Unprophetic Tocqueville: how Democracy in America got the modern world completely wrong.

• Author: Choi, Daniel
• Position: Alexis de Tocqueville

Over the past few decades, as Karl Marx was thrown into the dustbin, Alexis de Tocqueville came surging back from the graveyard of intellectual history. Tocqueville's main claim to fame is as the author of Democracy in America, which was originally published in two parts, in 1835 and 1840. Owing largely to this book, he is hailed today by almost universal consensus as a thinker of virtually superhuman prescience--indeed, as the supreme oracle of the modern age. Tocqueville now enjoys "magistral status," observes one eminent commentator (Wolin 2001, 4). "No one seriously believes," writes another, "that an author, dead for more than century, can say anything to us about the novelties we face, that he can explain us to ourselves. This is precisely what Tocqueville accomplishes, it seems to me, when he elaborates the idea of democracy" (Manent 1996, xi). "By speculating in the large about democracy," writes a third, Tocqueville "far transcended the confines of his time and place" (Eisenstadt 1988, 272). The introduction of a recent translation proclaims Democracy in America "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America" (Mansfield and Winthrop 2000, xvii). Democracy in America is "summoned not only to interpret the past and present but to augur the future.... Scarcely a week passes without some quotation from Democracy in America appearing in the popular media or in literary reviews" (Wolin 2001, 4). No less than three new English translations of Democracy in America have appeared within the past seven years.

One may be surprised therefore to hear that Democracy in America's predictions about modern civilization's future were wrong on nearly all essential points because Tocqueville incorporated into the definition of modern democracy the concrete social and economic features of early-nineteenth-century democratic societies, including the rudimentary degree of education, the unsophisticated technology, and the lack of extensive occupational specialization. In sum, his idea of democracy was premised on a permanent forestalling of modern industrialization and its social consequences. From this premise, he deduced practically all of the book's major predictions, warnings, and prescriptions for modern democratic societies. In the end, the interesting question is not how this young Frenchman (who was only thirty-five years old when he finished writing Democracy) could have been so astonishingly prescient--he was not--but how the near-sighted predictions he set forth in Democracy in America came to be construed as vindicated prophecies.

In letters and articles he wrote aster completing the first volume of Democracy in 1835, Tocqueville offered his views on industrialization in England during the 1830s. These letters throw into broad daylight his egregiously conservative estimate of the future impact of modern industrialization. Though rarely cited by modern Tocqueville commentators, they are the best starting point for understanding the logic of Democracy in America's reflections on modern democracy.

Tocqueville saw the facts clearly. "Already in England," he wrote in a letter dated May 19, 1835, "nearly two-thirds of the population have passed from agriculture to trade and manufactures" (1861, 2:7). We know, of course, that this movement of labor away from agriculture was laying the groundwork for the modern industrial economy. For thousands of years, since humans figured out how to grow crops and domesticate animals, the vast majority of worked in agriculture. Now, thanks to technological progress, a tiny fraction of the population can produce enough food for all the others, freeing up a huge mass of human talent and energy for countless other productive and creative pursuits.

Although the exodus of English workers from agriculture augured this Suture, Tocqueville certainly did not know it. He wrote that "its progress must lead to an unnatural and, I believe, an unmaintainable state of society" (1861, 2:7). The unemployment, job insecurity, and wealth inequality that accompanied industrialization in England would produce, he believed, "universal discontent" that ultimately would push England into revolution (1861, 2:8). It would not be a socialist or a Marxist revolution that would abolish private-property rights and socialize economic production, but a Jeffersonian-Jacksonian revolution that would reverse the progress of industrialization, roll back the division of labor, and redistribute the land, turning England into a democracy of independent smallholders--as France and America still were at the time. "To sum up," Tocqueville wrote, "I may say that if the taste of our people [in France] for possessing land, and our habit of cultivation on a small scale, have singularly facilitated our progress towards equality, it is probable that the excess of opposing causes will drive the English in the same direction" (1861, 2:9). In an article published a year later in the London and Westminster Review (edited by John Stuart Mill), he amplified this idea, writing that "there is nothing ... more favorable to the reign of democracy than the division of land into small independent properties" (1836, 155-56).

In other words, Tocqueville thought that the future of modern democratic civilization belonged to the yeoman farmers and small independent proprietors who predominated in Jacksonian America and Orleanist France, rather than to the workers, managers, capitalists, shareholders, corporations, and efficient, mechanized, large-scale agriculture emerging in England. From his vantage point in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville contemplated two diametrically opposed paths of modernization--the French and American path, which simply reflected agrarian society in its democratic phase, and the British path, which was setting the stage for full-scale modern urbanization and industrialization--and he chose the wrong one.

In a letter to Tocqueville in 1835, Nassau Senior, a prominent English economist, tried to show Tocqueville the sound economic logic that was driving England along its path of modernization. The wage laborer, who was more productive than a small independent farmer, was the wave of the future. The situation was a textbook case of the gains of a greater division of labor and of economies of scale. "This [greater productivity of the wage laborer] depends on the same ground," Senior explained, "which makes it more profitable to work for a cotton manufacturer than to make stockings for his own use" (Simpson 1872, 1:3-4, Nassau Senior to Tocqueville, February 17, 1835).

Despite the argument's cogency, Tocqueville was not convinced. He replied that the economic organization of 1830s France, dominated by yeoman farmers and small independent proprietors, would afford ample wealth and prosperity indefinitely. "The progress of our people in comfort and civilization has been rapid and uninterrupted," he boasted. Even if English workers were quantitatively more productive, French farmers and proprietors enjoyed greater well-being. They were their own bosses; they were self-reliant; and they were more secure economically. The French system had "political, moral, and intellectual advantages, which are a more than sufficient, and above all, a permanent compensation for the loss [in economic productivity]" (Simpson 1872, 1:7-8, Tocqueville to Nassau Senior, February 21, 1835). Tocqueville saw no reason why France would ever want to go down England's path of extensive industrialization. To the contrary, as we have already seen, he thought that England must sooner or later be forced to go the way of France.

Tocqueville expressed these views in 1835-36, but he did not change his mind by 1840, when Democracy in America's second volume was published. In the second volume, he allowed that a few large industrial enterprises would exist in the modern democratic world, but he placed great stress on few. By the 1830s, however, factory towns such as Manchester, England, and Lowell, Massachusetts, had already sprung up, presaging the massive Industrial Revolution to come. Yet Tocqueville erred once again on the side of industrial conservatism. He wrote that these large and complex forms of industrial enterprise would always be "an exception, a monstrosity" in the modern democratic economy, confined to only a few industries ([1840] 1969, 557, 2.2.20). (1) Although he conceded that the industrial logic embodied in the factory town was reintroducing aspects of aristocratic society, such as specialization, inequality, elaborate organization, and interdependence in small pockets of the modern world, the broad mass of society, he believed, would be unaffected by it. "[T]hat particular class which is engaged...