Introduction
Among the many new things that caught my attention during my time in the United States, nothing struck me more forcefully than the general equality of conditions. I quickly came to see the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts on the whole of society: it shapes public opinion, gives a particular character to the laws, introduces new principles to those who govern, and instills distinctive habits in those who are governed.
I soon realized that the influence of this fact reaches far beyond the country's political character and its laws, and that it holds no less sway over civil society than over government itself. It shapes opinions, generates feelings, guides the ordinary practices of daily life, and transforms whatever it does not itself create.
The more I advanced in my study of American society, the more I came to see that equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to flow, and the central point at which all my observations consistently arrived.
I then turned my attention to our own hemisphere, where I thought I could make out something analogous to the spectacle the New World had presented to me. I observed that equality of conditions is progressing daily toward those extreme limits it seems to have reached in the United States, and that the democracy governing American communities appears to be rising rapidly into power in Europe as well.
From this came the idea for the book now before the reader.
It is clear to everyone that a great democratic revolution is underway among us, but there are two very different opinions about its nature and consequences. To some, it appears to be a novel accident, one that might still be checked; to others, it seems irresistible, because it is the most consistent, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency to be found in history.
Consider the situation of France seven hundred years ago, when the territory was divided among a small number of families who owned the land and ruled its inhabitants. The right to govern passed down with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which one person could act on another; and landed property was the sole source of power.
Before long, however, the political power of the clergy took root and began to assert itself. The Church opened its ranks to all classes: to the poor and the rich, the peasant and the lord. Equality entered government through the Church, and the man who as a serf would have spent his life in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest among nobles, and not infrequently above the heads of kings.
As society gradually grew more stable and more civilized, the relationships between people became increasingly complex and numerous. The need for civil laws made itself felt, and a class of legal professionals soon emerged from the obscurity of courtrooms and dusty chambers to take their place at the monarch's court, standing alongside feudal barons in their ermine robes and armor.
While kings were bankrupting themselves through grand ambitions and nobles were draining their resources in private wars, the lower classes were growing wealthy through commerce. Money began to make its influence felt in affairs of state. Business transactions opened a new path to power, and the financier rose to a position of political influence where he was simultaneously flattered and looked down upon.
Gradually, the spread of education and a growing appetite for literature and art created new opportunities for talented individuals. Knowledge became a tool of government, intellectual ability led to social standing, and the man of letters found himself involved in the affairs of state.
The value placed on the privileges of birth declined in direct proportion to the opening of new paths to advancement. In the eleventh century, noble status was beyond price; by the thirteenth, it could be bought; it was conferred for the first time in 1270, and equality was thus introduced into government by the aristocracy itself.
Over the course of those seven hundred years, it sometimes happened that the nobles, seeking to resist the authority of the Crown or to weaken their rivals, granted the people a certain share of political rights. Or, more often, the king allowed the lower classes a degree of power, with the deliberate aim of keeping the aristocracy in check.
In France, kings were always the most active and most consistent forces for leveling society. When they were strong and ambitious, they worked tirelessly to raise the common people to the level of the nobility; when they were moderate or weak, they allowed the people to rise above them. Some advanced democracy through their talents, others through their vices. Louis XI and Louis XIV reduced every rank below the throne to the same subjection; Louis XV descended, along with his entire Court, into the dust.
Once land could be held on terms other than feudal tenure, and personal property began to confer influence and power in its own right, every improvement in commerce or manufacturing became a new force for equality. From that point on, every new discovery, every new need it created, and every new desire seeking satisfaction was another step toward a universal leveling. The taste for luxury, the love of war, the pull of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart all worked together to enrich the poor and impoverish the rich.
Once the exercise of the intellect became a source of strength and wealth, every addition to science, every new truth, and every new idea had to be seen as a seed of power placed within the people's reach. Poetry, eloquence, and memory; the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts that Providence distributes with an equal hand turned to democracy's advantage. Even when these gifts belonged to democracy's enemies, they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of humanity. Democracy's conquests therefore spread alongside those of civilization and knowledge, and literature became an arsenal where even the poorest and weakest could always find weapons ready to hand.
In browsing through the pages of our history, we will scarcely find a single great event in the span of seven hundred years that has not worked to the advantage of equality.
The Crusades and the wars with England decimated the nobility and divided their estates; the rise of towns introduced an element of democratic liberty into the heart of feudal monarchy; the invention of firearms put the peasant and the noble on equal footing on the battlefield; the printing press opened the same intellectual resources to every class; the postal system was organized to bring the same information to the door of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all people are equally capable of finding the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune and placed wealth and power within reach of the adventurous and the obscure.
