Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age

Why read Tocqueville today?

The amount of secondary literature on Tocqueville does not equal the mountains of material devoted to many older canonical authors or even to some of his contemporaries such as Emerson and Marx. It is however a substantial body of work, perhaps two hundred books and two thousand articles. [73] A large portion of the total, maybe a fifth or a quarter, was produced within the last twenty-five years; i.e., during the post–Cold War era that I’m calling the Internet Age. One might have expected interest in Tocqueville to fall off during this period if it’s true that his popularity after World War II was linked to the development of “American Studies” as an interdisciplinary department or program (attractive to returning GIs and other patriots) within many colleges and universities, and to his usefulness to the Free World as a champion of liberty in the fight against Communism. [74] If after the 1989–1991 dissolution of Eastern European governments Communism was mostly dead, and if the humanistic American academy was dying, being killed off (with interdisciplinary studies being a main target), [75] or repurposed (as exclusively preprofessional vocational schools, sports camps, wellness centers, or retirement community annexes), who could possibly be interested in reading Tocqueville? Besides, wasn’t Tocqueville just plain wrong about equality of social conditions being the distinctive feature of American society? And not only wrong about today’s America of extreme inequality [76] but wrong about nearly every decade in American history going back to the 1830s. [77] Wasn’t he only able to call America egalitarian because he was using monarchical France as a skewed yardstick and because he mostly bracketed the case of blacks, Indians, and women and underestimated the negative impact on equality of the advancing industrial revolution, the market revolution (Sellers [78] ), and the communication and transportation revolution (Howe [79] )? If so, how could people think it worth their while to “rediscover” Tocqueville? [80] Surely the French press’s habit of marking important anniversaries (10th, 20th, 25th, 30th, 50th, 100th, 200th, etc.) with articles, special issues, and other publications is not an adequate explanation, especially in the case of an author that most French intellectuals preferred to ignore for over a century, and also since many fairly recent publications in America and France appeared before the Tocqueville bicentenary in 2005.

Well, first of all, it is a well-known fact that peace and the “peace dividend” did not come through with the end of the Cold War. And the celebration of the West’s victory over Communism, of “freedom” over “serfdom,” eventually died down, along with the enthusiasm for Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), and was rather quickly moved off the front page by Bill and Monica, O.J., and then “September 11.” [81]

But before 9/11 changed everything, many who were worried about finding a new raison d’être for U.S. foreign policy and the military-industrial complex in the post-Communist era (and thus keeping their jobs and keeping Americans fearful and docile) looked to Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” (1992, 1996) for a new global ideological conflict to replace the old Cold War. The flap created in North America and Europe by and around the books of Fukuyama and Huntington (“It’s over!” / “No, it’s not over!”) arguably brought more readers to Tocqueville—he who had wondered if democracy in America would last, if it could take hold in France, if the Old Regime was dead or alive, and which parts of it were worth praising and preserving in order to save democracy from itself. Tocqueville’s stock was also boosted by the obvious fact that there were plenty of Eastern European Communists living on in various guises after Communism, and some of these people who had only ever thought of “democracy” and “America” as a dream or nightmare may have decided to try and know more, and there was old Tocqueville ready to offer his help to those who wanted to investigate, weigh, judge, or tutor democracy as he recommended we do (“instruire la démocratie”). In other words, world events between 1989 and 2001 got more people in America, France, and other places to take a closer look at themselves and ask about what Martha Nussbaum has called “the clash within,” and for this many have found reading Tocqueville helpful. [82]

In addition to recalling these recent events that I’m arguing had the unintended consequence of reviving interest in older theories about democracy such as Tocqueville’s, it should be said that the fact of American inequality (as measured by income, education, health, housing, profession, etc.…or by the less easily quantifiable notions of rights and mores), whether in 2035, 1935 or 1835, does not disqualify the interest one might have in the theoretical point Tocqueville is making; namely that equality of social conditions among a people is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for democracy and a democratic way of life. If a large income gap, education gap, health and health care gap, mobility gap, or mores gap makes democracy unworkable, this is something that both democracy’s friends and enemies ought to keep in mind (for different reasons), and Tocqueville can help you do that. Want to kill off democracy and replace it with a corporate, military, or mafia model? Read Tocqueville. Want to keep democracy from being taken over by or merging with corporations or the mafia or the military? Read Tocqueville. Want to keep democracy from committing suicide? Read Tocqueville. Want to push democracy over the edge and its people too? Read Tocqueville. If Tocqueville’s writings are not exactly a how-to manual, neither are they simply “academic.” In the right hands, his writings are a super “apps” store, no matter whether you’re interested in genuine ordinary democracy, covert or overt oligarchy (also known as “republicanism”), or direct dictatorship.

A Taxonomy of Tocqueville’s Commentators

Tocqueville’s commentators can be grouped and talked about in many ways. One, obviously, is by time period. Commentators from the pre-1989 era can be divided into four groups. In the first are Tocqueville’s contemporaries: the first English translator Henry Reeve, important early reviewers such as Sainte-Beuve and John Stuart Mill, and the author of introductions to the first American editions of Democracy in America, John C. Spencer. [83] A second scholarly, pre–World War II group takes shape around the time of the centenary with the founding/framing work of J. P. Mayer, George W. Pierson, and Phillips Bradley. [84] A third high Cold War group takes shape with a new translation (later often criticized) by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (1966), and includes the work of David Riesman, Max Lerner, Martin Lipset, and Raymond Aron. [85] The joint French-American founding of The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville in 1979 constitutes the late Cold War consolidation of Tocqueville studies as an international field of scholarly research. Important figures within this fourth group include François Bourricaud, André Jardin, François Furet, Jean-Claude Lamberti, Claude Lefort, Pierre Manent, Françoise Mélonio, Robert Nisbet, and James T. Schleifer. [86] This journal celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary just in time for the bicentenary with a special “best of” anthology, Tocqueville et l’esprit de la démocratie (Presses de Sciences Po, 2005).

In the post-1989 era, there are many commentators who are publishing research on Tocqueville for their own reasons. Some are long-term projects that may have been started before the events of 1989–1991 and have little direct connection to them. Two examples would be Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (1995, 2000) and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985, 1996, 2008) by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. There are others who may have had their interest in Tocqueville spurred on by world events, by personal events, and/or by the work of other Tocqueville scholars that appeared in the 1970s and 80s (Antoine, Heimonet, Janara, Welch, Wolin). And although it may not be as strong a habit within American academia, the role played by anniversaries in France—a centralized country long obsessed by both math and history—is not to be underestimated.

A birth year, death year, or year of publication is not just a handy attention-getting device for newspapers and magazines, but an important “magic marker” as it were that can drive the organization of conferences and seminars, and influence the selection of the authors and ideas to be studied in a given year in all French secondary schools and universities. They can also influence the syllabi within selective junior college programs known as “prépas” as well as the list of items to be thoroughly studied in a dense program of cram courses prior to taking one of France’s concours, the annual competitive exams that grant the winners lifetime employment as a civil servant (fonctionnaire) within France’s National Education system. [87] Publishers know that the pool of students who compete for these coveted jobs are a captive audience. In many ways they resemble the eager, docile, anxious, pragmatic, and self-interested demoland citizens Tocqueville describes in DA II, 1, and elsewhere. In other words, ideal consumers (numerous, predictable, and ready to spend), and for publishers this means being able to take risks on items that otherwise would have a harder time finding an audience. Consequently, there are professors who are going to hitch their wagon to a star and profit from the momentum, buzz, and sales that anniversaries routinely generate. There may be nothing wrong with this random and forced allocation of one’s time and attention based on concours and calendar-counting; who knows? It does seem to focus the mind, and it has the added benefit of regularly yanking the lazy narcissist in each of us away from the contemporary prose streaming through our consciousness by exposing us to thinkers and thoughts from the so-called past. Is that any worse (or better) than having one’s attention decided by Google, some website’s “most e-mailed” list, or one’s friends or thesis director? That’s a real question.

At any rate, this cultural practice of the French, which goes on elsewhere in somewhat milder forms, needs to be factored in if one wants to explain why all of a sudden around Tocqueville’s bicentenary there are three new translations of Democracy in America (2000, 2003, 2004), four new Tocqueville biographies (De Robien 2000; Benoît 2005; Brogan 2006; Jaume 2008), new scholarly general assessments (Audier 2004; Boesche 2007; Boudon 2005), new essay anthologies (The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville 2005; The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville 2006), new study manuals (Amiel 2002; Dubois 2004; Frioux 2002; Lafitte 2004; Guineret 2007; Ziccardi 2011), and many new single volumes and reprints of various selected shorter pieces taken from Tocqueville’s Oeuvres Complètes, which of course are in the public domain. [88] And that’s not counting what’s going on in other media on or around 2005, or what’s been produced after 2008 (Craiutu and Jennings, Damrosch, Elster, Epstein, Kaledin, Locke and Botting, Mansfield, Rahe, Zunz and Goldhammer) or the mute inglorious Miltons who assign and teach Tocqueville in undergraduate or graduate courses without leaving any record.

A second way to organize what’s been written by or about a famous author is by genre or type. In the case of Tocqueville these would include the following: allusion, anthology, article (scholarly, semischolarly [e.g., NYRB], mass market), biography, book review, didactic manual, edition, editor’s introduction, encyclopedia entry, epigraph, essay, the Internet (blogs, online journals, forums, conferences, editions, bibliographies, course materials, etc.), mention, monograph, multiauthor study, paraphrase, quotation (short, medium, long), reader, reception history, review essay, single-work or single-topic study, translation, translator’s note. One might also include various forms of “following in Tocqueville’s footsteps” whether conceived as homage, parody, pastiche, or poems. [89]

Another genre, perhaps the most frequently used today, might be called Tocqueville sauce, a tricky mixture of name-dropping allusion and paraphrase that can either carry or bury thinking. An example occurs in the Elizabeth Badinter profile referred to above when the author Jane Kramer quotes Badinter’s idea of what separates her from “most other feminists”:

Similar to epigraph, but less cold and static, Tocqueville sauce is a direct (mention) or indirect (allusion) reference to the great man smoothly inserted into a sentence that creates various effects (not necessarily all intended). Badinter’s remark is a typical example of softly aligning the tutor-speaker’s thoughts with those of a (better) known and (more) accepted authority.

I have never come across a willfully antagonistic lead-in or aside such as, “And as Tocqueville wrote, in words that are as false today as when they were written…” And yet writers and speakers who sympathetically apply Tocqueville sauce probably underestimate how much they may annoy the reader and provoke opposition. With writers like Tocqueville who are attracted to paradox and whose thoughts on paper are complex open networks, there is a fairly high risk of someone contesting whether the speaker’s claim is really supported by the authority figure or specially selected quotation, when there is one. In this case, I would say that Badinter’s claim may be true within a stable aristocratic society; i.e., when “talking about the eighteenth century,” for example. It is the basis of the “Christmas spirit” (also known as the “Gospel of Wealth” and “giving something back to the community”) that the most privileged can indulge in the easiest “to aid its servants and assuage their miseries” (DA II, 2, 20, 202, G652). But in a democracy such willingness becomes rarer and, frankly, less desired (because considered patronizing), and in its place there arises from different quarters a firm demand for social justice (as fairness) that replaces charity (or at least competes with it). [90] Therefore the least tolerant of inequality (and most strongly in favor of “redistributive justice,” in part because they’re likely to benefit) tend to be those in the low- to middle-income range, not the most privileged. And so it is very important to specify what century and what type of regime one is talking about, as well as other particulars of its history, because, as Tocqueville notes, beliefs and behaviors vary significantly at different times and places even within the same “state.” [91] My point is that Tocqueville sauce, though potent, can cause indigestion by obscuring or contradicting the point of the person who decides to apply it.

The writings on Tocqueville can also be grouped by language. Up until now, more has been written about Tocqueville in English than in French, though this might change during this century depending on who cares most about Tocqueville and democracy and in what language they express that care. Some authors have had their work on Tocqueville translated into other languages, sometimes more than one. The major works of Tocqueville and several of the most intriguing essays (on poverty and colonialism, for example) exist in many languages. The Bradley/Knopf bibliography lists editions of Democracy in America in Danish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish. A casual glance at the websites of online booksellers outside the U.S. reveals that translations also exist in Japanese and Chinese. One can also find recent work on Tocqueville published in German, Spanish, and especially Italian. [92] I regret that I can only read French and English competently, but it pleases me to know that Tocqueville is being read, hopefully well, in those other linguistic and cultural contexts.

To round out this taxonomy, we can list three final arrangements according to which what has been written about Tocqueville could be organized: audience (students, scholars, ordinary readers), attitude (very sympathetic, generally admiring, critical, hostile, complaisant, neutral), and purpose (advocate, amuse, doubt, entertain, inform, instruct, judge, persuade, question, weigh, wonder, etc.)—and of course a single text could have multiple aims and effects.

How to Read Tocqueville / How Not to Read Tocqueville

Of all the writings on Tocqueville during the Internet age that I have been able to put my hands on and get to know, I have selected eight texts that can serve as examples of how to read and how not to read Tocqueville. By reading Tocqueville, I mean an engagement with the complexities of his text that at least approximates Tocqueville’s labor to read and understand the complexities of the institutions and mœurs of America and France. The four ways not to read Tocqueville can be summarized as follows. Instead of reading the text, (1) talk about how it was made; (2) talk about how it has been read by others; (3) talk about something else and use large helpings of Tocqueville sauce (i.e., allusion and quotation) to claim that his text is a perfect mirror, illustration, confirmation, prefiguration, etc., of that other thing; (4) talk about something else and claim that Tocqueville is of little or no help understanding that other thing and therefore not worth reading.

I know that reading is not everyone’s preferred learning style, nor perhaps should it be. And because I am a teacher and not a salesman pushing product, and therefore open to the idea that there is something to be learned from mistakes and small achievements as well as from grand accomplishments, I have chosen four works that I consider to be flawed but interesting, and four others that I consider interesting but flawed. [93] In each group of four, there are two texts in English and two in French. To my knowledge, none of the French texts have been translated into English and vice versa. The authors of the texts in the first group are Leo Damrosch, Claire Le Strat and Willy Pelletier, Paul A. Rahe, and Emmanuel Todd. The authors of the texts in the second group are Agnès Antoine, Jon Elster, Jean-Michel Heimonet, and Sheldon S. Wolin. To me, the first four exemplify different ways of how not to read Tocqueville; the second four are examples of how to read Tocqueville.

Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (2010, 277 pages)

One way not to read Democracy in America is to talk about how it was made. This is what Leo Damrosch decides to do, though I am not claiming that evasion was his motive nor that he entirely avoids talking about the text. The book is a remake of the récit de voyage told by George W. Pierson in 1938 (Tocqueville and Beaumont in America) and is not to be confused with James T. Schleifer’s The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1980), for which it is the backstory. There is certainly nothing wrong with doing an original retelling of a good story.

Damrosch’s book was reviewed by Martin Rogoff in the American Journal of Legal History and by James Wood in the New Yorker. [94] After asking the unavoidable question, Why another book on Tocqueville?, Rogoff describes this new offering: “In Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, Leo Damrosch describes aspects of Tocqueville’s experience in America that give us a deeper appreciation of how Tocqueville came to the ideas and insights which he so eloquently expressed in Democracy in America. Damrosch focuses narrowly on Tocqueville’s American experience itself.” Rogoff then makes deft use of a quotation from Isaiah Berlin on the strenuous challenge of becoming good at political judgment (because it requires paying attention to so many different constantly changing things at the same time) and returns to it in his conclusion to say that Tocqueville comes close to the ideal described by Berlin and that “Damrosch’s book enables the reader to participate in that experience.” But does it enable reader participation? How much and what kind? If Tocqueville’s discovery of America is a set of daily events that only really exist thanks to the organizing, meaning-making textual event of his diary and other writings on the subject, then by focusing narrowly on Tocqueville’s American experience itself, Damrosch may be underestimating the importance of Tocqueville’s voyage of the mind (if the metaphor is not abusive) without which there would probably have been no discovery of America because his political judgment (which occurs in language) would not have been exercised. How much of that kind of exercise does the reader get from this book? Damrosch is a good storyteller and a knowledgeable tour guide (pausing regularly to tie in stops on the journey with a plot-thickening quotation from Tocqueville or some other author), but it seems legitimate to ask if the text’s desire for clarity and narrative pace doesn’t impede exercising one’s mind over a set of discoveries that of necessity, par la force des choses as the French say, can seem obscure (to those whose eyes are not yet adjusted) and therefore cause stumbling.

James Wood has similar reservations and chides his Harvard colleague for giving a too partial (in all senses) account of Tocqueville’s discovery—too “scintillating,” too smooth and one-sided to capture Tocqueville’s “unadorned intellectual charm” and his constant “tacking from anxiety to optimism and back again.” I share Wood’s feeling that “Damrosch contagiously enjoys himself” (106) as he retells the tale—he could be brought in as a consultant on the screenplay of a rollicking “buddy” road trip movie adaptation—but is joy or enjoyment really what’s most appropriate given the subject matter?

Reading Damrosch, one is reminded that transatlantic travel in those days was calculated in days or even months, roads were often terrible, and river travel could be hazardous. It is a wonder, given all the adversity, that in 1831 two twenty-something French aristocrats, who could have just continued slouching toward whatever while living off the land (labored by others in their service), would choose instead to go off to America for nine months like a couple of graduate students doing field research, get back alive, and write dissertations that people actually paid money to read instead of the other way around. And it is interesting to learn about Tocqueville’s reactions to what he witnessed, such as the solemn Fourth of July celebration in Albany, and about the informants who shared their views in response to Tocqueville’s many questions. [95] But we are not enabled to learn as much about Tocqueville’s struggle to make sense of it all, because that’s not the story Damrosch chose to tell. Over all, the book is informative and enjoyable, simply not all that probing or doubting, perhaps because really there is no argument. The book’s bland last sentence is a clear sign that something is just not right: “Tocqueville’s issues are still with us and still unresolved.” You can’t argue with that.

Claire Le Strat and Willy Pelletier, La Canonisation libérale de Tocqueville (2006, 288 pages)

Back at the pre-dawn of the Internet age, so-called reception theory and reception histories were for a time one of the more popular forms of literary criticism that had cropped up in the wake of 1950s formalist criticism and its radicalization in America as “theory” in the ’70s and ’80s. These metadiscourses about how reading was being performed within a given “interpretive community” were no doubt a welcome change of pace for those fatigued or annoyed by the “reading for rhetoric” they’d been taught in graduate school. [96] The latter activity could be carried on by those teaching “comp,” they figured, because they were no longer interested in “the meaning of meaning.” They wanted to talk about politics and history.

In France’s universities things didn’t evolve that way because formalist criticism (especially the twin scholastic exercises commentaire de texte and dissertation) continued to play a dominant role within the concours system. And formalism’s dominance extended into all the earlier school years as well going back to about age twelve since the language curricula are all designed in view of some future sorting and selecting procedure, and those two exercises along with math testing have been the standard French tools for over a hundred years. Therefore reception theory, generally understood to be a German-American import presented in the work of S. Fish, W. Iser, and H. R. Jauss, didn’t catch on in French language departments. However it did find a home in sociology departments, notably in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) and his continuators who were interested in extending the Weberian analyses of the circulation, conservation, and transmission of power and prestige among the members of certain professionalized groups. [97]

La Canonisation libérale de Tocqueville by Claire Le Strat and Willy Pelletier is a late application of such techniques to the world of French Tocqueville enthusiasts of the twentieth century. They claim that this group is very homogeneous and dominated by a doxa such that the whole community (if that’s the right word) constitutes what Bourdieu and others called a “habitus.” For us laypeople, the authors choose to convey the idea metaphorically by likening Tocqueville studies to the Catholic Church, where Tocqueville would be a sanctified prophet who is worshipped by his faithful followers, the pope or “papa” among them being Raymond Aron (1905–1983). The book offers a detailed account of the genesis and genealogy of this “liberal” “church” founded by Aron, Tocqueville, and their sacred texts that together form a sort of holy trinity.

This “canonisation” story deserves to be translated into English and integrated within a Western history of ideas, and the history of the history of those ideas of course. It would be of interest to Tocqueville scholars since it provides the most detailed account of “Tocqueville and the French” since Françoise Mélonio’s study from 1993. And since Tocqueville was French (wasn’t he?), it seems worth keeping up to date on the reception history of his writings in France, or a certain France at any rate. It would also be of interest to anyone interested in the Cold War since the book focuses mainly on the polarized French academic milieu between 1955 (the year Aron published L’Opium des intellectuals, which formalizes the battle lines between Sartriens and Aroniens) and 1993, one could say, since Mélonio’s reception history closes out the Cold War period with a last paragraph that tries to bring all parties to the peace table for a negotiated truce:

I think Mélonio is right when she says that Tocqueville is a figure of the repressed and that the word liberal is only attractive in its vagueness. But for anyone who seeks understanding, that vagueness soon becomes off-putting, and one realizes the only language users still attracted to the term are ideologues who seek to bash their enemies with it. In America those would be the “tax and spend liberals” vilified by conservatives, and in France the pro-business cult of “néo-libéralisme” denounced by the anticapitaliste Left. That liberal means “left” in America and “right” in Great Britain goes unexplained by Le Strat and Pelletier. [99] Therefore, it’s not surprising, given their choice of title and their view of liberalism as a dogma instead of a possible challenge to dogmas and rigidity, the authors cannot bring themselves to quote, much less follow, Mélonio’s nuanced reading of the term liberal. For them, her closing remarks can only be another one of the clever ruses by which the Tocqueville church enforces obedience and closes off dissent. When convenient, a clique can always deny it’s a clique to those outside the clique. School? What school? What doxa? What are you talking about?

In 1993, Mélonio is saying, “Look, it’s over, or it should be over, so let’s stop using Tocqueville as a sword and shield, and reinvent some esprit communal with which to treat our common interests in common—i.e., learning from reading Tocqueville in an open, collegial way.” Le Strat and Pelletier will have none of that mushy appeasement talk. For them it’s not over, and there’s not a shadow of a doubt that Tocqueville studies as practiced in France (and presumably in the United States, though they don’t bother citing any work on Tocqueville from the last ten years) is part of an “ongoing conservative modernization” as their backer Bernard Lacroix puts it in an explanation of the raison d’être of the collection this book belongs to and that he directs entitled La Politique au scalpel”[Politics under the scalpel]. The upshot is a decisive rejection of Tocqueville and Tocqueville studies in the history it tells.

One can’t help feeling, however, that the authors are cutting off their nose to spite their face with their strident tone, the constant suspicion, and especially the decision to include so few actual sentences from Tocqueville in their book; whereas they cut and paste passages from Aron and other commentators with a vengeance. Once they’d put their case to the reader (resolved: there is a right-wing Tocqueville consensus in France that has locked in certain interpretations of his writings to the exclusion of all others; here’s how it got started; here’s how it works; here’s why it’s harmful, etc.), why didn’t they just set it aside and go on to develop their own alternative vision of Tocqueville, or, if they like, argue why reading Tocqueville is a lot less valuable in today’s world than, say, reading Mill or Marx or Mitterrand? What was stopping them from cutting open that closed “horizon of meaning” they claim hangs over Tocqueville studies by writing their own story? Instead they sign off with a timid backward-looking hope:

By going on at length about an interpretive community whose vision they clearly disagree with, yet in the end offering no alternative interpretation of their own, the authors wind up lending even more prestige to their opponent (since bad publicity still counts as publicity); and no one will know whether their own vision was strong, weak, or somewhere in between, because they left the field without writing it up.

Paul A. Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (2009, 374 pages)

What does Paul A. Rahe want? What’s his dream job? What’s his dream for America for the twenty-first century? Is it a dream that takes into account the inalienable rights of all men, women, and children—the tall and the small—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What would be, say, twelve measurable, achievable, relevant actions that he would like to see taken—and by whom?—that would move the country closer to his vision of what America could and ought to be? And what arguments could he offer in favor of his top twelve to someone who might possibly disagree with one or more of his choices and argue instead for a different list of policy initiatives?

I’m leading off with these questions to make up for the fact that Rahe asks so few. In 280 pages of text plus another seventy pages of detailed footnotes, Rahe uses the question mark only twice (258, 310n53). The only other question marks that appear in the book occur in some quotations and in the titles of other people’s work. This aversion to the interrogative mood—if that’s what it is—is unusual in a scholarly publication, which is generally presumed to be the write-up of a research project built around a problem (and set of related questions) that the author wants to solve. [100] Rahe’s Introduction, however, does not leave the reader guessing about what problem he wants to solve and how. After two pages devoted to recalling for the reader a selection of historical events and related publications that deal with the collapse of Communism and some symptoms of ill health in the West, Rahe writes, “There is something altogether odd and not a little unsettling about these developments, for they leave us wondering where to turn” (xiii). Restated as questions, Rahe is asking: If Communism just died, and Communism was the West’s arch enemy, then why is the West not feeling all that happy and healthy? And what should “we” (Westerners?) do now? With whom? Why? So without coming right out and saying so, Rahe’s book is a guide for the perplexed, a group in which he would seem to include himself—or at least a former “blind” version of himself before everything became clear to him. He offers a solution to our problem at the bottom of the next page:

It should be noted that when Professor Rahe says “read with care” and “easier said than done” and throws in gentlemanly archaisms like “whither we are tending” and “crucial regards,” he is speaking the language of anyone who has ever come within a hundred miles of a certain private university located in New Haven, Connecticut.

The reason such reading won’t be easy, Rahe informs us, is that Montesquieu “lived in an age of censorship, and he composed his works in conformity with unwritten rules of discretion, intimating that which could not with profit be openly said” (xv). So Montesquieu was a wily practitioner of the arts of indirection, an ironist to put it bluntly; and Rahe proposes that we read carefully and pay special attention to how he was read by Rousseau and Tocqueville, i.e., that we read readers reading. This “intellectual” challenge, which, Rahe adds, “is also literary” and “unavoidably historical” corresponds closely to what was for many “in a time now largely forgotten and unfamiliar” (xv) the bread and butter of “a free and ordered space”: the utopian paradise known as Comparative Literature.

The promise Rahe makes us, his readers, is that if we take his advice and “undertake a journey into the past” (xv) to the days of the great teacher Montesquieu, an “archeological” task Rahe calls it (winking at Michel Foucault?), and then move forward to the time of his disciples Rousseau and Tocqueville, and if we read carefully at each step along the way, then we can experience a “liberation” (xv) from the unsettling developments in recent times and “recover from the profound sense of malaise to which we are now prone” (xvii).

And what is the malaise, the new “mal du siècle,” for which Rahe offers us a cure? It is “Soft Despotism,” an unhealthy condition first diagnosed among his French compatriots by the brilliant independent scholar Tocqueville and then re-diagnosed by Rahe (with Tocqueville’s assistance) in full-blown form in contemporary France (see Chapter Three, “The French Disease”) and then again in a perhaps treatable form in the United States (see Chapter Four, “Despotism of Administrators,” and “Conclusion”). So we (the French, Americans, and lots of others in the European Union, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand!) are sick. But if we virtuously take individual responsibility as Rahe recommends (280), such as by reading carefully, we can cure ourselves and be well again. That’s a stern yet ultimately hopeful message, but as with other recommendations about eating right, exercise, etc., the prescription is “easier said than done.”

One would expect Rahe to lead by example and be a careful reader. But is he? I leave it to others to decide what they think about his treatment of Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, but when it comes to Tocqueville, my answer is No. One symptom is that his text never doubts or questions anything that Tocqueville ever said or did. For him, it would seem, Tocqueville is an infallible prophet, his texts an oracle, a set of revelations that speak for themselves and thus need (must!) only be cited, accepted, and applied to modern times. Tocqueville’s oeuvre is Rahe’s bible, and its literal truth goes unquestioned by him. Again, this is unusual coming from a university history professor. Couldn’t Tocqueville, like his teacher Montesquieu, also have been forced to write in a multilayered, rhetorically complex, nonliteral way at times? Was his age not also subject to tough censorship laws, the clunky weight of inflexible Aristotelian logic, and peer pressure? Were not freedom of speech and freedom of association severely limited and under constant threat of further erosion throughout his lifetime? And didn’t Tocqueville have his weaknesses and blind spots like anyone else? If the answers to these questions are Yes, then one would expect Rahe to be more careful, i.e., more circumspect and resistant, when quoting and discussing Tocqueville.

Consider, for example, the long passage (quoted and discussed a bit hastily in my last chapter) where Tocqueville offers his vision of the “new features despotism might have in today’s world” (G818). Given his title and the whole drift, to borrow a term, of the second half of his book, one would expect Rahe to be scrupulously attentive here. He is certainly interested in quoting from these pages, and he does so four different times in different ways (nearly always in English). First on page vi as one long, unreferenced epigraph; then on pages 186–88, where key words and phrases are cut and pasted into his own prose (the technique I earlier referred to as Tocqueville sauce); then again on page 237, where some of the most jarring images (“immense tutelary power,” “herd of timid and industrious animals”) are recycled into Rahe’s diagnosis of what he calls “the French disease”; and then once more for good measure on page 270, where large portions of the whole passage are again interwoven with Rahe’s prose to form the concluding paragraph of the “Despotism of Administrators” chapter. But that’s not reading, that’s typing.

