Plan for the Day
- Finish up any Constitution stuff from Tuesday
- Alexis de Tocqueville’s Ch. 9 “On the Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States”
- Discussion Post #2 due tomorrow, 9/5, 11:07pm
- Democracy/Liberty/Freedom/ETC. quotation:
- Once again, getting to the actual source
- Below is probably one of the most famous quotations from de Tocqueville, and it abounds on the internet:
“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835) [c.f. Goodreads]
Of course, I have to be a stickler and request that we consider a larger context, and this is what we have:
One cannot say it too often: There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom. It is not the same with despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable. Freedom, in constrast, is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its benefits.
–de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. U of Chicago P, 2000, p. 229. [original work published in 1835]
- Freedom comes from struggle, civil discord
- Delayed gratification
- Despotism promises order and ending suffering
Alexis de Tocqueville
- Born in Paris, France, 1805
- Surprise, surprise…from an aristocratic family
- Traveled in the United States for 9 months with his friend Gustave de Beaumont
- Published Democracy in America in 1835–at 30 years old!
- Went into politics later in life
- Wanted France to have stability and not constant revolutions
- Died of tuberculosis and is buried at The chateau in Tocqueville
Ch. 9: “On the Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States”
This is just one chapter of a huge tome Democracy in America (1835). It’s an interesting comparison to de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1882). Tocqueville’s journey led him to raw concusions about the characteristics of citizens of the United States. As a political philosopher, he made lots of observations of American governmental practices,
- p. 264: Explains his goal for the book
- “A democratic republic subsists in the United States. The principal goal of this book has been to make the causes of this phenomenon understood.”
- p. 265: “…all the causes tending to the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States can be reduced to three:
- “The particular and accidental situation in which Providence has placed the Americans forms the first;
- The second comes from the laws;
- The third flows from habits and mores.” {mor-ayz}
On the Accidental Or Providential Causes Which Contribute To The Maintenance Of The Democratic Republic In The United States
- p. 265: “Influence of material well-being on the political opinions of the Americans.”
- “General [Andrew] Jackson…is a man of violent character and middling capacity….What therefore placed him in the seat of the president and still keeps him there? The memory of a victory carried off by him before the walls of New Orleans twenty years ago; now, this victory of New Orleans is a very ordinary feat of arms with which one could long be occupied only in a country not given to battles…”
-Consider another translation-
“General Jackson…is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents….he was raised to the Presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained twenty years ago under the walls of New Orleans, a victory which was, however, a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare.” {Online Version}
- “General [Andrew] Jackson…is a man of violent character and middling capacity….What therefore placed him in the seat of the president and still keeps him there? The memory of a victory carried off by him before the walls of New Orleans twenty years ago; now, this victory of New Orleans is a very ordinary feat of arms with which one could long be occupied only in a country not given to battles…”
- p. 266: “America does not have a great capital whose direct or indirect influence makes itself felt over the whole extent of its territory, which I consider to be one of the first causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the United States.
- “The preponderance of capital cities therefore makes a serious breach in the representative system.”
- Too many capitals focuses power to a portion of the State that has the most influence. Tocqueville believes too many centers of power was “the defect of republics of antiquity.”
- Note 1: “The low people who inhabit these vast cities form a populace more dangerous than that even of Europe….these men bring our greatest vices to the United States, and they have none of the interests that could combat their influence. Inhabiting the country without being citizens of it, they are ready to take part in all the passions that agitate it; so for some time we have seen serious riots break out in Philadelphia and New York.”
- pp. 266-267: “Americans had the chance of birth working for them: their fathers had long since brought equality of conditions and of intelligence onto the soil they inhabited, from which the democratic republic would one day issue as from its natural source.”
- p. 267: “Their fathers gave them the love of equality and of freedom, but it was God himself who, in leaving them a boundless continent, accorded them the means to remain equal and free for a long time.”
