CHAPTER 9

The Destruction of Trust

The analysis of trust has become a central focus in contemporary social theory. This is wholly to be welcomed, for it takes but a moment to realize that social life depends on trust. Parents and children habitually rely on each other without much question, with an enormous amount being simply taken for granted. Cooperative relations in general depend on trust, on the expectation that agreements will be honored. One example of this is the agreement to differ, the subject of chapter 1. So civility rests on trust. Accordingly, those who destroy trust must be ranked as enemies of civility. Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of such enemies is unduly neglected given its immense intellectual power. And it matters very greatly to the argument of this book, as it makes us turn our attention to the state.

Tocqueville seems to me to be the greatest of all theorists of trust.¹ This claim can be specified; it should not be misunderstood. “I have only one passion,” Tocqueville declared in 1837 in a letter to Henry Reeve, “the love of liberty and human dignity. All forms of government are in my eyes only more or less perfect ways of satisfying this holy and legitimate passion of man.”² Differently put, no radical claim is being made here to the effect that Tocqueville is a sociologist of trust rather than of liberty; the claim is simply that what Tocqueville did have to say about trust in political life is exceedingly high-powered, and of particular interest in a period in which many attempts to create or to restore cooperative relations are being made. It is not, of course, surprising that his ideas about trust are so impressive once we understand that there are several affinities between trust and liberty. Tocqueville has much to tell us about psychological and institutional links between trust and liberty, and pleasure can be derived from reconstructing his views. Tocqueville’s views of a world without trust are especially striking. The central thesis maintained here is that Tocqueville changed his mind about the circumstances that caused the loss of trust. The position at which he arrived is one in which kings rather than people are blamed for the loss of trust in society. In my view, Tocqueville’s final position is not just more powerful but actually correct: if intellectuals can be dangerous, political elites are still more likely to undermine civility.

Without further ado, let me turn to Tocqueville’s view of a world without trust. It is important to appreciate that Tocqueville regarded the possibility of a democratic tyranny of the majority with visceral dread and fear. Much more was involved here than such facets of the democratic era as the distaste for great men and noble literary themes. Tocqueville had been deeply influenced by Pascal and Rousseau, and accordingly believed that men could be subject to base and depraved passions quite as much as to more noble feelings. In particular, he believed that human beings had within them a devil that once released could make social and political life sheer hell. The passion in question—envy—is not always properly understood. In particular, it is crucial to recall the difference between jealousy and envy. Jealousy leads an individual who is aware that someone else has something, including the affections of another person, to imitate and copy: it is a positive and vitalizing emotion—with links to trust—that encourages the individual to reach higher in order to achieve. Envy is exactly the opposite.³ Its central core received inimitable treatment in Shakespeare’s Othello: when Iago realizes that there is a beauty in Cassio’s life that makes his ugly, his response is not to emulate the handsome Florentine but to destroy him. Envy is the evil eye that seeks not to imitate but to pull down: the destruction of a quality or a person removes the offense. It is this passion that Tocqueville feared would be released by modern circumstances. At best, the release of envy would remove all distinction. At worst, Tocqueville felt that there was a natural fit between despotism and social equality: rather than allow difference and divergence, the many would prefer to suffer in common, to be equal under a single ruler.

The initial presupposition of Tocqueville’s thought is that the advent of democracy was responsible for releasing this passion. To hold such a view was entirely characteristic of a whole generation of French intellectuals.⁴ Generalized dislike was shown to the individualism encouraged by bourgeois society, together with premonitions as to the political consequences of the isolation that its social form encouraged. Tocqueville insisted that individualism was a modern concept, “unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.”⁵ Such individualism began by encouraging a retreat into private life, only then to create a form of egoism opposed to all public spirit.⁶ This was naturally anathema to Tocqueville given his allegiance to the republican tradition of civic virtue.⁷ If Tocqueville took that from Rousseau, he was as much influenced by Montesquieu, accepting his view that liberty naturally characterized aristocratic circumstances. Liberty was guaranteed by the presence of competing groups, each one of which generated powerful ties of mutual loyalty and support. Perhaps a shared aristocratic background explains their insistence that self-restraint and self-mastery were necessary if liberty was to be sustained.

