Title: Why did tocqueville fear abundance? or the tension between commerce and citizenship
Abstract: On 12 January 1832, Tocqueville observed in his notes about North America that the United States was rapidly becoming the greatest maritime nation in the world, and then he added: ‘This commercial movement will for America still further delay the moment of plenitude, which is so much to be feared.” Those living in the twentieth century, a century that has comfortably consecrated itself to the pursuit of material progress, might well ask why Tocqueville feared plenitude or abundance. The answer to this question reveals as much about our own political assumptions as it does about Tocqueville’s, and it tells us that Tocqueville, so often regarded as a modern political thinker, wrote about the future of Europe and North America with one eye on the ideas of the eighteenth century and perhaps even a glance toward the political ethic of the old Roman Republic. Jefferson shared Tocqueville’s opinion when he wrote, ‘What a cruel reflection, that a rich country cannot long be a free one.‘* What is this fear, shared by Jefferson and Tocqueville, but a rejuvenated expression of the ancient conviction that luxury induces moral decline, enervating popular government? Montesquieu perhaps best expressed this idea, shared by so many in the eighteenth century from FCnelon to Robespierre, when he said, ‘the less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect’.3 In sum, Tocqueville clearly worried that commerce and the pursuit of wealth might clash with the demands of democratic freedom. In analysing why Tocqueville feared abundance, we will find that Tocqueville, using what I might loosely call political categories of classical thinking, concluded that democracy was haunted by an incipient and ever-present tendency4 to drift into an orderly hedonism, a society-monstrous in Tocqueville’s eyes-tied together only by narrow self-interest. Tocqueville, however, discussed at least six characteristics of democracy that temporarily restrained this tendency to self-interest: the family, community, religion, a sense of the future, laws and mores, and the necessity of the work ethic. And yet Tocqueville thought that the pressures of self-interest would gradually undermine each of these six restraints, like a sea wall weakened by the weight of waves. To take just one example, once wealth becomes abundant, the work ethic-which offered an internalised discipline and a broader view of selfinterest-would no longer be necessary. Tocqueville feared abundance because, just as the Roman military ethic was undermined by the wealth and pleasures of Empire, so might democracy’s disciplined ethic appropriate to commercial
Publication Year: 1988
Publication Date: 1988-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 11
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