I. The Social Question: A Cross-National Conversation

To study pauperism was to study England. Tocqueville took an interest in the subject during his journeys to England and Ireland in the 1830s, where he observed the “immense workshop, huge forge, and vast shop” that was Birmingham. It was also where he noted the tensions inherent in industrialization. Manchester was a lesson in contrasts—a “palace of industry” and “refuge of poverty.”Footnote ⁸ His observations seemed to confirm the insights of his countryman Jean-Baptiste Say, who claimed that the English invented the term “pauperism” to describe their country's widespread condition.Footnote ⁹

Still, defining and delimiting the “pauper class” remained somewhat of an open question. The term signaled a shift in conceptions of the “able-bodied poor,” from agricultural laborers and mendicants to industrial workers and urban poor. But as Drescher notes, neither English nor French theorists discriminated between categories of the poor in discussions of laws and relief.Footnote ¹⁰ The working poor, the industrial wage-earner, the unemployed, and the indigent were grouped together and joined to moral categories of the dangerous, delinquent, and depraved. Titles of various writings on poverty attest to this ambiguity—les classes laborieuses, prolétaires, paupérisme.Footnote ¹¹ The only notable distinction was between rich and poor, highest and lowest, perhaps the result of a persistent aristocratic mindset that could not account for the emergence of new classes and occupations.Footnote ¹²

Despite this ambiguity, at least one characteristic remained constant: paupers were distinguished by a condition of permanent poverty (or at least, the threat of permanence), from which their present state offered no obvious escape. If such persons were not currently relief recipients, they soon would be, as they could not provide for their own subsistence. A second characteristic concerned the origins of pauperism itself. Nearly all social theorists attributed pauperism, in one way or another, to industrialization. This was especially true of French thinkers who, like Tocqueville, looked upon England's industrial centers and saw poverty in the same places.Footnote ¹³

Underlying the problem of pauperism was a deep concern about the social consequences of poverty. Nineteenth-century discussions of relief deepened Thomas Malthus's image of the moral and societal degradation—the “drunkenness, carelessness, and dissipation”—spurred by poverty.Footnote ¹⁴ Eugene Buret warned of a new barbarism among the poor who have “regressed into savage life from exhaustion,” and wrote of entire populations living “outside of society, outside of the law, as outlaws.”Footnote ¹⁵ Aldophe Thiers spoke of “the vile mob that overturned every Republic,”Footnote ¹⁶ and H. A. Frégier identified pauperism as “the social danger… the proper object of fear to society.”Footnote ¹⁷

While these portrayals tied poverty to criminality and revolution, images of the poor as outsiders suggested a still more fundamental fear about the poorest classes relative to society. Paupers seemingly lived beyond the bounds of community, lacking both permanency of place (nomads) and the moral and mental disposition (barbarians) to take part in the larger social order. Their material and moral state became a problem of sociality. As Pierre Rosanvallon writes, paupers “revived the specter of a fourth order driven outside the gates of the city and even excluded from the human community.”Footnote ¹⁸ Pauperism represented a new breaking point between member and stranger, civilization and barbarism. This was truly the social question—a concern for how the extremes of poverty could alter the individual soul, and with it, the boundaries of the human community. Solving the issue of pauperism meant not only providing for the basic, material needs of the lowest classes, but integrating excluded, asocial, “unfit” populations into the social state, all the while avoiding the threat of instability those populations would allegedly introduce.

Whether this could be accomplished materially—via programs or private charity—remained England's guiding question in the 1830s, a question revived by the Swing Riots and renewed calls for poor-law reform. Tocqueville's own interest in the poor laws grew out of the tensions he noted in English society: the movement toward an egalitarian, democratic social condition on the one hand, and the emergence of a “cult of money” on the other. Although the power of the aristocracy had weakened in favor of the middle class, the English simply substituted one form of privilege for another. “Money,” he observed, “is the hallmark not of wealth alone, but of power, reputation and glory. Where the Frenchman says: ‘He has 10,000 francs of income, the Englishman says, ‘He is worth 5,000 pounds a year.’ … Everything worthwhile is somehow tied up with money.”Footnote ¹⁹ He had seen these processes at work in America only a year before, and worried similarly that the relentless pursuit of wealth might undermine the exercise of democratic freedom.Footnote ²⁰ England presented a more difficult case for which the aristocratic/democratic binary of Democracy in America was ill suited. By the 1830s, England far outpaced America in the growth of industry and manufacturing. Industrialization only seemed to bolster this new inequality of wealth rather than birth, and introduced extremes of poverty still unknown in America, with pauperism the most troubling, most obvious exception to providential equality and the democratic social state.Footnote ²¹