But if Tocqueville shared much with his generation, he also chose to differ from it. In private life, he opposed the dictates of his family and married a middle-class Englishwoman.⁸ In political affairs, he chose to serve the bourgeois republic of Louis Philippe—against the wishes not just of his father but also of his class. This decision to adapt to the new order explains his interest in the United States: by examining the most advanced of all democracies, Tocqueville felt he would be able to say something about France’s likely future.

It is important at this point to be more precise than was Tocqueville himself about his exact intellectual concern. Confusion has been caused by the different connotations attached to the concept of democracy. Tocqueville takes democracy to be a new era of equal social conditions. As his ultimate value is liberty, the central theme of his thought can in fact be simply stated. What will be the politics of the era of equality of conditions? Will this new age be characterized by arbitrary rule or by the presence of political liberty? And would it be possible, when people are so similar, to prevent a more thoroughgoing despotism than ever before?

The first volume of Democracy in America produced a favorable report on the United States. Tocqueville was surprised to discover that political liberty and equal social conditions could coexist. He confided to his travel journal his contempt for the middle classes, noting, almost reluctantly, that “in spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education and their vulgar manners, they clearly can provide practical intelligence.”⁹ Let us examine in turn the three factors—accidental, legal, and cultural—by means of which the United States reached its happy condition.

The most important accident allowing the United States to be at once equal and free is provided by geography:

The Americans have no neighbours and consequently no great wars, financial crises, ravages, or conquest to fear; they need neither large taxes, nor a numerous army, nor great generals; they have almost nothing to dread from a scourge more terrible for republics than all those things put together—military glory.¹⁰

This point can be put in slightly different terms: the creation of a powerful state apparatus makes it hard to maintain liberty. The United States was saved from this fate by geographical isolation from the major centers of interstate conflict. But other accidental factors are also considered to have played a part. Most important, abundance of land allowed for the egalitarian spirit of the early settlers to be maintained: no hierarchy could be easily created given that a laborer could always move on toward the frontier. In these circumstances, acquisitiveness did not breed corruption: on the contrary, the ability to extract plenty from the land depended on knowledge and independence, thereby creating the benefits of prosperity that helped to maintain the Republic.

Second, liberty was maintained by means of the laws. Tocqueville has much of interest to say about the judicial system, particularly about its capacity to restrain sudden outbursts of feeling. But of greater import here are his comments about participation. Tocqueville stresses that the American Constitution managed to combine the benefits of a great power at one and the same time as it allows the involvement characteristic of smaller societies. The United States, in another of Tocqueville’s formulations, possesses executive centralization with administrative decentralization. One benefit of this is that the United States is not dominated by a great capital. But of absolutely central importance is the fact that a decentralized system allows people to engage in politics. Tocqueville was impressed by the political participation he observed in New England, and he suggested that it served as a bulwark against the tyranny of the majority.¹¹ When people are actively engaged in political life, they begin to appreciate the benefits of hearing differences of opinion; equally, they gain both a taste for freedom and the necessary skills to maintain it. Liberty depends upon the civic training that can come only from taking charge of one’s destiny. Cooperation between classes and individuals is relatively easy to achieve within such a world, and this amounts to Tocqueville’s genealogy of trust. His general position is made particularly clear in a passage disputing the claim that the state needs to become more skillful and active in proportion as the citizens become weaker and more helpless:

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.¹²

For Tocqueville, a state can only truly be powerful if it is in a relationship of trust with its citizens—an idea that, as we will see, became central to his later work.

The third type of general cause concerns what Tocqueville felicitously called “the habits of the heart.” Here Tocqueville’s argument goes very much against current preconceptions in insisting that it is respect for religion that underlies liberty in the United States. One part of his argument is particularly clear and strikingly sociologically perceptive. He suggests that freeing the church from state control will encourage the spread of religious faith: in other words, secularization is usually at least half a political movement; that is, it is occasioned by the need to attack the strengthening of the politically powerful by religious legitimation. Altogether harder to understand, however, is the core of Tocqueville’s argument: that religion is necessary for liberty because it places some limits on human behavior. It is worth quoting Tocqueville at some length on this point. After explaining that the general respect for religion supports family life, he notes:

