26

Chapter 1 - Alexis de Tocqueville and the Moeurs of the Masses

Paraphrasing, quoting, and citing Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) have long

been a part of American political argument. Tocquevilles name has a peerless cachet
when it comes to bolstering claims about the United States, and the sum of this secondary
literature - especially that pertaining to Democracy in America - is astonishing. But
considering these stakes, Tocqueville has, surprisingly, rarely been the subject of
rancourous debate. While there certainly are different appropriations of Tocquevilles
work, many of them converged around a reading which achieved a cultural permanence
in the post-World War Two period. In no other era did Tocqueville more forcefully serve
as a unifying figure than in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was seen to speak directly to
the issue of democratic vulnerability brought into view by wartime fascism and postwar
communism and, thereby, to gather intellectuals around shared analyses of
authoritarianism and democracy in his name.
Tocqueville served as a keystone for the eras prolific pronouncements on mass
politics: a mode of political analysis that found wide circulation in postwar American
intellectual circles. According to these theorists, mass politics was a product of the
particular sociological conditions engendered by democracy which, for lack of a better
term, were gathered under the gloss: mass society. A mass society - of which America
stood as a prime example - was afflicted by despotic tendencies that emanated from an
equality (the democratic social condition) which tended to corrode healthy associative

27
relationships and the lattice of political and social authority characteristic of stratified
communities that oriented individuals around consensual norms. 1 As a result, people
become atomized - unconnected to the central value system - and were then vulnerable
to mass political mobilization. Drawing on Tocqueville, those who developed the mass
politics paradigm found democratic activism to be particularly appealing to these
alienated individuals in modern society who were not subject to binding social ties, or
mores. Having become available for political action and radicalization, these
individuals contributed to an activist or participatory form of democracy which was
singled out as one of the major threats of modernity; here political extremism was seen
not as a legitimate expression of discontent, but a symptom of mass or populist
engagement. 2
This discourse was reliant upon a sociological analysis of those social and cultural
linkages that pull people together in system-stabilizing associations. Again, drawing from
Tocqueville, mass politics theorists used the separation of the social (non-political
associations, religion, values, status) and the political to explain peoples political drives
as products of underlying sociological causes. In attending to the secret sociological
causes of human conduct, American intellectuals fastened upon a shared set of social
values which, they claimed, ought to serve as the touchstone for legitimate political
agreement (and disagreement) and therefore as the substructure for a moderate politics

Joseph R. Gusfield, Mass Society and Extremist Politics, in the American Sociological Review, Vol. 27,
No. 1 (Feb., 1962), pg., 20.
Gusfield, pgs., 19-21, 26-28.

28
devoid of extremism of the left or right. This approach to political theory also yielded
great results in the effort to undercut Marxist notions of class conflict. Political
radicalism, these theorists claimed, could only be understood as a product of social
causes and accordingly they viewed the political conflicts that emanated from divergent
economic interests as episodes in social alienation.
The result was a political theory grounded in an effort to redefine democracy so
as to insulate the masses from political mobilization and to incline politics towards a
quietist middle. This regnant postwar view rested on an often explicit belief that popular
democracy constituted a threat to the making of responsible political decisions, a belief
made unquestionable by a postwar characterization of the mass as incompetent and
manipulable by external forces and made unassailable by way of the authority of
Democracy in America.

Tocquevilles celebrated call for a new science of politics in Democracy in

America was itself a statement about an entire generation in France attempting to forge a
new understanding of social equality and its inevitable corollary - political democracy.
His bid for a more usable and relevant discipline was conceived in the tumultuous
atmosphere of post-Revolutionary France in which a succession of ruling interests, from
the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830) to the July Monarchy (1830-1848), failed to
establish broad appeal and social cohesion. During this period, the Crown did little to

29
recognize the popular disaffection that was manifesting itself in calls for broader political
inclusion and labor reform. Stability and liberty seemed incommensurable, and though
attempts were made to reclaim pre-Revolutionary order, there was no going back. The
Revolution had created a new political consciousness, and an expanding and variegated
political community emerged with a taste for political mobilization. The eventual result
was the revolution of 1848. Frances political culture now seemed wedded to extremes:
despotism or revolution. Here, 1789 stood as that immutable object lesson of politics:
democracy could itself be dangerous. 3
Alexis Charles-Henri-Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville was born in 1805, into a
well-connected, Norman family. Son of Herv de Tocqueville and Louise de Rosanbo,
young Alexis had lost close relatives to the guillotine and almost lost his parents as well.
Recovery from political misfortune was robust for Alexis father who eventually became
a royal prefect during the Bourbon recrudescence. Tocqueville too, in 1827, and at the
minimum age of twenty one, entered public service as juge auditeur at Versailles. There
he met Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866), a colleague and eventually his lifelong friend.
Thanks to extraordinary ability and propitious connections, Tocqueville rose through the
ranks of royal service and in 1839, he was elected to the Chambre de Deputs, serving
continuously until 1848. There, Tocqueville made a prophetic speech on January 27th,
1848, claiming that the Orleanist regime and the French people were slumbering now on

Roger Price, A Concise History of France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chap., 5;
Roger Magraw, France 1800-1914 (New York: Longman, 2002), Chap., 1; Andr Jardin, Tocqueville: A
Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), Chap., 5.

30
a volcano. 4
Tocquevilles public service in a time of precipitate change suggests that he was
not a reactionary. Despite having been part of the defeated, Tocqueville wanted to
participate in the thoughtful future development of the French polity and was unwilling
to endorse any artless return to authoritarianism as a shortcut to social peace. He was
equally concerned about the specter of revolution as a means of political change. Finding
this juste milieu was difficult enough, but that Tocqueville tried, despite his legitimist
past, has enamored him to critics. He recognized the need for a shared public philosophy
as the rivet that could secure the sensible democratization of French political life and his
trip to the United States was conceived in this moment of acknowledgment that French
democracy badly needed conscious direction. He and Beaumont, therefore, prepared for a
trip to the United States amidst political discontinuity and inchoate reform. Their stated
purpose was to survey the American penitentiary system - a topic of concern among
reformers - but Tocquevilles real interest was an analysis of American democracy and
what it could teach France. 5

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America trans., George Lawrence, ed., J. P. Mayer (1966; New
York: HarperPerennial, 1969), pg., 753; Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pgs., 4-6; Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), pgs., 8-12. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., Andr Jardin, (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), Introduction.
5

Welch, 8,12; Roger Boesche, Why Did Tocqueville Think a Successful Revolution was Impossible? in
Liberty, Equality, Democracy ed., Eduardo Nolla (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pgs.,
165-185.

31
Tocqueville and Beaumont reached New York on May 10th, 1831, and spent a
total of nine months in the United States with fifteen of those days spent in Canada.
They were eager to see the newest areas of settlement as well as the oldest and their
voyages, therefore, brought them to the margins of white settlement in Michigan and to
the centers of American privilege in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. They
survived a close call on the Ohio River, a nuisance on the Mississippi; they made it to
New Orleans, loved Qubec and were, in the end, profoundly moved by the spectacle of
American democracy at work. The two travelers eventually returned to New York and
embarked for Le Havre on February 20th, 1832, a little over nine months after their
arrival. On their return to France, with copious notes in hand, Tocqueville and Beaumont
set to work. Retirement from the magistracy assisted the completion of their official work
- The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France - which was
published in 1833. This was Beaumonts book though; Tocqueville contributed some
notes and other small details, but his thoughts and efforts were already taken with De la
dmocratie en Amrique. 6

II

There is a suggestive resemblance between Tocquevilles France and Cold War

America. Tocqueville found himself caught between the despotism of the Crown and the
chaos of revolutionary politics. American intellectuals, writing in the 1940s and 1950s,
6

Drolet, 20-35. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed., Andr Jardin (Belgium: Gallimard, 1991), pgs., XIX-XXII

32
found themselves caught between totalitarianism abroad and the threat of mass politics at
home. Not surprisingly, Tocquevilles search for the juste milieu - a middle ground of
moderate politics - found a receptive home with American intellectuals seeking to occupy
a similar vital center between Manichaean opposites. The postwar Tocquevillian
revival was therefore rooted (much like the concurrent popularity of Max Weber) in an
appreciation of political sociology and its uses for a politics of democratic moderation.
Political sociology was a product of the European social theorists of the nineteenth
century among whom Weber, Tocqueville and Marx stand as its most distinguished
practitioners. A key element in the birth of political sociology was the delineation of the
difference between the social and the political out of which emerged new ideas about
democratic stability. For Tocqueville, such a mode of analysis was itself borrowed from
intellectual mentors seeking to understand and control the uncertainty of
post-Revolutionary French politics.
The crisis of political legitimacy that had been gathering strength in France since
the Revolution set in motion an intellectual effort to compass and characterize the
political and social discordances brought about by the gap between the people and their
leaders. French intellectuals developed a science of the social which was designed to
set in authoritative relief the social needs around which politics ought to be organized. To
some, the post-Revolutionary upheaval revealed how those in authority, enamored only
of their own political survival, neglected to address prevailing social demands.
Concerned only with its own incumbency, the Crown had proven unresponsive to popular
calls for reform and the resulting political instability led French intellectuals in search of

33
a lattice of social laws that could help order politics. This nexus encompassed a body of
beliefs, experiences and cultural practices that were also reflected in official creeds, laws
and principles of the state.
At the forefront of this intellectual development were the Doctrinaires, a small
fraternity of French liberals who attempted to construct an intellectual grounding for a
stable, centrist politics amid the tumult of post-Revolutionary France. The Doctrinaires
raised fundamental questions about the nature of political analysis and human action, and
their efforts led them to develop new explanations of the relationship between politics
and the social structure. Specifically, they claimed that authority and legitimacy were
constituted within the social domain, which thereby determined, or ought to determine,
politics. In post-Revolutionary France, the ideological function of articulating a coherent
sociological approach to political theory that highlighted the dependence of political
institutions on a prior social order was not immediately clear - it could be used in an
number of ways - but, in all cases, it served to mitigate the capriciousness of state rule
and mass mobilization. 7

There is some debate about Tocquevilles assimilation of Doctrinaire ideas, especially those concerning
the primacy of the social sphere. For a perspective that suggests this assimilation to be substantial see
Aurelian Craiutu, Tocqueville and the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, in The Journal of
Political Thought XX, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pgs., 456-493 and his Liberalism Under Siege: The Political
Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). For an account that
claims Tocqueville never fully accepted the social determinism of the Doctrinaire paradigm see Welch,
Tocquevilles Resistance to the Social, in The History of European Ideas 30 (2004), pgs., 83-107and
Welch, De Tocqueville, 15-17.

34
A key figure here was Franois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874) the
dominant minister in France during the July Monarchy, the leader of the influential
constitutional monarchists, and the author of, among other works, The General History of
Civilization in Europe (1828); The History of Civilization in France (1829-1832); and
The History of France from the Earliest Times to the Year 1789 (1872-1876). It was as a
historian - a Doctrinaire historian - that Guizot exercised the most profound influence on
Tocqueville. From 1828 to 1830, Tocqueville attended Guizots lectures on the history of
civilization in Europe and the history of civilization in France. Guizots History of
Civilization in Europe was the only book that Tocqueville asked a friend to send him
from France, a week after his arrival in the United States, and whose ideas in a letter to
Beaumont he described as truly prodigious. 8

Oeuvres compltes, ed., J.-P. Mayer VIII, (I), pg., 80. Hereafter as O.C. Craitu, 474; Drolet, 8-10.

35
Guizot was a historian most interested in the philosophy of history and politics. In
Tocquevilles hands it would become known as political sociology; Guizot described it as
the physiology of history, or the search for those clandestine laws which constituted
the secret of a nations political destiny. 9 This secret turned out to be a complex
array of social and moral undercurrents that were closely connected and self-reinforcing
and culminated in a form of national fate. As such, Guizots intellectual purpose was to
couple a description of the progressive history of civilization with an analysis of those
opaque and axiomatic laws which determined or ought to determine a nations political
structure. At the very instant in which society forms itself and by the very fact of its
formation, it calls forth a government, which proclaims the common truth, the bond of
the society, which promulgates and maintains the precepts which that truth originates.
The power of government, Guizot continued, is implicated in the fact of existence of the
society. And not only is the government necessary, but it forms naturally . . [it]
establishes itself in the society in general. 10 This common truth was a natural
equilibrium, which, developing out of the free association of its citizens and under the
influence of these secret laws, determined a countrys political forms. Such was a
political theory grounded in the primacy of social relations.
Guizot also described a a certain universal spirit, a certain community of

Franois Guizot, Essais sur LHistoire de France (Paris: Charentier, Libraire-diteur, 1847), pg., 1.

10

Franois Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization En Europe (Paris: Perrin et Cie, Libraires-diteurs, 1856).,
pg., 132. Franois Guizot, History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe trans.,
Andrew R.
Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), pgs., 1-12.

36
interests, of ideas, of sentiments, that governments ought to promote and reflect. 11 This
had immediate implications for French history as it articulated a new conception of what
it meant to act politically. To act politically was to faithfully represent and manifest the
sociological status quo - its secret unity, its natural consensus, and its common spirit or
civic culture. In such a schema, the juste milieu was not political compromise but the
political recognition of latent social trends.