Nassau Senior, the primary author of England's 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, supplied Tocqueville with a copy of the act, the product of a study undertaken by the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Poor Law into the economic effects of outdoor relief.Footnote ²² Perhaps because he had read the commission's full report, or because he was particularly aware of the issues surrounding the poor law, Tocqueville saw the act for what it was: an attempt to discourage the poor from seeking public charity, by making its receipt too distasteful and burdensome. The commission aimed to distinguish between laborers and paupers, to make the condition of the able-bodied pauper less “eligible”—less desirable—relative to the laborer; in other words, to excuse poverty while avoiding pauperism.Footnote ²³ To create this system of “less-eligibility,” the commission proposed that relief for the able-bodied be dispensed only in workhouses.

Much of the reform Tocqueville recognized in the 1834 act was nowhere in the written text. “One can easily see,” he noted, “that the most important change is by no means in the letter of the law, but in the spirit which caused it to be enacted.”Footnote ²⁴ That spirit concerned the social burden of poverty and the accompanying hope that it could be reduced by decreasing the number of paupers while maintaining, even enlarging, the class of laborers who lived upon wages rather than relief. Nonetheless, Tocqueville's dissatisfaction with the 1834 act was not immediately clear from his brief comments on the law itself, but emerged over the course of his first Memoir on Pauperism. Though the act confined relief to workhouses, it preserved the very notion of a “right” to relief, however limited and constrained. So long as relief remained a “right,” and the very notion of rights remained misunderstood, the systemic problems surrounding poverty, Tocqueville believed, would go unresolved.

II. Pauperism and Industrialization

With his 1835 Memoir on Pauperism, Tocqueville joined the chorus of social theorists and political economists addressing pauperism and seeking its remedy. At first glance, his attempt looks unremarkable. At roughly twenty pages long, it contains an extended discussion of the causes of pauperism, before dismissing all current remedies as either dangerous or insufficient. Even scholars who have devoted some attention to the Memoir deem it “strangely inconclusive” and “unsatisfactory.”Footnote ²⁵ Tocqueville held the same disappointing opinion of his work, calling it “superficial,” in part because his writing was rushed. He had to finish the Memoir quickly to deliver to the Cherbourg academy.Footnote ²⁶

Yet for all of its limitations, the work offers a rich discussion of pauperism as a social problem, not only a material one, and provides a theoretical lens through which to address the relationship between material and social conditions, class and community. Though the term “democracy” never appears in the Memoir, the entire work represents Tocqueville's struggle to analyze those elements of the social order that fit uneasily within his schema of equality's inevitable triumph. His question was whether the gulf—material and social—that separated the poor from the wealthy and middle classes could ultimately be overcome, and whether the equalizing force of providential democracy could reach the poorest and most miserable persons. In fact, the shortcomings of the Memoir might be attributed to the enormity of Tocqueville's project: to analyze and solve the social question in its entirety.

The Memoir’s first part captures the tensions within English industrialization. England, Europe's “flourishing kingdom” and the so-called birthplace of pauperism, contrasted sharply with the impoverished nations of Spain and Portugal, their people “ignorant and coarse” but where nonetheless “the number of indigents is insignificant.”Footnote ²⁷ Though Tocqueville called these conditions “striking,” he hinted that they were unsurprising given the origin of human society and the historical relationship between prosperity and need. The introduction of private property, he claimed, served as the catalyst for both progress and desire:

Tocqueville's causal narrative mirrored Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of the simultaneous origins of inequality and political society: private property introduced inequalities that were later entrenched in political institutions, themselves created to preserve the interests of the few over the many.Footnote ²⁹ But Tocqueville extended this image, identifying a causal chain extending from property relations to class divisions, culminating in yet another paradox—this one of human needs and the means required to meet them. “In the Middle Ages,” he wrote, when “almost the entire population lived off the soil, great poverty and rude manners could exist, but man's most pressing needs were satisfied. … Today the majority is happier but it would always be on the verge of dying of hunger if public support were lacking.”Footnote ³⁰

