An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Savannah, Georgia, 3–7 November 1999.

1. Letter to Weightman, Roger C., 24 June 1826. Quoted from jefferson, Selected Writings, ed. Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr, (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1979, “Crofts Classics”), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar Tocqueville was regarded in France in the 1830s as an admirer of Jefferson. Mélonio, Françoise, Tocqueville and the French (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 33.Google Scholar

2. Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the Revolution, ed. Furet, François and Mélonio, Françoise, trans. Kahan, Alan S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 86–88.Google Scholar For the original see, Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Mayer, J.-P. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–), 2: 73–75.Google Scholar I will use the words liberty or freedom interchangeably for what Tocqueville calls liberté. Isaiah Berlin consistently includes Tocqueville among the partisans of liberty and liberalism. See Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 124, 165, and 173Google Scholar. Peter Lawler argues that Tocqueville is “fundamentally a partisan of human liberty,” that he had an “unprecedented clarity” about “how problematic that partisanship is,” but also adds that he was “not certain that human liberty even exists.” Peter Lawler, Augustine, “The Human Condition: Tocqueville's Debt to Rousseau and Pascal,” in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, ed. Nolla, Eduardo (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 2, 6.Google ScholarSalkever, Stephen G., Finding the Mean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p.246,Google Scholar notes, however, that Tocqueville's understanding of “liberty” is distinctive, drawn neither from liberal theory nor republican thought. See also Jardin, André, Tocqueville, A Biography, trans. David, Lydia with Hemenway, Robert (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988), pp. 384–85;Google Scholar and Manent, Pierre, Modern Liberty and its Discontents, ed. and trans. Mahoney, Daniel J. and Seaton, Paul (Lanham, MD: Rowman and littlefield, 1998), pp. 73–75.Google Scholar

3. On strands of “republican” thought in France see Keohane, Nannerl O., Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 232–35,306,459CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rosanvallon, Pierre, “The History of the Word ‘Democracy’ in France,” Journal of Democracy 6 (10 1995): 140–54;Google ScholarBoesche, Roger, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 194–200,Google ScholarPierson, George Wilson, Tocqueville in America (1938; reprint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 661–62Google Scholar; and, on the power of the “republican” idea within America, McDonald, Forrest, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1985), pp. 4–5, 66–80.Google Scholar

4. See Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), I, pt. 1, chap. 8.Google Scholar This work will be cited hereafter as DA with page or chapter number. References to the original will be to Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes, vol 1: De la démocratie en Amérique, volume 1, parts 1 and 2 of this edition. It will be cited as OC, I,1 or 2, plus page number.Google Scholar Some reasons for playing down the rights theme are suggested by Ceaser, James W., Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 16–18, 33–36.Google Scholar See also Maletz, Donald J., “The Union as Idea: Tocqueville on the American Constitution,” History of Political Thought 19 (Winter 1998): 599–620.Google Scholar

5. In discussing the earliest settlers, Tocqueville took note of the Puritans′ emphasis on political liberty and their temporarily successful combination of the spirit of religion and liberty, including “communal liberty,” in the first phase of colonial settlement (DA, pp. 47, 62–63,67). The theme in these remarks is, in fact, “republican” liberty, i.e., the practice of self-government, rather than the liberty of the individual; and even here Tocqueville noticed the emerging primacy of equality over liberty (DA, pp. 44, 57).

6. The liberties he observed are perhaps not so unusual to the British. See DA, p. 33, and The Old Regime, II, chap. 10, pp. 163–64.Google Scholar I note here that volume 1, part 2, as a whole has a special importance for the understanding of Tocqueville's thought. This is the portion of the book that is most directly based upon what he saw during his travels in America in 1831–1832.Google Scholar Volume 1, part 1, is drawn from research into the historical and documentary record, and the entire volume 2 reflects a much later stage of thinking about democracy in more general, rather than specifically American, terms. But at the root of volume 1, part 2, is the direct observation of democracy in action.

