Alexis de Tocqueville's American Democracy
ALL MODERN GOVERNANCE PRINCIPLES that are not authoritarian originated in the 17th– to 19th–century Enlightenment-era philosophy of liberalism. Within the classical tradition, a liberal is anyone who values liberty, and liberalism, collectively, advocates people’s freedom from authoritarian control, such as that of a monarch. It aligns with John Locke’s assertion of the inviolable principle that “every man has a property unto himself,” which is based on the Edenic ideal of freedom—considered man’s natural state in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This marked a radical departure from the pre-Enlightenment view that a monarch’s subjects were essentially the monarch’s property. Democracy, republicanism, and libertarianism all derive their foundational principles from liberalism.
When the Constitutional Convention delegate from Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, stood before the assembly and said, “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy,” he was referring specifically to state legislatures and their reluctance to tax citizens and remit the proceeds to the Confederation Congress, out of fear of violence. Think of Shay’s Rebellion, a yearlong tax revolt in western Massachusetts that was quelled in June 1787, the month after the convention began. This form of violence was on the minds of the founders, even as they conveniently forgot their own violent resistance to British taxes a little more than a decade earlier. In effect, Gerry equated democracy with a lack of money, providing the founders with a contemporary example to demonstrate the evils of democratic rule, namely, too much freedom to seek redress and too much equality.
Our founders did not reject democracy because a contemporary nation-state exemplified its evils; they rejected it on principle, relying on a flawed local example. They rejected it because it was messy and difficult to administer. They rejected it because it threatened the sovereignty of their wealth and the power derived from it. They rejected it and sought to wrest control from the masses, keeping it among themselves and those like them—elite, white men.
If our founders eschewed democracy and deliberately chose republican principles of governance instead, why did the French philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville refer to America as a democracy in his two-volume book, Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840?
“Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.”
He did so because he wrote under the accepted social norms at the time that dispossessed and disenfranchised entire groups based on race and gender. But for de Tocqueville, even the appearance of equality among white males suggested the exercise of democracy in a society where they were the minority.
