The American Spectator : Pride and Prescience

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Pride and Prescience

Joseph Epstein's finely written portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville is now available in paperback.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide
By Joseph Epstein
(Harper Perennial,  208 pages, $13.99)

Now that Joseph Epstein's finely-written portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville is available in paperback, there's no longer any reason to pass up this contribution to understanding one of the most insightful, not to mention early, explicators of democracy's charms and pitfalls.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide is part of the Eminent Lives series, brief biographies of the world's most important figures. The series includes, to name a few, Paul Johnson on George Washington, Bill Bryson on Shakespeare, Edmund Morris on Beethoven, and Francine Prose on Caravaggio. No footnotes. No indexes. No scholarly hedging and pettifogging. Just compact portraits of historical figures worth knowing about.

Whoever promoted Epstein to write the Tocqueville entry deserves a promotion. To some extent the choice is counter-intuitive. Epstein is a graceful short-story writer and, no-contest, the finest essayist on active duty today. In fact, he likely single-handedly resuscitated this form, which has too often been the favorite vehicle of prigs, drudges, and casuists. But he's more of a literary man than a political writer. Appropriate for a guy who taught writing and literature for 30 years at Northwestern.

In his stories and essays, which have graced the pages of such as Commentary, the New Criterion, Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the American Scholar, et al., Epstein has ignored the daily grub of politics and has shown his distrust of Big Ideas and the people who try to retail them at our expense. Partisans of "isms" find no ally in our Joe.

But then Tocqueville shared Epstein's prejudice against systematic political thinkers, who too often come up with, well, systems. And systems have a way of leading to death by the millions, gulags, firing squads, and guys in ill-fitting suits who knock down your door in the middle of the night.

Epstein has brought the erudite but accessible style of his essays and a deft treatment of political ideas to Tocqueville. He clearly knows his way around ideas as well as around poems and stories. He brings Tocqueville the political thinker and Tocqueville the complex and troubled man to life for readers. He gives us a look at a great mind at work.

Tocqueville and his two volumes of Democracy in America have retained a claim on our attention for more than a century and a half because of the trenchancy of Tocqueville's analysis of American society and the prescience of his predictions regarding where America and democracy were headed, many of which are well known. His insights are the more remarkable as they were made by an aloof, French aristocrat who at age 26 spent a mere 271 days in America, a fair fraction of those days in arduous and dangerous travel as there were no business-class flights in 1831.

Further, the two books on America, the first published in 1835, were written not with an American audience in mind but a French one. Democracy in America was about democracy more than about America, despite the spot-on predictions. (In addition to nailing so much about America, Tocqueville also predicted the 1848 Revolution in Europe a month before it took place. But he wasn't always right. He predicted the federal government in America would wither away as the country got larger geographically.)

Less than two decades before Tocqueville's birth in 1805, his country, burdened with a parasitic aristocracy and a peasantry and middle class with a long list of grievances, had taken a bloody run at liberté, egalité, and fraternité, only to wind up with the Reign of Terror and Napoleon instead. Members of Tocqueville's family were executed during the period of Robespierre's change you can believe in. Tocqueville can be forgiven for being more than a little suspicious of democracy, even though he saw it as the inevitable future, as aristocracy was the past.

Tocqueville understood the constant conflict in democracies between liberty and equality, and the threat too much emphasis on the latter poses to the former. He recognized the emotion of envy behind much of the high-minded talk about equality, which he once described as "generally the wish that no one should be better off than oneself."

Tocqueville saw the soft tyranny of the smothering paternalism that democracies can impose, and the bureaucracies they can build. He understood that too much centralization of government is a one-way street to despotism.

The proud and ambitious Tocqueville learned first-hand the discrepancies between democracy's lofty promises and its actual practice during his own frustrating and almost achievement-free, 13-year political career that spanned a couple of republics.

Politics was almost a comically mischosen career for the cool, cerebral, and ethical Count de Tocqueville. On the basis of his research, Epstein describes him as "a tightly-wound man of volatile nature." He was a man with a talent for friendship, but a backslapper he was not. Not a guy who could work a room. He was totally free of what Epstein calls the "cozening familiarity needed to form strong political groups." His integrity was forever getting in the way.

Tocqueville was crushed to learn that hardly any of his colleagues in the French Chamber of Deputies gave a rat's patootie about the general interest, but were tireless, often ruthless, in pursuing their own. They were, in effect, in business for themselves. He learned that the most important political questions had little to do with shades of difference in democracy versus dictatorship, or the centrality of an independent judiciary. No, the most important political question, on the evidence of the behavior of his colleagues, seemed to be, "What's in it for me?"

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About the Author

Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (12) | Leave a comment

Ken (Old Texican)| 1.6.10 @ 10:25AM

Larry,
Thanks. I shall get the book.

I am now shamelessly going to hook a thought that ran through my mind last night to your review. Please pardon me, but hopefully it can give you or some other fine essayist a theme for a pulitzer.

" THE PROBLEM WITH POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP"

In a "free markets" republic such as ours here in America, the idea of personally investing in a hopefully profitable venture with all the attendent risks and butt busting work.....is considered a pretty cool thing.
But!
When the same efforts are invested in a political career...it can be devastating for the governed.

