Tocqueville and the Two Tendencies of Equality

Alexis de Tocqueville is typically cast as a pessimist about the fate of democracy, particularly in light of the terrifying portrait of democratic despotism he paints near the end of the second volume of Democracy in America. Ultimately, many scholars say, Tocqueville is a sad, tortured liberal in whose thought we can find the best means of moderating our inevitable misery rather than any hope of transcending it. This article disputes such a reading. Rather than move between the two volumes of Democracy as one complete whole, it takes seriously the analytical changes of the second volume which reflect Tocqueville’s late engagement with the history of political thought in his final year of composition. Tocqueville aspired, in 1840, to overthrow the ancient prejudice against freedom in democracies shared by Plato and his French contemporaries alike, substituting in its place a new fear: the passion for equality. Unique to the second volume, Tocqueville distinguishes between equality as a “fact” and a “passion.” As a fact, equality gives to everyone in democracies by birth “two tendencies,” one towards the passion for more equality, the other towards the love of individual liberty. Since he finds the passion for equality to be overwhelmingly more powerful than the corresponding passion for liberty, Tocqueville does not fear in the slightest the use of our individual wills in unruly, expansive, and even anarchic ways. The problem in democracies, for Tocqueville, is not that people will abuse their freedom but rather that they are unable to imagine what and how much they can do with it. Far from being a pessimist, Tocqueville instead discovers conceptual resources within liberal societies themselves that are available, even in our darkest hour, for constant renewal and inspiration.