all hitherto existing accounts of the fundamental basis of political order were wrong. At the same time, America, for all its inherent propensities to facilitate the consolidation of power, was visibly a land of liberty: blessed by freedom of religion, of the press, even of association. Just as revolution had not entailed social dissolution, so social order did not preclude freedom. All of which meant that neither democracy in general nor this democracy in particular was especially well understood. A “new political science” was going to be needed to understand “a world altogether new.” Democracy in America set out to furnish it.64
That declaration, as Nolla rightly insists, is the pivotal moment in the book. But it is also easily misunderstood. This was true for one obvious reason. Tocqueville may have dramatically announced the necessity for change, yet he scarcely proceeded to describe any detailed content of the matter.65 Indeed, there is not much in the way of a conceptually
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explicit, methodologically precise, still less empirically grounded analysis—for which read recognizable political science—at work in the chapters of Democracy in America. As such, it is a good deal easier to describe what Tocqueville’s political science is not rather than what it is. Few would doubt that it bears little obvious relation to received wisdom of the ancients in this respect. It effectively denied the priority of the régime. It dismissed even the possibility of a mixed government and generally derided Greek concepts of justice.66 Yet, as Harvey Mansfield has noted elsewhere, it offered little comfort to modern prejudices either. It spurned any prepolitical state of nature. Then it eschewed the social contract.67 Most strikingly of all, it rejected Federalist political science.68
There is no need to exaggerate the full force of this departure in order to appreciate its vital significance. Certainly, there is little to be gained in contrasting supposedly backward-looking Americans with a future-orientated Frenchman. The once fashionable image of the framers as classical republicans, determinedly devoted to an agrarian ideal, has long since faded. All of them—from Hamilton to Jefferson—were committed to a liberal republicanism rooted in the improving
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possibilities of a commercial society.69 The Federalist Papers served, inter alia, to outline that new, improved political science appropriate for the new, improved order of the ages that the American founding had inaugurated.70 Tocqueville was properly respectful of the insights that these studies afforded into the American political scene, even as late as 1831. Nonetheless, he doubted that they had achieved this wider aim.71 That was not because the Federalists repudiated the doctrine
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of the sovereignty of the people, as Guizot did.72 To the contrary, they openly acknowledged it. However, in recognizing its just claims, they did not grasp the broader results seriously enough. They afforded proper due only to what they took to be popular sovereignty as a political norm. They failed to appreciate that this creed defined the whole social state over which they were attempting to preside. They had not realized just how radical a rupture was entailed in the events of 1776 and their aftermath.73
This was, perhaps, scarcely remarkable. For all their intellectual progressivism, the framers remained the aristocrats that Adams (among their number) and Guizot (among their admirers) took them to be. As such, they believed it was possible to regulate a popular democracy by just rule: in a government of laws, not men.74 They also presumed it was desirable to lead it with wisdom rather than through whim, that is, by representative methods of administration and legislation. This was the political science the Federalist Papers were supposed to describe.75 But Tocqueville’s journey through Jacksonian America proved to him that such aspirations were—in truth, had always been—forlorn hopes. What he discovered was that in a democracy, in the final analysis, the majority observed only those laws it chose to honor. That was why Negroes
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never got to vote in Pennsylvania.76 Not that Americans were often confronted by legislation of which they disapproved. This was because in the United States, the people increasingly elected congressmen only like themselves: “for the most part, village lawyers, businessmen, or even men from the lowest classes.”77 As a result, the tyranny of the majority was an ever-present threat in American society.78 Tocqueville has often been accused of overstating the contemporary importance of this malevolent possibility. In truth, he did no more than state its stark potential.79 The “planned extinction of the American native” and the “slavery of the African Americans” bore grim witness to what proved all too easily realizable under its sway. Abraham Lincoln knew that much; so too, in a very different way, did Stephen Douglas.80
But if the tyranny of the majority was such a threat to liberty, how could its sway be sufficiently tempered, if not by law and representation? Tocqueville found the answer to this critical question in his subtle reworking of the doctrine of the “democratic social state.” His argument went like this. Equality of conditions destroyed the historical basis of authority. But they failed to preclude the passion for rule.81 At the same time, they diminished the sense of individual responsibility and elevated the aura of personal vulnerability. This was because in extending the “doctrine … of equality” wholesale, even to personal intelligence, democracy “attacked the pride of men in its last refuge.” The result was not a republic of autonomous selves but rather a state of fearful similars (semblables).82 Such men, so placed, still occasionally sought to lord it over each other. But what they most desperately
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desired was the mutual protection of common authority. They found it in America, as “democratic man” qua democratic man can only find it, in the “moral empire of the majority.”83 What this meant was that men in the “democratic social state” were governed, at least in the first instance, by extrapolitical common custom, or mores, that is, by those broad-ranging attitudes and feelings that informed the whole rather than by specific laws, which instituted individual rights. If this was true in general, it is especially so of Jacksonian America. There, the vital instrument of this amorphous empire was found in “public opinion.”84
It is easy to miss the true significance of this, characteristically Tocquevillian, formulation, or rather, reformulation. For, in drawing such attention to the significance of “public opinion” in the social and political organization of early nineteenth-century American life, Tocqueville deployed a concept seemingly well known to his contemporaries. But he surreptitiously redefined it. This was “public opinion” conceived not as that “sentiment on any given subject which is entertained by the best informed, most intelligent and most moral persons in the community,” as William MacKinnon’s famous rendering theoretically had it.85 Rather, it was “public opinion” laid bare, as Tocqueville had actually seen the phenomenon, at work in America.
Mass opinion … common opinion … ready-made opinion … covering … a great number of theories in matters of philosophy, morality and politics [even including] religion itself … which reigns there
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less as revealed doctrine [and more] as adopted in this way by each person without examination … on the faith of the public.86
In that way, he disclosed an entirely new form of authority. This was democratic, social authority. Just as Tocqueville said it must, “the [new] social world” had created new forms of “intellectual and moral authority” out of the carnage democracy had wrought in the old [social] order.87 The authority of such “mass … opinion” would extend, progressively, to the whole of the world. It was already “infinitely greater than any other power.” Indeed, it was all the more effective for wielding such sway silently, that is, without ostentatious action.88 This was how republican democracies “immaterialisent le despotisme.” It explained why the freest society on earth boasted virtually no variety of views about any question that really mattered.89
But that was not a justification for nostalgic fatalism. Rather, it explained an essential task of Tocqueville’s political science. This was, as James Schleifer so arrestingly puts it, “to speak for liberty,” under conditions of equality.90 It was a goal specifically defined. This necessarily determined much of the resultant method. For,