Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville (Volume II)
This is a commentary for Volume II of Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. The series began with an introduction and a discussion of Volume I.#
(Note: There are many more subdivisions this time around. More parts, more chapters. But the size of the book is about the same, so each is shorter.)#
Part One: Influence of Democracy on Intellectual Movement in the United States#
Chapter 1: On the philosophic method of the Americans
Tocqueville explains that the Americans are not all concerned with philosophy and only marginally so with religion. An interesting remark is that religion in America was wise to voluntarily separate itself from politics because then it would never be allied with a force that lost majority support. Chip Gibbons wrote something about this recently.
Chapter 2: On the principal source of beliefs among democratic peoples
This talks about beliefs and how societies need them because each man cannot verify everything himself. In democracies those beliefs are the opinions of the majority which each individual will dare not rebel against.
I perceive how, under the empire of certain laws, democracy would extinguish the intellectual freedom that the democratic social state favors, so that the human spirit, having broken all the shackles that classes or men formerly imposed on it, would be tightly chained to the general will of the greatest number.
[...] That, I cannot repeat too often, is something to cause profound reflection by those who see in the freedom of the intellect something holy and who hate not only the despot but despotism. As for me, when I feel the hand of power weighing on my brow, it matters little to know who oppresses me, and I am no more disposed to put my head in the yoke because a million arms present it to me. [pg. 410]
Chapter 3: Why the Americans show more aptitude and taste for general ideas than their English fathers
A nice discussion of general ideas, in general:
General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather to its insufficiency, because there are no beings in nature exactly alike: no identical facts, no rules indiscriminately applicable in the same manner to several object at one. [pg. 411]
Chapter 4: Why the Americans have never been as passionate as the French for general ideas in political matters
Chapter 5: How, in the United States, religion knows how to make use of democratic instincts
Tocqueville mentions how Islam is incompatible with democracy and enlightenment:
Mohammed had not only religious doctrines descend from Heaven and placed in the Koran, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, in contrast, speak only of the general relations of men to God and among themselves. Outside of that they teach nothing and oblige nothing to be believed. That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot dominate for long in enlightened and democratic times, whereas the second is destined to reign in these centuries as in all the others. [pg. 419-420]
Chapter 6: On the progress of Catholicism in the United States
Chapter 7: What makes the mind of democratic peoples lean toward pantheism
Chapter 8: How equality suggests to the Americans the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man
A short discussion of the idea that man can be made perfect and earth heaven.
I meet an American sailor and I ask him why his country's vessels are built to last a short time, and he replies to me without hesitation that the art of navigation makes such rapid progress daily that the most beautiful ship would soon become almost useless if its existence were prolonged beyond a few years.
In these words pronounced at random by a coarse man concerning a particular fact I perceive the general and systematic idea according to which a great people conduct all things.
Aristocratic nations are naturally brought to contract the limits of human perfectibility too much, and democratic nations sometimes extend them beyond measure. [pg. 428]
Chapter 9: How the example of the American does not prove that a democratic people can have no aptitude and taste for the sciences, literature, and the arts
Chapter 10: Why the Americans apply themselves to the practice of the sciences rather than to the theory
Chapter 11: In what spirit the Americans cultivate the arts
Chapter 12: Why the Americans at the same time raise such little and such great monuments
As in, there are no medium sized monuments. Tocqueville's general remark on monuments is notable:
Every time any power whatever is capable of making a whole people combine in a single undertaking, it will succeed with little science and much time in getting something immense from the combination of such great efforts without anyone's having to conclude, because of this, that the people is very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong. The Spanish found Mexico City full of magnificent temples and vast palaces, which did not prevent Cortés from conquering the empire of Mexico with six hundred infantry and sixteen horses.
If the Romans had known the laws of hydraulics better, they would not have raised all the aqueducts that surround the ruins of their cities, and they would have made a better use of their power and wealth. If they had discovered the steam engine, perhaps they would not have spread to the extremities of their empire the long artificial rock masses named Roman roads.
These things are magnificent testimonies to their ignorance at the same time as to their greatness.
A people that left no vestiges of its passage other than some lead pipes in the earth and iron rods on its surface could have been more a master of nature than the Romans. [pg. 444]
Chapter 13: The literary face of democratic centuries
Chapter 14: On the literary industry
(This "chapter" is 8 sentences on half a page.)