7. At the beginning of DA, I. 2, chap. 5, while opening the discussion of “Government by Democracy in America,” Tocqueville suggests his own wariness about offending “the various parties dividing my country.” In France the issue of popular sovereignty is so contentious that it damages the ability even to “judge the true character and permanent instincts of democracy” (DA, p. 196). For Tocqueville's relationship to the existing parties, see Jardin, , TocquevilleGoogle Scholar, chap. 16, and Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, chaps. 1–2.Google Scholar

8. Great parties in England were the “seventeenth-century parties,” which divided on the divine right of kings, the papacy, and episcopacy. Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The great parties of France were those dividing for and against the Revolution. Boesche, , Strange Liberalism, pp. 200–202.Google Scholar

9. Tocqueville later asserts exactly this point (DA, p. 182).

10. This analysis of party may perhaps afford an example of what Tocqueville meant by claiming to see “not differently but further than” the parties (DA, p. 20). To see further than they see means to see them as smaller versions of great issues, to see them in the light of the great issue that they have forgotten. The issue of democracy is the question of whether to restrain or expand the power of “the people.” The parties seem to be no longer aware of it as an issue. The parties consequently make less use of the freedom offered to them in this society than one might expect. Would it then be the task of a political science of democracy to resurrect it as an issue, to bring it to light so that it can be more critically examined? Such seems to be Tocqueville's procedure throughout volume 1, part 2.

11. Circumstances may act to limit the press. The lack of a highly centralized administration or a capital city as dominant as Paris is in France means there is no locale in America where the thought of the nation is centered. Some see advantage in this fact: “[I]t is an axiom of political science there that the only way to neutralize the effect of newspapers is to multiply their numbers.” Yet, reflecting “instincts and passions of its own,” the “press [in America] has the same destructive tastes as in France and the same violence without the same reasons for anger.” Even so, “At this moment perhaps there is no country in the world harboring fewer germs of revolution than in America” (DA, pp. 184,182).

12. DA, p. 187; cf. DA, II, pt. 1, pp. 429–33.

13. Tocqueville's complaint has something in common with Rousseau's argument in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences about the consequences of the popularization of science or “enlightenment.” See Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Masters, Roger D. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), pp. 47–64.Google Scholar

14. Kessler, Sanford, Tocqueville's Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom (Albany,NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 111–12.Google Scholar See also Maletz, Donald J., “The Spirit of Tocqueville's Democracies,” Polity 30 (Spring 1998): 513–30;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kelly, George Armstrong, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 80–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. For a discussion of Tocqueville's views about associations, see Boesche, , Strange Liberalism, pp. 125–29.Google Scholar

16. Tocqueville later became more aware of the difficulties inherent in this transition, and more aware of the obstacles that might cause the individual to be incapable of productive association. See the discussion of “individualism” in DA, II, pt. 2, chaps. 1–8. In DA, I, pt. 2, where he works from what he sees rather than from more abstract concepts, Tocqueville stresses the fact of achieved association.

17. Tocqueville noted an incident when advocates of “free trade” called for a meeting to oppose a tariff. The call was initiated in Massachusetts but the press spread the call widely and effectively. Delegates from the entire country met in Philadelphia, where they styled themselves a “convention.” The purpose of their meeting was to attack the tariff, but the actual deliberations ranged over virtually all issues of government. Yet the meeting broke up peacefully, after having denounced the existing tariff as unconstitutional (DA, p. 192). He saw the potential for rebellion in such disputes, which were already in the early 1830s dividing northern and southern interests. Cf. Schleifer, , The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, pp. 103,107–108; and DA 386–95.Google Scholar

18. DA, p. 190. What Tocqueville means by an “association” is not strictly identical with a “party,” but it is also not clearly distinguished from it. An association seems to begin when individuals share ideas or doctrines and decide to act together to advance their views; when they take advantage of “freedom of assembly” to gather and meet, and then organize to advance their cause, the association begins to resemble a political party.

19. DA, p.191; see Boesche, , Strange Liberalism, p. 179.Google Scholar

20. Although he earlier says that “decentralization” of administration in the United States “has been carried to a degree that no European nation would tolerate…without profound discomfort” (DA, p. 89), his overall judgment is that the centralization of the state in Europe and the weakening of the capacity for association and common action by ordinary citizens is a disaster. See DA, pp. 92–95; Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, pp. 43–45; and The Old Regime throughout.Google Scholar

21. Cf. Lawler, Peter A., The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 134–38.Google Scholar

22. DA, p. 191. Metaphysical is a word that he uses, admittedly, without much expertise. See his letter to Corcelle, 16 October 1855, in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Boesche, Roger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 320–21.Google Scholar The lack of expertise did not hinder the formation of an opinion. In his “Introduction” to The Old Regime (p. 71),Google Scholar Kahan notes that during Tocqueville's attempt in 1854 to study Germany more carefully, he developed a “contempt for Hegelians of both the left and the right, whom he condemned collectively, without even reading their works, as so many fatalist, anti-Christian, and materialist philosophers.” See also Lamberti, Jean-Claude, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 155–65;Google Scholar cf. Lawler, , Restless Mind, pp. 92–100Google Scholar, and Ceaser, , Liberal Democracy, p. 59.Google Scholar

23. DA, p. 192, correcting the translation: OC, I.1, p. 197, reads “il faut que la minorité oppose sa force morale tout entière à la puissance matérielle qui l'opprime.”