11

Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe, 210.

37
Quite naturally, democracy represented a threat to this design. Chaos, Guizot
ruefully wrote in a moment of instability in his professional life, is now concealed under
one word - Democracy. 12 The potential of democracy to ride roughshod over social
continua was a consequence of its responsibility to the free expression of peoples
appetites and ambitions. The more Democracy . . [held] out an interminable vista and
infinite promises, Guizot argued, the more it moved away from the conditions necessary
to represent a common spirit. 13 Confronting democracys transformative potential,
Guizot appealed to an early argument against mass politics by way of a distinction
between the sovereignty of the people and the rule of capable democratic majorities:

It has often been said, that representative government is the government

of the majority, and there is some truth in the assertion; but it must not
be thought that this government of the majority is the same as that
involved in the sovereignty of the people. The principle of the
sovereignty of the people applies to all individuals, merely because they
exist, without demanding of them anything more. . . Representative
government proceeds in another way: it considers what is the kind of
action to which individuals are called; it examines into the amount of
capacity requisite for this action . . .it seeks for a majority among those
who are capable. 14

12
13
14

Guizot, Democracy in France, 2.

Guizot, Democracy in France, 4.

Franois Guizot, Representative Government in Europe, pg., 72. A comparison with Tocquevilles letter
to J .S . Mill is suggestive. Rest assured my dear Mill, that you have touched upon the great
question, or so
I deeply believe. For the friends of Democracy, the question is less one of finding the
means of having the
people rule, than of having the people choose those most capable of
governing. . . . I am deeply convinced
that the future of modern nations depends on its solution.
O.C. VI (I), pgs., 303-304.

38
Tocqueville made creative use of this early form of political sociology.
Democracy in America, in fact, was conceived at the height of Guizots influence on
Tocqueville. Yet, it is also clear that Tocqueville offered a more nuanced analysis of the
way social institutions and political democracy interacted than that offered by his mentor.
Tocqueville deviated from Doctrinaire analysis in important ways; significantly, he did
not share the determinism explicit in Guizots accounting of national destinies. Most
importantly perhaps, Tocqueville did not fully privilege the social over the political but
illustrated the ways in which the two might avail themselves of each other. As such, the
separation of the social and the political was not a prerequisite to establishing the
dominance of the former, but became, in Democracy in America, a blueprint for a larger
prescriptive argument about the ways the two might intermingle in the service of taming
radical politics. It was here, in Tocquevilles political sociology, that postwar American
theorists found a most usable past. Democracy in America provided American
intellectuals with a useful paradigm with which to warrant a restricted democracy
oriented around complacent social norms.

III

Another striking difference that sets Tocquevilles Democracy in America apart

from the works of his contemporaries - including those of Guizot - is a quality of
feeling. The emotional timbre of Democracy is its essence. Tocquevilles narrative lacks
the countenance of Doctrinaire historical determinism because it is ambivalent, subtle,

39
searching, and even disenchanted. The utter clarity of Tocquevilles writing masks a
fundamental ambiguity at the heart of his key terms - an ambiguity not attributable,
however, to duplicity or simple equivocation, but deep uncertainty, and perhaps even a
disinclination to explore the full ramifications of the unfolding democratic ethos. 15
Indeed, Tocqueville ultimately wanted France to control its future by acting, if possible,
to forestall the forces of democratic change, and Democracy was a manifesto of that
generation in France so concerned to shape (and tame) its emerging democracy. Much
like Edmund Burke in his account of the French Revolution, Tocqueville was writing to
his patrician friends and those of like-mind; he was not trying to convince his enemies.
And as such, his method of exposition relied on a rapprochement with the reader via the
attractive generalization, the comparative frame, the perpetual silent reference to
France, in lieu of justificatory or definitional rigor. 16 Tocqueville wanted to harness
Americas usable present to liberate France from the tyranny of its past (despotism or
revolution) and the fears of its future (democratic chaos). 17

15

James Schleifer, among others, noted the (suggestively) inconsistent uses of the term. See his chapter
Some Meanings of Dmocratie, in The Making of Tocquevilles Democracy in America
(Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
16

17

Tocqueville quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution, and Society: Selected Writings
eds., John Stone and Stephen Mennell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), pg., 14.

For an interesting look at the post-Revolutionary and nineteenth century creation of modernity
including, the dramatization of change as the restless iteration of the new and also the
insistence that the
experience of this change is unique and foundational to the idea of
modernity, (53-54) see Peter
Fritzsches, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time
Harvard University Press, 2004)
and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA:

40
The Americans have a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested
to them certain laws and certain political manners. 18 Tocquevilles phrase, as it
appeared in the Introduction to Volume II, explains a great deal about the substance and
mode of his overall analysis in Democracy. To make a claim that a democratic state of
society (or democratic social order in the Lawrence translation) occasioned American
laws, determined politics, and constituted a recognizable and integrated array of accepted
cultural practices, Tocqueville had to draw heavily upon the Guizotian apparatus in
which social forces underlay political institutions. For Tocqueville, politics was, in large
part, an expression of a prior array of self-sustaining habits, attitudes and customs, or
moeurs. This expansive explanatory term - moeurs - is only partially rendered by the
Reeve translation as manners and customs or by the Lawrence translation as
mores. In Volume I, Tocqueville described moeurs as follows:
I have previously remarked that the manners of the people may be
considered as one of the great general causes to which the maintenance
of a democratic republic in the United States is attributable. I here use
the word customs with the meaning which the ancients attached to the
word moeurs; for I apply it not only to the manners properly so called
- that is, to what might be termed the habits of the heart - but to the
various notions and opinions current among men and to the mass of
those ideas which constitute their character of mind. I comprise under
this term, therefore, the whole moral and intellectual conditions of a
people. My intention is not to draw a picture of American customs, but
simply to point out such features of them as are favorable to the
maintenance of their political institutions. 19
18

19

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., Henry Reeve, revised Francis Bowen and Phillips
Bradley (1840; New York: Random House, 1990), pg., V. Hereafter as Democracy II.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., Henry Reeve, revised Francis Bowen and Phillips
Bradley (1835; New York: Random House, 1990), pg., 299-300. Hereafter as Democracy I. Lynn
L.
Marshall and Seymour Drescher, American Historians and Tocquevilles
Democracy, in The Journal of
American History 55, no. 3 (Dec., 1968), 524.

41

For Tocqueville the term democracy was a synonym for civil and social
equality. According to Tocqueville, equality, as a democratic state, encouraged certain
psychic predispositions within the democratic individual. Put another way, the individual
in democratic society came to internalize a set of psychological tendencies that equality
made requisite. So defined, equality, that term of both contempt and esteem in
Democracy, was not primarily a political value - rather it was a compound moeur that
came to shape behavior, and therefore, politics. When Tocqueville spoke of democracy
he spoke not of political institutions, but the inevitability of a social equality which was
itself an alloy of egalitarian social conditions (social leveling) and a set of passions and
habits that revolved around it. In America, Tocqueville wrote in the notes taken during
his American visit, the free moeurs made the free political institutions. 20
That these moeurs settled into self-sustaining patterns of behavior and ultimately
cultural and political practices was at once prosaic and subversive. On the one hand,
politics followed, rather straightforwardly, from the Social condition. . . .[which] may be
justly considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas
which regulate the conduct of nations. 21 Yet, by depicting democracy in a manner
similar to the Montesquieuian notion of the spirit of a people - Tocqueville revealed
democracy to be a distinctly new arrangement of social practices that operated beyond
the ambit of politicians. Because political arrangements were the expression of the
20
21

Tocqueville Ouevres, ed., Andr Jardin, 167.

Democracy I, 46.

42
social condition, the superordinate claims for monarchical rule and aristocratic
complicity - in short the ancien rgimes theoretical legitimacy - was about to be
overwhelmed, Tocqueville claimed, by the customs, manners, habits and beliefs of the
masses. As the single most important causative force in politics these moeurs offered
some hope for political reform from le peuple, but they offered even more cause for
alarm as the public came, under the auspices of democracy, to acquire a capacity to
tyrannize.
When commentators speak of Democracy in America as a cautionary tale they
inevitably refer, in fact, to Tocquevilles most recognizable passages in which he argued
that a new form of modern despotism would result from this democratic state. His
apprehension centered on a meaningful question: I hold it to be an impious maxim that,
politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything; and yet I have asserted that
all authority originates in the will of the majority. Am I, then, in contradiction with
myself? 22 Tocquevilles influence in postwar America revolved around his answer that
there was a difference between democracy proper and mass democracy. Specifically, he
claimed that democracies are vulnerable to a form of tyranny in which the despot takes
advantage of a prior social condition characterized by the atomization of the nations
citizens. This social condition is caused by equality which corrodes the binding social
ties of older stratified societies. Vulnerable to political mobilization as a mass, the
democratic collectivity represents an aggregate of solitary individuals unconnected to
traditional associative relationships and seeking new ones in all the wrong places.
22

Democracy I, 259.

43
To be sure, the specifics of this cautionary tale differed somewhat in each
volume. In Volume I, Tocqueville described an ideal-type American democrat who was
in constant movement, in pursuit of insatiable appetites. Longing for freedom and
equality and driven at once to the edges of commitment and independence, the American
democrat in Volume I needed restraints and found one, to Tocquevilles chagrin, in the
stifling of individual dissent by majority opinion. This was the substance of
Tocquevilles famous tyranny of the majority claim; that in lieu of rigid social gradations
codified in law and embodied in custom (aristocracy), democracy encourages and
legitimizes the tyranny of majority opinion against the free expression of belief.
Tocqueville wrote, The majority in that country [United States], therefore, exercise a
prodigious actual authority, and a power of opinion which is nearly as great; no obstacles
exist which can impede or even retard its progress, so as to make it heed the complaints
of those whom it crushes upon its path. This state of things is harmful in itself and
dangerous for the future. 23 Majority opinion imposes conformity in a complicated
social recommendation that individuals absorbed as part of their pattern of moeurs. In
short, individual freedom was leading Americans to celebrate their sameness. The power
of this common culture - majority culture - to dominate was expressed politically as a
form of mass politics in which popular sovereignty carried out a form of legislative

23

Democracy I, 255. Tocqueville was mum as to the problems obstructive minorities could pose for the
state. Part of this is explained by Tocquevilles assumption that the only minority that could
effectively and
legitimately interpose itself between the government and the mass was the
Part of this was also a conscious avoidance, on Tocquevilles part,
aristocracy or elite of some sort.
of exploring beyond the bounds of his
own forecasts to a time when emergent minorities might
exact even more political power. For a good
exploration of Tocquevilles reluctance to
expose his deepest ideas to critical scrutiny, see Welch, 207-210.

44
despotism, (the social power thus centralized). 24 The ability of the pouvoir social to
ride roughshod over others was made particularly unbearable because the masses had
little ability to recognize their authoritarianism.

24

Democracy I, 88.

45
Volume II offered an even more unyielding analysis of modern democratic
despotism, and an even more disenchanted portrait of the impoverishment of democratic
life. The exceptionalism or particularism of American circonstances was downplayed in
the second volume in favor of a broader analysis of sociological constants and universals
the French themselves would soon have to confront. An empiricism driven by acute
observation led Tocqueville to measured conclusions in the first volume. In the second
volume, Tocqueville reasoned philosophically about democracy as a comprehensive state
of existence. What resulted was an emphasis on the threat of individualism: a form of
anomie brought on as democracys citizens retreated into the cocoon of their private
interests and satisfactions. Tocqueville termed this democratic permutation of egoism
individualisme. Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given
birth, Tocqueville wrote in an often-quoted passage. Our fathers were only acquainted
with gosme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self,
which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything
in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of
the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his
family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he
willingly leaves society at large to itself. 25 Tocqueville, therefore, revealed that
democracy wins an unsatisfying victory - in the name of freedom and equality - insofar
as the free pursuit of private satisfactions comes at expense both of citizenship and true
individuality. This new threat, different in scope from Tocquevilles earlier tyranny of the
25

Democracy II, 98.

46
majority, was grounded in a new description of the American democrat as timid and
altogether less intentioned by the civic demands of democracy and confining himself
entirely within the solitude of his own heart. 26

26

Democracy II, 99.

47
Yet a key similarity remained: in both volumes democracy was inherently
vulnerable to a form of centralized, mass politics. In the first volume, Tocqueville
described how democracies tend toward a form of administrative centralization which
encroaches and subjugates. I am also convinced that democratic nations are most likely
to fall beneath the yoke of a centralized administration, for several reasons, among which
is the following: The constant tendency of these nations is to concentrate all the strength
of the government in the hands of the only power that directly represents the
people. . . . 27 Such was the difference, Tocqueville warned, between democratic tyranny
and the arbitrary power of aristocracies - the former has a legitimacy insofar as it
tyrannizes in the name of the people; the latter often commands in spite of the people.

27

Democracy I, 95. Welch, 78-81.

