In 1944 my mother and I moved to Berkeley. My father’s ship,
DD-649, was stationed out of Treasure Island. We lived up by the University. It
was foggy, damp, cold, inhospitable a place. But as my father sailed out to
what was to become the biggest naval battle of the War his major fear was that
I was to become influenced by the Communists at the University. Strange that
this was his greatest worry. Yet as I read the piece by one of it current
economics faculty member I can now see the true basis for his terror. He feared
the Japanese but little, the faculty at Berkeley a great deal.
This, in my opinion, somewhat rotund appearing instructor tells us
When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis
de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835,
he did so because he thought that France was in big trouble and could learn
much from America. So one can only wonder what he would have made of the
Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.
Perhaps the author also means 1840 as well. de Tocqueville
spent much time writing both volumes, often abridged and missing key points,
and often poorly translated. The French is still somewhat dated and makes for
less than direct interpretation. One must also consider a possible Skinnerian
approach of the Cambridge School of seeing de Tocqueville in the context of
those commentators about him as well as those who influenced his writing. I
will comment more on that later. He continues:
For Tocqueville, the grab for centralized power by the
absolutist Bourbon monarchs, followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s
Empire, had destroyed the good with the bad in France’s neo-feudal order.
Decades later, the new order was still in flux.
In Tocqueville’s imagination, at least, the old order’s
subjects had been eager to protect their particular liberties and jealous of
their spheres of independence. They understood that they were embedded in a web
of obligations, powers, responsibilities, and privileges that was as large as
France itself. Among the French of 1835, however, “the doctrine of
self-interest” had produced “egotism…no less blind.” Having “destroyed an
aristocracy,” the French were “inclined to survey its ruins with complacency.” …
Tocqueville noted that “Americans are fond of explaining…[how] regard for
themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly
to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the general welfare.” The
French, by contrast, faced a future in which “it is difficult to foresee to
what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them,” and “into what
disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves, lest they should have
to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their
fellow-creatures.”
All of this was in the context of the individual and
individualism and the free creation of associations for helping. This was a
common thread in America, especially the frontier, and frankly still is. It is
at the core of religious institutions and social institutions, why the
Americans contribute more to charity than any other country. Americans are
unique in their ability to see distress and to reach out a hand. This has not
changed. But it was always voluntary; it was demanded of them from a moral
level, not mandated by Government who took their place.
For Tocqueville, France’s sickness in 1835 stemmed from
its Bourbon patrimony of a top-down, command-and-control government, whereas
America’s health consisted in its bottom-up, grassroots-democratic government.
Give the local community enough control over its own affairs, Tocqueville
argued, and one “will see at a glance…the close tie which unites private to
general interest.” It was “local freedom which leads a great number of citizens
to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually
brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the
propensities which sever them.”
Nearly two centuries have passed since Tocqueville wrote
his masterpiece. The connection between the general interest and the private
interest of individual Americans has, if anything, become much stronger, even
if their private interest is tied to a post office box in the Cayman Islands.
Indeed, no private-equity fortunes were made over the past generation without
investing in or trading with the prosperous North Atlantic industrial core of
the world economy.
But the mechanisms that individuals can use to join with
their immediate neighbors in political action that makes a difference in their
lives have become much weaker. If, say, 25% of the 1,000 households in the
30-block Brookside “fiberhood” in Kansas City, Missouri, pre-subscribe, Google
will provide all 1,000 with the opportunity to get very cheap, very fast
Internet service very soon. But that is the proverbial exception that proves
the rule.
The above Google comments is somewhat placed askance in his
argument. What is he trying to say? Google wants customers and it will do
whatever it can to get them. This is a sales gimmick not a commentary on social
mores!
And the Republicans gathered in Tampa to celebrate the
rule – to say that the America that Tocqueville saw no longer exists: Americans
no longer believe that the wealth of the rich rests on the prosperity of the
rest. Rather, the rich owe their wealth solely to their own luck and effort.
The rich – and only the rich – “built” what they have. The willingness to
sacrifice some part of their private interest to support the public interest
damages the souls and portfolios of the 1%.
