Alexis de Tocqueville 150 years on.

I just discovered that today's the 150th anniversary of the death of my favourite political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville. I just love the way he writes, and his thoughts on democracy really make sense:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

That's a particularly memorable on the value of associational life, from his great Democracy in America.

And here's an excerpt from an article by Diana Schaub:

Reading him is like running a virus-scan on the American polity. How healthy are those immune functions like federalism and the jury system? Does religious belief still protect us from willfulness on one side and despair on the other? If not, what can be done? We should remember Tocqueville’s message to his homeland, for he wrote Democracy in America as much for France as for us. Tocqueville knew that the remedies America had developed (particularly those rooted in mores) were not native to France. He did not propose that they could be directly imported or transferred. However, neither did he resign himself to American exceptionalism. As he explained, “My goal has been to show, by the example of America, that laws and above all mores can permit a democratic people to remain free.”

The American combination of equality and liberty is offered neither as the rule, nor the exception, but rather as a paradigm, a proof of possibility. The ways and means by which equality and liberty could be balanced may look quite different in a democratized Old World, and quite different again in twenty-first century America. It may not be possible for us now (any more than Europe then) to reinstate the precise protections that Tocqueville described. However, if we are friends of liberty—and Tocquevilleans are—then we might find and craft new protections, suited to current circumstances. Tocqueville’s “new political science” looks to revive the ancient (and aristocratic) love of liberty and reincarnate it in fresh and perhaps surprising forms. In the end, the modern friends of liberty are also the rarest friends of democracy—those who through their constructive opposition make possible the regime’s perpetuation.

Read the rest here

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
(July 29, 1805, Paris – April 16, 1859, Cannes)