On 11 May 1831, a fastidious 25-year-old Norman aristocrat arrived in New York City with an assignment to report on American prisons for the French Ministry of Justice. Over the next nine months he travelled up the East Coast, down the Mississippi and through what was then the wild west of Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. ‘Not every American is pleasant to interact with,’ he complained in a letter home. ‘A great many smoke, chew tobacco, and spit in front of you.’ He nearly drowned in a steamboat accident, and spent one long winter night shuddering with fever in a log cabin where the wind whipped through the walls and water froze in the glass. He analysed America. Most Europeans of the period saw the country, with its wild forests, Indians and newborn republic, as an image of their past. Tocqueville cast it as their future
To this day, most Americans who have heard of Tocqueville think of him as the country’s cheerleader, plain and simple. Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton all made speeches quoting, and attributing to Tocqueville, a poetic passage that described American pulpits ‘flaming with righteousness’, and concluded: ‘America is great because she is good.’ Tocqueville never wrote it. He would never have written something this fulsome.
At the end of the second volume (published in 1840), he issued a sombre warning about a ‘kind of oppression … unlike any the world has seen before’. Democratic equality of conditions, he claimed, was destroying bonds of mutual obligation among citizens, and fostering the rise of ‘an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate’. Different from conventional forms of tyranny, this ‘soft despotism’ corroded the soul and reduced adults to a condition of permanent childhood.
American conservatives – notably the Straussian political scientist Paul Rahe – like to claim that Tocqueville’s ‘soft despotism’ has actually arrived in the form of the modern American welfare state, and the supposed ‘socialism’ of Obamacare.
To this day, most Americans who have heard of Tocqueville think of him as the country’s cheerleader, plain and simple. Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton all made speeches quoting, and attributing to Tocqueville, a poetic passage that described American pulpits ‘flaming with righteousness’, and concluded: ‘America is great because she is good.’ Tocqueville never wrote it. He would never have written something this fulsome.
At the end of the second volume (published in 1840), he issued a sombre warning about a ‘kind of oppression … unlike any the world has seen before’. Democratic equality of conditions, he claimed, was destroying bonds of mutual obligation among citizens, and fostering the rise of ‘an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate’. Different from conventional forms of tyranny, this ‘soft despotism’ corroded the soul and reduced adults to a condition of permanent childhood.
American conservatives – notably the Straussian political scientist Paul Rahe – like to claim that Tocqueville’s ‘soft despotism’ has actually arrived in the form of the modern American welfare state, and the supposed ‘socialism’ of Obamacare.
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