Democracy in America: Translated, Edited, and With an Introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

## CONTENTS the state of nature. Tocqueville, however, does not build his understanding of democracy on the liberal state of nature first conceived by Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke. He does not refer to that concept in Democracy in America.18 He also was far from developing a "philosophy of history" in the thoroughgoing manner of the German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770Hegel ( -1831)). 19 But his liberalism, while totally lacking in Hegel's confidence that history was progress in reason, joined in his protest against abstract, state-of-nature liberalism. From Tocqueville's viewpoint, even Madison's liberalism seemed lacking in concrete observation of America, above all of the democratic revolution there. In Federalist 10, Madison's most famous statement of his liberalism, he distinguishes a democracy from a republic. A democracy is popular government in which the people rule directly, as in ancient cities; and a republic is one in which the people rule indirectly through their representatives, who "refine and enlarge" their views. The system of representation was largely unknown to the ancients and was invented by modern political science, says Alexander Hamilton, helpfully, in Federalist 9. Representation works best, Madison continues, in large, heterogeneous countries with many conflicting interests and sects that make it difficult to form a majority faction, the bane of popular government. Tocqueville does not share Madison's confidence that the problem can be solved. He fears majority tyranny in America and actually sees it at work there in public opinion. For him, the danger is not so much factious interest or passion as the degradation of souls in democracy, a risk to which Madison does not directly refer but which Tocqueville states prominently in his Introduction to Democracy in America. As a sign of his fear, he habitually calls the American government a "democratic republic," thus spanning and overriding the distinction that Madison was at pains to establish. A modern republic, Tocqueville means to say, cannot help being a democracy, and a modern democracy necessarily has a hard task in getting equal citizens to accept authority without feeling they have been subjected and degraded. Madison's reliance on the state of nature was a way of avoiding examination of the human soul, for in that early liberal concept the soul disappears as a whole while being divided into disconnected passions such as fear, vanity, or pity. Tocqueville looks at the whole soul and at all of democracy. He considers individual, society, and government as involved with one another without the simplifying state-of-nature abstraction. Among other liberals of Tocqueville's time we cannot omit the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who wrote long reviews saluting the two volumes of Democracy in America as they appeared in 1835 and 1840. After the first of these Tocqueville exclaimed to Mill: "Of all the articles written on my book, yours is the only one in which the author mastered my thought perfectly and was able to display it to the regard of others."20 At Mill's invitation Tocqueville wrote an essay, "Political and Social Condition of France Before and Since 1789," published in The London and Westminster Review in 1836, and he exchanged letters with Mill for the rest of his life. But there remain pronounced differences between Mill and Tocqueville that are evident even in the very favorable reviews Mill wrote of Tocqueville's book. These two liberals are together, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, in their appreciation of democracy, which both understand to be here to stay and welcome too. Yet Tocqueville's reservations, his criticisms, his forebodings are not shared by Mill, who in a letter confessed to Tocqueville with some understatement that his article is "a shade or two more favorable to democracy than your book."21 Mill believes, for example, that the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville warns of in the first volume of Democracy in America could be avoided "if the people entertained the right idea of democracy."22 To Tocqueville's remark that the American people cheerfully exclude the ablest men from government, Mill responds that great talents are not ordinarily needed and that "in a settled state of things, the commanding intellects will always prefer to govern mankind from their closets, by means of literature and science, leaving the mechanical details of government to mechanical minds."23 Here is wondrous confidence in the capability of intelligence to run the world, unsurprisingly combined with contempt for the actual operation of self-government, of which Tocqueville made so much. Mill's partisanship for democracy, warmer than Tocqueville's, depends on his confidence that the commanding intellects will direct it. They will do that through representative government, keeping the flow of influence moving from the intellects to the people and not in reverse, from the people to the intellects, as Tocqueville saw it. For Mill, in contrast to Tocqueville, representative government