Restlessness in Volume 1: Tocqueville's Praise of American “Energy”

From the earliest moments of his visit to America, Tocqueville saw feverish activity. He and Beaumont arrived on American shores on May 9th, 1931. By May 18th, he was recording his first impressions in a diary. Those impressions included observations of a bustling economy and a people constantly changing locations and professions. By June 7th, he had concluded that one of the distinctive traits of the American people was “a restless temper.”Footnote ²⁵ Tocqueville immediately began contemplating what the causes might be of what he called American “instability of character.” At first, his thoughts turned to the newness of American society and to Americans’ confidence about and hope in the future. What he thought most shaped American attitudes, however, were the changes taking place in the natural landscape and physical condition of the country.Footnote ²⁶ He developed this theme in a letter to his friend: “Change seems to [the American] the natural state of man; how would it be otherwise? Everything about him is in constant movement; laws, opinions, public officials, fortunes, the very land here changes in appearance from day to day.”Footnote ²⁷ These conditions, he judged, gave Americans positive views of change in general. “Instability, instead of meaning disaster to [the American], seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.”Footnote ²⁸

Tocqueville's reference to “disaster” here hints at a key reason that he initially regarded the feverish activity occurring in America in a positive light—namely, that an energetic, change-loving populace seemed to have such different implications here than it did in France, where widespread desires for change and advancement had exploded the political and social order twice in the past fifty years, and seemed as though they would continually destabilize the status quo. Tocqueville was especially struck by the way in which the American experience upended conventional European assumptions on this point. Contemplating the “great social dangers” of “restlessness of spirit, immoderate desire for wealth, and extreme love of independence,” Tocqueville concluded that, in America, these held little danger to the body politic, because they could be so readily satisfied. “America's vices,” he reflected, “are almost as useful to society as its virtues.”Footnote ²⁹ The threat posed by the expansion of education back home was similarly defused here. “There is less to fear here than anywhere else,” he wrote to his father, “from the malaise caused to a State by a great number of people whose education lifts them above their standing and whose restlessness could disturb society.”Footnote ³⁰ “There is no moral energy or intellectual activity but finds ready fuel for its flames.”Footnote ³¹

While Tocqueville was initially most struck by the vitality of America's economic life, it did not take long for him to see that Americans, while not taking to the barricades as their counterparts had done so recently in Paris, were actively and enthusiastically—even frenetically—participating in politics.Footnote ³² He even wrote a short satirical account of American political activity, found in his notebooks, in which an unnamed European visitor exhausts himself by following his American hosts around from one political gathering to another. At the end of a day of frenzied political activity, the narrator is told of the Americans’ intention to attend one final meeting in support of the Polish people's demand for liberation. He replies, “Good God! I thought you were fatigued after all the difficult efforts that you made today to increase the sum of your happiness. A European would think only of going to rest and would abandon other peoples to their fate.”Footnote ³³ In volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes countless cooperative and communal endeavors taking place throughout America: the construction of churches, roads, and schools, all being conducted with rapidity and facility. He says he found in American public life “an image of strength, a little untamed, to be sure, but full of vigor; and of life, not without mishap, to be sure, but also dynamic and energetic.”Footnote ³⁴

It is this line of thinking that culminates in his suggestion that the greatest benefit of democracy is the high level of energy it imparts to society. Contrasting free societies with those that are not free, Tocqueville writes that the former are “all bustle and activity,” while the latter are static and self-satisfied. In the former, “improvement and progress are on everyone's mind.”Footnote ³⁵ All of this energy and activity, of course, yielded extraordinary results in productivity and prosperity. But it was not only the physical results of this energy that Tocqueville saw as positive. He argues in volume 1 that the “universal movement” occurring in the United States keeps the soul in “a febrile agitation, which admirably disposes it to efforts of all kinds and keeps it above the common run of mankind.”Footnote ³⁶ He thus seems to have judged that the constant change to which Americans were exposed made them adventurous and innovative, and this drove them to success in commercial pursuits. Even Lawler, whose book The Restless Mind greatly illuminated the influence of Pascal's profoundly negative view of restlessness on Tocqueville, acknowledged that “Tocqueville sees greatness in the restlessness of the Americans.”Footnote ³⁷

