Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (1835-1840)

Editors’ Introduction

best book on democracy & best book on America
influence of Descartes (reliance on their own judgement → individualism)
remedy: voluntary associations
book stands above parties

Who Was Tocqueville?

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859): French aristocrat
no children
book: Volume 1: published in 1835, Volume 2: published in 1840;

Tocqueville’s Context

he loved greatness, couldn’t appreciate mediocre men
greatness inseparable from freedom
many correct predictions (but: he was wrong on coming war between the races)
democracy always understood in contrast to aristocracy
contemporary liberal: John Stuart Mill

Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau

people with similar view: Pascal, Montesquieu, Rousseau

The Writing of Democracy in America

traveled nine months in America with a friend
first Volume received with sensation & made him famous
second (somber analysis of democracy) without enthusiasm
most important source: The Federalist

Tocqueville’s Political Science

evades question of causality between politics & society

The Democratic Revolution

guiding thought: democratic revolution

Tyranny of the Majority

possible threat of democracy: 1) tyranny of the majority 2) mild despotism
principle dogma: sovereignty of the people
problem: unpopular truths will no longer be spoken

Pride and Race in America

second example for tyranny of the majority: racial discrimination, prejudice of the white

From the Proud Majority to a Herd

people are equal → cannot look elsewhere for help
modern man has more choices but less guidelines for making choices
weight is eased by simplification & respect for public opinion
democratic historians: trace all events to general causes & systems → no place for human responsibility
democratic poetry: idealizes man (as a general idea not the weak individual)

Self-interest Well Understood

persuades democrats to sacrifice some of their private interests for the rest
more than strict utilitarianism
compassion is easier because of equality
sovereignty of people: in principle intended to establish self-government by individuals ↔ in practice it makes mild despotism more desirable (caring for citizens, relieving them from having to think and act on their own)

Remedies for Majority Tyranny and Mild Despotism

decentralized administration & voluntary association
perfect independence is not feasible
newspaper: important to maintain associations
schools of freedom: township, jury, political associations → teaches citizens about justice & sovereignty in practice

The Virtue of Women

absence of formal aristocratic bonds → natural familial bonds become stronger
democrats marry by choice
spouses are faithful mainly because America is religious
women are intellectually & morally similar to men but socially inferior
democratic society’s tendency towards centralization of power
it limits itself naturally by 1) religion 2) family
why does democratic theory not overwhelm family the customs that sustain the family?

The Superiority of Practice

religion: most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries
Puritans: put politics in the service of religion

Volume One

INTRODUCTION

“A great democratic revolution is taking place among us: all see it, but all do not judge it in the same manner. Some consider it a new thing, and taking it for an accident, they still hope to be able to stop it; whereas others judge it irresistible because to them it seems the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history. (…) And this is not peculiar to France. In whichever direction we cast a glance, we perceive the same revolution continuing in all the Christian universe. (…) In the first part of this work I have therefore tried to show the direction that democracy, left in America to its penchants and abandoned almost without restraint to its instincts, has naturally given to the laws, the course it has imposed on the government, and in general, the power it has obtained over affairs. I wanted to know what have been the goods and ills produced by it. I searched for the precautions the Americans had made use of to direct it, and others they had omitted, and I undertook to distinguish the causes that permit it to govern society. My goal was, in a second part, to paint the influence that equality of conditions and government by democracy in America exert on civil society, on habits, ideas, and mores; but I am beginning to feel less ardent to achieve this design. Before I could provide for the task I had proposed for myself, my work will have become almost useless. Another will soon show readers the principal features of the American character, and hiding the gravity of the portraits under a light veil, lend to truth charms with which I would not be able to adorn it.”