Chapter 15: Why the study of Greek and Latin literature is particularly useful in democratic societies
Chapter 16: How American democracy has modified the English language
Men who live in democratic countries scarcely know the language that was spoken in Rome or Athens, and they do not care about going back to antiquity to find the expression they lack. If they sometimes have recourse to learned etymologies, it is ordinarily vanity that makes them seek deeply in dead languages, and not erudition that naturally offers them to their minds. It sometimes even happens that the most ignorant among them make the most use of them. The quite democratic desire to move out of one's sphere often brings them to want to enhance a very coarse profession with with a Greek or Latin name. The more the job is low and distant from science, the more the name is pompous and erudite. Thus it is that our rope dancers are transformed into acrobats and funambulists. [pg. 454]
Chapter 17: On some sources of poetry in democratic nations
Tocqueville discusses poetry and what the Americans, and other democrats, have to write it about.
Poetry in my eyes is the search for and depiction of the ideal.
The one who, by cutting out a part from what exists, by adding some imaginary features to the picture, and by combining certain circumstances that are real but not found together in conjunction, completes and enlarges nature--that is the poet. Thus poetry will not have for its goal to represent the truth, but to adorn it, and to offer a superior image to the mind.
Verse appear to me as the beautiful ideal of language, and in this sense they will be eminently poetic; but by themselves they will not constitute poetry. [pg. 458]
Chapter 18: Why American writers and orators are often bombastic
Chapter 19: Some observations on the theater of democratic peoples
Tocqueville observes that most theater is for the largest number by default, and thus it is always a way the majority can have some control, even in some aristocracies.
Chapter 20: On some tendencies particular to historians in democratic centuries
Tocqueville talks about the removal of people from history and the tyranny of "ideas" and general historic movements, tools that historians use to show their laziness and illustrate the fallacy that past events could only have happened one way.
Chapter 21: On parliamentary eloquence in the United States
There is so to speak no member of Congress who consents to go back home without having at least one speech preceding him there, or who suffers being interrupted before having been able to include within the limits of his harangue all that one can say of use to the twenty-four states of which the Union is composed, and especially to the district he represents. He therefor parades successively before the minds of his listeners great general truths that he himself often does not perceive and that he indicates only confusedly, and very slender little particulars that he does not have much facility for uncovering and setting forth. Thus it very often happens that discussion becomes vague and embarrassed within this great body, and it seems to drag itself toward the goal proposed rather than march to it. [pg. 475]
Part Two: Influence of Democracy on the Sentiments of the Americans#
Chapter 1: Why democratic peoples show a more ardent and more lasting love for equality than for freedom
I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they seek it, they love it, and they will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow. But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery. They will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.
This is true in all times, and above all in ours. All men and all powers that wish to struggle against this irresistible power will be overturned and destroyed by it. In our day freedom cannot be established without its support, and despotism itself cannot reign without it. [pg. 482]
Chapter 2: On individualism in democratic countries
Here, individualism refers to the desire to separate oneself from society, not to be a unique individual. This is in contrast with selfishness.
Chapter 3: How individualism is greater at the end of a democratic revolution than in any other period
Chapter 4: How the Americans combat individualism with free institutions
Despotism which in its nature is fearful, sees the most certain guarantee of its own duration in the isolation of men, and it ordinarily puts all its cares into isolating them. There is no vice of the human heart that agrees with i as much as selfishness: a despot readily pardons the governed for not loving him, provided that they do not love each other. He does not ask them to aid him in leading the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to direct it themselves. He calls those who aspire to unite their efforts to create common prosperity turbulent and restive spirits, and changing the natural sense of words, he names those who confine themselves narrowly to themselves good citizens. [pg. 485]
Chapter 5: On the use that the Americans make of association in civil life
A nice, libertarian-ish call out against the government getting involved in things that could be done privately:
A government could take the place of some of the greatest American associations, and within the Union several particular states already have attempted it. But what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association?
