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An Outsider's View: Alexis de Tocqueville on Aristocratic Society and Politics in 19th Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

David Spring
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Extract

This brief account of Tocqueville's ideas on aristocratic society and government in England is intended to serve as a sort of introduction to the longer papers that follow in this symposium. For some years the subject of English aristocratic power in the 19th century—especially in connection with the First and Second Reform Acts—has been much discussed. The discussion has dwelt on such questions as whether the aristocracy grew or declined in power, whether the Reform Acts made for a growth or loss of power, whether aristocratic leadership knew precisely what it was doing, and so on. So far this discussion has been carried on, so to speak, exclusively from the inside: that is, in terms of contemporary English events and ideas. In Tocqueville, who was both an Anglophile and an informed and penetrating observer of England from the 1830s until his death in 1859, we have a distinguished outsider. His ideas are always interesting for their own sake. For this symposium they have the added merit of touching on some of its central themes. On occasion, his ideas may strike the reader as exaggerated, ambiguous, even inconsistent, certainly without system. But they are usually suggestive, and merit the historian's serious attention.

Tocqueville's first impression of the English aristocracy was one of great power—a power rooted in its monopoly of landowner ship. As he saw it, the contrast between the French landowning aristocracy and the English was that between an aristocracy, on the one hand, that was land poor, and an aristocracy, on the other hand, that was richly endowed in land. Tocqueville also saw that if landed property did not always lead to economic power—since agriculture did not pay that well—it had a special quality, as compared to other forms of wealth, which was bound to lead to political power.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Summer 1980 , pp. 122 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1980

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References

1 Drescher, S., Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)Google Scholar, touches on some of these ideas, but does not draw them together as coherently as I have done in this paper. It may be that I found too much coherence in Tocqueville's ideas.

2 de Beaumont, G., ed., Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols. (Boston, 1862), 1: 230Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Memoir).

3 For a comparison of the landed wealth of the English elite with that of Continental elites, see Spring, David, ed., European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1977), chapter 1Google Scholar.

4 Memoir, 1: 228Google ScholarPubMed.

5 Mayer, J. P., ed., Alexis de Tocqueville: Journeys to England and Ireland (London, 1958), p. 67 (hereafter cited as Journeys)Google Scholar.

6 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York, 1856), p. 114Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Old Regime).

7 Ibid., p. 108.

8 Memoir, 1: 218.

9 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, H., 2 vols. (New York, n.d.), 1: 282Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Democracy).

10 Ibid., p. 276.

11 Ibid., p. 278.

12 Ibid., p. 279.

13 Memoir, 2: 376Google ScholarPubMed.

14 Democracy, 2: 348Google ScholarPubMed.

15 Old Regime, p. viii.

16 Journeys, p. 66.

17 Memoir, 1: 230Google ScholarPubMed.

18 Journeys, p. 47.

19 Ibid., p. 48.

20 Ibid., p. 66.

21 Ibid.

22 Democracy, 1: 244Google ScholarPubMed.

23 Simpson, M.C.M., ed., Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, 2 vols. (London, 1872), 2: 69Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Correspondence).

24 Democracy, 1:7Google ScholarPubMed.

25 Memoir, 2: 19Google ScholarPubMed.

26 Ibid., p. 211.

27 Democracy, 1: 218Google ScholarPubMed.

28 Ibid., p. 196.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 1: 279.

31 Memoir, 2: 20Google ScholarPubMed.

32 Correspondence, 2:26Google Scholar.

33 Journeys, p. 80.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 de Tocquevillk, Alexis, Recollections, ed. Mayer, J.P. (New York, 1971), p. 110Google Scholar.

37 Democracy, 2: 197Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 1: 57.

39 Ibid., p. 49.

40 Ibid. 2: 139. Tocqueville might also say: “An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society” (p. 107).