The imagination of Americans in its greatest leaps has therefore only a circumspect and uncertain step; its pace is hindered and its works are incomplete. These habits of restraint are to be found in political society and singularly favour the tranquillity of the people as well as the longevity of the institutions it has given itself. Nature and circumstances have made the inhabitant of the United States an audacious man; it is easy to judge of this when one sees the manner in which he pursues his fortune. If the spirit of the Americans were free of all impediments, one would soon encounter among them the boldest innovators and the most implacable logicians in the world. But revolutionaries in America are obliged to profess openly a certain respect for the morality and equity of Christianity, which does not permit them to violate its laws easily when they are opposed to the execution of their designs; and if they could raise themselves above their own scruples, they would still feel they were stopped by those of their partisans. Up to now, no one has been encountered in the United States who dared to advance the maxim that everything is permitted in the interest of society. An impious maxim—one that seems to have been invented in a century of freedom to legitimate all the tyrants to come.¹³

This passage offers, in my opinion, a very powerful insight into American political culture, but it needs, nonetheless, some highlighting. Tocqueville’s oeuvre as a whole suggests that what is at issue here is not in fact very complex. When we recall that the devil in modern political behavior is envy, it becomes apparent that the key self-limitation imposed by religion results from it regarding that passion as sinful. Religious belief entails respect for the gifts bestowed on humanity by God. What do differences between men matter given the much larger fact of equality in the sight of God?

Tocqueville’s contemporaries, as well as subsequent critics, have found the second volume of Democracy in America less forceful than the first, despite its obvious felicities. What is noticeable here is that Tocqueville can be seen as beginning to doubt his basic argument, that it is equal social conditions that create envy and thereby encourage despotism. His chapter “Why Democratic Nations Show a More Ardent and Enduring Love for Equality than for Liberty” begins by being true to its title. But toward the end of the chapter, the target of the discussion subtly changes:

Democratic peoples love equality at all times, but in certain periods, they press the passion they feel for it to delirium. This happens at the moment when the old social hierarchy, long threatened, is finally destroyed after a last internecine struggle….

What precedes applies to all democratic nations. What follows regards only us.

In most modern nations and in particular in all the peoples of the continent of Europe, the taste for and idea of freedom began to arise and to develop only at the moment when conditions began to be equalized and as a consequence of that very equality. It was the absolute kings who worked the most at levelling the ranks among their subjects. In these peoples, equality preceded freedom; equality was therefore an old fact when freedom was still a new thing; the one had already created opinions, usages, laws proper to it when the other was produced alone and for the first time in broad daylight. Thus the latter existed still only in ideas and tastes, whereas the former had already penetrated habits, taken hold of mores, and given a particular turn to the least acts of life.¹⁴

It is this line of argument that is fully developed in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, to which we can turn after making one important prefatory point.

In the most general terms, what is noticeable about the United States is that it was a cultural offshoot of England. It was created with equal social conditions and political liberty; it was born free. This renders Tocqueville’s analysis essentially static: it is an examination of social and political institutions that counterbalance the tendency, inherent in a society of equal social conditions, toward the tyranny of the majority. The essentially cheerful report that Tocqueville issues on the United States is consequently of limited use when it comes to understanding Europe. European society had the social hierarchy created by a feudal past, and the nature of the transition that the various national states make toward the world of equal social conditions therefore becomes absolutely vital. If Tocqueville’s central problem—how can liberty and equal social conditions be combined—remains the same, a key part of the agenda now becomes the historical development of both these forces. So let us turn from the striking book that he wrote when young to his masterpiece, The Old Regime and the French Revolution.

We know that in the 1850s Tocqueville had originally attempted to produce an analysis of the failure of France to embrace political liberty in the years after 1848—a failure that drove him to the depths of despair.¹⁵ That remained his question: the central subject of the book is the propensity of France to embrace despotism. But in seeking to understand why this was the case, Tocqueville was driven backward in time; he found the explanation less in modern social circumstances than in the nature of the Old Regime. Outlining his account must be our initial task. But Tocqueville’s argument gains very considerable force because he has—half implicitly, half explicitly—two control groups. He devotes an appendix to Languedoc, an area of France that resisted most of the centralizing encroachments of the absolutist regime, and had, in consequence, a very different social physiognomy. Far more important are the comments made about England, a society with a feudal past that nonetheless possesses liberty in the era of equal social conditions. Tocqueville is one of the greatest of France’s Anglophiles, and the English comparison serves as a foil for French developments at every step of his argument.

