Marvin Zetterbaum.  Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy.  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967)

Excerpt:

It is not uncommon for a major writer to be seen by his critics in widely divergent, even contradictory terms; Alexis de Tocqueville shares this fate.  To the familiar causes of critical disagreement, Tocqueville added his own—a veil of neutrality or objectivity that concealed his deepest views.  The publication in 1835 of the first part of Democracy in America thus gave rise to a still-continuing effort to discover Tocqueville’s true intent: behind his façade of neutrality does he favor one social system, aristocracy or democracy, over the other?

 

Does he not, on the one hand, reveal in his writings the ingrained and inescapable bias of his aristocratic origins?  Was he not hostile to the unformed and unforeseeable consequences of the democratic revolution? Did he not intend by his criticisms of the democratic system to “carry the reader to the point of wishing for its destruction”?  Was not the liberty he defended a “restricted liberty, protecting a small group of privileged people who were really independent so far as economic circumstances went”?  Was it not a liberty for believers, [a] liberty for owners…an aristocratic liberalism”?  Did he not believe that “the mass of men should remain bereft of political power”?

 

Or did he not wish, on the other hand, that contemporary liberalism would “cease to be bourgeois and become democratic by admitting the masses to the suffrage”?  Did he not regard the rise of a capitalist oligarchy as “the most revolting of all governments…a system offensive to his aristocratic instincts and to his democratic sympathies”?  Did he not, after all, “appreciate democracy as a form of progress in the providential control of history, the new political pattern [that] would be a blessing for most people”?  Would not democratic political and social conditions “bring about the slow advance of the intellectual and cultural standards of modern societies through education, political action, and the application of religious ethics to the problems of social action”?

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