Richard Sennett
WHAT TOCQUEVILLE FEARED
Open discussions of equality are difficult to conduct today
because of a political shorthand that equates the criticism of equality
with right-wing politics and the aspiration for equality with left-wing
concerns. Tocqueville's writings on equality, in the two volumes of the
Democracy in America,
stand outside this framework; Tocqueville
wrote as someone who sees demands for equality as irresistible. Unlike
his aristocratic friends and family, Tocqueville did not want to hide
from this force of history, nor to defy it. His stand was that of a realist
who accepts the inevitable, and looks
to
see how mankind can best
manage a social life it cannot avoid.
The curious and little-remarked thing about the critique of
equality in the two volumes of the
Democracy in America
is how much
Tocqueville's point of view changes from the first book to the second,
which appeared five years later.
In the first volume, Tocqueville takes a familiar image from the
past, that of mob rule, and attempts to show what a mob is like under
egalitarian conditions. Tocqueville tries to strip away the association
of mob rule with the vulgar, the peasant or the urban riff-raff; instead
he tries to show how rule of a decent-minded majority in an egalitarian
society tends to persecute the dissident. Majorities do more than express
their will; they attempt to universalize it. No one can believe unless
everyone does; a minority is always a threat
to
a majority's faith in
itself.
In the second volume, Tocqueville is no longer concerned with
active majority coercion of a minority; now he is concerned with a
whole society so pacified that it does not rule itself at all but rather
delegates tasks of public order to bureaucrats. Here again Tocqueville
takes a familiar image from the past, that of mass stupor, and gives it a
distinctive cast. He sees public stupor in egalitarian societies produced
not by the sloth of moral failure, but by anxieties and frustrations in
the private realm which so entrap people that they have no emotional
energy left for public commitments.
