Democracy in America

While this term is commonly used throughout his work, Tocqueville does not provide a coherent definition. Broadly speaking, class is the social and economic position people occupy as a result of their occupation and accumulated wealth or lack thereof. Some historians and theorists conceive of class in material terms and in labor relationships, especially those influenced by the work of Karl Marx. Tocqueville conceives of class identity in these terms but is also attentive to how individuals adopt particular cultural practices in response to their class position—this is particularly clear in his discussion of honor, which he argues has mostly disappeared as aristocracy has. As he argues, “it is the dissimilarities and inequalities of men that have created honor; it is weakened insofar as these differences are effaced” (599). 

Tocqueville’s concerns about industrialization as dehumanizing, making the worker a “brute” (531), likely reflect his own historical context. Tocqueville lived through the Romantic movement, a period in which many artists, political theorists, and writers recoiled from industrialization and sought greater wholeness elsewhere, often in nature. Much of the analysis here owes a debt to Jeffrey R. Webber, “EP Thompson’s Romantic Marxism” Jacobin, July 24, 2015. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/making-english-working-class-luddites-romanticism. Reading the first section may provide a greater understanding of how early understandings of class were a rejection of cultural change as much as a critique of economic exploitation.

This is the term typically used to describe an economic system where a few nobles own the land and are subject to a monarch, who collects their taxes and demands their military service. Peasants farm it as their tenants and have few legal rights. Clergy and merchants somewhat operate outside this system. For political philosopher Karl Marx, feudalism is the economic system that precedes the rise of the bourgeoisie, the class that owns property and exploits industrial workers. (Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. 1848.) Tocqueville similarly emphasizes that feudalism precedes the rise of democracy and is replaced by it. Though he was not remotely sympathetic to socialism, Tocqueville also treats feudalism as the precursor to another age: that of democracy.

This refers to the political events in 1789 that overthrew the French monarchy. Due to a general fiscal crisis, the monarchy was forced to summon the Estates-General, France’s parliament, for the first time in centuries. This body eventually radicalized to the point of overthrowing King Louis XVI. Political parties formed for the first time, and as the radical leftist Jacobins emerged as a dominant force, they launched campaigns of political terror against their opponents, including former nobles. Eventually, many of them turned on each other, and France’s government took a more conservative direction, culminating in General Napoleon Bonaparte’s ascension to power. While he does not say this explicitly, much of Tocqueville’s language about revolutions appears influenced by his family’s suffering during the 1789 revolution.

This is the term historians use to describe intermediate bodies, formed by citizens, that engage with political and social issues. Historian Laura Engelstein calls civil society “an autonomous public life that helps sustain the democratic (or at least participatory), political impulse.” (Engelstein, Laura. “The Dream of Civil Society in Tsarist Russia” in Civil Society Before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-century Europe. Ed. Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 23.) Tocqueville describes the importance of civil society in his analysis of newspapers, civil associations, and political associations. Tocqueville argues that a free press is an essential tool of social organization, to form associations. He notes with approval that America is unique in making use of association to enrich itself:

There is only one nation on earth where the unlimited freedom to associate for political views is used daily. That same nation is the only one in the world whose citizens have imagined making a continuous use of the right of association in civil life, and have come in this manner to procure for themselves all the goods that civilization can offer (496).

He further argues that any limits on political association likely have some negative consequences. He declares, somewhat dramatically, “If to save the life of a man one cuts off his arm, I understand it; but I do not want someone to assure me that he is going to show himself as adroit as if he were not one-armed” (500). In comparing free association to a body part, Tocqueville implicitly suggests that it is an extremely helpful tool for democratic flourishing.