would not be overwhelmed by democracy, and in contrast to Constant and Guizot, it did not have to fear democracy. Thus Mill felt free to call for more democracy and to press the case against aristocracy, for he, unlike Tocqueville, regarded aristocracy as a present menace still impeding the progress of civilization. It may be doomed, but only if it is hastened along to extinction. In Mill's view the best minds could ensure their ascendancy by demanding more democracy, for democracy aided by representation does not threaten to cause debasement of intelligence or cultural deprivation. The people, Mill believed against Tocqueville, will not insist on their sovereignty. At the same time, the commanding intellects will govern or direct but not dominate society, because their intellects keep them impartial. Representative democracy promises in sum that a free society will be without a dominant power, effectively classless. It is a pretty picture, attractive to liberals in Mill's day and ours, but it is not Tocqueville's. He did not think that society could exist without a sovereign power or that intellects would be unaffected by democracy (see DA II 1, as a whole). Yet he somehow gives the impression of being as impartial as Mill. He sees democracy and aristocracy as distinct and contrasting social states. Democracy is more just than aristocracy since it relies less on compulsion, but it nonetheless has its own character and its own stamp, he shows, that leave their mark effortlessly by consent and insinuation. Constant accepted the advent of popular sovereignty in the French Revolution, but he thought it could be restrained. The error of the Revolution, again, was to impose an anachronistic, illiberal democracy, derived from the ancient polis, on modern individuals who need only to be represented, not ruled. But the unintended consequence of this thought is to absolve modern democracy for crimes committed when it forgot itself during the Revolution, and then to imply that it has no ills of its own. It is as if all it needs to resolve its problems is self-doubt supplied by liberal thinkers and expressed through parliamentary opposition. Guizot, too, underestimated the power of modern democracy. He believed (as did Tocqueville) that merit would have its way in modern democracy because individual talent and the social power to which it gives rise cannot be denied. But he failed to see that mediocrity would also have its way in modern democracy. Constant, Guizot, Madison, Mill: all were confident that liberal rationality could contain the sovereign wills that liberalism set loose when it denied any basis to traditional authority. Tocqueville stands out from other nineteenth-century liberals by refusing to accept either a safe distancing of freedom from democracy or an easy convergence of the two. ## PAS CAL, MONTES QUIEU, AND ROUS S EAU From Tocqueville's fellow liberals, contemporaries with whom he shares an outlook, we turn to the philosophers-all French-whom he chose as daily companions. Writing in 1836 to his friend Louis de Kergorlay, he said: "There are three men with whom I live a little every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau."24 Besides being French, these are modern philosophers. Tocqueville's thinking has many points of similarity with that of the ancients; he shares their acute power of observation, their willingness to stop and reflect, their noble simplicity of judgment all the while questioning both nobility and simplicity. But although he does appreciate them as authors, and welcomes the spiritualism and moral elevation of Plato, he does not accept them as authorities or guides for modern times.25 Above all, he does not care for the best regime as they do. He does not, like the ancients, carry every discussion of the usual and the ordinary toward the best. He "places" democracy on the scale of human imperfection without a glance, it seems, to gauge the distance from utopian perfection. He is, of course, always comparing democracy to aristocracy, and always revealingly. But his "aristocracy" is the conventional aristocracy of inherited property, not the true natural aristocracy of the wise set forth in the tradition of Socrates. Come to think of it, where is Socrates in Tocqueville? In Democracy in America Socrates appears as a doctrinaire believer in the immortality of the soul, in which guise he serves both the permanent need of human greatness to be attached to an immaterial principle and the historical social state of aristocracy, now obsolete (DA II 1.15). Perhaps the questioning Socrates is also in Tocqueville himself, an ironical friend of democracy, praising virtues of which it is unaware and condemning as faults the excesses of which it is sometimes most proud. Thus Tocqueville has none of the enthusiasm of modernity in the heyday of its founding ambition. As he does not care for the rule of the wise, so too he does not believe in any scientific, methodological, or institutional substitute for the rule of the wise-the rule of the duly enlightened. Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau are modern philosophers to some extent critical of modernity. They are not captains of the first wave of the modern revolution. Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Rousseau (1712-1778) came after, and Pascal (1623-1662) kept a certain distance. We note the absence of Descartes, the unread, unacknowledged philosopher of the Americans (DA II 1.1), in Tocqueville's list of daily counselors. The founder of modern rationalism, however wonderfully French, was not to his taste. Tocqueville was convinced that a great revolution in human affairs was leading all men to one regime, democracy, but he was not persuaded that this was simply the regime of reason. Democracy for him is surely not unreason; much can be said on its behalf, and he says it. But he does not claim, as did the French revolutionaries, that it is light after darkness. Pascal was not a liberal, and it is strange to see plain marks of his influence in the thought of a liberal. Pascal tells of the vanity of human knowledge and of the misery of the human soul, conclusions in which Christianity and his philosophy converge. They are also matters that liberalism, with its faith in applied science and confidence in the self, would generally rather avoid or ignore. But Tocqueville's liberalism does not put aside yearnings of the soul and does not join in the attempt of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke to contain them and to reduce the complexity of satisfying the soul to the single task of preserving the self. Tocqueville cares little for ancient metaphysics, yet he cares less for its modern substitute, epistemology, which is designed to protect liberalism from dangerous involvement in deep questions. Thanks in good part to what he learned from Pascal, Tocqueville is a liberal with depth. This does not merely mean, as it might today, that he has picked up some psychology, and been informed of the turmoil at the bottom of the self; for that kind of depth is preparatory to a therapy that renders the soul as harmless as it was before the discovery of unreason in it. Tocqueville's depth is in his view of the soul's irremediable "restiveness" (inquiétude) that he shares with Pascal. "The condition of man," said Pascal, is "inconstancy, boredom, restiveness."26 In Democracy in America Tocqueville has a chapter on the restiveness of Americans in the midst of their well-being (DA II 2.13). Although they are the most enlightened people on earth, he says, they appear "grave and almost sad even in their pleasures." By their very enlightenment they are instructed that all goods are of this world and that many more of them are attainable than was believed in the past. So they pursue them avidly but inconstantly because they know there is always something better in the world than what they have got. Life is too short to enjoy present goods at the expense of future ones; so they keep on pursuing happiness in such manner as to assume they will never reach it. However enlightened, Americans live in a contradiction: they are attached to agrees with Rousseau that compassion is a necessary corrective to self-interest. But he does not rhapsodize over sympathetic feeling for one's fellow creatures in the Rousseauian style; he is rather cool about compassion (DA II 3.1-4). Compassion is as much an extension of self-interest as a corrective, and as such it is limited to temporary acts of kindness. The suffering of others, in fact, can add to one's own sense of impotence, thus to the deepest ill of democratic equality, which Tocqueville calls "individualism," the self-isolation induced by the belief that an individual by himself can do nothing within a mass of people ruled by vast social forces. Tocqueville shares Rousseau's disdain for the pettiness of the bourgeois. Particularly in his Souvenirs, when, recounting the faults of the regime of Louis Philippe in France (1830-1848), Tocqueville gives vent to his exasperation at a government confined to the middle class, thus timid and mediocre, and lacking in both virtue and greatness.42 But this was his private sentiment on France, not America, for a memoir not intended to be published that did not appear until 1893. In Democracy in America, intended for the public and therefore a truer statement of his teaching if not his feeling, he does not condemn. He does not oppose bourgeois to citizen or set interest against virtue in the manner of Rousseau,43 although he surely does not abandon these distinctions. He apparently welcomes the American doctrine of "self-interest well understood" (his expression for what we call "enlightened self-interest"), and clearly celebrates the American penchant for association, both of which cause self-interest to expand and to move in the direction of virtue. He is not enamored of sincerity and authenticity opposed to self-interest, as was Rousseau. Tocqueville, with his balanced appreciation of middle-class America, could never be put among the number of Rousseau's followers, on the Right as well as the Left, who condemn America as the quintessence of the bourgeois way of life. Tocqueville looks at the mix of religion with democracy, and of democracy with religion, as did Rousseau; but unlike Rousseau he does not adopt a civil religion or criticize and abandon Christianity. He praises religion as much for producing healthy, capable individuals as for strengthening community. Last, he praises Indians