PART ONE

External Configuration of North America
On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans: “When, after having attentively studied the history of America, one carefully examines its political and social state, one feels profoundly convinced of this truth: there is not one opinion, one habit, one law, I could say one event, that the point of departure does not explain without difficulty. Those who read this book will therefore find in the present chapter the seed of what is to follow and the key to almost the whole work. The emigrants who came at different periods to occupy the territory that today covers the American Union differed from one another in many points; their goal was not the same, and they governed themselves according to diverse principles. (…) Slavery, as we shall explain later, dishonors work; it introduces idleness into society, and with it, ignorance and haughtiness, poverty and luxury. It enervates the forces of the intellect and puts human activity to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English character, explains the mores and social state of the South.
Social State of the Anglo-Americans: “The social state is ordinarily the product of a fact, sometimes of laws, most often of these two causes united; but once it exists, one can consider it as the first cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas that regulate the conduct of nations; what it does not produce, it modifies. (…) The social state of the Americans is eminently democratic. It has had this character since the birth of the colonies; it has it even more in our day.”; law of equal portion: makes it difficult to preserve family property; love of money is prevalent but fortune turns quickly; “Men show themselves to be more equal in their fortunes and in their intelligence or, in other terms, more equally strong than they are in any country in the world and than they have been in any century of which history keeps a memory.”
On the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America
Necessity of Studying What Takes Place in the Particular States before Speaking of the Government of the Union: “A first difficulty presents itself: the United States has a complex constitution; one notes in it two distinct societies enmeshed and, if I can explain it so, fitted into one another; one sees two governments completely separated and almost independent: one, habitual and undefined, that responds to the daily needs of society, the other, exceptional and circumscribed, that applies only to certain general interests. (…) At the first stage is the township, higher the county, finally the state. (…) We have seen that in the United States administrative centralization does not exist. One hardly finds a trace of hierarchy there. (…) The political advantages that Americans derive from the system of decentralization would still make me prefer it to the contrary system. (…) Montesquieu, in giving despotism a force of its own, has, I think, done it an honor that it does not merit. Despotism all alone by itself can maintain nothing lasting. When one looks at it from close up, one perceives that what has long made absolute governments prosper is religion and not fear.
On Judicial Power in the United States and Its Action on Political Society
On Political Judgment in the United States
On the Federal Constitution

