Tocqueville's Democratic Wave: How Borders Aborted the Egalitarian Revolution
(written by Lancelot Finn, September 2003 / December 2004)
I can now begin to illuminate what I asserted at the beginning of the chapter, namely that borders are the chief source of injustice in the world today. Every human being receives at birth a citizenship attaching him or her to a particular nation-state. This citizenship confers upon the person a certain package of rights and restrictions, political liberties or lack thereof, a range of geographical mobility, and a set of economic opportunities. Some are predestined to education, good health, safety, and tremendous opportunities to acquire knowledge and wealth, to experience travel, leisure and creature comforts, for upwards of seventy years. Others are predestined to almost certain poverty, vulnerability to disease, violence and political oppression, to illiteracy and ignorance, over the course of a shorter life-span, averaging (in most developing countries) from forty to sixty years, and often tragically cut short in early childhood. Borders are the chief source of injustice in the world today in the same sense that rank was in the past: a person’s station in life is determined by birth and enforced with the help of laws, and among these stations in life, there is extreme inequality.
Rank today is an antique concept. Even in Britain, where there are still lords and dukes, their political and economic dominance is long lost and they run the constant risk of being snickered at. The old aristocratic rank-words are tolerated only because they are meaningless. In most countries, rich and poor, the old castes and ranks and hereditary classes and titles of nobility have vanished. Yet through most of history, every society in the world was stratified by rank. The world has undergone a social revolution in the past two centuries. And it started in America, where Thomas Jefferson made the wild-eyed, radical assertion that “all men are created equal.”
The primary meaning of the word democracy is different than what it used to be. During the Cold War era, Americans faced an existential threat from the Soviet Union and its communist ideology, and it fell to American intellectuals and a group of their foreign émigré allies to defend the virtues of, and in the process to define the essence of, the American (and British, Canadian, and more recently western European, etc.) system, democracy. The socialist critique was simple but forceful: wealth and luxury existed in the democracies alongside the agonies of destitute poverty and proved the moral bankruptcy of its “capitalist” (in those days, a term of abuse) economic system. Other critiques had been offered by a charismatic leader who held democracy in contempt: Adolf Hitler. At the same time, freedom of speech was threatened by McCarthyite impulses, and this critique, too, was simple but forceful: in the face of the communist threat, why should respect the freedom of expression even of avowed enemies of democracy who would welcome the chance to betray us to the Soviets? In defending it against these intellectual challenges, American and foreign thinkers articulated democracy anew. Central to their defense was the value of freedom: freedom of speech, of religion, of conscience, all of which made it possible for a person to live in truth. When communists and fascists had strayed from the strait and narrow path of free speech, they had gradually destroyed the ability of their subjects to think, and little by little state and society had gone mad. The defenders of democracy justified the capitalist system, despite its inequality, partly on economic grounds—in the long run, the incentives created by a property system and markets would make everyone better off—and partly on political grounds—if any authority that had enough power to disinherit the rich and redistribute to the poor, this authority had too much say in people’s lives and freedom would be lost. Democracy was the underdog in the mid-20th-century intellectual arena. Most thinking people found either communism or fascism more convincing, while democratic capitalism had been discredited by the Great Depression. Yet in the end the subtle virtues of democratic capitalism triumphed, first in the intellectual arena, then on the world stage. In the process, democracy took on a certain meaning, which emphasized the ways in which it was unlike communism: free-market capitalism, liberal rule which respected a wide range of rights, and elections and representative government.
Yet democracy had a very different meaning for Alexis de Tocqueville, a 19th-century analyst of democracy who wrote Democracy in America, published in 1836. Tocqueville was impressed by Americans’ instinctive notion of what their rights were, and by America’s powerful and independent judiciary, but he gave by far the most emphasis to social equality. As he expresses it in his introduction:
Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities and peculiar habits to the governed.
