Alexis de Tocqueville is often regarded as the keenest observer of American democracy, but a new article explains that he had a lot of help along the way—especially from one of Massachusetts’s leading lights.
In 1831 Tocqueville, a young, French aristocrat, journeyed across the Atlantic to observe life in America. The result of his two years here was the famous, “Democracy in America,” published in two volumes between 1835 and 1840, which is still considered arguably the very best analysis of American democratic life ever produced.
Tocqueville’s incisive observations seem nearly miraculous, especially from someone new to the country. As Guy Aiken, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, details in an article published in the current issue of The Tocqueville Review, Tocqueville’s insight into American life was in fact nurtured by a local—Jared Sparks, a prominent 19th-century historian who went on to become president of Harvard University.
Aiken describes Sparks as Tocqueville’s “most valuable informant” while he was in America. Sparks and Tocqueville exchanged letters, and Sparks wrote Tocqueville a long study called “Observations on the Government of Towns in Massachusetts,” which explained a central feature of American life. Tocqueville couldn’t make complete sense of towns because in France, all political power flowed down from the monarch—Sparks explained that in America, political power moved in the other direction, from the towns, up.
Sparks also prompted several other ideas that would become central to “Democracy in America”: the difference between administrative and governmental centralization, the importance of the frontier as a source of opportunity in America, and the essential role of universal education in democratic life.
Sparks’s most significant contribution, though, was to give Tocqueville one of his most powerful ideas: the “tyranny of the majority.” In 1831 he wrote to Tocqueville, “In this country the political dogma is that the majority is always right… Sometimes the majority has sought to oppress the minority.” Tocqueville made that insight famous when, later in Democracy in America, he wrote, “It is of the very essence of democratic government that the majority has absolute sway, for in a democracy nothing resists the majority.”
It’s easy to view a book like “Democracy in America” as the singular expression of a brilliant mind. Appreciating Sparks’s contributions to Tocqueville’s thought doesn’t diminish what Tocqueville achieved—but it does suggest that all great ideas have a history.