A more careful reading of these four reiterations would go beyond the framework of this survey, but it would be hypocritical of me to pass on without noting how, for example, Rahe uses Tocqueville to effect the transition he wants to make between “long ago” and “France today.” In the key paragraph on page 237, Rahe plays political pundit, opining that even if (then) French president Nicolas Sarkozy “succeeds gloriously, in the manner in which Thatcher did... it is hard to imagine that he would move decisively beyond what she achieved—in the direction of dismantling the administrative state or dramatically reducing its size and scope.” [101]

Then comes the Tocqueville sauce whose main function is to make the reader swallow that opinion and give it the allure not just of argument but of “brute fact.”

When I read this passage, I am first struck by the effort at yoking (zeugma in the rhetoric manuals) attempted with “astonishingly… astonishing.” Rahe is dumbstruck, he seems to be saying, by how sixty-five million people can be so dumb. Such talented people behaving like a herd of animals—astonishing! But, what about that herd metaphor? Hasn’t it been used as an unfair put-down, insulting to animal intelligence, by superior feeling anthropocentric humans since forever? My point is that herd animals, real ones, are neither timid nor industrious—those are projections we’ve learned from Aesop and La Fontaine—they’re just doing what comes naturally to them; and man, whose true nature is closer to that of a pack animal, like the wolf, than to either a herd animal, like the emperor penguin, or to a solitary animal, like the tiger, should perhaps neither emulate nor condemn the evolutionary success of other species. Many herd animals existed before man appeared, and perhaps some will outlive our species.

Second, note the embryo metaphor that attempts to naturalize the history of the French nation as progressing in a deterministic way (acorn to oak) rather than in a more open, things-could-have-gone-differently way. This is a bit surprising coming from a history professor, since one assumes that historians all judge certain “hours” and “moments” to be finer, graver, or rougher than others, no matter where they position themselves on the continuum between “hero” historiography and “forces” historiography. Third, note the clever pun effected with “brute fact.” Fourth, note the telepathy effect accomplished with “Over the people of France today, as he feared would someday be the case”—as though Tocqueville really had in mind Sarkozy’s presidency under the Fifth Republic when he was writing in the 1830s.

When I read the Tocqueville passage, it strikes me that one source of its seductive power is that it never specifies any particular time frame or people. This indeterminacy, perhaps the result of Tocqueville’s alternating, ghostlike interest and disinterest in the material world, may be what has allowed generation after generation of readers of this passage to color in Tocqueville’s spooky outline as they wish. Wow, he’s predicting the Soviet Union, the British Labor Party’s “Nanny State,” France’s Fifth Republic, “Obamacare,” etc. But that’s not careful reading, that’s reading into the text.

Nevertheless, aside from the questionable use of Tocqueville sauce to sharpen certain complaints, Rahe does give the reader some important historical information and political judgments that are worth considering. For example, besides the more commonly cited motives Tocqueville may have had for going to America, Rahe reminds the reader that Tocqueville was looking to confirm or refute democracy skeptics like his onetime teacher and future political adversary Guizot who believed that representative government would and should evolve toward an oligarchy of superior men (like himself) ruling over the ordinary masses. [102] This rivalry with an intellectual father figure, along with the rivalry with his royalist biological father and other peers, seems plausible. [103] But when he got to America, he didn’t see the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. “Beat ’em or join ’em?”—that’s the question I imagine Tocqueville asked himself, in impeccable French of course. And though ultimately he fails to beat them definitively (Democracy in America offers no knockdown argument for or against democracy), he nevertheless refuses both royalists and socialists and sides instead with God, a catholic God—small c—whom he has decided is a Democrat in favor of popular sovereignty and not a Republican who would prefer a grand guardian class of rulers, and this despite being himself the ultimate Ruler.

A second useful reminder reminiscent of Adam Ferguson’s 1767 declinist warnings (“Of Relaxations in the National Spirit, incident to Polished Nations”) comes in this passage that starts off Rahe’s “Despotism of Administrators” chapter.

The first paragraph is Rahe’s sententious diagnosis and prediction, now applied to present-day America. To my knowledge, Tocqueville never says that the “social state” of one people, whatever it may be, is easily transmitted to another. On the contrary, the specificity of the history, laws, and mœurs in each case tends to make exporting or importing democracy—which relies so much on local circumstances and energies—difficult. [104] Therefore the risk of infection or catching some “French disease” may be a fanciful misreading more appropriate to a creative writing workshop or a paranoid Homeland Security immigration policy debate than to a history department. [105]

More interesting is the second paragraph, which continues for a little over half of the next page. First, note how Rahe asserts with no argument that Tocqueville did not foresee “this development.” Which one does he have in mind? He has just named at least four developments (Europe’s decline, American smugness, Americans contracting the French disease, the “quickening pace” of that disease). In any case, it’s not clear why Rahe would consider Tocqueville to have been so prescient about the Fifth Republic but blind when it comes to the future of America. Of course it does allow him, Rahe, to have the privilege of being the visionary when it comes to America, but could that be the only reason?

Second, it may indeed be an error to think of Tocqueville in “American terms”—i.e., translated into the American context—but that’s no less true of anyone else’s writings, since all translation is impossible, and yet we all do it, more or less carefully and well, all the time. At any rate, I agree with Rahe that it would be incorrect to think of Tocqueville as an Anti-Federalist. But it’s also hard to think of him exactly as a convinced Hamiltonian-style Federalist given his praise of local associations and community spirit. Yet wasn’t this true for a lot of people at the time? Remember how close the ratification vote on the Constitution was in several key states. Really the whole thing could have gone either way. (NY 30–27, MA 187–168, VA 89–79). Like a lot of people, then (1788, 1835, 1840, 1848, 1850, 1860, etc.) and now, Tocqueville saw on both continents the real and potential strengths and weaknesses of both union and disunion—of a confederate republic of states (in France régions and départements) united as one probably wealthier, stronger nation versus a collection of smaller and probably weaker entities, though perhaps also more cohesive, responsive, and maybe responsible and accountable.

If in France the risk of getting the centralization versus regionalism equation wrong has sometimes been a debilitating quagmire of resentment, distrust, fear, antipatriotism, and low productivity that spreads out between Paris and the provinces, I agree with Rahe that Tocqueville saw plainly the potential dissolution of the United States over the slavery issue (for economic as much as moral reasons). [106] Tocqueville recognized that in an age when public virtue can be hoped for but not counted on, because, as Publius says, “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” (Federalist #6) and tend to follow their interests and those of their peer group, a nation in which large numbers of people think differently about a major issue (such as slavery) is unlikely to survive.

The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions (to disobey federal law) and the rise of political parties, which Rahe mentions in the second half of this paragraph, are further symptoms of the fragility of the American union that Tocqueville was sensitive to. Why he wouldn’t or couldn’t have been equally sensitive to the threat of a “despotism of administrators” in the American case, as Rahe claims, is unclear to me, since the signing over of one’s right to political participation to a select group of managers, albeit elected, does not seem to preclude “soft despotism” from taking hold in the U.S. if the auxiliary precautions of its laws and customs (i.e., the self-correcting feedback loops of democracy: an independent judiciary, a free press and other free institutions, and the right to freely associate whether to talk about God, politics, business, or sports) were to break down from abuse or disuse, or if government were to become completely outsourced to a professional-managerial class of administrators. [107]

When it comes right down to it, I think Rahe has been taken in by the astonishing, spooky passage he can’t stop quoting from, and just plain wrong if he is claiming that the drift of Tocqueville’s argument in Part Four of DA II is that Soft Despotism is the biggest and worst evil that should be avoided at all cost. At the end of the “French Disease” chapter, Rahe writes, “In short, in France, Tocqueville’s worst nightmare has largely come true” (236–237). I disagree. First, it’s not certain the animals of France (all species considered) are suffering as much as Rahe and others may want us to believe. Second, let’s recall that Tocqueville’s true worst nightmare is “a bunch of guys with a guillotine killing all your relatives” (Gopnik, 214)—and for good reason, it already happened once!

Tocqueville, who had his practical side just like Publius, renounces looking for the ideal Democracy or the ideal anything. He’s not waiting for Godot or any tutor to step forward with some master plan, nor is he offering one. He would prefer Democratic Liberty over Democratic Tyranny, that is, if he can get it; who wouldn’t? But if we can’t have robust and resilient Democratic Liberty right now, for whatever combination of reasons (lack of attention, motivation, intelligence, experience, trust, etc.), it would be better to hunker down (or buck up) and accept Democratic Tyranny since it would be preferable to Tyranny tout court; i.e., Hard Despotism of the traditional kind that goes straight for the body. Besides, there’s always a chance, in the fullness of time, and with a kick from man’s unpredictable indocility, that things will be able to swing back in the direction of Democratic Liberty, and then some grandeur, some creativity, some love for love’s sake could yet take place. So I agree with Rahe when he writes (270) that we could beneficially reassert as our motto “Don’t Tread on Me” as an expression, say, of our commonly shared desire to avoid torture and other cruel and unusually invasive punishments. But shouldn’t we also adopt in the characteristically American, pragmatic, keep-as-many-doors-open-as-possible sort of way, “Give me Liberty or Give me Soft Despotism”?

Another aspect of this book that deserves more attention than I will give it here is the intellectual cover that Rahe offers to the questionable doings of the so-called Tea Party in the United States. Even though Rahe does not mention the Tea Party by name, it is plain to anyone who has followed American politics since 2008 that he is sympathizing with the indocility and some of the views of that loosely organized group. Since publishing his book, Rahe has continued to express that viewpoint in more direct forums on the Internet, especially (Biggovernment.com and Commentary, for example). These matters have little direct bearing on Tocqueville studies, except perhaps for the biographical similarity that one might see between the careers of Tocqueville and Rahe insofar as they both drifted from the library and classroom to more contested areas and arenas over the course of their lives. One may wonder if Professor Rahe will go all the way, as Tocqueville did, and seek elective office to actually try and implement some of the policy recommendations that he casually puts forward in the final ten pages of his astonishing book.

Emmanuel Todd, Après La Démocratie (2008, 312 pages )

Emmanuel Todd became better known in the United States after the publication of After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2003). [108] Its fall release was well timed to take part in the first wave of criticism of George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq. In France, however, he often participates on the public intellectual circuit (radio, TV, glossy magazines), though less frequently than some, attuned as he no doubt is to the economics of scarcity. Todd’s preferred role is to be the impromptu gadfly who takes pleasure in biting or tipping over sacred cows on all sides with a mix of edgy provocation and coolly delivered statistical analysis. He’s a demographer by training, a comparatist at heart, and an author of a series of sociology- and anthropology-informed economics studies that regularly challenge received ideas. He has an enviable record as a debunker and fortune-teller. He made his name with his very first book, La Chute Finale (1976; The Final Fall, 1979), which “predicted” the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eight books later, he published L’Illusion économique: Essai sur la stagnation des sociétés développées (1998)—another success, but nothing compared to the bestseller Après l’Empire (2002), which was even rumored to have caught the ear of the French Foreign Ministry and to have been influential in articulating France’s decision to not take part in the American-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003.

Après la démocratie, which has been translated into Spanish but not English unfortunately, is another turn of the screw. [109] The book was published in the spring of 2008, roughly one year after the French presidential election of 2007. Among its many declarations on a variety of topics, there is Todd’s repetition of the prediction, which he already made in After the Empire, of an immanent financial crisis throughout the West (2003, 98; 2008, 269): “The only thing certain is economic catastrophe, but we know neither its exact form nor its timing.” Cool analysis or hot air? If Todd acted on his own speculation, like Mike Burray, he has probably become very wealthy by now as a short seller, but that kind of speculating may not interest him. [110]

Overall, Todd’s democracy book has the same approach and contains some of the same arguments that appeared in earlier work. For example, as literacy rates go up, birthrates tend to go down; equality matters more to a universalist people (e.g., the French) that views humanity as one (brothers) than to a differentialist people (e.g., Anglo-Saxons) that tends to divide and rank mankind in distinct groups (brothers and others) according to certain criteria (e.g., skin color, religion, SAT scores); universalist empires last longer than differentialist empires, etc. In the democracy book Todd offers his theoretical spectacles again to take into account historical events in France since 2003, notably the call in some quarters for more “participatory democracy,” the persistent efforts of France’s far-right party the National Front to get their foot (or boot) in the door, and the presidential victory of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, a man who has been compared to Napoleon III, George W. Bush, and many other dubious leaders, but whom many think of as just one more lean and mean leader of traditional “republican” politics, i.e., the head of an oligarchy of trusted career politicians who rely on party discipline and staying on message. That message goes something like this: The world outside the Hexagon is nasty, brutish, and short, but that’s OK because you’re French, and if you vote for us, there’ll be nothing to be afraid of; just work, vacation, and obey the laws that we’ve passed for your own good and we’ll take care of you, and you’ll live to a ripe old age. With some slight modifications this can also function as the message of the so-called opposition, a homogenizing tendency that exasperates wide-ranging intellectuals like Todd and confuses many ordinary people, some of whom are drawn into more extreme parties while others buy his books in search of an explanation of the big picture and “a theory of everything (sort of).” [111]

So where does Tocqueville fit in? Well actually he doesn’t, at least not as much as one might expect, and that’s one of the things I find most interesting about reading Todd. Before Zbigniew Brzezinski, Chomsky, Chua, Friedman, Gladwell, Paul Kennedy, Christopher Lasch, Oswald Spengler, or Todd, there was Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Gibbon (1737–1794)… and Tocqueville (1805–1859). Anyone with the least historical, comparatist bent who’s living in interesting times, or “between two worlds,” generally devours the books of these authors and others like them. Todd has clearly read Tocqueville and may even be indebted to him for certain things. Indeed, they seem to be kindred spirits in some ways (cosmopolitan, restless, contrarian). And yet Todd chooses to not accord “notre élégant Normand” much space in his own books. Whether this is a case of Bloomian “anxiety of influence,” Emersonian “self-reliance,” or something else is hard to say.