PART TWO

How One Can Say Strictly That in the United States the People Govern
On Parties in the United States: Parties are an evil inherent in free governments; but they do not have the same characteristics and the same instincts at all times. (…) What I call great political parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men. These parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more real convictions, a franker and bolder aspect than the others. (…) Small parties, on the contrary, are generally without political faith. As they do not feel themselves elevated and sustained by great objects, their character is stamped with a selfishness that shows openly in each of their acts. They always become heated in a cool way; their language is violent but their course is timid and uncertain. (…) Great parties overturn society, small ones agitate it; the former tear it apart and the latter deprave it; the first sometimes save it by shaking it up, the second always trouble it without profit. (…) The party that wanted to restrict popular power sought above all to make its doctrines apply to the Constitution of the Union, by which it earned the name federal. The other, which claimed to be the exclusive lover of freedom, took the title republican.
On Freedom of the Press in the United States
On Political Association in the United States: Political associations in the United States are therefore peaceful in their objects and legal in their means; and when they claim to wish to triumph only through laws they are generally telling the truth. (…) In Europe, there exist parties that differ from the majority so much that they cannot ever hope to get it to support them, and those same parties believe they are strong enough on their own to struggle against it. When a party of this kind forms an association, it does not want to convince, but to do combat. In America, men who are placed very far from the majority by their opinion can do nothing against its power: all others hope to gain it.
On the Government of Democracy in America: In Europe, we have trouble judging the genuine character and permanent instincts of democracy because in Europe there is a struggle between two contrary principles, and one does not know precisely what part one must attribute to the principles themselves or to the passions to which the combat has given birth. It is not the same in America. There the people dominate without obstacles; there are no perils to fear or injuries to avenge. In America, therefore, democracy is given over to its own inclinations. Its style is natural and all its movements are free. (…) I said previously that all the states of the Union had accepted universal suffrage. It is found among populations placed on different rungs of the social ladder. I have had occasion to see its effects in diverse places and among races of men whom language, religion, or mores render almost strangers to one another; in Louisiana as in New England, in Georgia as in Canada. I remarked that in America universal suffrage was far from producing all the good and all the evils that people in Europe expect from it, and that its effects were generally other than one supposes them to be. (…) Many people in Europe believe without saying, or say without believing, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is to call to the direction of affairs men worthy of public confidence. The people cannot govern themselves, it is said, but they always sincerely want the good of the state, and their instinct scarcely ever fails to designate for them those animated by the same desire who are the most capable of holding power in their hands. (…) It is impossible, whatever one does, to raise the enlightenment of the people above a certain level. (…) It is, therefore, as difficult to conceive of a society in which all men are very enlightened as of a state in which all citizens are rich; those are two correlative difficulties. (…) Many people imagine that the secret instinct that brings the lower classes among us to keep the upper away from the direction of affairs as much as they can is found only in France; that is an error: the instinct I speak of is not French, it is democratic; political circumstances could have given it a particular character of bitterness, but they did not give rise to it. In the United States, the people have no hatred for the elevated classes of society; but they feel little good will for them and carefully keep them out of power; they do not fear great talents, but they have little taste for them. (…) This is seen very clearly in the United States, where wages seem in a way to decrease as the power of officials is greater. Under the empire of aristocracy, on the contrary, it happens that high officials receive very great emoluments, whereas the small ones often have scarcely enough to live on.
What Are the Real Advantages That American Society Derives from the Government of Democracy
On the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects: It is of the very essence of democratic governments that the empire of the majority is absolute; for in democracies, outside the majority there is nothing that resists it. (…) Of all political powers, the legislature is the one that obeys the majority most willingly. (…) Thus in our day, of the world’s countries, America is the one in which the laws have the least duration. Almost all the American constitutions have been amended within thirty years. (…) A general law exists that has been made or at least adopted not only by the majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. This law is justice. Justice therefore forms the boundary of each people’s right. (…) Democratic republics put the spirit of a court within reach of the many and let it penetrate all classes at once. That is one of the principal reproaches that can be made against them.
On What Tempers the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States: When one visits Americans and when one studies their laws, one sees that the authority they have given to lawyers and the influence that they have allowed them to have in the government form the most powerful barrier today against the lapses of democracy.
On the Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States: Three things seem to concur more than all others to maintain a democratic republic in the New World: The first is the federal form that the Americans have adopted, which permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one. I find the second in the township institutions that, moderating the despotism of the majority, at the same time give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free. The third is encountered in the constitution of the judicial power. I have shown how the courts serve to correct the aberrations of democracy, and how, without ever being able to stop the movements of the majority, they succeed in slowing and directing them. (…) The greatest part of English America has been peopled by men who, after having escaped the authority of the pope, did not submit to any religious supremacy; they therefore brought to the New World a Christianity that I cannot depict better than to call it democratic and republican: this singularly favors the establishment of a republic and of democracy in affairs. (…) Thus Catholics in the United States are at once the most submissive of the faithful and the most independent of citizens. (…) So, therefore, at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything. (…) Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other; and among them, this is not one of those sterile beliefs that the past wills to the present and which seems less to live than to stagnate in the bottom of the soul. (…) There is a certain European population whose disbelief is equaled only by their brutishness and ignorance, whereas in America one sees one of the freest and most enlightened peoples in the world eagerly fulfill all the external duties of religion. On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye.
