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Sexual Equality and the Family in Tocqueville's Democracy in America*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

F. L. Morton
F. L. Morton
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Abstract

Tocqueville is usually understood to have proposed a two-tiered antidote to “the problem of democracy”: the doctrine of “self-interest rightly understood” and the preservation of religious belief. This article argues that Tocqueville provided a previously unnoticed third tier to his prescription: the democratic family. Sheltered from the competitive individualism of society, the family is portrayed as a haven of co-operation that nurtures the habits of altruism. Central to this scheme is a “different but equal” regime of the sexes. Arguing that increased equality leads to increased competition, Tocqueville suggests that a thorough-going equality of the sexes would undermine the family's function of moral formation.

Résumé

On interprète généralement Tocqueville pour avoir proposé un antidote à deux niveaux au « problème de la démocratic »: la doctrine de « I'intérêt bien entendu » et la conservation des croyances religieuses. Cet article soutien que Tocqueville à foumi à sa prescription un troisième niveau qui, auparavant, était passé inaperçu: la famille démocratique. Protégé de 1'individualisme compétitif de la société, la famille est décrite comme étant un abri de la coopération qui entretient les coutumes de l'altruisme. Le thème central de cet exposé est un régime des sexes « different mais egal ». En soutenant qu'une égalié accrue méne à une compétition plus grande, Tocqueville suggère qu'une égalité intransigeante des sexes attaquerait la formation morale du fonctionnement de la famille

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 309 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1984

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References

1 Briefly stated, Tocqueville defines the problem of democracy as its tendency toward a historically novel form of statism. This tendency is attributed to the preference for equality over liberty in democratic societies. Popular resentment of private inequality creates a society in which “the people” become equal in terms of increasing individual impotence, while the state, in the name of helping “the people,” becomes increasingly omnipotent. A corollary development is the spread of “individualism,”a novel form of egoism that increasingly isolates each man from the next, thus weakening society and strengthening the state. (See footnote 33 below.) Also see Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

2 Zetterbaum makes a very strong case for a third tier—commerce, and the commercial spirit that it engenders amongst a democratic people. I accept this argument, but find that it is reducible to yet another form of self-interest rightly understood. See Zetterbaum, Problem of Democracy, 124–35.

3 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, trans, by Reeve, Henry, with a foreward by John Stuart Mill, vol. I (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 145Google Scholar. These include the federal form of government, the combination of centralized government and decentralized administration, trial by jury, political parties, liberty of the press, freedom of association, the doctrine of rights and the spirit of commerce. There is another group of more formal or legal institutions that Tocqueville views as beneficial to democracy, but that are more mechanical than educational in function. These include representative government, separation of powers, indirect election of senators, a strong judicial power and an influential legal profession.

4 See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 150–52. Religious belief discourages the adoption of the otherwise rational policy of successful injustice.

5 See Zetterbaum, The Problem of Democracy, 147 and 157–60.

6 Meyer, J. P., Prophet of the Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1939).Google Scholar

7 Lively, Jack, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).Google Scholar

8 Dresher, Seymour, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).Google Scholar

9 Pierson, George Wilson, abridged by Dudley C. Lunt, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Doubleday, 1959).Google Scholar

10 Zetterbaum, The Problem of Democracy,68, 82 and 87. His only mention of the education of women in a democracy is to note that it is too minor an aspect of the work to pursue (59).

11 Schleifer, James T., The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 237, 244, 246, 298 and 178. Only once does Schleifer interpret the family as a positive force in a democracy, 149.

13 Berns, Walter, The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 222–25.Google Scholar

14 A major exception is Susan Okin, Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, who misses Tocqueville completely.

15 Baer, Judith, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women's Labor Legislation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 180.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 182–83.

17 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 130.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 131.

19 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 119.

20 Ibid., 229.

21 Ibid., 119–20.

22 “Continuity and futurity” are Zetterbaum's terms, but the theme they denote is stressed by Tocqueville (Democracy in America, II, 178–81). Zetterbaum uses them only in relation to religion and does not apply them to the family.

23 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 11, 237. This assertion is strongly reminiscent of Aristotle's emphasis on the importance of the education of women and children at the close of Book Iofthe Politics, 1260b. Rousseau is equally outspoken on this subject. See Emile, Book V, and the “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva” of “A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.”

24 Ibid., 238.

25 Ibid., 237 (translation amended). It is generally acknowledged that Tocqueville was a close reader of Rousseau and greatly influenced by him. Nowhere is this more evident than in the passages relating to the education of women. One almost suspects that Tocqueville had Book V of the Emile before him while composing these passages. Tocqueville's guiding principle, that women are the source of morals, finds its parallel in the Emile (Paris: Gamier-Flammerion, 1966), 468. Tocqueville's comparison of the American and the French educations of young women nearly duplicates a similar comparison made by Rousseau of the French and the Ancients. Tocqueville seems merely to substitute the Americans for the Ancients, and to keep the same end: “mieux maintenir les moeurs.” See Emile, 508. Even Tocqueville's unfavourable comparison of Protestant and Catholic education (Democracy in America, II, 239) finds a parallel in this section of the Emile (509). For additional similarities, see footnotes 23, 26, 27 and 57.

26 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 240. Again, Tocqueville may be seen as following Rousseau's lead, and even uses the same image of the home as a convent. See Emile, 508.