48
In the second volume, Tocqueville described a similar scenario in which a form of
administrated, paternalist despotism would pervade life by taking advantage of the
detached, democratic individual. This despotism was made possible first and foremost by
the central democratic principle of equality. The more equal the conditions of men
become and the less strong men individually are, the more easily they give way to the
current of the multitude and the more difficult it is for them to adhere by themselves to an
opinion which the multitude discard, he wrote. 28 Democracys subjects were just that subjugated souls who became the victims of their own appetites which were, in a cruel
and self-reinforcing irony, put together out of democracys constitutive attributes:
equality and freedom. Thus the vices which despotism produces are precisely those
which equality fosters, Tocqueville claimed. These two things perniciously complete
and assist each other. Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie;
despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to
consider their fellow creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public
virtue. 29 Unconnected to any meaningful social ties, the alienated paved the way for the
collectivity. In more modern parlance Tocquevilles dystopia would be considered
totalitarian - Tocqueville called it a mild despotism - but the results were the same:
Despotism, then, which is at all times dangerous, is more particularly to be feared in
democratic ages. 30

28
29
30

Democracy II, 114.

Democracy II, 102.
Democracy II, 102. See also Democracy II, Book 4, Chap., 3 - That the Sentiments of Democratic

49
Tocquevilles Democracy also offered a reasoned analysis of the ways in which
Americas moeurs could serve to mitigate democracys tendency towards mass politics.
I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny of the majority in America at the
present day; he observed, but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that
the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and
the manners of the country more than its laws. 31 The continued reference, made in both
volumes, to the ways in which American democracy depended upon a shared a
deep-seated system of beliefs about politics, society, morality, and religion served to tell
an instructive, cautionary tale - that democracy was going to have to be moderated from
within its underlying social framework, rather than through politics. According to
Tocqueville, political discussion and compromise were not the answers, rather, the issue
was to foster and eventually legitimize a stabilizing social consensus which could be used
to control the capriciousness of democratic politics. This was the challenge of modernity.

Nations Accord with Their Opinions in Leading Them to Concentrate Political Power.
31

Democracy I, 261-262,

50
Tocquevilles hope for the future was expressed in the idea of self-interest
rightly understood - a description of the state when self-interest and public interest
become commensurate within an individuals set of values. Bridging the idea of social
stability and individual freedom was not easy, but it could be accomplished both
Tocqueville and Weber thought, if a desire for social cohesion inhered in the psyche of
the individuals who would champion order in the name of free choice. In this ideal state,
the democratic individual would will or voluntarily make sensible political choices
thereby lessening the vulnerability of political freedom. For Weber, this was articulated
in his notion of elective affinity, for Tocqueville, it was self-interest rightly
understood; in both cases it was a correspondingly dismal appraisal of the capacities of
the masses to act responsibly or intentionally. The masses, of their own reasoned accord,
could not be expected to act on principle, rather, they had to be convinced that their
material interests were in harmony with the greater good. 32

32

The mild condescension of this perspective can be seen in the oft-quoted passage from Democracy II: It
is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to interest him in the destiny of the state, because he
does
not clearly understand what influence the destiny of the state can have upon his own lot.
But if it is
proposed to make a road across the end of his estate, he will see at a glance
that there is a connection
between this small public affair and his greatest private affairs;
and he will discover, without its being
shown to him, the close tie that unites private to
general interest. pg., 104. Or, in Tocquevilles notes for
May 29th, 1831 - The principle of the
ancient republics was the sacrifice of particular interest to the
general good, in this
sense, we can say that they were virtuous. This principle, it seems to me, ensconces
the
particular interest within the general interest. A sort of refined and intelligent gisme seems the pivot
around which the entire machine operates. These people [the Americans] are not shy to avoid searching
whether the virtue is good, but to prove that it is useful. If this last point is correct, as I think it is in
part,
this society can pass for enlightened but not virtuous. Tocqueville then goes on the
ponder the selfinterest rightly understood as an explanation for this state of American
affairs. Tocqueville Oeuvres, ed.,
Andr Jardin, 230.

51
The most important contribution Tocqueville offered as avenues toward
self-interest rightly understood was to present civil associations and religion as
effective (secret) mechanisms of intervention in the democratic social condition. That is,
both civil associations and religion were introduced as instruments of influence in the
substructure of democratic life which could moderate democracys tendency towards
mass politics. 33 This was natural outgrowth of Tocquevilles political sociology which
sharply distinguished civil society from political society and set the former in a realm
independent of the state and, if necessary, in opposition to it. In both volumes, for
instance, Tocqueville described how these associations had become a necessary
guarantee against the tyranny of the majority by alleviating the effects of individualism
and the unremitting material self-interest of the democratic individual. 34 Tocqueville
further claimed that associations must not follow too closely the pattern of divisive
political solidarities and serve for the advocacy of interests, rather, they ought to serve a
deeper function - the political maturity of their members who would come to accept a
more legitimate and stabilizing set of political moeurs. Feelings and opinions are
recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal
influence of men upon one another, Tocqueville claimed. I have shown that these
influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially

33

34

See Democracy II, Book II, Chap., 5 - Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in
Civil Life. Sheldon S. Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and
Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pgs., 343-344.
Democracy I, 194.

52
created, and this can only be accomplished by associations. 35
Religion could serve the same end. Concerned with the loss of civic virtue that
resulted from the corroding effects of the democratic social condition, Tocqueville
described how religion buttressed social authority. The chief concern of religion is to
purify, to regulate, and to restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for well-being that
men feel in periods of equality, he wrote. 36 Tocqueville championed a coherent set of
beliefs, a civil religion, that could help maintain a vital center, rather than a balanced
plurality of belief systems. Conceived as such, religion could help remedy the prosaic
and mundane quality of thought and culture in democracies and help in community
building by setting itself against that spirit of independence which is her most dangerous
opponent. 37 But it could also serve to curb democratic excess by inculcating habits of
restraint that will recur in political society and thereby serve to maintain political
tranquility. 38 Religion. . . is more needed in democratic republic than in any others,
Tocqueville argued. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the
moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? 39 Attending to
those secret forces that determined politics, religion could most effectively orient a

35
36
37

38
39

Democracy II, 109.

Democracy II, 26.
Democracy II, 28. In this regard, Tocqueville recognized that religion also wielded political influence.
There is, in every religious doctrine a political doctrine which by affinity they are joined. Tocqueville
Ouevres, ed., Andr Jardin, 167.
Democracy I, 305.
Democracy I, 307.

53
democracy towards temperate ends.
In an effort to stabilize democracy Tocqueville narrowed the parameters of
political conduct. Seeking to save democracy from itself, he concerned himself with
those elements that could counteract democracys innate tendency toward mass politics
with a separate realm of assentient civil activity. In other words, Tocqueville legitimized
democratic opposition and democratic change only insofar as they were favorable to the
maintenance of a certain social consensus. Claiming that democracy could achieve
stability by reflecting what people have in common was this architectures greatest
contribution; claiming that this had to be achieved in spite of le peuples other interests
or intentions was its least.

IV

The American encounter with Democracy in America came via the English
translation of Henry Reeve. A friend and contemporary, Reeve commissioned the
translation on Tocquevilles second trip to England. The first American edition of
Democracy in America (Part I) was published in 1838; Part II was published in 1840. The
1850 edition (the twelfth) was the last to be corrected by Tocqueville himself and
Reeves translation was itself amended twice, once in 1862 by Francis Bowen, and again,
in 1945, by Phillips Bradley. There have been other translations - George Lawrences
1966 translation for example - but it was Reeves translation, supplemented with fine
prefaces over the years, that remains our starting point. The dissemination of Democracy

54
was further helped by a 1945 mass market edition that carried a foreword by Harold
Laski, as well as Bradleys revised translation and his thorough introduction which
remains a fine resource especially for those interested in the initial reception and reviews
of Tocquevilles work. Subsequent mass market editions, including the 1947 Oxford
abridged edition which featured an introduction by Henry Steele Commager, and Richard
Heffners 1956 abridged edition, which remains in print, contributed to Tocquevilles
presence. 40
The story of Tocquevilles impact on the American mind begins as a tale of
astonishing, if delayed, success. After a brief period of hesitation, American reviewers
fully embraced Tocquevilles observations on American politics and were pleased to
come across a Europeans account of American culture that was on the whole quite
positive. The legacy of unflattering European descriptions of American mores accounted
for the delay in issue of an American edition of Democracy and some unfavorable early
reviews. Soon enough, however, Part I came to be recognized as work of unrivaled
perspicacity. The first English translation of 1835 and the first American edition of 1838
appeared well enough in advance of the publication of Part II (1840) to mellow the
criticisms of that more brooding later work and ultimately established Tocquevilles early
reputation as a gracious observer of American mores.
cToqueville was an accurate observer according to many early reviewers who

40

James T. Kloppenberg, Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America, in La Revue/The Tocqueville Review

Vol. XVII No., 2 (1996), pgs., 19-25. Robert Nisbet, Many Tocquevilles, in The American Scholar 46
(Winter 1976-1977), pgs., Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals (New
York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), Chapter 4,and 164-180.

55
claimed that his unbiased perspective made possible a trenchant understanding of
American life. Part I, thereby, became a successful and important nineteenth century
book on American political institutions. In the second third of the nineteenth century,
Democracy was adapted and used as a textbook in American schools, suggesting that his
observations more than his predictions were of interest. In particular, his celebration of
American political progress was widely accepted and his broad yet detailed look at the
machinery of American government proved to be highly valued. When Part II appeared,
reviewers were less enthusiastic, but Tocquevilles reputation was set: He understood
Americans and their exhilarating democratic experiment.
Yet Democracy fell from these heights during Reconstruction to late 1930s.
Tocqueville had little presence in the representative and important historical works of the
end of the century and Progressive Era including those of Frederick Jackson Turner and
Charles Beard. Choosing to emphasize conflict rather than consensus, Beard and others
had little use for Tocquevilles observations on American national character and its array
of shared moeurs. From 1904 to 1945, Democracy was rarely in print and was seldom
cited by students of American politics. Conventional survey texts such as Jesse Macys
Political Parties in the United States, 1846-1861(1900) and Party Organization and
Machinery (1904) and Henry Jones Fords The Rise and Growth of American Politics
(1898) made little use of Tocqueville. Perhaps more revealingly, works of broad political
theory and commentary such as those of Herbert Croly, contained few references to
Tocqueville as well. 41 Tocquevilles wane during this era was conspicuous. In the second

41

Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: MacMillan, 1909); Herbert Croly, Progressive

56
third of the nineteenth century, his name was invoked often and with authority; from the
end of the Civil War until the late 1930s, few were mining Tocqueville for insights, fewer
still considered him worthy of study. Even among those foreign observers of American
life Tocqueville could no longer claim supremacy as Democracy shared pride of place
with other works such as Lord Bryces 1888 classic, The American Commonwealth.
To be sure, Tocqueville did not disappear. Matthew Mancini has illustrated that
Tocqueville was in fact a continuing presence in American intellectual life during that
post-Civil War period when he is seen to have been eclipsed or forgotten. 42 Articles
continued to issue, editions of Democracy continued to be printed, and course syllabi
which assigned his readings continued to be handed out to students. His Recollections
was published in 1893 and Democracy underwent three separate editions and a number of
printings between 1898 and 1904. 43 In his History of the United States during the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1891-1898), Henry Adams
quoted from Democracys second volume and drew upon Tocquevilles analysis of
democratic society. Bryce too had taken note of Tocqueville and Turner came later to
discover him. 44 Daniel Coit Gilman, president of Johns Hopkins, and Francis Lieber a
pioneer in the establishment of American political science, directly and indirectly reveled

Democracy (New York: MacMillan, 1914).

42
43
44

Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals), 107.

Democracy II, 417.

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan and co., 1888) Frederick Jackson
Turner The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1920) and The United States,
1830- 1850: The Nation and its Sections (New York: H. Holt and Co.,1935). Marshall and Drescher, 513-515.

57
their interest in Tocqueville during the quiet phase in Tocqueville scholarship. 45 Yet
Tocquevilles appearances in the eras literature were sporadic and not connected by any
comprehensive revival of his main themes or predictions. Even those who acknowledged
him did so at a distance: Many of the evils he saw, and which he thought inherent and
incurable, have now all but vanished, Bryce wrote. Other evils have indeed revealed
themselves which he did not discern, but these may prove as transient as those with
which he affrighted European readers in 1834. 46 Tocquevilles Democracy had lost its
vitality as a source of usable knowledge.
The causes of this relative quietude are debated but have collected around two
explanations: the irrelevance of Tocquevilles consensual architecture vis-a-vis the
dislocation caused by urbanization, immigration, industrialization, and other forms of
diversity that made themselves apparent at turn of the century; and the disuse brought on
by a surfeit of sameself celebration as Robert Nisbet has termed it. 47 There were few
then who doubted American destiny, Nisbet wrote in Many Tocquevilles - his account
of Tocquevilles cyclical presence in the American mind. Ironically, it was this very

45
46
47

Mancini, Chapter 4.
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan and co., 1888), pg., 911.

Kloppenberg, Life Everlasting: Tocqueville in America, 22. Kloppenberg cites Wilfred McClay, The
Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) and Nisbet
as proponents of the second explanation; and himself, of the first. Nisbet, 59-75. Welch, chap., 5. In some important
ways, the explanation of Tocquevilles eclipse as the product of social dislocation confuses more than it explains.
One might just as plausibly contend that Tocquevilles palliative arguments should have appeared at a time - during
social stress - when Americans needed them most (as they did in France). Why would Tocqueville necessarily fall
out of favor in times of disruption? In fact, in the 1940s and 1950s, Tocqueville spoke to those concerned about the
perceived frailties of American democracy and the vulnerability of American social norms in an age of political
uncertainty.

