US history has been profoundly shaped by the existence of regions and regional consciousness, though the terms “sections” and “sectionalism” were more commonly used until the late nineteenth century. In its formative moments - the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention - the new republic was already divided along sectional lines that in turn marked out different economic, social, political, and security interests. Indeed, two of the defining “facts” about the United States of America - the existence of slavery and the presence of (so-called) “free land” in the West - made sectional politics inevitable. From them emerged the North-South and the East-West polarities in American politics and culture. Moreover, the three-sided contest among the Northeast, the South, and the West was one of the preconditions for the American Civil War (1861-5), with the South squared off against the North for control of the trans-Mississippi West. Without slavery there would have been no war, but had the peculiar institution been scattered evenly across the continent, it is hard to imagine that there could have been a sectional crisis.

A SLOW BEGINNING

Volume 1 of Democracy in America was published in France in January 1835 to immediate acclaim. In England, Henry Reeve translated it promptly, and it was published during the same year. But an American edition, the first requirement for broad circulation in the United States, had to wait until 1838.

A great difficulty in getting this initial installment of Alexis de Tocqueville's book to the American literary market was the sorry state of French-American relations. According to Tocqueville's friend Jared Sparks, Democracy in America could not have come out at a worse time. Sparks was a Unitarian minister ordained by William Ellery Channing, former proprietor and editor of the North American Review, soon-to-be Harvard's first history professor, and a New England Whig. Sparks had an interest in the book's appearance as he had had extensive conversations with Tocqueville and suggested to him two of the volume's driving ideas - the tyranny of the majority and the importance of the New England town as the point of departure for American democracy (on which he wrote a long disquisition for Tocqueville's personal use). On June 6, 1837, Sparks wrote to Tocqueville: ''I am vexed and mortified that an edition of your 'Démocratie' has not yet been published in America. . . . The work came out [in France] just at the time of the unfortunate 'Indemnity Controversy,' and then General Jackson's war spirit began to stir up in the people a hostile feeling towards France. Hence little interest was felt for a book by a French writer.''

One of the most surprising intellectual turns of the twentieth century - a phenomenon that shows no signs of abating - was the revival of interest in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1900, the French had almost forgotten Tocqueville, and Americans were beginning to find his famous portrait of early nineteenth century America of dubious relevance to their increasingly industrial immigrant nation. Yet in 2000, the Journal of Democracy asked public intellectuals to discuss issues affecting the future of democracy - the end of history, the problem of civil society, European federalism, race and ethnicity, the collapse of communism, war and foreign policy, international inequality, women and the family, even the democratic aesthetics of postmodernism - through Tocqueville's texts. The editors commented, ''one may say with little exaggeration: We are all Tocquevilleans now.'' Or, as Jon Elster has put it, “A generation ago it would have seemed absurd to see Tocqueville as the greatest political thinker of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, there is nothing unusual in this view.”

Tocqueville’s appeal has stemmed less from his ability to offer a grand theory of society and politics than from his curious role as intellectual provocateur, a writer who mysteriously appears to address the reader’s own concerns.3 Indeed, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Tocqueville has manifested a unique power to bring certain political anxieties into sharper focus: anxieties stemming from efforts to sustain civic cultures that will support the practices of self-government; from attempts to create such cultures in unlikely circumstances; and, finally, from troubling questions about the need for unifying moral beliefs as the basis for democratic viability.

Here is a striking statement, given a paragraph to itself, from the Introduction to Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Although it could hardly be more prominent, as an implied promise it is disappointing because Tocqueville never delivers the new political science. More cautiously, one could say that he never directly tells his readers what that political science is, what is wrong with the existing political science, and why political science is needed. Nonetheless, there is good reason to think that the new political science is in that book, and elsewhere in Tocqueville's writings, and that he left it implicit and scattered rather than explain it systematically, also for good reason.

To begin with the question why political science is needed, one might compare Tocqueville with two benchmarks, Aristotle and The Federalist. Aristotle is pre-modern; The Federalist is modern and American. In all three, political science is needed not only to describe politics but also to have a good effect on it. Contrary to the value-free ''empirical'' political science of our time, the task of their political science is to bring reform in the act of describing. For Aristotle, political science is a practical science.