And yet perhaps Lawler conceded too much. While Tocqueville spoke admiringly of the energy he observed in Americans, and of the lively, vibrant pace of their economic and political life, his praise for the spiritual effects of the “universal movement” occurring in America culminates in the suggestion that it gives rise to excellence in commercial pursuits. That is certainly noteworthy, but Tocqueville himself did not regard excellence in commercial pursuits as the highest kind of human excellence. Given the less theoretical character of volume 1, this issue does not come up. But by the time Tocqueville wrote volume 2, he seems to have thought more about the hierarchy of human goods and about the place of commercial excellence within that hierarchy. He also seems to have reflected on the costs associated with the many benefits of democratic energy, and to have decided that it would be worth bringing those costs to his readers’ attention. In volume 2, then, Tocqueville presents the energy associated with democracy in a much darker light.

The First Cause of Democratic Restlessness: The Love of Material Well-Being

A new wariness of democratic energy can be observed early on in volume 2, in Tocqueville's discussion of the intellectual tendencies fostered by democracy. Whereas in volume 1 he emphasized the efficiency and productivity that resulted from democracy's unleashing of man's energies, in volume 2 he points to a different consequence of social and economic mobility: no one has the time or the inclination for “meditation,” the kind of sustained attention that allows for in-depth study of a difficult subject. In democracies, he writes, “everyone is restless: some want to attain power, others to achieve wealth. In the midst of this universal tumult,” he asks, “this constant clash of conflicting interests, this unending quest for fortune, where is the calm necessary to the deeper strategies of the intellect to be found?”Footnote ³⁸ His newly negative assessment of democratic energy comes across most powerfully in the fact that he now refers to it as “restlessness.” Rather than characterizing constant change as invigorating, he now calls it “troubling” and says that the “constant turnover of people … disturbs and distracts the mind without stimulating or elevating it.”Footnote ³⁹

Then, in part 2 of volume 2, restlessness comes to the foreground. Tocqueville argues that, in places untouched by progress, in which one finds a poor and uneducated populace, one finds hardship but also tranquility and resilience amid difficult circumstances. In America, where there is great material prosperity, relatively speaking, and great hopefulness of achieving still more prosperity, one finds widespread discontent. He describes Americans moving, changing, and shifting from one place to another, from one occupation to another, from one life to another. He describes people buying land and houses only to sell them quickly and changing professions multiple times in their careers.Footnote ⁴⁰ The phenomena he describes here overlap quite extensively with the universal change and motion that he praised in volume 1. What had been described as expressions of dynamic energy now become expressions of dissatisfaction and discontent.

In trying to articulate the causes of American restlessness, Tocqueville no longer talks about the changing physical landscape or about Americans’ optimistic sense of limitless possibility.Footnote ⁴¹ Rather, he focuses first on the fact that a democratic social condition inspires a love of material well-being. He explains that aristocracy suppressed the concern with material well-being by putting it beyond the reach of most people and placing it almost beneath the notice of the privileged few, who rarely needed to concern themselves with it. Democracy, on the other hand, removes the barriers to material prosperity among the poor as well as the protections of it among the rich. In this way, a democratic social condition encourages people to care about material prosperity and to focus their attention and efforts on it.Footnote ⁴² And democracy does more than open up a path to material prosperity. It also magnifies the significance of material well-being by collapsing all other distinctions. Tocqueville observes that in democracies, “money is virtually the only thing that still creates very visible differences among the [men of democracy] and sets some apart from their peers. The distinction that is born of wealth is enhanced by the disappearance and diminution of all the others.”Footnote ⁴³ When the old sources of prestige—birth, estate, or occupation—cease to be important, money becomes the arbiter of success.

