A people which has existed for centuries under a system of castes and
classes can only arrive at a democratic state of society by passing
through a long series of more or less critical transformations,
accomplished by violent efforts, and after numerous vicissitudes; in the
course of which, property, opinions, and power are rapidly transferred
from one hand to another. Even after this great revolution is
consummated, the revolutionary habits engendered by it may long be
traced, and it will be followed by deep commotion. As all this takes
place at the very time at which social conditions are becoming more
equal, it is inferred that some concealed relation and secret tie exist
between the principle of equality itself and revolution, insomuch that
the one cannot exist without giving rise to the other.
On this point reasoning may seem to lead to the same result as
experience. Amongst a people whose ranks are nearly equal, no ostensible
bond connects men together, or keeps them settled in their station.
None of them have either a permanent right or power to command--none
are forced by their condition to obey; but every man, finding himself
possessed of some education and some resources, may choose his won path
and proceed apart from all his fellow-men. The same causes which make
the members of the community independent of each other, continually
impel them to new and restless desires, and constantly spur them
onwards. It therefore seems natural that, in a democratic community,
men, things, and opinions should be forever changing their form and
place, and that democratic ages should be times of rapid and incessant
transformation.
But is this really the case? does the equality of social conditions
habitually and permanently lead men to revolution? does that state of
society contain some perturbing principle which prevents the community
from ever subsiding into calm, and disposes the citizens to alter
incessantly their laws, their principles, and their manners? I do not
believe it; and as the subject is important, I beg for the reader's
close attention. Almost all the revolutions which have changed the
aspect of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy social
inequality. Remove the secondary causes which have produced the great
convulsions of the world, and you will almost always find the principle
of inequality at the bottom. Either the poor have attempted to plunder
the rich, or the rich to enslave the poor. If then a state of society
can ever be founded in which every man shall have something to keep, and
little to take from others, much will have been done for the peace of
the world. I am aware that amongst a great democratic people there will
always be some members of the community in great poverty, and others in
great opulence; but the poor, instead of forming the immense majority
of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are
comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by
the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury. The wealthy, on their
side, are scarce and powerless; they have no privileges which attract
public observation; even their wealth, as it is no longer incorporated
and bound up with the soil, is impalpable, and as it were invisible. As
there is no longer a race of poor men, so there is no longer a race of
rich men; the latter spring up daily from the multitude, and relapse
into it again. Hence they do not form a distinct class, which may be
easily marked out and plundered; and, moreover, as they are connected
with the mass of their fellow-citizens by a thousand secret ties, the
people cannot assail them without inflicting an injury upon itself.
Between these two extremes of democratic communities stand an
innumerable multitude of men almost alike, who, without being exactly
either rich or poor, are possessed of sufficient property to desire the
maintenance of order, yet not enough to excite envy. Such men are the
natural enemies of violent commotions: their stillness keeps all beneath
them and above them still, and secures the balance of the fabric of
society. Not indeed that even these men are contented with what they
have gotten, or that they feel a natural abhorrence for a revolution in
which they might share the spoil without sharing the calamity; on the
contrary, they desire, with unexampled ardor, to get rich, but the
difficulty is to know from whom riches can be taken. The same state of
society which constantly prompts desires, restrains these desires
within necessary limits: it gives men more liberty of changing and less
interest in change.
