the people generally disapprove, this majority will certainly be changed at the next election, and be composed of different elements. M. de Tocqueville’s theory can only be true where
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the majority is an unchangeable body and where it acts exclusively on the minority, as distinct from itself—a state of things which can never occur where the elections are frequent and every man has a voice in choosing the legislators.40
It should be noted that Ampère himself was not convinced by these criticisms and that, on Tocqueville’s behalf, he provided a response that is not without merit or cogency. That the oppressed could themselves in turn become the oppressors, he countered, was no safeguard for personal liberty. Moreover, the new majority might simply continue to voice many of the “common passions” and “prejudices” of the previous majority, thus continuing the oppression of “a persistent minority.” This was especially true in the states of the South where freedom of expression on the subject of slavery did not exist and where, on this issue, it mattered not whether the Whigs or the Democrats were in power. Moreover, that the excesses of Jacksonian democracy no longer existed did not prove that they had been completely cured and that they could not return. Tocqueville, he consequently affirmed, had been right to diagnose the existence of a “radical infirmity” existing at the heart of American society: “the possible tyranny of number where numbers counted for everything.”41 Nor, it should be added, was it the case that everyone shared the view that Tocqueville had failed to observe America in an accurate and impartial fashion. In a lengthy article written for the North American Review,42 Edward Everett, while not denying that Tocqueville was sometimes “led away by the desire to generalize,” affirmed that Tocqueville’s work was “by far the most philosophical, ingenious and instructive, which has been produced in Europe on the subject of America.”
Be that as it may, it is not easy to dislodge the criticism that errors in central aspects of Tocqueville’s analysis arose because of both the brevity of his stay and the fact that he could not escape his own inherited prejudices. Here let us remember that Tocqueville was an outsider in America not only because he was French and aristocratic but also
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because he was a Catholic.43 In short, on this view, the odds were well and truly stacked against Tocqueville ever producing an account of America that rose above shallow empiricism and vague theoretical generalization. Indeed, this was the view of no less an authority than François Furet, who asserted that “when Tocqueville went to the United States in the spring of 1831, he had already formed his own hypothesis for comparing the French Revolution and the American Republic.”44 Thus forewarned, it might be argued, are we not better placed to make sense of Tocqueville’s well-known remark that “in America I saw more than America,” for was he not really only interested in France all along? Moreover, is this not substantiated by Tocqueville’s statement that “[w]hile I had my eyes fixed on America, I thought about Europe.”45
Is this then not evidence enough to dispel any lingering doubt as to the lack of utility and purpose in Tocqueville’s voyage? First, we would do well to remember James T. Schleifer’s observation that it would have been remarkable had Tocqueville not “reached the shores of America carrying much of the historical and intellectual baggage of early 19th century France.” Could it have been imagined that he would have arrived with a completely empty mind, without “a variety of preconceptions about the fundamental nature and direction of modern society”?46 Next, Tocqueville was only too aware of his own prejudices and of the difficulties involved in freeing himself from them. In his Two Weeks in the Wilderness, we find the following remark: “[A]s for me, in my traveler’s illusions—and what class of men does not have its own—I imagined something entirely different.” America, he had believed, would be bound to exhibit “all the transformations that the social state imposed on man and in which it was possible to see those transformations like a vast chain.” Nothing of this picture, he confirmed, had any truth. Indeed, America was “the least appropriate
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for providing the spectacle that I was coming to find.”47 For his part, Tocqueville was in turn utterly damning in his attitude toward those of his fellow countrymen who had not bothered themselves with doing anything other than observing America from a lofty and disdainful distance. In a letter to the Abbé Lesueur, for example, he warned that his compatriot, a man called Scherer, “will paint you an unfavourable picture of America: the fact is that he has made the most stupid journey in the world. He came here without any other end than to stroll about, knowing nothing about either the language or the customs of the country.”48 He later repeated the advice to his mother, condemning what was probably the same person for deriving all he knew of the country from a “particular class of Frenchmen whom he saw exclusively.”49 Moreover, all of this accords with Gustave de Beaumont’s own description of Tocqueville as a traveler. Contrasting his friend with those visitors to North America “who passed through, seeing nothing and looking for nothing, not even wild ducks,” he remarked that, for Tocqueville, “everything was subject to observation.”50
Accordingly, a reading of Tocqueville’s diaries, notebooks, and letters reveals a mind, not closed to new experiences, but overwhelmed by the novelty and importance of what he was seeing. For example, having told us that the penitentiary system was a pretext for his visit to America, a letter to Kergorlay continues as follows: “In that country, in which I encountered a thousand things beyond my expectation, I perceived several things about questions that I had often put to myself. I discovered facts that seemed useful to know. I did not go there with the idea of writing a book, but the idea for a book came to me there.”
Nor is it easy to unravel the complex relationship between Tocqueville’s impressions of America and his thoughts on the future of European civilization. Even his earliest reviewers realized that this was not merely a book about America, and the fact that it is not so explains why we continue to read it for instruction and enlightenment (unlike the vast
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majority of nineteenth-century accounts of America that, if read at all, are done so for entertainment and amusement alone). Again, a letter to Kergorlay clarifies his intentions:
Although I rarely spoke of France in this book, I did not write a page without thinking of her and without always having her, so to speak, before my eyes. And above all what I tried to highlight in the United States and to make understood was less a complete picture of this foreign country but the contrasts and resemblances with our own. It was always, either through opposition or analogy with the one, that I endeavoured to present a fair and, above all, interesting idea of the other. In my opinion, the permanent return that I made, without making it known, to France was one of the main causes of the success of the book.51
But this does not reduce the journey itself to insignificance. A letter to his father reported that since their arrival, Tocqueville and Beaumont had had, “in truth, only one idea … this idea is to understand the country through which we are travelling.”52 He similarly told his brother: “In my opinion, one must be truly blind to want to compare this country to Europe and to impose on one what works in the other. I believed this before I left France; I believe it more and more in examining the country in the midst of which I now live.”53
Moreover, Tocqueville was under no illusions as to the limits of his knowledge and acquaintance with the United States. Writing from Washington, D.C., as his time in America reached its end, he confided in separate letters to his father and to his brother Édouard that he had only a “superficial” knowledge of the South and that a minimum stay of two years was required to prepare a “complete and accurate picture” of the whole country. To attempt to take in the whole, he continued, would be madness, because he had simply not seen enough. In any case,
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such a work would be as “boring as it was instructive.” Nevertheless, Tocqueville recorded, his time had been spent usefully and he had collected many documents and spoken with many people. Furthermore, he felt that he knew more about America than was generally known in France and some of what he knew might be of “great interest.” “I believe,” Tocqueville wrote modestly, “that