Tocqueville, Alexis De | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Politician and author Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), who was born in the village of Tocqueville in France on July 29 and died on April 16, is best known for his two politically minded books, Democracy in America (1835–1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). Tocqueville was born into an aristocratic family and lived as an aristocrat. He had no children and no strong desire to perpetuate his family's noble name. His passion was to promote human liberty in democratic times, to keep alive what was best about the old aristocracies in societies devoted to the democratic understanding of justice. Tocqueville's political career was undistinguished, but he deserves to be remembered for his literary legacy.

Democracy in America, the outgrowth of an extended visit to the United States from May 1831 until February 1832, remains the best single book written on democracy and the best book written on America. It has in many ways become more true over time, as America has become more democratic. Tocqueville presents democracy not just as a form of government but as a way of life; the democratic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, he correctly thought, had infused and would gradually continue to infuse themselves into every aspect of American and modern life.

Tocqueville's explicit discussion of democratic science, technology, and ethics occurs in Part 1 of Democracy Volume 2, where his subject is the democratic mind. There he describes Americans as Cartesians without ever having read a word of Descartes. They are habitual skeptics; they view all claims of personal authority as nondemocratic claims to rule. Skeptical of the soul, Americans act feverishly on behalf of the body and its enjoyments. So they prize scientific knowledge far less for its own sake than for its applications or technological effects. The Americans dismiss the proud and pure desire to know characteristic of theoretical science as an aristocratic prejudice. Democratic peoples subordinate pleasures of the mind to those of the body.

Tocqueville himself embraces neither the aristocratic nor democratic views of science, but adopts the position of an umpire determining what is true and false about each partial or extreme view. The pride associated with the ruling class in an aristocracy leads scientific inquirers to confine themselves to the haughty and sterile pursuit of abstract truths. All scientific advances find their roots in such fundamental inquiry, but aristocrats inconsiderately or unethically neglect what applied science might do to improve ordinary human life.

Democrats, Tocqueville adds, are so selfishly enthralled with the benefits of technology that they neglect to provide for pure or theoretical inquiry. Democracies characteristically do not have a class that possesses the leisure required for the theoretical sciences; the mind needs relatively calm or unagitated social circumstances to achieve its possible perfection. The theoretical life is rarely possible for members of a merely middle class, for free beings who must work to earn a living.

For minds in democratic times, the most magnificent products of human intelligence are methods that quickly produce wealth and machines that reduce the need for human labor and the cost of production. Those who direct democratic nations, Tocqueville contends, must use their influence and power to go against the democratic grain by raising those minds on occasion "to the contemplation of first causes," to elevate them sometimes with the magnificence of the theoretical life. Their failure to do so might mean the near disappearance of scientific geniuses such as Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and even the gradual decline of scientific progress itself. A nation with no theoretical passion at all might end up wallowing in the scientific stagnation characteristic of the China that Europeans discovered. The technical genius of America finally depends on the perpetuation of a way of life that disdains mere technology in the name of truth.

Tocqueville also worried about the effect of a democratic technological orientation on the souls of most human beings. He writes that if he had lived in an unjust, poor, and otherworldly aristocratic age, he would have attempted to turn people toward the study of physical science and the pursuit of material wellbeing. But in a democracy, people are readily pushed by social circumstances in that technological direction; there is no longer any need to promote applied science. Instead, the need is to raise souls in the direction of heaven, greatness, a love of the infinite, and the love of immaterial pleasures. The democratic danger is that "while man takes pleasure in [the] honest and legitimate search for well-being, he will finally lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and that by wishing to improve everything around him, he will finally degrade himself" (Democracy in America, Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 14). So any comprehensive scientific claim for the truth of materialism—for the idea that there is no truth at all to claims for the soul's immortality—should be condemned by thoughtful human beings in democratic times as probably untrue and certainly pernicious.

Tocqueville was also a critic of the effect of applied science on language in democratic times. Language becomes progressively more vague and impersonal; human action is described using words more appropriate to mechanical motion. Precise personal distinctions and assertions become suspect, and metaphysics and theology slowly lose ground. Instead of saying, "I think," those who aim to influence democratic opinion say, "studies show." Having rejected personal authority, people in democratic times are far less skeptical concerning impersonal scientific claims about the various forces that shape their lives. Having freed themselves from aristocratic tyranny, people are seduced by the expertise of schoolmasters whose despotism is milder but exceedingly meddlesome. A democratic danger is the loss of any conception of free will or personal liberty; people will too easily be governed both by the claims of impersonal expertise and public opinion determined by no one in particular.

Tocqueville's significance is his account of all of modern life in terms of democracy. Many of his observations and fears anticipate, for instance, Martin Heidegger's account of all of modern life in terms of technology, and certainly modern democracy would be impossible without the liberation of technological progress for the most part from moral and political concerns. But Tocqueville emphatically refuses to equate technological progress with human progress. His judgments about democratic progress are friendlier to democracy and more judicious than Heidegger's. Democratic thought is partly true and partly not, and there is no reason to believe that people will not be able to correct some of its excesses in the directions of truth and liberty.

Democracy;; Freedom;; Skepticism.

de Tocqueville, Alexis. (2000). Democracy in America, trans., ed., and introduced by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lamberti, John-Claude. (1999). Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lawler, Peter Augustine. (1993). The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Manent, Pierre. (1996). Tocqueville on the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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