Tocqueville’s Blind Spot

Garry Wills, "Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?"
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Tocqueville is uninterested in the material bases of American life. It is as if he ghosted his way directly into the American spirit, by passing the body of the nation. There is practically nothing in his first volume, and little more in his second volume, about American capitalism, manufactures, banking, or technology. He rides around on steamboats without noticing how crucially they were changing American life. He does not describe the speed, convenience, or dangers of this new technology. He also ignores the infant railroad industry and the burgeoning canal systems. Boston was one of the two cities he stayed in longest, but he was not curious enough to look at the factories in nearby Lowell. He does refer to cotton production, without recognizing the key to that production, the cotton gin. The importance of these developments was obvious to another French author, Michel Chevalier, who visited America four years later Tocqueville and emphasized the Industrial Revolution’s importance to its future.

Even John Stuart Mill, who praised Democracy on its appearance, noted: “It is perhaps the greatest defect of M. de Tocqueville’s book that, from the scarcity of examples, his propositions, even when derived from observation, have the air of mere abstract speculations.” James Bryce agreed with this criticism, saying that Tocqueville reasoned a priori rather than from facts he found in America. He “divines” America—or “intuits” it, as Bryce said.

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The New York Review of Books
Volume LI, Number 7 · April 29, 2004.
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