In After the Empire, Todd’s resistance to Tocqueville, if it even existed then, was hardly noticeable. He’s only mentioned briefly four times, two of them being footnotes, and one of those is a translator’s note cribbed from Seymour Drescher that tells the reader who Tocqueville was (206n3). Of the other three, one is a polite difference of opinion: Todd underlines higher literacy rates as one of the main material changes that contributes to expanding equality of social conditions, whereas Tocqueville used the catch-all fudge term providential to describe that long-term evolution (though he does discuss access to education, property, and other material causes). The second mention is a note of scholarly debt to Tocqueville for the interesting definition of Russia he sends in a letter to Beaumont: “America without the Enlightenment thinkers and liberty. A scary democratic society” (206n6). It’s an intriguing “tweet” that Todd chose in turn to forward to his readers. The third mention looks like a case of collegial mutual support wherein Todd incorporates a nod to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to reinforce his own main idea: “American society has in effect recreated the three-part structure that existed at the time of independence and later when De Tocqueville made his observations at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Indians, blacks, whites” (111).

In Todd’s democracy book, Tocqueville is referred to three times in a negative way. The first is by far the longest and most interesting. The second and third are two quick slaps that reinforce the negative assessment made earlier. The first slap takes the form, “One must really pay attention to x and not to y as Tocqueville did” (260). This is all that is likely to register with the general reader since the actual content (which requires knowing what happened on a certain August 4) is elliptically presented. Translated, the second slap says, “At the rate things are going in political philosophy today, democracy-loving intellectuals will soon miss the banal old Tocquevillism” [112] (273). The expression “le tocquevillisme banal” leaves unspecified whether Todd is knocking Tocqueville, certain Tocqueville-inspired studies, or both.

The more detailed treatment of Tocquevelle, compared to which these two later mentions are mere glancing blows, comes in an earlier section of Todd’s third chapter (“From Democracy to Oligarchy”) entitled “Mass Literacy and the Emergence of Democracy” (84–88). What’s evident from these five pages is that Todd is upset about the same things that bothered him already in 2003; namely Tocqueville’s use of the fuzzy God-talk word providential and his negligence, according to Todd, of education, especially literacy, as a democratizing factor, which for Todd is of capital importance. So already with two strikes against him, Todd notes that Tocqueville’s stock has risen lately and attracted more continuators than detractors (“plus d’héritiers que de contradicteurs”); but for Todd that’s bad, not good, because these practitioners of “tocquevillisme” are only recycling “a few banal theories such as the one about a type of equality that is menacing for liberty and the one about a type of individualism that tends to undermine itself” [113] (84). The adjective banal has several meanings in French. Is Todd using it negatively to mean worn out, worthless, trivial; or positively in the sense omnipresent, common, widely accepted? I suspect negatively, but in either case, he is manifestly uninterested in being more explicit about this tocquevillisme banal, since he neither quotes or references the relevant passages where these theories come from (such as DA I, 1, 5 and DA II, 2, 2). Instead he gives a celebrity endorsement to the Le Strat and Pelletier book, calling it “excellent” and then wittily embroidering on its thesis: “in our present age of a resurgence of unegalitarian feeling, the Norman aristocrat has become a totemic figure” (85, my emphasis). This paragraph concludes with an ad hominem put-down of the presumed middle-class origins of those who study Tocqueville today just as, he says, before 1989 those studying Marx came from a similar social class. In other words, for Todd there are two kinds of readers: the intrepid who seek truth and find it in a concatenation of books that truly matter and the insecure who follow fads down blind alleys. But Todd’s animus doesn’t stop there.

In the next paragraph he notes that Tocqueville has become a symbol of a Transatlantic relation (“lien transatlantique”), only to ridicule that link by alleging that Tocqueville was secretly disgusted (“secrètement dégouté”) by the United States and, unlike Nicolas Sarkozy, who was criticized by some for being too “pro-américain,” would never stoop to spend a vacation in a country whose democratic mores repelled him. Without citing a specific letter or any other source, Todd claims the correspondence contains evidence that Tocqueville cut short his American stay out of disgust with those democratic mores, even though it is more frequently reported that he and Beaumont were called back for professional and family reasons (Brogan, 197). He concludes this paragraph with a dry mock: “It was all the more meritorious of him to have accepted with pursed lips the inevitability of democracy.” [114] But this too is misleading because it’s not liberal democracy that Tocqueville claimed was inevitable, it was the expanding equality of social conditions. Furthermore, as Todd must know, democracy is never something singular or static for Tocqueville but comes in many different, usually hybrid, forms (tyrannical, aristocratic, liberal, venal, grand, petty, etc.), none of which are inevitable but depend on man’s collective and individual choices and behaviors over time

In the next paragraph Todd quotes a passage from an example of tocquevillisme that he finds particularly “simplified” and “degraded.” It’s a study by Guy Coq entitled (I translate), “Does Democracy Make Education Impossible?” Instead of being drawn to titles that ask questions, for Todd its trendiness is repellent. He then quotes ten lines from the book and discusses the phrase “l’individu démocratique.” Their gist is that democracy doesn’t necessarily produce new and better men, but instead people of ambiguous value. In support of this claim, Coq turns to Tocqueville: “Let’s recall Tocqueville for whom democracy’s success entails a danger for its own survival, namely that the democratic individual’s behavior, attitudes, and self-affirmation engenders a new despotic power” (Todd, 86; Coq, 13, my translation).

Aside from going a bit fast, jumping a few steps, and making the cause and effect relationship sound more fated with that verb engenders than I think Tocqueville really says or means, this particular instance of Tocqueville sauce does not seem abusive to me. For Todd, however, this passage serves as an example of how the “canonization of Tocqueville” squashes the necessary critical faculty. He claims Tocqueville almost got it, but didn’t quite see (as Todd has) the fundamental role literacy plays in the birth of democracy. Todd clarifies his position: “One does not learn to read to become the equal of others, or to be a ‘democratic individual,’ but to be a better educated individual intellectually.” [115] What Todd has in mind by “a better educated individual intellectually” is as vague as the old term well-rounded; nor is it easy to see how he has refuted Tocqueville or Coq here, since he cites no text of Tocqueville that makes the claim he attributes to him, and nowhere in the passage quoted from Coq does the author embrace (or exclude) the subject of reading.

So there is no clear victor in this odd cockfight, but Todd is still intent on establishing, over Tocqueville’s dead body, that the spread of literacy equals the birth of democracy “understood as the equality of conditions.” He then adds, “But political democratization is only an effect, not a cause.” This is rather elliptical, and its value is hard to gauge for that reason and also because Tocqueville has not been allowed to defend himself, so to speak. In the next and last paragraph of this section, Todd shows some mercy and pardons Tocqueville for not having had access to the statistical information about literacy rates that only began to be collected and published around 1826. Todd’s conclusion: Tocqueville’s reasoning was faulty, but it’s not entirely his fault because he lacked some empirical evidence that only later research into the subject, such as mine, could incorporate into new and improved theories about the birth of democracy.

It would seem that Todd needs to get Tocqueville and his followers out of the way to clear a space for his own theorizing. This is a familiar story and somewhat understandable given the do-it-yourself spirit of democratic times—everyone wants an original relation to the universe; everyone wants to be Adam and have one’s own chance to name the animals. [116] Nevertheless, it’s regrettable that Todd’s will to open up for himself new horizons of meaning should have been done with such a crude scalpel and so little respect for Tocqueville’s contribution. The result is that his book sends the unhelpful messages that the absent are always wrong, the present is superior to the past, theorists are a bunch of insecure, passive-aggressive nitpickers, and reading Tocqueville is a waste of time. Literacy may be a necessary condition for democracy (though I would want to ask anthropologists more about that claim), but it is hardly sufficient (look at Cuba). Also required are certain customs and dispositions, what Tocqueville called mœurs, and these would include agreement about the basic rules of engagement (such as good manners, mutual respect, security, generosity, honesty, and trust). The scarcity and fragility of those qualities might account in part for why democracy is so difficult to establish and sustain even among highly literate populations.

Another matter raised in the closing pages of this book is Todd’s policy recommendation to his universalist compatriots and other Europeans that the only way to safeguard European democracy is to adopt me-and-mine-first practices of protectionism; in other words the establishment of a differentialist hierarchy (an “invidious distinction” as Veblen would say) into brothers and others (e.g., European / not-European) with the attendant consequence of unequal treatment accorded to each. Is this an apology for “fortress Europe” or “La France forte” (Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 campaign slogan)? Or is it intellectual cover for right-wing nationalism? Or an excuse for a new kind of exclusionary democracy like the American one Tocqueville studied that advanced in predatory fashion via “force and fraud” [117] on the backs of women, blacks, and Indians (now women and “Arabs”)? If so, is it really the best policy for Europeans or others to adopt now? Why? Why not? Moreover, for Todd this protectionism is not just about the circulation of people and material goods, but seems to extend to the marketplace of ideas as well. Is this underwriting of a division into strident factions wise? We may wonder if there aren’t better alternatives.

Agnès Antoine, L’Impensé de la démocratie: Tocqueville, la citoyenneté et la religion (2003, 410 pages)

Why Todd should want to practice protectionism against Tocqueville, why he shepherds the reader away from the elderly “elegant Norman” as though he were senile instead of treating him like a brother, a familiar, a colleague as interested in the good, the true, and the beautiful as the next person, are mysteries that lead me to wonder if democratic association within even the most liberal, inclusive democracy is not always also dependent on an expulsion and continued exclusion of something or someone as part of the constituting frame or foundation of itself. Might this be part of what Agnès Antoine is getting at when she speaks of “l’impensé de la démocratie”?

Another technique for drawing the reader in besides using a title question (Stanley Fish’s Is there a Text in this Class? is a famous example) is to use a noun in one’s title, such as impensé, that doesn’t exist in the dictionary as such, but whose existence we can logically imagine since it is constructed out of something that does exist: the verb penser, to think, and its past participle pensé, thought, which is not exactly the same thing as une pensée, a thought, or la pensée, (the) thought. So with the prefix im-, l’impensé would then mean the unthought or the not thought. Follow this nonexistent (because as yet unthought until now!) noun impensé with a genitive construction, de la démocratie, and you add another layer of intriguing complexity because of the objective/subjective genitive ambiguity. So the title could be naming either democracy’s unthought, what democracy has not thought about, but knows it possesses and is maybe just keeping in reserve for later, or something that democracy doesn’t have a clue about, not the slightest idea of, because it lies outside, beyond democracy’s ken, beyond what it can ever know or imagine. The latter would be closer to something we’re more familiar with; at least the notion exists as entries in the dictionary, i.e., l’impensable, the unthinkable, and l’inimaginable, the unimaginable. So is it x or y, or both x and y? And then comes the subtitle, a list of three items—a proper noun and two common abstract nouns: Tocqueville, Citizenship, Religion. There is not a colon or equal sign between the title and subtitle, but sophisticated readers familiar with such titles often add, infer, or read them into the title. [118] Then the subtitle would be naming three “things” that are unthought by democracy—things democracy has not (yet) thought about, because it is keeping them in reserve, or three things that democracy cannot think about, because they are beyond its reach, beyond its grasp, properly unimaginable, unthinkable. Or “repressed,” as Françoise Mélonio suggests in the conclusion to her study Tocqueville and the French.

People who find such observations interesting and not simply annoying—perhaps because they too enjoy puzzling over things and believe that figuring something out and knowing it is, like virtue, its own reward—are generally drawn to philosophy and may even, under rare circumstances, rare under any regime let’s recall, become professional philosophers themselves. Agnès Antoine has had the good fortune, and manifestly done the hard work that puts luck on one’s side, to become a professional philosopher, and she is the author of a book on Tocqueville that could be fairly characterized as grand, important, big. That it will probably not be read by the likes of Le Strat, Pelletier, and Todd, because for them Tocqueville is bagged and tagged forever it would seem, is not something she is likely to lose any sleep over. Should she? For others, perhaps, her book will not remain a dead letter, but instead add to their knowledge and understanding of all four of the things named in her title—democracy, Tocqueville, citizenship, religion—as well as that fifth most strange “thing,” l’impensé.

Remember Tocqueville’s contrarian declaration in DA II, 1, 15, that the study of Latin and Greek is to be recommended to those living in democratic times because they usefully recall and may reinstate qualities that tend to drop out of everyday life within a democracy, namely “admirable mastery of technique and care in rendering details,” as well as patience and motivated choices (545). He doesn’t say everyone should become a classics major however.

Here is food for thought for harried students, professors, deans, college presidents, and legislators. I would go further (and forward in time) and extend Tocqueville’s recommendation to all texts written before the two World Wars, because 1914, roughly speaking, has now become the new dividing line today between Antiquity and Modernity, between what people today can still find more or less familiar and what stands as foreign to us as Greek and Latin were already to Tocqueville’s contemporaries. I only regret that Tocqueville was not more explicit about how he envisioned the transfer of knowledge and sensibility from the classics major who feasts often on the works of Antiquity (which I’m saying these days could just as well be the writings of Tocqueville as Tacitus) and the majority of “us” who are obviously required to devote ourselves to scientific, commercial, and industrial arts rather than to literature, philosophy, and other nonvocational topics in the arts and sciences. When and how will that counterweight, that “prop” as Tocqueville calls it, be applied and effectively do the compensatory balancing or steadying, also called a “salutary hygiene,” that will allow democratic man to regain and perhaps retain a better equilibrium? I’ve not yet found the answer to that question in Antoine’s book either. But maybe I have not read carefully enough. Or maybe it’s not there because she has not thought about it. Or maybe she has thought about it, sort of, but is keeping her thoughts in reserve for now and will tell us more about it later.

In any case, I’m convinced that reading Antoine’s book would be a salutary counterweight in democratic times. Where others are restless, she is calm; where others are in a hurry and interested in getting the most with the least effort, she proceeds patiently with a serene aristocratic disinterest for any possible conversion of knowledge into fungible capital. While others have deadlines, she seems intent on constructing her argument with the same transpersonal outlook as the cathedral builders of olden times. The long maturation of her thought will take however long it takes, her own individual contribution being of little importance next to that of the work itself which began before her and will continue after she, AA, has turned to dust.

I’m also convinced she is devoting her time and effort to what matters most to Tocqueville once he has discovered America and how democracy works, namely the compensatory counterweights to democracy’s “peculiar deficiencies” (G546) and self-destructive tendencies. Two of these counterweights are citizenship (which maintains community spirit) and religion (which stimulates projects and productivity while discouraging excess individualism, materialism, and nowism). A third counterweight, which Antoine enacts more than she discusses it, is the pursuit of a literary education; for example, feasting often on the works of Tocqueville, the first social scientist, and other scientists, philosophers, and artists. It is obvious that in democratic societies, only a minority will by nature or fortune be drawn to Antoine’s Tocqueville book. [119] But those who are so drawn should be allowed to read her and not be obstructed in any way or treated with contempt by the rest of us. Why? Because it’s in our collective best interest properly understood (“bien être proprement entendu”) that they be freely allowed to do so.

