Reflections Upon Reading de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: The Dangers of a Dead Level Equality©

In the late summer of 1851, Henri-Frederic Amiel, a Swiss philosopher and critic with a superior intellect and creative command of language, read Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous work, Democracy in America, in French. This caused him to muse about the democratic era the world was then entering. With the prescience of a prophet, Amile voices concern about mediocrity and a dead-level equality, particularly economic and social, and the consequences this would bring. The language is that of the 19th Century and may demand a slow and concentrated reading, but I think you will agree the effort will be repaid with provoked thought and perhaps even insight, as well as sober reflection about the present day. He spoke of a potential antidote, a "new kingdom" and "abiding city" where "beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship." Is his hope possible or a fantastical illusion?  What is the higher ideal of which he speaks?

Tocqueville's book has on the whole a calming effect upon the mind, but it leaves a certain sense of disgust behind.  It makes one realize the necessity of what is happening around us and the inevitableness of the goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain that the the era of mediocrity in everything is beginning, and mediocrity freezes all desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and it is by sacrificing what is excellent, remarkable, and extraordinary that we get rid of what is bad. The whole becomes less barbarous, and at the same time more vulgar. 

The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become everything and man nothing. 

As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down of the mountains, what is average will rise at the expense of what is great. The exceptional will disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be the aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady of a leveling age. 

Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? May not the general well-being be purchased too dearly at such a price? The creative force which in the beginning we see forever tending to produce and multiply differences, will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate them one by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is mere inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the natural form of life? Or rather, above the economic and political equality to which the socialist and non-socialist democracy aspires, taking it too often for the term of its efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a church of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond the region of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an abiding city? Utilitarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry of the flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, are they to be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors of our race? I do not believe it. The ideal of humanity is something different and higher. 

But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must first banish from among us all suffering which is superfluous and has its origin in social arrangements, before we can return to spiritual goods.(1)

Let’s think together again, soon.

Notes: 

1.  Henri-Frederic Amiel, The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel, trans., Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Project Gutenberg online version, under date of 6 September 1851, pp. 44-45, emphasis in original.