Dunn 2005; on the criticisms of Athenian democracy, see Ober 1998). For
Tocqueville, however,‘democracy’was both a process for selecting govern-
ments and, even more importantly, a condition of society characterized by an
irresistible tendency to‘equality’(Manent 1982).
Before the Revolution, society was viewed as a hierarchical organism whose
specialized limbs, each with a recognized collective identity, performed the
various functions essential for the well-being of the whole. In that hierarchy of
estates,‘everyone knew his proper place, enjoyed the appropriate rights and
duties and obeyed his superiors, receiving obedience from his inferiors in his
turn: all in the last resort obeyed the monarch, through whom human society
was slotted in with the divine’(Crone 2003, p. 99). Each person, Tocqueville
wrote, could therefore see‘a man above himself whose patronage is necessary
to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim’
(DA, II.2.ii). But democracy cast that hierarchy aside, making the servant‘not
a different man from the master’, and so also dissolving their bonds of mutual
obligation (DA, II.3.v).
Tocqueville saw much in this new world that‘saddens and chills’him; he
was‘tempted to regret the state of society which has ceased to be’(DA, II.4.
viii). As Harvey Mansfield put it, Tocqueville was, like his great admirer Leo
Strauss, a‘friend but not anenthusiast’of democracy (Mancini 2006, p. 210).
That is not to suggest he ignored its merits; on the contrary, as he explained in
a letter to a friend soon after thefirst volume ofDemocracy in America
appeared:
To those for whom the word democracy is synonymous with destruction, anarchy,
spoliation, and murder, I have tried to show that under a democratic government
the fortunes and the rights of society may be respected, liberty preserved, and
religion honoured. (Adcock 2014, p. 34)Nor was he any less deeply committed to the cause of equality, writing, a few
years before his death, that‘a more equal distribution of goods and rights in
this world is the greatest aim that those who conduct human affairs can have
in view’(Kaledin 2011, p. 147).
But he was also highly conscious of the risks. At the heart of those risks was
the potentially noxious brew of resentment and isolation to which the new
society could give rise.
The resentment came from the fact that democracy instilled in the minds of
men an‘ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible’(DA, II.2.v) hankering for
equality that rendered inequalities of any sort increasingly intolerable and
readily degenerated into a‘delirium’(DA, II.2.ix). That frenzy created an
unavoidable sense of frustration, as the‘constant tension that exists between
the instincts to which equality gives rise and the means it provides for their
satisfaction torments and tires the soul’(DA, II.2.xiii). And the frustration was
Henry Ergas