Tocqueville as the general passion of the Democratic Age, and the particular obsession of the American people.
“...procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.”
Tocqueville here builds on his prior argument that Aristocracy breeds the greatest individual men. It is true that his affection for the ancien-regime is manifest throughout the book, but setting aside this evident bias toward his own lineage, Tocqueville realizes some positive truths about Aristocracy’s culture of individual excellence. The flipside of this is that, according to Tocqueville, the absence of an Aristocracy might inevitably lead to a polity comprised of individuals more inclined to strive for the mundane, than for the heroic. For Tocqueville, Democratic man seems particularly susceptible to ‘vulgar pleasure’. This would seem to square with the experience we see today, as people succumb to petty vices which eventually enslave them.
“Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone…”
It is useful here to begin with Tocqueville’s assertion that in democratic ages, people are naturally separated from each other, their ‘unbroken chains’ from King to Peasant now severed by the necessity of equality. This speaks powerfully to the status of the community, in a way that the previous fragment of Tocqueville’s quote speaks powerfully to the status of the individual.
Certainly, today the notion of strangers being oblivious to the destinies of others rings true. Family breakdown, excessive individualism, and a careerist ethic seem to speak to an age unmoored from collective destiny. There are few people who would argue civil society remains in better shape today than it did in decades past. A challenge to the Tocquevillian proposition however, would be to consider whether or not information technology has interposed itself as a generative (rather than a mere accelerating) force in the breakdown of communal life and its interests. I would say not. Whilst it is certainly easier to sustain individualism in the electronic era, Tocqueville rightly hits on the underlying disposition in Democratic man’s quest for individuality, and holds that this fundamental disposition - not the technology that aids it’s advance - drives the breakdown of communities in today’s world. As he says, “individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues, but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.”
“…and if a family remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.”
In addition to his fatalistic sense of a disintegrating family life, Tocqueville’s concluding words here hold a troubling portent. What does he mean by man no longer having a native country? Tocqueville is here referring to a process of alienation that Democratic man will experience when his active communal interests recede back from the fullness of life lived in the state, the county, the village and the local community, into the immediate sphere of his family life. Tocqueville seems to frame this most forcefully in Part 2, Volume 2, where he says that “after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.” Having disappeared behind the horizon of community life, man’s interests could only be homogenized into an artificial ideal, but this is an ideal detached from the true sense of being part of a people.
Lest I sound too negative about the way Tocqueville believes that Americans might ‘disappear’ beyond community horizons, I think that on the contrary, this capacity to detach can be a great strength in Democratic countries. I am often struck at the ease and happiness with which Americans relocate their entire lives, and struck further by how quickly they regenerate new communities (in accordance with their particular interests, and particular family needs) in far-flung climes. Sure, there is a loss to be had when abandoning the seat of family life, and as Tocqueville realises, there is also a necessary shrinking of the sphere of communal life. But Americans, I think, seem to gain from this disposition a ready capacity to invent communities anew, rather than simply suffering the loss of whatever is old.
In many ways, Tocqueville does describe the kind of epoch that modern Westerners live within. It is easy to say that in our own advanced democratic age, we have less of a sense of nativeness in our own countries. What is harder to say is that this loss of nativeness has occurred as an inevitable result of the turn from aristocratic into democratic statehood. We cannot prove that there haven’t been overwhelming forces, visible or not, occurring after his time, and existing outside his reckoning, that have contributed more significantly to this loss of national belonging. Certainly though, we can see that Tocqueville thought it a significant danger that such a slide would occur.
What is most important in Tocqueville is what he frames as a commensurability between the polity of the soul and the polity of the state. In this way he is a writer after Plato. That, I think, is the attraction in his writing, and the value of his study. For each piece of commentary on the nature of the individual, Tocqueville points us clearly to a consequent reckoning for the nature of the state. This works in reverse as well, and, if I am correct, it is this reversal that is perhaps the deepest concern of his work. I say this because on the subject of the state itself, Tocqueville seems to reach a personal equilibrium with the respective fates of Democracy and Aristocracy. In his concluding pages, he says that “one cannot found an aristocracy anew in the world; but I think that when plain citizens associate, they can constitute very opulent, very influential, very strong beings - in a word, aristocratic persons.” Further still, there is this, in the following chapter, “What seems to me decadence is therefore progress in [God’s] eyes; what wounds me is agreeable to him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty.”
For Tocqueville then, we ultimately see despair at the fading of an era of greatness give way to an earnest concern with how the individual soul may fare in its inevitable journey from an era of tranquil greatness, to an era of excited mundanity. It is a touching end to a book seldom rivalled in its prophetic wisdom, and magnanimity of spirit.
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Ben Crocker is Academic Programs Manager at the University of Austin (UATX), and Research Fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington, DC.