The Ultimate Tocqueville

Peter Wood

Democracy in America
By Alexis de Tocqueville.
Translated, edited, and with introduction by
Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.
University of Chicago Press.
$28.00.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America belongs to the company of the hundred or so great works of Western social thought that preceded the rise of the social sciences and that still command wide and serious readership. Social scientists have divided this legacy and found different ways to live on its income. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations belongs to the economists in the manner of an heirloom clock. They take pride in seeing it on the mantel but consult their Rolex watches when they want to know the time. Thucidydes is a trust fund for historians who return to the History of the Peloponnesian War now and then when the discipline’s intellectual resources seem a little straitened. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is the drafty ancestral mansion of political science, clung to despite high taxes and a leaky roof. Sociologists for their portion received title to a whole shelf of books by French and Scottish thinkers, but lost everything at the racetrack. Who then owns Tocqueville?

Democracy in America continues to compel attention from historians, political scientists, and a substantial lay audience of Americans who are dazzled by the pertinence of Tocqueville’s insights into contemporary American society. To these audiences, I should add one other of which I am part: anthropologists to whom Tocqueville was a pioneer ethnographer and for whom Democracy in America is a kind of Argonauts of the Western Atlantic.

Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop have translated Tocqueville’s most famous work, as they put it, "with a certain reverence." It is, in fact, an excellent translation, but to discover its excellence, the reader must be ready to work through the obstacle that reverence has erected–a straining for fidelity to the French, even if minor adjustments would provide much more fluent English. For rapid reading, the ordinary American reader is probably better served by the widely available Reeve and Bowen translation (1835, 1862) or the George Lawrence translation (1966). For instance:

Tocqueville. Chapter 6: "Du Pouvoir Judiciaire aux États-Unis et de Son Action sur la Société Politique"

Reeve and Bowen: "Judicial Power in the United States and Its Influence on Political Society"

Lawrence: "Judicial Power in the United States and Its Effect on Political Society"

Mansfield and Winthrop: "Judicial Power in the United States and Its Action on Political Society"

"Action" is arguably an accurate choice for the French "action," but is unidiomatic and slightly opaque. The title of the chapter in Mansfield and Winthrop’s version suggests a chemistry experiment ("the action of sulfuric acid on calcium carbonate") not the vagaries of political life.

Mansfield and Winthrop’s preference for the literal shapes virtually every sentence in their translation. Sometimes the result is stuffy: "constitué le pouvoir judiciare," translated by both Reeve and Bowen, and Lawrence as "organized a judicial power," is anglified by Mansfield and Winthrop as "constituted judicial power."

But sometimes Mansfield and Winthrop’s literalism captures something the other translators missed. For example:

Tocqueville: "C’est ainsi qu’aux États-Unis le préjugé qui repousse les nègres semble croître à proportion que les nègres cessent d’être esclaves, et que l’inégalité se grave dans les moeurs à mesure qu’elle avec s’efface dans les lois."

Reeve and Bowen: "Thus it is that in the United States that the prejudice which repels the Negroes seems to increase as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country."

Lawrence: "Thus it is that in the United States the prejudice rejecting the Negroes seems to increase in proportion to their emancipation, and inequality cuts deep into mores as it is effaced from the laws."

Mansfield and Winthrop: "Thus in the United States the prejudice that repels Negroes seems to grow as Negroes cease to be slaves, and inequality is engraved in mores in the same measure as it is effaced in the laws."

In this case, Mansfield and Winthrop’s "engraved" / "effaced" captures Tocqueville’s epigram far better than Reeve and Bowen’s "sanctioned" / "effaced" or Lawrence’s "cuts deep" / "effaced." And Mansfield and Winthrop’s "cease to be slaves" retains Tocqueville’s carefully uncommitted phrasing, where both Reeve and Bowen, and Lawrence opted for the more conclusive "emancipation." The sense of the passage is that, in Tocqueville’s view, ceasing to be a slave is a far shot from genuine emancipation.

