Spring 2008
During the first summer session this year, David Foster will guide students in study of a "Great American Text" being taught for the first time in the MAHG program: Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s work offers both a lively account of life in Jacksonian America and a penetrating analysis of the political experiment unfolding in the young nation.
Text courses in the MAHG program focus on one long document (or occasionally two key texts) and guide students in the careful and thorough reading of it. Such a course develops a higher order of reading skill as students examine a whole book to experience its breadth of observation while tracing the unity of its argument. Tocqueville’s book, Foster explained, merits such close study for its fascinating analysis of "the relationship between equality and freedom."
Alexis de Tocqueville was born to an aristocratic Norman family in post-revolutionary France. His father had been detained during the Terror but survived it; he himself would serve as a deputy in the French legislature under both the republican monarchy of Louis Philippe and the short-lived Second Republic. Unlike many others of his class, Tocqueville accepted democracy as the inevitable form of future government, even speaking of its emergence as a providential design. He came to America "to study what the future was for Europe," Foster said. Yet, knowing that the democracy eventually realized in Europe would express itself in "different institutions," he thought it important to anticipate, understand and guide it.
Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, both magistrates at the court of Versailles, had petitioned for leave from their posts to travel in America, on the pretext of studying its penal system. Yet both had a larger curiosity about the new nation to satisfy. They spent nine months traveling throughout the country, visiting New England, New York City, the Great Lakes region, the mid-Atlantic, then traveling west and south as far as New Orleans. They came with letters of introduction to eminent men from John Quincy Adams to Sam Houston; spoke with plain citizens and highest officials; and took home with them many books and documents. After collaborating on their promised report on prisons, they undertook separate reflections on their experience in America, Beaumont soon producing a novel depicting slavery in America, while Tocqueville set to work on his more comprehensive analysis of American life.
When the first volume of Democracy in America appeared in 1835, it was hailed in Europe as important news about the social experiment unfolding across the Atlantic. Yet the second volume, published in 1840, drew little notice. Tocqueville’s importance as a political thinker was not widely recognized again until the 1970s. Today scholars read Tocqueville for his study of the effect of political equality on "every single aspect of American life: government, people, religion, science, literature, art, eloquence, and family life," Foster said.
Much has changed since Tocqueville wrote his analysis. At the time, "American government was much more decentralized than it is today," Foster noted; consequently, Tocqueville "speaks of the influence of state governments over our lives almost in the way we would speak of the federal government." Yet the explanation of how "equality makes us think and act" as Americans remains relevant. Among the "provocative" questions Tocqueville poses, Foster is particularly interested in his probing of the effects of the "moral power of the majority" on intellectual freedom.