Democratic Vitality: Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Founding at 250

“A new political science is needed for a world altogether new.”¹ This insight marks the opening of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work of democratic theory. Writing to instruct the people of France in the lessons of self-​government, since “democracy can only obtain truth from experience,”² Tocqueville is clear of his ambivalence. He seeks not to deliver a tribute or to “judge whether the social revolution, whose advance seems to me irresistible, was advantageous or fatal to humanity.”³ Instead, he accepted the democratic revolution as an accomplished fact, one he sought to understand through America, the nation which had most realized the democratic idea.

For Tocqueville, “It is because I was not an adversary of democracy that I wanted to be sincere with it.”⁴ He ultimately arrives at a mixed judgment. A French aristocrat who recognized the despotic tendencies of democracy in its support for majority will, he also appreciated its merits in achieving greater equality. Empirically, Tocqueville saw America as a lodestar for other nations as they sought to democratize. The Founders valorized ideals of liberty and equality, though Tocqueville observes the American people’s tendency to favor equality over liberty. He also insightfully notes America’s commitment to the constitutional ideal of higher law—despite the nation’s contradictions of race. Tocqueville’s analysis invites reflection on the nature of democracy as the American Founding’s 250th anniversary approaches. His ideas help to consider the ways America has both realized and deviated from the democratic idea.

Given present crises of democratic backsliding, it is unlikely Tocqueville would regard American democracy as singular today or affirm liberal democracy as the “end of history.” But he would likely appreciate the widened reach of democratic equality. With this context, this essay has both an expository aim and constructive purpose. It seeks to draw attention to underappreciated ideas in Democracy in America and to evaluate the present state of American democracy in light of them. The essay focuses on Tocqueville’s treatment of two subjects: democracy as providential and a driver of peace, and the American spirit of constitutionalism in relation to the challenge of race.

Democracy as Providential and the Foundation for Peace

Tocqueville often takes the perspective of God in Democracy in America, which is essential to observing democracy’s providential character: “I strive to enter into this point of view of God, and it is from there that I seek to consider and judge human things.”⁵ He links the divine perspective to popular sovereignty, the principle that the people are the source of political legitimacy, central to the work of self-​government. “The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe,”⁶ or as the saying goes, vox populi, vox Dei.

In Tocqueville’s account, popular sovereignty together with equality of conditions constitutes the essential meaning of democracy.⁷ After aristocracy, the reduction of hierarchy and expansion of equality leads inevitably to self-rule—exemplified by America. “From Maine to Florida, from Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean, [the American people] believe that the origin of all legitimate powers is in the people.”⁸ This drives a distinctive civic republican vision rooted in “the tranquil reign of the majority”⁹ and ordained by God. “Their fathers gave them the love of equality and of freedom, but it was God himself who, in leaving them a boundless continent, accorded them the means to remain equal and free for a long time.”¹⁰ Democracy was inexorable, founded in the will of God.

Tocqueville sees this providential equality of conditions exemplified by the American social state in its “empire of democracy.”¹¹ America served as the laboratory of democracy, the ideal context for evaluating the nature of this emergent political form:

In Tocqueville’s assessment, America naturally embodied the democratic idea catalyzing revolutions worldwide. The American social state, driven by favorable geographic circumstances, laws, and mores, was uniquely situated to realize democracy, exemplified by the Puritans’ foundational work.

Though Tocqueville was ambivalent on democracy and sought to merely understand it, reporting on its inexorability and preeminent realization in America, he occasionally accords noble qualities to the democratic impulse. In Democracy in America’s final chapter, Tocqueville arrives at a magisterial conclusion about equality, coming full circle by invoking the name of God—a rhetorical strategy with which he begins the book:

From the perspective of God, Tocqueville contends that what fulfills the divine will is not an aristocratic prosperity limited to a few, but democratic equality open to all. And although he critiques its decadence, he concedes that equality has a kind of justice that redeems it. One can conclude that for Tocqueville democracy’s providence is noble in advancing the justice of greater equality, even if he was ultimately ambivalent about democracy given his aristocratic heritage and concerns about the tyranny of the majority.