58
intoxication with American progress, I believe, that led to Tocquevilles decline. Granted
he had praised American progress-but not recently! His place was taken by dozens, then
hundreds, of Americans able themselves to praise the spirit from which all blessings
flowed. Tocquevilles 1835 ode to American progress was now lost in the vast chorus
that stretched from one ocean to the other. 48 As Nisbet suggests, Part I was all but
forgotten by the early twentieth century. Part II had yet to make an impact. Tocquevilles
observations had lost their immediacy and relevance with the passage of time. The early
emphasis on Tocquevilles straightforward observations concerning American politics
and manners had actually created a problematic legacy: it was inflexible and soon
became dated. An excerpt from an essay of the 1860s captured an image of Tocquevilles
work that would be unrecognizable to the postwar theorists for whom its expansiveness
explained so much: It is a noticeable feature of his works, that his mind was continually
directed to a specific object; and that he never indulges in that theoretical speculation
which either rejects facts or is incapable of practical application. He always looked
forward to a direct result. 49
The mid to late 1930s witnessed a renewed interest in the theoretical and
normative qualities of Democracy in America. Though revival is not an accurate term, the
re-acclamation of Tocquevilles oeuvre was grounded in a new appreciation of the
second volume and Tocqueville thereby acquired unassailable legitimacy as a pioneering
political sociologist commenting on democracy as a social condition as well as the
48
49

Nisbet, 64.
Anonymous, Alexis de Tocqueville, North American Review 95 (July, 1862), pg., 160

59
character of mass politics.
This process owed a great deal to George W. Piersons excellent work,
Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938) and the publication of J. P. Mayers
Tocqueville: Prophet of a Mass Age (1939), overseas. 50 Tocqueville could not have
asked for a more able expositor than Pierson. His account was remarkably balanced and it
maneuvered around Tocquevilles insights and oversights with intellectual honesty.
Much of Piersons book was taken up - as the title suggests - with the travel minutiae of
Tocqueville and Beaumont in America. But in the latter part of the book, Pierson offered
an important accounting of Democracy as a work of political theory. What Pierson also
revealed was the complexity and nuance of Tocquevilles work in its biographical
context. Pierson uncovered an earnest Tocqueville who wrote Democracy because he had
to. The book was not an aristocratic dalliance or an opportunity to offer the requisite
European chastisement of American culture; rather, it was an honest attempt to
understand the complexity of American democracy. That it was written for the French
made it no less important for Americans - in fact, it made it more so. An American
audience would have made impossible any allusive analysis of American politics and
culture. It was Tocquevilles angle of vision that was key according to Pierson;
Tocqueville was not a scientist, but a prophetic if appropriately estranged political
theorist. 51

50

It too should be noted that at about this time Tocqueville was finding his way into a number of nascent
sub-disciplines including American studies and the myth and symbol school in American literary theory.
51

George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1938), see especially, Chapters LVII Tocquevilles Work in Retrospect: Its Defects, and LVIII Tocquevilles

60
Behind this renewed admiration lay the notion that Tocqueville saw beyond mere
external forms to the secrets or unseen sociological impulses of modernity. Writing
in 1932, Harold Laski suggested that the book [Democracy] is not really about America
at all. Tocqueville, in fact, sought to illuminate those underlying and universal currents
of democratic life and he thereby saw with remarkable profundity into the secret of his
time. 52 This was a significantly new approach to Democracy - unthinkable by the
standards of nineteenth century assessments. The idea that Tocqueville was describing
something more than America and something deeper than self-evident politics, however,
would become a standard approach in the postwar era. Another key element of this
re-evaluation was the discovery of Democracys normative attributes. Tocqueville was
no longer an observer, rather he was making prescriptive arguments about how
Americans, and others, ought to live in a democracy. Laski described this as
Tocquevilles foray into the moral ethics of democracy, and for many, including Laski,
this prescriptive dimension centered around Tocquevilles warnings about equality and
the setting of standards in terms of the wants of the mass. The books ultimate
sadness, Laski wrote, lay in an insistence on the right of the individual at all costs to
affirm his own essence, a sad indignation at those implications of social life which, by
their nature, subordinate the individual to the mass. 53

Work in Retrospect: Its Enduring Qualities.

52

Harold J. Laski, Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy, in The Social and Political Ideas of Some
Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age, F.J.C. Hearnshaw ed., (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1935),
pgs., 102, 100.
53

Laski, 106, 111.

61
The image of Democracy that emerged from the 1930s was primarily derived
from Part II as egalitarianism and the attendant anomie thought to characterize mass
democracies became increasingly important to American intellectuals. As Harold W.
Stoke wrote in The South Atlantic Quarterly (1937), De Tocqueville almost alone
among writers on democracy, saw that an insistence upon equalitarianism can, at the
same time, lead to disaster and is bound to do so unless special safeguards are set up.
And it is in this warning to later generations of the dangers inherent in the idea of
equality in social and political life that De Tocqueville at once exhibited his greatest
intuition and performed his greatest service to future democrats. 54 Describing
Tocqueville as a French philosopher, Matthew Josephson suggested in The Virginia
Quarterly Review (1938) that, To sum up briefly the report which Tocqueville brought
back of American democracy in flower, the essential determining condition which he
emphasized was first and last the almost unexampled equality ruling there. 55 Thanks to
Piersons work which had the effect of suddenly opening a forgotten door to the past,
Josephson described how Democracy was now more appropriate than ever for use in
modern political theory, especially as a means to cope with democracy in the Machine
Age. 56 These were themes drawn from Tocquevilles political sociology and their tone
was accordingly uncertain.
54

55

56

Harold W. Stoke, De Tocquevilles Appraisal of Democracy - Then and Now, in The South Atlantic
Quarterly 36 (1937), pg., 19.
Matthew Josephson, A Century After Tocqueville, in The Virginia Quarterly Review 14 (Winter 1938),
pgs., 591, 589.
Josephson, 585, 582.

62
The vibrant American democrat described in Part I was supplanted in such
articles of the 1930s by a timid follower seeking the approbation of the group. The
desire of the individual to differentiate himself and his activities from masses of other
individuals is steadily declining, Stoke warned the reader in words that would be
repeated like a mantra throughout the 1950s. 57 Democracy often provided key shared
assumptions about the social conditions underlying democratic politics that could be used
for broad criticism of reformist and populist democracy and its attendant values. Stoke
wrote, the mass effects of equalitarianism are given force by the other principal
characteristics of democracies, the belief in the right of majorities to rule. 58 Drawing
from Tocquevilles own illustration of democracy as both an instrument of political
organization and a purveyor of destabilizing moeurs, Stoke argued for a cautious
approach to democracys potential for politicizing the masses.
In this regard, two articles by Albert Salomon, one written for the journal Social
Research, the other for The Review of Politics, proved important. Tocqueville, Moralist
and Sociologist, (1935) and Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, (1939) were
expansive treatments of Tocqueville as an authority on modernity. The first claimed him
as a sociologist and a moralist, the second as a philosopher, but in both cases Salomon
argued that Democracy acquired a new relevance thanks to the sociological and
philosophical profundity of Part II. The presuppositions and the direction of
Tocquevilles thought come to even clearer expression in the second part of Democracy
57
58

Stoke, 20.
Stoke, 20

63
in America, Salomon argued. Here for the first time in the nineteenth century the
attempt is made to show the change in forms of human existence in and through the
process of social development. In fact, Salomon claimed, recognizing the sociological
significance of Democracy was made difficult because the outward form of his concepts
is political, [while] their content nearly always refers to a sociological structure or
relations. Far from being vestiges of an outmoded liberalism, Tocquevilles ideas tapped
into sociological constants that explained the course of modern democracy. The key was
to dig beneath and beyond Part I to the arguments in Part II that addressed the new social
conditions emerging within modern democracies. This is the legacy of Tocqueville for
our times, his actual significance for our day. 59
In Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, Salomon barely mentioned
Democracy at all, using Tocquevilles ideas instead for wide-ranging comparisons and
speculations including a justification for elite rule. Opening Democracy for use in broad
analyses of politics and culture was made possible, Salomon claimed, by Pierson whose
scholarly masterpiece revealed that, Tocquevilles work is wrongly ignored as
belonging to a finished stage of political liberalism. Unlike Auguste Comte or Hegel
who fashioned philosophical and sociological systems that shared the same indifference
concerning the philosophical and structural problems of human existence (and were
thereby products of an older liberalism that had run its course), Tocqueville understood
that a modern political theory would have to address the problematical situation of

59

Albert Salomon, Tocqueville, Moralist and Sociologist, in Social Research 2 (1935), pgs., 414, 411,
427.

64
personality in the irreversible process of democratization and industrialization. In a soon
to be familiar Tocquevillian gambit, Salomon argued that individuals in a democracy
were subjected to new patterns of despotism in the radical pursuit of equalization,
which either overwhelmed them, or, most often, were internalized as drives to immerse
oneself in the group. For this reason, Salomon wrote, the main concern in these
sociological democratic times is not man and his action any more, but the knowledge of
those forces and those general movements and tendencies that bring man into power and
reveal him as a reflection of the standards of the multitude rather than as an exponent of
highest ideals of the few. 60 Such was the insight that people could oppress themselves.
This proved to be a highly rarefied argument that had little use for evidence other
than textual references to European social theorists. Of course, Tocqueville proved highly
useful for such constructions. Summoning his name was a means to instant sagacity and
the observations and forecasts in Democracy were often taken, without caution, as
evidence about extremely complex, modern social trends. Take one excerpt: The
omission of this group [the elite] increases the trend toward despotism inherent in the
individualistic egalitarianism of the democratic societies. How was it possible to
measure such despotism? And how was the march of political democracy and social
egalitarianism diminishing a societys total freedom, rather than redistributing freedom to
those from whom it had been previously denied? Such questions were rarely asked. For
Salomon, as for a number of other postwar American theorists, invoking Tocqueville

60

Albert Salomon, Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, in The Review of Politics 1 (1939), pgs., 403,
402, 410, 408.

65
sometimes absolved them from providing the sort of empirical evidence necessary to
answer fairly basic questions about the democracy-to-despotism thesis. For Salomon, the
strengthening of democracy meant the summoning of countervailing forces. Here he
rather narrowly followed Tocquevilles idea that associations and religion - taken
together - represented the most effective counter-measures for democratic activism and
excess. To foreclose dangerous attempts at political mobilization, those professional,
municipal and local organizations helping in the maintenance of equilibrium through a
union of interests, were to be prized, Salomon asserted, along with the embracing
solidarity of the religious communion, which served as an indispensable element for
the maintenance of a free society. 61
Democracy in America experienced its postwar revival not so much as an object
of study, but as the substructure for normative arguments about democracy. Few books
and articles undertook a full-scale analyses or a wholesale excavation of Tocquevilles
life and work. In fact, in a period of so-called revival there were fewer prominent
American works devoted solely to Tocqueville than one might expect. Rather, his
concepts about democracy, mass politics, the social sphere, consensus and conformity,
were reproduced for use within broad theories about democratic mobilization. 62 This
does not mean, however, that his ideas became mere bromides for those wary of

61
62

Salomon, Tocquevilles Philosophy of Freedom, 418, 422-423.

Tocqueville was (and is) so often cited - directly in epigrammatic quotes or indirectly in supplicatory
paraphrases - at the outset of a chapter or book to indicate the gravity of the analysis to be presented, or at its end, to
seal its justness. The lucidity of his writing lends itself to such applications. But the continuous use of his words as
self-standing aphorisms presents his main ideas as almost beyond scrutiny. Without any encumbering commentary
his positions have easily became proverbs to be accepted without debate.

66
democratic disorder. Quite the opposite. They were used to help construct and then
justify a new vocabulary for democracy and democratization. Again, this can be
explained by the new Tocquevilles who emerged in the mid to late 1930s. The
re-discovery of Democracy centered around the more formidable and heretofore
neglected arguments of Part II and his ideas acquired a new legitimacy as the lens - what
Louis Hartz called the Tocquevillian facts of American life - for ideological debates
and political theorizing. 63 Tocquevilles ideas were, by the 1940s and 1950s, quite rarely
the subject of critical debate or scrutiny; instead they quickly became the groundwork for
sweeping and axiomatic descriptions of the American national character and political
culture, as well as prescient explanations of how democratic despotisms could emerge
from within free societies and how Americans might avoid them. 64

63
64

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), pg., 94.
Marshall and Drescher, 513-517.

