Self and Association in Democracy in America

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Student ID: 12212565
5/25/19

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Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the democratic age certain forces pushing mankind towards

a dull universal mediocrity; but he saw in it as well the possibility of invigorated associations

that enable it to resist those forces. In this essay, I will analyze the role associations play in

Democracy in America in defending democracy against itself, using Tocqueville’s convergences

and divergences with Friedrich Nietzsche to elucidate Tocqueville’s argument and its

implications. First I will discuss Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the democratic age and its threat of

rendering man forever diminished, emphasizing his understanding of the function of community

in facilitating the decay of man. Next I will show that Tocqueville anticipated much of this

diagnosis but viewed community (or in his parlance, association) as the most important bulwark

against that decay. Finally, I will argue that Tocqueville’s view rests on an understanding of

human nature in which the individual self and its capacities are only realized in society, as

association is the fundamental condition of full selfhood.

“The democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization,”

Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of

man, making him mediocre and lowering his value.”1 That this democratic movement (which

itself is “the heir to the Christian movement”2) will complete this diminution of man “into the

perfect herd animal… the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims,”3 is for Nietzsche the great

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Section
203. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1966
2 BGE 202
3 BGE 203
danger of modernity. In the Prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, he depicts a world in which this

danger is realized. It’s a world of stultifying conformity, with “no herdsman and one herd.” There

are no inequalities in wealth or power; “Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much

of a burden; Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still

wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden.” In fact there are no differences at all

—“everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same”. Suffering seems to have been

abolished, but with it so too have all grandeur, high passions, and depth of spirit: “the earth has

become small,” and its denizens live only for “their little pleasure for the day and their little

pleasure for the night.” And it’s a world of eternal stagnancy whose creatures—who claim to

“have discovered happiness” and to “know everything that has ever happened” and so do not

seek to develop themselves or create new things—are called the “Last Men.”4

Throughout his writings, Nietzsche presents communal sentiments—sociability, dutiful

responsibility, love of one’s neighbor— as one of the great mechanisms by which humanity

decays into the Last Men. In Beyond Good and Evil, he identifies the heart of all modern

political persuasions as the “faith in the community as the savior, in short, in the herd.”5 He

elaborates this claim in The Geneology of Morals in his discussion of the “ascetic priest” whose

task is to form, maintain and tend to the herd. His most important6 means of carrying out this

task is the “prescribing of a petty pleasure that is easily attainable and can be made into a regular

event”; namely, “the pleasure of giving pleasure”. In order to facilitate this pleasure, the ascetic

priest organizes his charges into communities, which divert their attention from their own inner

4 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Section 5. Translated
by Thomas Common. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.
5 BGE 202
6 As implied by the phrase “above all” in GM 3:19
pain and suffering to the communal welfare: “With the growth of the community, a new interest

grows for the individual, too, and often lifts him above the most personal element in his

discontent, his aversion to himself… the individual’s discontent with himself is drowned in his

pleasure in the prosperity of the community.”7 And thus Nietzsche views “associations for

mutual aid, associations for the poor, for the sick, for burial” and all other such communities as

catalyzing the anesthetization, pacification and homogenization of the individual that he we’ve

seen him to worry will be finally and irrevocably accomplished by democratic modernity.

Democracy in America was completed almost half a century before the Geneology, but it

anticipates many of Nietzsche’s fears about what the democratic age would make of man.

