PRIVATE LIFE, CIVIC PURPOSE:

THE HABIT OF DEMOCRACY: Alexis de Tocqueville and the pleasures of citizenship. (ADAM GOPNIK, 2001-10-15, The New Yorker)

Although much of Tocqueville's time and many of his pages were spent trying to find out about what was already the basic issue in American life, North and South (he guessed wrong, as nearly everybody did, thinking that the hold of the federal government was weakening, and that the Union might simply break apart), his essential and recurrent question was "What is to keep this from turning into a mob with a head-cutter?" The answer his matrix gave him was that it was partly church-going and partly club-joining and partly shopping.

In retrospect, his vision of religion and civil association appears somewhat distorted-or, anyway, limited-by the particular nine months he passed here. It was a time of unusual religious revival-the end of the Second Great Awakening-and of special civic agitation over the tariff, and he therefore had an exaggerated view of the role played by religion and by civic associations. Yet Tocqueville's point about piety wasn't simply that democratic Americans had more religious feeling than debauched Europeans. It was that Americans had figured out how to keep religion in a box. "Priests keep their distance from public affairs," he wrote. "In America religion is a world apart."

By "associations" he meant such familiar bits of Americana as the New England town meeting, the young men's debating society, and so on. It wasn't just that small clubs are the training ground for good citizens. For Tocqueville, it was the capacity of American private associations to, in effect, secede from politics which made them special, and made them unlike European associations, which see themselves as governments about to happen; every French political club is a coup d'état waiting in a café.

Tocqueville's idea of the association and its role in civil society can sometimes seem diffuse. At times, his heroic "associations" seem to be our hated "interest groups": "The association gathers the efforts of divergent minds in a cluster and drives them vigorously toward a single goal." Yet his emphasis is on the way the association protects people who feel that they are being driven too rigorously by the majority toward a goal they don't much want to get to-its purpose is "to weaken the moral empire of the majority." (Nor is this association necessarily wholesome. If we were searching for the perfect contemporary Tocquevillian "association"-which both drives a minority toward a goal and protects its members from the tyranny of the majority-a good candidate would be the National Rifle Association.)

Tocqueville treads a delicate balance: while he believes that the pure springs of American town-meeting democracy can be polluted by materialism, he also believes that materialism is one of the things that keep the springwater of American democracy from being stained with blood. He feared a kind of mindless, dependent American, and he feared the invisible despotism of a managed state. There is an astonishing chapter in "Democracy" called "What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear," where he struggles to define a paternal, invisible despotism of entertainments: "Above these citizens an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments . . . but seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood." It sounds like a day at Disneyworld.

Yet shopping trumps killing: "The taste for well-being forms the salient and indelible feature of democratic ages." It is the constant pursuit of small pleasures which keeps Americans from disorder and mob rule, which is their life-affirming passion:

The love of well-being shows itself to be a tenacious, exclusive, universal, but contained passion. It is not a question of building vast palaces, of vanquishing and outwitting nature, of depleting the universe in order better to satiate the passions of a man; it is about adding a few toises to one's fields, planting an orchard, enlarging a residence, making life easier and more comfortable at each instant. . . . These objects are small, but the soul clings to them.

Tocqueville saw that, in a democratic society, the classical division between political engagement and the cultivation of private serenity need not be absolute. The good American was not just cultivating his garden instead of politicking in the city; he was building a patio extension right around the garden wall, and his desire to do this, and to have all the things that make patio extensions possible-property laws, long-term security, commercial expansion-meant that he was playing a political role in any case. Democracies withdraw civil life from the hold of government; but they reinvigorate private life with civil purpose.

That last helps explain Fareed Zakaria's point about democracy requiring a certain GDP per capita and Richard Pipes's concern with the protection of private property rights. Maybe you need to own a part of your society before you truly care about its overall state.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2003 08:43 PM