for their aristocratic pride, but for nothing else. In themselves they are inferior to the civilized whites and their way of life is no reproach to the sophistication of white civilization. Rather than a Rousseauian comparison of this kind, Tocqueville says quite severely that the civilized whites did not deal justly with the Indians. That treatment calls into question the superiority of civilized justice, but does not imply an endorsement of the noble savage. ## THE WRITING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA44 Before writing Democracy in America, Tocqueville took a trip to America of a little more than nine months in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866). Like Tocqueville, Beaumont was a magistrate; the two had studied law together and served on the same court at Versailles.45 In 1829 they both attended Guizot's lectures on the "history of civilization in France," a statement of the historical liberalism Tocqueville himself was to maintain.46 Then, in 1831, they came to America as collaborators in a grand project to see "what a great republic is," as Tocqueville put it in a letter to another friend.47 Tocqueville was drawn to America to observe the future society of "almost complete equality of social conditions" toward which he believed Europe was moving inexorably. Although he said later that he did not go to America with the idea of writing a book, it seems clear that he and Beaumont went with a large joint project in mind, for both refer to it in contemporaneous letters. They also had a definite smaller project to study penal reform in America, which Tocqueville described as a "pretext" for the voyage.48 But on returning to France he and Beaumont made good on the pretext and wrote a book, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which appeared soon after, in January 1833. The topic of penal reform gives evidence of the liberalism in which Tocqueville made his home, but the point made by the two authors reveals him to be characteristically at variance with the most advanced liberals. He was as much opposed to the enthusiasm of the reformers as he was in favor of reform, for which he held modest hopes. He certainly did not believe, as did the reformers, that reform could do away with crime or that it could replace punishment. During the nine-month trip in America, Tocqueville and Beaumont followed an efficient itinerary. With time out for rest, research, and conversation with useful or important Americans, they still went almost everywhere. Starting from New York they traveled upstate to Buffalo, proceeding through the Great Lakes to the frontier, as it was then, in Michigan and Wisconsin. There followed two weeks in Canada, from which they descended to Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Next they went west to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, then south to Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans, then north through the southeastern states to Washington and at last back to New York, from which they returned to France. Like tourists seeking characteristic experiences, they rode on steamboats (one of which sank) and stayed in a log cabin. EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION......Page 14 SUGGESTED READINGS......Page 72 A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION......Page 74 Volume One......Page 77 INTRODUCTION......Page 79 PART ONE......Page 90 1 External Configuration of North America......Page 91 2 On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans......Page 97 Reasons for Some Singularities That the Laws and Customs of the Anglo-Americans Present......Page 108 That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans Is Its Being Essentially Democratic......Page 111 Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans......Page 116 4 On the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America......Page 118 On the Township System in America......Page 121 Powers of the Township in New England......Page 123 On Township Existence......Page 125 On the Spirit of the Township in New England......Page 126 On the County in New England......Page 128 On Administration in New England......Page 129 General Ideas about Administration in the United States......Page 135 Legislative Power of the State......Page 138 On the Executive Power of the State......Page 139 On the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization in the United States......Page 140 6 On Judicial Power in the United States and Its Action on Political Society......Page 150 Other Powers Granted to American Judges......Page 154 7 On Political Judgment in the United States......Page 156 History of the Federal Constitution......Page 160 Summary Picture of the Federal Constitution......Page 161 Prerogatives of the Federal Government......Page 162 Legislative Powers......Page 163 Another Difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives......Page 165 On the Executive Power......Page 166 How the Position of the President of the United States Differs from That of a Constitutional King in France......Page 167 Why the President of the United States Does Not Need to Have a Majority in the Houses in Order to Direct Affairs......Page 170 On the Election of the