Tocqueville too worries that modern men will “[lose] little by little the faculty of thinking,

feeling, and acting by themselves, and thus… gradually [fall] below the level of humanity.”8 Just

as Nietzsche castigates the democratic age’s “inability to remain spectators, to let someone

suffer”9 and its repression of all thinking “against the morals of [the] society,”10 so too

Tocqueville worries that the democratic state will paternalistically seek to “render [the

individual] happy despite himself”11 and will “take away from [its citizens] entirely the trouble

of thinking and the pain of living.”12 Just as we saw that Nietzsche fears a coming era in which

“Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same,”13 so too Tocqueville fears the “universal

7 GM 3:18, 3:19
8 De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America, page 665. Translated by Harvey Mansfield and Debra
Winthrop. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
9 BGE 202
10 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science, Section 50. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

11 DIA 653
12 DIA 663
13 TSZ, Section 5
uniformity” of an “innumerable crowd composed of similar beings, in which nothing is elevated

and nothing lowered.”14 And just as Nietzsche speaks of the “animalization of man” into the

“perfect herd animal”15, Tocqueville describes democracy’s potential to turn humanity into “a

herd of timid and industrious animals.”16

And yet for all these similarities to Nietzsche, Tocqueville parts ways with him on one

crucial issue. We saw that for Nietzsche, it was “above all” the organization of mankind into

communities that made them more herd-like17; for Tocqueville, on the contrary, “in order that

men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected

among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.”18 The dangers inherent in the

egalitarianism of the democratic age can only be forestalled by what for Tocqueville—who holds

that “in democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all

the others depends on the progress of that one”19— is the democratic art par excellence.

A cursory reading of Democracy in America might suggest an obvious reason for the

divergence of the two thinkers’ views on associations. Tocqueville is extremely concerned with

the danger of the centralization of power in democracies,20 a political phenomenon on which

14 DIA 674
15 BGE 203
16 DIA 663
17 GM 3:19
18 DIA 492
19 ibid

20 In Volume One, this danger is discussed most often under the term ‘tyranny of the majority’. But by
this phrase, he primarily means not the threat the majority poses to the minorities’ negative liberties, but
rather the kind of stifling of human diversity and higher capacities that we saw him concerned with in
Volume Two. What distinguishes the tyranny of the majority from the tyranny of a monarch is that the
latter “has only a material power that acts on actions and cannot reach wills; but the majority is vested
with a force, at once material and moral, that acts on the will as much as on actions, and which at the
same time prevents the deed and the desire to do it.” (DIA 243) Thus “in democratic republics, tyranny…
leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” (DIA 244)
Nietzsche does not lay any great emphasis. Throughout both volumes, Tocqueville frequently

presents associations as a means of decentralizing power. “The central government,” Tocqueville

approvingly notes, “must rely for the execution of its commandment on agents who often do not

depend on it, and whom it cannot direct at each instant”; were it not for this fact, “freedom would

soon be banished from the New World.”21 Thus it would be easy enough to chalk up Tocqueville

and Nietzsche’s disagreement as simply the product of the former’s greater attention to the

repression of individual freedom and diversity perpetrated by the centralized state, and the

latter’s to that perpetrated by sociability.


But such an explanation, legitimate as it may be, seems to me to obscure a deeper

divergence between the two thinkers on the very nature of the relation between community and

self. As I have intimated in the previous two footnotes, Tocqueville writes of the despotism of a

centralized state as more than a merely political phenomenon; it describes not just an

arrangement of institutions under which people live, but also the condition of their innermost

beings and capacities, their souls. Thus in the rest of this paper, I will argue that what lies

beneath Tocqueville’s criticisms of centralized power is a deeper concern with the potential of

democracy to atomize humanity, to reduce individuals to a pale shadow themselves by isolating

them from one another.

Tocqueville’s descriptions of the herd into which the democratic era has the potential to

transform humanity frequently linger on its deep unsociability. Each individual is “withdrawn

21DIA 250. Note that this refers to civil just as much, and perhaps even more, than political associations,
not only because each is necessary for preservation of the other, but also because “it is above all in details
that it is dangerous to enslave men;” the agency and responsibility exercised through civil associations
with regards to seemingly apolitical everyday affairs of life is the greatest bulwark against democratic
despotism.
and apart, like a stranger to the destiny of all the others,” and “as for dwelling with his fellow

citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he exists only in himself and for himself

alone.”22 His obsession with equality leads man to “obey his neighbor, who is his equal, only

with extreme repugnance”23 and thus to isolate himself; democratic men “consider themselves in

isolation, and they willingly fancy that their whole destiny is in their hands.”24

