It's been a long time since I read Democracy in America but one passage in particular has always stuck with me.
It's where he contrasts New England (aka Vermont etc) with the South.
He essentially says:
- In New England, it's almost a Greek democracy b/c everyone is seen as equal and everyone is required to work together for the common good
- In the South, they tried to recreate the aristocracy. That was only possible if there were multiple classes of society with the lowest class being the primary manual laborers. In other words, if you didn't have serfs then you needed slaves.
Year later, I was reading a comparison of the US vs Argentina. Similar size, similar resources and similar weather yet vastly different outcomes politically and economically. The thesis of the comparison was that Argentina imported the Spanish aristocracy model whereas US had a more egalitarian model.
It was interesting to see two somewhat similar comparisons made hundreds of years apart and coming to similar conclusions.
I've been living in europe for the last couple of decades, and it's obviously been an even longer time since I read Democracy in America in american school, but the local culture seems a much better fit to what de Tocqueville was lauding (spontaneous self-organisation, etc). Was he just projecting? Or have the continents switched cultural places in the intervening centuries? (especially after Suez?)
Mostly converged to the same cultural place, but unevenly. That's the trend ever since the French revolution—France removed its aristocracy (though it kept coming back.) England basically weakened theirs to the point of redundancy, but kept it in a form. Russia kept theirs all the way until 1918 and then upheaved it all at once. The World Wars mostly wiped out whatever was left of the old world order. Sort of seems like Europe built a stronger immune system against the smell of hierarchy than the U.S. did, so the U.S. keeps inventing new caste systems e.g. Jim Crow.
Indeed. Another minor difference but I think it bears fruits :
Excessive wealth is still kinda view suspiciously in Europe. As in “in you are that rich, we are in different world and I suspect you don’t have my best interest in mind or that you might be a closeted psychopath”
While in the US, wealth indicate value of the individual and it radiate to morality and intrinsic capacity ( of the individual… )
“I see that in a certain portion of the territory of the United States at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. Whosoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”
Perhaps I was fed a reductionist view of the Civil War in grade school, but this seems to challenge core assumptions we were taught.
My view of the Civil War was further shifted when I learned that Lincoln’s idea of ending slavery never implied amalgamation of former slaves into white society— something he was openly against. He literally tried (and inhumanely failed) to deport all the black people to a remote location.
Before the War, Lincoln publicly complained that the slave states were breeding all the unwanted “mulattos”. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederacy, almost like it was a war tactic.
> ...but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary
"In the South, they don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too rich; in the North, they don't care how rich you get as long as you don't get too close."
(tbf I think the situation described has improved since my childhood ... so not exactly stationary, but definitely glacial)
>the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists;
Honestly I disagree with the statement, prejudice is still going strong in the south. The civil war did not end slavery. Slavery kept going on until WWII in the US when it became a little too embarrassing for us when the Axis countries where pointing that out.
You were certainly fed a reductionist view of the Civil War. You're lucky if you avoided a frankly false view of the Civil War, that it was a noble lost cause to be celebrated.
The industrial North was very much in fear of anybody taking their jobs. That included immigrant groups as well as blacks, though immigrants were usually able to assimilate within a generation or two, while blacks were permanently discriminated against.
There was plenty of discrimination against black people in the north after the war, too. But de Tocqueville was not around for the way southern bias turned into Jim Crow laws and lynching.
I think he was misled by the way southerners felt protected from blacks by slavery. They felt no threat, economically or personally. When the slaves were freed, that same emotion became virulent.
> Arthur de Gobineau, a French aristocrat and one-time secretary to Tocqueville, is considered one of the fathers of scientific racism. When Tocqueville became aware of Gobineau’s theories of inherent racial inequality, he responded fiercely, calling them “false” and “pernicious”
Maybe I read a different book, but in tome 1 there's some pretty racist chapters about the differences between white & black in America, and how they'll never get along or something.
It's possible he disagreed with "scientific racism" but he appeared pretty confident in some other racist views in that chapter in the first tome... (note his visit was before abolition of slavery)
You are probably referring to the various chapters on "Future Condition Of Three Races In The United States."
These chapters are basically an extended critique of the evils of chattel slavery and of the American policy against the natives. He does indeed say that
"As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle."
Why? Because blacks have been so oppressed and there are so many of them in the south, that it would be impossible for them to live together with their former oppressors after being liberated, both would fear and hate the other. And what does he mean by wholly mingle? He is advocating mixed race marriages, something that wasn't legal everywhere in the U.S. until the Supreme Court forced it to be in the 1960s.
