As Another Saw Us

...In fact, it helped to establish a new discipline, sociology-the systematic attempt to describe society as a unit and to discern its laws of cohesion and development...

...But he produced a work that continues to support our sense of America's pertinence...

...Taking his subject's genius for granted, Schleifer is inclined to describe the evolution of Tocqueville's thought rather than analyze it...

...Our institutions of learning were largely ignored...

...The visit lasted all of nine months, enough for a good initial impression...

...The tensions and conflicts in Tocqueville's mind are not reconciled, and his various shades of meaning are not always resolved into a controlling interpretation...

...his study of The Ancien Regime and the Revolution set new standards in French historiography...

...the former is, more sensibly, thematic...

...Yet Tocqueville did not understand the role technology would play in the making of modern America, falsely surmising that our economy would be mercantile rather than industrial...

...At the end of the 1930s, Tocqueville's warning that tyranny lurked within democracy itself sounded prophetic: The dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin all claimed to be the creatures of popular sovereignty, not merely the expressions of brutal power...

...Although he and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, had come to the U.S...

...Schleifer does not distinguish between those errors of Tocqueville's that affect his central themes, and consequently his argument, and those errors that are peripheral to the sociologist's method and bias...

...A parliamentary deputy and briefly a government minister, he became preoccupied with the connection between democracy and revolution...

...America, he told Mill, was only the frame of his study...

...Schleifer tells us almost everything we need to know about Democracy in America, except what makes it great...

...Schleifer is primarily interested in how Tocqueville arrived at his opinions, not in whether they were or are valid...

...For many years, he has virtually seemed our contemporary...

...The remarkable prediction that the United States and Russia would emerge as the two superpowers was confirmed during the Cold War...

...But with his death in 1859 Tocqueville's reputation went into eclipse, and the examination of American political culture that he was best known for soon went out of print...

...In 1938, Yale historian George W. Pierson retraced the French aristocrat's steps in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, and seven years later, Alfred A. Knopf reprinted Democracy in America...

...His claim that in the U.S...

...Schleifer's minute knowledge of Tocqueville's mental processes in no way detracts from his appreciation of his subject's blazing talent...

...His thesis became especially relevant once the Fourteenth Amendment was given strong application beginning in 1954...

...Indeed, he noticed so much on his single visit to the States, and anticipated so much more, that it seems churlish to point out his mistakes and oversights...

...Equality," for example, has half a dozen significances in Democracy, and as late as 1839 had been considered as the title for the final pair of volumes...

...From the glimpse of a district attorney shaking hands with a prisoner, Tocqueville envisioned the implications of democracy's triumph...

...every political issue is channeled into the courts has often been quoted in this ever more litigious society, and his discovery that attorneys serve as our aristocratic class has become a staple of bar association oratory...

...Thus in a second set of volumes, appearing in 1840, he moved on to consider the ramifica-tions of American self-government...

...Tocqueville's achievement did not stop there...

...this variety of intellectual history frequently resembles interior decoration...

...A master without disciples, a prophet without a movement, Alexis de Tocqueville enjoyed limited political influence...

...we did not become a nation of shopkeepers...

...In the brave clearing of the wilderness and the westward thrust of the frontier, Tocqueville did not foresee the growth of cities...

...Schleifer's conscientious archival research shows how the visitor from France shaped his observations of the particular into generalizations intended to mark the direction of modern history...

...Nor did he appreciate our political institutions' English heritage...

...Certainly little remains true in the letter Tocqueville sent home in 1831: "In the United States, people have neither wars, nor plagues, nor literature, nor eloquence, nor fine arts, few great crimes, nothing of what rouses Europe's attention...

...Authoritative sources were hard to come by, making Tocqueville's facility for apt generalization that much more impressive...

...Admittedly, the latter is stuffed with unnecessary particulars, and its organization is rigidly chronological, following Tocqueville's travel itinerary...

...Yet when his first work, part one of Democracy in America, was published a few years later, Tocqueville had delivered himself of a masterpiece on the American way of life...

...Tocqueville was also extraordinarily prescient when he cautioned—without ever having conversed at length with a single Negro—that the greatest threat to the internal stability of the Union came from the race question...

...He thus adumbrated the Civil War, and the Kerner Commission as well...

...His appeal to resist unmodulated popular pressures excited the liberal imagination...

...This revised dissertation is therefore designed largely to answer the question that Senator Howard Baker repeatedly asked about President Richard M. Nixon during the Senate Watergate hearings: What did he know and when did he know it...

...His English was inadequate and his preferred French was, of course, little understood by the Americans he met in taverns and the boarding houses where he stayed...

...In the 1950s, Tocqueville's belief that public opinion tends to stifle dissent appeared to have foreseen the blacklists, loyalty oaths and demands for orthodoxy of the period...

...James T. Schleifer, an historian at the College of New Rochelle, has examined practically all the extant drafts and notes that Tocqueville composed during and after his sojourn in America...

...its true subject was the leveling of ranks and distinctions as a new principle of social order...

...Moreover, although he intro-troduced the term "individualism" into the American vocabulary, Tocqueville did not see how individualism checked the nation's egalitarian impulses, how the imperatives of self-interest and self-advancement frustrated the search for community...

...The completed study was enthusiastically reviewed in his native land, in England (by John Stuart Mill), as well as in the United States...

...Tocqueville's work stands alone in the realm of social theory: Never has the polity or the culture of a nation been presented so engagingly and at the same time so soberly...

...But Schleifer's portrait of Tocqueville is no fuller than Pierson's and the historical and philosophical context he provides is thinner...

...His astonishment at the commercial proclivities of Americans, who seized upon every social occasion to close a deal, resonated in the unprecedented affluence of the postwar economy...

...Writing at a time when the institution of slavery seemed firmly in place, when the female half of the population was disenfranchised, when the very ideal of equal treatment under law was a cruel mockery to millions of the dispossessed, Tocqueville nevertheless asserted that equality was the axial principle on which everything in the nation turned...

...An important cultural resource was rediscovered...

...While noting that in Paris Tocqueville had two research assistants and probably drew upon such relevant information as was available to him, Schleifer also is aware that Democracy in America reflected an audacious burst of intelligence...

...Tocqueville did not visit a single college and wrote almost nothing about education—valued by many 19th-century Americans and, in the 20th century, often the testing-ground for issues of race, equality and federalism...

...He had outlined the nightmare of a mass society that obliterates political liberty a century earlier...

...Hailed during his lifetime as a successor to Montesquieu, Tocqueville is now lavishly compared to Marx...

...here people enjoy the most pallid happiness that one can imagine...

...In addition, Schleifer's work suffers a little by comparison with the 1938 study by Pierson, who became his teacher...

...Too fearful of the democratic prospect to be enchanted with America, Tocqueville was wise enough to know that the appeal of equality was too powerful to be stopped —it could only be regulated and restrained...

...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies, Brandeis Univesity When Alexis de Tocqueville disembarked in New York in 1831, he was only 25 years old, a minor French official recently demoted by the July Monarchy...

...Resurrection came late...

...Coming from a country that has traditionally been badly governed yet well-administered, he was fascinated by federalism, but failed to grasp the importance of the two-party system...

...ostensibly to study the penal system for their government —their first stop was Sing Sing—Tocqueville returned home inspired by another mission: to create "a new science of politics" that would make sense not only of the United States but of democracy itself...