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the North American continent, but just as Tocqueville and Beaumont were commissioned to report on the American penitentiary system, Chevalier was assigned a similar task with regard to the new nation’s railway network.

      The fact of the matter is that Tocqueville was not unfamiliar with these aspects of the American economic infrastructure. In his Notebook E, the section recording his impressions of Cincinnati and Ohio is followed almost immediately by a section titled “Means of Increasing the Public Prosperity.” “Roads, canals and the mails,” Tocqueville there wrote, “play a prodigious part in the prosperity of the Union.” America, he continued, not only enjoyed a greater sum of prosperity than any other country but also had “done more to provide for … free communications.” One of the first things done in a new state was to create a postal service such that “there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild that letters and newspapers are not delivered at least once a week.” Main roads are built in the middle of a wilderness and almost always before the arrival of those whom they were meant to serve. America, Tocqueville further observed, “has planned and built immense canals. It already has more railways than France. Everyone recognizes that the discovery of steam immeasurably increased the strength and prosperity

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      of the Union by facilitating rapid communications among the various parts of this vast country.” Moreover, because Americans were not a sedentary people, they felt the need for means of communication with a liveliness and zeal unknown in France. As to the means employed to open up communications in America, Tocqueville saw that, while “the American government does not involve itself in everything,” when it came to “projects of great public utility,” they were seldom left to the care of “private individuals.” The states led the way.26

      Why did Tocqueville not include these observations in Democracy in America? Wills has a simple answer. “Tocqueville,” he tells us in a footnote, “took some notes on these matters, but did not consider them important enough to reflect on in Democracy.” There might be another explanation. Tocqueville himself made the following remark: “To return to the subject of roads and other means of rapidly transporting the products of industry and thought from one place to another, I do not claim to have made the discovery that these promote prosperity, for this is a universally accepted truth.”27 As far as Tocqueville was concerned, in other words, these conclusions were so blindingly obvious that they did not merit comment or inclusion in his text.

      There is a further, and equally compelling, reason why Tocqueville chose to exclude these issues from his account. This is found in the first paragraph of the critical edition of Democracy in America provided by Eduardo Nolla. It reads as follows: “The work you are about to read is not a travelogue, the reader can rest easy. I do not want him to be concerned with me. You will also not find in this book a complete summary of all the institutions of the United States; but I flatter myself that, in it, the public will find new documentation and, from it, will gain useful knowledge about a subject that is more important for us than the fate of America and no less worthy of holding our attention.”28 Tocqueville therefore intended quite explicitly to distance his own inquiry from

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      the extensive travel literature that had flourished in France from the 1780s onward and that, for the most part, had focused its attention upon the flora and fauna of the American continent, its majestic landscape, and the rude manners of its people.29 To continue in this vein was no part of Tocqueville’s purpose. Again his perspective is clarified by the Nolla critical edition. In a first version of the drafts, Tocqueville wrote: “I have not said everything that I saw, but I have said everything that I believed at the same time true and useful [v: profitable] to make known, and without wanting to write a treatise on America, I thought only to help my fellow citizens resolve a question that must interest us more deeply.”30 He went on to add the following remark: “I see around me facts without number, but I notice one of them that dominates all the others: it is old; it is stronger than laws, more powerful than men; it seems to be a direct product of the divine will; it is the gradual development of democracy in the Christian world.”31 This was the subject of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and this was so, as he declared in the opening lines of the published version, because “[a]mong the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”32

      This aspect of American society was so striking and so novel that it came progressively to displace all other considerations in Tocqueville’s mind.33 Again, the process by which this occurred can be seen by consulting the Tocqueville material held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and assembled by Eduardo Nolla. In brief, if on Tocqueville’s

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      part there was no lack of interest in the commercial aspects of American society, as he came to reflect upon what he wanted to say in his own study, they were not integral to the argument that he wished to develop. As Tocqueville made plain in his letter to Beaumont of November 4, 1836, in which he asked his friend specifically for commentary on Chevalier’s rival text, his own study was intended to be an “ouvrage philosophique-politique.”34

      It was accordingly in light of the impact of industrialization upon the workings of democracy that, in volume 2 of the Democracy in America, Tocqueville considered the question of “What Makes Nearly All Americans Tend toward Industrial Professions.”35 Recognizing that “no people on earth who has made as rapid progress as the Americans in commerce and industry” and that, although they had “arrived only yesterday,” the Americans had “overturned the whole natural order to their profit,” Tocqueville drew three conclusions of substance and not inconsiderable importance from these “industrial passions”: commercial crises would be endemic to industrial capitalism; industrialization would produce a new kind of capitalist aristocracy; and a version of state capitalism would engender a new form of soft despotism. It was, however, never Tocqueville’s intention to publish a detailed description of America’s transport infrastructure.

      The second substantive criticism—and one that might be deemed to be fatal to his entire enterprise—is that Tocqueville overestimated the potential of American democracy to degenerate into the tyranny of the majority. For example, when Tocqueville’s good friend Jean-Jacques Ampère visited America in the early 1850s, he recorded that Americans were almost universally agreed that, on one thing, Tocqueville had been mistaken: the possibility of a tyranny of the majority was unfounded. The most intriguing of Ampère’s encounters, therefore, was with John C. Spencer, author of a preface to the first American edition of Democracy in America. According to Spencer, the ever-changing nature of majority opinion ensured that no “lasting tyranny” could

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      be established. Spencer himself attributed Tocqueville’s error to the peculiar political circumstances pertaining during his stay: namely, the support of the overwhelming majority for General Jackson’s populist measures, which might have given the impression that the minority was “crushed” and without the power to protect itself.36

      A very similar charge was made by Tocqueville’s American friend Jared Sparks, the man who in 1833 told Tocqueville that in his forthcoming book he anticipated “a more accurate and judicious account of the United States than has yet appeared from the pen of any European traveller”37 and who, after its publication and in the face of objections in America to Tocqueville’s remarks on “the defects of Democratic institutions,” assured his colleague that “all the intelligent persons among us who have read your treatise have applauded its ability and candour.”38 In a letter to another of Tocqueville’s critics, Guillaume-Tell Poussin,39 of February 1841, he wrote:

      Your criticisms of M. de Tocqueville’s work also accord for the most part with my own sentiments. Notwithstanding the great ability with which his book is written, the extent of his intelligence, and his profound discussions of many important topics, I am persuaded that his theories, particularly, when applied to the United States, sometimes lead him astray. For instance, in what he says of the tyranny of the majority, I think, he is entirely mistaken. His ideas are not verified by experience. The tyranny of the majority, if exercised at all, must be in the making of laws; and any evil arising from this source

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