Complementing democracy’s providential character, Tocqueville excels at defining what equality means. The American people, he argues, prize equality over liberty, the singular principle of their social state. “Democratic peoples love equality at all times, but in certain periods, they press the passion they feel for it to delirium.”¹⁴ Americans, possessing a “natural taste for freedom,” have by contrast “an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion” for equality, which they desire even in servitude—preferring an equality of powerlessness to the intolerability of aristocratic inequality.¹⁵

Since freedom has manifested itself in different times and forms, it cannot be the defining feature of this age. “The particular and dominating fact that makes [democratic] centuries unique is equality of conditions; the principal passion that agitates men in those times is the love of this equality.”¹⁶ A commitment to equality is more stable than a respect for liberty, Tocqueville notes. To lose equality, a people “would have to modify its social state, abolish its laws, renew its ideas, change its habits, alter its mores. But to lose political freedom, it is enough not to hold on to it, and it escapes.”¹⁷ Political freedom is easily lost as democratic peoples are willing to sacrifice freedom for the comfort of material equality. That said, Tocqueville identifies vices arising from the American people’s singular love for equality, especially democratic individualism. It can be countered through associational life, which cultivates “self-​interest rightly understood” within a culture of mutuality.

Tocqueville further links democratic equality to peace. He finds that democratic peoples prize peace the most, toward which their interests and instincts bring them. As a general principle, Tocqueville posits that “warlike passions will become more rare and less lively as conditions are more equal.”¹⁸ Democratization conduces to peace over war for many reasons: the rise in property owners who support peace, mobility of wealth which war consumes, mildness of mores, and coldness of reason in contrast to the violence of emotions provoked by war.

Tocqueville ultimately envisions war corroding republican institutions, especially their commitment to freedom. “There is no long war that does not put freedom at great risk in a democratic country … it almost inevitably centralizes the direction of all men and the employment of all things in its hands. If it does not lead one to despotism suddenly by violence, it leads to it mildly through habits.”¹⁹ There is a soft despotism to war in democratic nations, transforming the mores of a society. This reality is not merely theoretical but of high stakes for political liberty: “All those who seek to destroy freedom within a democratic nation ought to know that the surest and shortest means of succeeding at this is war.”²⁰

Tocqueville’s writings on war in Democracy in America anticipate democratic peace theory, whose basic principles were first outlined by Kant. Referring to the theory that democracy furthers peace, and hence that no democratic nation would wage war against another, its truth has been attested to by history. Tocqueville foresaw this: when the principle of democratic equality develops across proximate nations, “a sort of apathy and universal benevolence pacifies them … wars become rarer,” applying to both civil and international contexts.²¹

This insight into democratic peace rings true, but it is partially contested by recent history. Some democracies have waged war against non-​democratic regimes, infringing on civil liberties in the name of the common good of national security or the desire for liberal democratic hegemony through military strength. This certainly vindicates Tocqueville’s observation that war abolishes democratic freedom. Nevertheless, absent from his account is a reckoning with the ways that democracy’s valorization as providential can also be its undoing, seen prominently in efforts to impose liberal democracy through force.