President......Page 171 Mode of Election......Page 174 Crisis of the Election......Page 177 On the Reelection of the President......Page 178 On the Federal Courts......Page 180 Manner of Settling the Competence of the Federal Courts......Page 182 Different Cases of Jurisdiction......Page 183 Manner of Proceeding of Federal Courts......Page 186 Elevated Rank Held by the Supreme Court among the Great Powers of the State......Page 187 How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the Constitutions of the States......Page 189 What Distinguishes the Federal Constitution of the United States of America from All Other Federal Constitutions......Page 192 On the Advantages of the Federal System Generally, and Its Special Utility for America......Page 194 What Keeps the Federal System from Being within Reach of All Peoples, and What Has Permitted the Anglo-Americans to Adopt It......Page 198 PART TWO......Page 205 1 How One Can Say Strictly That in the United States the People Govern......Page 206 2 On Parties in the United States......Page 207 On the Remains of the Aristocratic Party in the United States......Page 210 3 On Freedom of the Press in the United States......Page 213 4 On Political Association in the United States......Page 220 On the Choices of the People and the Instincts of American Democracy in Its Choices......Page 226 On the Causes That Can in Part Correct These Instincts of Democracy......Page 228 Influence That American Democracy Exerts on Electoral Laws......Page 230 On Public Officials under the Empire of American Democracy......Page 231 On the Arbitrariness of Magistrates under the Empire of American Democracy......Page 233 Administrative Instability in the United States......Page 235 On Public Costs under the Empire of American Democracy......Page 236 On the Instincts of American Democracy in Fixing the Salaries of Officials......Page 239 Difficulty of Discerning the Causes That Incline the American Government to Economy......Page 240 Can the Public Expenditures of the United States Be Compared to Those of France?......Page 241 On the Corruption and Vices of Those Who Govern in Democracy; On the Effects on Public Morality That Result......Page 244 Of What Efforts Democracy Is Capable......Page 245 On the Power That American Democracy Generally Exercises over Itself......Page 247 The Manner in Which American Democracy Conducts External Affairs of State......Page 249 On the General Tendency of the Laws under the Empire of American Democracy, and on the Instinct of Those Who Apply Them......Page 252 On Public Spirit in the United States......Page 255 On the Idea of Rights in the United States......Page 257 On Respect for the Law in the United States......Page 259 Activity Reigning in All Parts of the Body Politic of the United States; Influence That It Exerts on Society......Page 261 7 On the Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects......Page 265 How the Omnipotence of the Majority in America Increases the Legislative and Administrative Instability That Is Natural to Democracies......Page 267 Tyranny of the Majority......Page 268 On the Power That the Majority in America Exercises over Thought......Page 270 Effects of the Tyranny of the Majority on the National Character of the Americans; On the Spirit of a Court in the United States......Page 273 That the Greatest Danger of the American Republics Comes from the Omnipotence of the Majority......Page 275 Absence of Administrative Centralization......Page 277 On the Spirit of the Lawyer in the United States and How It Serves as a Counterweight to Democracy......Page 278 On the Jury in the United States Considered as a Political Institution......Page 284 On the Accidental or Providential Causes Contributing to the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States......Page 289 On the Influence of the Laws on the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States......Page 296 On Religion Considered as a Political Institution; How It Serves Powerfully the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic among the Americans......Page 297 Indirect Influence That Religious Beliefs Exert on Political Society in the United States......Page 299 On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America......Page 303 How the Enlightenment, the Habits, and the Practical Experience of the Americans Contribute to the Success of Democratic Institutions......Page 308 That the Laws Serve to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States More than Physical Causes, and Mores More than Laws......Page 311 Would Laws and Mores Suffice to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere than in America?......Page 314 Importance of What Precedes in Relation to Europe......Page 317 10 Some Considerations on the Present State and the Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States......Page 321 Present State and Probable Future of the Indian Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed by the Union......Page 324 Position That the Black Race Occupies in the United States; Dangers Incurred by Whites from Its Presence......Page 335 What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last? What Dangers Threaten It?......Page 352 On Republican Institutions in the United