410
PARTISAN REVIEW
He poses a rhetorical question: when men join together in a collectiv–
ity, do they change their characters? Do people become more patient, or
wiser, or in any way different when they act together? To this question
Tocqueville gives a firm "no." That negative has great consequences.
It
means that he can treat the politics of society on the same terms as the
psychology of an individual human being. Unlike Rousseau before
him or the social psychologist Le Bon after him, Tocqueville here
denies that the nature of the human being is transformed by social
conditions; rather, society is a collective self.
I believe that this anthropomorphic image of collective life is what
gives Tocqueville's writings in this first volume such vividness, such a
sense of being very particular and personal even when making the most
sweeping generalization. Equally, it leads him to a particular concept
of justice in deciding how to protect the minority person against the
majority person. This concept, rendered in modern sociological jar–
gon, is "the maximization of countervailing power." There must be as
many checks as possible to majority rule, in the form of complexities of
interest that impede the majority from acting for the whole; these
checks are created by making a multidimensional set of interests, so
that the majority itself is never inherently one person, but a number of
persons at the same time. Tocqueville insists that absolute pluralism
cannot and should not be the result of fragmenting the majority's
image of itself, for if the majority has no identity, then society will
either enter into revolution or dissolve into anarchy. The principle of
legitimacy (majority rule) is also a principle of order, but this order can
only resist developing into tyranny if it contains contradictions within
itself, so that the will of the majority is checked by those in the majority
feeling themselves to have several collective personalities at the same
time.
Tocqueville then brings into play his third idea, which is the
experience of tyranny of the majority in an egalitarian society. Analyti–
cally, it may seem that such tyranny could appear in no other kind of
society. This is not the case. The people do not have to take each other
as equals to act as one to suppress dissidents or outsiders. But when
they do take each other as equals, the dangers of tyranny of the majority
have a special f0rm and a special force. When a man or a group suffers
from an injustice in an egalitarian society, Tocqueville asks,
to
whom can he appeal? to public opinion? No, that shapes the
majority'S will; to the legislative body? No, that represel1ls the
majority and obeys it blindly; to executive power? No, the execlitive
