Tocqueville’s Dual Theory of Revolution

Abstract

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought is often seen as inconsistent for offering two apparently dissimilar theories of revolution. The first is universal democratisation, understood as a social phenomenon and a grand revolutionary change; the second sees revolution as the logical continuation and radicalisation of the preceding regime. The following question arises: was Tocqueville inconsistent in his principal works? I argue that this was not the case and that the two processes are complementary elements in Tocqueville’s model, which combines the ancient cyclical science of regime change with modern theories of revolutionary progress. What Tocqueville offers is a powerful political theory with considerable predictive power. Tocqueville, I consequently claim, should be viewed as a theorist of revolution rather than as a theorist of democracy per se.

Notes

1. Works whose authors are sympathetic to Tocqueville’s thought but nevertheless criticize his theoretical inconsistency include, among others, Jon Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Robert Nisbet, “How Many Tocquevilles?” The American Scholar 46 (1977): 59–75; Seymour Dreshner, “Tocqueville’s Two Démocraties,” Journal of History of Ideas 25 (1964): 201–16. Similar arguments are used by Tocqueville’s critics; cf., for example, Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville, Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Gary Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” New York Review of Books 51 (2004): 52–56. James T. Schleifer agrees that there are many differences in the general tone of Tocqueville’s earlier and later works. However, he proposes a more evolutionary model of Tocqueville’s intellectual development, in “How Many Democracies?,” in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, ed. Eduardo Nolla (New York: New York University Press), 193–207.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer, French-English edition, 4-vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010); hereafter cited as DA, with volume and page number; Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence, with an Introduction by Fernand Braudel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005); hereafter cited as R; Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume 1, ed. Françoise Furet and Françoisee Mélonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); hereafter cited as OR.

3. Harvey Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6.

4. For a compelling discussion of the use of formal models used by Tocqueville, cf. Saguiv A. Hadari, Theory in Practice: Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989).

5. Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 159.

6. Rip Van Winkle is the eponymous protagonist in Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. Through the intervention of supernatural powers Rip falls asleep in the New York Catskill Mountains in colonial times and wakes up twenty years later in the independent United States. The story’s main motif is Rip Van Winkle’s bewilderment in the new political and social reality.

7. Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist, 11.

8. For the dual notion of democracy compare Pierre Manent, “Tocqueville, the Political Philosopher,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Cheryl Welch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), 108–21.

9. With reference to ancient Athens.

10. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 130, 52.

11. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2011), 189–229, 323–58.

12. The Tocqueville-inspired analysis of the connection between old and new despotisms is found in Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1977), 140–91, especially in chap. 3, where Huntington uses Tocqueville’s theories to explain how, after the modern democratic revolution, different types of old regimes are transformed into their “democratic” analogues.

13. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume 2: Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 222, 163.

14. Cf. Peter Lawler, The Restless Mind (Boston, MA: Rowland & Littlefield, 1993).

15. Cf. James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27 (1962): 5–19.

16. Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume 2, 31.

17. Sadly Tocqueville does not explore the origins of this teaching further to its Judaist roots in the Torah.

18. Cf. André Jardin, 1984. Tocqueville a Biography, trans. Lydia Davis and Robert Hemeway (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984), 336.

19. Cf. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 143–46.

20. The original adjective is translated by Schleifer as “mild [despotism]”. The notion of “soft despotism” was popularized by Paul A. Rahe in his interpretation of Tocqueville’s works. Cf. Paul A. Rahe, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and the Modern Prospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

21. Hannah Arendt claims that the Greek term anakuklesis, later translated into Latin as revolutio, was first used by Polybius and originally came from astronomy. However, a simple search on the Perseus database proves that the term was first used by Plato in his Statesman (269e). Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 12; and Plato, Statesman, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 12, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), available at Perseus Digital Library, at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ (accessed 11 November 2012). Cf. Online Etymological Dictionary at: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=revolution. This original meaning is, for instance, preserved in the title of the ground-breaking astronomical treaty by Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium [On the Revolutions, i.e. “turns” or “orbits,” of Heavenly Spheres] (Nuremberg: Petreium, 1543); available online at: http://ads.harvard.edu/books/1543droc.book/ (accessed 11 November 2012).