Political entreprenueurship for riches and power requires the same qualities and efforts and risks that commercial entreprenuers must endure, (fund-raising, butt kissing, long hours, campaign rigors, a dash of leadership ability, etc.).
But!
When an entreprenuer in commerce forgets the key idea of SERVICE, to his customers, and begins to reap the benefits of his original bright idea, and gets all enamored of himself...
Well...
His company usually fails and he gets a lesson in humility.
In the political sphere, one sees what we are seeing in these days in America. POLITICAL EMBEZZLEMENT AND MONOPOLY!
Yuck!

Eric Giunta| 1.6.10 @ 12:02PM

I'm sorry, but I just can't take seriously any work of scholarship,no matter how short, that does not contain footnotes.

Ken (Old Texican)| 1.6.10 @ 12:52PM

Eric, here is a footnote. (1)

(1) Ken (Old Texican), the purveyor of all knowledge and correct perspective, considers Eric an idiot, for not accepting every utterance from
Old Texican's keyboard. (Ibid)

explosion proof floodlight| 11.25.10 @ 1:30AM

That's the way it went in the U.S. for decades. People in poor communities were convinced that the police and justice system didn't give a hang about crime in their neighborhoods.

Mary Louise| 1.6.10 @ 7:48PM

Thank you for this.

I really like Mr. Epstein and wholeheartedly agree that he "is a graceful short-story writer and, no-contest, the finest essayist on active duty today."

Mary Louise| 1.6.10 @ 7:48PM

Thank you for this.

I really like Mr. Epstein and wholeheartedly agree that he "is a graceful short-story writer and, no-contest, the finest essayist on active duty today."

Mary Louise| 1.6.10 @ 8:06PM

Something else…

Reading Voegelin and cheering so much inside when I read “but doctrine isn’t life,” there remains the knowledge that while it may not be life, it’s necessary to be able to make sense of things. Especially if one suspects an unraveling is gaining on her. And more than this, knowing that such an unraveling can’t produce or reproduce an order not recognized by "the mind of the people." Adams used this phrase when he spoke of the meaning the American Revolution which he defined as a natural and fully conscious evolution.

In the disaffection that I encounter either through reading or conversation, I can’t really seem to find a cri du Coeur. I know it’s aimed at big government and maybe even a movement to a Calhoun like understanding of the Constitution at least among some. One of the things that rings hollow though is that Governor Palin, who stands to gain from this disaffection because of life lived and what that life represents in terms of who can claim to be an authentic American, offered up the idea of a 26 million dollar program or effort on behalf of special needs kids. This happened when the economy had just collapsed, and McCain had called for a spending freeze. Maybe she meant that only as a one shot deal that involved no recurring funds and expansion of program or government.

I think what drives the disaffection is the same thing that drove Nixon’s silent majority. Did they really care if Nixon wanted to nationalize health care? Did they care that he wanted to increase the minimum wage? Did they care that he went to China? Probably not. It was probably driven by the need for recognition stemming from the need for affection. John Adams’s explanation of what drives a man’s individual need for distinction is a work both of science and art.

The election of this president recalls Tocqueville thoughts on race in America, and what a sin it is to dishonor labor, to grow rich and indolent on the blood and sweat of those you have oppressed. Nothing reads more effete and womanly in Kirk’s Conservative Mind, than his handling of the topic of slavery.

And as to your point about Tocqueville being claimed by right and left, Kirk points out that he and J.S. Mills were friends.

I suffer from doubt too. Not doubt about theism, but doubt about the truth of Christianity.

One day on my lunch hour I was walking near a small, historic park. This park boasts, as gift, a cannon captured by the Third Italian Army of WW I. It also boasts a monument to Abraham Lincoln. There he sits long and lanky atop a square. A square that holds a full-sized sculpture of a cavalry man at one corner, a seaman at another, an officer at yet another, and a foot-soldier at last.

It was at that park that the first denial of the Resurrection took declared form. My mind wouldn’t let me actually finish the declaration, it was like I had a paddle inside to electroshock me out of thought and acceptance. Denial in that shape and form never resurfaced. But you know what? That unfinished denial led me to the thought that, if Resurrection is true, then it must be more painful than birth. I thought of the Italian verb risorgere which conjured up dead synapses recharging and refiring and nerve endings recapturing sensation.

I try to seek the opinion and counsel of men and women who are daily in the fight of preserving life, stability and order. They’re not downcast at all. For a firefighter to have to leave anyone in a burning house or building is anathema to him. It’s the material of sacrament to me.

Would like to recommend Joseph Ellis’s book, The Passionate Sage. It’s a joy to read. It led me to study Adams writing and helping me to sift through interpretations of the meaning of the American Revolution.

alin| 1.11.10 @ 1:10AM

The proud and ambitious Tocqueville learned first-hanike outletnd the discrepancies between democracy's lofty promises and its actual practice during his adidas outletown frustrating and almost achievement-free, 13-year political career that spanned a couple of republics.