- “When the people govern, it is necessary that they be happy in order for them not to overturn the state.”
- “In the United States, it is not only legislation that is democratic; nature itself works for the people.”
- “Everything about the Americans is extraordinary, their social state as well as their laws; but what is more extraordinary still is the soil that supports them.”
- pp. 267-268: “When the land was delivered to men by the Creator, it was young and inexhaustible, but they were weak and ignorant; and when they had learned to take advantage of the treasures contained within it, they already covered its face, and soon they had to fight to acquire the right to possess a refuge and to repose there in freedom.”
- Population grew too much and outstripped the resources.
- p. 268: “It is then that North America is discovered, as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just emerged from beneath the waters of the flood.”
- “It presents, as in the first days of the creation, rivers whose source does not dry up, green and moist solitudes, boundless fields that the plowshare of the laborer has not yet turned. In this state, it is offered no longer to the isolated, ignorant, and barbaric man of the first ages, but to man already master of the most important secrets of nature, united with those like him, and instructed by an experience of fifty centuries.”
- pp. 268-269: “Millions of men advance at once toward the same point on the horizon: their language, their religion, their mores differ, their goal is common.”
- p. 269: “Legislation in the United States favors the division of property as much as possible…”
- p. 270: Tocqueville makes an argument about the benefits of Eastern Americans (specifically from Connecticut) being able to move west:
- “…it is probable that instead of being wealthy property owners they would have remained small laborers; that they would have lived in obscurity without being able to open up a political career for themselves, and that, far from becoming useful legislators, they would have been dangerous citizens.”
- “‘…the abundance of uncultivated land in the market and the constant stream of emigration from the Atlantic to the interior states, operates sufficiently to keep paternal inheritances unbroken'” (Tocqueville cites Chancellor Kent’s Treatise on American Law, vol. 4, p. 380)
- Entrepreneurial Spirit
“the avidity with which the American throws himself on the immense prey that fortune offers him….a passion stronger than love of life spurs him constantly….he hastens for fear of arriving too late.” - “These men have left their first native country to be well-off; they leave their second to be still better-off…”
- p. 272: “In Europe we habitually regard restiveness of mind, immoderate desire for wealth, extreme love of independence as great social dangers….What a happy country is the New World, where man’s vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues!”
- Americans and Canadians want “to abandon the living and the dead to run after fortune there is nothing that merits more praise in their eyes.”
- The linearity of Bob Dylan. “Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you” (Bob Dylan, “Baby Blue”)
- Moderation
“all needs are satisfied without trouble: one must not be afraid of giving rise to too many passions, since all passions find an easy and salutary nourishment; one cannot make men too free there, because they are almost never tempted to make a bad use of freedom.”
- Americans and Canadians want “to abandon the living and the dead to run after fortune there is nothing that merits more praise in their eyes.”
- p. 273: American Business
- “The passions that agitate the Americans most profoundly are commercial passions and not political passions, or rather, they carry the habits of trade into politics. They love order, without which affairs cannot prosper, and they particularly prize regularity of mores, on which good houses [of business] are founded.”
- Meeting the Frenchman in Pennsylvania
“One must go to America to understand what power material well-being exerts on political actions and even on opinions themselves, which ought to be subject only to reason.” - p. 274: “The influence of well-being is exerted still more freely on Americans than on foreigners. The American has always seen before his eyes order and public prosperity linked to one another and marching in the same step; he does not imagine that they can live separately: he therefore has nothing to forget and will not lose, like so many Europeans, what he owes to his early education.”
- What message about prosperity is being conveyed here?
On Influence of Laws on The Maintenance of A Democratic Republic in The United States
- p. 274: “which among these laws really tend to maintain a democratic republic and which put it in danger….Three things seem to concur more than all others to maintain a democratic republic in the New World:”
- 1) “…the federal form…permits the Union to enjoy the power of a great republic and the security of a small one.”
