The Man Behind the Quotes

...Most important of all, the American people's religiosity instilled in them an innate moderation and commitment to civic duty...

...Once it was completed, Tocqueville turned his attention to politics...

...He had eyed a political career since his youth...

...Perhaps we should not be surprised...

...He was eager to assure free institutions for the French in Algeria...

...He was a classic example ofthat bumbling naïf, the intellectual in politics, the person who keeps his head in the clouds while everyone around him is stealing his shoes...

...The age of rule from above, the divine right of kings, caliphs, and nawabs, was nearing its end in the 19th century...

...Born in 1805, the third son in a family of Norman nobles that traced its roots back to William the Conqueror, Tocqueville did not come by his viewpoint naturally...

...His parents had been imprisoned during the Revolution, and his father loyally served the restored monarch as a prefect and a peer...

...The culminating experience in the evolution of his thinking occurred in 1831...

...But how many of us know very much about Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville beyond what is contained in his masterpiece, Democracy in America1...

...Despite their small passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar habits, they can obviously provide a practical sort of intelligence and that turns out to be enough...

...Today, with the exception of a few bizarre backwaters located around the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Tocqueville's prophecy is echoed in every country on earth, from the most genuine liberal democracy to the phoniest people's republic...

...Shortly before his death in 1859, he wrote to his wife: "We will not be replaced, as I often tell myself sadly...

...A decade later he occupied the post of Foreign Minister for a few brief months...

...For someone who entered government with progressive ideals, Tocqueville ended up wandering down some strange byways...

...Far from being an end in itself, democracy had to be hedged about lest the state trample upon the rights of despised minorities or the freedom of the individual...

...about the natives he could not have cared less...

...system and a critic...

...Paradoxically, these sentiments, the expressions of an aristocrat who grasped his lack of place in a society hurtling toward egalitarianism, give his writings their special relevance for our century...

...Years later, Tocqueville could still recall the shattering moment when he realized the values handed down to him by his parents and teachers were anachronisms: "I was seized by the blackest melancholy, then by an extreme disgust with life—though I knew nothing of life— and was almost prostrated by agitation and terror at the sight of the road that remained for me to travel in this world...

...Education in the responsibilities of citizenship was imperative...

...He was Janus-faced about the flow of events he perceived, unsentimental when he looked into the future, nostalgic and a bit mushy when he regarded the past...

...And if Democracy in A merica is one of those rare classics that continues to be read beyond college classrooms, the reason is that its author was not only the first analyst of the phenomenon but also one of the most clearsighted and profound...

...In an age when even Communist revolutionaries were convinced of Europe's mission civilisatrice, this by itself cannot be held against him...

...In its place was being substituted a completely different foundation for legitimacy: governance of, for and by the governed...

...Not by chance did he enjoy a revival in the era of the "democratic" tyrants Hitler and Stalin...

...Commenting on Claude Monet, the doyen of French Impressionism, Paul Cézanne once remarked: "Only an eye, but what an eye...

...The nation's schools had produced an enlightened populace, the best educated in the world...

...Yet to a sensitive boy, the jumble of conflicting ideas swirling through the post-Revolutionary period was a source of confusion and uncertainty, and his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire at age 16 aggravated an "all-embracing doubt...

...For the problem that he identified—who or what can legitimately stand against the will of the majority when sovereignty resides in the people—has never been satisfactorily resolved...

...On the pretext that they were examining America's prison system, he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont undertook a nine-month journey across the United States...

...For a time he seemed to be inching toward a kind of Tory socialism, with suggestions for workers' associations and the abolition of poverty...

...In America, Tocqueville saw a number of restrictions on the centralizing tendencies of popular government...

...Tocqueville understood that these habits and institutions could not be transported wholesale across the Atlantic...

...This can scarcely be called dithyrambic praise, and, as is well known, following his American adventure Tocqueville became both a champion of the U.S...

...It would be unfortunate if the rather formidable price tag prevented this book from reaching a wide audience in the United States...