I truly do not understand this diatribe. The “wealth” of
those who took risks to create businesses that may have endowed them with some
wealth was and is of their making. It was their risk taking, their delayed
satisfaction that made it happen. Frankly the employees who were hired by
entrepreneurs took little if any risk. They entered the open market placed and
took a “job” at a competitive salary. They did not put their homes and lives at
risk; they just took one of many possible paths with defined compensation. Not
so for the entrepreneur. My salary was always less than any one’s else, and
often for years no salary. People got paid before I received a penny. My money
was at risk, my children helped without compensation. This economist clearly
shows not a single inkling of how entrepreneurs work.
Perhaps the moral and intellectual tide will be reversed,
and America will remain exceptional for the reasons that Tocqueville identified
two centuries ago. Otherwise, Tocqueville would surely say of Americans today
what he said of the French then. The main difference is that it has become all
too easy “to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead
them” and “into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves.”
de Tocqueville had truly mixed views of America; he was
after al a Frenchman of the First Estate and was concerned deeply about
democracy and specifically democracy as perceived in the French Revolution.
Now any true and capable intellectual, or even a reasonable
person, would examine de Tocqueville a bit deeper. One does no more than read
the work of Schleifer[2].
The author of the above seems not to have done so.
As Schleifer states:
Curiously, in the
United States (and to a lesser degree in England)
the term would have a heavily positive connotation quite at odds with the
typically pejorative use of indvidualisme Tocqueville and most other Frenchmen. To Americans, especially as the nineteenth century progressed, the word
would conjure up images of extensive political and economic freedoms.
Tocqueville's own diary remarks about the "fundamental social principles" in the United States of self-reliance and of
individual independence and responsibility had captured something of what
Americans would later mean by "individualism."5 But Tocqueville's own understanding of
the term would consistently be quite different.
In 1840 Tocqueville would begin his
explanation by attempting carefully to distinguish egoisme and individualisme.
“Egoisme is a passionate and exaggerated love of
self which leads a man to think of all things in terms of him and to prefer himself
to all.
Individualisme is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate
himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and
friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.
Egoisme springs from a blind instinct; individualisme is based on misguided judgment rather
than depraved feeling. It is due more to an inadequate understanding than to
perversity of heart.
Egoisme sterilizes the seeds of every virtue; individualisme at first only dams the spring of public
virtue, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others too and
finally merges in egoisme.
Egoisme is a vice as old as the world. It is not peculiar to one form of
society more than another.
Individualisme is of democratic origin and threatens to grow as conditions get more equal.”
Key elements in this definition were the
peaceful and reflective nature of individualism and
Tocqueville's insistence that, despite apparent prudence,
individualism arose from short-sighted and erroneous
judgments.
Thus the individualism of de Tocqueville
was an outward looking self-reliance as compared to egoism which is inward looking self-acclaim. The latter, egoism, was rampant in the French Courts.
Individualism was rampant in the American frontier. It was not however in such places as Boston and the large plantations
of the South. For it was at this time that the Bostonian,
Alexander Wendell Holmes’
father, declared themselves the new intellectuals, called the “Boston
Brahmins”, the intellectual elite of the New World, the first set of
what we today would call the Public Intellectual. This self-anointed clan
still exists despite the massive changes in society over the past two
centuries.
Now back to de Tocqueville, he saw and
despised the individualism. The main reason one could surmise was the rejection
of the family lineage. American individualism was
no respecter of one’s ancestors, any American had equal opportunity, and yes to do it
themselves.
The conclusion is that we often see these
self-acclaimed Public Intellectuals opine on
things which they seem less than capable of understanding.
There are many authors who have attempted to use de Tocqueville but again have
misinterpreted him. Albrecht has espoused an extreme left wing version of
individualism in a Sophist manner and then critiqued it[3]. Similarly one should read Manent on de
Tocqueville as it provides perhaps a more even tuned approach[4].
[2]
Schleifer, J., The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2nd
Ed, Liberty Fund Press (Indianapolis, IN), 2000.
[3] Albrecht,
J., Restructuring Individualism, Fordham Press (NY) 2012.
[4]
Manent, P., An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Princeton (Princeton) 1995,
and Manent, P., Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Rowman and Littlefield
(Lanham, MD) 1996.
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