Not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of
revolutions, but they are afraid of them. All revolutions more or
less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in
democratic countries are possessed of property--not only are they
possessed of property, but they live in the condition of men who set the
greatest store upon their property. If we attentively consider each of
the classes of which society is composed, it is easy to see that the
passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious amongst
the middle classes. The poor often care but little for what they
possess, because they suffer much more from the want of what they have
not, than they enjoy the little they have. The rich have many other
passions besides that of riches to satisfy; and, besides, the long and
arduous enjoyment of a great fortune sometimes makes them in the end
insensible to its charms. But the men who have a competency, alike
removed from opulence and from penury, attach an enormous value to their
possessions. As they are still almost within the reach of poverty, they
see its privations near at hand, and dread them; between poverty and
themselves there is nothing but a scanty fortune, upon which they
immediately fix their apprehensions and their hopes. Every day increases
the interest they take in it, by the constant cares which it occasions;
and they are the more attached to it by their continual exertions to
increase the amount. The notion of surrendering the smallest part of it
is insupportable to them, and they consider its total loss as the worst
of misfortunes. Now these eager and apprehensive men of small property
constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of
conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people
do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they
continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
I have shown in another part of this work that the equality of
conditions naturally urges men to embark in commercial and industrial
pursuits, and that it tends to increase and to distribute real property:
I have also pointed out the means by which it inspires every man with
an eager and constant desire to increase his welfare. Nothing is more
opposed to revolutionary passions than these things. It may happen
that the final result of a revolution is favorable to commerce and
manufactures; but its first consequence will almost always be the ruin
of manufactures and mercantile men, because it must always change at
once the general principles of consumption, and temporarily upset the
existing proportion between supply and demand. I know of nothing more
opposite to revolutionary manners than commercial manners. Commerce is
naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize,
takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It
is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme
measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. Commerce renders
men independent of each other, gives them a lofty notion of their
personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs,
and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for
freedom, but preserves them from revolutions. In a revolution the owners
of personal property have more to fear than all others; for on the one
hand their property is often easy to seize, and on the other it may
totally disappear at any moment--a subject of alarm to which the owners
of real property are less exposed, since, although they may lose the
income of their estates, they may hope to preserve the land itself
through the greatest vicissitudes. Hence the former are much more
alarmed at the symptoms of revolutionary commotion than the latter. Thus
nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal
property is augmented and distributed amongst them, and as the number
of those possessing it increases. Moreover, whatever profession men
may embrace, and whatever species of property they may possess, one
characteristic is common to them all. No one is fully contented with
his present fortune--all are perpetually striving in a thousand ways to
improve it. Consider any one of them at any period of his life, and
he will be found engaged with some new project for the purpose of
increasing what he has; talk not to him of the interests and the rights
of mankind: this small domestic concern absorbs for the time all his
thoughts, and inclines him to defer political excitement to some other
season. This not only prevents men from making revolutions, but deters
men from desiring them. Violent political passions have but little hold
on those who have devoted all their faculties to the pursuit of their
well-being. The ardor which they display in small matters calms their
zeal for momentous undertakings.
From time to time indeed, enterprising and ambitious men will arise in
democratic communities, whose unbounded aspirations cannot be contented
by following the beaten track. Such men like revolutions and hail their
approach; but they have great difficulty in bringing them about, unless
unwonted events come to their assistance. No man can struggle with
advantage against the spirit of his age and country; and, however
powerful he may be supposed to be, he will find it difficult to make his
contemporaries share in feelings and opinions which are repugnant to t
all their feelings and desires.
It is a mistake to believe that, when once the equality of conditions
has become the old and uncontested state of society, and has imparted
its characteristics to the manners of a nation, men will easily allow
themselves to be thrust into perilous risks by an imprudent leader or
a bold innovator. Not indeed that they will resist him openly, by
well-contrived schemes, or even by a premeditated plan of resistance.
They will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will
even applaud him--but they do not follow him. To his vehemence they
secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary tendencies their
conservative interests; their homely tastes to his adventurous passions;
their good sense to the flights of his genius; to his poetry their
prose. With immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they
speedily escape from him, and fall back, as it were, by their own
weight. He strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted
multitude, and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not
because he is conquered, but because he is alone.
I do not assert that men living in democratic communities are naturally
stationary; I think, on the contrary, that a perpetual stir prevails
in the bosom of those societies, and that rest is unknown there; but I
think that men bestir themselves within certain limits beyond which
they hardly ever go. They are forever varying, altering, and restoring
secondary matters; but they carefully abstain from touching what is
fundamental. They love change, but they dread revolutions. Although the
Americans are constantly modifying or abrogating some of their laws,
they by no means display revolutionary passions. It may be easily seen,
from the promptitude with which they check and calm themselves when
public excitement begins to grow alarming, and at the very moment when
passions seem most roused, that they dread a revolution as the worst
of misfortunes, and that every one of them is inwardly resolved to make
great sacrifices to avoid such a catastrophe. In no country in the world
is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United
States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those
principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws
of property. I have often remarked that theories which are of a
revolutionary nature, since they cannot be put in practice without a
complete and sometimes a sudden change in the state of property and
persons, are much less favorably viewed in the United States than in
the great monarchical countries of Europe: if some men profess them,
the bulk of the people reject them with instinctive abhorrence. I do not
hesitate to say that most of the maxims commonly called democratic in
France would be proscribed by the democracy of the United States. This
may easily be understood: in America men have the opinions and passions
of democracy, in Europe we have still the passions and opinions of
revolution. If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will
be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the
United States--that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the
equality, but to the inequality, of conditions.
