Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

Many thinkers have alleged that free markets are inimical to a sense of community. According to critics such as Robert Putnam, commercial societies tend to dissociate people from one another and to undermine the basis of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America seems to present a challenge to this view insofar as he regards the Americans as both exceptionally commercial and uniquely associational. If markets and associations are in tension with one another, how can they coexist in the United States? As Rachael K. Behr and Virgil Henry Storr argue in this chapter, a closer attention to Democracy in America suggests several ways in which commercial society and the spirit of association are mutually supportive. Markets foster a complex division of labor that requires mutual cooperation. Markets encourage a sense of enlightened self-interest that teaches citizens how they might engage with one another in mutually beneficial ways. Further, markets facilitate innovations in communication that make it easier for citizens to coordinate and freely associate for political change. Rather than giving rise to Tocqueville’s dreaded pathology of “individualism,” as critics have alleged, markets are instead conducive to active civic engagement and the free association of democratic citizens.

Following Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America regards mores or manners as of the utmost significance for democracy. Tocqueville further attributes to women and especially mothers the primary role of inculcating democratic habits of equality. His portrayals of women in Democracy in America are suggestive of the many ways in which gender, race, and class intersect with one another in Jacksonian America. Looking ahead, Tocqueville also anticipates what contemporary feminist theorist Judith Butler describes as “gender troubles.” In Botting’s view, both Tocqueville and Butler appreciate the complex ways in which women and their sexuality shape the mores and manners that animate the culture of democracy. In Tocqueville’s case, the transformation of American girls from objects of sexual desire coveted by the male gaze to mothers who bear primary responsibility for the transmission of manners takes place between volumes 1 and 2 of Democracy. Botting further suggests that Tocqueville’s shifting attitude toward women parallels his own marriage and an increased ability on his part to identify with the sacrifices of young American wives.

Notwithstanding his reputation in the contemporary United States as a sort of political conservative, Tocqueville in his own lifetime was very much a figure of the centrist-left. In the French politics of his day, Tocqueville was closely associated with various causes of reform, most notably the abolition of slavery. In this chapter, Robert T. Gannett, Jr. reminds us that Tocqueville’s calls for decisive action and concerns with social reform were appreciated by many figures on the political Left in the twentieth century. These Left interpreters of Tocqueville range from postwar intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Salomon to latter-day communitarian thinkers such as Robert Putnam and William Galston to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky and Gene Sharp. Gannett reveals how Tocqueville plays a major role in the writings of Alinsky and Sharp and thus indirectly shaped the theory and practice of community organizing as it has come to be known in the United States and throughout the world.

This chapter explores the relationship between democracy and Christianity through the lens of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. As Tocqueville noted, unlike the European nations of his own day where the forces of democracy and proponents of religion were at odds, the United States in the 1830s is characterized by a harmony between religion and democracy. Tocqueville sees a number of ways in which these two forces may be mutually supportive. First and most importantly, Tocqueville regards Christianity and its affirmation of the equality of all human beings as an important source for democracy. He also finds American religion to be supportive of democratic government in the sense that it counters democratic tendencies toward cultural mediocrity, the tyranny of the majority, the pathologies of individualism, and secular materialism. Not only is Christianity necessary for the formation of democratic governments, in Tocqueville’s view, but their long-term flourishing requires a certain moderation on the part of religious believers. While it might seem that Christianity is the only religion capable of preserving democracy, a closer reading of Democracy in America would suggest otherwise.

Democracy in America begins from the central insight that religion precedes politics. This is best seen in the prominent role that Tocqueville accords to America’s Puritan Founders. The Puritans, in his view, contribute much to the spirit of American political culture. On the one hand, they contribute a covenantal theology that focuses on the importance of intermediation among otherwise separate democratic individuals. Yet the Puritans are also responsible for notions of sinfulness and religious “stain” that have the potential to assume illiberal forms. As Joshua Mitchell argues in this chapter, one potentially illiberal danger of Puritanism is the scapegoating of particular groups through the dynamics of identity politics. In Mitchell’s view, we need to reckon with America’s Puritan legacy not only through the lens of John Calvin and the covenantal theory of mediation but also through the prism of Blaise Pascal whose insights into the problems of loneliness, separation, and redemption illuminate contemporary political dilemmas.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s lifelong friend and companion Gustave de Beaumont produced a literary work based on their visit to the United States. Beaumont’s 1835 novel Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats Unis, explored themes of race, manners, and equality in American society. Although Democracy in America is not a work of literature per se, it does contain a remarkable number of literary vignettes that give the work a distinctively literary quality. As Christine Dunn Henderson argues in this chapter, Tocqueville’s literary portraiture is a consistent rhetorical device throughout the book. His recourse to literary vignettes as a way of illustrating dimensions of race, religion, and American manners demonstrates the evocative power of literature to convey moral lessons by appealing to emotions rather than reason. In this regard, Tocqueville’s rhetorical strategy of sympathy and imaginative identification is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s use of vignettes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