Note that Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic tendency to isolation would be quite

foreign to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, solitude is the necessary refuge from democratic society;

higher men—unlike “slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas” [who are] human

beings without solitude”—are “born, sword, friends of solitude, of our own most profound, most

mighnightly, most middaily solitude.”25 For Tocqueville, perhaps the greatest danger of

democracy is that it “threatens finally to confine [man] wholly in the solitude of his own heart.”26

Moreover, whereas for Nietzsche solitude is the only place in which men can enjoy true

freedom,27 for Tocqueville it prepares the ground for the worst despotism, which “sees the most

certain guarantee of its own duration in the isolation of men.”28

22 DIA 662
23 DIA 645
24 DIA 484
25 BGE 44
26 DIA 484. Note that this quote demonstrates that Tocqueville uses the words ‘solitude’ and ‘isolation’

synonymously (unlike thinkers such as Hannah Arendt).

27 Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s argument that “the feeling: ‘this or that is against the morals of your

society’” is “the argument that refutes even the best arguments for a person or a cause,” and that in this
feeling “the herd instinct speaks out in us.” What the individual who suppresses his deviant argument in
response to that herd instinct is “really afraid of” is “growing solitary!” In other words, the fear of
solitude is what prevents individuals from free thought, and it is only in overcoming that fear and
accepting solitude that free thought becomes possible. (GS 50) It is possible that Nietzsche leaves open
the potential of a higher form of community in which freedom is possible, but if so it would bear little
relation to kind of associations Tocqueville observes in America.
28 DIA 485
 What, for Tocqueville, is the relation between isolation and unfreedom? What

Tocqueville writes most explicitly is that “man in democratic centuries… distrusts [his

neighbor’s] justice and looks on his power with jealousy… [and thus] loves to make him feel at

each instant the common dependence of them both on the same master.”29 This is a relatively

simple story, in which men are so reluctant to grant their neighbors power that they mutually

agree to surrender all power to a faraway central government. But the deeper lesson of the story,

I want to argue, is that to undermine one’s neighbor’s power is inherently to undermine one’s

own; power itself is not something that isolated individuals are capable of exercising.

In pre-democratic times, of course, it seemed that aristocrats exerted great power on the

strength of their individual virtues and nobility of spirit. But Tocqueville would view this ‘great

man’ theory of power, if I may call it such, as an example of how “the manners of aristocracy

placed beautiful illusions over human nature.”30 A clearer picture shows that “in aristocratic

societies men have no need to unite to act” not because individuals can act alone, but rather

because they are already “kept very much together.” Thus “each wealthy and powerful citizen…

forms as it were the head of a permanent and obligatory association [of his dependents]… whom

he makes cooperate in the execution of his designs.”31 What seemed to be the power of the

individual was in fact the power of the association he led.

This point extends beyond an analysis of power to an analysis of selfhood itself.

“Aristocratic institutions have the effect of binding each man tightly to several of his fellow

citizens,” Tocqueville writes, and it seems to be this ‘binding’ that confers on each individual her

29 DIA 645
30 DIA 581
31 DIA 490
identity. Every individual “perceives higher than himself a man whose protection is necessary to

him, and below he finds another whom he can call upon for cooperation”;32 one’s relation to

one’s protectors and dependents not only determines one’s capacity for action, but in so doing

defines one’s notion of oneself. For Tocqueville no less than Nietzsche, it seems, one can only be

a true individual insofar as one can act and exert one’s power. Thus he writes that “sentiments

and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the

reciprocal action of men upon one another;”33 our higher capacities are realized only in some

form of association. The unsociable masses of citizens under democratic despotism, on the other

hand, lose “the faculty of thinking, feeling and acting by themselves, and thus… fall below the

level of humanity”;34 the truly isolated man, whom democracy makes possible on a large scale

for the first time in history, is something less than fully human.