67
What best explains the nature of the Tocqueville revival among political theorists
in postwar America were the specific conditions under which the renewed interest and
appreciation for his arguments occurred. Simply put, Tocqueville was summoned in
answer to the problem of democratic instability brought to light by wartime
totalitarianism. The appeal to mass politics among fascist parties in Italy and Germany
(and left-wing parties after the war) created a distrust of political cures and the political
mobilization that supported them. Totalitarianism (in its modern form) initiated a crisis in
democratic theory and yielded a wealth of exacting debates and jeremiads because it was
seen to be the product of popular support and demagogic manipulation. It is at the level
of popular response and participation, therefore, that twentieth-century totalitarian
regimes differ most sharply from their pre-industrial predecessors, Barrington Moore Jr,
claimed in Political Power and Social Theory (1958). 65
Such assumptions led many theorists scrambling in search of democracys
theoretical underpinnings. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, a significant portion
of this collective self-assessment of American democracy turned to Tocquevilles
Democracy and took as a starting point Tocquevilles claims about the social bases of a
quiescent democratic politics. As such, Democracy filled a postwar need for a theoretical
touchstone in the American search for a stable democracy of the vital center. As
Benjamin Wright wrote: There is still, over a century later, no satisfactory book on the
nature of democracy - none, I think, that does a more comprehensive or a more

65

Barrington Moore, jr., Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1958), pg., 80.

68
meaningful job of description and analysis than Tocquevilles. 66 Or, in a book with one
of the eras most suggestive titles, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), J. L.
Talmon maintained, There exists no special and systematic study on the subject of this
work; neither a theoretical treatise on the main thesis of the present essay, nor a historical
investigation into the emergence and growth of what will be called here the totalitarian
trend of democracy. The keenest perception of the current and of its vital significance is
to be found in some of the - considering the early date - prophetic utterances of Alexis de
Tocqueville. 67 In this influential work, Talmon, an British political theorist, noted that
totalitarian democracy regarded, in the last analysis, the popular vote as an act of
self-identification with general will, and refused to allow individuals to opt out from the
demands of political life. 68 According to Talmon, this idea could be traced back to the
assertions of J. J. Rousseaus concerning popular mobilization. Contrasted to his
intellectual legacy (as one of democracys saboteurs) was Tocqueville who suggested
the distinctive vulnerability of mass society long before the rise of nazism and
communism. 69 As Tocqueville well-noted, liberal-democracy could ensure its stability
only insofar as it did not inflate the importance of politics but accepted its basis in a prior
social structure. For Talmon, this claim was imported without alteration to explain how a
66

67

68
69

Benjamin F. Wright, American Government and Politics of Democracy in America, in The American
Political Science Review XL no. 1 (Feb., 1946), pg., 58.
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952), pg., 257.
Emphasis is Talmons.
Talmon, 251,
Talmon, 121.

69
polity reflecting a social consensus was the necessary alternative to totalitarian
democracys answer to the paradox of freedom (the uneasy co-existence of freedom
and orderly political existence) which realized itself in a forced political unanimity
caused by enlarging the scope of political behavior - a dictatorship resting on popular
enthusiasm - as Talmon phrased it. 70
Another indication of Tocquevilles credibility can be seen in a UNESCO survey
(1947-1948) that bore upon the idea of democracy and the (mis)understandings it
occasioned among those of different political sympathies. Claiming that, Few words
have played a greater role in these [postwar ideological] conflicts than the word
democracy, the surveys committee, including E. H. Carr, Richard McKeon and Paul
Ricoeur, set out probe the opinions of a vast array of the worlds luminaries. 71 It is the
central aim of the inquiry launched by UNESCO, the committee members stated
confidently, to remedy this [lack of material concerning the problem of democracy]
shortcoming, to organize philosophically detached debates between nations, between
opposed ideological camps: to elucidate, through international exchanges of views, the
divergencies of usage and interpretation, to analyze the normative foundations of those
divergencies and to search for potential sources of reconciliation. 72 The somewhat
complicated questionnaire made use of Lincoln and Tocqueville alone at any substantive

70
71

72

Talmon, 2, 6.
Democracy in a World of Tensions, ed., Richard McKeon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
pg., 513.
Democracy in a World of Tensions, 514.

70
length. Using Tocquevilles 1848 speech in the Assemble Constituante when he
famously delineated the fundamental differences between socialism and democracy, the
surveys authors set out to establish normative political definitions to which the
contributors could respond. This proved to be one of the most suggestive passages and
the one that occasioned the most passionate rejoinders among the participants who
included John Dewey, Giovanni Borgese, Wilhelm Rpke, Henri Lefebre, and C. I.
Lewis.
Emphasizing how politics reflected an underlying and stabilizing social structure
was an effective way of distinguishing Soviet-style mass politics from the healthy
democratic equilibrium of America. Yet, Tocqueville also revealed how the struggle
between democracy and despotism can take place within nations, as much as between
them. Specifically, Tocqueville illustrated how democracy (American democracy) itself
creates the favorable conditions for the despotism of the mass. First and foremost,
democracy explained the loss of community and the emergence of the atomized
individual who was vulnerable to political mobilization on behalf of radical causes.
According to mass politics theorists, including Arthur Kornahuser, Robert Nisbet, Philip
Selznick, and Seymour Martin Lipset, democracy ate away at those bonds of loyalty to
groups and associations which had characterized the social structure of an earlier
historical period. Egalitarian conditions paved the way for a ruinous conformity and
helped create a discontented public with an aversion for traditional sources of political
and social authority. As a result, democratic political institutions had to deal with a large,
other-directed mass unmoored to any stabilizing social ties and inclined towards

71
political activism. Because of this accepted fact, the mass politics debate also cut to the
core of participatory democracy. Tocquevillian social theory, as put to use in the postwar
era, revealed that popular participation was not necessarily a measure of political health,
but more often a symptom of an impending democratic despotism. Over time, activist
politics emerged as the central problem of democratic legitimacy and the all-important
question for those proponents of the mass politics paradigm - and a good place to begin
an illustration of its principles - then became, how do we distinguish legitimate
democratic majorities, from despotic ones? 73
In one of this genres most notable works, The Politics of Mass Society (1959),
William Kornhauser used a thoroughly Tocquevillian argument to establish the outlines
of a political theory that could be used to such discriminating effect. Kornhausers gambit
was based on the premise that the strength of democratic institutions depends on the
underlying social structure. . . . 74 With the requisite invocation of Tocqueville - De
Tocqueville suggested the distinctive vulnerability of mass society long before the rise of
nazism and communism, - Kornhauser outlined the social contexts of democratic
political behavior in such a way as to set in relief the threat of massism. 75 Such
massism, as Kornhauser described it, was a Tocquevillian anomie that included groups
of individuals who were disconnected from the mainsprings of the national, stabilizing
73

For a good description of the ways European social theory was used in modernization theory and
American foreign policy debates, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War
America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Chapters 1-3.
74
75

William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pg., 13.
Kornhauser, 121.

72
culture. He called these crises of disconnection, discontinuities in the social process
that weakened the social relations intermediate between the individual and the state. 76
The attenuation of these social relations was the central problem of modern
democracies because it ate away at those relationships which bound the individual to
uphold the political equilibrium and which provided a buffer from direct political
engagement. Unmoored by any of these associative connections/restraints meant the
realization of mass societys first prerequisite: social alienation, or the distance between
the individual and his society. 77
Of course, these atomized individuals were most prone to mass action only if
effectively politicized. People cannot be mobilized against the established order,
Kornhauser wrote, until they first have been divorced from prevailing codes and
relations. Only then are they available for activist modes of intervention in the political
process. 78 Groups, therefore, were a natural outgrowth of the stable and established
social structure and remained, for the most part, non-politicized, while masses were
highly politicized, organized around the idea of political action, and therefore, very
dangerous. Not surprisingly, participatory democracy was at fault. Modern democratic
systems possess a distinct vulnerability to mass politics because they invite the whole
population, most of which has been historically quiescent, to engage in politics, he

76
77
78

Kornhauser, 125.
Kornhauser, 237.
Kornhauser, 123.

73
wrote. 79
To what ends people were politically active was of little concern to Kornhauser.
In fact, democracy was evaluated by mass politics advocates, including Kornhauser, as a
mode of regulating social tensions not of realizing social justice. Such a paradigm
effectively marginalized other causal factors in the nascence of democratic unrest
including class. How American democracy measured up as means to address significant
economic, racial or other issues was not considered as important as the underlying social
and political forces politicizing the mass. Kornhauser argued that Differences in
receptivity to mass symbols and leaders are due primarily to the strength of social ties,
and not to the influence of class, or any other social status, by itself. 80 That some
Americans might be alienated from the political vital center because of economic
issues, was seen first and foremost as a problem for political stability requiring a
countervailing force. Unemployment, Kornhauser claimed, helped prepare people
psychologically for all kinds of extreme behavior they would reject as members of
established groups and social institutions. 81 Coherence and integration were to be
defended at all costs (not reform), since poorly integrated sections of the community are
most likely to engage in mass action outside and often against established social
institutions in times of crisis. For people with few social and psychological ties to the

79
80
81

Kornhauser, 227.
Kornhauser, 237.
Kornhauser, 163.

74
community are subject to less social or self control. 82
Quoting variously from both Democracy and the Ancien Rgime, Kornhauser
prescribed social integration by means intermediate associations: More than one
hundred years ago, De Tocqueville also argued that French political upheavals were
related to the lack of independent group life. . . . 83 Mass Society then, represented a
classic form of postwar Tocquevillian de-politicization; democracy had to be protected
from its inherent tendencies by a countervailing response from the consensual social
structure. So stated, Kornhausers argument was not concerned with improving
democracy, but controlling it.
Describing how a mass could suffer from a state of social isolation and yet be
prone to excessive political engagement was no simple task. In a key article,
Institutional Vulnerability in Mass Society, Philip Selznick explained how, Mass
behavior connotes weakened social participation, and yet mass organization is associated
with a high degree of involvement. This apparent inconsistency is soon resolved,
however, if we consider the meaning of mobilization. 84 As with Weber, postwar
American theorists used Tocqueville to help define legitimate democratic behavior.
Attending to the quality of participation allowed theorists to de-legitimize activist

82

Kornhauser, 66.

83

Kornhauser, 87-88. It is worth noting that Kornhauser misquotes Tocqueville through Hartz. Hartzs wellknown citation error - occurring at the outset of his book, The Liberal Tradition in America - that the American
is born free without having to become so, was repeated by Kornhauser on page 136. It ought to have read - they
were born equal instead of becoming so. See Democracy II, 101.
84

Philip Selznick, Institutional Vulnerability in Mass Society, in The American Journal of Sociology LVI,
no. 4 (Jan., 1951), pg., 326.

75
participation and to offer arguments that purported to distinguish among types of
democratic engagement. Claiming that there existed a current weakness of social and
political theory as regards the vulnerability of democracy, Selznick argued for a
reformulation of the idea of mass society as the best beginning. 85 In doing so, he began
with a familiar question: How can we preserve the integrity of social institutions when
they become targets of political combat? 86 Of course the question thus posed assumed
that social institutions would be targets of political combat rather than sources of it.
Nonetheless, as the phrasing implied, democratic activism was corroding those
consensus-generating social relationships: Mass behavior is associated with activist
interpretations of democracy and with increasing reliance upon force to resolve social
conflict, Selznick argued. 87
Social stability, then, was not just the substructure for a healthy democracy, but it
became democracys goal. Democracy was supposed to represent this consensus, to be
oriented toward the preservation of central values and purposes, anything else was
illegitimate. Separating out the social and the political, Selznick argued that the political
achievement of a nation rested on the populations continued adherence to the nations
integrative social institutions. Mass behavior devalues social institutions and therewith
subverts their character defining functions, Selznick wrote. Like habits in the
individual, they have the indirect consequence of committing the society to an integrated
85
86
87

Selznick, 324, 320.

Selznick, 320.
Selznick, 329.

76
system of values. Taken together, these valued institutions reflect the ethos of the culture,
its peculiar way of self-fulfilment. 88

So defined, political opposition was a

particularly harmful brand of sedition: a crime against the nations values.

For Robert Nisbet, as well, modern society was an aggregate of deracinated
individuals caught in the failure of our present democratic and industrial scene to create
new contexts of association and moral cohesion . . . . 89 As with many of the eras
political sociologists, Nisbet used his inquiry to describe totalitarianism, not as aberrant,
not as some vast irrationality or monstrous accident, but profoundly linked to the
progressive ideals of modern liberal-democracy. 90 The totalitarian tendency, as he
described it in a key work, The Quest for Community (1953), was assailing those secret
conditions of behavior that had kept liberal-democracies stable and at arms length from
the absolute political community. 91 Nisbet suggested that, The formal, overt
judgements of liberalism have rested, historically, not merely upon processes of
conscious reason and verification, but upon certain prejudgements that have seldom been
drawn up for critical analysis until the most recent times. And these prejudgements have,
in turn, been closely linked with a set of social relationships within which their symbolic
fires have been constantly kept lighted through all the normal processes of work,

88
89
90
91

Selznick, 330.
Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pg., 73.
Nisbet, 197,195, 120.
Nisbet, 201.