Tocqueville saw the magnified importance of material well-being as problematic for a few reasons. The person who seeks only material pleasures is tormented by the thought that life is short and his time to enjoy himself is limited. “The memory of life's brevity constantly spurs him on.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This makes the pursuit of material pleasures urgent and frenetic. It fills the man of democracy with “anxieties, fears, and regrets, and keeps his soul in a state of constant trepidation that impels him again and again to change plans and places.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Imagination adds to the problem, fostering the contemplation of countless pleasures that will elude his grasp.Footnote ⁴⁶ This preoccupation with material pleasures is also problematic, in Tocqueville's view, for what it draws people away from. The pursuit of material pleasures distracts people from their spiritual longings. As he puts it, material pleasures “block [the soul's] view of the rest of the world” and “sometimes come between the soul and God.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Preoccupation with material pleasures fosters a tendency to think in entirely materialistic terms. He writes: “Democracy encourages the taste for material gratifications. If this taste becomes excessive, it soon leads men to believe that everything is mere matter, and materialism in turn adds to the forces that propel pursuit of those same gratifications with wild ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are driven.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Now, Tocqueville famously saw great strength in American religion, and hoped that there was strength enough in it to temper Americans’ obsession with material pleasures. In the chapters shortly following the one on restlessness, he voices this hope and exhorts all “decent and enlightened men” to bolster religion's strength.Footnote ⁴⁹ But he also thought that the love of material pleasures resists being tempered, and that it has the power to push people's religious longings to the back of their minds, if not out of their minds altogether. Meditating on the consequences of the decline of religion in modern democracy, Tocqueville argues that men become frightened in the face of limitless independence. “With everything in a perpetual state of agitation, they become anxious and fatigued.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The loss of religious belief thus becomes a powerful source of restlessness in its own right.Footnote ⁵¹ This is a Pascalian sentiment: “It is not good to be too free.”Footnote ⁵²

Indeed, this is where Pascal's influence makes itself keenly felt. Tocqueville's statements about material pleasures imply that even if a person can succeed in securing a steady supply of pleasures for himself, such pleasures can never altogether satisfy, because they are not what human beings most need and long for. Human beings naturally long for goods of the soul as well as goods of the body, and they rebel against the thought that earthly life is the only life. “Man did not bestow upon himself the taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal. These sublime instincts were not born of a caprice of his will. Their fixed foundation lies in man's nature. They exist in spite of his efforts. He can hinder and deform but not destroy them.”Footnote ⁵³ And so, by pushing people toward the pursuit of material goods, democracy discourages them from confronting their own deepest needs. Tocqueville repeatedly points out how busy Americans are, and he stresses that Americans make themselves busy. They “feel pushed by an irresistible need for action.” Their activity, he argues, has the character of a flight from something. That something seems to be the contemplation of their own demise. In America, he remarks, “you feel existence less,” and “you arrive at the great abyss without having had the time to notice the road you followed.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In their efforts to pursue material prosperity, then, Americans, in Tocqueville's view, gain comfort, convenience, and a higher standard of living. But they become less able to meet their nonmaterial needs. This is true of other nonmaterial needs besides the need for spiritual fulfillment. Tocqueville points out that the constant movement of Americans from place to place and from one profession to another deprives people of their ties to one another. It causes them to abandon their friends and families and makes the people in each profession “strangers to one another, each indifferent and almost invisible to all the rest.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This compounds the severing of connections between individuals in democracy that makes them “at once independent and weak.”Footnote ⁵⁶ It also changes men's relationship to their work. When people are frequently changing their professions, few experience the satisfaction that comes from long mastery of a craft or art. There is, Tocqueville reflects, “something unexpected and in a sense improvised about [Americans’] lives. Hence they are often forced to do things that they barely learned, to speak of things they scarcely understand, and to engage in labors for which no long apprenticeship has prepared them.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, democracy makes it harder to take satisfaction from work, even as it puts paid work at the center of men's lives.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Second Cause of Democratic Restlessness: Envy

In volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville identifies envy as one of the passions that originate from the democratic state of society. He speaks there of “the restlessness of the heart which is natural to men when, all conditions being almost equal, each person sees the same chance of rising.”Footnote ⁵⁹ And yet envy is not simply the desire for wealth or material pleasures by another name; Tocqueville points out that American leaders had largely managed to defuse the danger that envy posed to their society by countering it with the idea of rights. Envy, in his understanding, signifies resentment. In keeping with the aims of volume 1, in this passage he emphasizes that American democracy has managed to quell this problem. When he returns to the issue in volume 2, rather than emphasizing the ways in which the threat posed by envy has been defused, he pauses to consider it as a problem in and of itself. Love of material pleasures is the first cause of democratic restlessness in volume 2; envy is the second.

