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Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, edited by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000, 722 pp.; $35
Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard, is one of the most prominent and controversial academics in America today. Many people know him primarily as the outspoken critic of grade inflation, political correctness, and identity politics in the academy. But Mansfield is first and foremost a meticulous scholar and a leading expert on the political philosophy of Machiavelli. He also enjoys translating great books in political philosophy. His translations of Machiavelli's The Prince (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985, 1998) and Discourses on Livy (Chicago, 1996) are major contributions to the field. More recently, Mansfield and his wife, Delba Winthrop, have turned their attention to the great classic of American political thought, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Chicago, 2000). Mansfield sat with Donald Yerxa in February before a lecture at Eastern Nazarene College to discuss this new translation and the enduring relevance of Tocqueville's observations.
You indicate, in the introduction to your new translation, that Tocqueville's Democracy in America "is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." Why do you say that on both counts?
Well, let's see; can we think of a better book written on democracy? Maybe John Stuart Mill's On Liberty? Or Henry Adams's book, Democracy? What is striking about Tocqueville's Democracy in America is that it's not a book about democratic theory. It is a book about democratic practice. You might say in addition to this that since he claims to be producing a new political science for a new world, he is giving us a theory about the practice. That is what makes Democracy in America so special, different, and perhaps superior to books like Mill's On Liberty, which is a paean to democracy, a hymn of praise that does not go into the practical difficulties, but contents itself with the theories and improvements which one might propose. Tocqueville, on the other hand, looks at democracy in America for its practices.
That is why he begins his study of American government in the first volume with the New England township. It is a spontaneous form of government. He ends the first volume with a discussion of the Constitution (which he calls "a work of art"). The beginning is spontaneous; the end is an artificial construction—very complicated. That perspective distinguishes Democracy in America from The Federalist, which takes for granted the township and state governments and concentrates on the federal government. So Tocqueville's picture of democracy is fuller than that of The Federalist, which I think would be another rival for a description of democracy or "popular republic"—a phrase that The Federalist's authors would prefer. At the same time, Tocqueville's book is much better than our contemporary theories of democracy, such as Robert Dahl's, for example. Again, it is so much fuller, so much more interested in democracy as a way of life in addition to democracy as a form of government.
As to being the best book on America, well, there again, I just tried to think what is a better book. Tocqueville's book is 165 years old or so. A lot of the facts that he recounts have been overtaken by subsequent events, but it is amazing the extent to which the analysis holds up: his insights into things peculiarly American, like the Puritan beginning, the discussion of the Indians, the discussion of slavery and race relations in general. So I think I would hold to that judgment.
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