It therefore seems juste et bon to include a passage, chosen at random, from Chapter Twelve (“La Dialectique Tocquevillienne”), entitled “La modernité et la réhabilitation de la chair.” We can cut in midsentence:

By chance we’ve hit on a passage that (1) touches on the main thesis of Antoine’s book—the necessity of democracy’s supplements (Tocqueville, citizenship, and religion), which it protects even while sort of ignoring them; (2) features the need for striking a new balance as mentioned above in the context of Tocqueville’s recommendation to protect and honor the voluntary pursuit of a literary education; and (3) shows Antoine practicing what she preaches, so to speak, with a piece of careful reading that is attentive to making sure the reader does not fall into misunderstanding. There is an evident desire for clarity as her prose guides the reader with its parallel repetition, “Une humanité, celle de… Une autre, celle de…”; phrases that underline the point to be understood: “Il faut donc… il s’agit de… Il ne s’agit pas de…”; and the judicious use of outside points of reference: Aristotle, Nietzsche. The latter are offered tactfully, as tools to even better understand Tocqueville’s position, but they are optional, like hiking with ski poles, and the reader who knows nothing about Aristotle or Nietzsche is not made to feel stupid, excluded, or blocked from understanding and continuing to follow the argument.

Antoine’s strategy and tactics exemplify the still dominant approach to reading in France; namely, critical explanation or interpretation that they call explication de texte or commentaire de texte. It is an approach that considers it to be in the reader’s best interest to place the text first and try to serve it well by illuminating its truth and protecting it from possible misinterpretation by roving wolves or thirsty leopards who might willfully attempt to drag it off in other directions or change its spots. In Tocquevillian terms, one could say it’s a form of rational patriotism within the republic of letters. It is a way of reading that tends to be conservation-minded, literal, and spiritual, and aristocratic in the sense that it believes in good, better, best, takes the long view, lives frugally off the light and nourishment engendered in the encounter between reader and text, and draws as little attention to itself as possible, convinced that individualism and narcissism, like Pascal’s “moi,” are “haïssable” and vulgar.

People raised in democratic lands where individualism, materialism, and nowism may have been allowed to develop unchecked can find reading a book like Antoine’s unbearable or, on the contrary, wonderfully liberating, a refreshing change, a salutary counterweight to democracy’s short-term thinking, pragmatist bullying (“There is no alternative”), and unquenchable thirst for news, novelty, change, progress. [120] I for one admire the way her 410 carefully composed pages push back against the general passion (“engouement général”). Just as I like the rock in the reproduction of the painting that was chosen to adorn the cover of her book—a rock that juts up above the water on which two fur traders in a long canoe are floating with their goods and their cat, all three staring out at a spectator on the riverbank, if there is a spectator. [121]

Jon Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (2009, 202 pages)

Jon Elster starts off his Tocqueville book with a personal testimony about his first and second experiences reading Tocqueville:

This autobiographical anecdote is valuable for many reasons. First, it humanizes the author by recalling for us, his readers, that he too was a reader once, “clueless in academe,” and later, though older and smarter, still challenged and ill at ease with a set of texts that both stimulated and blocked his efforts at understanding, texts that were teaching him more and better than almost anything he had ever read, but that still remained somehow unknowable, unmasterable. The feelings of exhilaration, frustration, adventure, and humbleness expressed here are emotions most readers who take on the task of reading nine hundred pages of argument-driven prose can relate to, and this creates sympathy or shared feeling between him and us. Second, it reminds us of something that is easy to forget: the words on the page may not change, but we do, and therefore we never step into the same text twice no matter how familiar we may think it has become for us. We may think we’re reading the same text, and in a sense we are, but the text is reading a new you every time you read it. Third, it enthusiastically puts Tocqueville’s texts in a constellation with two others that we can file away for later and test whether we have the same reaction as Elster. And fourth, by being so intimately confessional with the reader from the start, it also allows him to put the personal aside, because it’s clear from what follows that Elster, like Antoine, does not want this to be about him. He merely wants to be a helpful guide to those who are inclined to make use of his services as an experienced reader of Tocqueville, a pedagogue, and a fellow social scientist. [122]

His focus will be Tocqueville and especially Tocqueville’s texts, and among those many pages he concentrates our attention on the least biographical and empirical dimensions, which he names in the second paragraph “small and medium-sized causal mechanisms and highly sophisticated methodological insights that”—and now here comes the claim that Elster will defend in the next two hundred pages—“although they do not add up to the grand theory to which he aspired, have lasting value. Even today, it seems to me, they are not as fully explored and utilized as they ought to be” (vii).

Translated into the language of mid-twentieth-century philosophy of language, Elster’s book could be entitled “How to do things with Tocqueville.” In the language of the Internet age, it is the Tocqueville “apps” store with Elster as the general manager in charge of inventory, configuration, and local installation. His book could be compared to Gene Sharp’s free, downloadable, how-to manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (4th edition, 2010) that is reported to have been widely read and highly influential during the Arab Spring. [123] There are a few differences though. Sharp’s inventory of strategies, tactics, and methods is more succinctly presented (93 single-spaced, large-type pages), and it addresses the roughly 2.5 billion people who are living in countries officially designated as “not free.” Elster’s book contains about four times as many words and could be addressed to readers of any political persuasion from dictators to democrats because it is not arguing in favor of any particular form of government but instead sticks to its self-imposed pedagogical mission of highlighting frequently overlooked causal mechanisms and insights in Tocqueville’s text that could be used in many ways—to promote democracy, to foil democracy and favor liberal or tyrannical republicanism, or other purposes. In this way Elster’s book and by association Tocqueville’s texts (which Gene Sharp never mentions) are potentially more useful “playbooks,” since the range of possible applications is much wider.

Before turning to a partial inventory of the Tocqueville tools that Elster’s book passes along at little cost to the reader, it’s worth noting Sharp’s constant attention to the open-ended, probabilistic nature of politics and his reminder that “the conflict in which political defiance is applied is a constantly changing field of struggle with continuing interplay of moves and countermoves” (34). This sounds very much like Tocqueville, especially the later politically seasoned Tocqueville of DA II, Recollections/Souvenirs, and The Old Regime and the Revolution. Here is a passage, for example, from a section of Sharp’s Chapter Two (“The Dangers of Negotiations”) entitled “‘Agreeable’ Dictators”:

Aside from certain thematic resemblances to the famous Part Four of DA II, what attracts my attention, now sharpened by what I’ve learned from reading Elster, is the repeated use of may (i.e., possible/probable, maybe / maybe not); the use of cause and effect formulas such as “effect x, if cause y / if y, maybe x”; and especially the warning in the last sentence to beware of making concessions because you could end up in a worse situation than before, which sounds a bit like the folk wisdom “Be careful what you wish for.” It is also similar to the set of cause and effect scenarios that Elster groups under the heading “Precipitants: the Tocqueville Paradox” (162–169)—the crucial resemblance being the observation made by both Sharp and Tocqueville, and highlighted by Elster, that in real life the actual consequences of an action may be other than the hoped for consequences and may even be precisely the opposite of what the action aimed to achieve. [124]

Shakespeare and other writers of comedies and tragedies going back to Antiquity have always known this of course, but literary irony is not generally considered to be the stock in trade of social scientists. This makes Sharp’s, Elster’s, and Tocqueville’s attention to backfiring, backlashes, boomerangs, and the other ironies of everyday life all the more special and striking to the social science reader who may have thought she was in the “real world” of more knowable, static truths—even though Tocqueville repeats over and over that democratic times are characterized by constant change, mobility, dynamic tensions, and blended contradictory impulses and identities. [125]

Tocqueville’s discoveries, which all have as their source his insight into the not-necessarily-Newtonian physics of the mind, are not presented as a mere list of forces, but as an intellectual narrative that is argued and directed. [126] With its embrace of a formation-of-thoughts-while-thinking approach, Tocqueville’s text is obviously closer to the French essay tradition of Montaigne and Montesquieu than it is to a PowerPoint presentation. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to us here in the Internet age to have Tocqueville’s innovative achievement highlighted by Elster’s rigorous translation of Tocqueville’s lively prose into more easily graspable discrete units. Taking a cue from Sharp’s book, Elster could go even further in that direction and add an appendix with a glossary if he gets a chance to rework his book for a second edition.

Elster clearly states his interest in Tocqueville in the Introduction: “the main task I set myself is to elucidate the structure of his arguments, their validity, and their relevance for us today.” This relevance depends on proving that Tocqueville’s writings offer “exportable causal mechanisms.” Note, his claim is not the same as that of utopian, ideal State theorists from Plato down to modern times for whom designing, installing, and fine-tuning a given political regime, as though it were a computer operating system, seems entirely feasible. The causal mechanisms that he calls “exportable” are in effect underappreciated but knowable laws of psychology, especially group dynamics, and their exportability is predicated on certain universalist assumptions about how all our minds work, individually and collectively.

Among these laws are those that concern, for example, “preference formation.” Elster lists three: the spillover effect (“behavior p in context x will be repeated in context y”), the compensation effect (“not behavior p in context x, but behavior p in context y”), and the satiation effect (“not behavior p in x, not behavior p in y”) (13). Elster’s goal is to train the reader’s ear to hear Tocqueville using these analytical tools to make observations about the relationships between behaviors across one or more spheres of activity. These spheres include “religion, literature and the arts, politics, warfare” and “civil society” or “private life” (14). On the next page, Elster gives an example of Tocqueville observing how the spirit of risk taking and risk loving spills over from industry to warfare:

The persuasiveness of Tocqueville’s argument depends on accepting at least (1) the feeling he claims democratic man has (“a passionate desire to acquire quickly and enjoy easily the goods they desire”), (2) the transfer of that feeling to another context (“It is in this spirit that…”), and (3) the stable reality of “military grandeur” and “the imagination of a democratic people.” If no doubts are raised about any of that, chances are the reader will find Tocqueville’s spillover observation perceptive and convincing.

Another area that interests Elster is Tocqueville’s analysis of “Belief Formation” (Chapter Two), especially conformism. He claims that “Next to ‘the Tocqueville paradox,’ [it] is probably the piece of analysis in his writings that has had the greatest influence on social science” (40). He gives several examples of Tocqueville’s observations about conformity, many of which rest on the presupposition that similar causes produce similar effects. Consider, for example, this passage from DA II.

In this same chapter, but developed further in Chapter Six, “Patterns of Social Causality,” is Elster’s commentary on Tocqueville’s doubts about the possibility and sustainability of so-called halfway houses, i.e., intermediate “centrist” positions where one might try for bargains, compromises, or half-measures with the idea of attaining harmony or getting the best of both worlds, and instead one ends up with more conflict and less power or advantage than before. This presupposition (an apology for hard-liners and an admonishment to compromisers?) conditions Tocqueville’s pronouncements about the dynamics of equality at the end of DA I, 1, 3:

The weakness of halfway houses also conditions the “hang together or hang separately” thought lower down on the same page.

The idea here is that a group may try and win liberty for all together or risk seeing it taken away from each individual one by one. This almost sounds like Tocqueville coming out in defense of labor unions, with a cautionary doubt raised in the last sentence about how often they might really win their battles due to the difficulty of forming efficient collaborative groups.

The phrase “all almost equal” is typical of another theme that Elster explores, which is Tocqueville’s sensitivity to how cause and effect relationships as well as perceptions of size (large, medium, small) can vary depending on whether one is living in a state of approximate equilibrium (in a democracy or under absolutism, for example) or transitioning between steadier states (such as during a revolution). As always, Elster keys his remarks to examples from Tocqueville’s text. Thus, a sentence praising freedom of the press in a democracy as “the only cure for most of the ills that equality can produce” is juxtaposed with a warning about the harm a free press can cause when it occurs in contexts where it had previously been absent: “Woe unto those generations that abruptly introduce freedom of the press for the first time!” (DA I, 272, G213). Forgetting the difference between “transition effects” and “equilibrium effects” says Elster, echoing Tocqueville, can cause a lot of confusion, misunderstanding, and harm.

Ultimately, Elster’s pedagogical laying out of Tocqueville’s contributions to social science permits asking clearer questions about “the quality of democratic government” and the possibility and probability of containing “the pathologies of democratic government” (147–149) within reasonable, nonfatal limits. These are similar to the questions the American framers asked in Philadelphia and that Publius tries to answer in The Federalist. In Elster’s plain style the question is posed this way: “To assess the quality of the system we may ask, therefore, whether it tends to produce wise aggregate beliefs and just aggregate values” (145). In other words, with statistical tabulation of choices (essentially “votes” of all kinds) over a sufficiently lengthy and broad sample space, we can measure the wisdom and justice of this or that regime, with whatever mix of democratic, oligarchic, or monarchical components it may have. It will test, among other things, the “wisdom of crowds” to see to what extent it really exists and to what extent it may be merely the ideological preference, the wish, of democracy sympathizers. [127]

Elster also stresses how important it is to have enough time. This is especially true for democracies, says Elster, echoing Tocqueville, because if people in democracies are guided by the principle that “the interests of the many ought to be preferred to those of the few” (Elster, 145; G285), and if they are able to correct their mistakes and counteract their own worst tendencies, then they may, in the long run, be able to avoid the ten “pathologies of democratic government” that Elster distills from his reading of Tocqueville (147–149). But in the short term, democracies frequently make bad policy choices due to “motivational and cognitive deficits” (144). This underscores the importance of making “repairable mistakes” (DA I, 318, G258)—something democracy is good at—but this takes time, which is uncompressible. [128] Here again is Elster’s commentary (147):

It’s easy to see from this passage why Tocqueville was picked as Foreign Affairs minister in 1849 even though there’s doubt about whether he really did a good job or, we may add, had enough time (less than two years) to learn from and repair his mistakes. [129] Along the same lines, it’s tempting to think Elster’s Tocquevillian sensitivity to the influence that geography, neighbors, and other variables have on public policy (leading to outcomes that are more or less wise and just) would make him a good consultant in Brussels, Paris, London, or Cairo; but then again that same knowledge might lead him to hold tight to the arms of his chaire at the Collège de France and be thankful for the chance to continue making his living peacefully in amphitheaters, libraries, and his study.