It is easy to forecast that the time is approaching when a man by himself alone will be less and less in a state to produce the things that are the most common and the most necessary to his life. The task of the social power will therefore constantly increase, and its very efforts will make it vaster each day. The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to come to their aid: these are causes and effects that generate each other without rest. Will the public administration in the end direct all the industries for which an isolated citizen cannot suffice? and if there finally comes a moment when, as a consequence of the extreme division of landed property, the land is partitioned infinitely, so that it can no longer be cultivated except by associations of laborers, will the head of the government have to leave the helm of state to come hold the plow? [pg. 491]
Chapter 6: On the relation between associations and newspapers
Chapter 7: Relations between civil associations and political associations
Chapter 8: How the Americans combat individualism by the doctrine of self-interest well understood
Chapter 9: How the Americans apply the doctrine of self-interest well understood in the matter of religion
Chapter 10: On the taste for material well-being in America
Chapter 11: On the particular effects that the love of material enjoyments produces in democratic centuries
Tocqueville describes the very popular vice of Americans, then and today:
The taste for material enjoyments does not bring democratic peoples to [excesses similar to aristocrats]. There, the love of well-being shows itself to be a tenacious, exclusive, universal, but contained passion. It is not a question of building vast palaces, of vanquishing and outwitting nature, of depleting the universe in order better to satiate the passions of a man; it is about adding a few toises to one's fields, planting an orchard, enlarging a residence, making life easier and more comfortable at each instant, preventing inconvenience, and satisfying the least needs without effort and almost without cost. These objects are small, but the soul clings to them: it considers them every day and from very close; [pg. 508-509]
Chapter 12: Why certain Americans display such an exalted spiitualism
Chapter 13: Why the Americans show themselves so restive in the midst of their well-being
Talks about how the American can never be satisfied and will always try to conquer the next hill once the first is taken, but before it can be enjoyed.
Chapter 14: How the taste for material enjoyments among Americans is united with love of freedom and with care for public affairs
Tocqueville talks about how this love can diminish the strength of democracy:
When the taste for material enjoyments develops in one of these peoples more rapidly than enlightenment and the habits of freedom, there comes a moment when men are swept away and almost beside themselves at the sight of the new goods that they are ready to grasp. Preoccupied with the sole care of making a fortune, they no longer perceive the tight bond that unites the particular fortune of each of them to the prosperity of all. There is no need to tear from such citizens the rights they possess; they themselves willingly allow them to escape. The exercise of their political duties appears to them a distressing contretemps that distracts them from their industry. If it is a question of choosing their representatives, of giving assistance to authority, of treating the common thing in common, they lack the time; they cannot waste their precious time in useless work. These are games of the idle that do not suit grave men occupied with the serious interests of life. These people believe they are following the doctrine of interest, but they have only a coarse idea of it, and to watch better over what they call their affairs, they neglect the principal one, which is to remain masters of themselves. [pg. 515]
Find a better description of people who can be bothered to be involved in politics.
Chapter 15: How religious beliefs at times turn the souls of Americans toward immaterial enjoyments
Chapter 16: How the excessive love of well-being can be harmful to well-being
Chapter 17: How in times of equality and doubt it is important to move back the object of human actions
Chapter 18: Why among the Americans all honest professions are reputed honorable
This is in contrast with aristocrats who find all work beneath them, or at least most types of work.
American servants do not believe themselves degraded because they work; for everyone around them works. They do not feel themselves debased by the idea that they receive a wage, for the President of the United States works for a wage as well. He is paid to command just as they are to serve. [pg. 526]
Chapter 19: What makes almost all Americans incline toward industrial professions
Chapter 20: How aristocracy could issue from industry
Tocqueville warns that an aristocracy could arise from the wealth and social state created by types of industry:
The territorial aristocracy of past centuries was obliged by law or believed itself to be obliged by mores to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries. But the manufacturing aristocracy of our day, after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourish by public charity in times of crisis. This results naturally from what precedes. Between worker and master relations are frequent, but there is not genuine association.
I think that all in all, the manufacturing aristocracy that we see rising before our eyes is one of the hardest that has appeared on earth; but it is at the same time one of the most restrained and least dangerous.
Still, the friends of democracy ought constantly to turn their regard with anxiety in this direction; for if ever permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are introduced anew into the world, one can predict that they will enter by this door. [pg. 532]
Part Three: Influence of Democracy on Mores Properly So-Called#
Chapter 1: How mores become milder as conditions are equalized
Chapter 2: How democracy renders the habitual relations of the Americans simpler and easier
Chapter 3: Why the Americans have so little oversensitivity in their country and show themselves to be so oversensitive in ours
This talks about what happens when Americans travel...
