Tocqueville’s Political Science of American Democracy

Essay 7 in Reading Tocqueville at 250

Reminder: I am using multiple translations; my main reading is from the hardbound copy of the Mansfield translation. When I refer to page numbers it’s to the Mansfield translation, and when I want to pull quotes that are longer I’ll use the online Schleifer translation, so the text may not match exactly but they are close (and I also read French so I calibrated across the translations to get comfy with Tocqueville’s word choice).

In the closing chapters of Volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville displays the combination of observation, research, causal reasoning, and independence that gives him a legitimate claim to be the first political scientist. Chapter 9 asks why the democratic republic has endured in the United States (which at the time it had done for just over 40 years). The first part of Chapter 10 turns to the condition and probable future of the Native American tribes living within the territory claimed by the Union. The subjects initially seem quite different, with one chapter explaining the stability of American democracy and the next describing the dispossession of peoples excluded from it. Yet Tocqueville approaches both topics through the same method, moving from visible events to underlying causes, combining firsthand observation with documentary research, and testing America’s stated principles against the actual operation of its institutions.

Tocqueville begins Chapter 9 by organizing the causes that sustain the American republic into three categories: providential circumstances, laws, and mores. The first covers geography — distance from powerful adversaries, abundant land, opportunities for a mobile population. The second covers formal institutions — federalism, township government, inheritance law. The third covers religion, habits of self-government, and the social norms that teach citizens how to use freedom.

More than a taxonomy, this list is a causal explanation. Tocqueville wants to know not merely what American institutions are, but why they work, and he distinguishes among kinds of causes rather than treating them as interchangeable. By the end of the chapter he has made clear that laws and mores matter more than physical circumstances alone: geography creates opportunities, but institutions and habits determine how a people uses them.

Andrew Jackson, president during Tocqueville’s visit, receives one of the book’s sharper asides: “... a man of violent character and middling capacity; nothing in all the course of his career had ever proved that he had the requisite qualities to govern a free people ...” (p. 265). The judgment is severe, delivered almost in passing, and its immediate purpose is institutional rather than personal. The republic does not depend on the wisdom of its chief executive. It survives a mediocre or dangerous president because authority is dispersed through federalism, local government, courts, and deeply rooted habits of self-rule.

That dispersal recurs throughout the chapter. The absence of a single great capital like London or Paris keeps population, ambition, and political pressure from concentrating in one place. Partible inheritance works similarly: unlike primogeniture, it breaks up concentrated wealth over generations, and even though families may still arrange for an eldest son to keep the house or business, the law does not compel it. American democracy is stabilized, again and again, by the scattering of authority.

Material prosperity matters too because widespread opportunity lowers the stakes of political conflict: “When the people govern, it is necessary that they be happy in order for them not to overturn the state” (p. 267). Where land is abundant and prospects fluid, dissatisfied citizens can seek improvement through movement rather than revolution. His lyrical image of abandoned western cabins, already reclaimed by forest and flowers, captures this restlessness at work: Americans clear land, abandon it, and move again, so that discontent never accumulates too densely in one place (p. 271).

That restlessness is why Tocqueville can make his most paradoxical claim: qualities Europeans regard as dangerous — restlessness, the immoderate desire for wealth, extreme love of independence — help guarantee the American republic’s peaceful future. In Europe those passions produce upheaval; in America they propel people outward, so that the vices of man are nearly as useful to society as his virtues (p. 272). Tocqueville withholds an inherited moral judgment until he has examined how it functions under particular institutional conditions, a method he uses repeatedly.

The same sensitivity appears in his praise of township government, which moderates the despotism of the majority while teaching citizens the taste for freedom and the art of being free — institutions functioning as schools of character, not merely as rules (p. 274). This process lies behind his broad concept of mores, or moeurs: the habits, opinions, and customary practices through which constitutional forms become a lived political order.

Religion, for Tocqueville, is one of the most important sources of those habits. He is struck that neither Catholicism nor Protestantism in America is fundamentally hostile to democracy; Catholicism hierarchical among clergy but egalitarian among the faithful, since “… the priest alone is raised above the faithful: everything is equal below him” (p. 276). Its influence on politics is more indirect than direct: it teaches prudence and restraint rather than governing the state outright. Despotism, he famously observes, can do without faith, but freedom cannot — a claim that free societies need internal moral restraints a despot can simply impose (or not) by force. The separation of church and state follows the same logic: religion retains more authority by staying outside partisan power, so that freedom of conscience and religious influence over mores reinforce each other.

