America offered a glimpse of Europe’s destiny, as a place where the ‘great social revolution’ that was still tearing its way through the Old World had worked itself out in a comparatively easy fashion. Tocqueville was reassured by New England’s civic associations and local newspapers: they showed that modern politics didn’t automatically lead to Jacobin despotism or utopian schemes to transform society. Democracy in New England was in fact rather mundane, dominated not by the clash of incommensurate, strongly held beliefs or charismatic cult leaders but by individual reason and calculation – the routine, narrow self-interest of commercial citizens. In that sense, the American future was also dispiriting. Revolution was unlikely to occur in a society that fostered individualism rather than collective action and generated unprecedented material gratification. But at what cost? Left unchecked, democracy meant the predictable administration of an ‘immense, tutelary’ state and the soft despotism of common sense; it meant that everybody would be comfortable, safe, equal and bored. This was a radical thing to say about a form of government that most people associated with emancipation or violent upheaval. But for Tocqueville it made sense once you looked at how Americans actually behaved – how they drank alone, read popular novels and hid themselves away in ersatz antique palaces. There was a ‘monotony’ beneath the agitated surface of American society, and Tocqueville found it terrifying. As if anticipating the end of history, he feared that ‘man will exhaust his energies in petty, solitary, and sterile changes, and that humanity, though constantly on the move, will cease to advance.’
Biographers and historians have tended to treat these passages, most of which appeared in the second volume of Democracy in America (published five years after the first, in 1840), as proof that Tocqueville’s aristocratic disdain ultimately eclipsed his earlier admiration for American life. In many respects, though, this disposition was there all along. The first volume is also haunted by a world that has been lost, not least in its uncompromising account of the genocide inflicted on Native Americans by European colonists and, more recently, by Andrew Jackson’s government. Tocqueville had witnessed the forced removal of the Choctaw Nation from Arkansas, and a trip to the virgin forests of Saginaw had left him dreading the encroachment of the frontier into the American wilderness. As the despondent final chapter of the first volume made clear, the ‘formalities’ and ‘legalities’ of the United States were proving far more effective than the atrocities of Spanish colonialism at exterminating or expelling Indigenous populations. Like the European aristocrat, the ‘noble savage’ was helpless against the onslaught of democracy.