If we look at what has happened in France at fifty-year intervals, beginning with the eleventh century, we will consistently find that a twofold revolution has taken place in the structure of society. The noble has descended on the social ladder while the commoner has climbed; one falls as the other rises. Every half-century brings them closer together, and they will very soon meet.
Nor is this phenomenon unique to France. Wherever we turn our eyes, we witness the same ongoing revolution throughout the whole of Christendom.
The various events of national life have everywhere worked to the advantage of democracy; all people have contributed to it through their actions: those who labored for it intentionally and those who served it without knowing it; those who fought for it and those who declared themselves its opponents. All have been swept along the same path, all have worked toward the same end, some unknowingly and some unwillingly. All have been blind instruments in the hands of God.
The gradual development of equal conditions is therefore a providential fact, possessing all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is enduring, it constantly eludes human interference, and all events as well as all people contribute to its progress.
Would it be wise, then, to imagine that a social movement reaching back so far in history could be stopped by the efforts of a single generation? Is it believable that the same democratic force which destroyed the feudal system and brought down kings will show respect for the citizen and the capitalist? Will it stop now, when it has grown so powerful and its opponents so weak?
No one can say where we are headed, because we have no adequate terms of comparison. The equality of conditions is more complete in the Christian nations of today than it has ever been, at any time or in any part of the world, and the sheer scale of what already exists prevents us from foreseeing what may still be to come.
This entire book was written under the weight of a kind of religious dread that the contemplation of so unstoppable a revolution produced in the author's mind: a revolution that has advanced for centuries despite extraordinary obstacles, and that continues even now amid the ruins it has left behind.
God does not need to speak directly for us to recognize the unmistakable signs of His will. We can discern them in the ordinary course of nature and in the consistent tendency of events. I know, without any special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the Creator's hand.
If the people of our time were led by careful observation and honest reflection to acknowledge that the gradual, progressive rise of social equality is both the past and the future of their history, this single truth would give the change the sacred character of a divine decree. To resist democracy in that case would be to resist the will of God, and nations would then be compelled to make the best of the social condition Providence had assigned them.
The Christian nations of our age present what strikes me as a deeply alarming spectacle. The force carrying them forward is too strong to be stopped, but not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided. Their fate is still in their hands; wait a little longer, and it may no longer be so.
The first duty now imposed on those who govern is to educate democracy: to strengthen its faith, if that is possible; to purify its morals; to direct its energies; to replace inexperience with practical knowledge, and blind impulse with a clear understanding of its true interests; to fit its government to the time and place, and to adjust it as circumstances and the people of the age require.
A new science of politics is essential for a new world.
Yet this is precisely what we think about least. Launched into the middle of a swift current, we stubbornly fix our eyes on the ruins still visible on the shore we have left behind, while the current sweeps us along and drives us backward toward the abyss.
In no country in Europe has the great social revolution I have been describing advanced so rapidly as in France, yet it has always been driven by chance rather than design. Those who led the state never anticipated its demands, and its victories were won without their consent or even their awareness. The most powerful, most intelligent, and most morally serious classes of the nation never tried to align themselves with it in order to guide it. The people were consequently left to their own wild impulses, growing up like outcasts who receive their education in the streets and know nothing of society except its vices and miseries. The existence of a democracy was barely acknowledged when, suddenly, it seized supreme power. Everything was then surrendered to its whims; it was worshipped as an idol of strength, until, weakened by its own excesses, the legislators conceived the reckless plan of destroying its power rather than educating it and correcting its faults. No effort was made to prepare it for self-governance; instead, everyone was focused on shutting it out of government entirely.
The result is that the democratic revolution has transformed only the material structures of society, without the corresponding changes in laws, ideas, customs, and manners that were needed to make such a revolution genuinely beneficial. We have acquired democracy, but without the conditions that soften its flaws and bring out its natural advantages. Though we can already see the harms it produces, we remain blind to the benefits it might offer.
While the power of the Crown, backed by the aristocracy, governed the nations of Europe in relative peace, society possessed, amid all its hardships, certain distinct advantages that are now almost impossible to appreciate or even imagine.
The power held by part of his subjects formed an insurmountable barrier against the prince's tyranny; and the monarch, who sensed the almost divine character that the common people attributed to him, found in that reverence a motive for using his power justly.