Tocqueville was a far more systematic thinker than is often realized. When dealing with France and England, he asked about the same types of social cause that had structured his account of the United States: namely, accidents, laws, and mores or habits of the heart. We can follow him in using these categories, though clarity of presentation will be enhanced by taking them in an order different from that used when dealing with the United States. Let us begin with the laws of France.

Tocqueville tells us that what surprised him most in the research for his book was the discovery that administrative centralization was the work of the Old Regime rather than of the Revolution. Several aspects of this centralization may be traced. The absolutist regime placed its own servants, the intendants, in every area of France so as to rule and tax through them. Even where old systems of authority were left, they were effectively undermined. Thus, court cases that presented difficulties for the regime were “called” to Paris. Furthermore, the autonomy of towns was destroyed by Richelieu, that of the aristocracy by Louis XIV. The latter built Versailles so as to neuter his aristocracy by removing them from their power bases and placing them under his supervision. The consequences of all these changes were profound. Most obviously, the administration learned to distrust the people:

Any independent group, however small, which seemed desirous of taking action otherwise than under the aegis of the administration filled it with alarm, and the tiniest free association of citizens, however harmless its aims, was regarded as a nuisance. The only corporate bodies tolerated were those whose members had been hand-picked by the administration and which were under its control. Even big industrial concerns were frowned upon. In a word, our administration resented the idea of private citizens’ having any say in the control of their own enterprises, and preferred sterility to competition.¹⁶

In general, the administration realized that its power was negative, resting as it did on preventing linkages between the people that it could not oversee: it was able to control but not to mobilize the people. And the people, bereft of the chances of participation, increasingly looked to the state for social improvements, and came to regard it almost as a deity in its own right. In these circumstances, Parisian affairs began to have a profound effect on French politics as a whole.

Administrative centralization was but one side of the picture of laws and institutions. The most brilliant pages in all of Tocqueville are contained in chapters 8–10 of the second part of the book. The first of these three chapters explains “How France had become the country in which men were most like each other.” What was involved here, in Tocqueville’s view and in that of later historians whose work supports this point, was the convergence of income levels and lifestyles of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.¹⁷ The second stage of the argument is a nice example of Tocqueville’s love of paradox: chapter 9 considers “How, though in many respects so similar, the French were split up more than ever before into small, isolated, self-regarding groups.” This section begins with an analysis of local politics before the advent of absolutism. Records showed that classes had once been able to trust each other, and to cooperate with each other in defending regional interests. This spirit of class cooperation was shattered most of all by the granting of tax and legal immunities to the French aristocracy: this destroyed all community of interest, and naturally made it senseless to serve as leaders against the encroachments of the state. This basic separation of the classes was exacerbated by the state raising extra revenues by granting more special privileges. This was so excessive that it not only set bourgeois against aristocrat but some sections within the bourgeoisie against many of their colleagues. The final stage in the argument, chapter 10, bluntly considers “the suppression of political freedom and the barriers set up between classes.” It is here that Tocqueville finds an explanation for France’s inability to combine equal social conditions with political liberty. The exercise of political liberty depends, as noted, upon trust between different social classes, while it in turn breeds responsibility; differently put, participation is the only effective means of training citizens suited to liberty. The trouble with the pattern of the French past, in contrast, is that envy has been so encouraged by rulers as to make people prefer equality under a despot to differentiation under liberty. The whole burden of Tocqueville’s argument is thus to offer a political explanation for the rise of envy and destruction of trust. His own summary on this point is brutal:

Almost all the vices, miscalculations and disastrous prejudices I have been describing owed their origin, their continuance, and their proliferation to a line of conduct practised by so many of our Kings, that of dividing men so as the better to rule them.¹⁸

Tocqueville had changed his mind about the loss of trust. Liberty is undermined less by passions released by the age of social conditions and much more by those created by the strategy of the state.

