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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mayer, the greatest of Tocqueville scholars, published a small but puissant
volume on Tocqueville as the prophet of mass society. Albert Salomon, a
refugee European scholar at the New School in New York, published two
evocative pieces on Tocqueville in the decade. In 1945, Alfred
A.
Knopf, in
heroic service, published the first edition of
Democracy in America
in half a
century. By the middle of the 1950s the words "as Tocqueville said" were
almost as common where intellectuals gathered as "as Marx said." By the
early sixties, arguments became fierce as to whether Tocqueville was a
conservative, a liberal, or even a radical, the sure sign of a political classic.
There is presently no indication of any waning ofTocqueville; certainly none
to interfere with what is certain to be a glorious sesquicentennial on both
sides of the Atlantic, the American doubtless a little more glorious.
Jardin gives us an admirable fusing of Tocqueville the man, the
celebrity, the thinker, and, of special value, the politician. For sixteen years
following the publication of Democracy, Tocqueville published little of conse–
quence. His life was filled with political office. "Even in ... his early twenties,
Alexis de Tocqueville could not conceive of fulfilling his personal destiny in
any other way than by active participation in political life," writes Jardin . His
fame as author of
Democracy in America
assuredly didn't hurt his reputation
as a politician, but that reputation took on a momentum all its own. When the
Revolution of 1848 - which Tocqueville eloquently forecast just before it
broke and, I think, more convincingly than Marx did, and more subtly too -
came, Tocqueville was elected to the Constitutional Commission. And after
victory, he became France's Foreign Minister.
His public career came to an end in 1850, as much, Jardin suggests,
from the onset oftuberculosis as disgust with Louis-Napoleon and the coup
d'etat. He set to work writing his
Recollections
without delay. For those oc–
casionally wearied by the Olympian seer writing
sub specie aetemitatis
in the
Democracies,
the
Recollections
is tonic. From the point of view of style it is
Tocqueville's best book. Here is the real Tocqueville, warts and all, on the
stage of history. For those who have ventured to find the Galbraithian liberal
or the social democrat born of Rousseau in Tocqueville, the Recollections
should be a quick cure. His favorite economist was not his friend Mill but
Nassau Senior; he was contemptuous of contemporaries who believed that
legislation could set aside the dictates of Providence with respect to the un–
employed and impoverished; he excoriated socialism for "stirring up war
between the classes"; he was appalled by the "democratic disease of envy"
infecting more and more people; and he criticized Lamartine harshly for fail–
ing to rout the unemployed demonstrating outside government halls.
The
Recollections
are invaluable too for self-portraits of its author,
some proud, some rueful, always candid. "I find it troublesome to discuss