America’s Spirit of Constitutionalism and the Challenge of Race

Tocqueville’s conception of democratic peace relates to his analysis of constitutionalism, a constraining force on sovereign power. That said, he focuses exclusively on the US Constitution, notably omitting the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights from examination. Tocqueville’s analysis synthesizes both the general and modern senses of constitutionalism. The general sense of “higher law” that precedes the state is an ancient idea, a reality which exists beyond positive law and subjects it by universal justice—often construed as natural law.²² Meanwhile, the modern sense refers to constitutional constraints on sovereign power that preserve individual rights.²³

“In America man never obeys man, but justice or law,”²⁴ Tocqueville writes, aligned with John Adams’s insight that America is a government of laws and not of men. Indeed, Tocqueville notes that Americans “still feel, by a sort of obscure but powerful instinct, that there exists a more general, older, and more holy law which they sometimes disobey without ceasing to recognize.”²⁵ He himself feels existentially compelled to disobey laws that are unjust according to the higher law: “when I refuse to obey an unjust law … I only appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.”²⁶ By linking popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of the human race, Tocqueville insightfully uncovers the relation between democracy and the higher justice of natural law.

Beyond abstractions, Tocqueville also discusses the Constitution at length. “The Constitution of the United States resembles those beautiful creations of human industry that lavish glory and goods on those who invent them, but that remain sterile in other hands.”²⁷ Although the Constitution exists preeminently as higher law, one cannot apply it to other contexts. That misses its vital spirit, the unique factors constituting the American social state—especially laws and mores.

Singular to American constitutionalism in the modern sense was the New England township, a model of civic republican liberty. “It is in fact incontestable that in the United States the taste for and usage of republican government are born in the townships and within the provincial assemblies.”²⁸ The townships, which moderate the possibilities of soft despotism and majoritarian tyranny through participatory self-​government, or what is now called deliberative democracy, “give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.”²⁹

In reflecting on constitutionalism, Tocqueville’s chapter on the three races in Democracy in America stands out for examining America’s contradictions of race in light of the higher law. He writes, “I contemplated evils that would be impossible for me to recount.”³⁰ This observation informs how he reflects on the American Founding, which he locates in the Puritans rather than the Virginians, who endorsed the institution of slavery. The New England township served as Tocqueville’s model of American constitutionalism, synthesizing the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty.

Tocqueville latently links his analysis of race to the higher law. On the native Americans, “In our day the dispossession of the Indians often works in a regular and so to speak wholly legal manner.”³¹ And regarding slavery, “The legislation of the southern states relative to slaves in our day presents a sort of unheard-​of atrocity, and that alone serves to reveal some profound perturbation in the laws of humanity,”³² where the laws of humanity refer to the higher law. For Tocqueville, the reality of slavery and indigenous dispossession in America also existed in tension with the founding’s high ideals. He relates this to the European development of modern slavery based on race:

Tocqueville notes the contrast between democratic equality—rights, the opening of ranks to all—and modern slavery’s exclusion of slaves from the democratic circle. Although slavery was widely practiced at this time, the key question remains why Americans tolerated ongoing slavery after their founding texts valorized liberty and equality for all, and why slavery persisted in the nation after the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1808. In response, Tocqueville observes the American South’s profound cultural and economic dependence on slave labor given slaveowners’ aristocratic habits, as well as their fear of a race war resulting from emancipation.

Distinctively, Tocqueville links America’s problem of race to mores, even should slavery be legally abolished. “I perceive slavery receding; the prejudice to which it has given birth is unmoving.”³⁴ This poses a problem for American constitutionalism: both the higher law and constitutional constraints exist separately from mores’ cultural endurance. “Inequality is engraved in mores in the same measure as it is effaced in the laws.”³⁵ Some thinkers have ventured further, locating the origins of America’s race problem in the nature of democracy. They note the way equality of conditions subdues the hierarchy of aristocracy—enabling the desire to identify a subaltern Other that persists in mores.

Evaluating Tocqueville’s Account Today

Tocqueville’s account of democracy contains compelling insights that still resonate today. The democratic tide he considered inexorable and providential has only expanded since he was writing. But the thesis that liberal democracy is the “end of history,” anticipated by his ideas and by teleological philosophies of history in the nineteenth century, meets contestation. In particular, recent challenges to liberal democratic order, such as populism and nationalism, question whether liberal democracy is the highest, ultimate achievement of history.