I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less effect on civil society than on the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to new sentiments, founds novel customs, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all other seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.[1]
Tocqueville’s work constantly contrasts what happens “in aristocratic societies” with what he observes in “democracy in America.” As Cold War defenders of democracy defined democracy by what communism was not, Tocqueville defines democracy by what aristocracy was not: social equality. Thus he asserts that “the social condition of the Americans is eminently democratic… great quality existed among the immigrants who settled on the shores of New England. Even the germs of aristocracy were never planted in that part of the Union. The only influence which obtained there was that of intellect.”[2] Elections were part of democracy because social equality ruled out kings and aristocrats, so sovereignty belonged to the people, and elections were the only way for them to exercise it. But Tocqueville was not fond of them. Sharing the prevailing sentiment of the time, he saw political parties as at best a necessary evil, and described the injurious effects of both “small” and “great” parties. Indeed, it seems that neither freedom nor elections were essential to democracy in Tocqueville’s view:
[In America, democracy’s] real character must be judged. And to no people can this inquiry be more vitally interesting than to the French nation, who are blindly driven onwards, by a daily and irresistible impulse, towards a state of things which may prove either despotic or republican, but which will assuredly be democratic.[3]
Tocqueville’s portrait of democracy in America is for the most part highly favorable. American democracy was a subject of great interest for Europeans in Tocqueville’s day, for they wanted to know if a republic founded on Jefferson’s revolutionary principle could stand. When the French revolution claimed usher in “liberty, equality and fraternity,” the result was instead the terror of the guillotine, the military dictatorship of Napoleon, and a war that convulsed the entire continent of Europe. Yet in America, a similar political experiment seemed to be prospering. Was it a mirage? Tocqueville argued that it was real.
Tocqueville had reason to be impressed, for social equality in America was indeed something new under the sun. There is some dispute about whether primitive societies, such as the North American tribes before the arrival of the white man, lived in some form of social equality, as Friedrich Engels, for example, believed. But if we confine our attention to civilizations, all of them appear to be “aristocratic.”
When Louis XVI of France, in 1788, found himself in such an inextricable financial crisis that he had to turn to the French nation for help, he summoned the Estates-General. The Estates-General was a representative body, but it had not been summoned for over a century and its structure epitomized the ancien regime. The “estates” were France’s three traditional classes, or ranks: the “First Estate” was the aristocracy, the “Second Estate” was the clergy, and the “Third Estate,” everyone else. By 1788 this class system was archaic and on the brink of destruction, but it had a history going back a thousand years. To medieval man, nothing could be more natural than to divide men into “those who fought, those who worked, and those who prayed.” And not only in France: the same three estates existed throughout Christian Europe, although earlier, and further east, there were four, because “those who worked” were divided into free peasants and serfs. The first two estates were generally well-off and few in number; the third (and fourth), poor and numerous.
India offers an interesting mirror to the French ancien regime. India is a society famously characterized by caste. “Caste” is the translation of two different words: jati and varna. Jati is caste in its practical form, and India’s population is divided into thousands of different jati, each with its own customs, institutions, and rules on who can marry or eat with whom, etc. European history offers no real analogy to jati. But varna, a more abstract notion of caste, resembles the estates of the French ancien regime. J. Hutton offers this description of the theory of varna:
According to Hindu tradition the caste system owes its origin to the four varna, which are respectively derived from the Brahman who sprang from the mouth of the deity, the Kshatriya who was created from his arms, the Vaishya who was formed from his thighs, and the Sudra who was born from his feet. To the Brahmans were assigned divinity and the six duties of studying, teaching, sacrificing, and assisting others to sacrifice, giving alms and receiving gifts to the end that the Vedas might be protected; to the Kshatriya were assigned strength and the duties of studying, sacrificing, giving alms, using weapons, protecting treasure and life, to the end that good government should be assured; to the Vaishya were allotted the power of work and the duties of studying, sacrificing, giving alms, cultivating, trading and tending cattle, to the that labor should be productive; and to the Sudra was given the duty of serving the three higher varna.[4]
The four castes in India bear comparison to the “estates” of Christian Europe: Brahmans are the counterpart of the European clergy, “those who pray”; Kshatriya, of the European nobility, “those who fight”; and Sudras, of the European peasantry, “those who work.” However, in India, the Brahmans, and not the Kshatriya, were the “first estate.” The Vaishyas are the counterpart of a class that the Europeans did not recognize as a separate estate, but should have: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie appeared in Europe in medieval times, around the tenth century: they were “those who lived under the castle [das Burg] walls.” That their way of life did not have a place in the traditional schema of “those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked” left them somewhat alienated, which is partly why they played the key role in bringing about the French Revolution.
Perhaps because it recognized a “bourgeoisie,” perhaps because it enjoyed a religious sanction that the class system in Europe never enjoyed, caste was a highly stable institution and survived in India from Vedic times to independence, despite the interruptions of Muslim conquest in the medieval period, and British conquest in the modern period. Caste was also much more rigid than the European “estates.” Since the priesthood in Catholic countries was supposed to be celibate (even if in practice this was not always the case), it could not be hereditary. And the bourgeoisie, which began life as a result of illegal immigration to the towns, was usually open to anyone resourceful enough to succeed at its games. Nobles, too, could be created: the king of France, for example, had a right to ennoble rich bourgeois who served him well. So there was more social mobility in Europe than in India, where systematic taboos on who could eat with or marry whom made the castes more endogamous and hereditary.
