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PARTISAN REVIEW
disposed more and more to write about his American experiences in
terms of cultural homogenization. Active mob tyranny is the danger of
equality in egalitarian politics; another danger appears when one
comes to consider equality as a cultural phenomenon.
This explanation, however, does not give enough credit to the
interior strengths of Tocqueville's thought, especially his capacity for
working through a problem so that by the time he arrived at the end of
an idea, the beginning assumptions were transformed or reversed.
Tocqueville worked through the traditional ideas of mob rule to a
unique vision of majoritarian tyranny; one of the conclusions of that
effort-i.e., that egalitarian societies are hungry for more than the
brute domination of minority dissidents-led Tocqueville to transform
traditional ideas of mass stupor into a new critique of egalitarian
culture.
Probably the greatest writer on mass stupor before Tocqueville
was La Boetie. This French writer of the sixteenth century was
passionately concerned with voluntary servitude, and the qualities of
his thought come through in such passages as these:
. .. so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations,
sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than
the power they give him; who could do them absolutely no injury
unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict
him . . . it is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or
rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit
they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,
cuts its throat . .. gives consent to its own misery, or rather, appar–
ently welcomes it. . ..
It
is the stupid and cowardly who are neither
able
to
endure hardship nor vindicate their rights; they stop at mere! y
longing for them, and lose through timidity the valor roused by the
effort to claim their rights, although the desire
to
be (ree still remains
a part of their nature.
La Boetie's vision of voluntary slavery is of a moral condition;
although such slavery is a collective phenomenon, it results from
failings of personal character. Tocqueville replaced La Boetie's indict–
ment of voluntary slavery as moral failure by a notion of voluntary
slavery as social tragedy. However, by this point he had also replaced
his own earlier notions of society as a collective person with a more
truly sociological idea: society has the power to transform human
character.
The curtain rises on this tragedy in the first chapter of the second
part of Volume Two. Tocqueville declares, as he has in Volume One,