- 2) “…the township institutions that, moderating the despotism of the majority, at the same time give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.”
- 3) “…the judicial power…the courts serve to correct the aberrations of democracy, and how, without ever being able to stop the movements of the majority, they succeed in slowing and directing them.“
- Think of classical conservatism being slow, pragmatic change
On The Influence of Mores on The Maintenance of The Democratic Republic in The United States
- p. 274: “I said above that I consider mores to be one of the great general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States can be attributed.”
- p. 275: “mores; not only do l apply it to mores properly so-called, which one could call habits of the heart, but to the different notions that men possess, to the various opinions that are current in their midst, and to the sum of ideas of which the habits of the mind are formed.”
On Religion Considered as A Political Institution; How It Serves Powerfully The Maintenance of A Democratic Republic Among The Americans
- p. 275: The Golden Mean
- “Allow the human mind to follow its tendency and it will regulate political society and the divine city in a uniform manner; it will seek, if I dare say it, to harmonize the earth with Heaven.”
- “From the [principle], politics and religion were in accord, and they have not ceased to be so since.”
- “These Catholics show great fidelity in the practices of their worship and are full of ardor and zeal for their beliefs; nevertheless they form the most republican and democratic class there is in the United States.”
- p. 276: “…Catholicism…likes to intermingle all classes of society at the foot of the same altar, as they are intermingled in the eyes of God.”
- “If Catholicism disposes the faithful to obedience, it does not therefore prepare them for inequality. I shall say the contrary of Protestantism, which generally brings men much less to equality than to independence.”
- Tocqueville was Catholic, so he could be biased…
- “Catholics are in the minority, and they need all rights to be respected to be assured of the free exercise of theirs.“
- “If Catholicism disposes the faithful to obedience, it does not therefore prepare them for inequality. I shall say the contrary of Protestantism, which generally brings men much less to equality than to independence.”
- p. 277: “One can say, therefore, that in the United States there is no single religious doctrine that shows itself hostile to democratic and republican institutions. All the clergy there hold to the same language; opinions are in accord with the laws, and there reigns so to speak only a single current in the human mind.”
- Compare to de Crèvecoeur’s take on religion.
- “I was invited to attend a political gathering whose purpose was to come to the assistance of the Poles and to get arms and money to them.”
- A priest’s sermon “…save the Poles.”
Indirect Influence that Religious Beliefs Exert on Political Society In The United States
- p. 278: “Society has nothing to fear nor to hope from the other life; and what is most important to it is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion but that they profess a religion. Besides, all the sects in the United States are within the great Christian unity, and the morality of Christianity is everywhere the same.”
- There are two definitions of C/catholic worth pointing out.
- “…one cannot say that in the United States religion exerts an influence on the laws or on the details of political opinions, but it directs mores, and it is in regulating the family that it works to regulate the state.”
- pp. 278-279: “Religion there is often powerless to restrain man in the midst of the innumerable temptation that fortune presents to him. It cannot moderate the ardor in him for enriching himself, which everything comes to excite, but it reigns as a sovereign over the soul of woman, and it is woman who makes mores.”
- p. 279: “…the European submits only with difficulty to the legislative powers of the state….the American returns to the bosom of his family, he immediately meets the image of order and peace….he becomes habituated to regulating his opinions as well as his tastes without difficulty.”
- “In the United States religion not only regulates mores, but extends its empire over intelligence.”
- pp. 279-280: “Nature and circumstances have made the inhabitant of the United States an audacious man….If the spirit of the Americans were free of all impediments, one would soon encounter among them the boldest innovators and the most implacable logicians in the world.”
- Consider this in light of The Constitution, Article, Sec. 8, “Science and the useful Arts”
- p. 280: “…at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.”
- Religion is a check on extremes.
- p. 281: “I saw Americans associating to send priests into the new states of the West and to found schools and churches there; they fear that religion will be lost in the midst of the woods, and that the people growing up may not be as free as the one from which it has issued.”