Marx posited that “feudalism” was a stage in the “historically necessary” development of every society, and when Marxist proselytizers later spread across the world, they were generally able to identify “feudalism” in each country’s history. It seems that some features of the Indian caste system and the European ancien regime are in the nature of agrarian societies, so that analogous institutions emerge independently all over the world. Russia developed a system similar to that of Catholic Europe, with an aristocracy, a priestly class and a peasantry, though in contrast to Catholic Europe, priests were allowed to marry and therefore the office was in some cases hereditary in practice. Japan lacked a priestly class as prominent as the Brahmans, but its symbol was recognizably feudal, with a high aristocracy of daimyos and a lower gentry of samurai, while Japan’s bourgeoisie were as single-minded, thriving and insouciant as those of Europe. If Marxist evangelists had arrived in the early Roman republic, they could have seen the signs of “feudalism” there too: there was a “first estate,” the patrician class; below them was a “third estate,” the plebeians; some religious personnel might constitute a “second estate;” as in France, the plebeians de facto consisted of a more numerous peasantry and a smaller commercial class concentrated in the cities, a “bourgeoisie.” Then there were the slaves. It seems to be a feature of many societies to split the “third estate,” “those who work” into free and unfree: thus while there was no serfdom in France in 1788, it did characterize Europe earlier and further east, and lasted in Russia until 1861. Latin America in the centuries after the Iberian Conquest, too, displayed a variation on feudalism—wealthy hacenderos ruling over an enserfed Indian peasantry, with a priestly “second estate” and African slaves to complete the mix—though with the important distinction that the stratification of society was racial as well as socio-economic.
China offers an interesting variation on feudalism. They, too, had an aristocracy endowed with land and entrusted with the duties of government. Yet ruling and fighting duties were not combined in the same class, as in India, Europe, Japan and elsewhere. Instead, the duty of a Chinese mandarin was service in the bureaucracy and mastery of the Confucian classics, while soldiers were a lower rank in society and enjoyed little prestige. Moreover, the Chinese mandarinate was not entirely hereditary. Under the Manchu dynasty, there were nine ranks in the aristocracy, and families descended one rung of this ladder each generation, unless they re-entered the first rank through the examinations. To enter the imperial bureaucracy, one had to succeed in the imperial examinations, essay exams on the Confucian classics which were held periodically, with a few interruptions, for a thousand years. Membership in the bureaucracy offered prestige and status and was also highly remunerative, since many practices that would now be defined as “corruption” were more or less accepted. This gave Chinese aristocrats a strong incentive to train the minds of their young in the Confucian classics, since this was the way their families could maintain membership of the aristocracy across generations. Because China composed its “first estate” of humanists rather than soldiers, it had a certain persistent military weakness relative to Japan, or to the peoples of the steppes to the north, and was often raided, humiliated in battle, and conquered; but it was a cultural superpower, which assimilated its conquerors and brought all its neighbors into its orbit.
Non-agrarian societies are less inclined to develop feudal systems. The chief example of this before modern times was Islam, which had an urban ethos and got a good deal of its wealth from by controlling, for centuries, the great trade routes between Europe, Africa, India and China. Muslims differed in wealth, of course, but Islam assumed social equality among its free male members, and this equality may have been part of its appeal to some of the peoples it conquered: indeed, Muslims were sometimes known to discourage subject Christians from converting because this would entitle them to social equality. Yet Islamic societies practiced slavery on a massive scale, and subjugated women and non-Muslims, so they offer no counter-example to general prevalence of the institution of rank in pre-modern civilizations.
In Latin America, the feudal stratification of society was a direct result of conquest, and this may be one explanation for the widespread prevalence of feudal institutions, for most feudal systems can plausibly be dated to some episode of conquest: French feudalism, to the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Franks; English feudalism, to either the Saxon conquest of Roman Britain or (more likely) to the Norman Conquest of Saxon England; Indian “feudalism” (the caste system) to the Aryan Conquest of the subcontinent in Vedic times. On the other hand, there may be a more commonsense rationale for feudalism. Agrarian society needs certain tasks accomplished: it needs to be defended and governed; its religious needs must be served; and it must be fed, clothed and provided for. So naturally, there should be a class to attend to each of these needs. And before Adam Smith offered his ingenious revelation of the laws of supply and demand in labor markets, hereditary assignation of social station seemed the best way to ensure that the ratios of these classes were appropriate, and society’s needs were met. In any case, it was a conservative system which assigned to people certain duties, assumed that the preservation of society depended on people observing these duties, and dreaded the disorder that would result if people abandoned them. In the words of an English rhyme:
God bless the pastor and his relations
And keep us in our proper stations.
