the ever higher levels of tariff protection—pursued by governments that were
incapable of resisting‘opportunistic state action’and were vulnerable to
‘corrupt bargains’with private interests (Osmond 1985, pp. 152, 155; Shann
1930; Eggleston 1932; Melleuish 1995). For others, notably the more radical
circle of Nettie and Vance Palmer that Hancock had befriended in his
Melbourne University days, the roots of the malaise were even more pro-
found, with‘delayed development, false starts and unfulfilled talents’marking
‘a scurvy period, when Australians seem content to accept second-rateness,
were deferentially inactive in most aspects of public and cultural life and shut
themselves off as best they could from the world and modern thought’(Serle
[1973] 2014, pp. 90, 151). But regardless of the precise diagnosis, it seemed
undeniable that the aspirations of‘a glorious nation with no sordid past’had
become‘a hollow mockery of departed hopes’(Walker 1976, p. 8).
In that sense, bothDemocracy in AmericaandAustraliaare attempts tofind
bearings in a world of heightened uncertainty about the future of social order.
Tocqueville was especially clear in that respect.‘I admit that I saw in America
more than America’, he wrote; in crossing the Atlantic‘it was the shape of
democracy itself which I sought, its inclination, character, prejudices and
passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to
fear or to hope therefrom’(Democracy in America(henceforthDA), intro.^1 ).
Confronted with what Jacques Barzun has called the dominant problem of the
Romantic era—the need‘to create a new world on the ruins of the old’(Barzun
1961, p. 14)—Tocqueville looked to America from the perspective of a man
who, as he wrote in 1837 to his English translator and friend, Henry Reeve,
had‘only one passion, the love of liberty and of human dignity’(Kaledin
2011, p. 3).
5.2 The New Regime
In examining America, Tocqueville well knew that‘democracy’would appear
to his readership as anything but a self-evident good; on the contrary,‘even
thefirst steps on the road to such an order’seemed likely to‘end in civil war,
continual instability, reactionary regression and constant fear of revolution-
ary uprising’(Offe 2005, p. 12). At least until the fall of Napoleon, the term
itself mainly referred to an antique form of government, famously disparaged
by antiquity’s great philosophers; once the Restoration era began in 1814,
with its decision not to revert to theancien régime,‘democracy’came to mean
the acceptance of some degree of‘levelling’(on the history of the concept, see
(^1) The translations from Tocqueville are largely drawn from the Goldhammer translation
(Tocqueville 2004), checked against the Nolla historical-critical edition (Tocqueville 2009).
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History