- p. 282: “Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic they extol than in the monarchy they attack, and in democratic republics more than all others.”
On The Principal Causes That Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America
- p. 282: “The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual weakening of beliefs in an altogether simple fashion. Religious zeal, they said, will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase. It is unfortunate that the facts do not accord with this theory.”
- In Europe, “I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil.”
- p. 283: “…all attributed the peaceful dominion that religion exercises in their country principally to the complete separation of church and state.”
- “…the clergy…distance themselves from power voluntarily and take a sort of professional pride in remaining strangers to it.”
- p. 284: “One has seen religions intimately united with earthly governments, dominating souls by terror and by faith at the same time; but when a religion contracts an alliance like this, I do not fear to say that it acts as a man would: it sacrifices the future with a view to the present, and in obtaining a power that is not due to it, it risks its legitimate power.”
- “…in allying itself with a political power, religion increases its power over some and loses the hope of reigning over all.”
- p. 285: “Insofar as a nation takes on a democratic social state, and societies are seen to incline toward republics, it becomes more and more dangerous for religion to unite with authority…”
- “Agitation and instability are due to the nature of democratic republics, just as immobility and sleep form the law of absolute monarchies.”
- “What would become of its immortality when everything around it was perishing?”
- p. 286: “In America, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been in certain times and among certain peoples, but its influence is more lasting….it acts in one sphere only, but it covers the whole of it and dominates it without effort.”
- What does this say about the separation of church and state?
- p. 288: “In Europe, Christianity has permitted itself to be intimately united with the powers of the earth. Today these powers are falling and it is almost buried under their debris.”
- Compare to the end of George Washington’s “Farewell Address” (p. 22).
How The Enlightenment, The Habits, and The Practical Experience of The Americans Contribute to The Success of Democratic Institutions
- p. 288: “…new laws are constantly made; but great writers have still not been found to inquire into the general principles of the laws.”
- pp. 288-289: “…the mechanical arts. In America, they apply the inventions of Europe shrewdly, and after perfecting them, they adapt them marvelously to the needs of the country. Men there are industrious, but they do not cultivate the science of industry. One finds good workers and few inventors.”
- p. 289: “..one must not extend indiscriminately to the whole Union what I say about New England. The farther one moves to the west or toward the south, the more instruction of the people diminishes.”
- “…the peoples of Europe have left the shadows and barbarism to advance toward civilization and enlightenment.”
- p. 290: “The Anglo-Americans arrived quite civilized on the soil that their posterity occupies…”
- “Americans do not use the word “peasant”; they do not employ the word because they do not have the idea…“
- What’s the significance of this?
- “…the pioneer…All is primitive and savage around him, but he is so to speak the result of eighteen centuries of work and experience.”
- “…he is a very civilized man who, for a time, submits to living in the middle of the woods, and who plunges into the wilderness of the New World with his Bible, a hatchet, and newspapers.”
- p. 291: “One cannot doubt that in the United States the instruction of the people serves powerfully to maintain a democratic republic….everywhere that the instruction that enlightens the mind is not separated from the education that regulates mores.”
- “I lived much with the people of the United States, and I cannot say how much I admired their experience and their good sense.
Do not lead an American to speak of Europe; he will ordinarily show great presumption and a rather silly pride.”- Perhaps Tocqueville may need to do some reflection here.
- “It is from participating in legislation that the American learns to know the laws, from governing that he instructs himself in the forms of government.”
- “I lived much with the people of the United States, and I cannot say how much I admired their experience and their good sense.
- pp. 291-292: “In the United States, the sum of men’s education is directed toward politics; in Europe, its principal goal is to prepare for private life.”
- p. 292: “Americans, on the contrary, almost always carry the habits of public life into private life. Among them the idea of the jury is discovered in school games, and one finds parliamentary forms even in the ordering of a banquet.”