27 Ibid., 242. The term “austere duties” is also used by Rousseau, Emile, 470.

28 Ibid., 239.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 233 and 236.

31 Ibid. I, Introduction, lxxii-lxxiii.

32 Ibid., II, 149.

33 The use of the public-private distinction easily gives rise to confusion, and Tocqueville's thought is especially susceptible to this problem. Modern liberalism clearly expanded the scope of “the private”—individual liberty—by reducing the scope of “the public”—those aspects of individual activity subject to state regulation. Tocqueville, a self-confessed political liberal, approved this change as enhancing the exercise of human freedom. On the other hand, he also saw an implicit threat to liberty in the social atomism that accompanies this change. Tocqueville captured the threat posed by the “privatization” of the regime in the novel phenomenon of “individualism.” An unchecked individualism creates social atomism, a condition that actually favours the expansion of the powers of the state by increasing demands on it. The state is increasingly asked both to do what before was done “voluntarily” by private individuals and families, and to prevent or deter antisocial behaviour that before individuals “voluntarily” refrained from doing. Tocqueville feared that over time this trend threatened to destroy political liberty. To arrest this trend, Tocqueville recommended that matrix of institutions and traditions that fostered the self-dependence of families and local communities, and the ethical self-restraint of individuals. (See footnote 3.) Tocqueville portrays the family as one of these institutions. It is private in that it arises out of a voluntary association, is not part of the state and is not (generally) subject to state regulation. However, its social consequences give it a political and thus a public significance.

34 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 251 and 253.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., 252.

38 Ibid., 232.

39 Before the cui bono method of political analysis popularized by Machiavelli and Hobbes became dominant, the exercise of paternal power was presumed to be benevolent. This benevolent rule of the father over the household was one of the principaljustifications for the analogous rule of kings over their subjects. See Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 9, s. 105. Also Schochett, Gordon, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1975).Google Scholar

40 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 186–87. Tocqueville emphasizes in both volumes I, 39–41, and II, 153, 232, the political significance of abolishing laws of entail and primogeniture, and the subsequent subdivision of estates. He declares that the repeal of entail laws in America during the revolution represented “the last step to equality.”

41 Ibid., 153 and 154.

42 Ibid., 158.

43 Ibid., 118–19. Zetterbaum and Schleifer, the only Tocqueville commentators to notice the family dimension in Democracy in America, comment only on its negative aspects. See The Problem of Democracy, 66; and The Making of Democracy in America, 178, 237, 244, 246 and 248: “When conditions are equal, when each person is more or less sufficient unto himself and has neither the duty to give nor receive from anyone else, it is natural that he withdraws into himself and that for him society ends where his family ends.”

44 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 255.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 251.

47 Ibid., 251 and 254.

48 This is not to say that the law does not both reflect and reinforce moral beliefs of the people. Rather, the moral scope of the law in a liberal regime is much narrower than the moral scope of the law, or nomos, in traditional, nonliberal regimes. In a liberal regime there are many actions that are considered “immoral” but not illegal, while in a traditional regime this would be rare. Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21, with Aristotle, Ethics, V, vi, i.

49 I refer to Tocqueville's analysis of the fate of both the North American Indians and European aristocracy when confronted by the new commercial ethos of modern democracy. Their respective destructions are both attributed to their refusal to abandon their traditional ethics of honour and virtue when thrown into competition with the new commercial society. Their example thus suggests an interesting parallel with that of women. See I, 408, 409, 416, 420 and 423.

50 This line of reasoning constituted one of the principal arguments against the women's suffrage movement in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Anti-suffragists argued that politics was a dirty business, and that women could not participate in it without becoming morally sullied. The suffragists responded that politics as then practised was indeed a dirty business, but that if women were given the vote, they would clean it up! That is, ratherthan politics “lowering” the character of women, women would “elevate” the character of politics. Significantly, both sides assumed the moral superiority of women. See Kraditor, Aileen S., The Ideas of the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Anchor Books. 1971).Google Scholar

51 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 119. The relationship between equality, competition, and compassion is further developed in II, 195–200.

52 This “hors concours” theory of democratic compassion is developed by Clifford Orwin, “Compassion as a Source of Democratic Morals,” paper delivered at the 1977 meeting of the American Political Science Association.

53 Tocqueville, , Democracy in America, II, 236.Google Scholar

54 In this respect, Tocqueville's defense of the “bourgeois family” resembles that of Hegel. See Landes, Joan, “Hegel's Conception of the Family,” in Elshtain, Jean Bethke (ed.), The Family in Political Thought (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 125–44.Google Scholar

55 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 251–52.

56 Ibid.

57 It is plausible to assume that Tocqueville's appeal to nature as the justification for a “different but equal” regime of the sexes is based on Rousseau's elaboration of the same argument. A generation earlier, Rousseau made many of the same arguments in Book V of the Emile, 465–75: that in all things common to the species, the sexes are equal, but that in things unique to the sex they are not comparable; that the physical differences of sex give rise to moral differences; that the most important of these differences is that women are the moral arbiters of society; and that a healthy political structure depends upon a healthy family structure. There are also numerous similarities of detail that seem too close to be accidental. See footnotes 23, 25, 26 and 27. For an analysis of Rousseau's “nature” argument, see Morton, F. L., “Sexual Equality and the Family in the United States Supreme Court: A Study of Judicial Policy-Making” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1981), 133–45.Google Scholar

58 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 243–50. One wonders whether Tocqueville had read Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac: “Where there's marriage without love, there will soon be love without marriage.”

59 Ibid., 236.

60 Ibid., 240.

61 Ibid., 1–13.

62 See footnote 33, above.