Unlike Rahe’s ten-page Conclusion, which may strike some readers as a rather abrupt passage from the classroom to the war room, from talking points to bullet points, Elster’s last ten pages follow the advice to orators at this stage of the game (“Tell ’em what you told ’em”) and provide a clear summary of what he considers to be Tocqueville’s key insights and strengths as a researcher. He then offers a diplomatic assessment of what Tocqueville’s future role might be.

In other words, Elster is not claiming that air-dropping copies of Tocqueville over Europe, the Middle East, or other hot or cold war zones will solve the world’s problems. He does believe, however, that “There is… a Tocquevillian mind-set that is consistently helpful” (190) when it comes to thinking about transitional effects and equilibrium effects, including the challenge of knowing which are which.

Another aspect that I will not develop here is Elster’s conviction that Recollections is more than just anecdote and caricature, but offers a “psychology of revolutionary action” (151) that he says is also one of the hallmarks of The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. He praises that late unfinished work in his last paragraph as perhaps “the most theoretically informed historical analysis ever written” (191). Elster backs this up with an impressive list of what he says one can learn about from AR:

These are some of the causal mechanisms that Elster says have not been taken into account as much as they could be, especially in rapidly changing parts of the globe such as Eastern Europe (190). He suggests that a more open-minded reading or rereading of Tocqueville would allow one to get a better grip on what those mechanisms are and how they work, or might work, case by case, since the Tocquevillian mind knows that “results may vary” and “past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.” [131]

Jean-Michel Heimonet, Tocqueville et le devenir de la démocratie: la perversion de l’idéal (1999, 397 pages)

Jean-Michel Heimonet is the author of eleven books published over a twenty-year period (1986–2007) by smaller but thoroughly respectable presses. In 1999, after having devoted years of teaching, research, and writing to topics often lumped together under the heading “French theory,” he turned his attention to the honorary American that some Frenchmen love to hate, and came out with a big book on Tocqueville. [132] He has followed that up with three shorter essai books that all explicitly make use of Tocqueville as an important guide. [133] Heimonet’s other “tutelary deities”—comparable I’m suggesting to Tocqueville’s daily exercise with Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau—are Georges Bataille (1897–1962, especially the writings devoted to evil and the sacred) and Albert Camus (1913–1960, especially L’Homme révolté, 1951). [134] As far as I know, none of Heimonet’s books have been translated, and none of his fellow Tocqueville enthusiasts seem to have read him—not Rahe, whose fifty pages of footnotes crammed with book titles testify to his having read just about everything on Tocqueville that’s out there, and not Antoine, despite the fact that one of her central themes, religion, is also of prime importance for Heimonet. And yet his books are all in print and as easy to procure as anyone else’s. The website goodreads.com lists no reader reviews, and under the heading “Jean-Michel’s Fans” are the dispiriting words: “None yet.” How could Heimonet’s Tocqueville book have made no friends or enemies in all this time? Simple oversight? Willful neglect? Malicious intent? It’s hard to say.

The silence or silent treatment in response to what Heimonet has written about Tocqueville recalls the modern death sentence that Tocqueville says falls on the writer who dares to venture beyond the formidable barrier around thought erected by the omnipotent majority in today’s democratic republics.

I don’t want to exaggerate. There are some book reviews only a click away online, but very few on the four Tocqueville books. And presumably Professor Heimonet has not been “deactivated” from the Catholic University of America, where, according to the school’s website, he holds the position of “Ordinary Professor of French” and in that capacity presumably still goes to faculty meetings, teaches, holds office hours, and grades papers, just like any other humanities professor in America.

Could there be something offensive or upsetting in his writings that would cause the majority of professional Tocqueville scholars to shun him? Is he maybe a silenced “whistle-blower”? Or is it perhaps that his work on Tocqueville is so derivative, amateurish, or off-base (“hors sujet”) as to be not worth reading let alone making use of or quoting from? The last hypothesis seems impossible since Heimonet’s interest in religion (and the sacred) clearly overlaps with Tocqueville, for whom, as everybody agrees, religion occupies a central place as the spiritual stuff within democratic societies that makes democratic man care about the public sphere and work on meaningful group projects that in turn affirm and strengthen community spirit. [135] Religion also keeps the demolander from acting on the temptation to abandon civilization and simply strike out for the territory like the carefree boy Huckleberry Finn.

Secondly, there’s nothing amateurish in the sense of sloppy or slapdash about Heimonet’s books. There is only the amateurism that he himself admits to on the first page: coming to Tocqueville belatedly with the inexperience but also the fresh enthusiasm of an outsider. The “tolle lege” story he tells on the first page—rereading Tocqueville after living as a Frenchman in America for fifteen years, still trying to make sense of it all—is as believable and endearing in its own way as Elster’s story or that of any other close encounter whose mix of intrigue and mystery makes a big impression.

Could one say Heimonet is derivative in the sense of being a copycat or lazily following the lead of others? He is clearly indebted to Eduardo Nolla’s edition of Democracy in America like a lot of other readers and has learned things from Claude Lefort. [136] He is also familiar with the work of Furet, Mélonio, Gauchet, and Manent. But he specifically marks disagreements he has with the last two about the status of religion in Tocqueville’s writings (against Manent, pp. 273–275; against Gauchet, pp. 326–330). Nor is it likely he derived his views from the work of Agnès Antoine, since he published his book on religion and citizenship four years before hers came out; and he probably has had little contact with her given the distance between the academic worlds of Paris and Washington, D.C. If anything, there is a certain sui generis, “my way” quality to Heimonet’s Tocqueville books. They put Democracy in America into new constellations with the writings of authors that I dare say had never before been associated with him, notably Bataille, Barthes, and Camus. Besides the use of these stars from the world of French theory, which strikes me as motivated and instructive and not forced or fraudulent, Heimonet also makes use of a broad literary background (familiarity with Orwell, Huxley, Popper, German idealism and romanticism) and his knowledge of current events and the commentators that surround them (Barber, Mailer, Soros, Sunstein).

Before 9/11 and the ensuing resurrection of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” strategy on ideologically polarized American radio and TV shows over the last decade, not as many people were quoting Benjamin Barber or Cass Sunstein, and certainly not in books about Tocqueville. [137] The use of these contemporary cultural critics becomes more prominent in Heimonet’s three smaller Tocqueville & Co. books. But in all four there is a strikingly original back and forth movement between the here/now of our terror-stricken modern societies and the there/then of the first half the nineteenth century in America and Europe that seems to most of us now like ancient history.

Along the time line of the last 150 years, at roughly the same eighty-year distance between “us” and “them,” between our Internet age and the age of Jackson, Lincoln, Napoleon III, and Tocqueville, lies the disturbing decade of the 1930s. This decade, I am claiming, is what now separates our modernity from the “Antiquity” of Tocqueville’s day and all that came before him. [138] Our own time, interestingly, is often compared to the 1930s—it’s a decade that haunts us—and it was also around the centenary of Democracy in America, in 1935, that Tocqueville first began to be “rediscovered.” The 1930s is an important decade in the lives of Forster, Huxley, and Orwell, who will be discussed later, and in the career of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), whose writings are of crucial importance for Heimonet. He stands as a hybrid, transitional figure on the borderline between the new anciens (the pre-1914, pre-1930s world) and the new modernes (the Internet age), just as Tocqueville stood or floated—along with his countrymen—between the Old Regime and a new age still struggling to come into existence as he put it.

The title (in English) of Heimonet’s first Tocqueville book—Tocqueville and the Becoming of Democracy: The Perversion of the Ideal—gets across two ideas. First, that it is going to be about Tocqueville’s vision of democracy and how it might develop by its own means (or lack of means, incapacity, vulnerability), its own becoming that grows out of its being by its agency. That notion of becoming must be important to Heimonet, because otherwise the first part of the title could simply have been Tocqueville et l’avenir de la démocratie (Tocqueville and the Future of Democracy), which suggests a mere inventory of “forces” in the most general indeterminate sense. The second part of the title after the colon, The Perversion of the Ideal, names the low distortion or degradation from the once high élan of democracy’s becoming that had been boldly launched by the Puritan idea/l, namely that a religious spirit and a spirit of freedom could and ought to be complementary and mutually reinforcing. This is the story that Heimonet understands to be the main thrust of the opening chapters of Democracy in America, and it is the falling off from the grandeur of this ideal to the sterility and vulgarity of small, overly private concerns that Tocqueville worries about for the rest of DA I and all of DA II—and rightly in Heimonet’s view. Hence the need to insist on the example set by religion, which serves a double role: (1) it lubricates the wheels of democracy by encouraging cohesiveness and dynamism; (2) it directs that energy (or at least a portion of it) to higher projects and goals (such as passions and powers) beyond the most primary needs for basic survival: food, shelter, clothing, and sex. It even reinvents the notion of basic needs and inserts the religious, the sacred among them (“L’âme a des besoins qu’il faut satisfaire”—“the soul has needs that must be satisfied,” DA II, 2, 12, 169). For Heimonet, it is an important moment later in DA II when Tocqueville declares that faith is the norm within human existence and incredulity is the accident or aberration: “L’incredulité est un accident, la foi seule est l’état permanent de l’humanité” (DA II, 2, 9, 403). Here Heimonet understands Tocqueville to be claiming a status for religious faith—which will be lived through acts of experiencing the sacred—that is very close to Bataille’s affirmation one hundred years later of man’s primal need for the sacred.

What Bataille contributes to Heimonet’s reading of Tocqueville is the insight that the perversion of the ideal, the desecration of the grandeur by the low, the dirty, the vulgar, is necessary to establish the very notion of the ideal, the high, the transcendent. And therefore religion’s role is not only to encourage cohesiveness but to also permit, and even incite, transgression, going against the grain, being an annoying irritant; for example, to the majority and its mœurs (its beliefs, routines, and values). The religieux plays this paradoxical double role of being the shepherd of the flock of co-believers, but also standing outside the “flock” of civil society, and thereby reminding everyone that there is an outside, and calling the parishioners to contemplate it while yet not dissolving the bonds that constitute the order of church and state (e.g., our ties to family, friends, employers, clubs, governors, and the law). This outside/inside double status is the model that Tocqueville, Bataille, and Heimonet (and long before them, John Calvin, John Knox, and Cotton Mather, for example) incarnate as writers and theorists. Theirs are quasi-priestly services in modern society comparable to the work of shamans and medicine men in earlier civilizations.

Bataille was a librarian and an author of some provocative stories and essays. He was a smuggler or passeur, both within a community and between a community and the transgressive outside of that community. His transgressions, going too far—like Don Giovanni, say, or Dimmsdale or Hester Prynne—were also a nourishment of the community, food that necessarily must come from some outside if it is to nourish and keep the community from turning in hungry stagnant circles. Via the example of Bataille, Heimonet reminds us that Tocqueville, like Adam Ferguson, Gibbon, and other general commentators of world civilization, insisted on the importance of invention and innovation, which explains Tocqueville’s allegorical use of China as a negative example of traps to avoid; his scolding assessment of his own countrymen’s disorientation and improductivity; and his warnings about America’s potential for perversion and degradation—paradoxically because there has not been enough perversion (i.e., transgression—call it “Pussy Riot” [139] ) of the enlivening kind that would nourish. Thoreau, a classics major of aristocratic bearing, was a good example of someone who experienced the sacred, lived sacredly, and nourished his community through the act of being outside and coming back and producing Walden (1854), the testimony of his disobedient transgression outside the community and an immense gift.

Reading Tocqueville and Bataille together, as Heimonet invites us to do, highlights the importance of certain remarks of Tocqueville that we had not fully measured. For example, when he witnesses the Fourth of July celebration and remarks on that solemn, spiritual atmosphere. What’s going on there in Albany? Tocqueville realizes he is in the presence of the sacred and that in fact democracy in certain circumstances brings individuals a type of ecstatic, religious experience. But there should not be career politicians as there are career religieux in their various orders. It would be better if everyone rotated in and out of these quasi-priestly civilian roles, nourishing themselves and their community in turns, like at a potluck supper. What matters is belief in the religious experience, the sacred, and that can happen in many democratic offices, such as jury duty, serving on a community board or committee, or serving in the police, fire brigade, militia, or when voting—because in those roles one is signifying the community, in and outside the community at the same time, connected and the connection, the agent and the acted on. In those passing moments of communion (paradoxical because they consist in being in an oblique semidetached status vis-à-vis the community) one feels particularly alive, charged, meaningful. One’s life and life in general feels important, validated, and one is at the source of that validation, not God, but godlike in the sense of creating, doing, making as God is said to be able to do.

Along the way Heimonet makes many worthwhile observations. For example, that Tocqueville’s method is Socratic and not magistral, that he is his own midwife and wants to be a midwife for the thought of the reader, not the master, not the grand arrogant father as Guizot was and perhaps his own father Hervé as well (59). Second, that Tocqueville’s method is itself democratic—open, free, disinterested inquiry, ready to look at as many sides as can be identified for inspection and weighing (83). Third, that life is the goal of democracy, just as truth is the goal of science and beauty is the goal of art (83). Fourth, that individualism, materialism, and nowism only become problematic for democracy when they stop being perverse (i.e., transgressive) but become a banal norm—because then they are not even in fact themselves: individualism flips into a simulacrum of individualism that is really just another conformity (to the uniform—e.g., having it “your way” composed from a pre-set menu of choices); materialism and shopping become sacred; the now is worshipped as though it were transcendent outside of time (slow-motion cinema, such as the plastic bag scene in the film “American Beauty,” is often used to suggest this idea).

Reading Tocqueville and Bataille together lets one better understand how Tocqueville could be opposed to excess individualism and yet favor free individuals; i.e., a defender of an individual’s right to liberté d’intelligence, liberty of action, initiation, invention, including the pursuit of eccentric or geeky (but generally law-abiding) minority pleasures such as studying Greek and Latin, for example. Tocqueville realizes that the spirit in “community spirit” is the gift that each individual gives as a sacrifice of his own energy for the sake (sacredness) of the group—it’s a don, a free gift. But the community can only benefit from that energy if they themselves are free gifts, if they are not constrained, not duty-bound. The mistake of the Puritans was perhaps to have forgotten this freely given quality of each individual’s participation. Voting must not be made compulsory for this reason. That turns the gift of voting into a due, a duty, and perverts its sacred dimension—something that we can perhaps only clearly appreciate when a country (Australia, Brazil, etc.) imposes mandatory voting. [140]

The problem with despotism, says Heimonet, is that it’s “asymbolique,” which is a fancy way of saying that it is sterile because it has no project, it is throwing nothing together, making no meaning, and therefore obstructing man’s nature which is precisely to make meaning [141] (123). Politics, Tocqueville realized, is one material form of an inner psychic need of the mental life not unlike the circular processes of toddler’s play or experimental science: a continuous contest of problem solving by making projects and seeing them through to fruition.