There are surely lots of passages in the book that 'read' as racist by modern standards, but by 1830s U.S. standards, Tocqueville was very progressive.
It seems pretty possible to vehemently disagree on the "scientific racism" part without disagreeing on the second part, that we will never get along. History has yet to prove that we can on a national level, in fact, it seems pretty insistent on reminding us that there will always be forces that seek to keep us divided.
Where we have proved that as a multicultural democracy, American has been successful, I firmly believe, is one of the ways where America truly is exceptional.
The "accord" argument is the basis for almost all of de jure segregation in the 20th century, and has been decisively refuted by the experience of residential desegregation beginning in the 1980s.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was lawful for municipalities to literally zone their cities to restrict Black residents, and most of those zoning ordinances took the form of disallowing residents of a regional minority race to move into any area with a dominant majority; accord was the specific reason given for those ordinances.
Whatever else you'd like to say about the argument, it absolutely fucked over the United States in profound and enduring ways.
Did you just quote the entire book (600 pages or so) as an example? That’s pretty funny and you may as well just as GP to google it.
I’m currently halfway through the book and don’t remember any particularly egregious (any more than I expect all 19th century European aristocrats were regularly racist) and am interested in what passages are most of interest to understand the argument.
I don't think it is inherently racist to claim that two culture-groups will never get along. Could you articulate the author's claim further? If it is a racist claim, I suspect it goes a bit further than this.
> Tocqueville observes that among the French “the taste for general ideas” is much stronger than in America, where something of the English proclivity for details and practical concerns predominates.
The details & practical concerns, although I've a feeling reading this article is painted as lesser than these higher level "general ideas" is something Tocqueville seemed to find somewhat admirable, or at least he was neutral about it. That basically local government would have an elected official for small, specific matters was a very US thing.
Overall he seemed to emphasize how the decentralization in US was in contrast to deep centralization in France (and China, at the time too apparently).
How this decentralization meant the principle of "subsidiarity" was applied closely in the US (and was the only major country doing it).
I noticed this quote that made me think of Paul Graham’s Economic Inequality essay [0], and I think it made me change my mind as originally I agreed with Graham’s premise out of a rational analysis perspective of it being objectively right.
Tocqueville reminded me that objective truth doesn’t help you against an angry mob.
“ It is difficult to imagine a durable union of a people which is rich and strong with one that is poor and weak. Even if it were proved that the strength and wealth of the one are not the causes of the weaknesses and poverty of the other. A union is still more difficult to maintain at a time when one party is losing strength and the other is gaining it. This rapid and disproportionate increase of certain states threatens the independence of the others.”
As it happens I've just finished reading Irena Grudzińska Gross's Custine, Tocqueville, and the Romantic Imagination [1], half of it being devoted to Tocqueville and his journey to the United States. The part that touches on him and his friend Gustave de Beaumont visiting Lake Oneida and especially the deeply forested Frenchman Island located there was really illuminating. I highly recommend the entire book (the first part on Custine and his travels into Russia also deserves an entire article all by itself, probably even more so).
What I find remarkable about Tocqueville and Democracy in America is how frequently and in how many contexts he is still quoted. With such a broad coverage of topics and a knack for pithy characterization, he is easily mined for quotes to give your argument a feeling of authority.
I enjoyed this lecture by a law professor about Washington Irving and the social subtexts in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The prof makes substantial use of Tocqueville. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMKQ8De_xo)
What you quote is not especially scandalous. It uses the language of the time but is not wrong in that Europe essentially conquered the world and was factually superior to everyone else at the time where in some places people still lived like in the iron age.
I think the person you're replying to is interpreting "superiority over all the other races" to mean moral / intrinsic superiority, and I think you're reading it as meaning superior economic / military power. I tend to agree with your reading.
>the individual, placed with us, by his vices and his ignorance, on the lowest step of society, is yet the first among savages.
I think Tocqueville speaks very clearly for himself, and I don't how if there exist mental gymnastics dexterous enough to try to make this sentence mean anything other than what it clearly means.
I’m curious why you think it’s scandalous. Do you disagree that Europe was most powerful at the time of writing?
I think it makes total sense to say this isn’t just or appropriate. But to say that Europe was powerful is not scandalous. The section seems written with humility and more of a theme of “I’m not sure why Europe is so powerful and luck is involved” than a more unpleasant version that could have said something like “Europe is the best because the rest of the world is a bunch of monkeys” but that’s not what he wrote.