The paradox of comfort and indigence weighed heaviest on the working class, which contributed to human progress but was left untouched by its benefits. Workers were “exposed to miseries,” while fulfilling their “God-given,” “dangerous mission” to “provide for the pleasures of the greatest number.”Footnote ³¹ The products of their labor fulfilled the “secondary needs” of modern society, but at the same time tethered workers to those very products. Because luxuries became necessities, the worker's labor aimed only at the satisfaction of these new needs. If laid off or displaced, he had no other means of support.Footnote ³² The contrast with agricultural labor proves instructive: though agricultural workers could live off the soil, “the [industrial] worker, on the contrary, speculates on secondary needs which a thousand causes can restrict and important events completely eliminate.”Footnote ³³ While the rural peasant was bound to his lord, who took some responsibility for the peasant's subsistence, no equivalent tie existed between worker and industrialist. The agricultural laborer remained tied to land and lord; the industrial worker shared in no such bonds. He was at once dependent and solitary.

The progress of luxury also altered the very definition of poverty. Tocqueville suggested that increasing luxury brought increasing expectations, a revised notion of “subsistence,” and most importantly, a growing belief that society should aid those who might fall below this revised standard. These qualities—the untethered, precarious condition of the industrial worker and the fact of rising expectations—explain the distinctiveness of pauperism as a social problem. They also reveal why pauperism as a social ill affected only the most advanced European nations, as it depended upon processes of industrialization and the taste for luxury such processes encouraged.

Tocqueville's discussion of industrial progress framed his broader concern, namely, that poverty altered the boundaries of the political community. Industrialization paradoxically situated the worker at both the center of society and outside of it. He was the force behind productive capacity; his labor enabled the fulfillment of secondary needs. He remained, however, subject to the whims of changing tastes and markets, without benefit of social bonds uniting him to other persons and more stable ways of life. A similar argument animated Tocqueville's now well-known worry about democratic atomization. Lacking the social ties of aristocracy, democratic individuals were equal but isolated, susceptible to new forms of dependency and despotism.

Pauperism also reconfigured the social in another respect, one Tocqueville found even more alarming than atomization alone. Through public relief, society appeared to assume responsibility for the pauper, but only in a distorted way. Though relief was “less instinctive, more reasoned, less emotional, and often more powerful” than private charity, it amounted to nothing more than a “beautiful illusion.”Footnote ³⁴ England revealed the depth of this illusion. Nowhere else was the principle of public welfare so embraced, Tocqueville alleged, and nowhere else had its practice wrought such “fatal consequences.” In all nations with widespread public relief, the result was the same: “the most generous, the most active, the most industrious part of the nation, devotes its resources to furnishing the means of existence for those who do nothing or who make bad use of their labor.”Footnote ³⁵

This argument would have already been familiar to Tocqueville's audience. In his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795), Edmund Burke argued that the poor laws would only perpetuate poverty by reminding the poor of their own misery. This was especially true, he claimed, when the label “poor” was applied to wage-earners.Footnote ³⁶ Malthus similarly warned that the poor laws “create the poor which they maintain” at the expense of the “more industrious and more worthy members of society.”Footnote ³⁷ Tocqueville certainly appropriated and repeated these earlier arguments in his objections to public welfare. But his critique went beyond Malthusian moralizing. The crux of his argument concerned the understanding of relief as a “right,” and the general misconception of rights that followed. On this point, I argue, Tocqueville offered his most original contribution to the social question. In so doing, he revealed his aim to approach the question as just that—a social and political issue, of which the specific debate over material relief was merely a part.

III. The “Idea” of Rights

Tocqueville's definition of rights is the unifying principle of the Memoir, though scholars who have studied the work closely devote relatively little attention to this theme.Footnote ³⁸ At first glance, this relative neglect seems justified. Tocqueville's explicit discussion of rights is quite short, totaling only a few pages of the already brief Memoir. Still, this discussion is informed by his reflections on the relational character of rights in Democracy in America (hereafter DA), and underlies his later call to integrate the lower classes into political life.Footnote ³⁹ When read in isolation, the brief treatment of rights in the Memoir appears inconclusive; when considered alongside other elements of his thought, including his observations on American democracy, it frames his thoughts on poverty and the social inclusion of the poor. It also reveals a central yet overlooked element of his vision of democratic society, namely, the role of rights in fostering a “true” society rather than a divided nation.

