Lessons From Which We Might Profit: Democracy in America

In the 1830s, a French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville, made his first visit to the United States. As an aristocrat, Tocqueville was not an eager supporter of democracy, but he believed that democracy was destined to sweep not only Europe, but much of the globe. So he believed that Europeans ought to study the United States in order to discover both the advantages and disadvantages of a democratic society. As he wrote, "a new political science is needed for a world that is itself quite new."

Tocqueville began his visit to America in the Northeast, then traveled to the Western frontier and across the South. Upon his return to France, he published two volumes titled Democracy in America, which detailed his observations not only about American society, but about the potential benefits and drawbacks of democracy. In recent decades, many of Tocqueville's findings have proved far-sighted.

Tocqueville believed that democratic nations would produce mediocre cultures. He assumed that only an aristocracy, which enjoyed the benefits of generations of wealth, education, and refinement, could produce great ideas or sublime works of art. Democracy, by contrast, would raise the status of society's lowliest members, but would lower the status of its elite, producing a middling culture. In America, according to Tocqueville, the opinions of powerful or learned men received little more influence than the opinion of a typical citizen. Experts and leaders commanded much less authority in the U.S. than in Europe.

Tocqueville was generally optimistic about the future of American democracy. His chief fear was that Americans felt too little attachment to their society. That is, he feared that the comparative abundance of America and its citizens' attention to their private interests would gradually undermine their sense of duty to the larger society. Tocqueville feared that Americans might eventually sever virtually all ties to the larger community, focusing exclusively on their private concerns. As he wrote, for such a citizen, "His home and family would become for him the sum total of society."