‘The Man Who Understood Democracy’ Review: Tocqueville’s Dilemma

In none of these or a thousand other lamentations is it clear what the authors mean by “democracy.” It is perhaps an opportune time to consider the life and work of a man who, as this book’s title has it, “understood” the thing Mr. Obama et al. want to rescue and revive.

Mr. Zunz, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia and a respected scholar of Tocqueville, has written an exhaustively researched and discretely focused biography of the great Frenchman. Readers unfamiliar with “Democracy in America” are best advised to read that work first. Its two volumes appeared in 1835 and 1840, after Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, spent 9 ½ months touring the American Northeast, Midwest and South in 1831-32. “Democracy in America” is, as its reputation suggests, a masterpiece of political reflection. It is also, as I was reminded by Mr. Zunz’s biography, a work of stylistic grace. Tocqueville—this is apparent even in English translations of his work—constantly revised his writing to achieve maximum clarity and felicity. 

The crucial fact of Tocqueville’s upbringing and early adult years—he was born into an aristocratic family in 1805—was that a large number of his elder relatives had lost their property or their heads during the Terror of 1793-94. Surviving nobility were permitted a gradual return, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814-15, though in constitutional, not absolutist, form. Tocqueville’s familial provenance led many to assume that he would defend the pro-Bourbon, backward-looking “Legitimist” cause even after the July Revolution of 1830 and the inauguration of the more liberal and reformist regime of Louis-Philippe.

But by 1830 Tocqueville no longer had any use for the Bourbons. They “aren’t worth a thousandth part of the blood that has been spilled for their quarrel,” he wrote. He understood even then that the democratic idea would sooner or later conquer Europe and relegate monarchical power to the margins. Tocqueville swore an oath to the new king, but in the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution, France was no place for a young aristocrat of known political ambitions and unknown loyalties. He hatched a plan with Beaumont to spend a year or so traveling throughout the young democracy across the Atlantic. His idea was to study the country’s penitentiary system, return to France and write a report that, as he explained to a friend, “might alert the public to one’s existence and draw the attention of the parties.”

He would write that report on American penal institutions, but it was the book that followed—the first volume of “Democracy”—that alerted the public to his existence.

Mr. Zunz’s biography situates Tocqueville’s great treatise in its French context. Americans, this reviewer included, tend to read “Democracy” as though the author were explaining America to Americans. He was in fact asking France’s political class to consider the promise—and the perils—of political equality.

Tocqueville often used the term “equality” as a synonym for democracy, since democratic reforms by definition bring citizens into closer parity with each other. “Democracy in America” sought in essence to answer this question: Would the work of cultivating equality destroy liberty? That question haunts every modern democratic state, but the United States more so than any other.

Tocqueville, despite a retiring demeanor and ill health, would use his reputation as a first-rate political mind to press his way into elective government. There, too, as Mr. Zunz relates, he would labor to reconcile liberty and equality in French political life. In the 1840s, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies (the French Parliament’s lower chamber), he tried to find a middle path between the French left’s insistence that all children be educated by the state and the clergy’s use of education as a way to retain political influence. He didn’t succeed in that effort, but the episode reminds us that problems of educational curriculum were known to societies far less pluralist than our own. 

Mr. Zunz, for reasons that escape me, avoids broader interpretations of Tocqueville’s life and work. Some readers will prefer this narrowly factual approach. I do not. Early in the book, for example, we learn that the young Alexis once had a love affair with Rosalie Malye, the daughter of an archivist, that lasted for several years. Eventually he ended the relationship because, as Mr. Zunz writes, “her different social class made an alliance unthinkable.” Tocqueville had been injured in a duel defending her honor, or so the evidence suggests. Even after the breakup he wrote letters to her “using invisible ink made from lemon juice.” Now it doesn’t take a heedless Freudian to wonder if the pain of that parting contributed in some way to Tocqueville’s thought on equality. But Mr. Zunz doesn’t raise the possibility even to reject it.

Mr. Zunz also declines for the most part to engage with Tocqueville’s ideas beyond accurately rendering them and occasionally pointing out oversights. This is a biography, not an argument. But anybody who publishes a full-length treatment of Tocqueville—particularly one whose title claims that he “understood democracy” and whose appearance comes at a time of widespread confusion over democracy’s meaning and fear for its prospects—bears some obligation to connect the man’s ideas to the present. 

Accomplished academic scholars sometimes write with surprising reserve or dryness about subjects about which they possess vast knowledge, refusing to indulge in the swashbuckling style of journalists who’ve read two or three books on a topic and feel entitled to make grand pronouncements. Perhaps that’s it.

But I wonder if I’m wrong to detect another reason for Mr. Zunz’s (let’s call it) more cautious approach. Tocqueville, he writes, “has inspired readers of opposite political persuasions who have always felt free to choose their preferred formulation to claim him.” That used to be truer than it is now. Mr. Zunz is a man of the center-left writing for a center-left audience, and American liberals and progressives have over the past two decades begun to lose touch with Tocqueville. Whereas the American right draws on Tocqueville more and more—his description of democracy’s drift toward soft despotism at the end of volume two is quoted on the right as frequently as anything by Edmund Burke—the American left now sees “democracy,” however defined, as a sacred thing that must be defended, never doubted or criticized.

This was very far from Tocqueville’s attitude. His most famous apprehension about democracy, which he shared with most of the American founders—that it could lend itself to the tyranny of a majority—was once felt keenly by American liberals. Today’s left feels itself just as keenly to be the majority. Its adversaries take power, in the left’s imagination, by gerrymandering or rigging countermajoritarian institutions or spreading “disinformation” or suppressing minority votes or colluding with foreign powers. Whatever the merits of these charges, they don’t arise from any fear of a reckless majority.

I may be wrong about the reasons for Mr. Zunz’s reticence, but about this I am pretty sure: The people who would profit most from the man who understood democracy think they already understand it. 

—Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.