Tocqueville highlighted the social function of rights in the Memoir, for “there is something great and virile in the idea of rights which removes from any request its suppliant character, and places the one who claims it on the same level as the one who grants it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Properly conceived, the very idea of rights entails and extends equality; it “elevates and sustains the human spirit,” supplanting arbitrary distinctions with mutual, acknowledged equality.Footnote ⁴¹ Rights also originate within social relationships, freely granted from one individual to another. Absent from the idea of a right is any mention of legislation or state involvement, a notable contrast with the system of centralized administration enacted by the 1834 poor-law amendment.

The so-called “right to relief,” however, begins from the opposite principle and has a contrary effect: “the right of the poor to obtain society's help is unique in that instead of elevating the heart of the man who exercises it, it lowers him.”Footnote ⁴² The name of the relief recipient was inscribed on the poor list of his local parish, an act Tocqueville likened to “a notarized manifestation of misery, of weakness,” a publicized statement of inferiority. The right to relief disrupted the equality inherent in right itself, all the while forcing the individual to internalize his alleged inferiority. Private charity, too, originates in inequality and subordination, but its recipient adopts that label only “secretly and temporarily.” Public relief, by contrast, publicizes and perpetuates inequality. It originates in difference, and justifies itself in terms of the distance between rich and poor.

Tocqueville identified the injurious influence of relief on the recipient, who “looks to the future as an animal does. Absorbed in the present and the ignoble and transient pleasures it affords, his brutalized nature is unaware of the determinants of its destiny.”Footnote ⁴³ Lacking material comforts and adopting a position of inferiority relative to the rest of society, the pauper cares only to satisfy his immediate, daily needs. In this respect, he is more animal than human, since his thoughts do not extend beyond his present moment. Worse still, the pauper lacks the agency to understand the depth of his dependency, a cause and a consequence of his present condition, from which there is no immediate or obvious escape.

These arguments call to mind earlier, well-known critiques of public relief, like those of Burke and Malthus. But by articulating similar anxieties through the language of rights, Tocqueville departed from his predecessors and contemporaries on the social question.Footnote ⁴⁴ Public relief not only produced dangerous outcomes for the material and moral condition of the individual poor, as other theorists had alleged, but also had profound social consequences, as it entrenched the concept of inferiority for entire classes. More importantly for Tocqueville, relief undermined the idea of right, which he interpreted as a mechanism for affirming social equality. In undermining this ideal, it created yet another obstacle to integrating the poor classes into society, tying rights only to inequality, division, and humiliation. If the possibilities of rights—socializing and equalizing—remain misunderstood, even undone by the principle of public relief, they could not serve as remedies to problems of poverty and exclusion.

This misrepresentation of right, Tocqueville suggested, had ongoing implications for the liberty of the pauper, and here the problem of exclusion re-entered his discussion. Once again, England served as his example. Because relief was administered locally, parishes aided those who resided in their jurisdictions, and other localities were wary of accepting new residents onto their relief rosters. When an individual attempted to relocate, “the authorities immediately ask him to post bond against possible indigence, and if he cannot furnish this security, he must leave.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A standard of economic self-sufficiency preceded communal inclusion, the outcome of both a relief program that burdened local parishes and the mark of inferiority triggered by a misplaced “right” to relief. Paupers were limited to residing in the communities of their birth; even then, they were only reluctantly accepted by those communities, their status as inferiors well known. This exclusion applied not only to the pauper seeking relief, but to any person who appeared to be “threatened by poverty”—”whose clothes do not clearly indicate wealth” and who therefore failed to meet the implicit economic threshold for social inclusion. This phenomenon had a notable influence on the excluded, Tocqueville lamented, binding them to land like the “medieval peasantry” and perpetuating backwardness against a general condition of human progress.Footnote ⁴⁶