Elevated as they were above the people, the nobles could not help taking a calm and benevolent interest in the people's fate, much as a shepherd feels toward his flock. Without treating the poor as equals, they watched over the destiny of those whose welfare Providence had placed in their care.
The people, having never imagined a social order different from their own, and expecting no chance of ever rising to the level of their chiefs, received benefits from them without questioning their rights. They grew attached to their lords when those lords were clement and just, and they submitted without resistance or servility to their demands, accepting them as the inevitable visitations of God's hand. Custom and the manners of the age had, moreover, created a kind of law within the midst of violence, and established certain limits to oppression.
Since the noble never suspected that anyone would try to strip him of the privileges he considered legitimate, and since the serf regarded his own inferiority as a consequence of nature's immutable order, it is easy to see how a genuine exchange of goodwill could develop between two classes so differently gifted by fate. Inequality and wretchedness existed in that society, but the souls of neither class were degraded by them.
Men are not corrupted by the exercise of power, nor debased by the habit of obedience; they are corrupted by exercising a power they believe to be illegitimate, and debased by obeying a rule they regard as usurped and oppressive.
On one side stood wealth, strength, and leisure, accompanied by the refinements of luxury, elegance of taste, the pleasures of wit, and the religion of art. On the other stood labor and rough ignorance; yet even among this coarse and unlettered multitude, it was not uncommon to find energetic passions, generous sentiments, deep religious convictions, and independent virtues.
A State organized along these lines could take pride in its stability, its power, and above all, its glory.
But the scene has now changed. Gradually, the two ranks are merging; the divisions that once separated humanity are breaking down; property is being divided, power is held in common, the light of knowledge spreads, and the capacities of all classes are cultivated equally. The State becomes democratic, and the rule of democracy is slowly and peacefully woven into the institutions and customs of the nation.
I can imagine a society in which all people profess an equal attachment to and respect for the laws they have collectively authored; in which the authority of the State is respected as necessary, though not as sacred; and in which loyalty to the chief magistrate is not a passion, but a calm and rational conviction. When every individual holds rights they are certain to keep, a kind of confident self-reliance and mutual courtesy naturally arises among all classes, equally free from arrogance and servility.
A people well acquainted with its true interests would recognize that, in order to enjoy the benefits of society, it must also meet society's demands. In such a state of affairs, the voluntary cooperation of citizens could replace the individual efforts of the nobility, and the community would be protected equally from anarchy and from oppression.
I admit that a democratic state built on these principles won't be static; but the energy of society can be guided and directed forward. If there is less splendor than in the halls of an aristocracy, there will also be less stark misery; pleasures may be less extravagant, but comfort will be more widely shared; the sciences may be less rigorously cultivated, but ignorance will be far less common; the intensity of feeling will be tempered, and the habits of the nation will grow more refined; there will be more vices, perhaps, but fewer crimes.
Without the fuel of enthusiasm or deep religious conviction, great sacrifices can still be drawn from citizens by appealing to their reason and experience. Each person will feel the same need to unite with fellow citizens in order to protect against their own vulnerability; and knowing that others will only help if he contributes in return, he will quickly see that his personal interest and the common interest are one and the same.
The nation as a whole may be less brilliant, less glorious, and perhaps less powerful; but the majority of its citizens will enjoy greater prosperity, and the people will remain peaceful, not because they have given up hope of improvement, but because they recognize the genuine advantages of their situation.
If not all the consequences of this arrangement were good or useful, society would at least have secured everything that was. And having once and for all given up the social advantages of aristocracy, humanity would come into full possession of everything democracy has to offer.
But here a question naturally arises: what have we put in place of those institutions, those ideas, and those customs of our ancestors that we have left behind?
The spell of royalty is broken, but nothing has replaced it with the majesty of law; the people have learned to despise all authority, yet fear now extracts more obedience than reverence and love ever did.
I see clearly that we have destroyed those independent institutions capable of standing up to tyranny on their own; but it is the government that has inherited the privileges stripped from families, corporations, and individuals. The weakness of the whole community has replaced the influence of a small class of citizens which, if sometimes oppressive, was often a stabilizing force.
The division of property has narrowed the gap between rich and poor; but the closer they draw to each other, the deeper their mutual hatred seems to grow, and the more fierce the envy and dread with which they contest each other's claims to power. Neither class has any real sense of rights, and both treat force as the only argument available today and the only guarantee worth trusting tomorrow.