However democratic a people's social state and political constitution, they will tend to turn their focus to those who enjoy some kind of superiority over them. It is impossible to do away with every possible inequality and every least privilege, and those that remain will offend.Footnote ⁶⁰ Envy is not simply a resentment of others for having more than oneself. It also has a moral element, because democratic morality makes all inequalities seem wrong and unfair. In aristocracy, the experience of hierarchy and privilege is softened by the principles that provided a rationale for inequality.Footnote ⁶¹ Democracy provides no such rationale. Thus, “the least superiority held by one member of society over another appears as an unjustifiable privilege.”Footnote ⁶² The belief in equality sharpens the experience of relative hardship, then, by adding a sense of injustice to it.

Now, one belief that might soften the experience of inequality in democracy is, of course, the belief that one's status and position may improve. If one can hope to ascend the socioeconomic ladder, it might make present hardships more bearable. But, as Tocqueville notes, while ambitious men “may readily conclude that the road to success is wide and smooth” in a democracy, “this is a mistaken belief, one to which experience supplies a daily corrective.”Footnote ⁶³ This point comes into sharper relief when Tocqueville takes up the effects of the burgeoning development of industry, an element of Tocqueville's account that scholars have tended to neglect when considering democratic restlessness. He explains that the nature of industrial enterprises threatens to trap low-level workers in jobs and situations that do not admit of change.Footnote ⁶⁴ For those workers, the hopes kindled by the new egalitarian politics are more illusion than reality. The experience of day-laborers is a particularly acute example of the general truth that hopes of advancement are almost always met with frustration in democracies because of the universal competition that democracy sets in motion. “The same equality that allows each citizen to entertain vast hopes makes all citizens individually weak. It limits their strength in every respect, even as it allows their desires to expand.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Tocqueville's reference to the “expansion of desires” touches on another aspect of his account of life in modern democracy, one closely connected with the problem of envy. In Tocqueville's view, one reason it is hard for people to have their needs and desires satisfied is that the human experience of needs and desires is not fixed, but changes with people's social and political context, as well as their personal circumstances. He holds that men's experience of material prosperity is relative and comparative; just how sufficient one's material condition seems to be is determined, in large part, by how it compares to the condition of one's neighbors. This is especially problematic in democracies, because a democratic social condition encourages exhibitionism with regard to wealth.Footnote ⁶⁶ Aristocrats enjoy a tranquil sense of superiority. But in a democracy, “since each person is surrounded by a million others who possess quite similar or analogous advantages, pride becomes exigent and jealous; it fastens on trifles and defends them stubbornly.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The men of democracies are eager to show off any advantages they acquire, because they are uncertain of their superiority. They feel the need to confirm it both to themselves and to others.

Even the satisfaction of material needs is not as easy or straightforward a task as it might seem. In his Memoir on Pauperism, Tocqueville argues that man's material needs are not static, but change with his social and economic circumstances. He gives a brief sketch of the development of man's relationship to material prosperity in the West. The sketch appears to be heavily influenced by Rousseau, another one of the authors with whom Tocqueville said he “lived a little every day.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In it, Tocqueville argues that man in his savage state was concerned only with basic needs.Footnote ⁶⁹ With each century of development, and especially with the growth of industry, both the powers and the desires of men increased.Footnote ⁷⁰ Those powers and desires gave rise to new habits, and those habits began to be experienced as needs.Footnote ⁷¹ Since industry encourages the emergence of new needs, and democracy encourages industry, the needs of modern democratic societies are destined to diversify and multiply continually. Thus it is that in America, an unprecedented level of social energy goes into the invention of new ways to meet social needs.Footnote ⁷² And yet “new needs arise every day.”Footnote ⁷³

Moral Restlessness: Politics, Family, Industry, and the Search for Self-Transcendence