77
function, and belief. 92 To substantiate this point, Nisbet included a two page
uninterrupted quote from the brilliant Tocqueville taken from the Fourth Book, Chapter
Six of Part II - What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear. Nisbets
commentary was effusive: Here, in these paragraphs, lies one of the most astonishing
prophecies to be found anywhere in political literature. It is nothing less than a picture,
nearly a century in advance of the reality, of the totalitarian community. But it is more
than mere prophecy. It is an analysis of the nature of totalitarianism that has not been
improved upon by even the most brilliant of contemporary students of the subject. 93
Nisbet concerned himself primarily with the attendant institutional and political
vulnerability that tended to follow democratization. Again, echoing a long line of postwar
intellectuals, he concluded that alienation from specified social relationships served more
than any other causal factor to explain totalitarian conditions: Nor are poverty and
economic distress, as such, the crucial factors leading to the rise of totalitarianism . .
.What is decisive is the social context, the sensations of disinheritance and occlusion
from rightful membership in a social and moral order. These may or may not accompany
poverty. 94 In reference to the composition of the mass, Nisbet further claimed that,
The essence. . . does not lie in the mere fact of numbers. It is not the quantitative but the
qualitative aspect that is essential. . . . What is crucial in the formation of the masses is
the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain
92
93
94

Nisbet, 222.
Nisbet, 191.
Nisbet, 193.

78
their normal sense of membership in society. 95 To argue, as Nisbet did, that only a
deep examination of the underlying social causes of political behavior would reveal
democracy to be effective or dangerous, also turned out to be a good way to vindicate the
role of expertise in political theory and the role of elites in maintaining equilibrium. Who
else, after all, could see to what extent an ostensibly legitimate democratic majority was,
in fact, a mass threatening the political fabric?
According to theorists of mass politics, democracy left a well-integrated and
consensual stable social structure open for attack by doing away with societys culture
sustaining elites. The re-affirmation of elite rule in postwar thought was therefore an
explicit means to secure the stability and cohesion of social norms from democratic
threats as well as a profesional gambit for cultural authority. Tocquevilles own
conservatism proved a good fit and American intellectuals used his arguments (and
laments) in Democracy concerning the destabilizing effects of democratic equality and
the subsequent loss of elite authority, as justifications for the cultivation of some sort of
democratic noblesse. In highly stratified societies the political and cultural elites served
to stabilize the masses as the people looked to their superiors for guidance on matters of
broad social, cultural and political concern. As Edward Shils argued, Society has a
centre, which is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs. It is the centre of the
order of symbols, of values and beliefs, which govern the society. 96 Yet, he continued,

95
96

Nisbet, 198.
Edward Shils, Centre and Periphery,(1961) in Selected Essays by Edward Shils (Chicago: Center for
Social Organization Studies, University of Chicago, 1970), pg., 1.

79
this centre is also a phenomenon of the realm of action. It is a structure of activities, of
roles and persons, within the network of institutions. It is in these roles that the values
and beliefs which are central are embodied and propounded. 97 Thus, using a Weberian
and Tocquevillian analysis, Shils offered a representative argument that described how
this consensual realm was tied through an elective affinity, to the specific interests of
those in authority. This central value system which supports an affirmative attitude
towards established authority is inextricably tied to the interest situation of the elite
stratums. Or put another way, the central value system is constituted by the values
which are pursued and affirmed by the lites of constituent subsystems. . .[and] are
clustered into an approximately consensual pattern. 98 The elites then were not just
protectors but the conduits of the nations stabilizing moeurs and a reaffirmation of their
authority (through a new form of functional-stratification), Shils and others claimed,
could serve to mitigate the fact that democratic society had dissolved the frameworks of
social authority which had constituted older stratified societies.
Nowhere did worries over the attenuation of the elite (and the rise of the mass)
take on more urgent elaboration than in the eras burgeoning and brooding industry
devoted to an analysis of mass culture. This was a highly entertaining and exceedingly
anxious discourse that tended to view the cultural effects of democracy, as Tocqueville
did, with a certain lordly astonishment. In the well-received Mass Culture (1957),
Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning collected a generous buffet of articles in which
97
98

Shils, Centre and Periphery, pg., 1.

Shils, Centre and Periphery, pg., 3.

80
Tocqueville served as the conceptual centerpiece. In Tocquevilles eyes, the editors
wrote, America was destined to become the creator and mass-acceptor of what later
critics of American artistic life so pungently term kitsch. The cogency of Tocquevilles
argument makes his critique of American life as forceful and thought provoking as if his
visit to this country had occurred yesterday instead of 125 years ago. 99 That America
was destined to embrace kitsch seems to hyperbolize Tocquevilles prophetic
powers. Nonetheless, the sentiment was widely shared - the democratic social condition
was the enemy of high culture and the enemy of those shared social/cultural standards
that undergirded it.
Yet there was more at stake than an aesthetic elegy. Taken together these articles
dressed a highly charged political argument in a variety of cultural laments. At its worst,
mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, Bernard Rosenberg wrote in the
opening piece, but to brutalize our senses while paving the way to totalitarianism. And
the interlocking media all conspire to that end. 100 Many of the authors chose their words
more carefully than Rosenberg, preferring to sidestep the specter of totalitarianism or a
direct attack on democracy, by way of a selective critique on the mass or the media. But
the implications were clear. Democracy was ( in large part) culpable for mass culture and
would soon be its victim. If the evolution from low-brow art to totalitarian politics was
not always made evident, what was clearly assumed was a Tocquevillian notion of

99

Mass Culture, eds., Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957),
pg., 24.

100

Bernard Rosenberg, Mass Culture in America, in Mass Culture, 9.

81
democracy as the tyranny of the majority. Having pulled down all barriers separating
social classes, and having assailed those joint social/cultural values that previously
sustained high art and a stable politics, democracy tended toward the despotism of the
mass. Such sentiments were shared by a broad swath of works including the Mass
Culture and the Media, issue of the journal Daedalus (Spring 1960). In both the
Rosenberg and White collection and the Daedalus assemblage, Tocqueville was singled
out to be excerpted in long passages forming self-standing chapters. And in both
anthologies, arguments about the inherent incompetence of the mass were made palatable
and legitimate under the cloak of Tocquevillian wisdom.
For commentators more inclined to straight political analysis, the consequences of
American egalitarianism and democratization were no less dire. Selznick found that the
vulnerability of institutions to political manipulation, increased in tandem with
democracys tendency to overwhelm societys culture-sustaining elites, by encouraging
activist involvement. 101 These elites, Selznick argued, were a stabilizing force and were
victims of the consequences of democratization, including the spread of incompetence
into new areas and, indeed the emergence of a type of man who may be found in all
sectors of social life-the mass man. 102 Such elites were different from the political
leaders who politicized the mass by seizing upon their withdrawal of deference to
established institutions and encouraging their political participation on behalf of

101
102

Selznick, 320, 328.

Selznick, 320.

82
change. 103 The alienated mass man is in society but not of it, Selznick urged in that
typically cautionary tone. He does not accept responsibility for the preservation of value
systems; hence he may be easily moved to new adherence. 104 Putting Tocqueville into
the realm of aristocratic theorists along with Jacob Burckhardt, Karl Mannheim, and
Walter Lippmann, Kornhauser agreed with Selznick and found that European social
theorists were correct in their diagnosis that the accessibility of elites created the most
de-stabilizing phenomenon in Western political modernity. People in mass (that is,
available non-elites) are inclined to adopt populist values, including diffuse anti-elitist
and strongly egalitarian movements, he wrote. Members of elites in mass society do
not feel elite; they feel mass. As a result, elites lack the capability for strong leadership:
they cannot take advantage of opportunities to strengthen a democratic order which are
provided by those liberal-pluralist tendencies that may exist alongside of mass
tendencies. 105
Seymour Martin Lipset too articulated such an analysis in his work Political Man
(1959), (whose subtitle was The Social Bases of Politics), a book he described as
suggesting that the sociology of politics return to the problem posed by Tocqueville: the
social requisites and consequences of democracy. 106 Using both Weber and Tocqueville,

103
104
105
106

Selznick, 329.
Selznick, 324.
Kornhauser, 60.
Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1959; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1981), pg., 24.

83
Lipset fashioned an argument that reproved the political activism of the mass by claiming
that the nations core social values (as mediated through the elites and civil associations)
were the only effective bulwark against demagoguery. The politics of democracy are to
some extent necessarily the politics of conformity of the elite of the society, as soon as
they must consider mass reaction in determining their own actions, the freedom of the
elite (whether political or artistic) is limited, he wrote. Lipset then followed with
quotations from Tocqueville to prove this claim. The last one read: the small number of
distinguished men in political life [can be attributed] to the ever increasing despotism of
the majority in the United States. 107 More than any other of the European theorists that
Lipset identified as having influenced political sociology (Max Weber, Robert Michels,
Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx), he used Tocqueville as a means to legitimate elite
authority in democratic contexts.
One of the eras most explicit paeans to elite rule was Gabriel Almonds The
American People and Foreign Policy (1950), which used Tocquevilles insights into the
American character to delimit the influence of the mass on matters of foreign policy.
Claiming the interdependence of foreign and domestic values (and the dependence of
politics on the larger social system), Almond argued that the capacity for intelligent
foreign policy decisions required an understanding of the popular attitudes towards
politics which are conditioned by the national character. 108 Opinions must be placed
in their subjective matrices of values and basic attitudes if we are to gain an impression
107
108

Lipset, 450.
Gabriel Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950), pgs., 29, 4.

84
of their stability, ramifications, and possible future development, he asserted. Opinions
must be sociologically placed if we are to speculate intelligently about the potential
political behavior of large social aggregations and their sub-groupings. 109 Arguing that
politics was oriented toward action by its social culture, Almond separated out the social
sources of political behavior to find the nations constitutive moeurs.
Chapter three of this book which took up the bulk of this sociological analysis,
was, not surprisingly, highly indebted to Tocqueville, the most sensitive and accurate
observer of American political behavior and institutions, and whose prophetic work is
still applicable today. 110 Excerpted in a long block quotation, Democracy was used, in
conjunction with the work of other theorists, as evidence (not merely suggestive) of the
American national character. What Almond found was a general ideological consensus
in the United States in which the mass of the population and its leadership generally
share. At the level of basic attitudes this is largely an unconscious consensus of feeling
with regard to values and of reactions regarded as suitable in response to certain political
cues. 111 This consensus on values was then used to set boundaries on the publics role in
foreign policy debates. Specifically, in accounting for the complicated structure of the
policy-making process in a mass democracy, Almond claimed it would best if the mass

109

Almond, 5.

110

Almond, 30. Almond explained his rather uncritical use of Tocqueville (and others) in the following
terms: In the absence of tested hypotheses about the American character we have had to rely on the intuitions and
impressionistic observations of historians, writers, and anthropologists. pg., 9
111

Almond, 158.

85
serve as an attentive public before the elites. 112 The mass would decide among policies
and judge whether or not they fall within the orbit of the nations social values, but no
more. Recognizing the publics role as such, the elites only responsibility as regards the
public trust was to offer information that would facilitate those ends. The task and the
responsibility of the opinion and policy elites in a mass democracy, Almond argued,
was to introduce information and critical intelligence into the stream of communication
at key points in the political process and in channels which conform to the social
terrain. 113 Almond also suggested that this would present a difficult set of problems
because Americans would have to overcome the democratic myth (and its realization
into a morally satisfying demagogy) perpetuated by their social egalitarianism that the
people are inherently wise and just, and that they are the real rulers of the country. 114
All of this left little room for participatory democracy or for democratic change.
The nations moeurs as internalized by the people and as attended to by the elites were
privileged over the publics ability to think critically about issues of public concern.
Almonds analysis began with a fundamental question -can any people in the mass grasp
with justice and wisdom the complex issues and strategies of foreign policy in the present
era? His answer calls for a full quotation:
There are inherent limitations in modern society on the capacity of the
public to understand the issues and gasp the significance of the most
important problems of public policy. . . The function of the public in a
112
113
114

Almond, 6.
Almond, 8, 7.
Almond, 4.

86
democratic policy-making process is to set certain policy criteria in the
form of widely held values and expectations. It evaluates the results of
policies from the point of view of their conformity to these basic values
and expectations. The policies themselves, however, are the products of
leadership groups (elites) who carry on the specific work of policy
formulation and policy advocacy. The public share in policy decisions
may be compared, with important qualifications, to a market. It buys or
refuses to buy the policy products offered by competing elites. 115

The foregoing gives us a good illustration of the postwar liberals enchantment

with consensus, and its distinction from conformity. Consensus was not political
agreement, nor was it unanimity on issues of social/cultural concern, rather, consensus
was the internalization of the social conditions of American democracy as inscribed in
the nations history. Consensus was not so much deliberative, logical, or rational, as it
was a certain quality of insight, a sagacity or intuition conferred by the nations social
structure and its particular history. This was a discourse profoundly and explicitly
indebted to Tocquevilles Democracy in which he explained how a democratic state
required, more than a rational capacity or even a commitment to the ethical ideals of
political democracy, a certain social character in its citizens in order to function properly.
Just as Almond came to see the nations underlying social values as the best political
boundaries, so too did a whole coterie of postwar intellectuals see Americas consensual
array of moeurs as the only rampart against populism and the only justifiable basis of
popular democratic political agreement. This was an argument constructed on maxims one that offered unassailable claims about the qualities of democratic agreement over the
heads of those participating in it. A panoply of authors in the postwar period authored
115

Almond, 5, 6.

