О демократии в Америке: Исследование Алексиса де Токвиля

1833 text by Alexis de Tocqueville
the book written by Alexis de Tocqueville

De la démocratie en Amérique (dəla demɔkʁasi ɑ̃n‿ameˈʁik; published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French work by Alexis de Tocqueville. Its title can be translated literally as Of Democracy in America. In the book, Tocqueville examines the democratic revolution that he believed had been occurring over the previous several hundred years. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters, Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead. They arrived in New York City in May of that year and spent nine months traveling the United States, studying the prisons and collecting information on American society, including its religious, political, and economic character. The two also briefly visited Canada, spending a few days in the summer of 1831 in what was then Lower Canada (modern day Quebec) and Upper Canada (modern day Ontario). Tocqueville and Beaumont returned to France in February 1832 and submitted their report, Du système pénitentiaire aux États Unis et de son application en France (On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France), the next year. When the first edition was published, Beaumont was working on another book, Marie, ou, L'esclavage aux États Unis (Marie, or, Slavery in the United States, published as two volumes in 1835), a social critique and novel describing the separation of races in a moral society and the conditions of slaves in the United States. Before finishing Democracy in America, Tocqueville believed that Beaumont's study would prove more comprehensive and penetrating.

Tocqueville begins his study of the U. S. by explaining the contribution of the Puritans. According to him, the Puritans established the U. S. democratic social state of equality. They arrived equals in education and were all middle class. In addition, Tocqueville observes that they contributed a synthesis of religion and political liberty in America that was uncommon in Europe, particularly in France. He calls the Puritan Founding the "seed" of his entire work.

Tocqueville was one of the first social critics to examine the situation of U. S. women and to identify the concept of separate spheres. The section Influence of Democracy on Manners Properly So Called of the second volume is devoted to his observations of women's status in U. S. society. He writes: "In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different." He argues that the collapse of aristocracy lessened the patriarchal rule in the family where fathers would control daughters' marriages, meaning that women had the option of remaining unmarried and retaining a higher degree of independence. Married women, by contrast, lost all independence "in the bonds of matrimony" as "in America paternal discipline [by the woman's father] is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict." Yet despite this lack of independence, He believed America would "raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man" and praised America for having more legal protections for women than in France.</blockquote>

The primary focus of Democracy in America is an analysis of why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the United States while failing in so many other places. Tocqueville seeks to apply the functional aspects of democracy in the United States to what he sees as the failings of democracy in his native France. Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the risk of developing a tyranny of the majority. He observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. He contrasts this to France, where there was what he perceived to be an unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious, which he relates to the connection between church and state. Recent scholarship has pointed out that Tocqueville did not speak to or attend to any African American women in the course of his study, though their views on democracy, autonomy, and freedom largely aligned with his, if slavery were abolished. Insightful analysis of political society was supplemented in the second volume by description of civil society as a sphere of private and civilian affairs, mirroring Hegel. Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve". He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself. Tocqueville's views on the United States took a darker turn after 1840, however, as made evident in Craiutu and Jennings' Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings.

Democracy in America was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the other in 1840. It was immediately popular in both Europe and the United States, while also having a profound impact on the French population. By the twentieth century, it had become a classic work of political science, social science, and history. It is a commonly assigned reading for undergraduates of American universities majoring in the political or social sciences, and part of the introductory political theory syllabus at Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton and other institutions. In the introduction to his translation of the book, Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield calls it "at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." Tocqueville's work is often acclaimed for making a number of astute predictions. He anticipates the potential acrimony over the abolition of slavery that would tear apart the United States and lead to the American Civil War, as well as the eventual superpower rivalry between the United States and Russia, which exploded after World War II and spawned the Cold War. Noting the rise of the industrial sector in the American economy, Tocqueville, some scholars have argued, also correctly predicted that an industrial aristocracy would rise from the ownership of labor. He warned that 'friends of democracy must keep an anxious eye peeled in this direction at all times', observing that the route of industry was the gate by which a newfound wealthy class might potentially dominate, although he himself believed that an industrial aristocracy would differ from the formal aristocracy of the past. On the other hand, Tocqueville proved shortsighted in noting that a democracy's equality of conditions stifles literary development. In spending several chapters lamenting the state of the arts in America, he fails to envision the literary renaissance that would shortly arrive in the form of such major writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. Equally, in dismissing the country's interest in science as limited to pedestrian applications for streamlining the production of material goods, he failed to imagine America's burgeoning appetite for pure scientific research and discovery. According to Tocqueville, democracy had some unfavorable consequences: the tyranny of the majority over thought, a preoccupation with material goods, and isolated individuals. Democracy in America was interpreted differently across national contexts. In France and the United States, Tocqueville's work was seen as liberal, whereas both progressives and conservatives in the British Isles interpreted his work as supporting their own positions.

Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, tr., revised edition (2 vols., Cambridge, 1862)
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Arthur Goldhammer, trans. ; Olivier Zunz, ed.) (The Library of America, 2004)
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (George Lawrence, trans. ; J. P. Mayer, ed. ; New York: Perennial Classics, 2000)
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans., ed. ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)