Americans’ greatest source of satisfaction, in Tocqueville's account, is their involvement in politics. He says that Americans love politics and would feel utterly empty without it. A closer look at his depiction of American political life, however, suggests that he thinks it is an expression of American restlessness rather than an antidote to it. Tocqueville describes Americans holding meetings “for every imaginable purpose”; making public pledges, declarations, and pronouncements; and listening to speeches and giving them, as much for fun as for any serious purpose.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the satirical account of American political life found in Tocqueville's notebooks, after learning that his American friends will attend one final meeting to express solidarity with the Poles, the European narrator inquires whether they would be in favor of going to war with Russia. His American friend replies that they would not. On the contrary, the American says, Russia is one of America's most faithful allies; what they want is merely to express their indignation at Russia's treatment of the Poles. “I understand,” says the European, finally grasping the situation, “that you are going to make speeches about Poland.” “More or less,” comes the reply from the American—“consequently it is more of a diversion than a serious matter.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Tocqueville thus seems to have thought that much of American political life consisted of superficial posturing. And in his chapter on restlessness, he suggests that politics is yet another means Americans use to keep themselves busy. “Should the American's private affairs leave him a moment's respite, he will plunge straightaway into the whirlwind of politics.”Footnote ⁷⁶ And while he suggests that Americans find great entertainment in politics, he also suggests that this is due to the impoverishment of all other forms of entertainment. In America, political activity is “life's only pleasure.”Footnote ⁷⁷

There is also another aspect of American political life to consider. American political life, while dynamic, does not seem to Tocqueville to be about questions of great moral significance or to require much self-sacrifice. The life of the New England towns—the real locus of American political life in Tocqueville's view—is tranquil and easy. Few conflicts arise, owing to their small size and homogenous populations. Town politics are not about life-or-death issues, but the ordinary business of life. And what is true in the towns is also true more broadly of the country, for the physical and material circumstances make American politics a relatively easy business. “The Americans do not have neighbors; consequently no great wars, financial crises, ravages, nor conquest to fear; they need neither heavy taxes nor a numerous army, nor great generals.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The issues and disputes animating national politics, such as the Tariff and the Bank of the United States, are mundane questions of economic interest. Americans are fervently attached to their property above all else, and all of their political conflicts revolve around it in one way or another.Footnote ⁷⁹

So American politics, in Tocqueville's view, is not a theater of great moral action. Now Tocqueville concluded that, from a political point of view, this mattered surprisingly little. The circumstances in America were so favorable to public peace and prosperity that the society could largely do without self-sacrifice, provided that people took a sufficiently enlightened understanding of their self-interest.Footnote ⁸⁰ “Tocqueville found in the self-interest well understood of the Americans,” Kahan writes, “a democratic substitute for virtue.”Footnote ⁸¹ But what does the character of democratic citizenship mean for human happiness? This is much harder to say. Scholars tend to take Tocqueville to be saying that people are becoming more self-concerned in the democratic era. They focus on the fact that he tries to shore up the doctrine of enlightened self-interest as a new foundation for civic virtue.Footnote ⁸² And Tocqueville does indeed present this doctrine approvingly, arguing that it is well adapted to the needs of the new political era. But in his account, the prevalence of this doctrine is not a simple, straightforward story of the people of modern democracies becoming more selfish. In a way, his account suggests the contrary. Americans may not undertake grand moral actions, in Tocqueville's assessment, but they do feel the impulse to help others. Their outlook being what it is, however, they feel the need to explain their public service—both to themselves and to others—in self-interested terms. “Americans,” he says, “would rather do justice to their philosophy than to themselves.” They explain themselves as self-interested even when what they are really doing is “yielding to the disinterested, spontaneous impulses that are part of man's nature.”Footnote ⁸³ They often act similarly in the realm of religion. Americans justify their Christian piety as a form of the pursuit of self-interest, by claiming that they practice their religion out of a concern with their own salvation. But in this too, he says, they sell themselves short and thus delude themselves.Footnote ⁸⁴

Tocqueville's assessment of the gap between Americans’ true motivations and their understanding of their motivations suggests that moral longings, like religious longings, are permanent features of the human soul. Even though the people of modern democracies seem to abandon their admiration for devotion, they feel themselves drawn toward selfless service. The idea of self-interest rightly understood has become popular because it offers the citizens of modern democracies a way out of their dilemma, a way of allowing them to serve their communities without feeling foolish or exploited. It allows them to give of themselves without having to admit to themselves what it is that they are doing. In the realm of moral action, then, a part of human nature continues to make itself felt without being acknowledged, and perhaps not even recognized, by those who experience it.

