NOT AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE:

Tocqueville and the cultural basis of American democracy (Daniel J. Elazar, June 1999, PS: Political Science & Politics)

Tocqueville had the distinction of not falling into what seems to have been the most common nineteenth-century intellectual trap, that of searching for the automatic society. This search for the automatic society was the common denominator of the ideologies popular in the nineteenth century, whose major premise was that if humans could simply find the right formula and implement it, government would no longer be necessary. Instead, human society would be able to function automatically on the basis of those right principles. This was true whether the argument was made on behalf of the free market as a set of automatic principles (laissez faire), the classless society as the automatic mechanism (Marxism), the goodness of the human soul (anarchism), the workings of the laws of sociology (Comte), or whatever.

Each of these recipes for utopian achievement, if tried, failed disastrously in the past century. So, at least since World War II, humans, sadder but wiser, have returned to earlier ideas of civil society: namely that there are no automatic arrangements. Instead, a consensus has developed around the ideas that all members of a society must work at such arrangements and that the maintenance of democratic republics requires governmental, private, and voluntary associations to work together to constantly rebalance political and social forces as circumstances demand.

In this respect, unlike present fashion in discussion of the idea of civil society, Tocqueville does not distinguish between civil society and the state. In manner and spirit, he follows the American tradition of understanding government as part of civil society, as its most comprehensive association (so well and succinctly described in the Preamble of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, written by John Adams). Civil society is not just that segment of voluntary public space between the reified state and the private realm, as Europeans see it. Tocqueville equates civil society with all of open public space and does not distinguish between the two. Indeed, it has been argued that not only does he not distinguish between them with regard to the United States, whose theory of government and the sovereignty of the people he clearly recognizes for what it is, but not even with regard to France, where conventional theory views the state as a reified entity completely separated from civil society.

This reading is vitally important for understanding Tocqueville's theory of associations, which he sees as culturally rooted in the United States. In other words, the American penchant and ability to form voluntary associations for every purpose has had a dual impact. It has enabled the people to remain sovereign and it has also enabled them to establish comprehensive associations, mainly democratic.

Indeed, it may very well be that Tocqueville's discussion of voluntary associations (II, 2: chaps. 4-8) is his bridge between culture and institutions, especially the institutions of government. It may be more accurate to say that it is one bridge he used to sharpen the argument that is implicit in his earlier discussion of the township and its governance (I, 1: chap. 5). In that earlier bridging discussion, he takes what he defines as the "natural cell of free government" and shows how it has been improved upon by the Americans, who turned it into a free association, comprehensive for the locality it serves.

The third bridge Tocqueville builds is between ideas, culture, institutions, and behavior. It is to be found in his contrast between (American) individualism and (French) egoism. In making that distinction, he emphasizes the way in which American individualism combines the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty and leads to the establishment of free associations to provide a corrective to the kind of individualism that knows no bonds, which Tocqueville refers to as "egoism."

It is especially useful for contemporaries to examine this third bridge. Following Tocqueville, the change in American individualism as a result of the revolutionary events of the 1960s is its shift to egoism, namely to individualism strictly as self-concern, with a concomitant erosion of American institutions and all that this erosion means for the future of American democracy.

What chance does Tocequeville's obviously correect view--that we all have to work very hard to preserve a free and decent society--have in the long run against ideologies that promise a given structure will obviate the need for any effort on our part?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2003 9:00 AM