> >The European race has received from Providence, or has acquired by its own efforts, so incontestable a superiority over all the other races which compose the great human family, that the individual, placed with us, by his vices and his ignorance, on the lowest step of society, is yet the first among savages.
From a political power perspective he’s correct though. Especially in 1830. I didn’t real this as biologically superior so much as “Europe is so great, it’s greater than everywhere else.” And at the time, wasn’t that true? Were there any major world players at the time? This was at the peak of industrialization that was having Europe eclipse historical powers like China and India. And this would all change around in the 20th century (and 21st obviously).
I think the word race was used very differently at the time and means more like peoples or nations.
You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.
Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.
Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.
I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Can you please stop it with the ideological flamewar? I'm bending over backwards not to ban you, and you keep posting things that are not the curious conversation we're looking for.
If you want to have curious conversation, you're welcome here, along with all of your opinions and views. If you just want to smite enemies, please go do that somewhere else.
We don't need you to tow any ideological line (trust me, we really couldn't care less, besides which I'm all in favor of having well-read communists in the conversation) but we do need you to stop it with the generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and uninteresting.
Also, you've been crossing into personal attack regularly and that sucks and is not ok. It's also beneath you, or at least I would have thought so.
It would be helpful if you would take to heart that we want HN to be a web forum where people don't make habits of such things.
This is like a cop saying they're trying to be fair in mediating between the dozen people mobbing me and unjustifiably downvoting all my posts, and me for simply saying well-founded, well-cited things that disagree with the liberal ethos of this place.
Why so much self-delusion? Just let it be, ban if it makes you happy, you know just as well as I do that this place is crawling with fascists.
If possible, though, I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone. My MO is always the same: keep cool, cite quotes that upset people because they tarnish the images of their idols. You keep saying I'm breaking the rules and attacking people, and I don't see where?
I'm trying to help you here. If you can't agree that you've been posting flamewar comments, past the point of trolling in many cases, and just keep blaming others (including the mods) for the entire problem, it's hard to see how this is going to work. Ironically, it's your right-wing counterparts that I most often have to tell this to.
You're not just "simply saying well-founded things" and "keeping [your] cool" - you're inundating the threads with provocation and snark. The effect of this is predictable and we have no choice but to moderate it. HN's survival depends on not burning to a crisp, and you're starting and feeding flames all over the place. I'm not saying it's arson, but it's negligence, and the flames are just as damaging either way. The fact that other people lose their shit in response is not only not an excuse, it's an effect you're co-producing and are therefore co-responsible for. That doesn't make what they're doing ok, and we'll moderate it whenever we see it, as usual.
There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views. You can't just drop them like bombs in the threads without deranging people and destroying the environment. No doubt the majority is wrong, but it's your job to know who you're dealing with and to persuade them, not troll them. Otherwise you end up discrediting your own views and re-entrenching others in their errors (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you want to keep posting on HN, you have a responsibility to protect it for its intended purpose. It's only because most of the community does so, and moderators work hard to mitigate the rest, that HN has any value at all. You're benefiting from that, since you find it valuable enough to spend your time here. Trashing the place in return is a poor way to give back—and I'm sure you wouldn't do the equivalent in other cases (such as littering in a city park, or starting fires and leaving them to others to put out).
> I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone.
You needn't look far; you did it two sentences before your question ("self-delusion"). Here are some other places where you crossed the line:
1) Calling someone a bad writer isn't an insult, it's an honest appraisal of their literary talents.
2) Where's the insult? They themselves said they're the child of a CIA agent and that they think Russian culture is stagnant and worthless. I simply repeated exactly what they said but emphasizing how vile it was.
3) Again, where's the insult? They accused me of delusion, I said that they can choose theirs.
4) I told someone that they have a wrong theory of statecraft. Again, are you saying that telling someone they're wrong crosses a line? Is this a safe space for... being wrong?
5) Again, I fail to see the insult.
From my perspective, you seem to be arguing that all my engagement should take on the superficial form of "civilized engagement", even when people are saying rancid or provably incorrect things, attacking me, and mass downvoting me. I don't swear, I don't insult. This place has a problem with ad-hominem, as shown by the funny reactions to this post:
>There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views.
I think this is very much what's at stake, but I have the opposite view: contrarian views deserve a little support from neutral parties and authorities if they are valid and the prevailing challenge to them is subpar, not additional responsibilities to coddle those who dismiss the unfamiliar from a position of smugness. Other than simply kowtowing to "might makes right", why should the members of the numerous and overpowering status quo have less responsibilities than challengers to it? You can say that them's the breaks, that's how things are, but it's a construct just like everything else on here.