Some Considerations on the Present State and the Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States: The Indians will die in isolation as they have lived; but the destiny of the Negroes is in a way intertwined with that of the Europeans. The two races are bound to one another without being intermingled because of that; it is as difficult for them to separate themselves completely as to unite. (…) Christianity had destroyed servitude; Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it; they nevertheless accepted it only as an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They thus made a wound in humanity less large, but infinitely more difficult to heal. (…) The immediate evils produced by slavery were nearly the same among the ancients as among the moderns, but the consequences of these evils were different. Among the ancients, the slave belonged to the same race as his master, and often he was superior to him in education and enlightenment. Freedom alone separated them; freedom once granted, they easily intermingled. (…) This is because among the moderns the immaterial and fugitive fact of slavery is combined in the most fatal manner with the material and permanent fact of difference in race. The remembrance of slavery dishonors the race, and race perpetuates the remembrance of slavery. (…) The modern slave differs from the master not only by freedom, but also by origin. You can make the Negro free, but you cannot do it so that he is not in the position of a stranger vis-à-vis the European. (…) The moderns, after having abolished slavery, therefore have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it; the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white. (…) Until now, everywhere that whites have been most powerful, they have held Negroes in degradation or in slavery. Everywhere that Negroes have been strongest, they have destroyed whites; this is the only account that has ever been opened between the two races. (…) In the portion of the Union where Negroes are no longer slaves, have they been brought closer to whites? Every man who has inhabited the United States will have noticed that a contrary effect has been produced. Racial prejudice appears to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere is it shown to be as intolerant as in states where servitude has always been unknown. (…) In almost all the states where slavery was abolished, the Negro has been given electoral rights; but if he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds only whites among his judges. The law does indeed open the jurors’ bench to him, but prejudice repels him from it. His son is excluded from the school where the descendant of Europeans comes to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his own priests and churches. One does not close the doors of Heaven to him: yet inequality hardly stops at the boundary of the other world. When the Negro is no longer, his bones are cast to one side, and the difference of conditions is still found even in the equality of death. Thus the Negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labors, nor the grief, nor even the tomb of the one whose equal he has been declared; nowhere can he meet with him, neither in life nor in death. (…) Thus in the United States the prejudice that repels Negroes seems to grow as Negroes cease to be slaves, and inequality is engraved in mores in the same measure as it is effaced in the laws. (…) It is easy to respond. It is not in the interest of Negroes, but of whites, that slavery is being destroyed in the United States. (…) If I wanted to push the parallel further, I would easily prove that almost all the differences remarked between Americans of the South and the North have arisen from slavery; but that would be to depart from my subject. (…)The abolition of slavery, therefore, does not enable the slave to arrive at freedom; it only makes him change masters: from the North he passes to the South. As for freed Negroes and those born after slavery has been abolished, they do not leave the North to go to the South, but they find themselves in a position analogous to that of the natives vis-à-vis the Europeans; they remain half-civilized and deprived of rights in the midst of a population that is infinitely superior to them in wealth and enlightenment; they come up against the tyranny of the laws and the intolerance of mores. (…) A country cultivated by slaves is generally less populated than a country cultivated by free men; in addition, America is a new region; therefore at the moment when a state abolishes slavery, it is still only half full. (…) By destroying slavery, southerners would find themselves in one of these alternatives: either they would be obliged to change their system of cultivation, and then they would enter into competition with northerners, more active and more experienced than they; or they would cultivate the same products without slaves, and then they would have to withstand the competition of other states in the South that had kept them. Thus the South has particular reasons for keeping slavery that the North does not have. (…) It is evident that in the southernmost states of the Union, slavery cannot be abolished as has been done in the northern states without running very great dangers that the latter have not had to fear. (…) Thus, in abolishing slavery, southerners would not, like their brothers in the North, succeed in having the Negroes arrive at freedom gradually; they would not appreciably diminish the number of blacks, and they alone would remain to check them. In the course of a few years, one would therefore see a great population of free Negroes placed in the midst of an approximately equal nation of whites. (…) If one absolutely had to foresee the future, I would say that, following the probable course of things, the abolition of slavery in the South will increase the repugnance for blacks felt by the white population. (…) Furthermore, whatever the efforts of Americans of the South to preserve slavery, they will not succeed at it forever. Slavery contracted to a single point on the globe, attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as fatal; slavery, in the midst of the democratic freedom and enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure. It will cease by the deed of the slave or the master. In both cases, one must expect great misfortunes.