Even Tocqueville has some sympathy for this conservative order. Here is his description of the ancien regime:
While the power of the crown, supported by the aristocracy, peaceably governed the nations of Europe, society, in the midst of its wretchedness, had several sources of happiness which can now scarcely be conceived or appreciated. The power of a few of his subjects was an insurmountable barrier to the tyranny of the prince; and the monarch, who felt the almost divine character which he enjoyed in the eyes of the multitude, derived a motive for the just use of his power from the respect which he inspired. The nobles, placed high as they were above the people, could take that calm and benevolent interest in their fate which the shepherd feels towards his flock; and without acknowledging the poor as their equals, they watched over the destiny of those whose welfare Providence had entrusted to their care.[5]
What exactly is rank? As with nationality, defining it is tricky, because some conspicuous aspects of rank which at first glance appear to provide a possible definition turn out, on closer inspection, to be neither necessary nor sufficient conditions. Aristocrats, most obviously, are distinguished by their possession of money and lands. Yet noblemen often wasted their wealth, mortgaged their estates and plunged into debt without anyone doubting that they were still noblemen. Rank was associated with certain forms of dress and behavior: elegant speech and manners, certain pursuits such as hawking and hunting and dancing the minuet, riding in carriages rather than walking on foot. Yet noblemen who walked, dressed badly or had crude manners did not thereby relinquish their rank. As we saw in the case of the Indian caste system, rank may be associated with a certain profession or calling. Yet the European aristocracy—“those who fought”—could neglect the profession of arms for generations without calling their rank into question. In the end, the best definition we can offer for rank is the same as what we can offer for the nation: it is a certain kind of imagined community. And just as national imagined communities are knit together through a distinctive mythology and ethos, so are ranks. The mythology and ethos of a rank, like that of a nation, is its most essential and yet its most mysterious characteristic. Historian Barbara Tuchman offers this description of chivalry, the ethos of Europe's "first estate:"
[C]hivalry, the culture that nurtured [European noblemen, is] more than a code of manners in war and love; chivalry was a moral system governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that. It developed at the same time as the great crusades of the 12th century as a code intended to fuse the religious and martial spirits and somehow bring the fighting man into accord with Christian theory… With the help of Benedictine [monastic] thinkers, a code evolved that put the knight's sword arm in the service, theoretically, of justice, right, piety, the Church, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed…
But… chivalry could not be contained by the Church, and bursting through the pious veils, it developed its own principles. Prowess, that combination of courage, strength, and skill that made a chevalier preux, was the prime essential. Honor and loyalty, together with courtesy—meaning the kind of behavior that has since come to be called "chivalrous"—were the ideals, and so-called courtly love was the presiding genius… Largesse was the necessary accompaniment. An open-handed generosity in gifts and hospitality was the mark of a gentleman and had its practical value in attracting other knights to fight under the banner and bounty of the grand seigneur…
Prowess was not mere talk, for the function of physical violence required [a knight] to fight on horseback or foot wearing 55 pounds of plate armor, to crash in collision with an opponent at full gallop while holding horizontal an eighteen-foot lance half the length of an average telephone pole, to give and receive blows with sword or battle-ax that could cleave a skull or slice off a limb at a stroke, to spend half of life in the saddle through all weathers and for days at a time… Prowess was not easily bought.
Loyalty, meaning the pledged word, was chivalry's fulcrum… Chivalry was regarded as a universal order of all Christian knights, a trans-national class moved by a single ideal, much as Marxism later regarded all workers of the world. (A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman, p. 62-4)
As chivalry was to the European nobility, Vedic spiritualism was to the Indian Brahman, Confucian humanism to the Chinese mandarin, and fierce martial honor to the Japanese samurai. The class ethos was the source of moral norms, of identity, of pride for each of these classes; but those outside the class sometimes saw it differently. Poorer classes saw, not a lofty ethos, but wealth and luxury as the distinctive characteristics of these privileged classes—wealth and luxury which the privileged classes were accustomed to, took for granted, came to feel entitled to, and little noticed.
