Democracy in America

What It Is

Two volumes, published in 1835 and 1840, and they are not the same kind of book. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont on an official commission to study the penitentiary system. They travelled from Boston to the Michigan frontier to New Orleans, talked to everyone who would sit still, and went home with something else entirely.

The first volume examines the machinery: the townships, the federal system, the courts, the press, the parties, and — in the longest and most unsparing chapter — slavery and the destruction of the Indian nations. The second, published five years later, is stranger and more abstract. It asks what equality does to a people's art, ambitions, religion, families, language and inner life. Many readers come to think the second volume is the greater book.

Why It Matters

Tocqueville was not really writing about America. He was writing about the future, and America was where it had arrived first. Equality of condition, he thought, was coming to Europe whether Europe wanted it or not, and the only useful question was what kind of society it would produce.

The vocabulary we use to worry about democracy is largely his. The tyranny of the majority. Individualism, in the sense of citizens quietly withdrawing into private life and leaving the public square empty. The civil associations that he thought were democracy's real defence. And soft despotism, a term now claimed by every side of every argument about the modern state, which tells you how well he saw it coming.

He got things wrong. He underestimated industrial capitalism and misjudged how the slavery question would break. He also, in 1835, made predictions about the shape of the next century that are unnerving to read now. It is an uncomfortable book to be right so often in.

Before You Read

Around eight hundred pages, and twenty-five to thirty hours. Long, but never hard: the prose is lucid, aphoristic, and built for stopping to think.

Take it a chapter or two at a time. It is written in short, self-contained chapters and it rewards being read that way over months.

Do not read it as reportage. Tocqueville is unreliable on the details of Jacksonian America and was never trying to be a historian. Read it as theory, tested against a country. The most technical chapters of the first volume, on the mechanics of federal law, are the ones most commonly skimmed, and skimming them costs little.

Which Translation to Read

• Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (University of Chicago Press, 2000) — recommended. The most exact version in English. Tocqueville uses a small set of terms with great precision, and where other translators reach for a graceful English synonym, Mansfield and Winthrop keep the word he wrote, so you can follow an idea across eight hundred pages. Their notes track his sources. The cost: the fidelity is sometimes stiff, and their introduction is a strong interpretation rather than a neutral guide. View on Amazon →
• Arthur Goldhammer (Library of America, 2004). The best English prose of any version, and a prize-winner. If you want to read Tocqueville rather than study him, read this. The cost: the fluency smooths over some of the precision, and the Library of America volume is a heavy object to hold for thirty hours.
• George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (1966). The version generations of students read: warm, readable, easy company. The cost: freer than both of the others. Where Tocqueville is careful, Lawrence is comfortable.

Take Mansfield and Winthrop to think with, Goldhammer for pleasure. The Folio Society's illustrated edition of 2002 uses the Mansfield and Winthrop translation, which makes it a rare case where the collectible and the best text are the same book.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the second volume even if you have to skim the first. It is the part that is about you.

Keep a pencil and mark every passage that describes something you had assumed was a recent development. You will run out of pencil.

Read the introduction afterwards; the good ones are interpretations, and Tocqueville is better met without a chaperone. The strangest thing about him is not that he made predictions. It is that he describes the arguments of your own decade in the vocabulary of 1840, and describes them better than the people having them.