Volume Two

PART ONE - INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY

ON INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

On the Philosophic Method of the Americans: I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.
On the Principal Source of Beliefs among Democratic Peoples
Why the Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas than Their English Fathers
Why the Americans Have Never Been as Passionate as the French for General Ideas in Political Matters
How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts: When religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at all. Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the springs of the will and prepares citizens for servitude. Not only does it then happen that they allow their freedom to be taken away, but often they give it over. (…) One must recognize that equality, which introduces great goods into the world, nevertheless suggests to men very dangerous instincts, as will be shown hereafter; it tends to isolate them from one another and to bring each of them to be occupied with himself alone. It opens their souls excessively to the love of material enjoyments. The greatest advantage of religions is to inspire wholly contrary instincts. (…) Religious peoples are therefore naturally strong in precisely the spot where democratic peoples are weak; this makes very visible how important it is that men keep to their religion when becoming equal. (…) Mohammed had not only religious doctrines descend from Heaven and placed in the Koran, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, in contrast, speak only of the general relations of men to God and among themselves. Outside of that they teach nothing and oblige nothing to be believed. That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot dominate for long in enlightened and democratic times, whereas the second is destined to reign in these centuries as in all the others. (…) The idea of the unity of the human race constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator, whereas on the contrary, men very separate from one another and very unalike willingly come to make as many divinities as there are peoples, castes, classes and families, and to trace a thousand particular paths for going to Heaven. (…) At the moment when the Christian religion appeared on earth, Providence, which was undoubtedly preparing the world for its coming, had united a great part of the human species, like an immense flock, under the scepter of the Caesars. The men who composed that multitude differed much from one another, but they nevertheless had this common point: they all obeyed the same laws; and each of them was so weak and small in relation to the greatness of the prince that they all appeared equal when one came to compare them to him. One must recognize that this new and particular state of humanity ought to have disposed men to receive the general truths taught by Christianity, and serves to explain the easy and rapid manner with which it then penetrated the human mind. (…) It appears evident to me that the more the barriers that separate nations within humanity and citizens within the interior of each people tend to disappear, the more the human mind is directed, as if by itself, toward the idea of a single omnipotent being, dispensing the same laws to each man equally and in the same manner. It is therefore particularly in centuries of democracy that it is important not to allow the homage rendered to secondary agents to be confused with the worship that is due only the Creator. (…) Another truth appears very clear to me: that religions should be less burdened with external practices in democratic times than in all others. (…) I believe firmly in the necessity of forms; I know that they fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths, and by aiding it to grasp them forcefully, they make it embrace them ardently. I do not imagine that it is possible to maintain a religion without external practices; but on the other hand, I think that in the centuries we are entering, it would be particularly dangerous to multiply them beyond measure. (…) The principal business of religions is to purify, regulate, and restrain the too ardent and too exclusive taste for well-being that men in times of equality feel; but I believe that they would be wrong to try to subdue it entirely and to destroy it. They will not succeed in turning men away from love of wealth; but they can still persuade them to enrich themselves only by honest means. (…) I showed in my first work how American priests keep their distance from public affairs. This is the most striking, but not the only, example of their restraint. In America religion is a world apart, where the priest reigns, but which he is careful never to leave; within its limits he guides intelligence; outside of it, he leaves men to themselves and abandons them to the independence and instability that are proper to their nature and to the times. I have not seen a country where Christianity wraps itself less in forms, practices, and [representational] figures than the United States, and presents ideas more clearly, simply, and generally to the human mind. (…) Another remark is applicable to the clergy of all communions: American priests do not try to attract and fix all the attentions of man on the future life; they willingly abandon a part of his heart to present cares; they seem to consider the goods of the world as important although secondary objects;
On the Progress of Catholicism in the United States
What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean toward Pantheism
How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man
How the Example of the Americans Does Not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and Taste for the Sciences, Literature, and the Arts
Why the Americans Apply Themselves to the Practice of the Sciences Rather than to the Theory
In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts
Why the Americans at the Same Time Raise Such Little and Such Great Monuments
The Literary Face of Democratic Centuries
On the Literary Industry
Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Particularly Useful in Democratic Societies
How American Democracy Has Modified the English Language
On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations
Why American Writers and Orators Are Often Bombastic
Some Observations on the Theater of Democratic Peoples
On Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries
On Parliamentary Eloquence in the United States

PART TWO - INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE SENTIMENTS OF THE AMERICANS

Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom: The first and most lively of the passions to which equality of conditions gives birth, I have no need to say, is the love of this same equality. (…) Then with none differing from those like him, no one will be able to exercise a tyrannical power; men will be perfectly free because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal because they will be entirely free. This is the ideal toward which democratic peoples tend. (…) Equality can be established in civil society and not reign in the political world. (…) Men, therefore, do not hold to equality only because it is dear to them; they are also attached to it because they believe that it will last forever.
On Individualism in Democratic Countries: I have brought out how, in centuries of equality, each man seeks his beliefs in himself; I want to show how, in the same centuries, he turns all his sentiments toward himself alone. (…) Individualism is a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself.
How Individualism Is Greater at the End of a Democratic Revolution than in Any Other Period
How the Americans Combat Individualism with Free Institutions
On the Use That the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life: It is clear that if each citizen, as he becomes individually weaker and consequently more incapable in isolation of preserving his freedom, does not learn the art of uniting with those like him to defend it, tyranny will necessarily grow with equality. (…) Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. It often happens that the English execute very great things in isolation, whereas there is scarcely an undertaking so small that Americans do not unite for it. (…) They judge that as citizens become weaker and more incapable, it is necessary to render the government more skillful and more active in order that society be able to execute what individuals can no longer do. (…) It is easy to foresee that the time is approaching when a man by himself alone will be less and less in a state to produce the things that are the most common and the most necessary to his life. (…) The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to come to their aid: these are causes and effects that generate each other without rest. (…) The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere. (…) One ought however to recognize that they are as necessary as the first to the American people, and perhaps more so. In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one. (…) In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.
On the Relation between Associations and Newspapers: That can be done habitually and conveniently only with the aid of a newspaper; only a newspaper can come to deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at the same moment. (…) I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers often bring citizens to make very inconsiderate undertakings in common; but if there were no newspapers, there would almost never be common action. (…) A newspaper not only has the effect of suggesting the same design to many men; it furnishes them the means of executing in common the designs they themselves had already conceived. (…) They must find a means of speaking to each other every day without seeing each other and of moving in accord without being united. Thus there is scarcely a democratic association that can do without a newspaper. There exists, therefore, a necessary relation between associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers; and if it was true to say that associations must be multiplied as conditions are equalized, it is no less certain that the number of newspapers must be increased as associations are multiplied. Thus in America one encounters at once more associations and more newspapers than any other country in the world. (…) A newspaper can only exist on condition that it reproduce a doctrine or a sentiment common to many men. A newspaper therefore always represents an association of which its habitual readers are the members.
Relations between Civil Associations and Political Associations: There is only one nation on earth where the unlimited freedom to associate for political views is used daily. That same nation is the only one in the world whose citizens have imagined making a continuous use of the right of association in civil life, and have come in this manner to procure for themselves all the goods that civilization can offer. (…) Civil associations therefore facilitate political associations; but, on the other hand, political association singularly develops and perfects civil association. (…) Thus politics generalizes the taste for and habit of association. (…) Politics not only gives birth to many associations, it creates vast associations. (…) A political association draws a multitude of individuals outside themselves at the same time; however separated they are naturally by age, mind, fortune, it brings them together and puts them in contact. They meet each other once and learn to find each other always. One can be engaged in most civil associations only by risking a portion of one’s patrimony; so it is for all industrial and commercial companies. (…) Political associations can therefore be considered great schools, free of charge, where all citizens come to learn the general theory of associations. (…) In democratic countries, political associations form so to speak the only powerful particular persons who aspire to regulate the state.
How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood
How the Americans Apply the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood in the Matter of Religion
On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America: The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle-class passion; it grows larger and spreads with this class; it becomes preponderant with it.
On the Particular Effects That the Love of Material Enjoyments Produces in Democratic Centuries
Why Certain Americans Display Such an Exalted Spiritualism: Although the desire to acquire the goods of this world may be the dominant passion of Americans, there are moments of respite when their souls seem all at once to break the material bonds that restrain them and to escape impetuously toward Heaven.
Why the Americans Show Themselves So Restive in the Midst of Their Well-Being
How the Taste for Material Enjoyments among Americans Is United with Love of Freedom and with Care for Public Affairs
How Religious Beliefs at Times Turn the Souls of the Americans toward Immaterial Enjoyments: Americans show by their practice that they feel every necessity of making democracy more moral by means of religion. (…) Democracy favors the taste for material enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing but matter; and materialism in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor.
How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being
How in Times of Equality and Doubt It Is Important to Move Back the Object of Human Actions: Men of those times are therefore accustomed naturally, and so to speak without wanting it, to consider for a long succession of years an unmoving object toward which they constantly advance, and they learn by insensible progressions to repress a thousand little passing desires the better to succeed in satisfying the great and permanent desire that torments them. (…) This explains why religious peoples have often accomplished such lasting things. In occupying themselves with the other world they encountered the great secret of succeeding in this one.
Why among the Americans All Honest Professions Are Reputed Honorable
What Makes Almost All Americans Incline toward Industrial Professions
How Aristocracy Could Issue from Industry

