The change in our society from Tocquevillean democratic liberty to government-enforced egalitarianism was the result of broader, deeper, and more corrupting trends than a specific change in the Constitution.

The Good and Bad of Democracy

by Bruce Frohnen

I’ve been rereading Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterful Democracy in America. This book, written in the first half of the nineteenth century by a French aristocrat for his countrymen, remains standard reading for American college students and even some of their professors. In a way it is too bad that we tend to read it as Americans, as if it were written for Americans. The problem with this bit of (entirely understandable) self-involvement is that it blinds us to just how unique—even odd—the United States is in global and historical perspective.

Tocqueville knew how odd we were, and this knowledge helped him to analyze and highlight what made it possible for us to combine two important but usually contradictory principles of public life: democracy and ordered liberty. To make sense of this achievement, one first must understand what Tocqueville meant by “democracy.” Tocqueville often referred to “the sovereignty of the people” in a way that comports with democracy as majority rule through representatives. But this purely political definition in no way captures all Tocqueville meant. For Tocqueville, our “democracy” was as much social, and even economic, as it was political. Equality of condition—in terms of how much formal political power each American citizen had, but also in terms of how they were treated by the laws, their roles and respect in social life, and even their wealth—was, according to Tocqueville, a defining characteristic of American life.

Living in our liberal, post-Marxian age, most Americans today would emphasize how unequal Americans were in the nineteenth century. In addition to the scandal of slavery, many Americans would point to the great families (the Washingtons and the Lees, to name but two) and the seemingly stratified hierarchies of early American social life, with its mechanics, farm workers, and semi-aristocratic landholders. But the French aristocrat Tocqueville was astonished by just how equal Americans were, and how equally they were treated by their governments and by one another.

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