Tocqueville foresaw a democratic revolution ahead, ready or not:
I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, and thought that I discerned there something analogous to the spectacle which the New World presented to me. I observed that equality of condition, thought it has not there reached the extreme limit which it seems to have attained in the United States, is constantly approaching it; and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe…[6]
The gradual development of the principle of equality is… a providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.[7]
…the scene is now changed. Gradually the distinctions of rank are done away with; the barriers that once severed mankind are falling; property is divided, power is shared by many, the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all classes tend towards equality. Society becomes democratic, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peaceably introduced into institutions and customs…[8]
This prediction of Tocqueville’s, written in 1836, proved gloriously prophetic. In the course of a few generations after his work, rank has been swept away by the rising tide of an empowered demos. In 1832, England adopted an electoral reform which updated the distribution of seats, eliminating many “rotten boroughs” dominated by minor gentry, and newly enfranchising many large and growing industrial towns: in other words, 1832 is among the most plausible start dates for English democracy. Another is the advent of universal male suffrage in 1881. In Tocqueville’s own France, the social revolution had begun in 1789, and as Tocqueville feared it had a rough road, but staggered gradually through a series of unsteady governments until it more or less settled into a liberal democratic order after 1870. As the democratic revolution proceeded, the demos did not always prove liberal, as Tocqueville, who dreaded “tyranny of the majority” and wrote that “I am far from supposing [the Americans] have chosen the only form of government which a democracy may adopt,”[9] suspected it would not. After the 1880s many self-appointed leaders of the working classes were seduced by the theories of another would-be prophet of social revolution (much less prophetic than Tocqueville as it turned out but, lamentably, much more influential): Karl Marx. Under the Marxists and later the fascists, rule of “the people,” alias “the proletariat” or “the Volk,” fulfilled the darker side of Tocqueville’s prophecy:
This point [the absence of a centralized administration in America] deserves attention; for if a democratic republic, similar to that of the United States, were ever founded in a country where the power of one man had previously established a centralized administration and had sunk it deep into the habits and the laws of the people, I do not hesitate to assert that in such a republic a more insufferable despotism would prevail than in any of the absolute monarchies or Europe; or, indeed, than any that could be found on this side of Asia.[10]
Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany proved the truth of Tocqueville’s words: each inherited a centralized administration from a powerful monarchy, and created tyrannies more vicious than anything the absolute monarchs had achieved. Were they “democratic republics?” Because we now define democracy in opposition to communism, emphasizing structured civic freedom and popular sovereignty realized through the periodic elections of representatives, it is usual to dismiss the labels of states such as “the German Democratic Republic” (communist East Germany) or “the People’s Republic of China” as euphemism and propaganda. But for Tocqueville “democracy” meant neither liberty nor elections, but rather equality of condition, the negation of aristocracy. The Soviets, the Nazis and the Communist Chinese meet this criterion. Each humiliated or exterminated the local aristocracy, and social position became a function not of birth but of some sort of “merit,” even if there were grim episodes when that “merit” consisted of bloody-minded dogmatism. Yet by fair means or foul, the democratic revolution carried on. Feudalism and quasi-feudalism persists today only in social and economic backwaters, and rank is obsolete in all the richest and most dynamic countries.
Yet Tocqueville’s revolution has an ironic ending. On the one hand, while differences in wealth persist in the rich democracies, they are not hereditary (at least, not in anything like the degree they were in the past), nor are the lower classes trained to offer ritual gestures of respect to their betters (that is, the upper classes, whom they no longer consider their betters). On the contrary, wealth is earned by hard work and ingenuity, and serves as an incentive to effort that enriches the whole society; even then, it can purchase private luxury but not general public esteem. A person may no longer consider herself superior to her compatriots on the basis of birth.
Yet at the same time a hierarchy of nations has emerged, and the sanctity of borders which insulates the nation-state has allowed nationality to coalesce into an institution similar to rank. Citizens of wealthy and powerful countries vote for social safety nets which assure they will never fall to living standards as low as those that prevail among humanity outside, and shut their borders to foreigners, giving themselves a stark advantage in geographical mobility and assuring an artificially high wage rate. Each nation has its ethos and practices—in America’s case, liberty, democracy opportunity, college education, rock-n-roll—yet to the Third World, as the French aristocracy appeared to the Third Estate, America is defined not by its ethos (democracy, chivalry) so much as by its disproportionate, and often envied and resented, wealth. Meanwhile, Americans and other rich-country citizens develop the same sense of superiority to other nations that aristocrats once felt to the peasantry around them. Count, duke, samurai and mandarin are no more. In their place are US Citizen, EU Citizen, Swiss, Canadian, Japanese. The border is the place where our apostasy began, where our intonations of the Jeffersonian manifesto of the American revolution, that “all men are created equal,” are exposed as hypocrisy.