Let us complete Tocqueville’s argument. The analysis of the “habits of the heart” of French people is well known, both because it became a staple of nineteenth-century French social thought and because it gave rise to a striking thesis by Daniel Mornet on the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.¹⁹ Three critical and mutually reinforcing points are made by Tocqueville about the political culture of eighteenth-century France. First, the divide-and-rule strategy of the absolutist state meant that the intellectuals, quite as much as other social actors, lost touch with political reality. They criticized society remorselessly, heedless of social costs, and produced plans that looked perfect on the drawing board but were to prove extremely dangerous in practice. Second, particularly important in this regard was their assault on religion. Tocqueville explains this assault in terms familiar from his earlier book: it was the alliance of church and state that led to anticlericalism. That attack was, he stresses, exceedingly dangerous because it removed all limits from politics: when everything is possible, in Tocqueville’s eyes, despotism becomes likely. Third, Tocqueville notes that a particular group of intellectuals, the economists, much preferred order to liberty. The Physiocrats sought to make the state enlightened and despotic, unaware, in Tocqueville’s eyes, that what was really necessary was a diminution of the presence of the state. A general point is called for at this point. Tocqueville is telling us that intellectuals become enemies of civility because of political exclusion; this is one reason for suggesting that civility is endangered most of all by the behavior of states.

The central comment made about accidental causes is a neat counterpoint to the isolation of the United States. The fundamental origin of the absolutist state in France lies in an institutional change introduced at the blackest moment of the Hundred Years’ War with England:

It was on the day when the French people, weary of the chaos into which the kingdom had been plunged for so many years by the captivity of King John and the madness of Charles VI, permitted the King to impose a tax without their consent and the nobles showed so little public spirit as to connive at this, provided their own immunity was guaranteed—it was on that fateful day that the seeds were sown of almost all the vices and abuses which led to the violent downfall of the old regime.²⁰

The basis of class cooperation had been respect for the two maxims of canon law that had governed representative estates; namely, “no taxation without representation” and “what touches all must be agreed by all.”²¹ Once these maxims were undermined, the state could divide society and perch despotically on top of those divisions.

Before contrasting this portrait with those of Languedoc and England, the nature of the case that Tocqueville has made can usefully be highlighted. We are really being told that history—and not, as Freud had it, biology—is destiny. France lost its freedom under the Old Regime and is thus basically incapable of having liberty in the new age of social conditions. It is not, in other words, the actual process of transition to equal conditions that matters; rather, patterns of political organization and culture persist across social transformations—a general ethic that also applies to England, as we shall see in a moment. This is a highly deterministic conclusion, one that is wholly depressing.

Languedoc had been able to resist the centralizing tendencies of the monarchy, and Tocqueville applauds the decision of the notables of Languedoc to collect taxes locally—and this despite the fact that their total tax burden was heavier. Running one’s own affairs allowed trust in society to continue; much is made of cooperation between classes. It is at this point that Tocqueville most clearly spells out an important theoretical point about the nature of state power. What he notes about Languedoc is that it was better governed than the rest of France. A lessening of despotism/retention of local liberties increased the rate of fiscal extraction because the aristocracy contributed to a government that it could control. In consequence of this, and of the greater knowledge created by trust in contrast to the power standoff characteristic of the rest of France, the level of social infrastructure and general prosperity was strikingly high. Constitutionalism breeds trust, and trust empowers. And this is true more generally of England as compared to France: for Tocqueville what matters about England is that its state is far more powerful than that of France, despite—or, rather because of—its lack of absolutist powers.²²

England provides a neat counterpoint to France at each theoretical juncture on which Tocqueville’s thought concentrates, and it equally forms a coherent and comprehensible whole. Tocqueville himself writes most extensively about the laws and institutions of England. What impresses him most is the resilience of the aristocracy. That resilience is explained by continuing social function: the lack of centralized state administration meant that the aristocrats provided local government. As in Languedoc, the aristocracy was not exempt from taxation, with the English state accordingly being strengthened by large revenues; hence, aristocrats joined with other members of the community in resisting any extension of arbitrary state power. Both a consequence and a cause of this happy situation was the openness of the English upper classes. In France, privileges, legal and fiscal, had turned the aristocracy into a caste separate from the rest of society. In England, the absence of such privileges encouraged intermarriage and allowed the aristocracy to be opinion leaders for the whole of society. The success of that leadership was seen, for Tocqueville, in the way in which the idea of the gentleman became popular throughout society.

