De Tocqueville

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) was a French aristocrat who, while in some ways regretting the passing of the Ancien Régime as a result of the French Revolution, nevertheless became one of the most sympathetic and acute observers of Western democratic movements during the 19th century. His two great works were The Ancien Régime, a study of the social and political forces at work in France immediately before the Revolution, and Democracy in America. The former is still a valuable contemporary document for historians, but de Tocqueville was too close, chronologically and emotionally, to be capable of the sustained value-free analysis that might have made it a first-class work of political science. However, after he visited America in 1830, and despite the fact that he was there for only eight months and visited only a few eastern-seaboard states, he produced a massive, detailed and analytically brilliant study which can still be read today for its insights into the operation of American political culture. It is quite common for modern American political scientists and sociologists to attempt their own version of his American study, invariably finding much that is still true. In this work he also develops a political and social theory about the consequences of mass democracy that is similar in many ways to Durkheim’s much later thinking. His principal concern was to demonstrate that some aspects of the traditional European aristocracy had been beneficial, and that their absence in modern democracy raised dangers to the very values of democracy itself.

Formal political equality, without actual economic equality, put the masses in the hands of those whose wealth gave them power, but who lacked the aristocracy’s noblesse oblige sense of duty towards those whom they ruled. De Tocqueville also feared the vulnerability of the masses to demagogic manipulation, and regretted the absence of the countervailing influence of some aspects of the feudal world order. In this context he was close to the thinking of British liberals, such as John Stuart Mill, on whom his influence can clearly be seen. His observations were often acute, for example seeing that America was becoming an increasingly litigious society, where not only inter-personal conflicts but also general political questions rapidly became entangled with the legal system. His predictions were also extremely perceptive. He was convinced that the USA would become one of the leading world powers (which was hardly obvious in 1830), and even foretold that its great opponent would be Russia. Ultimately he approved of American democracy much more than he deprecated it. He was perhaps the first real political sociologist in that he sought to explain American culture in terms of its social and economic conditions and its political culture.