One might conjecture that Tocqueville thought that the “disinterested impulses that are part of man's nature” would simply shrivel up in the democratic era, absent any social or political encouragement. But in his view, these impulses endure, showing up in places both expected and unexpected. They show up, for example, in war. A democratic people's desire for quick success, together with the general intensity of their passions, makes them “willing to risk their lives in order to assure themselves in an instant the spoils of victory.”Footnote ⁸⁵ For the most part, Tocqueville thought this willingness would lie dormant, for he predicted that America would rarely be involved in wars—in part because its size and geographic isolation insulates it from military conflicts, and in part because democracy itself discourages war. The materialism that prevails in democracies makes people risk averse and makes them prioritize protecting their property.Footnote ⁸⁶

More surprising is the appearance that the impulse toward self-forgetting makes in an entirely different quarter: moneymaking. The attitude and energy with which Americans approach commercial enterprises, Tocqueville writes, can only be described as a kind of heroism. An American sailor will risk everything, even his life, to make it across the ocean one day earlier than his British rival, thereby beating him to the customer, and making a few more dollars’ profit. Tocqueville goes so far as to compare the self-forgetting of the American merchant to the men of the French Revolution.Footnote ⁸⁷ One scholar even characterizes Tocqueville's view this way: “For Americans, commerce is the moral equivalent of war.”Footnote ⁸⁸ But the “heroism” of the American merchant or sailor is, of course, heroism only in a sense. It may be impressive, but it is not the sort of self-forgetting that provides deep spiritual satisfaction.Footnote ⁸⁹

In general, if there is one area in which Tocqueville held that man's desires are better satisfied in democracy than in aristocracy, it is the family. American family life struck Tocqueville as attractive and even enviable. In democracy, family relationships do not carry with them the heavy burdens or onerous duties of aristocratic families. People's levels of wealth and success are not entirely predetermined by the families into which they are born, so the family does not give rise to the frustrations it often elicited in the aristocratic era. Democracy, Tocqueville argues, makes family life free and familiar, allowing natural affection to bloom. The relations between father and son in particular are “more intimate and tender” than in aristocracies. Among siblings, too, absent any “particular prerogatives,” an easy intimacy and affection develops.Footnote ⁹⁰

One would expect the democratic family, then, to constitute a significant check on restlessness, both because it satisfies the natural human desire for love and affection and because it provides an outlet for the human impulse to give of oneself. And, at least in volume 1, Tocqueville does present the family as a source of tranquility in the democratic era. Enumerating the key supports of the American republic, he cites the order that reigns in the American household. He argues that the character of men's domestic lives critically shapes their political attitudes, giving them a taste for calm rather than for agitation and tumult.Footnote ⁹¹ This account of the democratic family in volume 1 emphasizes order and regularity rather than selfless devotion, but the result of that order and regularity—peaceful repose—suggests a respite from restlessness.

In volume 2, however, both the moral situation within the democratic family and the relationship of the family to democratic restlessness come to light as more complicated. The lightness of the bonds between family members makes it easier for them to love one another. But the same facts that make it easier for affection to develop between family members—the gentleness of family bonds, siblings’ freedom to shape their relationships as they choose—make the family something other than a locus of high moral action. The strings of family obligation may pull in America, as they do in all ages and places, but the pull is relatively gentle. Precisely because the democratic family is so unproblematic, so unfettered by social and economic significance, it rarely requires grand gestures of selflessness from its members. So the family is a source of meaningful human connection in democracy, in Tocqueville's view. But, like America's boisterous politics, it is not the stuff of exalted self-transcendence.

