by mends » 23 Nov 2006, 19:50
Liberty and democracy
from The Economist print edition
Alexis de Tocqueville's strong views on demagoguery and citizenship are worth remembering, as is clear from a splendid new biography
ON SWITCHING off the light after reading “War and Peace”, Edmund Wilson, an American critic, would find his bedroom magically “full of people”. Something like that happens with this biography of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), a French politician and thinker whose anxieties about liberty and democracy many people find as pressing now as when he voiced them.
Hugh Brogan is not just a sure-footed guide to a brilliant, though elusive, theorist. He has a historian's grasp of the period and a novelist's gift for character. As a portrait of a complicated man, a teeming milieu and a world in tumult, “Alexis de Tocqueville” has the satisfying fullness of 19th-century fiction.
The timing could hardly have been better. The call of Tocquevillian ideals—civic virtue, active citizens, strong community associations—has seldom been stronger. This is particularly true in America, which Tocqueville visited in 1831-32 and wrote about enthusiastically in his masterpiece, “Democracy in America”. The vogue for communitarianism may have cooled somewhat, but Tocqueville's name is heard around the White House; earlier this year President George Bush told an interviewer that he wanted his legacy to include the creation of a Tocquevillian think-tank.
What Tocqueville said and did, however, is not necessarily what modern followers would always want him to have done, as Mr Brogan, a British historian of America, makes clear. Exasperated by his acolytes, Karl Marx supposedly grumbled, “I am not a Marxist.” On finishing this marvellous book, it is easy to imagine Tocqueville's ghost murmuring, “Say what you will, I was never a Tocquevillian.”
To appreciate his ideas, Mr Brogan thinks it important first to understand his “cross-grained” character. Seldom in good health, Tocqueville lived on his nerves, working in bursts followed by frequent collapses. The surface clarity of the writing is a pose. To Mr Brogan, Tocqueville was less a cool-headed analyst than an impulsive romantic, able to “write successfully” only when “his feelings were deeply engaged”. He loathed the Paris crowd, adored his run-down manor on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy and loved France almost to the point of jingoism. Religious faith was not rationally defensible, but he thought that some dogmatic beliefs (preferably Roman Catholic) were necessary for social cohesion. He was more a man of attachments than one of principles.
Though lucid about its failings, Tocqueville was proud to belong to the twin secular peaks of old France, the noblesse d'épée and noblesse de robe. His father came from a line of Norman squires claiming a forebear who sailed with William to conquer England in 1066. His mother's grandfather was Chrétien-Guillaume de Malesherbes, a lion of the Paris bar who defended Louis XVI at his trial. The French revolution swept away Malesherbes and several of his family. Tocqueville's father, jailed with them, escaped only because the guillotine caught up with Robespierre first.
The son respected many of his family's attitudes but flouted others. His father had flourished in the Bourbon restoration, but at its fall in 1830, the son took an oath to the new Orleanist king. More daringly yet, in 1835 he married an Englishwoman who was not noble, Catholic or rich.
Tocqueville's arias to excellence and warnings about mediocrity have misled people into thinking him a snob. This is a confusion. He was a nob, with a sense of noblesse oblige. Public office, though no longer a privilege, was still a duty. A poor speaker and hopeless party man, Tocqueville was elected to the Chamber of Deputies only at his second go in 1839, sitting with the centre left. In the second republic of 1848-51 he was briefly foreign minister and drafter of a constitution that lasted barely a year. His “Souvenirs” contain sharp, somewhat sour, memories of his unhappy role in those times.
Louis Napoleon, the popularly elected president, ended Tocqueville's career. In 1851 he closed parliament. Before long he made himself emperor. The second empire promised France stability and prosperity. But to Tocqueville the price in despotism was too high. The rise of a populist demagogue, to use modern terms, confirmed his blackest fears about the tyrannous possibilities of democracy.
He began a history of the French revolution but completed only the portion on the ancien régime before tuberculosis killed him at 54. Still, his collected writings fill 17 volumes. Mr Brogan warms to those that are freshest and most direct, above all the first volume of “Democracy in America” (1835), in which an aristocratic lawyer discovers at first hand a society turning its back on privilege. His chapters on Tocqueville's American travels make a book within a book. Mr Brogan is cooler towards the darker, more generalised second volume of 1840, where Tocquevillian abstractions—individualism and centralisation—do battle against civic mores for the soul of modern society.
Without forcing a 19th-century figure into 21st-century disputes, Mr Brogan brings out two related ways in which Tocqueville remains part of the argument. One is his insight that despotism has no dates, but can be ancient or modern, monarchical or democratic. The other is a conviction, shared with the ancient Greeks and Machiavelli, that good citizens matter more to free societies than good institutions. Tocquevillian liberals believe that governments should encourage better citizenship. Economics liberals distrust fiddling with markets, however worthy the goal. It is unsure if the two can be more than tactical allies. Before either side says another word about Tocqueville, though, they should both read Mr Brogan.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution—A Biography.
By Hugh Brogan.
Profile; 724 pages; £30.
To be published in America by Yale University Press in March
"I used to be on an endless run.
Believe in miracles 'cause I'm one.
I have been blessed with the power to survive.
After all these years I'm still alive."
Joey Ramone, em uma das minhas músicas favoritas ("I Believe in Miracles")