Alfred E Smith, the much-loved governor of New York state for most of the 1920s, was famous for his unpretentious way with words; it authenticated him as a man of the people. So it is easy to see why he blue-pencilled a certain press release that was to be issued in his name: “People might think I could quote Thomas Jefferson, but De Tocqueville, never!”

This anecdote does more than illustrate Al Smith’s character: it also pinpoints the position of Alexis de Tocqueville in American culture. He is remembered as a wise man who wrote a glowing book about democracy in the United States, a book which can conveniently be ransacked for impressive quotations (though occasionally pundits just invent them); but he is also considered too highbrow for everyday use, and his book is more praised than read. Of late he has been taken up by the neoconservative right as a sort of 19th-century Leo Strauss, and even more by the “civil society” left, worried about the declining sense of trust and community. But the truth is that his work has few lessons for either.

Tocqueville remains, however, an enjoyable and important writer. He was born in 1805 and died relatively young, of tuberculosis, in 1859. His father’s family belonged to the ancient French nobility, whose duty and purpose in life was to fight for the king when ordered. His mother’s family belonged to the legal nobility: among its recent members was Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who had been one of Louis XVI’s ministers, and was his chief counsel at his trial, for which services he was guillotined in 1794. This background, and especially the influence of his father, who was a prefect and then a peer of France during the Bourbon restoration (1814-30), helps to explain why Tocqueville felt the call to govern France as a political vocation. But in this he was by no means unusual in his class and time. In post-Napoleonic France, politics was widely regarded as a profession for gentlemen, and there was deep reluctance among the nobility and the grande bourgeoisie to share power with lesser mortals.

• Share
•  Subscribe to post comments