So why is the transgressive writer punished by the omnipotent majority? It would be surprising if Heimonet did not comment on “the power that the majority in America exerts over thought,” [142] which he seems to know so intimately. The reason is because the despotic majority cannot tolerate that its project be questioned, doubted, competed with by an alternate project, an alternative vision. It wants more than to be right (which would imply that there’s a possibility of being wrong, an outside); it wants “to go without saying,” “aller de soi,” to be the way it is—i.e., immanence—not just the unique thought (la pensée unique), but beyond thinking. In other words, The Truth. To achieve this total mastery, it will exert overwhelming force when necessary against the slightest signs of resistance. It manifests itself in countless everyday situations as the immense pressure of the collective mind over the intelligence of each individual (“la pression immense de l’esprit de tous sur l’intelligence de chacun,” DA II, 18, G491).

Heimonet remarks on the moments when Tocqueville seems to despair of finding anything sacred or high in America, any product of a spirit of creative, “manly” liberty. Such as on page 149 where he quotes the Norman aristocrat’s lament: “Il n’existe pas de genie littéraire sans liberté d’esprit, et il n’y a pas de liberté d’esprit en Amérique.” [143] He is less mindful of other moments (such as DA II, 1, 9–10) where Tocqueville says that while for now there is no American Pascal (see DA II, 56), that sort of extraordinary genius may emerge eventually, because Americans have set up so many free institutions where they are able to exercise and give expression to an esprit de liberté: social clubs, libraries, schools, jury duty, and later liberal arts colleges and research universities, museums, parks, and vast wilderness and urban reserves. In all these places the democrat learns, in his bones, that liberty is something sacred—“chose sainte,” (DA II, 1, 2, 19).

Like Tocqueville again, Heimonet wants to balance his despair with hope. He wants to insist on the “nature preventive de notre analyse” (155). In other words, like the ghost’s lecture to Scrooge, he’s not saying what will happen, but what could happen if certain steps are not taken—certain counterbalancing reforms. Heimonet seems to trust in Tocqueville’s idea that democracy contains within it the cure for what ails it. (Recall Elster’s ten “pathologies of democratic government,” 147–149.)

For example, there is the religieux, who, like the teacher, practices a profession that has both conservative and subversive dimensions: conservative because his memory and his literacy allow him to strengthen the connective tissue of the community; subversive because he leads, and while leading by definition he is not following, not consuming, not merely receiving the sense, the products made and delivered by others, but is taking the Promethean step of having an original relation to the world—as Emerson recommended he do—“building his own world,” which is transgressive of the values of the group, but which is also necessary if the group is to avoid stagnating and turning in sterile circles. [144] So there is at once tolerance and intolerance for the religieux, the teacher, the artist, and for the scientist who is researching and not merely applying the results of yesterday’s research.

Reading Tocqueville and Bataille together, as Heimonet recommends we do, reveals why judging Tocqueville; i.e., deciding whether he is liberal or conservative, progressive or regressive, avant-garde or reactionary, attracts so much attention. That he could be both, that he has to be both if he is to be true to the high—grand—role that he set for himself, this is not easily accepted by those in different camps who need him to be one or the other. “Reactionary” for the revolutionary Left and therefore to be rejected. “Communitarian” (an epithet) and (overly) protective of the community’s local prerogatives for a certain nationalist Right that may deploy the terrifying (and hence uniting) specter of soft despotism, as Rahe does, or else denounce localism as “populism” (another epithet) in order to get people to accept “aristocratic liberalism”; i.e., their brand of managed democracy that they’ll name approvingly liberal republicanism or meritocracy…and impose confidently with one-size-fits-all expediency no matter how suffocating or ill-adapted in certain circumstances. [145]

Unlike Marx, says Heimonet, Tocqueville never gives priority to matter over spirit, nor does he dissociate the two, but views them instead as always co-dependent, the one requiring the other for its very knowledge of itself (165). Heimonet clarifies this interdependence via some instructive borrowing from an early essay by Roland Barthes in which the famous semiologist takes stock of the wider social significance of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916). [146] Barthes points out that what Saussure did by shifting the focus of his discipline from diachronic to synchronic studies was to democratize it (374). In this view Saussurean linguistics becomes the scientific equivalent of the French Revolution in that it ends the dominance of the former regime that was predicated on vertical lineage and inherited meaning and puts in its place horizontal relations where signifiers, like citizens, are all égaux en droits, i.e., have equal rights, and jockey for their significance amid a network of other competing signifiers each with the interest of pursuing its project, making its meaning, asserting itself, its existence and its power to signify, to do things with that significance.

Heimonet repeats that he is not trying to be alarmist or elegiac when he draws attention to the perversion of the ideal (171). The perversion has to happen. We have maybe to lose our community spirit in order to reinvent and cherish it anew. A version of the fortunate fall. So while the perversion is bound to happen, equally necessary is the recovery or relève through meaning making. Heimonet is fond of repeating Camus’s affirmation from the Introduction to L’Homme révolté, “Parler répare”—Speaking repairs. The regrettable scenario in Heimonet’s view would be unmanly cowardice, cowering and retiring, leaving the field to the polarized and complementary opponents—Jihad and McWorld—the two faces of terrorism: the one that swears by the annihilation of all meaning making by exterminating you, and the other by the annihilation of all meaning making by stuffing you with the “burgers” (meanings) they’ve already made and force you to consume. The one keeps you living in fear of being killed next; the other claims to nourish you, but not so you grow up to be big and strong, but instead so that you live forever dependently, having to receive all from McWorld or from “Dreamworks,” the dream factory that saturates you with its images, its narratives, its software, leaving you little chance of creating anything on your own. It tolerates poets, geeks, and nerds, so long as they’re “hacks” providing content, entering code under their orders and not competing with them independently.

Heimonet, like Tocqueville, points out problems and cruxes, acting as a warning sign, but does not presume to know a miracle cure. He offers hints about the kind of behaviors that might get one out of the quagmire, out of the predicament of triviality and sterility, the “informe,”, the “autodéstruction,” the “perversion” toward a grander future—which doesn’t mean simply a restoration of Classics or the pre-democratic classical doctrine. Heimonet’s is not a nostalgia-driven enterprise angling for any particular past; it’s a call similar to Emerson’s in his “American Scholar” essay to battle the “counterenlightenment” that democracy is prone to by lighting the lamps that have gone out, if necessary at the light of previous examples that can serve as sources of inspiration—such as Bataille or Camus or Tocqueville. [147] Their revolt, their example, is what Heimonet calls us to pay attention to and admire for its bold transgressive qualities that went largely against received ideas, simplicity, the easy way out, and consensual thinking and behaving. Democracy, if it remains an open society, preserves the possibility of this revolt that can happen when democratic man realizes that he has allowed his own system to turn on him, on his freedom (of intelligence); and the revolt is at once this realization and the expression of a new launching or lighting, a “reboot” to start anew. While at the same time there must be a conservation-minded desire to prevent “overkill” in the very gesture that clears a space for the new freedom to express itself, not to kill off others, their habitats, and their projects, which, on the horizontal playing field of democracy, have as much right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the next person’s. But there is no ducking contest which is the basis of true politics. Let there be competition but let it be fair competition that moderates the inevitable pride and violence that come with being the winner, restrains the impulse to humiliate and reject out of hand, and allows losers to play again another day.

Heimonet sees religion as Tocqueville’s best bet as to how democratic ages might be able to keep democracy off the twin rocks of entropy and totalitarianism (182). Totalitarianism, despite disguising its sterility under a momentary period of intense efficient productivity as all move in the same direction (think Sputnik or Minitel), ultimately reveals and stumbles on its entropy. Tocqueville had in mind a certain sclerotic China, but there are plenty of other examples (the Soviet Union, North Korea), as well as sclerotic corporations that either redo or die (GM, IBM, Xerox), bureaucracy-heavy (and sometimes corrupt) NGOs and charities, unwieldy school systems and political parties, and of course bad marriages and stale friendships.

Heimonet reiterates his essential message in different ways in the three shorter follow-up books. They dispense with the exegesis of Tocqueville accomplished in the first longer study and use what was learned there to illuminate and comment on various geopolitical events, social phenomena, and transitional effects that Heimonet’s Tocqueville mind-set (which is also a Bataille mind-set) allows him to diagnose with verve and insight. Among these phenomena are (1) apathy; (2) hétérophobie, a distrust of others (autrui) and disbelief in Autrui (the transcendent); (3) a distrust (méfiance) that a contract culture exacerbates; (4) twin, complementary terrorisms, Jihad and McWorld, which, Heimonet stresses, are not opposed, as Barber claimed in his book title—the mission of both being to extend dehumanization and the prime tactic being visceral anti-intellectualism (“anti-intellectualisme visceral”) crushing the soul and man’s capacity for sacred meaning making; (5) the power of the archaic to be revolutionary in archconservative, antirevolutionary times or, alternatively, to be conservative and therapeutic in revolutionary times of dislocation and dismantling.

Faith changes objects, it doesn’t die (“la foi change d’objet, elle ne meurt point,” DA I, 406). This claim is what leads Heimonet to insist that for Tocqueville it’s not a specific past tradition that matters as much as vision, faith in a future project so as to avoid resignation (“démission”) and renunciation of one’s proper humanity. The proper goal is to conserve religion’s role within a democracy, to unseat the false, abusive total sacralization of private interest, of mere things, of the accidental ephemeral I-me-mine-here-now.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (2001, 650 pages)

To get them in the same room, so to speak, I begin this presentation of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Tocqueville book with an epigraph from Georges Bataille, as quoted by Jean-Michel Heimonet at the end of Chapter Twelve of one of his Tocqueville follow-up books, La Démocratie en mal d’altérité (2003). I don’t claim complete understanding of these three sentences that I’ve translated as best I can into English. It would seem Bataille is asking the question that occurs to every writer—For whom do I write?—and roughly speaking his answer is: For the infinite possible uses of mankind, for other language-users like myself but beside and beyond myself, “mes semblables,”—from before Baudelaire to Heimonet and beyond. Bataille, I take it, is saying that writing involves self-sacrifice for others and an infinite other, or Other, if you like, whom we can never completely know or master but to whom we can make our meaning-full contribution, our gift, in language—if we manage to fend off depression and mutism. Ultimately, that may be the answer given by any writer, any artist, or any person who builds, transforms, or reinvents something. It is an answer at once true, or at least plausible, but so general, so banal perhaps, as to hardly seem interesting or worthy of our attention. So let’s ask a more pointed question: What does Sheldon S. Wolin want, and who cares? Taking the second part of the question first, the short answer is Not as many people as you might expect given his stature, the praise he receives from academic colleagues, the importance of the subjects he treats (politics, democracy, America, the social), and the painstaking attention that characterizes all of his writing—all two thousand or so pages of it. [148]

Some facts about his Tocqueville book. The book was published in 2001, well before the bicentenary, but has still not been translated into French or any other language as far as I know. Among the six endorsements on the back cover, we’re told that “Sheldon Wolin speaks with a master’s voice,” has “enormous intellectual energy and flair,” and the book is “penetrating, thorough, and authoritative,” “a work of supreme scholarship,” and a “magisterial study of Tocqueville.” I happen to agree with all those claims. In addition, an online merchant lists only praising declarations, fifteen in all, from diverse authorities, including one who calls the work “masterful” and another who claims “the strength of Wolin’s monograph lies in his patient, close readings of Tocqueville’s major works.” But that same online merchant lists no customer reviews for the book. This fact may lead one to reread differently one of those back cover blurbs that calls the book “an arresting critique.”—arresting how? Is it a treatment of Tocqueville that makes you stop and think, or is it a book that makes you stop, period? Here we’re faced with another embarrassing case of unintended consequences it seems. Presumably, Wolin’s goal is to reach out to ordinary people, the demos, and raise their consciousness, educate, guide, embolden, and empower them. [149] It’s his proper professional role as set down in Emerson’s “The American Scholar” speech (1837). But he’s manifestly not getting through—not to ordinary people, not to American intellectuals other than those who were paid to comment on his book, and not even to French Tocquevillians and democracy sympathizers whom one would expect to be enthusiastic allies. [150] Why not?

One answer is that he doesn’t always know how to talk to ordinary people in democratic times. It was a good idea to go for “the making of” narrative structure, because ordinary people like to have ideas told to them in the form of a story, especially a life story, plus it’s easier to remember, just like when things are arranged in a tuneful song such as the letters of the alphabet. On the other hand, it was maybe a bad idea to make up new words for new ideas near the end of his story, whereas he could have simply followed Tocqueville’s strategy (in DA II, 4) and described those new things without giving them names. Hearing what sounds an animal makes and seeing how it behaves is often more memorable than being told its name.

“Postdemocracy,” for example, and in the follow-up books “fugitive democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” are three important neologisms for Wolin in which he invests a lot of explanatory energy, but none of these notions has gained any traction with the general public, perhaps because all three go against strongly held positions. First, the temporal prefix post- would be offensive to millions of people who believe they are living in actual democracies with democratic forms of government and a democratic way of life, however flawed and fragile. The words posthuman and postmodern are similarly counterintuitive for most people who consider themselves human beings and modern, because alive, and so these name tags may only work as shibboleths among academic oligarchs. Second, democracy does not typically cower, flee, or hide, and therefore to be linked with the noun or adjective fugitive (the connotations of which are runaway slaves or convicts) doesn’t compute for ordinary people. Finally, the word totalitarianism sounds scary and hyperbolic and makes no sense to a card-carrying Democrat living in a wide open, unpredictable world that includes wet T-shirt contests, the Internet, Tony Hawk, and Sheldon Wolin. Totalize that! As for the word inverted, the likely associations are gymnastics or other extreme sports, neither of which is doing Wolin’s argument much good. Therefore, despite his overall pedagogical clarity, at crucial moments he goes for lame names that have no “stickiness” for ordinary people and on the contrary risk being a drag or a turnoff. [151] This tone deafness is somewhat surprising coming from someone who lived in demotic California in the 1960s, but there it is. The French would call it déformation professionnelle—one of the disadvantages of an elite education and an overly insular professional life perhaps. [152]

A second explanation is that his “friends” in intellectual circles have not been as helpful as they might have been. The words magisterial, masterful, monumental, supreme, and masterpiece are the kiss of death in democratic times, as any reader of Tocqueville (DA II, 1) knows. [153] Those words, decoded by the demos, are saying “forbidding,” “over my head,” “not for me,” “I’m not worthy,” “I’d turn back if I were you”—“stop.” In a similar vein, being an intellectual “star” openly associated with elite institutions of higher learning (Berkeley, Princeton) risks harming instead of helping in a demoland where a combination of envy and resentment is directed toward anyone who thinks. Tocqueville never tires of reminding his reader that thinking presupposes having the time, energy, and desire to think and is therefore an activity that, in the mind of the ordinary demolander, places the thinker in a leisure class from which she may feel mostly cut off and toward which she may also feel either hostility or indifference. [154] Anyone who has read Tocqueville knows that publishers who want to sell brainy books in democratic times would be better off not advertising the prestigious institutional affiliations of their authors or their diplomas, concours victories, or awards. [155]

Another hypothesis might be that the book is too long. But demolanders are not put off by big books. Look at The Da Vinci Code or the Harry Potter books. Is the book’s subject matter—a hero moving between different worlds, acquiring special powers, witnessing battles between weak and strong filled with reversals of fortune—not engaging enough? But demolanders love those kinds of stories, just as they are regularly seduced by “making of” supplements to their favorite movies that take them “behind the scenes.” So what is it? Why isn’t Tocqueville Between Two Worlds a best seller?