You probably think that I "generate work" for you with my posting, but what you'll find is that in the absence of communist types (ideally many and more belligerent ones than me), this place will continue to descend more and more into people talking about the need to exterminate the Chinese, the importance of appreciating the fundamental IQ differences between races, the need to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco at the human level, the celebration of war as a cult of death. You'll find that, as a mod aspiring for "neutrality", you'll have banished anyone who might care to "organically" oppose those views, and that suddenly upholding "neutral" law and order will mean enforcing fascist takes.
But this is just HN, so it will be a farcical and goofy version of what you'll be witnessing happening everywhere else in society. I don't expect you to do anything differently, but at the very least you should stop blaming me for people finding Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin quotes scandlously upsetting to their own poor understanding of history.
Marx and Engels weren’t writing on American slavery and race relations.
But they seem pretty racist to me based on their frequent dropping of n-bombs in their writings [0].
I think the reason we don’t have 19th century racist essays by Marx and Engels is that they wrote almost always about Europeans and European culture.
Agree on Churchill. But does that surprise anyone? England was still literally colonizing India and South Africa during Churchhill’s time. It would be weird to find a non-racist world leader from that time period. Even LBJ, decades later, held pretty racist beliefs even while passing the civil rights act.
It's pretty easy to find non-racist leaders, actually, but not if you restrict yourself to ghouls like LBJ.
---
A point to be noted is that in this respect Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world. The German race theory led Hitler and his friends to the conclusion that the Germans, as the only superior nation, should rule over other nations. The English race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world.
Actually, Mr. Churchill, and his friends in Britain and the United States, present to the non-English speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: “Accept our rule voluntarily, and then all will be well; otherwise war is inevitable.”
But the nations shed their blood in the course of five years’ fierce war for the sake of the liberty and independence of their countries, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. It is quite probable, accordingly, that the non-English-speaking nations, which constitute the vast majority of the population of the world, will not agree to submit to a new slavery.
It is Mr. Churchill’s tragedy that, inveterate Tory that he is, he does not understand this simple and obvious truth.
So you agree that Marx and Engels were racist and rescind your point “I read a lot of Marx and Engels, who wrote at a similar time, and they don't sound racist?”
So you don’t think Marx and Engels are racist? That’s interesting, would you expand on why?
I can’t think of a reason why people would write n-word used in a diminutive and insulting manner and not be racist. And it’s really common too. Not just a single instance but many times and seems like it was in their regular vernacular.
Think whatever you want, but know that the idea that "everyone was racist", or that any Westerners were at the humble vanguard of anti-racism, is utter bunk.
I really don't know if trying to tease this out is worth it, but is there an eastern power you would hold out as an exemplar of "anti-racism" or whatever?
It's difficult to say that the chapter "Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare" was proven wrong by history. Tocqueville isn't saying that revolutions will become rare period. He says that in societies with social equality (that is, without a caste system), revolutions will become rare, even when other forms of equality exist such as wealth/income inequality. All the revolutions you talk about in this thread are in societies with social class delineation. In countries like America, we can witness first-hand how extreme wealth inequality has not produced revolution in the same way that social inequality has in the past.
He also argues that there are great incentives against revolution in societies when people possess things they could lose in a revolution (his main example is property). I think an example of this is May 68's failure to bring political change due to the Communist Party's nonviolent stance/cooperation with the Gaullists. We can debate back and forth why they took an antirevolutionary position but consensus seems to be that they at least did not want to surrender what political power they had won through elections.
He also makes other predictions about how equality in social conditions causes people to be more individualistic and less communal, but at the same time less unique. Again, I think we can witness this first hand in America. Maybe he's wrong about other claims, but I wouldn't say this essay is wrong based on the title alone, since the actual essay reads spot on.
Plenty of societies with castes had no revolution, plenty of societies without castes had some.
Post-revolution America also had Black slavery, which made it a caste society. Even if we restrict ourselves to America, Tocqueville betrays zero awareness of the impending Civil War.
1848 also happened all over Europe in places that had already largely departed from caste, to say nothing of the Paris Commune.
I find all of this excessive charity towards an incorrect prediction ultimately unconvincing.
I would not characterize my comments as excessive charity. It’s an accurate summary of Toqueville’s essay and a rough comparison of his claims to the way history unfolded.