When an opulent American lands in Europe, his first care is to surround himself with all the wealth of luxury; and he has so great a fear of being taken for a simple citizen of a democracy that he twists himself in a hundred ways to present you with a new view of his wealth every day. He ordinarily finds lodging in the most conspicuous quarter of the town; he has numerous servants who constantly surround him. [pg. 544]
Chapter 4: Consequences of the preceding three chapters
Chapter 5: How democracy modifies the relations of servant and master
This talks about how freedom to decide where and how one will be employed makes the American servants treat much differently than in England or France:
An American who had traveled for a long time in Europe said to me one day:
"The English treat their servants with a haughtiness and a peremptory manner that surprise us; but on the other hand, the French sometimes use a familiarity with them or show a politeness with regard to them that we cannot conceive of. One would say that they fear to command. The attitude of superior and inferior is poorly kept." [pg. 546]
Chapter 6: How democratic institutions and mores tend to raise the price and shorten the duration of leases
Chapter 7: Influence of democracy on wages
Chapter 8: Influence of democracy on the family
Chapter 9: Education of girls in the United States
Chapter 10: How the girl is found beneath the features of the wife
Chapter 11: How equality of conditions contributes to maintaining good mores in America
These last few chapters are all talking about the effect of equality between men and women and how women in America are much better educated and independent than women from Europe. Here is a particularly interesting note:
In aristocratic peoples, birth and fortune often make man and woman such different beings that they can never come to be united to one another. Passions bring them together, but the social state and the ideas it suggests prevent them from bonding in a permanent and open manner. Hence a great number of passing and clandestine unions necessarily arise. Nature compensates itself in secret for the constrain that the laws impose on it.
One does not see this same thing when equality of conditions has brought down all the imaginary or real barriers that separate man from woman. Then these is no girl who does not believe she can become the wife of the man who prefers her, which makes disorder in mores before marriage very difficult. For whatever the credulity of passions may be, there is scarcely a means by which a woman may be persuaded that you love her when you are perfectly free to marry her and do not do it. [pg. 568, my emphasis]
Chapter 12: How the Americans understand the equality of man and woman
Chapter 13: How equality naturally divides the Americans into a multitude of particular little societies
Chapter 14: Some reflections on American manners
Interesting presentation of the idea that democracies only create manners with great difficulty, and when they are created they are much smaller and go more often unnoticed, unlike those rules of "social grace" that live in an aristocracy.
Chapter 15: On the gravity of the Americans and why it does not prevent their often doing ill-considered things
Chapter 16: Why the national vanity of the Americans is more restive and more quarrelsome than that of the English
Chapter 17: How the aspect of society in the United States is at once agitated and monotonous
Chapter 18: On honor in the United States and in democratic societies
In aristocratic peoples all ranks differ, but all ranks are fixed; each occupies a place in his sphere that he cannot leave, where he lives in the midst of other men around him attached in the same manner. In these nations, therefore, no one can hope or fear not to be seen; he encounters no man place so low that he has no theater, who will escape blame or praise by his obscurity.
In democratic states, on the contrary, where all citizens are confused in the same crowd and constantly act on each other, public opinion has no hold; its object disappears at each instant and escapes it. Honor will therefore always be less imperious and less pressing there; for honor only acts in public view, differing in that from simple virtue, which lives on itself and is satisfied with its own witness. [pg. 598]
This seems to suggest to me that people in a democracy are more honest in their actions towards each other because the payback is negligible, and this shows itself as dishonor, because people are not inclined to honor as many people as aristocracy requires.
Chapter 19: Why one finds so many ambitious men in the United States and so few great ambitions
Tocqueville talks about the problems inherent with testing and giving everyone an equal chance--it destroys motivation and the magnitude of ambition when progress is so slow through ranks.
By hatred of privilege and embarrassment over choosing, one comes to compel all men, whatever heir stature might be, to pass through the same filter, and one subjects them all indiscriminately to a multitude of little preliminary exercises in the midst of which their youth is lost and their imagination extinguished; so they despair of ever being able to enjoy fully the goods that are offered to them; and when they finally come to be able to extraordinary things, they have lost the taste for them. [pg. 602]
"Embarrassment over choosing" reminds me of so many situations in life it is sad. There seems to be a great taboo over preferring one person or thing over another, unless it is incredibly trivial, like a preferred soft-drink brand.
Chapter 20: On the industry in place-hunting in certain democratic nations
Chapter 21: Why great revolutions will become rare
One encounters, in fact, few idle men in democratic nations. Life goes on in the midst of motion and noise, and men are so busy acting that little time remains to them for thinking. [...]
