Tocqueville on the 'Omnipotence of the Majority"
The 'tyranny of the majority' was already in full swing when Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America." The genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and several other ethnicities were contested by abolitionists and rejected by the majority. It took a Civil War to get straight about what Democracy stood for but this did not stop the conservative majority. The Civil Rights movement, the movement for women's suffrage, feminism, began around the time of the Civil War, or earlier. These two social movements are still pushing because the tyrannous majority led by faction and sect persist in discrimination. Plato called it "mob rule" or "the dictatorship of the majority" in the Cornford translation of "The Republic." Hegel called it the 'rabble' and stated in 'Philosophy of Right' that he had no solution to the problem. Napoleon hauled in cannon and blew them away! Thus ended for good the French Revolution even after Thermidor, the execution of the revolutionaries!
This is a Problem that Tocqueville turns to in that very important chapter from book one called “The omnipotence of the majority in the United States and its Effects,” which is, in many respects, a response or provides his reading and critique of the classical or traditional theory of democratic tyranny.
The U.S. constitution has enshrined the majority in its own Preamble – “We, the People.” But as sovereign power doubled, It has enshrined the majority and the elite representatives as it has sought to limit the powers of the people.
He is far less impressed than Madison or the Federalist authors were that the problem of majority faction has been solved in America. Again, the Federalist authors, following Locke and Montesquieu, believed all that was necessary was separation of powers, a system of representation, a system of checks and balances, that this could serve as an effective check on majority rule.
But Tocqueville was less certain of that. He was less certain that these institutional devices alone could check what he calls the “empire of the majority.” The 'empire of the majority' clearly has theological connotations, denoting a kind of divine omnipotence, that the people have come to be the ultimate or final authority. Rather than regarding the people in Madisonian terms simply as a kind of ongoing shifting coalition of interests, or expressions, Tocqueville regarded the majority in democratic societies, the power of the majority, as unlimited and unstoppable.
Legal guarantees of minority rights, he thought, were unlikely to be effective in the face of mobilized public opinion. Why does Tocqueville believe that, or what led him to express such skepticism about even American democracy’s inability to check the prospect of democratic tyranny?
Tocqueville’s answer was that majority tyranny was inseparable from the threats of revolutionary violence and particularly charismatic demagogues and military leaders like Napoleon in France and America’s counterpart to Napoleon, Andrew Jackson. Napoleon was in France, the man capable of mobilizing the masses into fits of patriotic zeal and to carry on war. Jacksonianism, for him, simply looked like an American form of Bonapartism, a military commander riding to political power on the wings of popular support. More than anything else, Tocqueville feared militarism combined with a kind of unlimited patriotic fervor.
In these respects you can see some of the less ennobling features of the democratic experience and the more ominous possibilities of democratic rule.
The power of the majority, he says, makes itself feared especially through the dominance of the legislature. He believed, we could talk about whether this belief is still valid or true that democracy tends towards a dominance of the legislatures where the people’s voice makes its will most clearly known as if the legislatures are expressions of the people! By having short elections or short cycles every two years in the House of Representatives, it was a way of making sure that the legislatures, the House, the states, Houses, are very close to public opinion and public control. He sees this as a dangerous thing, this kind of legislative dominance that he sees is one form in the way in which the tyranny of the majority expresses itself.
But the most important and the most memorable aspects of tyranny of the majority have less to do with these institutional forms. It has to do with the way in which the the empire of the majority makes itself felt in the realm of thought and opinion, the influence of the majority over thought. In a startling passage, Tocqueville remarks, “I know of no other country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.”
He is, I suspect, overstating the case, because political dialogue is the most important form of talk that we engage in, but his argument here is that the dangers to freedom of thought are exercised in subtle forms of exclusion and ostracism. Tocqueville is one of the first and most perceptive analysts of what today might be called the power of political correctness, and propaganda, to control and to eliminate certain kinds of ideas and opinions from being thought.
It is the fear of ostracism, in some sense, the fear of being socially ostracized through which the majority exercises its control. Tocqueville says that persecution can take many forms under a democratic people, from the cruelest to the most mild. He gives various examples of the crueler forms of the way in which the majority have expressed itself. In a lengthy footnote, he gives two examples; one in which during the War of 1812, he says there were some anti-war journalists in Baltimore who were taken out. Their newspaper press was burnt down and they were hung. This is a way in which mob mentality took over. He also uses the example of the way in which black voters in the state of Pennsylvania, and he focuses on this particularly, have been disenfranchised.
He mentions Pennsylvania in particular because Pennsylvania is a Quaker state, that is to say a state where one would have thought liberal opinion towards questions of racial justice would have been most advanced. Even there, he says, the majority constrained African American voters, free blacks, from voting.
Overt and cruel and persecutory ways, others milder, but through the form of ostracism democratic sovereignty can exercise itself. “Chains and executions are the coarse instruments,” he writes, “that tyranny formerly employed. But in our day, civilization has perfected despotism itself, which seemed to have nothing more to learn.” We have perfected despotism, he says. “Under the absolute government of one man, despotism struck crudely at the body so to reach the soul,” no doubt thinking about the Inquisition and things like this in Spain and in parts of Catholic Europe. France underwent 6 religious civil wars before 1789! He writes, “and the soul escaping from those blows rose gloriously above it. But, in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way. It leaves the body alone and goes directly for the soul.”
"Tocqueville’s new political science is based on a novel and profound understanding of the relationship between history or historical forces and human agency, between individual powers or agency and historical forces. Tocqueville attributes a kind of providential power to history. The immense, centuries-long progress or transition from the aristocratic to the democratic era seems to be, as he describes it, almost an act of divine providence, almost of divine will. He warns his readers that it is a mistake, it is self-defeating to try to resist or to turn back this movement. This would be futile. It would not only be futile. He even suggests it would be impious, it would be in some ways to go against the will of God, as if the hand of God were behind this immense historical progress or process. Tocqueville no doubt deliberately overstates that argument but he does so, I think, in order to make a serious and profound point." Smith, S 2009 "Introduction to Political Philosophy"
Our politics are deeply embedded within long structures of human history that we can do little to alter and escape. We seem to be deeply embedded, we as individuals, deeply embedded within these structures. This is, to use a term that modern political scientists often use to describe this, it is an argument from what is often called path dependency, that we are again deeply embedded within historical processes, tendencies, paths of development that we can do little to resist or control. And in many ways Tocqueville often–you will find Tocqueville often writing as if he is some kind of historical or sociological determinist allowing little room for individual initiative or agency. Words like “fate,” “destiny,” “tendency” are frequently used throughout the book to underscore the limits of political action. It would even be an interesting experiment to go through the book, page by page, and find how many examples of those kinds of words, “tendency,” “fate,” “destiny,” these kind of deterministic words that suggest irresistible movements, movement of history, how many times he uses these and in what context.
Here is what Tocqueville writes about the statesman. He says, “Sometimes after a thousand efforts the legislator succeeds in exerting an indirect influence on the destiny of nations and then one celebrates his genius whereas often the geographical position of the country about which he can do nothing, a social state that was created without his concurrence, mores and ideas
of whose origin he is ignorant, a point of departure unknown to him, in part irresistible movements to society against which he struggles in vain and which carry him along in turn.”
In sum, the problem is that the new structures of democracy, the institutions and their differentiated form of executive power, legislators and judiciary under a Constitution is a structural edifice enforcing the procedures and dialogue of the political structures, but Tocqueville posits a movement of history itself as an agential force, a natural law, which may undermine the man-made structure and cause surface events of a punitive nature!