The poor man carries the prejudices of his ancestors without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues. He has adopted self-interest as his guiding principle without understanding the discipline that keeps it in check, and his selfishness is no less blind than his former devotion once was.
If society is calm, it is not because it trusts in its own strength and well-being, but because it knows its own weakness and fragility. A single serious blow might cost it everything. Everyone senses the problem, but no one has the courage or energy to seek a remedy. The desires, regrets, sorrows, and joys of the age produce nothing visible or lasting, like the passions of old men that end only in helplessness.
We have abandoned whatever advantages the old order once offered, without gaining anything in return. We destroyed an aristocracy, and we seem content to stand among its ruins, as if we intend to make our home there.
The state of intellectual life is no less troubling. French democracy, either obstructed in its progress or left to its own unchecked impulses, has toppled everything in its path and shaken whatever it hasn't destroyed outright. Its hold on society wasn't established gradually or peacefully; it advanced constantly through disorder and the turbulence of open conflict. In the heat of the struggle, each partisan is pushed beyond his own convictions by the opinions and excesses of his opponents, until he loses sight of what he was fighting for and speaks in ways that conceal his true feelings and deeper instincts. This is the source of the strange confusion we are witnessing today.
I can't think of a moment in history more deserving of sorrow and pity than the scenes unfolding before us now. It is as if the natural bond connecting a person's opinions to his tastes, and his actions to his principles, has been severed. The sympathy that has always existed between human feelings and human ideas seems to have dissolved entirely, and all the laws of moral coherence appear to have been swept away.
Zealous Christians can be found among us whose minds are shaped by love of God and hope in eternal life, and who readily champion the cause of human liberty as the source of all moral greatness. Christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of God, can hardly refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal before the law. Yet, by a strange convergence of circumstances, religion has become entangled with the very institutions that democracy attacks, and it is frequently pushed into rejecting the equality it loves, and into cursing the cause of liberty as an enemy, when it could instead sanctify that cause through its embrace.
Beside these religious men I see others whose eyes are fixed more on the earth than on heaven. They are champions of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but above all as the foundation of every lasting advantage; and they sincerely wish to extend its reach and share its benefits with humanity. It is natural that they should turn to religion for support, since they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. But they have seen religion standing in the ranks of their opponents, and they look no further. Some attack it openly, while the rest are too afraid to defend it.
In earlier ages, slavery was championed by the corrupt and the servile, while the independent and the warm-hearted struggled without hope to preserve human freedom. But today one meets men of noble and generous character whose convictions contradict their instincts, and who praise a servility they have never personally experienced. Others, by contrast, speak in the name of liberty as though they genuinely feel its sanctity and its majesty, and loudly demand for humanity those rights they have always privately scorned.
There are virtuous, peaceable individuals whose moral integrity, quiet habits, comfortable circumstances, and genuine talents make them natural leaders of the communities around them. Their love of country is sincere, and they would willingly make great sacrifices for its welfare. Yet they cannot separate the abuses of civilization from its benefits, and in their minds the idea of evil is bound up inseparably with the idea of change.
Not far from this group stands another faction, whose aim is to reduce humanity to purely material concerns: to pursue what is convenient without asking what is just, to acquire knowledge without faith, and prosperity without virtue. These people claim the title of champions of modern civilization, occupying a position they have seized with arrogance and from which their own unworthiness will eventually drive them out.
So where does that leave us?
The religious are enemies of liberty, while the friends of liberty attack religion. The high-minded and noble advocate submission, while the most servile and base preach independence. Honest, enlightened citizens oppose all progress, while men without patriotism or principles set themselves up as apostles of civilization and reason.
Has this always been the fate of the ages before our own? Has humanity always lived in a world like this one, where nothing holds together, where virtue exists without genius and genius without honor, where the love of order is confused with a taste for oppression and the sacred cause of freedom with contempt for law, where the light that conscience casts on human actions grows dim, and where nothing seems any longer to be forbidden or permitted, honorable or shameful, false or true?
I cannot believe, however, that the Creator made humanity only to leave it locked in endless struggle with the intellectual miseries that surround us. God has destined a calmer and more certain future for the communities of Europe. I don't know His designs, but I will not stop believing in them simply because I cannot fully grasp them. I would sooner doubt my own understanding than His justice.
There is a country in the world where the great revolution I am describing seems to have nearly reached its natural limits. It has been carried out with ease and simplicity; or rather, this country has arrived at the consequences of the democratic revolution we are still undergoing, without having lived through the revolution itself.