In the editor’s introduction, Richard Boyd surveys the main intellectual sources for Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America. After sketching out how Democracy in America has been read in light of the influences of Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Pascal, and François Guizot, Boyd surveys the book’s contemporaneous receptions in France, England, and America. Consulting reviews from leading journals of the 1830s and 1840s, Boyd demonstrates that, while Democracy in America was universally acclaimed as a work of genius, its teachings about democracy were interpreted differently as a function of the ideological predilections of its readers. Tocqueville’s appeal to divergent political sensibilities – conservative and liberal democratic alike – anticipates a consistent pattern of subsequent thinkers adapting the book’s complex teachings to their own political circumstances. This rich tradition of appropriation is hardly confined to the United States or Europe but extends globally into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

One of the central themes of Democracy in America is the dawning tide of democratic equality. In Tocqueville’s view, this equality – understood as uniformity – represents the future of modern democratic society. Rogers M. Smith argues in this chapter that, even though Tocqueville’s assessment of America as a world of democratic equality may be unreliable, his reckoning with these issues nonetheless proves instructive for how we confront challenges of diversity and inequality. Tocqueville’s worries concerned excessive equality and uniformity, but today’s dilemmas increasingly involve inequality and differential treatment. Rather than treating everyone equally, in what Smith calls a “post-Tocquevillean America,” we confront the challenge of trying to secure diversity and equity by differential treatment of some groups. Smith argues that we ought to be prepared to offer special accommodations and differential treatment for groups so long as these do not substantially harm the civil rights of others and are consistent with the broader ends of substantive equality. Although Tocqueville’s vision of the challenges of democracy may diverge from our own, his thoughts remain illuminating of contemporary challenges of diversity and inequality.

In this chapter, Ryan Patrick Hanley surveys some of the best-known Enlightenment sources of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. He considers in particular the respective influences of René Descartes, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Blaise Pascal on the arguments and methodology of Democracy in America. Rather than conceiving of Tocqueville as either pro- or anti-Enlightenment, Hanley argues that we should instead understand Tocqueville as an example of a “Moderate Enlightenment” that eschews the rationalism and materialism of the “Radical Enlightenment.” By way of illustration, Hanley identifies specific affinities between Tocqueville and the moderate Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith.

In this chapter, Richard Avramenko suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America should be understood in light of a lifelong aristocratic concern for unearthing lost remnants of the Ancien Régime. By way of illustrating Tocqueville’s ambivalent relationship to aristocracy, Avramenko draws an etymological distinction between the concepts of “debris” and “remnants,” two words Tocqueville uses in systematic ways throughout his corpus to differentiate certain institutions of the Ancien Régime that are doomed from others that might be rehabilitated for a democratic age. Avramenko traces the etymology of these two words in the French tradition and then locates these usages in Tocqueville’s discussion of various aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic institutions in the United States such as the Native Americans, the American South, the military, the new industrial aristocracy, and the profession of the law. Avramenko finds one inspiration for Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s travels in their childhood fascination with a 1798 novella Voyage d’un Allemand au Lac Onéida by Sophie von La Roche. The book tells the story of an aristocratic couple’s exile to Lake Oneida, New York, one of the destinations Tocqueville and Beaumont visited during their travels as chronicled in Tocqueville’s “Journey to Lake Oneida.”

Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America is widely recognized as one of the most definitive accounts of American society and political culture. However, his thoughts on the US Constitution have often been overlooked. In this chapter, Jeremy D. Bailey argues that this neglect is unfortunate insofar as Tocqueville’s view of the US Constitution diverges in significant ways from the authoritative rendition of The Federalist. Rather than echoing classic explanations of the workings of the US Constitution by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Tocqueville’s understandings of federalism, Congress, US elections, the presidency, and the Supreme Court are more influenced by the constitutional interpretation of Thomas Jefferson. Despite his extensive discussion of other parts of the US Constitution, however, Tocqueville has little to say about the Bill of Rights. This apparent oversight may be explained by the fact that he sees a respect for rights as emerging from political culture rather than any specific institutional framework.

While interest in Democracy in America has been centered in the West, James T. Schleifer describes in this chapter how Japanese interest in Democracy in America began as early as the late nineteenth century during the period of the Meiji Restoration. By way of contrast, Chinese interest in Tocqueville’s writings emerged only in the past few decades and has focused more on his Old Regime and the Revolution. These two case studies are exemplary of growing international interest in Tocqueville’s writings as thinkers outside the West wrestle with his lessons about the future possibilities of equality, political rights, and democratic liberty.