Tocqueville's concern for mobility and liberty clarified the grounds for his dissatisfaction with the 1834 English reform. Although the act avoided this particular problem of communal exclusion—of turning away—it did so by confining paupers to the workhouse, constituting a near-total deprivation of liberty by literally separating the poor from the community. The act created a second “society” for the impoverished, governed by unique laws designed to address idleness and criminality.Footnote ⁴⁷ In seeking to alleviate the “cost” of pauperism for the community, the 1834 act imposed a new kind of cost in the form of social division, initially unrecognized but no less detrimental to the social state and the preservation of liberty within it.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such exclusion was not limited to circumstances of “less-eligibility,” like those established by the 1834 reform. If the system of relief rendered the pauper stationary, it also separated him from the given community in which he was forced to reside. Far from closing the gap between rich and poor, the right to relief undermined any hope of uniting “two rival nations,” wealthy and indigent.Footnote ⁴⁹ As soon as the law intervened to alleviate poverty, the rich man would view the poor man as simply a “greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share in his wealth.”Footnote ⁵⁰ State welfare shattered any potential bond between rich and poor that could be established by private alms, an arrangement that inevitably “involved” the giver in the fate of the poor man. Public relief reduced this potential relationship to a burden, marking the pauper as inferior and alienating him from the wider community. And just as the rich looked upon the poor as strangers, the latter recognized no connection or personal gratitude to the former.

Poor relief deepened existing divisions among rich and poor, reinforcing the material and social distinctions that separated the two classes. The language of “rival nations” is telling, as it revealed Tocqueville's anxiety regarding the profound social outcomes of poverty and poor relief.Footnote ⁵¹ Public relief would destroy any hope of remaking the social order—of uniting rival classes characterized by wealth at one extreme and material dependency at the other. On a grander scale, the outcomes of public relief, debasing and dividing, served as countervailing forces against the tendencies of the democratic age, imposing barriers against the mobility characteristic of a changed social world. The very condition of pauperism remained a startling exception to the progress of civilization Tocqueville witnessed, a point of “backwardness” set against modernity's progress.Footnote ⁵²

The image of “rival nations” also suggests a relationship between the social and the economic, between the sentiments of shared political life and the economic standards for accepting or excluding certain persons and classes from membership. If the contours of the political community may be so shaped by expectations about the economic and material standing of its members, then the question becomes whether economic proposals may provide a solution. Tocqueville praised private charity as a means of rebuilding social bonds between rich and poor, but notably acknowledged its limits. The great virtue of private charity consisted in its personal character: it emanated from goodwill and fostered a sense of duty. It involved giver and recipient in a voluntary exchange, where material aid was met with gratitude. But it remained arbitrary, limited, and local. For all of its dangers, public relief was systematic, more powerful, and in a sense, democratic: the same sentiments of mutuality that underlie democracy also compel society as a whole to aid its most suffering members.Footnote ⁵³ But as Tocqueville declared in various ways throughout his writings, good intentions do not always translate to good outcomes.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the case of pauperism, the challenge was twofold. Any worthwhile solution must retain the personal dimensions of private charity and the systematic reach of public welfare, all the while avoiding the social costs of legislated relief.

The social question had also grown beyond a problem of material distinctions to be overcome by material solutions. A complete remedy must, above all, rebuild the social state by uniting rival nations of rich and poor. It must erase the mark of inferiority stamped upon the pauper by the corrupted “right” to relief. If the corruption of rights constituted the heart of the problem, only their reclamation—an idea of rights as elevating rather than degrading—could solve it. Tocqueville's remedy thus originated not with specific policies, but with the restoration of right itself.

Perhaps this is why scholars have been so divided in their attempts to appropriate Tocqueville as advocate for one policy over another, or to locate his proposals along a spectrum from purely private charity to public welfare, or from civil society to state-regulated reform.Footnote ⁵⁵ They have been searching for the wrong kind of answers, for a concrete policy in response to a problem whose solution had to be found prior to policy, in the theory of rights and their misrepresentation. Insofar as Tocqueville offered explicit policy proposals regarding charity in the first Memoir and property ownership in the second, they must be framed as practical attempts to reclaim the idea of rights. His remedy, then, cannot be captured by reference to a purely economic solution alone—by private charity, social welfare, or something in between. As Richard Swedberg has argued, Tocqueville articulated an understanding of political economy interwoven with social phenomena, with “ideas and moral feelings.”Footnote ⁵⁶ His political economy proposals must thus be interpreted in light of the moral and social concerns that animated them, in particular, the role of rights in overcoming class conflict.