87
historically-based analyses of American culture and found such consensus. Seymour
Martin Lipset, Louis Hartz, David Riesman, David Potter, Richard Hofstatder, and
Daniel Boorstin are best known and while putting them under such a rubric does some
violence to the nuance of their respective approaches, it does not distort their overall
analyses. Admittedly some were ambivalent about the consequences of consensus, but all
considered it to be fact and most considered it to be good. For the latter, the
historically-based accounts of Americas consensual social conditions served to
de-legitimize forms of political opposition that deviated too far from the vital center.
The Liberal Tradition (1955) by Louis Hartz stands as most influential of these
accounts. Evidence of Tocquevilles postwar revival is resplendent in Hartzs classic
work, though not obviously so. A glance at its index reveals that Tocqueville makes far
fewer appearances in the text than George Fitzhugh and John Locke, for instance, and
roughly the same number as Karl Marx and Woodrow Wilson. Hartz often used
Tocqueville in quick definitive clauses - Here we have the tyranny of the majority
that Tocqueville later described in American life, or We are reminded again of
Tocquevilles statement: that Americans are born equal, - rather than offering more
critically extended references to Tocquevilles ideas. 116 What we do have in The Liberal
Tradition, then, is a profoundly Tocquevillian argument whose momentum is not
sustained by lengthy citations but by a sort of immersion in the Tocquevillian facts of

116

Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), pg.,
55, 56.

88
American life. 117
The greatest foreign critic America ever had - Tocqueville. We find in him a
series of deep insights into the American liberal community. 118 So wrote Hartz in a
book whose comparative frame uses points of reference - the July Revolution, the Ancien
Regime, 1848, - that could have come from Tocqueville himself. The deepest of
Tocquevilles insights, according to Hartz, were those connected to the American
understanding and experience of equality - not as a demand for rights, but as an
internalized given of American identity. Hartz wrote: When Tocqueville wrote that
the great advantage of the American lay in the fact that he did not have to endure a
democratic revolution, he advanced what was surely one of his most fundamental
insights into American life. 119 Lacking any feudal past, Americans participated in a
national egalitarian endowment (by way of shared moeurs) that allowed them to forgo
any revolution from below. Hartz, in fact, referred to the American Revolution in terms
of the social goals it did not need to achieve and he illustrated how this shared
democratic social condition actually kept democratic politics in check. 120
Yet, such pervasive egalitarianism also brought up a number of new questions and
problems the most important of which revolved around the qualitative difference between
legitimate collective action and unanimity. I believe this is the basic ethical problem of a
117
118
119
120

Hartz, 94.
Hartz, 31.
Hartz, 35.
Hartz, 50.

89
liberal society, Hartz wrote, not the danger of the majority which has been its
conscious fear, but the danger of unanimity, which has slumbered unconsciously behind
it: the tyranny of opinion that Tocqueville saw unfolding. . . . 121 Tocquevilles analysis
was an ever-present reminder for Hartz that while the social consensus at the heart of the
American national experience had furnished a serenity to Americas early development,
it also created an obligation to offset the threat of mass politics. But on what grounds? In
defining democratic-liberalism - its attendant structures and many of its achievements as those of social origin not political choices or the outcome of diversified debate, Hartz
almost wrote politics out of American history, past or future. In fact, the knowledge that
they were similar participants in a uniform way of life, allowed Americans to
successfully de-politicize their world. 122
Hartz was not enthusiastic about this democratic social condition; the fact that
Americans did not have to go in search of a national ethic sapped a certain independence
of spirit and had taken away their vividness of experience. Moreover, if American
liberal-democracy did not confront its elites with the same admixture of proletarian and
aristocratic grievance, Hartz claimed, it was bound to confront it with something else
which in certain ways was worse: a democratic movement of the lower middle class that
it could not possibly master. 123 Yet even here, Hartz echoed a familiar refrain (used by
more orthodox mass politics theorists) that pluralistic democratic debate was certainly
121
122
123

Hartz, 11.
Hartz, 55.
Hartz, 91.

90
not the answer for a despotic uniformity, rather, elites, were the only sensible stewards of
the liberal inheritance.
The idea that a stable civic culture inhered in pre-political conditions was further
explored in People of Plenty (1954), in which David Potter looked to Americas
economic abundance as the basis of shared American moeurs (the all important unifying
factor) and as the reason behind the lack of radicalism. 124 Since the nation is often the
political manifestation of the impulse toward unity in a culture group, 125 Potter claimed
in moment of Doctrinaire-like exhortation, then all explanations and evaluations of
American politics must first account for the consensual social effects of economic
stability. Thus democracy was not seen as embodying any ethical, principled force and
was therefore free from ideological stain - thus he wrote that we have achieved it
[democracy] less by sheer ideological devotion to the democratic principle than by
creation of economic conditions in which democracy will grow. 126 The evidence of
distributive inequality was downplayed and so too was the historical contribution of
democratic debate and disagreement to the course of American political life. Like Hartz,
Potter was not offering a bullish defense of this consensus, rather he leavened his claims
with a clear measure of ambivalence about American social life. His focus on the
normative impact of consensus, and the idea of democracy as a rather simple reflection of

124

125
126

David M.Potter, People of Plenty; Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1954), pgs., 29-30.
Potter, People of Plenty, 58.
Potter, People of Plenty, 112-113.

91
that unanimity, however, did not allow him to see the degree to which those in positions
of economic authority could use that unanimity for unhealthy ends, or the degree to
which the people could subvert it. The dynamics of the mass market, Potter said, . .
.would seem to indicate that freedom of expression has less to fear from the control
which large advertisers exercise than from the control which these advertisers permit the
mass market to exercise. 127
The Liberal Tradition and People of Plenty revealed the creative uses to which
Tocquevillian theory could be put. Hartz, for instance, marshaled Tocquevilles political
sociology to explain how Americans shared a rather rarefied Lockean consensus. This
mode of analysis - that a nations social values and structure delimit its politics - was
shared by advocates of comprehensive national character studies including David
Riesman and Daniel Boorstin as well as by more focused sociological or historical
approaches to national character carried out by Shils, Hofstadter and Lipset. Such
analyses elevated the nations moeurs to a set of normative ideals that, for the most part,
politics ought to preserve and reflect, not change. This was not just a deradicalization, but
a de-politicization that underrated the role democracy had (and could have) in reconciling
the nations values with peoples divergent interests and experiences.
In The First New Nation (1963), (which reads as a modern version of Democracy
in America) Lipset made the case for a democracy confined to the task of expressing the
nations core values. Lipset offered a comparative and historical approach to illustrate
how two basic American values - equality and achievement, stood at the heart of the
127

Potter, People of Plenty, 185.

92
American national experience and its institutions. 128 And so, much like Tocqueville,
Lipset used the same historical givens to describe the American national character as
immune to ideology. In contrast to more rigid national culture studies, Lipset called his a
dynamic equilibrium model which explained that a complex society is under constant
pressure to adjust its institutions to its central value system, in order to alleviate strains
created by changes in social relations; and which asserts that the failure to do so results in
political disturbance. 129 The biggest disturbance, of course, was mass politics - what
Lipset referred to as populism - a condition Alexis de Tocqueville was fully aware of . .
.when he pointed out that the same equality that renders him [The American]
independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and
unprotected to the influence of the greater number. 130 Lipset judged democracy on its
ability to forestall the problems brought out by equality including an activist and
revolutionary disposition caused by social alienation in which traditional sources of
legitimacy gave way to claims that authority should be exercised by the people-which
is almost never feasible. 131 This meshed with his claim about voter participation in
Political Man that a sudden increase in the size of the voting electorate probably reflects
tensions and serious governmental malfunctioning and also introduces as voters
individuals whose social attitudes are unhealthy from the point of view of the

128
129
130
131

Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, inc., 1963), pg., 1.
Lipset, The First New Nation, 7, 8.
Lipset, The First New Nation, 137.
Lipset, The First New Nation, 11.

93
requirements of the democratic system. 132 Describing how democracy was realized in
the natural outgrowth of non-political circumstances further revealed how consensus was
democracy, not just a type thereof.
Perhaps this aspect of Tocquevillian analysis found its most hagiographic
culmination in Daniel Boorstins The Genius of American Politics - an extended
Tocquevillian tribute to the persistence of Americas cardinal social norms, and not their
politicization. The social condition and the Constitution of the Americans are
democratic, De Tocqueville observed about a hundred years ago. But they have not had
a democratic revolution. This fact is surely one of the most important of our history, 133
Boorstin wrote. That democracy was almost entirely a social construct, not a political
one, explained why there existed no explicit political theory in America. Surveying the
landscape of American quiescence, Boorstin called this American inheritance (its
historical uniqueness) a gift - a gift of orthodoxy. I propose the name giveness, he
said. Giveness is the belief that values in America are in some way or another
automatically defined: given by certain facts of geography or history peculiar to us. 134
Instead of choosing and committing to a specific political life, then, Americans implicitly
understood and freely accepted the notion that values are implicit in the American

132
133

134

Lipset, Political Man, 229.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953),
69.
Boorstin, 8-9.

94
experience. 135 Claiming that a legitimate democracy inevitably avoids ideology (and
populism) by adhering more closely to those (internalized) social norms that
characterized the nation, Boortsin not only omitted any constructive role democratic
debate played American history, but he also overlooked how the consensus over
democratic principles have led, and indeed legitimated, productive disputation, change
and even radical dissent
In many ways, David Riesman stood at the center of the postwar studies of
Americas social egalitarianism and mass politics. His work enunciated so many of the
intellectual currents of the postwar era and his book, The Lonely Crowd (1950) - with a
possible challenge from Hartzs Liberal Tradition - has served as the centerpiece of
American meditation on life and politics in the 1940s and 1950s. This is somewhat odd
because so much of Riesmans work (like that of Edward Shils) was a highly
self-conscious attempt to assume the role of public contrarian and to articulate the topical
in unconventional ways. But despite the fact his writing sometimes took on a quality of
gratuitous subversion of all givens, there were some conservative constants.

135

Boorstin,, 22, 23-24.

95
Much like Hartz, Riesman was cautious about celebrating American social norms
and deadly serious about the threat of mass politics. Not surprisingly, his analyses often
detailed how American egalitarianism corroded old social structures that imputed
meaning, and limits, to a free life, and created aggregates of atomized individuals who
then sought solace in forms groupism (Individualism Reconsidered) or
other-directedness (The Lonely Crowd). In Individualism Reconsidered (1954), for
instance, Riesman described a modern trend toward the destruction of a social
cohesiveness which, in earlier periods, had manifested itself as moral compulsions
that individuals carried within themselves and which served to bring them back in
support of community standards. 136 With the advent of social equality and its corollary democracy - however, this cohesiveness could no longer be taken for granted.
Democracy, in fact, was among those institutions of acculturation which required from
individuals a decadent extroversion and created an environment suited to unruly
collective action. Those who became socially alienated often found solace in the
collectivist requirements of democratic action. Such groupism clashed with authentic
individualism, Riesman argued, and not surprisingly the antidotes he offered for mass
action were a hearty individualism buttressed by a nerve of failure - the ability to face
the possibility of defeat without feeling morally crushed. 137 Or, if democratic equality
had completely overwhelmed ones defenses, apathy: . . . many Americans have found
only one workable defense against the pressure of their ideological environment, namely

136
137

David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1954), pg., 27.
Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered, 79.

96
apathy, often touched with humor, or a self-protecting cynicism. 138
Riesman effectively used a Tocquevillian analysis to illustrate the distinctiveness
of his postwar intellectual project by, among other things, creating a contrast between the
anthropologically-based, national character studies of Margaret Mead and Clyde
Kluckhohn, and his own investigation of psychological types including those he
described as tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. These latter
categories, Riesman said, were intended to explain something underlying and general,
namely, the attitude people take toward their society, their unconscious way of relating
themselves to their place in the society and to the others in it. 139 Unlike the broader
(and, he implied, static) illustrations of shared socio-cultural values that did not take into
account how such values were internalized and interpreted by individuals, Riesman
wanted to explore these values as moeurs. This is an important detail and of a piece with
the emerging political sociology that owed much to European social theory, especially
Tocqueville and Weber. Traditional political theorizing, which often relied on
generalized and disembodied descriptions of the American character, needed to be
replaced, Riesman argued, by a more complex accounting of how social values were
unconsciously inscribed onto, and assimilated by, the psyches of free individuals.
Modern society - especially America - was beset with a permeating social equality that
was fostering new character types requiring new methods of investigation. Riesman

138
139

Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered, 75.

David Riesman, Psychological Types and National Character, in American Quarterly V, no. 4 (Winter
1953), pg., 342.

97
hoped such undertakings would offer up new descriptions of those connections between
the collectivity and the individual and new insights about how to foster stability and to
ward off mass politics within modern democracies. Tocquevilles ideas about how
democracies constitute new personalities was a clear influence here, but so too was his
conception of the democratic individual as being acted on from without. The problem, as
Riesman suggested in an interesting article entitled Psychological Types and National
Character, was to focus on the difference between character and behavior, or, how
Americans may be one way, and behave in another way, rather than any reasoned
commitments these individuals may have expressed. 140 The experts task, therefore, was
to look at the response to the demands which people feel, correctly or not, the social
environment imposes on them, and to determine if some adjustment could be made to
engender new response patterns among those other-directed individuals who
internalized Americas pervasive social equality in detrimental ways. 141 Such was
postwar social-scientist as technocrat.

140
141

Riesman, Psychological Types and National Character, 332, 339.

