was actually in place in Jacksonian America.11 How could this be? How could Tocqueville be at once so famous yet curiously little known? Similarly, why is he so widely praised yet also unjustly belittled? Is it because he remains, as Russell Baker once shrewdly remarked, “the most widely quoted … of all the great unread writers”?12 Or do even those who take the trouble continue to construe him badly? If so, does Nolla’s edition enable us to read him aright—and judge him properly—for the first time?
There are, I shall suggest here, powerful reasons for thinking that this might be so. True, Tocqueville’s first book brought him instant recognition both in France and beyond. If it did nothing else, Reeve’s virtually simultaneous, though often sloppy, translation saw to that. But it also brought immediate confusion (for which, read multiple interpretation) in both the domestic and the foreign understanding of his work.13 Not all of this can be blamed on Tocqueville’s hapless translator. Some part of the difficulty must also be traced to the author’s elusive, almost aphoristic, prose style. But it owed still more to the detached, seemingly anonymous, method of Democracy’s organization and presentation. For Tocqueville’s “new political science” was, as Harvey Mansfield has wisely observed, a great theoretical departure that barely bothered to explain itself.14 It was also, as Jeremy Jennings notes, a scholarly treatise that
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largely obscured its sources.15 More still: it was a work cast in a curious relationship, with both its author’s youthful past and what became of a mature statesman’s future. The Tocqueville who wrote Democracy barely appears in its pages. No less strikingly still, the celebrated public figure he quickly became interjected himself only rarely into subsequent editions of the text. Perhaps as a result, Tocqueville is still widely misconceived, either as a theoretical ideologue or as an aristocratic dupe, in America. To these ways of thinking, he was alternatively a Parisian intellectual who brought too much continental conceptual baggage and too little unprejudiced observation to his American travels, or a European grandee, characteristically compromised by the testimony of local notables barely better informed about what was actually going on in that country themselves. Whatever, and for all his undoubted intelligence and perspicacity, he remained (so the argument goes) a typical man of the old world—rural, agricultural, and traditional—simply unable to appreciate the dynamic realities of a new order—at once, urban, industrial, and democratic.16
This is nonsense. To be sure, Tocqueville never pretended to have written a mere travelogue. As he said himself, “I admit that in America I saw more than America.”17 Even at the time, he acknowledged that he was “think[ing] about Europe” all along.18 Later, he would make it quite clear, in a letter to Louis de Kergorlay, that while “he rarely spoke of France in the book, he rarely wrote so much as a page without … having it in front of his eyes.”19 Yet, as James Schleifer has properly observed, it would have been quite extraordinary—actually, it would have been
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somewhat disturbing—if Tocqueville had not “touched the shores of America carrying much of the historic and intellectual baggage of early-nineteenth-century France” with him.20 Of course, he was a young man when he visited America. But he was not especially young; within living memory Pitt had been prime minister of England at two years his junior and Napoleon became first Consul barely four years older.21
More to the point, Tocqueville had been the beneficiary of a quite remarkable political education before his arrival in the United States in May 1831. Its purely formal aspects have been quite satisfactorily considered elsewhere.22 We might simply note in passing three of its most important, informal dimensions. First, there was the significance of his birth. This was aristocratic, but it was not simply aristocratic. Tocqueville was also a member of a quite distinct second generation; he was among those men and women who did not make the Revolution at first hand but who grew up under its influence, by way of the Napoleonic Empire and then the restoration—only to become victims of the “great ennui” of the 1820s.23 Second, he was the product of a legitimist upbringing and yet also of deep liberal connections. This was true at the outset, during the years of reaction under Charles X, and then in the wake of the July Revolution and the reign of Louis-Philippe.24
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Finally, he had immersed himself—no other word will do—in the lectures and the writings of François Guizot: about France, on the historic course of European civilization, and concerning the nature of modernity itself.25
The political breadth and moral depth of the intellectual grounding so gained should go without saying. It also enables us to appreciate, without in any way belittling his subsequent achievement, how:
[a]ll the themes which Tocqueville developed (in Democracy in America) were being discussed, indeed were already well known, when he published [his first great book]; the notion of the “social state,” pretty well everywhere; the difference between the two kinds of centralisation (administrative and political), commonly so in the legitimist milieu. The tyranny of public opinion under democracy (normal in certain American circles, and perhaps also from Fenimore Cooper), the religious dimension of democracy (Lamenais, Leroux), the irresistible march of equality (Constant, Guizot, Royer-Collard, Chateaubriand) even the inherent opposition of democratic and aristocratic literature (Mme de Staël)—these were recurrent, contemporary ideas; so too finally … was the idea of democracy in Restoration and post-1830 France.26
Certainly, what was at least initially significant about Tocqueville’s Democracy was not that he had such ideas. These were common currency in contemporary, thinking, French circles. Rather, it was that he chose to test them—and that he eventually came to insist that their full implications could only be properly understood—in an American context. Put another way, his fundamental presupposition about America was that it was the country from which he (and others) had most (that was positive) to learn. We underestimate the importance of that conceptual breakthrough at our peril.27
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True, he was not the first to insist upon the importance of this idea. Hegel had famously celebrated—if scarcely elucidated—the great possibilities of America long before.28 But Tocqueville was highly unusual in postrevolutionary France, and perhaps particularly during the early years of the July Monarchy, in looking to America (as opposed to England) as the vital model for his country’s political salvation and indeed civilization’s broader future. It cannot be stated too often that most European visitors to early nineteenth-century America came with no such intention. Still less did they ordinarily leave with so portentous a thought. Most did little more than gawp at Niagara Falls and sneer in New York society.29 Of course, there were serious travelers to the United States at the time. By no means the least observant was Edward Stanley, subsequently 14th Earl of Derby, and thrice Conservative prime minister of England. He visited North America between July 1824 and March 1825, saw everyone who mattered from President Adams downward, and kept an impressive private journal, in which he tempered a damning judgment of democratic politics and an unambiguous condemnation of southern slavery with surprisingly sympathetic accounts of material well-being and moral decorum among the natives. Still, to Stanley, America was for
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the most part an example of what best to avoid.30 This was a view of the United States that (sympathetic) Tory interpreters of Tocqueville subsequently commended in what they took to be a fellow skeptic’s account.31
French observers were generally more disposed to be favorable. The very year that Stanley journeyed (almost incognito) around America, Lafayette toured the United States at the (very public) invitation of President Monroe. Visiting twenty-four states in twelve months, ostentatiously paying homage at the tomb of Washington, even embracing his old friend Jefferson at Monticello, he was finally feted at a banquet in the capital where he declared how delighted he was to “see the American people daily more attached to the liberal institutions which they have made such a success, while in Europe they were touched by a withering hand.”32 Still, this was in a sense the point. Tocqueville may never have had much time for Lafayette, whom he considered a “vain and dangerous demagogue.” But he went to America with the highest opinion of Guizot. And Guizot believed that America had become a