...Democracy signified forhimasocial condition—not a political system— containing a potential for despotism, whether through the famous "tyranny of the majority" or a "lack of attention" on the part of the citizenry...

...Governments derive their authority from their subjects...

...Yet the aristocratic sensibility that served him so well as an author was no asset in the daily rough-and-tumble of policymaking...

...It is the political man that we have to develop in ourselves," he wrote to Beaumont...

...As the general editor in France of Tocqueville's collected works, a project expected to extend to 30 volumes, André Jardin understands there is a great deal worth knowing, and in Tocqueville: A Biography (Farrar Straus Giroux, 550 pp., $35.00), he has set down the main points in a study, already hailed in his native country, that is a model of Gallic concision and lucidity...

...Rather to his surprise, and relief, the future he saw appeared to work: "America demonstrates invincibly one thing that I had doubted up to now: that the middle classes can govern a State...

...of a world that is passing...

...The jury system and the courts imposed a respect for tradition and the law...

...The children were raised in a household that was "ultraroyalist, aristocratic, paternalistic toward the people, and little affected by the trends of the time...

...A trip to England had alerted him to the dangers to democracy posed by industrialization, and a well-known passage in the second part of Democracy in America expresses his concern over the development of a "manufacturing aristocracy...

...But if democracy was inevitable in his own country, then the groundwork for it had to be carefully laid...

...Jardin observes that the most significant bequest of Tocqueville's father was a commitment to public service, a feeling strengthened by Tocqueville's voyage to America, andin 1839 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies...

...His support of democracy, Jardin notes, was "purely intellectual" at times, a loveless acceptance of the inevitable...

...For Tocqueville, it was the chance to escape from a France destabilized by the 1830 Revolution and to gain a sense of what he conceived was ultimately in store for his own country...

...Nor was he certain that the United States offered the best model in every case...

...He was unrealistic and ineffectual...

...Tocqueville was almost as benighted about the growing working class in his own country...

...We are part...

...The Arabs, who were to be forbidden from attending schools in France, had to be taught to know their place: " It is neither useful nor responsible to allow ourMuslimsubjectsto entertain exaggerated notions of their own importance...

...A single notion shaped his entire life and thought, the belief—or, more properly, the perception—that democracy (understood as the condition of equality and the sovereignty of the people) was civilization's wave of the future, destined to overturn every other principle of social and political organization...

...The French, for one thing, were not nearly as religious as the Americans...

...The Revolution of 1848, however, sent him into a panic, throwing him back to his worst reactionary instincts: "He now voted against the limitation of the workday to 10 hours, against the abolition of the salt tax, in favor of continuing to allow men called for military service to hire substitutes instead of making military service obligatory for all—and, of course, against amnesty for those convicted during the June Days...

...He lacked the collégial personality that oils squeaky wheels...

...He was a confirmed imperialist...

...Tocqueville insisted on remaining independent, free of associations, though most of the work got done through parties and blocs...

...Out of this quite modern instance of existential dread eventually emerged Tocqueville's brilliant perception...

...American intellectuals devoured his books in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy was running amok, and his ghost reappears whenever there is a vacancy to be filled on the Supreme Court...

...In this respect, it is a pity that the great diagnostician of democracy never had occasion to read the master of interestgroup analysis, his contemporary, Karl Marx...

...His years in public life reveal him at his least attractive...

...Democracy in America was the major effort he made toward public enlightenment upon returning to France...

...An old family, in an old house that belonged to its forefathers, still enclosed and protected by the traditional respect and by memories dear to it and to the surrounding population—these are the remains of a society that is falling into dust and that will soon have left no trace.' In considering such regrets, it is necessary to remember that Tocqueville's use of language is not ours...

...Of Tocqueville it might similarly be said, "Only an idea, but what an idea...

...His high-mindedness is attractive, certainly, especially from a distance, but he failed to learn that parliamentary politics operates less through ideals than interests...

...But Tocqueville was a particularly unenlightened imperialist whose ideas, Jardin says, had their source in ultraroyalism...