22. Tocqueville read both Plato and Aristotle while working on OR. He attests to this in his 1852 speech to the French Academy of Political and Moral Sciences. The English text of the speech can be found in Brian Danoff and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., eds., Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of Democratic Statesmanship (New York: Lexington Books), 17–31.

23. Cf. especially Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 299–301.

24. Tocqueville’s views on England often seem inconsistent. Seymour Drescher, in Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), suggests that there is a cyclical pattern visible in Tocqueville’s favourable and critical descriptions of Great Britain. However, in his chief published writings Tocqueville seems to consistently assert that England compares favourably with France, although, not necessarily with America, which, according to him, managed to combine English aristocratic liberty with democratic equality.

25. Cf. Allan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

26. François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government

(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002). Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in Karl Marx: A Reader, 23–29.

27. Cf. James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 241–305. Schleifer also mentions the tyranny of the majority, which, however, is more a process than a regime.

28. Cf. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Edmund Burked and Thomas Paine, Reflections on the Revolution in France & The Rights of Man (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 15–267.

29. From Tocqueville’s notes on Burke, quoted in Robert T. Gannett Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 61.

30. Astolphe de Custine, Letters from Russia, trans. Anka Muhlstein, New York Review of Books, 2002; originally published as La Russie en 1839 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1843). Custine was immensely influenced by Tocqueville; he even used a passage from DA, as an opening quote in his first political work, which he decided to devote to Spain. Cf. Astolphe de Custine, L’Espagne Sous Ferdinand VII, Tomme Trousième (Paris: L’advocate, 1838), available at Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=OV8PAAAAQAAJ&hl=pl&source=gbs_navlinks_s (accessed 11 November 2012), 298.

31. Steven Pincus, “Rethinking Revolutions: A Neo-Tocquevillian Perspective,” in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Susan C. Stokes and Charles Boix (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 397–416.

32. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist no. 22,” in the Federalist Papers, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 131.

33. One, however, has to remember that what Tocqueville means by “public esteem” is the polar opposite of the popularity of a modern, democratic politician. His notion of esteem is akin to the notion of majesty, the traditional expectations regarding the modus operandi of the monarch that sets her/him apart from ordinary persons. In contrast, the aim of modern popularity is to make the ruler seem similar to and close to the citizens.

34. Cf. The Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. Olaf Christopher Blum (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 3–187. Chateaubriand famously decided to embrace the Bourbons and defame his former protector, Napoleon Bonaparte only when he was absolutely certain that Napoleon had lost all his political and military power, and thus published his piece on 6 April 1814.

35. Chateaubriand, “On Bonaparte and the Bourbons,” in Blum, The Critics of the Enlightenment, 14, 5.

36. As Thomas Paine somewhat condescendingly observes, old regimes in their official titles

and symbols usually legitimised the person of the ruler (1) through “priestcraft,” by

using the theistic legitimisation in titles such as “by God’s grace”; and (2) through “power,” using the timocratic legitimisation in titles such as “the Great,” “the Magnificent,” “the Brave.” Cf. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791) (London: Dover, 1999), 32–33. That political actors in old regimes used particular props to legitimise their power is significant since, just like using arguments in an unsettled dispute, using such props has consequences. For a further discussion of various methods of legitimisation, cf. J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 256–63.

37. The title “by god’s grace” is still used in Denmark, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom but carries little legitimising weight, as those countries elect their

parliaments, which in turn elect the “real” executives. The most well-known remaining old regimes are the Vatican and Saudi Arabia. See the list of full titles of rulers and executives at: “World Statesmen,” http://www.worldstatesmen.org/ (accessed 11 November 2012). In these two states there are no general elections and the ruler’s titles include formulas such as

“Vicar of Jesus Christ” and “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”; cf. Elliott Abrams,

“Dictators Go, Monarchs Stay,” Commentary 134 (2012): 26–31. One can also view the attempts of creating the Islamic State (Caliphate) as a vicious return of the old theocratic regime. The durability of this project, however, is still uncertain.

38. Edudardo Nolla, “Editors introduction,” in Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amerique, xlvii-cxlvii.