124) Dois livros sobre Tocqueville e a Democracia na America

Even God Quotes Tocqueville
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
The Times Magazine, July 8, 2007

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville's first volume, published at the end of
1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of "a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence."

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: A Life.
By Hugh Brogan.
Illustrated. 724 pp. Yale University Press. $35.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: Democracy's Guide.
By Joseph Epstein.
208 pp. Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.95.

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville's misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.
Tocqueville was an unlikely student of democracy, and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness. A sickly blueblood, he grew up listening to his mother sing royalist songs in his father's chateau. He was a cousin by marriage of the writer René de Chateaubriand and the great-grandson of the eloquent Chrétien de Malesherbes, who defended Louis XVI at trial and died under the guillotine for it. Others in Tocqueville's family met the same fate, and virtually all of them were either jailed or exiled.
As Brogan keenly notes, there was a paradox in Tocqueville's position. He felt born to rule; until the last decade of his life his political ambitions were stronger than his literary ones. Yet despite his sympathies for royalism, he benefited from its passing. The postrevolutionary order empowered a new class of well-read "notables," to which Tocqueville belonged. Intellectually, the July Revolution of 1830 liberated Tocqueville -- a young judge who was neither an enthusiast for the newly installed house of Orléans nor (yet) a republican. With his friend Gustave de Beaumont, he obtained a leave to study American prisons -- a pretext, Tocqueville admitted, for investigating larger questions.
The success of "Democracy" paved the way for a political career. Tocqueville was elected as a deputy for his family's district in Normandy. He would be a formidable orator during the revolution of 1848, a drafter of the constitution of France's second republic and, for five months, foreign minister. He left politics after the coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851.
Brogan's expertise pays constant rewards to the reader. His knowledge of 19th-century French politics is comprehensive and his attention to context punctilious. Nor does he beat around the bush: Tocqueville's cousin and confidant Louis de Kergorlay is "a young idiot" and the legitimist insurrectionist the Duchesse de Berry "one of the silliest princesses in all European history." And although this book is rigorously chronological, it detours into mini-essays on pivotal topics -- Tocqueville's relationship with his invalid mother; Foucault's reading of Tocqueville's ideas of incarceration; and so forth. It is never dreary. Tocqueville's life is always a pulsing intellectual and political drama.
But it is a drama in which Brogan is mostly at odds with his subject. Tocqueville's goal as a deputy during the 1848 revolution was to protect both liberty and order. In Brogan's view, he did a poor job of distinguishing between the two. Brogan blames conservative property owners for the excesses of the socialist revolutionaries. "The notables," he writes, "Tocqueville among them, projected their own violent hatred and panic onto the urban workers, and in doing so created the very monster which they feared." Brogan faults Tocqueville for "impudence," "blindly prejudiced" views, an "obsessive cult of property" and a "ruthless hostility" to lower-class Parisians. That Tocqueville now considered himself a republican meant little. "Whatever he called himself," Brogan writes, "the nobles knew that he was one of them."
Brogan credits Tocqueville with a deepening respect for the French people in the decade before his death in 1859. Those are the years when he wrote his posthumously published memoir of the revolution of 1848 (Brogan's favorite among his works) and his unfinished history, "The Old Regime and the Revolution." Although Brogan sees the history as a "medley of fiction and wishful thinking," he is deeply impressed with Tocqueville's pioneering use of local archives, which allowed him to lay out the continuity between prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary France.
Brogan sees Tocqueville as a purveyor, rather than a generator, of insights. With an insistence that verges on hostility, he repeats that Tocqueville, despite a "craving" to seem original, was not. Some of Brogan's misgivings have been shared even by readers well-disposed toward Tocqueville: He didn't always define his terms with precision. He missed the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He had a weak grasp of how political parties worked, and of the role of the American presidency.
But Brogan adds further complaints, dismissing Tocqueville's theory of the tyranny of the majority as his "most serious mistake." Tocqueville's aphorism on American conformism in the first volume of "Democracy" ("I know no country where in general there prevails less independence of mind and true freedom of debate") is, Brogan writes, "absurd, as a comparison of the polemics of the age of Jackson with the ice age of Metternich or with the press laws of Louis Philippe quickly makes clear." Brogan has even less use for the second volume of "Democracy," where this paradox-seeking tone predominates. He views it as a book marked by the longing for "good old aristocratic times," written for purposes of self-justification and "shaped as much by personal neurosis as by logic and observation."
So how do we explain the praise that Brogan heaps on "Democracy," which he calls a "masterpiece and a classic," after spending almost 30 pages pillorying its second volume? The answer lies in Brogan's view of Tocqueville's work as a whole. "A man like Tocqueville," Brogan says, "enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. He does this through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance."
It is hard to agree. For Tocqueville, democracy sets society moving in an egalitarian, not a libertarian, direction. To be preoccupied with equality under such circumstances is to be preoccupied with a foregone conclusion. It is the "passion for liberty," by contrast, that is most in danger of dying out, and most in need of defenders. This is Tocqueville's core belief. Brogan disagrees with it diametrically. He believes equality is more vulnerable than liberty, and perhaps as precious. Out of this disagreement comes an impressive, fascinating but somewhat odd book, in which Brogan praises Tocqueville as a thinker and writer while hammering away at much of what he thought and wrote.
Joseph Epstein's brief "Alexis de Tocqueville" leans on the work of earlier historians, including Brogan. It takes seriously Tocqueville's worry about trade-offs between liberty and equality. In an unpretentious, even wiseacre style ("God himself may have quoted Tocqueville"), Epstein piles up Tocquevillean aperçus ("Nations are like men in that they prefer a fuss made on their behalf to real services rendered"), ranks Tocqueville's predictions for accuracy (he "nailed" the way democracies have trouble ending wars, but overestimated the long-term constitutional importance of state governments) and gives a serviceable rundown of how he has been received by English-language readers from John Stuart Mill to Sean Wilentz. It is a brisk and admirably accessible account of how Tocqueville gave a name to certain misgivings about democracy that are with us still.

Christopher Caldwell, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is at work on a book about immigration, Islam and Europe.