Riesman, Psychological Types and National Character, 333, 337-338. Riesmans ideal-type citizen: an
individual not afraid to strike from the crowd, but willing to uphold tradition as he or she did so; innovative, but
within the guiding orbit of sanctioned social mores; had much in common with Marvin Meyers description of the
nineteenth century American character as venturous conservative. Meyers cited Tocqueville thoroughly to
describe the Jacksonian democrat in much the way Riesman used Tocqueville to describe democracys most
appropriate character type. Marvin Meyers, The Basic Democrat: A Version of Tocqueville, in Political Science
Quarterly 72 no., 1(March, 1957), pgs., 50-70; Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1957).

98
Taken as a threesome - Riesman, Hartz and Boorstin - held court as the authors of
Americas most well-known postwar descriptions of the national American character, but
their mode of analysis was widely shared by a whole panoply of political theorists who
accepted the view of political equilibrium that stood at the heart of mass politics theory.
They maintained that there existed a secret harmony of interests which sustains the social
and political system (this would emerge in conservative thought as civil society).
Occurrences of sharp conflict were indicative of false political ambitions caused by
alienation from Americas central values, rather than reasonable but altogether different
ways of seeing the world and ones interests. Here, moeurs replaced ideology. Peoples
considered ambitions- as expressed through politics - were de-legitimized in favor of
those impulses rendering individuals more likely to support the status quo. In fact, strong
political commitments were seen to be synthetic - American mobility and equality had
made political radicalism (of the left or right) superfluous at best, despotic at worst.
Daniel Bell among others criticized ideology as a rearguard attempt on the part of
deracinated individuals to salvage social meaning or to create a false set of moeurs. Not
surprisingly, democracy itself came to represent a threat. As individuals internalized an
entitlement to rule, to participate of behalf of populist ideologies, so too might they
call into question the status quo. Bell began The End of Ideology with Jacob Burckhardt:
The future belongs to the masses, or to the men who can explain things simply to
them. 142 The or was key; mass society had arrived and the social fabric had suffered
irreversible assaults, the question now concerned who would control the masses without
142

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pg., 13.

99
the traditional modes of authority and without politicizing them?
Much of Edward Shils work, for instance, was an attempt to clarify those
non-political modes of authority as antidotes for ideological politics. In The Torment of
Secrecy (1956) he argued for a reaffirmation of Americas centrist social values and the
free and easy mutual confidence, the vague sense of affinity on which the cohesion of
civil society, especially at the top, depends, all of which had been corroded by the
language of ideological politics. 143 This demand is not utopian, he wrote. It calls
for something already in existence as a deeply rooted tradition of our national life . . .
What is needed is a more active appreciation of the beneficent tradition and a more
conscientious refusal of the twin enthusiasms of alienated traditionalism and alienated
radicalism. 144 This active appreciation meant the stewardship of the elites and the
supplication of the masses. For instance, Shils was adamant that the intellectuals, as
trustees for the nations traditional values, recover some of the civility and moderation
they had abandoned when they developed a taste for ideologically dominated political
activities. 145 The opacity concerning the content of ideology here was precisely the
point - ideology was not about issues, but was characterized by intensity with which
goals were pursued. Shils was also known for a defense of mass culture. But a rather
backhanded defense this turned out to be as he championed the brutal culture among

143
144
145

Edward A. Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), pg., 192.
Shils, The Torment of Secrecy, pg., 18.
Edward A. Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives for Comparative Analysis, in
Comparative Studies in Society and History I no., 1(October, 1958), pg., 10.

100
the masses as the best defense against their politicization and radicalization. 146 Shils
argument for democratic equilibrium depended upon mass de-politicization, or the
acquisition of political commitments only insofar as they served non-ideological,
consensual ends. As he wrote in The Torment of Secrecy: Democracy requires the
occasional participation of most of the citizenry some of the time, and a moderate and
dim perceptiveness-as if from the corner of the eye-the rest of the time 147
Out of this quest for a democratic equilibrium - and to check any mass tendencies
- emerged a revival of Tocquevilles account of religion and civil associations as the
principal elements of political moderation in a democratic society. By nourishing the
right set of moeurs, associations and religion (the two often merged since secondary
associations included churches and comparable organizations) created a commitment to
civic virtue and political restraint. In an expression of the subordinate status accorded
politics, such theorists claimed that democracy could only work if individuals had first
internalized these legitimate moeurs. Taken as a whole, the animated postwar discourse
on religion is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a significant part of it concerned the
concept of civil religion and religion came to uphold the national character - its central
values and institutions. 148 At its heart, and despite the variations that have come to

146

Edward A. Shils, Mass Society and its Culture, in Daedalus 89, no., 2 (Spring 1960) and Shils,
Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture, in The Sewanee Review 65,
no., 4, pgs., 587-608.
147
148

Shils, The Torment of Secrecy, pg., 21.

A small sampling of the eras works exploring the social and political role of religious belief include:
Evarts B. Green, Religion and the State (1941; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959); Jane C. Zahn ed., Religion
and the Face of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959); William Lee Miller American Religion
and American Political Attitudes, and H. Richard Niebuhr The Protestant Movement and Democracy in the United

101
constitute the genre, civil religion pushed aside the content of religious belief in favor of
explorations of the role those beliefs played in a differentiated democratic society. It was
therefore a paradigm oriented around a search for religions role in Americas political
stability and not surprisingly Democracy was highly valued for the insights it contained
about how religion participated in the creation and inculcation of a nations political
culture and its stability. Lipset, for instance, reserved a significant section of The First
New Nation, for a discussion of the American religious ethos and how its secular focus
(Lipset maintained that it had always been more about morality than transcendental
belief) was remarkably predisposed to facilitate Americas consensual development. As
Lipset noted, Tocqueville saw the special need of an egalitarian and democratic society
for a self-restraining value system that would inhibit the tyranny of the majority. . . . 149
American civil religion provided that element of unity and coherence independent of
politics and therefore free from the any mass politics tendencies.

States, in J.W. Smith and A. L. Jamison, eds., The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961); Will Herberg The Biblical Basis of American Democracy, Thought XXX (Spring 1955); M. E.
Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959); Herbert W. Schneider,
Religion in 20th America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); W. L. Warner, The Family of God (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Leo Pfeffer, Creeds in Competition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958).
Mention should also be made of the National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of Our Democracy, held in
Washington, 1952.
149

Lipset, The First New Nation, pg., 95.

102
Will Herberg helped define the genre with the publication of
Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955), a book
which illustrated how Christianity and Judaism came together in America to serve
consensual (and secular) social ends. His argument pinpointed how these faiths helped
assimilate immigrants to the the American Way of Life and provided an overarching
sense of unity within Americas democratic pluralism. What are the sources of the
religious revival, on the one hand, and of the trend towards secularism on the other? he
asked. 150 The answer, Herberg claimed, could only be seen against the background of
certain deep-going sociological processes whereby these three faiths had served as a sort
of triple melting pot through which immigrants were at once able to assimilate and to find
comfort in familiar environs. Herberg variously described the American Way of Life as
a collection of beliefs and customs, and as democracy itself. By all definitions, however,
democracy was equated with a stabilizing set of values to which the Judeo-Christian
churches served as virtual denominations. Christian and Jewish faiths tend to be prized
because they help promote ideals and standards that all Americans are expected to share
on a deeper level than merely official religion. . . . [they serve] primarily as sanction
and underpinning for the supreme values of the faith embodied in the American Way of
life. 151 Separating its social functions from its theology, Herberg located a basic unity
of American religion. . . in the underlying presuppositions, values and ideals of the
150

Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York:

Doubleday and Co., 1955), pg., 54. For a provocative discussion of Herbergs life and work, see J. P Diggins, Up
From Communism (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), Chapters 2 and 7.
151

Herberg, 15, 96.

103
American vital center; a religious outlook that helped Americans commit themselves to
the nations central value system. 152
The idea of these stabilizing preconditions was also the focus of a symposium.
The resultant article - Cultural Prerequisites to a Successfully Functioning Democracy:
A Symposium, - set as its mission to find ways to stabilize democracy in an insecure
time. The sociologists have an approach that sheds light upon that for which we are
searching, Ernest Griffith wrote in the Preface. They speak of the mores, those
modes of thought as well as behavior by which men live and institutions are
sustained. 153 Looking for those mores that will sustain democracy, then, the authors
chose to exclude any detailed discussion of political institutions, which they considered
by-products or derivatives of the attitudes which we regard as cultural prerequisites than
themselves basic. 154 Among the mores heralded for their educative effect was religion.
It is my hypothesis, Ernest Griffith wrote, that the Christian and Hebrew faiths
constitute a powerful matrix, a common denominator of those attitudes most essential to
a flourishing democracy. 155 The idea presented here suggested that there are ideas and
actions that not only underlie but explain democratic success, and which are not subject
to the corrosive effects of public debate, but are unexamined cultural continuances such

152

Herberg, 247.

153

Ernest S. Griffith, John Plamenatz, J. Ronald Pennock, Cultural Prerequisites to a Successfully

Functioning Democracy: A Symposium, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 50, No.1. (Mar., 1956), pg.,
101.
154
155

Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 101.

Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 103.

104
that, deviations therefrom are subject to questioning and usually social disapproval. 156
Ultimately, this interlocking set of mores leads to appropriate motivation[s]
which most importantly include a non-activist view of democratic participation. 157 A
state the tempo whose social change is slow and devoid of stress and strain would seem
to pose less of a problem in maintenance of its democratic institutions, the authors
argued. 158 Noting the totalitarian potential in democracy, John Plamenatz went further
and extolled citizen apathy as a necessary. He wrote: . . .in the modern world, it is not
possible for the ordinary citizen to take more than a very small part in the business of
government. There must always be, in a large state, however democratic, a small
minority active in government and a large, almost passive majority. 159 Apathy had now
become a democratic prerequisite.
Postwar admiration for associations or groups therefore reflected a desire to
ensure types of participation (not just to curtail it). The chief social values cherished by
individuals in modern society are realized through groups was a guiding assumption
among those postwar theorists who saw these bodies, in the aggregate, as the secret
source of success for American democracy 160 As Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F.
Lazarsfeld, and William M. McPhee, claimed in their study of voting patterns - Political
156
157
158
159
160

Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 103, 104.

Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 103.
Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 102.
Griffith, et al., Cultural Prerequisites, pg., 122.
Earl Latham, The Group Basis of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), pg., 1.

105
stability is based upon social stability. Family traditions, personal associations,
status-related organizational memberships, ethnic affiliations, socioeconomic strata such ties for the individual do not change rapidly or sharply, and since his vote is so
importantly a product of them, neither does it. In effect, a large part of the study of voting
deals not with why votes change but rather why they do not. 161 Much like the purposes
accorded civil religion, associations and group life in general, would inculcate
community integrity.
Bell, Kornhauser, Lipset, Riesman, Shils, Nisbet, Selznick all, at one point or
another, claimed civil-associations were important for creating buffers against
unmediated direct participation by making the masses unavailable for political
mobilization. Describing how weak intermediate relations invite mass behavior by
inviting direct participation in key political and social domains without the mediation of
elites (and with disregard for the nations moderate ideals), Kornhauser spoke for many
when he too urged a quest for community through legitimate group life. 162 Mass
movements depend for their success on the weakness of existing institutions and on the
intensive support of large numbers of people, he argued. . . .We seek to show that
totalitarian movements in particular mobilize people who are available by virtue of
being socially alienated. 163 Social alienation was useful phrase and referred to a

161

Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William M. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion
Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1954), pg., 315.
162
163

Kornhauser, 76.
Kornhauser, 177.

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quality of feeling among individuals who found themselves detached from social norms
and in search of relief in ideologies or radical political commitments or mass action. As
Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Vital Center, It is the disappearance of effective group
activity which leads toward emptiness in the individual as it also compels the
enlargement of the powers of the state. 164

VI
Post-Revolutionary French politics and America itself had convinced Tocqueville that the
incommensurability of political persuasions was an aberrant, though likely state, to be
avoided at all costs. That such conflict - in a sustained form - could be part of a healthy
democracy and not a revolutionary one, became virtually inconceivable. In one sense,
then, the mass politics paradigm was a disenchanted understanding of democracys limits
and a downgrading of its ethical aims. Edward Shils echoed a widely shared opinion
when he claimed that Populism can be the legitimating principle of oligarchic regimes
as well of democratic regimes and of all intermediate types. 165 Looking back on the
results of European political activism, American intellectuals argued that political
participation said little about the advantages that democracy had to offer. Too much
conflict and too little consensus were indeed problems democracies had to face, but

164

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jrs., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1948), pg., 253. See also, Oscar Handlin Group life within the American pattern, Commentary 8 (November,
1949), pgs., 411-417. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper and Row,
1985), pgs., 142-147.
165

Quoted in Lipset, The First New Nation, pg., 69.

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arguing for the authority of consensual social values and concurring political interests as
a way to limit political debate was too strong a tonic. Here, Tocquevilles ideas were
used to explain how political democracy was often the enemy of liberty. And, under his
influence, democracy itself became the problem, or rather, democratization did, since
individuals were said to be more inclined to destabilize society by radically questioning
established norms and generating debate about that social consensus assumed to be
democracy itself, when they were given the political agency to do so.