This does not mean that self-sacrifice is absent from the democratic family. Tocqueville follows up his account of the easy freedom of the democratic family with an account of the lives of American women. He expresses admiration for the self-denial that American women practice on a daily basis. He highlights the response of American women to what he calls the “great trials” of their lives. He describes the frequency with which American families ascend from poverty to wealth and back again and remarks that “the women of America bear these revolutions with quiet, indomitable energy. Their desires seem to contract with their fortunes as readily as they expand.”Footnote ⁹² Not only do American women bear up admirably under great reversals of fortune, they also adapt to being brought along by their husbands who go west. Tocqueville makes reference to his discussion in volume 1 of those who “hastened so boldly after wealth.” But now he points out that these men—whose dynamic energy he had earlier praised as constituting indispensable fuel for American democracy—took their wives with them, and made them share in their “perils and miseries.” He praises the inner strength of women who went “virtually without transition from the wealthy homes of their parents to drafty cabins in the woods.”Footnote ⁹³ In this presentation, rather than checking the restlessness of American men, the moral virtue of American women facilitates it, and is necessitated by it.

Art, Literature, and the Democratic Mind

One final element of Tocqueville's account of democratic man bears on the theme of democratic restlessness, and that is his analysis of how democracy affects people's experiences of great works. Here, Tocqueville reveals what he regards as some of the most problematic effects of democracy on the mind and soul. We noted earlier that democracy shapes Americans’ experience of work. It also shapes Americans’ experience of leisure. The first way it does so is by severing the link between leisure and privilege. When Tocqueville lays out the identifying features of a democratic social state early in volume 1, one of them is the absence of a leisured class “with the time and inclination to devote itself to high intellectual pursuits.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In democracies, even the wealthy throw themselves into industrial or commercial enterprises.Footnote ⁹⁵ Leisure becomes viewed as a break from paid work, which is regarded as the serious business of life. With the downgrading of leisure comes the demotion or loss of respect for the intellectual and artistic pursuits that people once used leisure to pursue.Footnote ⁹⁶ Americans thus tend to see leisure as a problem to be solved, as time to be filled. “When, at the end of a year filled with labors, the American discovers that a brief period of leisure remains, he turns his restless curiosity to this or that corner of the vast territory of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred leagues in a few days the better to distract himself from his happiness.”Footnote ⁹⁷

As a result of this general orientation toward leisure, democratic peoples turn to the contemplation of art and literature without really expecting to find profound meaning there. In fact, in Tocqueville's observation, when confronted with literary and artistic productions, democratic peoples find it hard even to pay attention. The thought that they ought to be doing something more practical and productive is a constant drain on their focus. Moreover, democratic peoples are always in a hurry. They can give but little time and attention to each thing they pursue. “Habitual inattention,” he reflects, “is the disease of the democratic mind.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Democratic habits of mind thus discourage people from deriving meaningful experiences from the artistic creations with which they fill up their leisure time.

And yet they want to find meaning in them. Tocqueville notes that, for the most part, Americans live orderly, productive, one might say bourgeois lives. They are practical, prudent, and focused on their work. “It is impossible to imagine anything as insignificant, dull, or encumbered with petty interests—in a word, as antipoetic—as the life of an American.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Like all people of democracies, when they turn to literature and theater, they want to be transported.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ They want “deep emotions of the heart”; they long to be moved.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But they are ill-equipped to be transported, because they are “impatient in their desires.”Footnote ¹⁰² They want every moment to be profitable. “They insist on facile beauties that yield of their own accord and can be enjoyed immediately. … They have need of intense and rapid emotions, sudden illuminations, and glaring truths or errors to wrench them out of their own lives and plunge them instantly and almost violently into the heart of the subject.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Needless to say, a certain skepticism about the depth of such experiences is detectible in Tocqueville's characterization of the democratic experience of art. For Tocqueville, if one wants to understand a work, “penetrating and sustained attention” is necessary. One can see this in his remark that a man who tried to ground all of his own opinions in his own independent judgment “would be kept in a perpetual state of agitation that would prevent him from delving deeply into any truth or settling on any firm conviction.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He also worried that his own poor health would one day cause him to “acquire the habit of idle musing, that is to say, touching subjects without embracing them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To hurry through great literature or art in hopes of finding great meaning there, then, would simply not work in his view. In this way, too, he seems to have judged that, in their experience of literature and art, the people of modern democracies want something they are ill-equipped to get.