The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville, by Olivier Zunz

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'The Man Who Understood Democracy' by Olivier Zunz

Alexis de Tocqueville remains a seminal commentator on the American experiment. His 1835-1840 analysis of the new republic, Democracy in America, continues to be a source of aphorisms and warnings from partisans of many persuasions.

In a new biography, The Man Who Understood Democracy, Olivier Zunz explores “Tocqueville’s innate penchant for complexity,” adding that the French author “rarely made a point without giving ample space to the opposing view.” It was a rhetorical strategy, appearing to concede only to double back and pick apart objections to his positions. Careless readers can come away from Democracy in America with a misunderstanding of the author’s views.

Tocqueville journeyed to the U.S. in 1831, ostensibly on an official mission to study prison reform. He traveled a circuit of affluence and influence, spending much of his time in New York and Massachusetts, with a rapid trek (in those horse and steamboat days) through what’s now called the Midwest (he stopped in Green Bay), then down to New Orleans and up and around to Washington D.C. for a brief audience with Pres. Andrew Jackson.

Tocqueville denounced Jackson’s policy of Native American ethnic cleansing but was pessimistic about the future of “the Indian race.” He was shocked by the casual violence of whites against Blacks in the South, understood that slavery was the issue that could disunify the United States and condemned the rise of biological racist ideology. He saw that in a democracy, women should attain legal equality.

Some of Tocqueville’s distinctive thoughts in Democracy in America relate to the decentralization of authority and the importance of civil society. Settlers in the original colonies first built towns, he was told, working from there to establish what became the 13 states that voluntarily joined the Union. He favored this more grass roots system over the top-down model of France, seeing decentralization as a check against tyranny. In today’s terms, his ideas can be deployed on behalf of local activism as well as states’ rights. As for civil society, Tocqueville understood the churches, lodges and other voluntary organizations American belonged to as engines of democracy. He did not foresee the nation’s decline into social isolation.

The Man Who Understood Democracy is a lucid book, by America’s leading Tocqueville scholar, about an outsider whose understanding of America helped America define itself.