Tocqueville: Neutrality and the Use of History

It is not uncommon for a major writer to be seen by his critics in widely divergent, even contradictory terms; Alexis de Tocqueville shares this fate. To the familiar causes of controversy, Tocqueville added his own—a veil of neutrality or objectivity concealing his deepest views. The publication in 1835 of the first part of Democracy in America thus gave rise to an effort, still continuing, to discover Tocqueville's true intent: behind the façade of neutrality does he favor one social system, aristocracy or democracy, over the other?On the one hand, does he not reveal in his writings the ineradicable bias of his aristocratic origins? Was he not hostile to the openended, unformed, and unforeseeable consequences of the democratic revolution? Did he not intend by his criticisms of the democratic system to “carry the reader to the point of wishing for its destruction?” Was not the liberty he defended a “restricted liberty, protecting a small group of privileged people who were really independent so far as economic circumstances went?” Was it not “a liberty for believers, [a] liberty for owners…an aristocratic liberalism?” Did he not believe that “the mass of men should remain bereft of political power?”