When social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart,
centred in himself and forgetful of the public. If the rulers of
democratic nations were either to neglect to correct this fatal
tendency, or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from
political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might eventually
produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come when the
inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligent selfishness
or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would ultimately compel
society to pass through strange vicissitudes. In democratic communities
revolutions are seldom desired except by a minority; but a minority
may sometimes effect them. I do not assert that democratic nations are
secure from revolutions; I merely say that the state of society in
those nations does not lead to revolutions, but rather wards them off.
A democratic people left to itself will not easily embark in great
hazards; it is only led to revolutions unawares; it may sometimes
undergo them, but it does not make them; and I will add that, when
such a people has been allowed to acquire sufficient knowledge and
experience, it will not suffer them to be made. I am well aware that
it this respect public institutions may themselves do much; they may
encourage or repress the tendencies which originate in the state of
society. I therefore do not maintain, I repeat, that a people is secure
from revolutions simply because conditions are equal in the community;
but I think that, whatever the institutions of such a people may be,
great revolutions will always be far less violent and less frequent than
is supposed; and I can easily discern a state of polity, which, when
combined with the principle of equality, would render society more
stationary than it has ever been in our western apart of the world.
The observations I have here made on events may also be applied in
part to opinions. Two things are surprising in the United States--the
mutability of the greater part of human actions, and the singular
stability of certain principles. Men are in constant motion; the mind
of man appears almost unmoved. When once an opinion has spread over the
country and struck root there, it would seem that no power on earth is
strong enough to eradicate it. In the United States, general principles
in religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics, do not vary, or at
least are only modified by a hidden and often an imperceptible process:
even the grossest prejudices are obliterated with incredible slowness,
amidst the continual friction of men and things. I hear it said that it
is in the nature and the habits of democracies to be constantly changing
their opinions and feelings. This may be true of small democratic
nations, like those of the ancient world, in which the whole community
could be assembled in a public place and then excited at will by an
orator. But I saw nothing of the kind amongst the great democratic
people which dwells upon the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
What struck me in the United States was the difficulty in shaking the
majority in an opinion once conceived, or of drawing it off from a
leader once adopted. Neither speaking nor writing can accomplish it;
nothing but experience will avail, and even experience must be repeated.
This is surprising at first sight, but a more attentive investigation
explains the fact. I do not think that it is as easy as is supposed to
uproot the prejudices of a democratic people--to change its belief--to
supersede principles once established, by new principles in religion,
politics, and morals--in a word, to make great and frequent changes in
men's minds. Not that the human mind is there at rest--it is in constant
agitation; but it is engaged in infinitely varying the consequences of
known principles, and in seeking for new consequences, rather than in
seeking for new principles. Its motion is one of rapid circumvolution,
rather than of straightforward impulse by rapid and direct effort; it
extends its orbit by small continual and hasty movements, but it does
not suddenly alter its position.
Men who are equal in rights, in education, in fortune, or, to comprise
all in one word, in their social condition, have necessarily wants,
habits, and tastes which are hardly dissimilar. As they look at
objects under the same aspect, their minds naturally tend to
analogous conclusions; and, though each of them may deviate from his
contemporaries and from opinions of his own, they will involuntarily and
unconsciously concur in a certain number of received opinions. The more
attentively I consider the effects of equality upon the mind, the more
am I persuaded that the intellectual anarchy which we witness about us
is not, as many men suppose, the natural state of democratic nations.
I think it is rather to be regarded as an accident peculiar to their
youth, and that it only breaks out at that period of transition when men
have already snapped the former ties which bound them together, but are
still amazingly different in origin, education, and manners; so that,
having retained opinions, propensities and tastes of great diversity,
nothing any longer prevents men from avowing them openly. The leading
opinions of men become similar in proportion as their conditions
assimilate; such appears to me to be the general and permanent law--the
rest is casual and transient.