A TOTALLY NEW WORLD

We see Alexis de Tocqueville first of all as a citizen, a politician, and statesman confronting a temporal discontinuity. The old order has been swept away; the new order is not firmly established. If instability and disorder are prevalent in institutions, it is because they already affect men’s souls: “The laws of moral analogy have . . . been abolished.” If one is to become capable of acting in and on the new society, one must first know it. But what does it mean “to know the new society?” A “new political science” of unparalleled prestige already existed, that of Montesquieu. Benjamin Constant held fast to Montesquieu’s conclusion that the “modern difference” was the difference introduced by the development of commerce and the institution of regular political representation. In a style all his own, François Guizot ratified and extended the science of “representative government.”

INTRODUCTION

In his discussion of the causes of the English Revolution, Lawrence Stone distinguishes among preconditions (1529-1629), precipitants (1629-39), and triggers (1640-42). The preconditions ''made some form of redistribution of political power almost inevitable [ . . . ], but whether these changes would come about by peaceful evolution, political upheaval, or force of arms was altogether uncertain.'' Later, the ''precipitants of the 1630s turned the prospects of a political breakdown from a possibility into a probability,'' whereas the trigger was provided by ''a sequence of short-term, even fortuitous events which turned the probability into a certainty.'' The dates are of course somewhat arbitrary, but indicate points of inflexion in the likelihood that observers, whether writing at the time or with the benefit of hindsight, might assign to a revolutionary outcome.

One can try to make a similar distinction with regard to Tocqueville's writings on the French Revolution. The preconditions, discussed in Book II of the Ancien Régime (AR), were established over the period from 1439 to 1750. The precipitants, which are the topic of Book III, developed from 1750 to 1787. The triggering events, which are discussed in the notes for Books I and II of the planned second volume, occurred from 1787 to 1789. Although roughly adequate, this periodization is not quite true to his analysis, which points to a further inflexion point around 1770. In Ch.III.i of AR he points to 1750 (''vers le milieu du siècle'') as a watershed, marked by the appearance and intellectual hegemony of a certain kind of abstract philosophical radicalism.

Writing his preface to The Old Regime and the Revolution in May and June 1856, Alexis de Tocqueville gave his own view of one of his climactic work's abiding puzzles: ''The book I now publish is not a history of the Revolution . . . ; it's a study of that Revolution.'' In keeping with this express rejection of his work as history per se, Tocqueville made a concurrent decision to omit from his book the entire edifice of supporting scholarly documentation customary to similar historical works by his contemporaries. He excised, we might say, his book's ''scientific'' content in the interest of providing what he viewed as a more succinct, more personal, less intimidating, more accessible genre of political and social commentary. He chose pedagogy over history - a choice that readers and scholars of The Old Regime have worked assiduously to overturn ever since the book's publication almost 150 years ago.

It was Gustave de Beaumont – himself a prize-winning historian and the reviewer, with his wife, of Tocqueville’s final galley-proofs, although not of the outlying texts encompassing his introduction and endnotes – who first sought to build the posthumous case for Tocqueville, the historian. After providing his own view of Tocqueville’s historical method in his 1861 introduction to Tocqueville’s (Euvres, he made the first teasing reference to his friend’s extensive reading notes on the French Revolution: “To publish a single volume [of The Old Regime], he wrote ten,” Beaumont correctly claimed, although he then exaggerated their status as “so many fully developed works.”

“It was necessary to glance briefly beyond France in order to make sense of what follows; for I dare say that whoever has studied and seen only France, will never understand anything about the French Revolution.” These words, appearing in 1856 in Tocqueville's last published work, were indicative of his perspective about every subject to which he turned his attention. A generation earlier, his attendance at François Guizot's influential course of lectures on the history of civilization was preceded by a long meditation on the lessons of English history. These reflections were formulated in his very first letter to Gustave de Beaumont, who was to be Tocqueville's lifelong friend and traveling companion in America and England.

The quotation from the Old Regime speaks not only of studying but of seeing what one wished to understand, of viewing from without what one wishes to understand within. Tocqueville believed deeply in the importance of personal, even first, impressions. Again and again, the first volume of the Democracy (1835) would frame an observation in personal terms. One had to ''go to America'' to appreciate the extraordinary and pervasive sensations of political and economic activity, of personal mobility and religious belief that pervaded American life.