Tocqueville’s comments about English geopolitics and the habits of the heart are less developed, albeit the contrast with France at each point is exceedingly neat. Geopolitically, England has the advantage of being an island, far less fearful of invasion and accordingly with citizens less likely to hand over their liberties because of the pains of war. Furthermore, Tocqueville is encouraging us to say simply that the presence of naval forces, rather than of a standing army, encourages liberty.²³ In more general matters of political culture, Tocqueville notes that English intellectuals are far less prone to create wild schemes because they have practical experience of political life. This is certainly an accurate description of the world of Hume and Smith, the theorists of empiricism and capitalism, both of whom sought to encourage prudence, calculation, and moderation. It is not, of course, true to say that these figures were themselves advocates of religion. Nonetheless, both Hume and Smith sought, as noted, to discourage enthusiasm of any sort—Hume by showing a decent respect for the dead certainties of established religion, Smith by encouraging an increase of religious sects that were able to balance and to check each other.²⁴ For the sake of completeness, it is well worth noting that one of the later members of the liberal and Anglophile school of thought to which Tocqueville belongs can sensibly be seen as completing his thought at this point. The first volume of Élie Halévy’s celebrated history of England in the nineteenth century offered an explanation for the relative moderation of the working class in England as compared to that of France during the course of the century.²⁵ Those attacking the upper orders in France became by necessity anticlerical, with all the increase in radicalism—in this case toward Marxism—that superimposition of conflicts normally imposes.²⁶ Such a course of action was not necessary in England. The partial disestablishment of the church meant that the working class did not need to attack religion per se: on the contrary, it could invent its own. The moderation and organization of the British working class in the nineteenth century is to be ascribed in large part to its being methodist rather than Marxist.

Let me summarize and conclude. State behavior can destroy, thereby undermining civility. The principal argument about Tocqueville is that he came ever more powerfully to blame kings rather than people for the loss of trust within society. This is a matter of great import. Majorities can threaten minorities, but elites can repress and divide majorities into suspicious and warring groups. Accordingly, it is best to see democracy as a necessary condition for civility in modern times, even though sufficiency to that end requires the creation and maintenance of a civil political culture. Furthermore, Tocqueville has sometimes been utilized by conservatives who wish to argue that the “socialistic envy” of the people is both vile and a danger to settled contemporary capitalism. There is everything wrong with such a view. Most obviously, it is not correct. Tocqueville’s concern with state-centered explanation can helpfully be seen, to begin with, as lying at the back of an important, recent breakthrough in understanding the rise of socialism. There is now something of a general agreement among political sociologists, as we saw in chapter 3, to the effect that socialist militancy was not created by the capitalist mode of production but rather by ruling-class strategies. And the whole spirit of Tocqueville’s work stresses the possibility of working cooperatively—that is, of transcending material interests reductively defined. Contemporary historical sociology underlines the importance of this point when demonstrating that European social democracy has depended on cross-class alliances—most obviously, those between peasants and workers in Scandinavia.²⁷

Further points can be made against the conservative use of Tocqueville by considering Habits of the Heart, the most celebrated recent analysis of the character of American society produced by Robert Bellah and his colleagues. The authors of treatise should not be allowed to get away with their attempted appropriation of Tocqueville for their argument that American society should be reformed through reinforcing community sentiment at the expense of individualism.²⁸ Most immediately, Tocqueville was a pessimist, reluctant to concede that reform was ever likely to succeed. His analyses of the difficulties involved in liberalization are, of course, subtle and quite well known. His crucial point is that the envy encouraged by the Old Regime made cooperation impossible once it fell:

