Member-only story
Communal Solidarity and Individual Freedom — Antagonists or Allies?
Editor's note — this essay was submitted to the 2020 edition of the Hubert Butler essay contest, an initiative by the House of European Art London (HEART).
As he jotted down his fascination with American life, De Tocqueville likely thought Democracy in America (1835) would be read back in France more like a travelogue than a towering work in theoretical politics. From Pausanias to Marco Polo, travel writing had been long established as a sought-out genre, while political philosophy had yet to blossom as a discipline of research. Otherwise, his year-long sojourn with Gustave de Beaumont across the American landscape of the early 1830s would have likely gone down in History as a success story in academic fieldwork, the Knossos excavation of political science. Incidentally, De Tocqueville and Beaumont were indeed on research duty to report on America’s prisons for the French government, but the story that caught their eye was not one of imprisonment, but of liberty.
As a work of cultural commentary, De Tocqueville’s magnum opus remains a seminal description of America’s character, even as the nation’s social fabric has evolved beyond recognition. That is perhaps precisely why the mirror Tocqueville held up to America’s communitarian tradition has withstood the test of time — the erosion of Tocquevillian…