States; What Are Their Chances of Longevity?......Page 376 Some Considerations on the Causes of the Commercial Greatness of the United States......Page 380 Conclusion......Page 386 Volume Two......Page 391 NOTICE......Page 394 INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES......Page 396 1 On the Philosophic Method of the Americans......Page 398 2 On the Principal Source of Beliefs among Democratic Peoples......Page 402 3 Why the Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas than Their English Fathers......Page 406 4 Why the Americans Have Never Been as Passionate as the French for General Ideas in Political Matters......Page 410 5 How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts......Page 412 6 On the Progress of Catholicism in the United States......Page 419 7 What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean toward Pantheism......Page 420 8 How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man......Page 421 9 How the Example of the Americans Does Not Prove That a Democratic People Can Have No Aptitude and Taste for the Sciences, Literature, and the Arts......Page 423 10 Why the Americans Apply Themselves to the Practice of the Sciences Rather than to the Theory......Page 428 11 In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts......Page 434 12 Why the Americans at the Same Time Raise Such Little and Such Great Monuments......Page 438 13 The Literary Face of Democratic Centuries......Page 440 14 On the Literary Industry......Page 445 15 Why the Study of Greek and Latin Literature Is Particularly Useful in Democratic Societies......Page 446 16 How American Democracy Has Modified the English Language......Page 448 17 On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations......Page 453 18 Why American Writers and Orators Are Often Bombastic......Page 458 19 Some Observations on the Theater of Democratic Peoples......Page 460 20 On Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries......Page 464 21 On Parliamentary Eloquence in the United States......Page 467 INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON THE SENTIMENTS OF THE AMERICANS......Page 471 1 Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom......Page 473 2 On Individualism in Democratic Countries......Page 477 3 How Individualism Is Greater at the End of a Democratic Revolution than in Any Other Period......Page 479 4 How the Americans Combat Individualism with Free Institutions......Page 480 5 On the Use That the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life......Page 484 6 On the Relation between Associations and Newspapers......Page 488 7 Relations between Civil Associations and Political Associations......Page 491 8 How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood......Page 495 9 How the Americans Apply the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood in the Matter of Religion......Page 498 10 On the Taste for Material Well-Being in America......Page 500 11 On the Particular Effects That the Love of Material Enjoyments Produces in Democratic Centuries......Page 502 12 Why Certain Americans Display Such an Exalted Spiritualism......Page 504 13 Why the Americans Show Themselves So Restive in the Midst of Their Well-Being......Page 506 14 How the Taste for Material Enjoyments among Americans Is United with Love of Freedom and with Care for Public Affairs......Page 509 15 How Religious Beliefs at Times Turn the Souls of the Americans toward Immaterial Enjoyments......Page 512 16 How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being......Page 516 17 How in Times of Equality and Doubt It Is Important to Move Back the Object of Human Actions......Page 517 18 Why among the Americans All Honest Professions Are Reputed Honorable......Page 520 19 What Makes Almost All Americans Incline toward Industrial Professions......Page 522 20 How Aristocracy Could Issue from Industry......Page 525 INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON MORES PROPERLY SO-CALLED......Page 528 1 How Mores Become Milder as Conditions Are Equalized......Page 530 2 How Democracy Renders the Habitual Relations of the Americans Simpler and Easier......Page 534 3 Why the Americans Have So Little Oversensitivity in Their Country and Show Themselves to Be So Oversensitive in Ours......Page 536 4 Consequences of the Preceding Three Chapters......Page 539 5 How Democracy Modifies the Relations of Servant and Master......Page 541 6 How Democratic Institutions and Mores Tend to Raise the Price and Shorten the Duration of Leases......Page 548 7 Influence of Democracy on Wages......Page 551 8 Influence of Democracy on the Family......Page 553 9 Education of Girls in the United States......Page 558 10 How the Girl Is Found beneath the Features of the Wife......Page 560 11 How Equality of Conditions Contributes to Maintaining Good Mores in America......Page 562 12 How the Americans Understand the Equality of Man and Woman......Page 567 13 How Equality Naturally Divides the Americans into a Multitude of Particular Little Societies......Page 570 14 Some Reflections on American Manners......Page 572 15 On the Gravity of the Americans and Why It Does Not Prevent Their Often Doing Ill-Considered Things......Page 575 16 Why the National Vanity