It was no easy task bringing together fellow citizens who had lived for many centuries aloof from, or even hostile to, each other and teaching them to co-operate in the management of their own affairs. It had been far easier to estrange them than it now was to reunite them, and in so doing France gave the world a memorable example. Yet, when sixty years ago the various classes which under the old order had been isolated units in the social system came once again in touch, it was on their sore spots that they made contact and their first gesture was to fly at each other’s throats. Indeed, even today, though class distinctions are no more, the jealousies and antipathies they caused have not died out.²⁹

In other words, once trust has gone—as anyone who has experienced divorce will surely know—it can never be restored. In this context, it is worth noting that Tocqueville’s passionate love of liberty did not prevent him from reaching conclusions that were quite repulsive to him:

The segregation of classes, which was the crime of the late monarchy, became at a late stage a justification for it, since when the wealthy and enlightened elements of the population were no longer able to act in concert and to take part in the government, the country became, to all intents and purposes, incapable of administering itself and it was needful that a master should step in.³⁰

In this there is grandeur. Tocqueville has sufficient stature as a thinker to be able not to write his hopes into history: on the contrary, his hopes pointed one way while his analysis of social and political processes often indicated another. If one hopes that his pessimism may be refuted by contemporary transitions from authoritarianism, his work does at least allow one to be armed so as to confront likely dangers.

But if chances for reform exist, the spirit and legacy of Tocqueville would certainly not seek to secure them by means of restriction and control. Most immediately, let us remember that Tocqueville liked active independence, contention rather than the dead hand of order and uniformity. At a deeper level, his injunction is always to trust the people: the only guarantee of liberty consists in the hearts of those who know the value of liberty, and that can only be created as the result of living in freedom. The sole way to deal with a decided lack of trust is to persevere in repairing democratic deficits. In the long run, liberty will teach people trust. It is therefore appropriate to conclude with the words of Sting, an English pop star who understands Tocqueville better than does Bellah when proclaiming that “if you love someone, set them free.”

¹ Good use of Tocqueville is made by G. Hawthorn, “Three Ironies in Trust,” in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. D. Gambetta (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

² A. de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. R. Boesche, trans. J. Toupin and R. Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 115.

³ H. Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, trans. M. Glenny and B. Ross (New York: Harcourt, 1969).

⁴ R. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), part 1.

⁵ Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 96.

⁶ A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), trans. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 514–17. Cf. J. C. Lamberti, Tocqueville et les deux democraties (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970).

⁷ On this tradition, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For an appreciation of Tocqueville’s allegiance to this tradition in comparison to thinkers who endorsed bourgeois society without major qualification, see A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

⁸ For details, see A. Jardin’s excellent Tocqueville (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).

⁹ A. de Tocqueville, Journey to America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. G. Lawrence, rev. ed. in collaboration with A. P. Kerr (New York: Anchor, 1971), 259, cited by Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, 89.

¹⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 265.

¹¹ Tocqueville’s admiration for New England town meetings was, in a sense, overdone. G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938) makes it clear that by the 1830s—in the midst of Jackson’s presidency!—New England was no longer a guide to the complete political reality of the United States.

¹² Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 491.

¹³ Ibid., 279–80.

¹⁴ Ibid., 481–82.

¹⁵ R. Herr, Tocqueville and the Old Regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).

¹⁶ Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 64.

¹⁷ P. Higonnet, Class, Ideology and the Rights of Nobles during the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

¹⁸ Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 136.

¹⁹ D. Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Revolution francaise, 1715–1787 (Paris : A Colin, 1933).

²⁰ Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 98–99.

²¹ A. R. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975).

²² J. A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), chapter 5. Cf. J. Brewer, The Sinews of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).

²³ Cf. B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

²⁴ D. Hume, The Natural History of Religion ([1757] Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1956); A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, book 5.

²⁵ É. Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, England in 1815, trans. E. I. Watkin ([1913] London: T. F. Unwin, 1934) and The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. B. Semmel ([1906] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

²⁶ The importance of superimposition is stressed by R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959).

²⁷ G. Esping-Anderson, Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

²⁸ R. Bellah, R. Madsen, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler, and S. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Striking negative comments were made by A. Greeley in his review in Sociology and Social Research 70 (1985), as was noticed by S. Lieberson, “Einstein, Renoir, and Greeley: Evidence in Sociology,” American Sociological Review 57 (1992).

²⁹ Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 107.

³⁰ Ibid.