In America, Andrew Jackson was an influential political figure in molding Tocqueville's impressions of American political life. Bode, Carl, ed. American Life in the 's. Cosentino, Andrew J.
Washington: Library of Congress, Grimstead, David, ed. Notions of the Americans: New York: George Braziller, Lacour-Gayet, Robert. New York: Ungar Publishing Company, Langdon, William Chauncy. Everyday Things in American Life: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, Larkin, Jack.
The Reshaping of Everyday Life: HarperPerennial, Minnigerode, Meade. New York: G. Putnam's Sons, Pierson, George Wilson. Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. New York: Oxford University Press, Trollope, Frances. The most important part is the second activity below and the most time should be spent on it.
Have a student read out loud the first three paragraphs of the Introduction. Follow this with a brief discussion of this passage, beginning with the question, what is it about America that most impressed Tocqueville?
But he does describe in broad strokes how important it is, and the students should get some appreciation of this. Ask them what the equality of conditions is responsible for in America.
Students should be able to say several things about this, but one thing they should notice is that it is not the same thing as democracy. Equality of conditions influences and may give rise to democracy, but it is something deeper and more powerful than any particular form of government. To answer this question, Tocqueville gives us a thumbnail sketch of French history over the past seven hundred years. The core of the lesson is what Tocqueville says in this history in the next two and a half pages.
For most of this passage, each paragraph elaborates a different thing that has contributed to the advancement of equality. Have students read and discuss this passage. Students should understand how the thing Tocqueville is discussing e. Students will have their lists to consult and the teacher may want to develop a running list on the blackboard or whiteboard. The first paragraph of the history gives a brief sketch of Europe at that time, before the great movement towards equality began.
For example, Tocqueville says that a few families had a monopoly on political power. Moreover, their power is a certain kind, being tied to the possession of land feudal estates and passing from one person to another in the same family only by inheritance.
These arrangements guarantee that only a very few people have a share of political power — the king and the nobles or aristocrats warriors ; all the rest are peasants or serfs working the land. There is absolutely no equality between a king and a noble, on the one hand, or between a noble and a serf, on the other. In the paragraphs that follow, Tocqueville describes the important developments and events usually one for each paragraph that gradually undermined the feudal system and transformed Europe in the direction of social equality.
After having a student read a paragraph, have the class discuss it, asking how the development or event fostered or encouraged equality. Americans are so used to thinking that church and state should be separate, that we might wonder how it can be a good thing i.
Tocqueville suggests two answers. Tocqueville was the first political writer to bring together the newly-invented modern understanding of civil society with the old Greek category of democracy; and he was the first to say that a healthy democracy makes room for civil associations that function as schools of public spirit, permanently open to all, within which citizens become acquainted with others, learn their rights and duties as equals, and press home their concerns, sometimes in opposition to government, so preventing the tyranny of minorities by herd-like majorities through the ballot box.
Through their participation in civil associations, they come to feel themselves to be citizens. Tocqueville called upon his readers to understand democracy as a brand new type of self-government defined not just by elections, parties and government by representatives, but also by the extensive use of civil society institutions that prevent political despotism by placing a limit, in the name of equality, upon the scope and power of government itself.
Tocqueville also pointed out that these civil associations had radical social implications. Under democratic conditions, civil society never stands still. It is a sphere of restlessness, civic agitation, refusals to cooperate, struggles for improved conditions, the incubator of visions of a more equal society.
Readers of Democracy in America often brush aside this point. While they admit that Tocqueville was well aware that democracy is prone to self-contradiction and self-destruction, they note that he tended to exaggerate the momentum and geographic extent of the busy levelling process that was underway in America. According to this view, Tocqueville, who was blessed with a remarkable sixth sense of probing the difference between appearances and realities, sometimes, when looking at life in the United States, swallowed whole its own best self-image.
Consider the Italian fashion of visiting the new democratic republic, to see what it was like. The same visitor was struck by the way American citizens casually wore caps and hats, how they spurned moustaches, chewed tobacco, and liked to chew the fat, hands in pockets.
Truth, always truth. No prejudices, no red tape. Tocqueville was much less sanguine about the fledgling American democracy.
Many of his observations were both astute and prescient, for instance concerning the grave political problem of slavery. Tocqueville was perhaps the first writer to show at length why modern representative democracy could not live with slavery, as classical assembly-based democracy had managed to do, admittedly with some discomfort. Black people in America were neither in nor of civil society. They were objects of gross incivility.
Legal and informal penalties against racial intermarriage were severe. In those states where slavery had been abolished, black people who dared to vote, or to serve on juries, were threatened with murder. There was segregation and deep inequality in education. Lurking within these racist customs was a disturbing paradox, Tocqueville observed.
The prejudice directed at black people, he noted, increases in proportion to their formal emancipation. Slavery in America was in this sense much worse than in ancient Greece, where the emancipation of slaves for military purposes was encouraged by the fact that their skin colour was often the same as that of their masters. By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. If liberty be refused to the Negroes of the South, they will in the end forcibly seize it for themselves; if it be given, they will long abuse it.
He was right as well to be anxious about the magnitude of the problem. By , at least ten million African slaves had arrived in the New World. Some , had settled in North America, but their numbers had multiplied rapidly, to the point where all the states south of the Mason-Dixon line were slave societies, in the full sense of the term. Even in New England, where there were comparatively few slaves, the economy was rooted in the slave trade with the West Indies.
They cleared forests, turned the soil, planted and tendered and harvested the exportable crops that brought great prosperity to the slave-owning classes. So successful was the system of slavery that after Southern politicians and landowners and their supporters within the federal government agitated for its universal adoption.
As a mode of production, and as a whole way of life, slavery went on the warpath, as Abraham Lincoln made clear in his not inaccurate claim that Slave Power was hell-bent on taking over the whole country, North as well as South. The aggressiveness of Slave Power during the s and s disturbed the dreams of some Americans; it forced them to conclude that the American polity required a re-founding.
Reasoning with their democratic hearts, they spotted that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of free and equal citizenship. These same opponents of slavery were to some degree aware of a contradiction that lurked within the contradiction. In the end, as we know, armed force decided, bringing with it four years of terrible misery. An ugly struggle between two huge armies that locked horns 10, times, the Civil War was the first recorded war between two aspiring representative democracies, whose political elites were prone to think of themselves as defenders of two incompatible definitions of democracy.
The conflict was in a way a clash between two different historical eras. The travelers returned to France in Tocqueville was impressed by much of what he saw in American life, admiring the stability of its economy and wondering at the popularity of its churches. He blamed the French Revolution on corruption among the nobility and on the political disillusionment of the French population.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Before the war, he worked to strengthen ties with Great Britain and Russia against the growing threat of In that time, he transformed the monarchy, ushered in a golden age of art and literature, presided over a dazzling royal court at
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