The line I keep returning to is that inequality becomes imprinted in the mores as it fades in the laws. It generalizes well beyond its subject. Removing a formal barrier while leaving intact the structure that produced it does not end the exclusion; it relocates it. Once law and mores diverge, the adjustment shifts into informal institutions, where it becomes harder both to see and to challenge because there is no statute left to repeal. Tocqueville is saying the visible constraint was never the decisive one.
That connects to something in your durability section that deserves even more weight than it gets. A federal government that needs the free concurrence of the governed in order to subsist, together with a society existing only when men consider a great number of objects in roughly the same way, says the constitutional structure is downstream of the mores rather than the source of them. If that is right, the constitutional text was never doing the work we usually assign it. Which would explain why a document that has changed so little now supports a government that would be unrecognizable to the people who ratified it. The words held. The common political grammar underneath them did not.
Two smaller points.
The Fogel and Engerman comparison is the boldest move in the essay, and I think it needs one more sentence. Tocqueville anticipated their accounting question, that the cost of maintenance is dispersed across food, clothing, childhood, illness, old age, supervision, and coercion so that no single payment makes it legible. He did not anticipate their conclusion. They argued slavery was economically efficient. Anticipating the method while reaching the opposite conclusion is worth distinguishing.
On inheritance, the causal direction is left open. You report that primogeniture preserved concentrated fortunes and a stable ruling class, and that partible inheritance fragmented estates and weakened that structure. The alternative is that concentrated fortunes sustained primogeniture, and that the rule survived because the interests it served were strong enough to preserve it. Tocqueville's own method suggests the relationship is endogenous. Institutions create interests, those interests preserve institutions, and the causal arrows run both ways.
The Kentucky and Ohio passage is the best part. You concede the design problem before anyone can raise it and then show why the institutional mechanism survives the concession.
Thanks Jeffrey. The laws and mores aspect you point out was, for me, the biggest of Tocqueville’s insights here, and he sure is robust in carrying it through from topic to topic. It’s something I had always casually associated with his work from the excerpts I had read, but I didn’t realize how consistently and persistently he would use it.
On the Fogel & Engerman point, I didn’t want to go down the path, in part because I think it’s unfair to Tocqueville given the disparity in the empirical analytical tools available to him 140 years earlier, not to mention that the concept of economic efficiency was not theoretically well-defined yet in the 1830s. But in hindsight I wish I had read Tocqueville back in graduate school when I read Fogel & Engerman!
Lynne,
The line I keep returning to is that inequality becomes imprinted in the mores as it fades in the laws. It generalizes well beyond its subject. Removing a formal barrier while leaving intact the structure that produced it does not end the exclusion; it relocates it. Once law and mores diverge, the adjustment shifts into informal institutions, where it becomes harder both to see and to challenge because there is no statute left to repeal. Tocqueville is saying the visible constraint was never the decisive one.
That connects to something in your durability section that deserves even more weight than it gets. A federal government that needs the free concurrence of the governed in order to subsist, together with a society existing only when men consider a great number of objects in roughly the same way, says the constitutional structure is downstream of the mores rather than the source of them. If that is right, the constitutional text was never doing the work we usually assign it. Which would explain why a document that has changed so little now supports a government that would be unrecognizable to the people who ratified it. The words held. The common political grammar underneath them did not.
Two smaller points.
The Fogel and Engerman comparison is the boldest move in the essay, and I think it needs one more sentence. Tocqueville anticipated their accounting question, that the cost of maintenance is dispersed across food, clothing, childhood, illness, old age, supervision, and coercion so that no single payment makes it legible. He did not anticipate their conclusion. They argued slavery was economically efficient. Anticipating the method while reaching the opposite conclusion is worth distinguishing.
On inheritance, the causal direction is left open. You report that primogeniture preserved concentrated fortunes and a stable ruling class, and that partible inheritance fragmented estates and weakened that structure. The alternative is that concentrated fortunes sustained primogeniture, and that the rule survived because the interests it served were strong enough to preserve it. Tocqueville's own method suggests the relationship is endogenous. Institutions create interests, those interests preserve institutions, and the causal arrows run both ways.
The Kentucky and Ohio passage is the best part. You concede the design problem before anyone can raise it and then show why the institutional mechanism survives the concession.
Jeffrey
Thanks Jeffrey. The laws and mores aspect you point out was, for me, the biggest of Tocqueville’s insights here, and he sure is robust in carrying it through from topic to topic. It’s something I had always casually associated with his work from the excerpts I had read, but I didn’t realize how consistently and persistently he would use it.
On the Fogel & Engerman point, I didn’t want to go down the path, in part because I think it’s unfair to Tocqueville given the disparity in the empirical analytical tools available to him 140 years earlier, not to mention that the concept of economic efficiency was not theoretically well-defined yet in the 1830s. But in hindsight I wish I had read Tocqueville back in graduate school when I read Fogel & Engerman!