In passages like this, Mansfield and Winthrop’s literalism gives us a richer text, one to perhaps set next to Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic, or Mansfield’s own translations of Machiavelli. These are all translations infused with a certain pedantry but which also aim at something higher. We are meant to be reminded that Plato, Machiavelli, or Tocqueville breathed a more rarified air than we; that they achieved insights more profound than can be combed from the sumptuous interpretative traditions in which they have been wrapped; and that, as with all powerful and original thinkers, they sometimes expressed themselves in odd and difficult ways. The goal of a translation, according to this way of thinking, is to present a text in which the authentic difficulties remain, not smoothed away by the translator.

This is not to say that Mansfield and Winthrop have indulged in the snide sorts of difficulty championed by Judith Butler and other contemporary "theorists" who claim that to write clearly is to concede to the mind-control of the capitalist state. Bad writing and helpless obscurity pretending to be deliberate choice is epidemic in the academy and, with that in view, it is crucial to observe that the difficulties posed by Mansfield and Winthrop arise from altogether different sources. Their Tocqueville is difficult because they leave the reader in the perplexity of the original author’s thought, in a vocabulary slightly askew from contemporary American English, and organized on the page in Tocqueville's jittery sentences and short paragraphs. Tocqueville himself never intends to be obscure, and Mansfield and Winthrop have not made him so. But they have allowed him to be more foreign than his previous translators have, and made him occasionally reach for a different word than a native speaker would.

The result is a Democracy in America that seems at once a little less accessible and a lot more intellectually and philosophically textured. The fate of classics is often to lie dead on the page to be served up to unwilling undergraduate readers and all-too-eager scholarly specialists. Mansfield and Winthrop are offering an excellent opportunity to read what has seemed a thoroughly familiar book with fresh eyes. Their own agenda–or at least, one suspects, Mansfield’s agenda–may be to promote deeper respect for the republican vision of America’s Founding Fathers. The tendency to underrate the complexity and force of the Founders’ ideas pervades academic political science; and Tocqueville, who read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers with respect and deep critical understanding, can bring us back into fruitful conversation with that tradition.

But Mansfield and Winthrop leave this as an unspoken implication. Their translation may be an attempt to claim Tocqueville as the legacy that belongs foremost to political philosophy, but the other social sciences still have their claims. For anthropologists, Tocqueville provides an extraordinary example of how to integrate historical research, textual sources, and first-hand observation, and then to draw from this a fine-tuned analysis of the cultural logic of a society. No other European visitor of the eighteenth or nineteenth century who committed his thoughts to writing–and there were, of course, many–came close to Tocqueville’s comprehensive vision. For anthropology, which made the study of cultural wholes the great quest of the twentieth century, Tocqueville is probably the most important precursor among European thinkers, rivaled only by Montesquieu in breadth of analysis.

But anthropology has fallen on hard times. Many of its practitioners disdain interest in whole societies, to focus instead on the "margins." The cultural dissenter, the misfit, especially the disadvantaged who resist their situation, are riding high in anthropological interpretations of human social life, and the old intellectual enterprise of attempting to grasp a culture or society in its essentials or its entirety is in disrepute. Wholes and essentials are, according to this view, likely to be only the simplified views of those in power, and the anthropologist who gives license to such views is contributing to the oppression of those who are under the thumb of the local elites.

To be sure, not all anthropologists think this way, but enough do to have set the tone of discussion in the professional journals and the classrooms. Anthropology is haunted by the specter of Marx leading an entourage of lesser wraiths, including Foucault and Gramsci, and a procession of feminist, "subaltern," and other resent-nik acolytes. Tocqueville can be a powerful corrective to the narrowness and cynicism of these views, for he demonstrates that the quest to understand a society as a whole need not entail conceding to that society’s dominant myths. Tocqueville’s views on the "tyranny of the majority" in the United States, his insights into the darker sides of individualism and equality, and his prescient account of race in America demonstrate an intellectual scope and freedom nowhere approached by Marxian or postmodern analysts.

The example of Tocqueville seems all the more pertinent as anthropology and the other social sciences tackle the massive increase in scale in human societies that is characteristic of our time. Perhaps Mansfield and Winthrop’s new translation of Democracy in America will inspire a new Tocqueville to write a Democracy in Russia or an ambitious account of the laws and mores of one of the other distinct societies emerging in our globalized economy.