the familiar British fashion’(Hancock 1930, p. 202), it was also because the
industrial relations system gave them so much to preserve.
Hancock’s tendency to downplay the degree to which Australian institu-
tions both brought the‘swarms of petty appetites’he denounced under some
degree of control and, in the process, entrenched them, then carries over into
his view of the country’s future. Tocqueville’s fear—and the root of his
pessimism—was that because liberty‘is most formidable when it is a novelty’
(DA, II.2.iii), American democracy might wither as it matured. In contrast,
Hancock believed Australia’s problems were signs of immaturity: of a people
who, never having been‘compelled to shoulder the responsibilities and with-
stand the pressures which are part of the life of older peoples’, had‘followed
the line of least resistance’and so had‘not yet come of age’(Hancock 1930,
p. 284). In thus coming of age, he optimistically believed, it would grow out of
its teething difficulties, laying sounder bases for the nation’sflourishing. In
reality, of course, the opposite happened, as Australian democracy’s institu-
tional superstructure gave the policies he acutely criticized a permanence that
persisted long after they had‘become a positive danger to the national pur-
pose which...called them into existence’(Hancock 1930, p. 128).
5.6 The Contrasting Fates
ButAustralia’s lacunae, however serious they may be, can hardly explain the
contrast between its fortunes and those ofDemocracy in America.
There was, after all, a time, not so long ago, whenAustraliawas everywhere:
when it shone as bright in Australian intellectual life as the star ofDemocracy in
Americadid in American political and cultural debates. Indeed, documenting
its pervasiveness—which ranged from the leading, fashionably left-leaning,
sociology textbook of the 1970s (Encel 1970) to the quote at the front of
Sidney Baker’s remarkable compendium of the Australian idiom (Baker
1966)—was an important aspect of several perceptive critiques (Connell
1968; Osmond 1972; Walker 1976, pp. 204–6). Compared to the peaks of
authorityAustraliathen enjoyed, its subsequent decline in Australian political
culture has the suddenness and scale of an extinction, made all the more
startling by the fact that—whatever its limitations—no superior rival has
emerged.
It would, of course, be an exaggeration to sayAustraliahas entirely disap-
peared; it is, for example, extensively discussed, and its importance empha-
sized, both in a recent collection of essays by a well-known Australian
sociologist (who also considers, albeit mainly in passing, Hancock’s relation-
ship to Tocqueville) (Beilharz 2015) and in a review essay by one of Australia’s
leading historians (Macintyre 2001, pp. 33–57), as well as in several studies of
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History