2
First Principles

Democracy on the March

Later chapters in this book will explore the development and complexities of Tocqueville's major themes in social and political theory. Here our goal is to present some of the most important underlying and (mostly) unchanging concepts in his writings, to consider what might be called Tocqueville's first principles. This effort will also reveal a few of his favorite terms and habits of thinking and writing.

Tocqueville announced his most basic conviction, the ongoing democratic revolution, in both his major works. From his Introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America to the text of The Old Regime, he presented the same fundamental message. "[As] I studied American society," he wrote in 1835, "I saw more and more, in equality of conditions, the generating fact from which each particular fact seemed to derive, and I rediscovered it constantly before me as a central point where all of my observations came together. Then I turned my thought back toward our hemisphere?.?and this same democracy that reigned in American societies, appeared to me to advance rapidly toward power in Europe.?.?A great democratic revolution is taking place among us."1

He then sketched a brilliant summary of 700 years of French history, linking all major events and developments to the march of democracy.2 As a theorist, Tocqueville sometimes used the concept of a main or mother idea (idée mère) that served as a central starting point and generated a host of subsequent ideas and consequences. Arguably, his thesis of an ongoing democratic revolution was the mother idea for the entire body of his work.

In 1848, in the Foreword to the twelfth edition of Democracy in America, he reaffirmed this basic principle by reproducing his own words from 1835: "The gradual development of equality of conditions is a providential fact;?.?it is universal, it is lasting, it escapes every day from human power; all events, like all men, serve its development."3 And in a note to The Old Regime in 1856, as he reflected on the reasons for the decline of feudal institutions, he again asserted: "[The] general cause was the passage from one social state to another, from feudal inequality to democratic equality."4

Tocqueville's consistency over three decades is noteworthy, but his declarations also illustrate the way in which he shifted, perhaps too easily, from equality of conditions, to democracy, to democratic revolution, to democratic equality, using the words almost interchangeably. And what did he mean by social state, a concept essential to his definitions of democracy, his understanding of democratic and aristocratic societies, and his explanation of equality of conditions?

Tocqueville dedicated the third chapter of the 1835 volume of Democracy to the "Social State of the Anglo-Americans," and there described the origins, development, and varieties of equality in colonial America. He began his discussion with an attempt at definition. "I will speak so frequently about the social state of the Anglo-Americans that, first and foremost, I need to say what I mean by the words social state. In my view, the social state is the material and intellectual condition in which a people finds itself in a given period. The social state is ordinarily the result of a fact, sometimes of laws, more often of these two causes together. But once it exists, it can itself be considered the first cause of most of the laws, customs and ideas that regulate the conduct of nations; what it does not produce, it modifies."5

Apparently even Tocqueville found this effort vague and unsatisfying.6 The meaning of the term remained elusive. How did social state relate to equality of conditions or to democracy? How was the "first cause" itself produced and shaped? In Tocqueville's social and political theory, this would not be the only significant concept with a plastic and ultimately indeterminate meaning. The chronic tendency to slip over firm definitions remains one of Tocqueville's inescapable mental characteristics.

Three Causes: Circumstances, Laws, and Mores

Tocqueville was never single-minded. As an historian and theorist, he recognized a host of causes when he told the story of any nation or society. Some, which he usually labeled accidental or particular, were ranked as secondary causes. These included, for example, the size of capital cities, the level of commercial activity or financial complexity, and the absence of dangerous military heroes, as well as the element of chance. In his Recollections, he summarized his viewpoint. "I believe that many important historical facts can be explained only by accidental circumstances, while many others are inexplicable, and finally, that chance - or, rather, that skein of secondary causes that we call chance because we cannot untangle them - plays a major part in everything that takes place on the world stage. But I also firmly believe that chance accomplishes nothing for which the groundwork has not been laid in advance."7

For Tocqueville, however, discovering how to explain the history, the success, or failure of any given society involved more than identifying a multitude of miscellaneous causes. As he traveled in the United States in 1831, he kept this puzzle of causation in mind and several times in his travel notes drew up preliminary lists of likely reasons why the American republic seemed to prosper and flourish.8 By 1834, as he drafted the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville settled on his ultimate explanation, naming circumstances, laws, and mores (moeurs) as the three fundamental causes for the historical path of a nation or people. Of this trinity, the most important was mores.

Circumstances, for Tocqueville, included both physical or geographic characteristics and historical beginnings and developments (origins). His definition of circumstances remained fluid, however. As he wrote Democracy in America, physical or material circumstances, including climate, geographic position, and resources, faded somewhat in favor of historical circumstances, antecedent facts, or point of departure, another of Tocqueville's favorite terms.9

In 1835, after describing the physical circumstances of North America in the opening chapter of Democracy in America, he turned his attention to history in the second chapter, "Of the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans," where he retraced the colonial laws and mores of the first inhabitants of New England.10 The search for origins even drove Tocqueville in 1833, as we have noted, to travel to England for the first time to explore the American starting point. This growing stress on point of departure would become even more striking in the 1850s as Tocqueville planned The Old Regime. His initial interest was to write about Napoleon and his Empire, but he soon realized that such a project required treatment of the causes and course of the Revolution itself. Tocqueville found himself looking at the old regime in order to uncover the roots of the events of 1789 and after. The Old Regime and the Revolution was itself testimony to the importance for Tocqueville of the point of departure and historical circumstances.

Laws in Tocqueville's thinking embraced legal and political institutions, as well as constitutional structures. The term signaled both the work of ordinary legislators and that of the makers of fundamental laws; it also called to mind the rights and duties of citizens, the organizations and activities of civil society, and the powers and functions of the various branches of government. For Tocqueville, laws meant the particular institutional and structural thicket that defined the unique contours of every society.

Mores involved an even broader cluster. "I apply [the expression mores] not only to mores strictly speaking, which could be called habits of the heart, but to the different notions that men possess, to the diverse opinions that are current among them, and to the ensemble of ideas from which the habits of the mind are formed. So by this word I understand the whole moral and intellectual state of a people."11

Among the diverse elements of mores, ideas held a privileged and increasingly important place in Tocqueville's analysis. Ideas could drive history. In 1835 he stressed the seminal influence of Puritanism on the future of the American republic. In his Recollections and related speeches and letters, socialist theories played a similar key role in producing the events of 1848, especially the terrible June Days of violent class warfare. And in The Old Regime, the social and political schemes of the philosophes, the men of letters of the eighteenth century, worked powerfully to cause and to shape the nature of the French Revolution. For Tocqueville, it can be argued, habits of the mind - opinions, beliefs, notions, theories, ideas - were as significant as habits of the heart, an understanding of mores sometimes overlooked by his readers.

In the 1835...