After his visit to America in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville returned to France and published the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, and the second in 1840. The work is remarkably timely. Here I have selected a few words from the final pages. The work is full of warning, especially toward the end of the second volume. In what follows, one sees how he inspired Friedrich Hayek’s title The Road to Serfdom. But the final words also sustain a note of hope. When Tocqueville speaks of certain “more enlightened” people, it is with irony:
Among our contemporaries, I see two contrary but equally fatal ideas.
Some perceive in equality only the anarchic tendencies to which it gives birth. They dread their free will; they are afraid of themselves.
Others, fewer in number, but more enlightened, have another view. Next to the route that, departing from equality, leads to anarchy, they have finally discovered the path that seems to lead men invincibly toward servitude. They bend their souls in advance to this necessary servitude; and despairing of remaining free, at the bottom of their hearts they already adore the master who will soon come.
The first abandon freedom because they deem it dangerous; the second because they judge it impossible.
If I had had this latter belief, I would not have written the work you have just read…
Let us therefore have that salutary fear of the future that makes one watchful and combative, and not that sort of soft and idle terror that wears hearts down and enervates them…
As for myself, having come to the final stage of my course,…I feel full of fears and full of hopes. I see great perils that it is possible to ward off; great evils that one can avoid or restrain, and I become more and more firm in the belief that to be honest and prosperous, it is still enough for democratic nations to wish it.
Dan Klein is professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Brady
Dec 1 2020 at 7:30pm
This may seem off-topic, but whenever I read an account of what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote on one occasion or another, I am reminded that he believed that former slaves owed compensation to their now dispossessed owners, and that he worked toward that end. Yes, I know that he was “a man of his time,” but there were many men and women of France and every other country both prior to, and contemporaneous with, Tocqueville, who did not hold to his warped proprietarianism, but recognized an uncompromised right of all human beings to self-ownership.
Daniel Klein
Dec 3 2020 at 4:49pm
Hi, Mark,
Tocqueville died in 1859, so whatever you are saying he said could not have been said after emancipation in the US South.
I don’t understand what you are saying he said.
Can you clarify?
And point to sources?
Thanks.
/Dan
Mark Brady
Dec 3 2020 at 9:34pm
Alexis de Tocqueville’s belief that slaves should compensate their owners was in the context of the French colonies. (I don’t know what his views were, if any, on whether slaves in the U.S. should compensate their owners.) I read this in Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism and Ideology (2019/2020) and I’ll provide the references when I have access to my copy and time to compile another post. Whatever you and I may think about Piketty’s proposals for higher taxes on the wealthy, I recommend the first part of this book for a fascinating and thoroughly documented history of property rights both within and outside of Europe. It’s striking how his new book, and this section in particular, has been ignored by critics of his earlier book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013/2014).
Jon Murphy
Dec 4 2020 at 10:19am
I cannot find that in any of Tocqueville’s writing. Indeed, I find he explicitly states the opposite:
Source (pgs 21-22 of the PDF)
Tocqueville does think that, without some sort of compensation, emancipation would be difficult to come by and thus proposes a sort of apprenticeship program that modified from the British experiment, but I cannot find him saying the former slaves owe compensation.
Perhaps Piketty found something else. I do not have access to his book.
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