I believe that it will rarely happen to any man amongst a democratic
community, suddenly to frame a system of notions very remote from
that which his contemporaries have adopted; and if some such innovator
appeared, I apprehend that he would have great difficulty in finding
listeners, still more in finding believers. When the conditions of men
are almost equal, they do not easily allow themselves to be persuaded by
each other. As they all live in close intercourse, as they have learned
the same things together, and as they lead the same life, they are not
naturally disposed to take one of themselves for a guide, and to follow
him implicitly. Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a
man like themselves, upon trust. Not only is confidence in the superior
attainments of certain individuals weakened amongst democratic nations,
as I have elsewhere remarked, but the general notion of the intellectual
superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the rest
of the community is soon overshadowed. As men grow more like each other,
the doctrine of the equality of the intellect gradually infuses itself
into their opinions; and it becomes more difficult for any innovator to
acquire or to exert much influence over the minds of a people. In such
communities sudden intellectual revolutions will therefore be rare; for,
if we read aright the history of the world, we shall find that great and
rapid changes in human opinions have been produced far less by the force
of reasoning than by the authority of a name. Observe, too, that as the
men who live in democratic societies are not connected with each other
by any tie, each of them must be convinced individually; whilst in
aristocratic society it is enough to convince a few--the rest follow.
If Luther had lived in an age of equality, and had not had princes
and potentates for his audience, he would perhaps have found it more
difficult to change the aspect of Europe. Not indeed that the men of
democracies are naturally strongly persuaded of the certainty of their
opinions, or are unwavering in belief; they frequently entertain doubts
which no one, in their eyes, can remove. It sometimes happens at such
times that the human mind would willingly change its position; but as
nothing urges or guides it forwards, it oscillates to and fro without
progressive motion. *a
[Footnote a: If I inquire what state of society is most favorable to the
great revolutions of the mind, I find that it occurs somewhere between
the complete equality of the whole community and the absolute separation
of ranks. Under a system of castes generations succeed each other
without altering men's positions; some have nothing more, others nothing
better, to hope for. The imagination slumbers amidst this universal
silence and stillness, and the very idea of change fades from the human
mind. When ranks have been abolished and social conditions are almost
equalized, all men are in ceaseless excitement, but each of them stands
alone, independent and weak. This latter state of things is excessively
different from the former one; yet it has one point of analogy--great
revolutions of the human mind seldom occur in it. But between these two
extremes of the history of nations is an intermediate period--a period
as glorious as it is agitated--when the conditions of men are not
sufficiently settled for the mind to be lulled in torpor, when they are
sufficiently unequal for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of
one another, and when some few may modify the convictions of all. It is
at such times that great reformers start up, and new opinions suddenly
change the face of the world.]
Even when the reliance of a democratic people has been won, it is still
no easy matter to gain their attention. It is extremely difficult to
obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak
to them of themselves. They do not attend to the things said to them,
because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are doing.
For indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is passed in
the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged in acting that
little remains to them for thinking. I would especially remark that they
are not only employed, but that they are passionately devoted to their
employments. They are always in action, and each of their actions
absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in business puts
out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for idea. I think
that it is extremely difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a democratic
people for any theory which has not a palpable, direct, and immediate
connection with the daily occupations of life: therefore they will not
easily forsake their old opinions; for it is enthusiasm which flings the
minds of men out of the beaten track, and effects the great revolutions
of the intellect as well as the great revolutions of the political
world. Thus democratic nations have neither time nor taste to go in
search of novel opinions. Even when those they possess become doubtful,
they still retain them, because it would take too much time and inquiry
to change them--they retain them, not as certain, but as established.
There are yet other and more cogent reasons which prevent any great
change from being easily effected in the principles of a democratic
people. I have already adverted to them at the commencement of this
part of my work. If the influence of individuals is weak and hardly
perceptible amongst such a people, the power exercised by the mass upon
the mind of each individual is extremely great--I have already shown for
what reasons. I would now observe that it is wrong to suppose that this
depends solely upon the form of government, and that the majority would
lose its intellectual supremacy if it were to lose its political power.