I think that it is very difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a democratic people for any theory whatsoever that has no visible, direct, and immediate relation to the daily practice of its life. Such a people does not easily abandon its old beliefs. For it is enthusiasm that precipitates the mind of man beyond beaten paths and that makes great intellectual revolutions as well as great political revolutions.
Thus democratic peoples have neither the leisure nor the taste to go in search of new opinions. Even if they come to doubt those they posses, they preserve them nonetheless because they would need too much time and examination to change them; they keep them not as certain, but as established. [pg. 614]
Chapter 22: Why democratic peoples naturally desire peace and democratic armies naturally [desire] war
First, I want to point out that Tocqueville writes that the hardest things for a democratic people are "beginning a war, and ending it."
Secondly, I want to quote Tocqueville's warning against the power of war.
There is no long war that does not put freedom at great risk in a democratic country. It is not that one must precisely fear to see winning generals take possession of sovereign power by force after each victory, in the manner of Sulla and Caesar. The peril is of another sort. War does not always give democratic peoples over to military government; but it cannot fail to increase immensely the prerogatives of civil government in these peoples; it almost inevitable centralizes the direction of all men and the employment of all things in its hands. If it does not lead one to despotism suddenly by violence, it leads to it mildly through habits.
All those who seek to destroy freedom within a democratic nation ought to know that the surest and shortest means of succeeding at this is war. There is the first axiom of the science. [pg. 621]
Think of this next time you ponder the War on Terror will standing in rope lines with your shoes in your hands.
Chapter 23: Which is the most warlike and the most revolutionary class in democratic armies
Chapter 24: What makes democratic armies weaker than other armies when entering into a campaign and more formidable when war is prolonged
A thought that tells a great deal about history and American movie tastes:
Men of democracies naturally have a passionate desire to acquire quickly the goods that they covet and to enjoy them easily. Most of them adore chance and fear death much less than trouble. In this spirit they lead commerce and industry; and this same spirit, transported by them onto the battlefield, brings them willingly to expose their lives so as to be assured, in a moment, of the prizes of victory. There is no greatness that satisfies the imagination of a democratic people more than military greatness--brilliant and sudden greatness obtained without work, by risking only one's life.
Thus, whereas interest and tastes turn the citizens of a democracy away from war, the habits of their souls prepare them to fight it well; they easily become good soldiers as soon as one has been able to tear them from their business and their well-being.
If peace is particularly harmful to democratic armies, then war secures advantages to them that other armies never have; and these advantages, though hardly felt at first , cannot fail to give them victory in the long term.
An aristocratic people that, in conflict with a democratic nation, does not succeed in ruining it on the first campaigns always takes much risk of being defeated by it. [pg. 629]
Chapter 25: On discipline in democratic armies
Chapter 26: Some considerations on war in democratic societies
Part Four: On the Influence That Democratic Ideas and Sentiments Exert on Political Society#
Chapter 1: Equality naturally gives men the taste for free institutions
Yet I am convinced that anarchy is not the principal evil that democratic centuries will have to fear, but the least.
Equality produces, in fact, two tendencies: one leads men directly to independence and can drive them all at once into anarchy, the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but surer path toward servitude.
Peoples easily see the first and resist it; they allow themselves to be carried along by the other without seeing it; to show it is therefore particularly important. [pg. 640]
Chapter 2: That the ideas of democratic peoples in the matter of government are naturally favorable to the concentration of powers
Chapter 3: That the sentiments of democratic peoples are in accord with their ideas in bringing them to concentrate power
Chapter 4: On some particular and accidental causes that serve to bring a democratic people to centralize power or turn it away from that
Chapter 5: That among European nations of our day sovereign power increases although sovereigns are less stable
Chapter 6: What kind of despotism democratic nations have to fear
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: 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 strange to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends from 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 still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object o prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep the fixed irrevocably in childhood; it like citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willing works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides fro their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take way from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? [pg. 663]
Chapter 7: Continuation of the preceding chapters
Equality isolates and weakens men, but the press places at the side of each of them a very powerful arm that the weakest and most isolated can make use of. Equality takes away from each individual the support of his neighbors, but the press permits him to call to his aid all his fellow citizens and all who are like him. Printing hastened the progress of equality, and it is one of its best correctives. [pg. 668]
Chapter 8: General view of the subject
Many ideas are bubbling in my head. All I can say now is that my understanding of the effects of democracy is better now and this book will be an invaluable resource.#