Rightshelf

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Having read Democracy in America earlier this year, I was, of course, anxious to read Hugh Brogan's biography of Tocqueville. I am relatively impressed. Brogan is an engaging writer with an obviously strong command of the details of Tocqueville's life. His relation of Tocquevillean correspondence between his friends and his wife helps open new vistas into the mind and soul of the man responsible for perhaps the greatest work on democratic government's effects on America. Brogan's book certainly carries with it tremendous value in considering and studying Tocqueville's life and we should consider ourselves grateful that he wrote it.

Having written the above, I am nevertheless disturbed by some of Brogan's contentions regarding the writing of Democracy in America, contentions that have been discussed by others who have taken note of Brogan's book.

Read on . . .

Consider what Daniel Mahoney has to say about Brogan's treatment of Tocqueville's thought:

Tocqueville's profound love of liberty and his noble and generous soul become, in Brogan's telling, almost palpable. We commune with the man and admire a greatness of soul that owes something to the dying world of aristocracy but isn't simply reducible to aristocratic convention.

This faithfulness to Tocqueville's world is all the more striking because Brogan himself shares all of today's egalitarian prejudices. For him, democracy is an unqualified good and anything that challenges it is evidence of aristocratic nostalgia, narrow class interest, or "masculinist ideology." He fails to take Tocqueville seriously as a political thinker who in some decisive respects transcended his milieu. At the same time, Brogan fails to appreciate the broadest context of Tocqueville's life and thought, what Tocqueville calls the great "democratic revolution" that was already transforming the Christian European world. His understanding of what might be gained and lost in the transition from the "aristocratic" to the "democratic" dispensation (great "orders of humanity," rather than regimes in the narrow sense of the term) gives Tocqueville's work a certain timeless intellectual and spiritual depth.

And more:

If Brogan succeeds in recovering Tocqueville's world, however, he is woefully unsuccessful in capturing his thought. He censures the French political thinker for his deeply suspicious idea of "the tyranny of the majority"--an idea that ostensibly reveals Tocqueville's insufficient confidence in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Brogan caricatures Tocqueville's measured analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of democracy as "the anxious degradation of American democracy." This biographer simply cannot distinguish between the candid friend and the indiscriminate flatterer of democracy, and foolishly insists that all criticisms of democratic majoritarianism are proffered with anti-democratic intent.

Similarly, Brogan cannot fathom that Tocqueville's equanimity in addressing the two great "anthropological forms" of political experience--democracy and aristocracy--is rooted in a profound thoughtfulness about both human nature and the nature of democracy. As Pierre Manent points out in an insightful article ("Tocqueville, Political Philosopher" in the recently published Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville), "[t]hese questions are currently resolved as follows: Tocqueville was a political man of old noble stock who made a resolute choice for democracy in his head while his heart remained filled with aristocratic `nostalgia.'" Manent concedes that some of Tocqueville's own statements support such an interpretation. But a more serious reading suggests that Tocqueville's quasi-neutrality (at least on the philosophical plane) between democracy and aristocracy is rooted in a fundamental tension in his own mind.

My own view--as expressed in my review of Democracy in America-- was that Tocqueville's writings on the "tyranny of the majority,"

. . . while pathbreaking and welcome in the larger effort to combat any incipient form of oppression--still strikes one as rather simplistic. Tocqueville seemed to believe that after a debate on a particular issue, no matter how perfunctory or prolonged that debate may be, once the will of the majority was made clear and announced, the rest of the United States would line up--in the manner of a collective hive mind--behind the will of the majority, thus shutting off debate of any kind. To be sure, this is a dramatic overstatement of the power of the majority; irrespective of the existence of a majority side on a particular issue of the day, America has always been riven by debate and division over great events and arguments of consequence. From the ratification of the Constitution to the wrenching debates--and war--over slavery, to America's stance as either an isolationist force or an internationalist power, debate has been prolonged and passionate notwithstanding the eventual decision of a majority regarding a certain matter. Even when the minority perceives itself as being outnumbered by opposite interlocutors, in America, the minority rarely (if ever) relents in trying to change minds. Equally overstated, perhaps, were Tocqueville's observations on the supposed loneliness of the individual in a democratic society, though, to be sure, the "bowling alone" view of American society is a common one with not inconsiderable support behind it.

I stand by that characterization but it is a far different characterization of Tocqueville's writings than the one that Brogan affords us. I believe that Tocqueville was right to consider the issue of the tyranny of the majority but that he overstated his arguments concerning the issue. Brogan seems to have thought that Tocqueville was wrong to address the issue at all. This, it seems to me, is a rather dramatic overstatement. One cannot consider the question of democracy--relatively new system of government that it is--without considering and addressing the question of the tyranny of the majority as well. Even if one disagrees with Tocqueville's treatment of the question, it is too much to say that he should not have even bothered with the issue at all.

This is an issue noted as well by The Economist, which of course has a blog named after Tocqueville's great work. Read the whole thing, as it does an excellent job in acquitting Tocqueville's capacity for making political observations that are just as relevant today--if not more so--than they were when they were first made.

Hugh Brogan's book works quite well as a biography. Alas, as a discussion of Tocquevillean thought, one has to go elsewhere, I am afraid. If Brogan showed as much appreciation for the nature of Tocquevillean thought as he showed for Tocqueville's own life, his book would have been improved tremendously.