A more complete picture of the social function of rights emerges in Democracy in America. If English poor relief represented the worst, the distortion of rights, America offered Tocqueville a vision of the best. Its democratic social state provided a clearer picture of the “idea of rights” only mentioned in the Memoir, and offered a model under which both duty and benevolence prove self-perpetuating, grounded in equality and mutual recognition. What appeared as mere possibility in the Memoir—the equalizing promise of rights—Tocqueville saw actualized in the American way of life:

Just as rights begin socially with the extension of equality, they also serve as continual reminders of the same. The idea of rights is self-reinforcing: the individual, himself elevated by their exercise, extends that same respect to his fellow citizens and also recognizes his duty toward them. Rights not only equalize; at their best, they create ties between individuals based initially on self-interest, then “general interest,” and finally respect. Recall that this ideal of respect was altogether absent in a schema of public relief, in which rich and poor look upon one another as strangers rather than citizens.Footnote ⁵⁸

But the distance between America and Europe posed a challenge. The former, Tocqueville contended, had thus far survived its democratic revolution, embracing equality while maintaining liberty at least for the present. Yet he compiled his reflections on America under the impulse of a “religious terror,” anxious for what this same revolution would hold for Europe's future.Footnote ⁵⁹ America's modest democratic success, though reason for optimism, was far from guaranteed—for Europe and for America itself. The progress of industrialization complicated this picture further. England's social condition forced Tocqueville to adopt a new point of departure when considering the fate of democratic societies. Pauperism represented this very problem, a challenge to the cautious optimism he placed in the American model. The question was how rights—so beneficial to the Americans who possessed them—might extend to those who lack them entirely, especially those whose material poverty confined them to membership in the “barbarous” classes. Could the exercise of rights serve a similar socializing, equalizing function in a society so divided along class lines as to constitute “two rival nations”? Under such conditions, what would it take to integrate the lowest classes into the social order?

Tocqueville addressed such concerns in his second report on pauperism. While the first Memoir outlined the effects of relief in England, the second aimed to avoid the same outcomes in France. He looked to France's agricultural past for solutions to problems posed by its industrializing present. Again, the image of American democracy provided the unseen lens through which he examined the “best” of these solutions, an ideal to be contrasted with the realities of his present-day Europe.

IV. Political Rights and Remaking the Social State

Looking to his work on American democracy, the answer to these questions initially appears a resounding yes. In DA, he suggested that political rights could accomplish an end similar to that he associated with property rights in the Second Memoir. Political participation was the means by which the individual could grasp his place in society. Just as property ownership introduces ideas of respect and commonality, “in the political world it is the same. In America, the man of the people has conceived a lofty idea of political rights because he has political rights.”Footnote ⁷¹ The township was the space in which local participation could serve as an “incubator” for democracy, educating individuals in democratic practice at the same moments they engaged in it for themselves.

Yet it remained to be seen whether that civic spirit he observed in America could be fostered in France—and by what means. Tocqueville undoubtedly acknowledged the potential benefits of political participation in theory, but would widespread suffrage in France confer those same benefits on his own nation as they had in America? Was his apparent enthusiasm for the democratic experiment of the American township tempered—even undone—by the unique circumstances of France? These questions have divided scholars, who wrangle with Tocqueville's own shifting claims on French suffrage, as well as his status as a theorist of democracy. Sheldon Wolin offered the most extreme interpretation of Tocqueville as an ardent antidemocrat in France, whose “deepest and most abiding concern [was]… to obstruct the expansion of democracy.”Footnote ⁷² Tocqueville's own argument against expanding French suffrage in 1842 initially seems to confirm Wolin's thesis. Speaking before the Chamber, he appeared as a pragmatic liberal and very reluctant democrat (if much of one at all), urging France to “give enough, but not too much to democracy” in matters of electoral law.Footnote ⁷³