PART THREE - INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON MORES PROPERLY SO-CALLED

How Mores Become Milder as Conditions Are Equalized
How Democracy Renders the Habitual Relations of the Americans Simpler and Easier
Why the Americans Have So Little Oversensitivity in Their Country and Show Themselves to Be So Oversensitive in Ours
Consequences of the Preceding Three Chapters
How Democracy Modifies the Relations of Servant and Master
How Democratic Institutions and Mores Tend to Raise the Price and Shorten the Duration of Leases
Influence of Democracy on Wages
Influence of Democracy on the Family
Education of Girls in the United States
How the Girl Is Found beneath the Features of the Wife
How Equality of Conditions Contributes to Maintaining Good Mores in America
How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman
How Equality Naturally Divides the Americans into a Multitude of Particular Little Societies
Some Reflections on American Manners
On the Gravity of the Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Their Often Doing Ill-Considered Things
Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Restive and More Quarrelsome than That of the English
How the Aspect of Society in the United States Is at Once Agitated and Monotonous
On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies
Why One Finds So Many Ambitious Men in the United States and So Few Great Ambitions
On the Industry in Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Nations
Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare
Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies Naturally [Desire] War
Which Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary Class in Democratic Armies
What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker than Other Armies When Entering into a Campaign and More Formidable When War Is Prolonged
On Discipline in Democratic Armies
Some Considerations on War in Democratic Societies

PART FOUR - ON THE INFLUENCE THAT DEMOCRATIC IDEAS AND SENTIMENTS EXERT ON POLITICAL SOCIETY

Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions: Equality, which renders men independent of one another, makes them contract the habit and taste of following their will alone in their particular actions. (…) Yet I am convinced that anarchy is not the principal evil that democratic centuries will have to fear, but the least. Equality produces, in fact, two tendencies: one leads men directly to independence and can drive them all at once into anarchy, the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but surer path toward servitude.
That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples in the Matter of Government Are Naturally Favorable to the Concentration of Powers: As conditions are equalized in a people, individuals appear smaller and society seems greater, or rather, each citizen, having become like all the others, is lost in the crowd, and one no longer perceives [anything] but the vast and magnificent image of the people itself.
That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are in Accord with Their Ideas to Bring Them to Concentrate Power: Men who inhabit democratic countries, having neither superiors nor inferiors nor habitual and necessary associates, willingly fall back on themselves and consider themselves in isolation.
On Some Particular and Accidental Causes That Serve to Bring a Democratic People to Centralize Power or Turn It Away from That: The first, and in a way the only, necessary condition for arriving at centralizing public power in a democratic society is to love equality or to make it believed [that one does]. Thus the science of despotism, formerly so complicated, is simplified: it is reduced, so to speak, to a single principle.
That among European Nations of Our Day Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stable
What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear: In past centuries, one never saw a sovereign so absolute and so powerful that it undertook to administer all the parts of a great empire by itself without the assistance of secondary powers; there was none who attempted to subjugate all its subjects without distinction to the details of a uniform rule, nor one that descended to the side of each of them to lord it over him and lead him. (…) One sees that in the time of the greatest power of the Caesars, the different peoples who inhabited the Roman world still preserved diverse customs and mores: although subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were administered separately; they were filled with powerful and active municipalities, and although all the government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone and he always remained the arbitrator of all things in case of need, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control. (…) It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. (…) But the same equality that facilitates despotism tempers it; we have seen how, as men are more alike and more equal, public mores become more humane and milder; when no citizen has either great power or great wealth, tyranny in a way lacks an occasion and a stage. All fortunes being mediocre, passions are naturally contained, imagination bounded, pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign itself and holds the disordered sparks of its desires within certain limits. (…) Democratic governments can become violent and even cruel at certain moments of great excitement and great peril; but these crises will be rare and transient. When I think of the small passions of men of our day, the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, the mildness of their morality, their laborious and steady habits, the restraint that almost all preserve in vice as in virtue, I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters. (…) So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen. (…) Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
Continuation of the Preceding Chapters
General View of the Subject