In aristocracies men have often much greatness and strength of their
own: when they find themselves at variance with the greater number of
their fellow-countrymen, they withdraw to their own circle, where they
support and console themselves. Such is not the case in a democratic
country; there public favor seems as necessary as the air we breathe,
and to live at variance with the multitude is, as it were, not to
live. The multitude requires no laws to coerce those who think not like
itself: public disapprobation is enough; a sense of their loneliness and
impotence overtakes them and drives them to despair.
Whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with
enormous weight upon the mind of each individual; it surrounds, directs,
and oppresses him; and this arises from the very constitution of
society, much more than from its political laws. As men grow more alike,
each man feels himself weaker in regard to all the rest; as he discerns
nothing by which he is considerably raised above them, or distinguished
from them, he mistrusts himself as soon as they assail him. Not only
does he mistrust his strength, but he even doubts of his right; and he
is very near acknowledging that he is in the wrong, when the greater
number of his countrymen assert that he is so. The majority do not need
to constrain him--they convince him. In whatever way then the powers of
a democratic community may be organized and balanced, it will always be
extremely difficult to believe what the bulk of the people reject, or to
profess what they condemn.
This circumstance is extraordinarily favorable to the stability of
opinions. When an opinion has taken root amongst a democratic people,
and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the community, it
afterwards subsists by itself and is maintained without effort, because
no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false, ultimately
receive it as the general impression; and those who still dispute it in
their hearts, conceal their dissent; they are careful not to engage in a
dangerous and useless conflict. It is true, that when the majority of
a democratic people change their opinions, they may suddenly and
arbitrarily effect strange revolutions in men's minds; but their
opinions do not change without much difficulty, and it is almost as
difficult to show that they are changed.
Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind, will
sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign
of the change. It has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has been
formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly
secede--day by day a few of them abandon it, until last it is only
professed by a minority. In this state it will still continue to
prevail. As its enemies remain mute, or only interchange their thoughts
by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great
revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainly
they take no steps--they observe each other and are silent. The majority
have ceased to believe what they believed before; but they still affect
to believe, and this empty phantom of public opinion in strong enough to
chill innovators, and to keep them silent and at respectful distance. We
live at a time which has witnessed the most rapid changes of opinion in
the minds of men; nevertheless it may be that the leading opinions of
society will ere long be more settled than they have been for several
centuries in our history: that time is not yet come, but it may
perhaps be approaching. As I examine more closely the natural wants and
tendencies of democratic nations, I grow persuaded that if ever social
equality is generally and permanently established in the world, great
intellectual and political revolutions will become more difficult and
less frequent than is supposed. Because the men of democracies appear
always excited, uncertain, eager, changeable in their wills and in their
positions, it is imagined that they are suddenly to abrogate their laws,
to adopt new opinions, and to assume new manners. But if the principle
of equality predisposes men to change, it also suggests to them certain
interests and tastes which cannot be satisfied without a settled order
of things; equality urges them on, but at the same time it holds them
back; it spurs them, but fastens them to earth;--it kindles their
desires, but limits their powers. This, however, is not perceived at
first; the passions which tend to sever the citizens of a democracy are
obvious enough; but the hidden force which restrains and unites them is
not discernible at a glance.
Amidst the ruins which surround me, shall I dare to say that revolutions
are not what I most fear coming generations? If men continue to shut
themselves more closely within the narrow circle of domestic interests
and to live upon that kind of excitement, it is to be apprehended that
they may ultimately become inaccessible to those great and powerful
public emotions which perturb nations--but which enlarge them and
recruit them. When property becomes so fluctuating, and the love of
property so restless and so ardent, I cannot but fear that men may
arrive at such a state as to regard every new theory as a peril,
every innovation as an irksome toil, every social improvement as a
stepping-stone to revolution, and so refuse to move altogether for fear
of being moved too far. I dread, and I confess it, lest they should at
last so entirely give way to a cowardly love of present enjoyment, as to
lose sight of the interests of their future selves and of those of their
descendants; and to prefer to glide along the easy current of life,
rather than to make, when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort
to a higher purpose. It is believed by some that modern society will be
ever changing its aspect; for myself, I fear that it will ultimately be
too invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the
same manners, so that mankind will be stopped and circumscribed; that
the mind will swing backwards and forwards forever, without begetting
fresh ideas; that man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary
trifling; and, though in continual motion, that humanity will cease to
advance.