That The Laws Serve More To Maintain A Democratic Republic in The United States More Than Physical Causes, And Mores More Than Laws
- p. 292: Tocqueville defines mores in Note 8 as “sum of the intellectual and moral dispositions that men bring to the state of society.”
- “There is not a single part of the New World where Europeans have been able to create an aristocracy.”
- p. 293: “It is only Anglo-American democracy that, up to the present, has been able to maintain itself in peace.”
- Just wait a few decades…
- “The laws and mores of the Anglo-Americans therefore form the special reason for their greatness and the predominant cause that I seek.”
- p. 294: “American laws are therefore good, and one must attribute to them a great part of the success that the government of democracy obtains in America…”
- “It is in the East that the Anglo-Americans have practiced the longest use of democratic government and have formed habits and conceived ideas most favorable to maintaining it.”
- p. 295: “It is in the East that the literary instruction and the practical education of the people have been most perfected and that religion has best intermingled with freedom.”
- “Many Americans in the states of the West were born in the woods, and they mix with the civilization of their fathers the ideas and customs of the savage life. Among them, passions are more violent, religious morality less powerful, ideas less fixed.“
- “It is therefore particularly mores that render the Americans of the United States, alone among all Americans, capable of supporting the empire of democracy…”
- “l am convinced that the happiest situation and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution despite mores…The importance of mores is a common truth to which study and experience constantly lead back.”
Would Laws And Mores Suffice To Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere Than in America?
- p. 296: “…one must carefully distinguish the institutions of the United States from democratic institutions in general.”
- p. 297: “…the success of the laws of the United States proves nothing for the success of democratic laws in general, in a country less favored by nature.”
- pp. 297-298: “Their various municipal laws appeared to me as so many barriers that keep the restive ambition of citizens within a narrow sphere and turn the very democratic passions that could overturn the state to the profit of the township.”
- p. 298: “…social state that Providence….The organization and establishment of democracy among Christians is the great political problem· of our· time. The Americans have doubtless not resolved this problem, but they furnish useful lessons to those who wish to resolve it.”
Importance of What Precedes in Relation To Europe
- p. 299: “If absolute power came to be established anew among the democratic peoples of Europe, I do not doubt that it would take a newf orm, and that it would show itselfwithfeatures unknown to our fathers.”
- pp. 299-300: “But when once the prestige of royalty has vanished in the midst of the tumult of revolutions; when kings, succeeding each other on the throne, have by turns exposed to peoples the weakness of right and the hardness of fact, no one any longer sees in the sovereign the father of the state and everyone perceives a master there.”
- p. 301: “One would perhaps have to inquire into the monuments of antiquity and think back to those frightful centuries of Roman tyranny, when mores were corr upt, memories effaced, habits destroyed, opinions wavering, and freedom, chased out of the laws, no longer knew where to take refuge to find an asylum…”
- “Would it not then be necessary to consider the gradual development of democratic institutions and mores, not as the best, but as the sole means that remains to us to be free…”
- “It is difficult to make the people participate in government; it is more difficult still to furnish them with the experience and to give them the sentiments that they lack to govern well.”
- “And if complete equality must finally arrive, would it not be better to let oneself be leveled by freedom than by a despot?“
- p. 302: “My goal has been to show, by the example of America, that laws and above all mores can permit a democratic people to remain free.”
- “…little by little…prepare them for freedom and afterwards permit them the use of it…and I foresee that if one does not in time succeed in founding the peaceful empire of the greatest number among us, we shall arrive sooner or later at the unlimited power of one alone.”
Next Week
Make sure you do Discussion Post #2 by Friday, 9/5, 11:07pm.
We’ll pick up where we left off if we didn’t get through de Tocqueville. For Tuesday, 9/9, we have George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796); then, on Thursday, 9/11, we won’t meet as a class. Instead, you’ll take Test #1 on Canvas wherever you have internet access.