The 1848 revolutions you talk about occurred in different ways, but a way to generally characterize them is that they were all democratic with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures (regardless of the actual participants). This aligns with Toqueville’s claim that revolution stems from social division (which liberalism eliminates) and not other forms of inequality. The same is true of the Paris Commune; the third republic was initially dominated by monarchists and the Paris Commune as government was organized as a rival to the national government in Versailles/Bordeaux.
The American Civil war is another example that supports Tocqueville. The social stratification of slavery led to war but not the extreme inequality of the 1920s. Neither has the inequality of the present.
Tocqueville’s observation of the connection between social class and revolution also explain why the 20th century movements in Europe played out the way they did. Communist revolution occurred in Russia but not Germany. The fascist movements in liberal Germany and Italy took power without bloody revolution but the movement in Spain was tied to monarchists and thus there was civil war.
His main point is that liberalism provides off-ramps from violent revolution because people have other ways of wielding political power. In societies with strict social classes, the classes without political power have much greater incentives to fight. I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with this claim.
Can't reply (HN being silly as usual) but, regarding being scandalized at the American-capitalist essence of Nazism... I mean, didn't Hitler look to America for inspiration?
Didn't the term "Untermensch" come from "under man" in the works of Lothrop Stoddard, an American?
From Hitler’s infamous Mein Kampf [My Struggle], published in 1925:
>There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship laws] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union, in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigration on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalization, it professes in slow beginnings a view which is peculiar to the folkish state concept.
From Hitler's 1942 recollections:
>The struggle we are waging [in Crimea] against the Partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory will go to the strong, and strength is on our side. At all costs we will establish law and order there. […] Saxony, for example, will enjoy an unprecedented trade boom, and we shall create for her a most profitable export market, which it will be the task of Saxon inventive genius to develop.
There's a whole book about it: Hitler's American Model.
I don't see anything wrong with the argument. A few good things are said about American efficiency, and that's what I think history will say in the end.
Well, starting from the 1840s onwards, we saw far more revolutions than ever before.
The European revolts of 1848, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, all the others (Vietnamese, Korean, etc.).
Then we also had the counter-revolutions in Germany and Italy, etc.
Tocqueville was a bad analyst, but people who say what others want to hear stand a decent chance of failing upwards (see: American invasion of Iraq, etc.).
And how does that compare to the frequency of revolutions in earlier periods?
The premise wasn’t that there would be no further revolutions. Just that they would be more rare. I think it’s important to think on this from a 500 year horizon rather than just what’s happened recently.
Just another American holding up a book they've never read and screaming lines they've been fed by a think-tank about it.
"Some years ago several pious individuals undertook to meliorate the condition of the prisons. The public was excited by the statements which they put forward, and the regeneration of criminals became a very popular undertaking. New prisons were built; and for the first time, the idea of reforming as well as of punishing the delinquent, formed a part of prison discipline. But this happy alteration, in which the public had taken so hearty an interest, and which the exertions of the citizens had irresistibly accelerated, could not be completed in a moment. While the new penitentiaries were being erected (and it was the pleasure of the majority they should be terminated with all possible celerity), the old prisons existed, which still contained a great number of offenders. These jails became more unwholesome and more corrupt in proportion as the new establishments were beautified and improved, forming a contrast which may readily be understood. The majority was so eagerly employed in founding the new prisons, that those which already existed, were forgotten; and as the general attention was diverted to a novel object, the care which had hitherto been bestowed upon the others ceased. The salutary regulations of discipline were first relaxed, and afterward broken; so that in the immediate neighbourhood of a prison, which bore witness to the mild and enlightened spirit of our time, dungeons might be met with, which reminded the visiter of the barbarity of the middle ages."
Tocqueville, unlike the newly minted class of college-educated illiterates who would come to throw him back and forth at each other while throwing in English words they learned upon encountering their foreign equivalents on Duolingo, each smearing a little bit more of their unwiped fecality from fingernail to spine of the $38 Barnes-and-Noble hardcover reprint of a public domain translation, was complicated, and the phenomenon he described, Democracy in America, remains complicated.
You have failed at understanding the meaning of the passage, I am not going to be replying further, as not only have you not read any of the books you are pretending to talk about, it is now apparent you are either incapable of reading or too concerned with something dangling from your forehead to make an attempt at it.
The only thesis you actually advanced in that polemic word salad around the quote is that he didn't think absolutely everything about democracy was 100% perfect. No one is making that claim here.