Robert Gannett attempts to account for this shift in Tocqueville's thought, from his admiration of the New England township in 1835 to his reservations about “too much” democracy in France only seven years later. Gannett frames Tocqueville's apparent change of heart in terms of the stability he wished to preserve and the revolutionary violence he aimed to avoid.Footnote ⁷⁴ Even in America, Gannett argues, this was the motivation behind Tocqueville's praise of democratic practice in the township, where he recognized how the “extreme” elements of democracy—the exercise of a widespread suffrage—could dampen the democratic excesses of instability and despotism.Footnote ⁷⁵ By 1842, occupied by the same prudential concerns, now amplified in his own nation, Tocqueville recognized that the ends of stability would be best served by avoiding in France those same democratic practices that proved so vital for America. In Gannett's interpretation, suffrage was a tool for Tocqueville, to be deployed in service of the wider cause to resist social revolution and political corruption.Footnote ⁷⁶

Tocqueville worried about the coming revolutions, and his calls for electoral reform in 1848 reveal the necessity, in his mind, of accommodating working-class demands in order to avoid unrest.Footnote ⁷⁷ At the conclusion of his famous speech of January 27, 1848, he declared that electoral reform was both useful and urgent; the preservation of society depended upon a change in the law and in the public spirit.Footnote ⁷⁸ This urgency arose, in part, from political developments that undermined his earlier faith in France's guaranteed stability. He articulated that faith in volume 2 of DA, “Why Great Revolutions Would Become Rare,” where he maintained that any nation with dispersed property—like France and America—would prevent revolution by instilling a taste for order. But Drescher describes the political developments that unraveled Tocqueville's earlier optimism: “what property should have joined together, political privilege tore asunder. … [Events of] 1848 shattered the vision of 1840.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, by 1848, Tocqueville believed that political reform was required to undo what politics had caused.

The language of Tocqueville's 1848 speech also reflected the anxieties Gannett recognizes, as he spoke of the “passionate feelings” of the lower classes that would overturn “society itself, shaking the very foundations upon which it now rests.”Footnote ⁸⁰ But his justification for these reforms ran deeper than the problem of “stabilizing democracy” Gannett presents. One need only look to his reflections a year earlier, in his unpublished manifesto for the “New Left,” for a fuller explanation of his reasoning in favor of reform. Disenchanted with the policies of the July Monarchy, Tocqueville wrote in 1847 of “a morbid torpor” prevailing in politics, and warned that “a muffled restiveness is beginning to appear among the lower classes, who are supposed to remain strangers to public life according to our laws.”Footnote ⁸¹ Much of his analysis hinged on a broader critique of bourgeois society and of the preeminence of the bourgeoisie under the July regime.Footnote ⁸² In the conclusion to the 1847 manifesto, he called on France to “slowly extend the circle of political rights, so as to go beyond the limits of the middle class… involve the lower classes in politics,” a solution that would not only quiet social unrest, but make public life “more diversified, more fruitful.”Footnote ⁸³ His final recommendation went still further, and disclosed the extent of his attitude toward the lowest classes and their role in a changing society. He urged:

In this passage, Tocqueville revealed his intent neither to abolish the individual right to property nor to create a comprehensive system of public relief, but to create a politics in conformity with the equality of the democratic social state.Footnote ⁸⁵ Material inequality will ever remain, but so long as social equality prevails, politics must acknowledge and reinforce it. His statement certainly anticipates the Revolution of 1848, but beyond that, it stands as an expression of the potential function of political rights. For Tocqueville, the extension of rights was the final means of integrating the lowest classes at once into the social order and the political one. This integration serves politics itself, for it introduces newfound energy and life into what was previously a privileged yet weakened sphere of human action.

Preservation of stability was certainly at the front of Tocqueville's mind when weighing matters of electoral reform, but his 1847 manifesto reveals that it was not his only concern. His turn “back” to the social in 1847, undertaken certainly out of anxiety about the coming unrest, eventually moved him beyond the political problem of instability. Tocqueville implicitly acknowledged the distance between le pays légal and le pays réel in France—emerging as “two rival nations”Footnote ⁸⁶ —and the reality of a political order that excluded entire classes. The forces of industrialization and social change forced him to wrestle with the problem of pauperism as a social question, and those same changes necessitated a reconsideration of politics. Electoral reform was not simply a “safety valve” that might relieve working-class pressures from below, the suggestion of a reluctant democrat whose aim, as Wolin claimed, to “obstruct democracy” was thwarted by the threat of violence. It was, rather, a way of creating a legal France that mirrored the ideal social one. The result would be a more stable nation, to be sure, but also one in which there were no longer “strangers to public life,” and where each class could take an interest in the affairs of the nation through political participation.