Chapter 9, then, is a wide-ranging explanation of democratic success. Chapter 10 complicates that success while retaining the same analytical method and adding to it. Tocqueville turns to the condition of Native American tribes and shows that Democracy in America is not a hagiography. His admiration for American institutions does not prevent him from examining their violence, hypocrisy, and limits.

This section is especially important for understanding Tocqueville as a researcher. He draws on what he witnessed during his travels, on conversations with people he encountered, and on extensive documentary evidence — congressional debates, official reports, materials connected to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. He had, in fact, watched a group of Choctaws cross the frozen Mississippi near Memphis in the winter of 1831 (pp. 310-311), and he sets that firsthand scene alongside population figures and the chronology of land cessions, so that eyewitness and statistic corroborate one another rather than standing in for each other. The chapter is among the most heavily sourced in the book, its footnotes tracing specific congressional debates over the 1830 Removal Act rather than gesturing vaguely at official policy. Tocqueville is recording impressions as well assembling evidence from different sources and using it to reconstruct a political process.

As Rodriguez (2024) has argued, this encounter with the removal debates did more than supply Tocqueville with material for a single chapter; it helped him sharpen the conception of democracy that structures the book. Watching a democratic majority act, with full legal process, against people who stood entirely outside its bounds gave Tocqueville a limiting case he could not have derived from theory alone.

The same restlessness he had just praised as a safety valve, propelling settlers outward rather than letting discontent concentrate at home, drains the hunting grounds and food supply on which Native communities depend. Settlers clear forests, occupy hunting grounds, and drive away game. Even where they don’t expel Native communities by force, they destroy the material foundations that allow those communities to remain. Looking from inside the democratic community, restlessness is a virtue that keeps the republic peaceful. From outside, the same restlessness is the mechanism of dispossession.

Tocqueville applies the same scrutiny to treaties and land purchases. The outward form is one of consent and exchange, but the bargaining conditions are profoundly unequal. Government agents offer money, supplies, and distant territory. When tribes hesitate, they are warned that the government may soon be unable or unwilling to protect their existing rights. Tocqueville summarizes the process with devastating concision: half persuaded, half forced, the Indians move away.

That phrase reveals his analysis’s sophistication. The transaction is neither wholly voluntary nor openly compulsory, occupying the ambiguous territory between persuasion and coercion. Native peoples agree formally, but only after settlement, hunger, insecurity, and political pressure have narrowed their alternatives. Legal form, Tocqueville observes, does not guarantee substantive justice.

He also distinguishes carefully between the states and the federal government. Southern states use what he calls tyrannical measures (p. 321), while federal officials sometimes attempt to soften the consequences of removal. Yet the federal government repeatedly fails to defend the rights it has promised to protect: “There is less cupidity and violence in the way the Union acts toward the Indians than in the policy followed by the states; but the two governments equally lack good faith” (p. 323).

The severe moral indictment is also an institutional analysis. Federalism, which elsewhere protects liberty by dividing power, fails those who lack effective standing within the political community. State governments press aggressively for land. The federal government retreats before state resistance. Treaties and solemn guarantees prove temporary. Native peoples are moved westward into territories that settlement will soon reach again, so the proposed refuge is provisional from the beginning.

Chapter 10 applies and deepens Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy. Chapter 9 explains how American democracy sustains itself through opportunity, decentralization, law, religion, and habits of self-government. This first part of Chapter 10 shows that these benefits are not distributed universally (and I expect the second part to do so too). The abundance of land that supports equality among citizens depends in part on the acquisition of territory from those excluded from citizenship. The legal and federal institutions that preserve liberty within the democratic community do not reliably protect those outside it.

Which brings the argument back to Jackson. The president Tocqueville judged unfit to govern a free people is the same president presiding over Removal. The republic’s capacity to absorb an unworthy executive, the very durability Chapter 9 credits to dispersed authority, let the policy proceed with so little check. State legislatures press; federal officials yield; no single actor has to feel responsible for the outcome, because authority was never concentrated enough for anyone to be. The dispersal of power that makes the republic safe for its citizens is the same dispersal that leaves those outside it with nowhere to appeal. Tocqueville does not say this explicitly, but the implication is clear.