Near the end of his classic essay ''Two Concepts of Liberty,'' Isaiah Berlin struggled to deal with a verbal confusion that allegedly confounded negative liberty not with his famous concept of positive liberty but with ''her sisters, equality and fraternity.'' These, Berlin argued, are less matters of freedom than of status. For example, when members of groups denied both freedom and respect long for the emancipation of their entire nation or race or religious brotherhood, they often confuse liberty with the recognition of fraternity. Such longings, however labeled, are certainly no less explosive in the twenty-first century than they were fifty years ago. I read Tocqueville - interpreted by Berlin as well as many others primarily as a brilliant theorist of the tensions between liberty and equality - for insight into the perplexing relationship between liberty and fraternity. Here, as elsewhere, his struggles for clarity about democracy's contrary tendencies, his ambivalence, and his uneasy compromises in some ways mirror our own.

Tocqueville believed and feared that the modern world was moving not only toward equality but toward sameness – that “variety [was] vanishing from the human species.” Hence the distinctive ties that bind particular peoples called for analysis and evaluation. We see his attention to such ties not only in Democracy in America – with its seminal treatment of the different fates of Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians in the New World – but also in his political writings on European colonial slavery, imperial conquest, and the nationality question within Europe.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter appears in a collective work along with other chapters focused upon such topics as Tocqueville's political philosophy, theory of revolution, and analysis of the ancien regime. No doubt their authors will discuss Tocqueville's theories of liberty, and the ways in which equality, revolution, and administrative centralization endanger liberty in modern democracies. Hence, these subjects will be alluded to when relevant to my own concerns, but not discussed in detail. My purpose is to clarify Tocqueville's conceptualizations of modern regimes incompatible with liberty - that is, those governments he classified under the rubrics of “despotism” and “tyranny.”

These regime types have played a significant part in political thought since classical antiquity. They may appear to be curious choices of terms for a theorist such as Tocqueville, who insisted on the radical novelty of modern post-revolutionary democracies. Another paradox derives from the fact that Tocqueville conflated the concepts of ''despotism'' and ''tyranny,'' terms that had been historically distinguished from one another until the late eighteenth century.

INTRODUCTION: THE REBIRTH OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Tocqueville's reflections on civil society have proven to be one of his most enduring theoretical legacies. They have also proven to be one of the most contested and promiscuously appropriated. This is especially so in America, where in recent years there has been an explosion of academic and journalistic writing on the topic of civil society. Authors from across the ideological spectrum have turned to Tocqueville for guidance in figuring out how the resources of civil society - the diverse array of political, charitable, educational, religious, neighborhood, and professional associations - might best be deployed in the fight against a wide range of social ills. These include perceived declines in civic engagement and individual responsibility, the loss of trust and a sense of community, and the spread of urban decay, apathy, and selfishness.

Perusing this literature, the casual reader might well conclude that ''civil society'' has become little more than a feel-good slogan in a time of generalized distrust of (or impatience with) governmental institutions. The core of Tocqueville's idea - civil society as the sphere of intermediary organizations standing between the individual and the state - has been worked and reworked to the point where it is no longer clear where the primary importance of this realm lies.

"Since you're here, Monsieur de Tocqueville, I'd like you to tell me a little about America," said Louis-Philippe, the king of France, in 1848. For 150 years, the French have enjoyed discussing America with Tocqueville; the Americans, too. In America, as in France, Tocqueville is best known as the author of a single book, Democracy in America, which is read as a textbook on the political constitution of the United States. The French see Tocqueville as the apologist for a foreign model: "That American," his adversaries call him. For Americans, Tocqueville is an honorary citizen, who reinforces their idea of their own exceptionalism.