Though Tocqueville advocated extending political rights around 1848, he cautioned against the idea of “social rights,” specifically a “right to work,” which would guarantee employment to every able-bodied member of society. At the beginning of the Second Republic, he argued forcefully against a proposal to include the “right to work” in the constitution's preamble. The right to work was built upon similar foundations as the right to relief: both required the state to assume responsibility for the individual. But both “rights,” he suggested, would actually counteract what they aimed to achieve. Just as the right to relief would further alienate rich and poor, so too a recognized right to work would set the working class against the rest of society. The “socialist” principle behind the right to work would have ongoing, divisive consequences for the relations between classes, as it depended on maintaining “proletarians” as a class apart from the social order. Moreover, it would demoralize and degrade the individual who claimed it, creating a “regimented, regulated, formalized society where the State takes responsibility for everything and where the individual is nothing… where the goal assigned to man is well-being alone.” Society, too, would suffer—a living organism “without air, almost without light.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Tocqueville's rejection of the social right to work reflected his larger stance toward the events of 1848, a revolution he saw as social and political, aiming toward equality in both society and government. The socialists, he contended, had mistakenly declared that the revolution was purely social. For Tocqueville, the most necessary—indeed the most democratic—transformations in society, in the relations between individuals and classes, would come not through social unrest, but through political reform.Footnote ⁸⁸

Tocqueville did in fact come “full circle” on political rights in 1848, as Gannett writes, “reiterating his belief first expressed . . . years previously in Democracy in America.”Footnote ⁸⁹ And this return did reflect “what he believed best for France at each given moment.”Footnote ⁹⁰ But this was not a belief solely in the stabilizing power of political democracy, as a force that could at times temper its own excesses and moderate competing claims to rule. It was also a belief that democratic participation could repair social divisions, and by incorporating once-excluded persons into public life, grant new vitality to the public sphere. The American model was not a one-size-fits-all solution for France or the whole of Europe; the lessons it offered had to be weighed against the particular circumstances of a given place and time. The issue of suffrage was no exception. But by 1848, Tocqueville seemed to have recognized that those lessons, though adapted, might now suit his own country, leading it forward in the evolution of democracy. He again placed great faith in the educative potential of democratic experience. The social question could find a solution in both property and political rights, which exercised together could alleviate the many ills, material and social, associated with pauperism.

V. Conclusion

Looking at once to England's failures and America's qualified successes, Tocqueville sought to remedy the problem of pauperism for nineteenth-century France. He shared in his generation's diagnosis of the problem: pauperism as the consequence of industrialization, and as a “fourth order” that defined the boundary between civilization and barbarism. Yet his overarching thesis on the providential character of democracy framed his particular take on the social question, granting his project a unique depth. He was not preoccupied with Malthus's concern for prosperity and population, nor only with the issue of “pauperizing” the poor. For him, the social question posed a problem for the ideal of French nationhood following the Revolution, and for the larger historical emergence of democratic equality. The existence of a pauper class challenged the great optimism he found in the American model of democratic progress, and threatened the potential administration of a similar model of political practice within Europe.

His unique point of departure on the social question led him to advocate a novel solution: reclaiming the idea of right as that which equalizes rather than degrades, with the exercise of property rights emerging as the most fruitful remedy for widespread poverty. Within this solution, as I have argued, we might uncover Tocqueville's broader position regarding both the lowest classes and the character of political society. For it was his return to “the social”—to the concerns for class division and exclusion that dominated his work on pauperism—that in part prompted Tocqueville to advocate for extending political rights in France by 1848, in the hope that public life would be made more robust, and society itself less divided.

Tocqueville's concerns about divided society, poverty, social and material inequality, exclusion, and the shared bonds of community are still very much with us. Of course, his theory of rights remains prior to any concrete policy, and in this respect, we might conclude (as others have done) that the writings on pauperism are unsatisfactory for contemporary politics. But his writings on poverty return us to the theme that motivated his political thought, and that continues to inform political life: how do we realize the promise of equality? On this question, his writings remind us that in creating policy to address still-persistent inequalities under democracy, we would do well to remember the relationship between our economic and social lives.