Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s darkest and most prophetic warning: that democratic equality breeds a new kind of solitude he named <em>individualism</em>, and that from it can grow a new kind of tyranny - mild, benevolent, and total - in which a vast tutelary state reduces free citizens to a flock of contented, passive children.
Tocqueville coined, or gave new and precise meaning to, a word we now use constantly: individualism. And he was careful to distinguish it from something it resembles but is not - ordinary selfishness or egoism. The distinction is essential to his whole analysis, and we have largely lost it. Selfishness, he said, is a vice as old as humanity: the passionate, exaggerated love of oneself that leads a person to prefer himself to everything and everyone, to grab and dominate. Selfishness is a fault of the heart, a moral failing found in every age and society.
Individualism is something different and distinctively modern - a product not of vice but of the democratic, equal condition itself. It is not a passionate love of self but a calm, considered withdrawal: a disposition that leads each citizen to cut himself off from the larger mass of his fellows and retreat into a small circle of family and friends, leaving the wider society to look after itself. The individualist is not necessarily grasping or cruel; he may be a perfectly decent, mild, well-meaning person. He simply withdraws - turns inward to his private life, his home, his immediate circle, his own affairs, and ceases to concern himself with public matters or the fate of the larger community. He does not hate his fellow citizens; he merely loses interest in them, and in the common life they share. Selfishness, Tocqueville observed, springs from a depraved heart and blights all the virtues; individualism springs at first only from misguided judgment and faulty understanding, and at first attacks only the public virtues - but in the long run, he warned, it attacks and destroys all the others too, and ends in pure selfishness. Individualism is the gentle beginning whose terminus is the very vice it seemed so harmless beside.
Why should equality breed this withdrawal? Tocqueville’s explanation is among his most penetrating. In an aristocratic society, he observed, every individual was bound into a vast chain of connection. Each person had a fixed place in the hierarchy, tied permanently to those above and below - the noble to his ancestors and descendants, to his dependents and his lord; the peasant to his master, his village, his inherited station. These bonds were often oppressive, but they were bonds: they connected each person to others, gave each a recognised place in a larger whole, and made each acutely aware that his fate was tied to others’ - that he was a link in a chain stretching from the distant past into the far future, embedded in a web of mutual obligation and dependence.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Tocqueville’s concepts of “individualism” and “soft despotism.” Explain in your own words what he meant by each, and how he thought the first could lead, through a benevolent path, to the second.
Leads to Benjamin Constant.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.