24. Ranney and Kendall argue that Tocqueville credits the “party system” with the role of a “barrier” against majority rule, but they support this view by quoting a passage in which Tocqueville emphasizes the role of associations rather than parties. He seems to regard parties as an instrument of majority politics because they seek majority support. Ranney, Austin and Kendall, Wilmoore, Democracy and the American Party System (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1956), p. 136.Google Scholar

25. See DA, p. 195. It is notable that the analysis of the need for numerous associations leads to a much stronger affirmation of the value of freedom of the press than in the previous chapter. If he earlier decried a certain license of the press, now he says that from a certain perspective the free press is “the principal and, so to say, the constitutive element in freedom”—at least “in the modern world” (DA, p. 191). It is less dangerous than associations, because less directly oriented toward action, and it “makes political life circulate,” thereby fostering the communication that brings dispersed individuals together into groups (DA, p. 186).

26. See Dahl, Robert A., Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consensus (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1967), pp. 24, 40–42Google Scholar (emphasis added); cf. Dahl, Robert A., Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 168–73.Google Scholar Spragens observes that according to Dahl, “we don't really have majority rule” and therefore there is no “real threat of majority tyranny” (Spragens, Thomas A. Jr, Civic Liberalism: Reflections on Our Democratic Ideals [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999], p. 25).Google Scholar For a qualified defense of Tocqueville's view, see Lamberti, , The Two Democracies, pp. 118–20,162.Google Scholar The roots of the pluralist view are explored in Truman, David B., The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), chap. 2;Google Scholar instructive about some of the theoretical and political origins of pluralism is Elliott, William Y., The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928)Google Scholar

27. Cf. Ceaser, , Liberal Democracy, p. 18.Google Scholar

28. This phenomenon in contemporary terms is explored from two very different directions by Pangle, Thomas I., The Ennobling of Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), especially pp. 211–13,Google Scholar and Kuran, Timur, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

29. These associations “perdent ainsi le caractère sacré qui s'attache à la lutte des opprimés contre les oppresseurs” (DA, p. 195; OC, I. 2. 4, p. 201). I note here that volume 1, part 2, of Democracy in America shows a society in which a more secular practice of liberty prevails. There are few traces of that original close linkage of religion with liberty that Tocqueville thought so extraordinary in the early colonies of New England. Democracy now seems to play the role that religion played in the earliest settlements, but it cannot dispense with the “sacred” altogether.

30. For a persuasive attempt to explain how the “sacred” fits into Jefferson's views, see Lawler, Peter Augustine, American Views on Liberty (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), chaps. 1–2;Google Scholar and for comment on the same issue for another founder, see Lawler, , “James Madison and the Metaphysics of Modern Politics,” Review of Politics 48 (1986): 92–115, especially at 98–100,CrossRefGoogle Scholar where Lawler notes that “the idea of inner moral freedom, at least democratically conceived, finds its origin in the biblical-Christian experience” (emphasis added). On the other hand, what is “sacred” for Tocqueville in the resistance to oppression is not distinctly Christian. See also The Old Regime, pt 3, chap. 3, pp. 216–17.Google Scholar

31. In tracing the development of Tocqueville's understanding of liberty, Aron notes that he once wrote about freedom in terms rather close to those of Locke and Jefferson. See Aron, Raymond, An Essay on Freedom, trans. Weaver, Helen (New York: World Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 12–13,Google Scholar drawing from the early “On the Social and Political Condition of France” (1836). He calls this Tocqueville's clearest definition of the term. Aron clarifies several later, more characteristically Tocquevillian uses, at 14, 16; these, he notes, reflect a deeper acquaintance with Montesquieu. Lawler, stresses Tocqueville's rejection of “apolitical liberalism” (Restless Mind, pp. 2–4).Google Scholar

32. Aron, , Essay on Freedom, pp. 45, 48.Google Scholar For an assessment of the origins and consequences of this view, see Salkever, , Finding the Mean, pp. 29–30.Google Scholar