He failed to foresee the many ways in which the young American democracy, with its palpable ethos of equality with liberty manifested in simple body language, tobacco-chewing customs and easy manners, would give rise to self-consciously democratic art and literature. It is in fact their progenitor. The four-volume work is still regarded, justifiably, as one of the great books about the subject, in no small measure because at a crucial moment in the democratic experiment in America Tocqueville managed to put his finger on several sources of its dynamic energy.
For Tocqueville, it is not just capitalism and the law-enforcing territorial state that define modern times. Democracy is a sui generis but seemingly irreversible feature of the modern age. Tocqueville emphasises to his readers that democracy challenges settled ways of thinking and speaking and acting.
It reveals that humans are capable of transcending themselves. For him, democracy is the twin of contingency. It tutors their sense of pluralism. It prods them into taking greater responsibility for how, when and why they act as they do. In other words, democracy promotes something of a Gestalt switch in the perception of power. What are the wellsprings of this shared sense of contingency? Why does democracy tend to interrupt certainties, impeach them, enable people to see that things could be other than they presently are?
Tocqueville might have been expected to say that because periodic elections stir things up they are the prime cause of the shared sense of the contingency of power relations. Not so. Tocqueville actually thought that elections trigger herd instincts among citizens. Tocqueville reminds us in Democracy in America that the core principle of democracy is the public commitment to equality among its citizens. The reminder seems lost these days on most politicians, political parties and governments.
Equality is for him not the equal right of citizens to be different. Equality is sameness semblable. Proof of its allure was the way the new American democracy unleashed constant struggles against the various inequalities inherited from old Europe, thus proving that they were neither necessary nor desirable. Democracy, argued Tocqueville, spreads passion for the equalisation of power, property and status among people. They come to feel that current inequalities are purely contingent, and so potentially alterable by human action itself.
Tocqueville was fascinated by this trend towards equalisation. In the realm of law and government, he noted, everything tends to dispute and uncertainty. The grip of sentimental tradition, absolute morality and religious faith in the power of the divine weakens.
They also look upon the power of politicians and governments with a jealous eye. Government structured by the good blood of monarchs is anathema. They are prone to suspect or curse those who wield power, and thereby they are impatient with arbitrary rule. They come to be regarded as simply expedient for this or that purpose, and as properly based on the voluntary consent of citizens endowed with equal civil and political rights.
The spell of absolute monarchy is forever broken. Political rights are extended gradually from the lucky privileged few to those who once suffered discrimination; and government policies and laws are subject constantly to public grumbling, legal challenges and alteration.
Thanks to democracy, something similar happens in the field of social life, or so Tocqueville proposed. It becomes subject to something like a permanent democratisation. This is how: if certain social groups defend their privileges, of property or income, for instance, then pressure grows for extending those privileges to other social groups.
Eventually the point is reached where the social privileges enjoyed by a few are re-distributed, in the form of universal social entitlements. That at least was the theory. On the basis of his travels and observations, Tocqueville predicted that American democracy would in future have to confront a fundamental dilemma. Democratic mechanisms, said Tocqueville, stimulate a passion for social and political equality that they cannot easily satisfy.
Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the subversion of marital power or the confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner, and they maintain that in the smaller association of husband and wife as well as in the great social community the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers that are necessary, and not to subvert all power.
This opinion is not peculiar to one sex and contested by the other; I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, or that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it.
It appeared to me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off.
Such, at least, is the feeling expressed by the most virtuous of their sex; the others are silent; and in the United States it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamor for the rights of women while she is trampling on her own holiest duties…. Living with them is one thing. Agreeing that they represent my worldview is another.
Or that they are the representative of the evangelical world view is another. Why should they keep leading people astray? Or expert on any matter? I would think people like Eric Metaxas would appreciate the correction.
Self-interest is such an interesting concept. If they would be faithful to God and obey His laws, they would prosper and live long in the land. Of course, the opposite would happen if they were unfaithful and disobedient.
Of course, we all know that they blew it rather significantly! We moderns often equate self-interest with selfishness. We make the assumption that life is a zero sum game and if one person gets rich then someone else must have fallen into poverty.
In Israel part of self-interest was to care for the widow, the orphan, the impoverished, and the foreigner. Self-interest was not selfishness because it encompassed the whole community, nor merely the individuals within it. I wonder if that is something Tocqueville saw in the American character as he toured the land.
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