Setting aside these marketing questions, we can take a step closer to the book itself and ask why Wolin cares about Tocqueville and about the importance his writings seem to have had over his long career. First, Wolin has an interest in origins and beginnings that is common to many researchers (Darwin, Heidegger, Said). Just as with Elster, for whom Tocqueville is the first social scientist, Wolin claims “Tocqueville” represents many firsts. It’s the first time democracy is taken as the central focus of a political theory (59), the first time a living democracy’s practical sustainability and not just its formal structure comes in for scrutiny, the first time someone advances any serious belief in that sustainability, and the first time a major theoretical voice also participates in his country’s political life through elective office. Wolin is also convinced that Tocqueville “was among the first to sense that modernizing is potentially totalizing” (97) and therefore that society could and most likely would in the years ahead either be steered toward or away from unfree status, i.e., to more authoritarianism or to more liberty.

Following Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the study of the genesis and genealogy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism was common during the Cold War, and it has been the central concern of many of Tocqueville’s earlier and more recent readers, including Rahe and Heimonet. Wolin, who had just graduated from college at the beginning of the Cold War, has also written two follow-ups to his big Tocqueville book that focus on the dangers of “managed democracy,” “postdemocracy,” and “inverted totalitarianism.” They are the second half of the new expanded version of Politics and Vision (2004) and Democracy Incorporated (2008). Wolin’s concerns in these later studies build on his early encounter with Tocqueville; in a certain sense one could say they have been ghostwritten by Tocqueville under the shadow of the Cold War, by which I do not mean that they are derivative or outdated. [156] Wolin’s long professional career spans the revolutionary “sixties” and the neoconservative backlash that took shape with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and on into the Internet age. Moving with the years as a scholar and a citizen between ancient and modern worlds—for example, between the turbulent times of mid-nineteenth-century America and Europe and/versus the problematic start to the third millennium—I can easily imagine Wolin being spurred on to write these two additional pieces before it was too late. They are shorter, more declarative, and somewhat testy books written with an urgent indocile tone. These are characteristics that Wolin shares with Heimonet, Rahe, Todd, and Le Strat and Pelletier (and with the post-1848 Tocqueville, one might add). Is the older theorist inclined to scramble a bit, thinking that time is running out, and not just his own?

In contrast, Wolin’s Tocqueville book, like his early breakthrough book Politics and Vision (1960), has an aristocratic calm and patience that are similar to the tone set by Agnès Antoine or by the younger Tocqueville, especially in those longer, unhurried chapters of DA I. Time is not money, and money is no object for at least some scholars even in democratic times. [157] Wolin takes more time to ask questions in the Tocqueville book, and they’re mostly real open questions that stand out and genuinely draw in the reader, inviting his participation in the thought-journey that’s taking place. In other words, they are not just send/reply placeholders, so-called rhetorical questions or leading questions that allow the master to display knowledge or opinions and catch a breath before barreling on with the demonstration. Here’s an example taken at random from page 268:

Compare that with this piece of pseudo-Socratic method on page 285 of Democracy Incorporated:

The point I want to make is that in the Tocqueville book Wolin is more willing to be the midwife of the reader’s own thoughts and his own—because the questions are more real and the answers less clear—whereas in Democracy Incorporated his thoughts are put forward with less doubt and more affirmation—take it or leave it. [158]

This turn toward the magisterial—the academy’s version of the totalitarian state, let’s be clear, where the professor, if he chooses, can play the great dictator, the benign despot, the clown, or any combination of personae—may already be under way in the last chapter of the Tocqueville book, “Postdemocracy” (561–572). [159] There, less than two pages from the end, Wolin asks this question:

I regret that the answer is not more obscure or open for Wolin, just as I regret that he talks about the political in the past tense (“What was that form?”), as though it were already gone for Tocqueville and perhaps for us. This choice of the past tense leaves him no alternative, it seems, but to sign off with a final bitter declarative: “Democracy is perpetuated as philanthropic gesture, contemptuously institutionalized as welfare, and denigrated as populism” (572). Note how the ternary rhythm gives the list an air of exhaustivity—that’s all, folks! How depressing.

Wolin might have made better use of this scorn and mourn technique by following it with a repetition of the real question he asked at the end of the paragraph just cited (570), like this:

Not only would this ending have been more in the spirit of Tocqueville’s own interrogative mood at the conclusion of DA I and II, but it would have left the reader with a real challenge, worthy of his full attention and intelligence, because the answer is obscure. [160] One of the reasons it’s obscure is that one cannot even be sure that it’s only a person or group—a “who”—that will control the meanings of democracy.

If Barthes, following Saussure, is right when he says that democracy is structured like a language, well, then, that means no one of us is going to totally decide on the meaning of democracy and its fate any more than Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty decides on the meaning of individual words. The meanings of democracy tomorrow—like the meanings of friendship, marriage, love, liberty, equality, art, war, peace, death, life, and all the other big subjects that interest most of us (e.g., the Internet)—will be decided on by all of us (not each of us), and maybe by some things beyond anyone’s will or control. [161] Will some individuals or groups have more influence than others? Perhaps. But how could we ever predict in advance or measure with certainty afterward whose actions had done what? Who, for example, could predict that the wintry discontent and immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller would change the fate of the Arab world? And why did so many think, before this man’s decision to light himself on fire, that certain peoples are fated to remain unfree? [162]

In the final analysis, however, whatever tactical flaws there might be take little away from the intrinsic merit of Wolin’s truly grand, not just “fine,” achievement. It would again be in Tocqueville’s spirit of paradox to argue that those flaws are even “fortunate falls,” since they are instructive and also humanize Wolin, thus bringing him closer to the rest of us more ordinary mortals. Demolanders may love perfectibility, but they secretly hate perfection and are openly hostile to a know-it-all. [163] But all carping, paradox, and other inverted figures aside, Wolin’s book is arguably the single greatest commentary on Tocqueville ever written.

What’s so great about it? Many things in fact. First, there are “the patient, close readings of Tocqueville’s major works” [164] and of some minor ones such as the prison essay, along with a keen sense of how one might think of them as a coherent ensemble. [165] Second, there are substantive but not overwhelming doses of historical background information that allow the reader to appreciate the originality and boldness—the “material event”—of Tocqueville’s achievements as a writer, as well as the complexity and compromises of his political life. Third, the book is uncommonly clear, well organized and motivated, and above all interesting. It is a page-turner (!) because Wolin succeeds in laying out a problem—Where ultimately does Tocqueville stand on democracy?—and relating it to a multitude of questions that engage us all: Where do I stand? where am I going? and my spouse? my kids? their school? my employer? my town? my country? my neighbors? These are large matters, and Wolin’s Tocqueville book is a very fine guide to thinking about them. [166]

Taking these in reverse order we can give an example of each. We have already said how real questions addressed simultaneously to the reader and to the author are interest-creating, and we can add to that sympathy-creating: they place the reader in collaboration with the author on a shared journey of discovery. Here is another example taken from Wolin’s discussion of the chapter in DA I that concerns the present and future of the three races that inhabit the United States, a chapter that he nominates as “at once the lengthiest, the most revealing, and the most enigmatic of the entire work” (266):

This is a real question because there is no sign that Wolin has a ready answer, and also because it contains within it many important subproblems. How can genius be a curse? Isn’t God what Americans trust in, not political compromisers? Was God only a front all along, or did Americans lose their way and their nerve—trusting in Clay instead, what a name!—as Heimonet and Rahe both suggest (each in his own way and each with different recommendations about how to recover and repair)?

Wolin’s organizational skills are in evidence with his decision to opt for chapters of manageable length with multiple subdivisions that proceed chronologically through Tocqueville’s life and times. He also offers a parallel supplement of bite-size epigraphs that are each referenced, thereby allowing the reader to follow up. Unreferenced epigraphs can be marveled at like sand dollars, but they risk projecting a haughty, marmoreal coldness—“Closed”—that may annoy or alienate the ordinary reader in democratic times.

Another sympathy-builder is Wolin’s tactful placement of his own contribution within the history of the critical conversation on Tocqueville:

Without insulting or bragging, Wolin lets the student who wanders in late know she’s welcome, that there is more day to dawn, and she can take part in the journey too.

Wolin’s discussion of theory is a good example of an experienced professor’s good judgment about how much of the backstory to give. For example, in this account of how theory and especially utopian theories derive from voyages of discovery:

This is smooth sailing for the ordinary reader, because there are few things a demolander likes more than to be told some facts that cover a lot of ground and order in his mind disparate elements that he had never connected before on his own. Wolin gets the job done efficiently here and then proceeds to move the reader along through Bacon, Locke, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and others in a way that avoids the reefs of superficiality and pedantry and the negative side effects of “great men” fatigue.

Examples of Wolin’s sharp textual attention include his two chapters (22 and 23) on Tocqueville’s political career: “Souvenirs: Recollections In/tranquillity” and “Souvenirs: Socialism and the Crisis of the Political.” By keeping the title of Tocqueville’s private political memoir as Souvenirs, the reader who knows both French and English can hear the word naming both memories and the signifying material tokens a traveler accumulates. In these two chapters Wolin demonstrates that while the revolutionary events of 1848 may not have been Tocqueville’s finest hour when it came to defending the Republican and Christian value of “fraternité” (solidarity), his fears about socialism leading to an expansion of centralized State power, and thereby being a threat to his aristocratically tinged concept of the political as quintessentially local, had a certain validity. However it does also look as though Tocqueville was caught in a contradiction of praising popular sovereignty abroad while denying it at home.

A second careful demonstration takes place over the following two chapters devoted to The Old Regime and the Revolution. Especially valuable is Wolin’s discussion of Tocqueville’s investment in the “archaic” as a means to resist and perhaps check the will-to-level of the modern State. Wolin explains:

This is well put, but it must be remembered that this is Tocqueville’s hopeful vision/version that Wolin is mimicking. [167] One may note the need to anthropomorphize “the past” and “the present” as signs of the strain to tell a coherent narrative. The truth, what may really take place, as Wolin goes on to say in the next pages (and seven years later in Chapter Seven, “The Dynamics of the Archaic,” of Democracy Incorporated), is that two can play at that game; in other words, the force of the archaic is also available for retrofitting and collaborative redeployment by the State (aka Superpower, Wolin’s name for the new entity that results from the merger of the political and the economic in later modernity). If that happens, the resistant, archaic Tocquevilles of the world can be made to fall or when necessary be tripped into self-caricature, or flattened into objects of unthinking worship or equally unthinking ridicule like Shakespeare’s Polonius, Wilde’s Canterville Ghost, or Ishiguro’s butler in Remains of the Day (1989), or else be smashed like Winston Smith’s precious paperweight in Orwell’s 1984. [168] Wolin summarizes the predicament this way:

What worries Wolin, and what worried Tocqueville, is that we might all end up being thankful to sign over our liberty to Superpower—Phew, what a load off my mind!—instead of mourning or resisting its passing. This possibility, which Wolin spooks up with the “specter” metaphor [169] in the title of his follow-up book, leads him to ask about three pages later the real question that I suggested might have more fittingly been placed at the very end. I cite it again this time with the contextualizing lead-in sentences that make it all the more understandable and engaging for the ordinary reader:

As I’ve already said, if the goal is to “nurture the civic conscience of society” and thereby ordinary popular sovereignty and the real advantages that can come from a democratic regime, I don’t think it’s productive to scare the reader (or oneself) with the idea that an anthropomorphic Superpower is calling all the shots, any more than it would be useful or true to say that we are more or less all decultured hollow men living in solitary confinement under the surveillance of some Superwarden, like at the American prisons Tocqueville visited and perversely recommended imitating in his government report (see Wolin’s Chapter Twenty, “The Penitentiary Temptation”). Those who agree will prefer to let the question hang in the air—Who controls the meanings of democracy and, thereby, its fate?—and recall the possible effect of the smallest “Yip” or “Yop,” the serendipity of the Tocqueville Paradox, and the chance of unintended consequences. This is not a recommendation that we renounce deliberation and choice and let “invisible hands” or “forces” do all the work. Perhaps better than anyone since Tocqueville himself, Wolin recalls for us the high stakes and the infinite responsibility of the task before us. The presence of the past, to use his phrase, and the whole arc of Wolin’s project are clearly stated in the last paragraph of his Introduction:

The task: to retrieve a receding democratic present. Keeping in mind Wolin’s lesson that “theorist” means traveler and witness, it should be stressed that he is inviting each and every one of us to take up the task of retrieving democracy, and not merely an avant-garde of “brainworkers” (Orwell) as the elitist, professional-managerial-academic connotation of that word theorist might suggest. What the world needs now, says Wolin at the end of the expanded version of Politics and Vision (606), is a discordant, dissonant democracy—because the former project of reconciliation between community and authority has been largely bulldozed by Superpower and won’t be able to be salvaged until communities dig out from beneath the rubble and rebuild. “There’s a place for us,” sing Tony and Maria in two-part harmony during the height of the Cold War (West Side Story, 1957, 1961)—a democracy composed of public-spirited amateurs and professionals, ordinary and extraordinary individuals whose diverse talents, dispositions, and types of intelligence are aggregated in ways that welcome open debate, pursue projects of common interest, and avoid unrepairable mistakes.