Populists see themselves as restoring democratic institutions from elites to drive a truer popular sovereignty, but they have been critiqued for undermining key liberal democratic institutions like an independent judiciary, media, and minority rights. Meanwhile, nationalism can be interpreted as patriotism and a justified concern for the domestic over the international, but it often cultivates discrimination against immigrants and aversion to liberal norms of global cooperation.

Although Tocqueville does not explicitly address populism and nationalism in Democracy in America, he does discuss “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people” at length, aligned with populist concerns. In thinking through who the people deserving of equality and self-​rule consists in, Tocqueville scholar Ewa Atanassow contends that “‘We the People’ is not only a constitutional faith or a foundational principle, but an object of ongoing political contestation.”³⁶

Writing prior to the Civil War, Tocqueville’s chapter on the three races presciently inquires into those excluded from the people, and thus from democratic equality. Atanassow links this to tensions in the national form: “While a democratic people’s sense of its own distinctiveness fuels its civic spirit and helps sustain its political culture, it can also lead to chauvinistic excess and mistreatment of others,”³⁷ Persons in a nation can still be excluded from the full rights accorded to the people through citizenship that drives civic identity—as Tocqueville attested in this chapter.

Signaling progress, however, Tocqueville’s observation that the American people prize equality over liberty endures. We see this priority of equality in struggles for recognition in recent decades, expressive of the desire for deeper levels of democratic equality to groups once on the periphery of society. Where Tocqueville saw formal equality denied to black and indigenous Americans, some point to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and treaties on indigenous sovereignty as examples of the evolution toward greater equality.

Furthermore, at the time of writing, Tocqueville considered America an exemplar of democracy. That position in the international landscape drove Americans’ self-​account:

This picture is challenged by recent concerns of democratic backsliding in America, reported by sources including the Berggruen Institute,³⁹ Brookings,⁴⁰ the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,⁴¹ The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2024 Democracy Index,⁴² and Varieties of Democracy (V-​Dem).⁴³ These note America’s status as a “flawed democracy” due largely to centralization of executive power through the expansion of executive orders, control over independent agencies, and invocation of national emergency powers—in addition to recent declarations of war.

Daniel Stid insightfully invokes Tocqueville’s critique of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in relation to what is considered our executive moment. Tocqueville was concerned that “surface-​level instability, if sufficiently chronic and severe, could drive citizens to question the value of republican self-​government altogether,” which Stid finds relevant to America currently, “an executive-​centric polity marked by chronic instability in major federal policies.”⁴⁴

Though some find that democratic erosion is not as severe as it could be, America in its present state would seem to deviate from the form of a constitutional democracy, challenging the confidence of Americans in republican ideals. But this recognition can be clarifying in reflecting on the past and future of democracy—especially as other nations such as Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland have uniquely realized the democratic idea through procedures such as direct democracy. Tocqueville himself declares, “Let us therefore cease to see all democratic nations in the shape of the American people and try to finally view them with their own features.”⁴⁵

In reflecting on the American Founding on its 250th anniversary, it is revitalizing to recognize how the democratic revolution America helped catalyze, especially through its founding ideals of liberty and equality and republican institutions, has extended worldwide. Seeing the ways other nations have become pinnacles of democracy provides inspiration for renewing the project of self-​government today.

Conclusion

Ultimately, rather than categorically opposing democracy as an aristocrat or valorizing democracy without critique, the mixed judgment Tocqueville renders in his “new political science” provides rich reflection on the history and meaning of American democracy. Democracy in America deserves to be remembered for its continuing explanatory power. Tocqueville inspires in his account of democracy as providential and a driver of peace over war. Meanwhile, his analysis of the American spirit of constitutionalism, shaped by republican institutions and the higher law, illuminates America’s problem of race. On the 250th anniversary of the American Founding, it is worthwhile to revisit this classic text for its magisterial, even-​handed analysis of democracy in America.