The Americanization of Tocqueville is evident from the fact that the remark for which Tocqueville is best known in the United States is apocryphal. Presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan and Clinton have repeated what Tocqueville is supposed to have said but never did: "America is great because America is good. When America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great." Though falsely attributed to Tocqueville, the saying is instructive nonetheless. Like other, genuine quotations, but in a more obvious way, it aims to reinforce an American identity based on moral values and said to derive from an initial promise to which the nation is urged to remain faithful or perish.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter focuses on Democracy in America, certainly the most famous - and probably the most important - of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville. It is an effort on my part to re-examine and to rethink the making of Tocqueville's classic book, based upon my work over the past five years as translator of the forthcoming English language version of Eduardo Nolla's critical edition of the Democracy. In 1990, this invaluable contribution to Tocqueville studies was published first in a Spanish translation and then in the original French. The Nolla work was the first, and remains by far the fullest, critical edition of Tocqueville's Democracy. It presents a very broad and extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials relating to the writing of Tocqueville's book. These working papers are largely drawn from the Yale Tocqueville Manuscripts Collection, which is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and contains, among other treasures, Tocqueville's original working manuscript for the Democracy and large quantities of his drafts. Included in the apparatus of the Nolla critical edition are editorial notes, a selection of important appendices, excerpts from and/or cross-references to Tocqueville's travel notebooks, his correspondence, and his printed sources, as well as significant excerpts from the critical commentary of family and friends, written in response to their readings of Tocqueville's manuscript.

Rather than entering into a discussion of the frequently asked questions - ''Was Tocqueville himself a believer,'' ''Did he think Christianity was true or useful (or both),'' and so on - I will consider whether we can conclude from Democracy in America that there is such a thing as democratic religious experience? To put the question somewhat differently, do the ''conditions of social equality'' about which Tocqueville wrote occasion modes of religious experience that are historically novel, relatively coherent, and distinguishable from what might be called aristocratic religious experience?

In order to investigate this thought, I will rely on Tocqueville's historical schema in Democracy in America, first, to illuminate what I will here call ''the fable of liberalism,'' within which, it is often presumed, religion and democracy are immiscible, and second, to provide an account of certain developments within Christianity in the modern period that Tocqueville intimates can be explained by the emergence of democratic social conditions. My concern, among other issues, will be the emergence of an impulse toward fundamentalism, which I suggest is a necessary development in the democratic age; the increasing claims of unmediated personal religious experience and the decreased importance of religious formalities, which I take to be related phenomena; the appearance of radical claims about the depth of sin; and the crisis of authority in the churches.

THE CLASSIC

Nearly everyone will grant that Tocqueville's Democracy in America deserves to be called a ''classic.'' Does the work's classic status constrain its translator? Should it? And if so, how? These are the questions I want to address.

Tocqueville wrote as the self-conscious heir of a long intellectual tradition of writing about politics. Though never a systematic student of the ancient classics, he is known to have consulted Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch during the period in which he wrote Democracy in America. He also read ''classic'' writers of the postclassical tradition such as Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. His early education owed a great deal to his tutor, the Abbé Lesueur. Lesueur, who had also been his father's tutor, was a man who belonged more to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth, and who wrote an elegant French in the manner of that earlier time. When the young Tocqueville won a prize in rhetoric at the Metz lycée, he credited the preparation received from his tutor. The good Abbé, moreover, was an ecclesiastic with Jansenist leanings, who probably imparted the values of that austerely cerebral sect to his pupil, and we know that Pascal, the most sparkling of Jansenist writers, remained an important influence on Tocqueville's thinking.

[Translated By Arthur Goldhammer] ''The overwhelming fact of our time - the advent of democracy - changes the conditions of the revelation of ideas.'' So said Victor de Laprade, a poet, critic, and admirer of Lamartine whose name has passed into oblivion. Nevertheless, his 1843 formulation precisely captures the question that Tocqueville faced in Democracy in America, and which he answered in a style different from that of both the great ''romantic magi'' and ''the school of disenchantment,'' to use Paul Bénichou's categories. His style differed as well from that of his colleagues in liberalism: Guizot, Cousin, and, from an earlier time, the liberals of Coppet, even though he aspired as they did to a role as enlightened guide of public opinion. With the July Revolution - after which the waggish Jules Janin described a scene in which Lamartine had ''retired from the world of poetics'' to become a deputy; Carrel, ''the finest pupil of Tacitus,'' had moved into journalism after renouncing history; and Guizot and Villemain wielded power as ministers - the liberal illusion of a harmonious union of ''literature'' (or ''science'') with political institutions and a revolutionized society faced a crisis brought on by the test of power. Democracy in America echoed these doubts: indeed, the treatise pondered the implosion in France of the liberal philosophy that called itself, in the words of Victor Cousin, a philosophy of ''the true, the beautiful, and the good'' and that had been elaborated with unwavering concern for the benefits it might yield for society.