We are now in a position to see why Tocqueville insists so emphatically on the

importance of associations in enabling men to “remain civilized” in democratic times:

associations enable humans to be fully themselves. Tocqueville describes the American as

“trust[ing] fearlessly in his own forces, which appear to him to suffice for everything” in the

same paragraph as he details the individual’s means of action: “he makes known his plan, offers

to execute it, calls individual forces to the assistance of his, and struggles hand to hand against

all obstacles.”35 From the perspective of the isolated man, who we saw also takes pride in his

self-sufficiency, this would seem a blatant contradiction; in the same breath Tocqueville speaks

of self-sufficiency and of the necessity of assistance. But from Tocqueville’s perspective (and

32 DIA 483
33 DIA 491
34 DIA 665
35 DIA 90
that of the American he describes), the individual’s “own forces” are only manifested in their

active exercise alongside others’ forces; and more broadly, the individual herself is manifested

only in her active participation in her community.36

The association, one could say, takes over the role previously played by the aristocrat; as

Tocqueville puts it, “when plain citizens associate, they can constitute very opulent, very

influential, very strong beings—in a word, aristocratic persons.”37 Tocqueville often speaks of

the necessity of these associations as secondary powers resisting central authority (just as

aristocrats resisted the power of the monarch), but as we've seen, this function reflects their

deeper necessity: to maintain the bonds between men and thus maintain men themselves. Thus

Tocqueville would criticize Nietzsche’s attempts to substitute the bygone aristocrat’s

independence from the masses by the segregation and isolation of the few ‘healthy’ beings. Not

only would he object that Nietzsche is attempting to “carry into the new world the institutions,

the opinions, the ideas born of the aristocratic constitution of the former society” rather than

“attain the kind of greatness and happiness that is proper to us,”38 but more fundamentally he

would argue that Nietzsche misunderstands what enabled that apparent aristocratic

‘independence’: not isolation, but rather an extremely tight underlying interdependence that

makes individual greatness possible.

36 For Tocqueville, the necessity of active as opposed to passive participation is crucial. Thus one feels
that “the great work of society is accomplished daily before his eyes and so to speak in his hands.” (DIA
291, my italics) And thus the active participation in public affairs through civil and political associations
leads the citizen to feel “glorified in the glory of the nation; in the success that it obtains he believes he
recognizes his own work, and he is uplifted by it.” (DIA, my italics) Note the fundamental difference
between this identification of self with nation and the subsumption of self into nation characteristic of
democratic despotism: “each citizen, having become like all the others, is lost in the crowd, and one no
longer perceives [anything] but the vast and magnificent image of the people itself.” (DIA 641)
37 DIA 668
38 DIA 675, slightly rearranged
 Where does an appreciation of Tocqueville’s analysis of the function of associations leave

us? I think we do Tocqueville a disservice if we read him as we would a contemporary political

scientist and look in his work for particular policy recommendations. One often hears

Tocqueville quoted in arguments, for example, for a renewed federal investment in American

“social capital.” It may well be that Tocqueville would have supported such a program,39 but one

might be tempted to ask: who cares what a mid-nineteenth century Frenchman would have

thought about twenty-first century policy? Tocqueville seems to me much more fruitfully read as

a theorist of human nature and society from whom we can learn something about ourselves and

our age. The fundamental teaching I read Tocqueville to impart, as I have tried to show, is that

we err when we understand freedom as what we’re allowed to do when no one interferes, power

as being stronger than our neighbor, and the self as contained within the individual; all these

heights of selfhood are collective creations, given life only by our collective work, impossible to

possess in isolation, and for all that no less our own.

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39 Although we should remember that the associations he described were not state funded and that in fact
he viewed them as an alternative to the European charitable establishments which “have all more or less
fallen into dependance on the sovereign.” (DIA 652)