of the Americans Is More Restive and More Quarrelsome than That of the English......Page 578 17 How the Aspect of Society in the United States Is at Once Agitated and Monotonous......Page 580 18 On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies......Page 582 19 Why One Finds So Many Ambitious Men in the United States and So Few Great Ambitions......Page 592 20 On the Industry in Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Nations......Page 597 21 Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare......Page 599 22 Why Democratic Peoples Naturally Desire Peace and Democratic Armies Naturally [Desire] War......Page 609 23 Which Is the Most Warlike and the Most Revolutionary Class in Democratic Armies......Page 614 24 What Makes Democratic Armies Weaker than Other Armies When Entering into a Campaign and More Formidable When War Is Prolonged......Page 617 25 On Discipline in Democratic Armies......Page 621 26 Some Considerations on War in Democratic Societies......Page 623 ON THE INFLUENCE THAT DEMOCRATIC IDEAS AND SENTIMENTS EXERT ON POLITICAL SOCIETY......Page 627 1 Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions......Page 629 2 That the Ideas of Democratic Peoples in the Matter of Government Are Naturally Favorable to the Concentration of Powers......Page 630 3 That the Sentiments of Democratic Peoples Are in Accord with Their Ideas to Bring Them to Concentrate Power......Page 633 4 On Some Particular and Accidental Causes That Serve to Bring a Democratic People to Centralize Power or Turn It Away from That......Page 636 5 That among European Nations of Our Day Sovereign Power Increases Although Sovereigns Are Less Stable......Page 641 6 What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear......Page 650 7 Continuation of the Preceding Chapters......Page 655 8 General View of the Subject......Page 662 AT’s NOTES......Page 665 END NOTES......Page 691 FOOTNOTES TO AT’s NOTES......Page 736 SOURCES CITED BY TOCQUEVILLE......Page 739 INDEX......Page 742 "Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its democracy. The book he wrote on his return to France, Democracy in America, is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. When it was published in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of Democracy in America--only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840--was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship." -- Provided by publisher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) came to America in 1831 to see what a great republic was like. What struck him most was the country's equality of conditions, its "democracy." The book he wrote on his return to France, "Democracy in America," is both the best ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America. It remains the most often quoted book about the United States, not only because it has something to interest and please everyone, but also because it has something to teach everyone. When it waspublished in 2000, Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop's new translation of "Democracy in America" only the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840 was lauded in all quarters as the finest and most definitive edition of Tocqueville's classic thus far. Mansfield and Winthrop have restored the nuances of Tocqueville's language, with the expressed goal "to convey Tocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." The result is a translation with minimal interpretation, but with impeccable annotations of unfamiliar references and a masterful introduction placing the work and its author in the broader contexts of political philosophy and statesmanship

The Norton Critical Edition presents Tocqueville’s classic text in the Henry Reeve translation.

Booknews

Political philosophers Mansfield (government, Harvard U.) and Winthrop (constitutional government, Harvard U.) present a new translationonly the third since the original two-volume work was published in 1835 and 1840aiming to restore the nuances of Tocqueville's language. Tocqueville himself was not satisfied with the 19th-century translation; the other, prepared in the late 1960s (Harper & Row), is cited in This translation is based on a recent critical French edition (Editions Gallimard, 1992). Mansfield and Winthrop provide a substantial introduction placing the work and its author in historical and philosophical context, as well as annotations elucidating references that are no longer familiar to readers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A contemporary study of the early American nation and its evolving democracy, from a French aristocrat and sociologist. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, set out from post-revolutionary France on a journey across America that would take him 9 months and cover 7,000 miles. The result was Democracy in America, a subtle and prescient analysis of the life and institutions of 19th-century America. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His study of the strengths and weaknesses of an evolving democratic society has been quoted by every American president since Eisenhower, and remains a key point of reference for any discussion of the American nation or the democratic system.