The emigrants who settled on the shores of America at the beginning of the seventeenth century severed the democratic principle from all the forces that had suppressed it in the old communities of Europe, and transplanted it, undiluted, into the New World. There it was allowed to spread in complete freedom and to work out its consequences in law and in the shaping of social customs.
It seems to me beyond doubt that sooner or later we will arrive, as the Americans have, at an almost complete equality of conditions. But I don't conclude from this that we will necessarily be driven to draw the same political conclusions that Americans have drawn from a similar social order. I am far from assuming they have chosen the only form of government that a democracy can adopt. Nevertheless, the fact that the same underlying forces have shaped both the laws and the customs of these two countries is reason enough to take an intense interest in understanding what those forces have produced in each of them.
My purpose in examining America was not simply to satisfy a reasonable curiosity. I wanted to find lessons from which we might actually learn. Anyone who imagines I set out to write a celebration of American life would be badly mistaken, as a reading of this book will quickly confirm. Nor was it my goal to champion any particular form of government, since I believe that absolute excellence is rarely found in any system of laws. I did not even attempt to argue whether the social revolution, which I consider unstoppable, is ultimately good or bad for humanity. I accepted this revolution as something already accomplished, or on the verge of being so, and I chose the nation among those that had undergone it where its development had been most peaceful and most complete. My aim was to understand its natural consequences and, where possible, to identify the means by which it might be made to work in our favor. I will admit that in America I saw something larger than America itself. I was searching for a portrait of democracy as such: its tendencies, its character, its blind spots, and its passions, so that we might understand what we have to fear or to hope from its advance.
In the first part of this work, I have tried to show the direction that democracy gives to the laws in America, where it operates almost without restraint, following its own instincts. I have traced the course it sets for government and the influence it exerts on public affairs. I have looked for both the harms and the benefits it produces. I have examined the safeguards Americans have put in place to guide it, as well as those they have neglected, and I have tried to identify the conditions that allow it to hold society together.
It was my intention to depict, in a second volume, how the equality of conditions and democratic rule shape the civil society, habits, ideas, and manners of the Americans. I find myself, however, growing less eager to complete that project now that my friend and travelling companion Mr. de Beaumont has given his excellent work to the world. I cannot say whether I have succeeded in conveying what I actually saw in America, but I am certain that this was my sincere aim, and that I have never, knowingly, bent the facts to fit my ideas rather than shaping my ideas to fit the facts.
Whenever a point could be established through written evidence, I went back to the original sources and the most authoritative works available. I have cited my references in the notes, and anyone is welcome to consult them. Whenever I was dealing with an opinion, a political custom, or an observation about the country's character, I made every effort to consult the most knowledgeable people I encountered. If the matter was important or uncertain, I didn't rely on a single account but formed my view from multiple sources. Here the reader must simply take me at my word. I could often have cited names, either already familiar to the reader or deserving to be, in support of what I claim; but I have deliberately avoided doing so. A stranger often hears important truths by the fireside of his host, truths that the host might never share with a close friend. The host confides in his guest precisely because he cannot speak openly elsewhere, and the brevity of a traveler's visit removes any fear that the confidence will be betrayed. I carefully recorded every conversation of this kind as soon as it took place, but those notes will never leave my desk. I would rather undermine the reception of my own arguments than add my name to the long list of strangers who repay generous hospitality with embarrassment and grief.
I am aware that, despite all my care, nothing will be easier than to criticize this book, if anyone ever chooses to do so.
Those readers who examine it closely will discover the central idea that connects all its parts. But the range of subjects I've had to address is enormous, and it won't be hard to set an isolated fact against the body of facts I cite, or a single idea against the broader framework of ideas I present. I hope to be read in the spirit that guided my work, and that my book will be judged by the overall impression it leaves, just as I formed my own judgments not on any single reason, but on the full weight of the evidence.
It should not be forgotten that an author who wishes to be understood is obliged to push every idea to its furthest theoretical conclusion, and often to the very edge of what is false or impractical. In active life it is sometimes necessary to set logic aside, but that is not the case in writing, and a person finds that nearly as many difficulties arise from inconsistency of language as usually arise from consistency of conduct.
I will close by pointing out myself what many readers will consider the book's principal flaw. This work was written to favor no particular views, and in composing it I had no intention of serving or attacking any party. I set out not to see things differently from others, but to look further than the parties do; and while they are busy planning for tomorrow, I have turned my thoughts toward the future.
