John Gray
AN AMBIVALENT AUTHORITY
Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution
By Hugh Brogan (Profile Books 724pp £30)

In 1927 Paul Valéry wrote that Europe dreams of being ruled by an American Commission, and for many Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few who would now want to be subject to American rule but there are still many who see America as standing for a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of politics as on the right. There seem to be plenty of ex-communists and former Trotskyites who regard the United States with a loyalty and reverence of a sort they once reserved for the Soviet Union, and who round on critics of US policies as enemies of progress. Right across the spectrum of opinion America is seen as the supreme modern society, which more than any other embodies the future.

If any one writer can be said to be responsible for this view, it must be Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely observant, high-strung French nobleman has been hugely influential in disseminating the idea that America is the country in whose path all others are bound - sooner or later, one way or another - to follow. Tocqueville's Democracy in America is a classic not only on account of its insights into American life but because it suggests that the dilemmas faced by America are those that will confront European countries in future. Chief among these is reconciling personal liberty with democracy. Tocqueville understood democracy as being at bottom the acceptance of human equality rather than any one type of government. He was afraid that in breaking with the complex hierarchies of Europe America could fall into a type of mass conformism, and he feared the same could happen in Europe itself as it shook off its feudal inheritance. The trend towards democracy was benign and irreversible, even providentially ordained, but it carried with it a threat to freedom of mind and action.

Toqueville's classic relies for much of its interest on his view that America is not a singularity but an exemplar of the main trends of modern development. He presents this view without much in the way of argument, and in fact many of the experiences he reports testify to America's abiding difference from other countries - he was as dumbfounded by America's intense religiosity as most Europeans are today, for example. Hugh Brogan gives a vivid account of the ambivalent responses America evoked in Tocqueville when - for reasons that are still not entirely clear - he made his celebrated tour in 1831-32. Brogan shows how often the sometimes clairvoyantly far-seeing French aristocrat viewed the country through the prejudices of his class and time. It might be thought that Tocqueville is by now a rather familiar figure, but he emerges anew from Brogan's consummately skilful presentation as an intricate and in some ways contradictory personality. Blessed with a naturally inquiring turn of mind, he was also plagued by doubt, and struggled almost to the end of his life to sustain his Catholic faith. A sensitive man, Tocqueville was also capable of a harshness that grates on our ears nowadays. One of his aims on his American tour was to investigate the prison system - then as now a core American institution - with the help of his friend, Gustave de Beaumont. Writing of a prisoner in solitary confinement in Philadelphia, he notes that the man was healthy, well clothed, well fed, well bedded. 'However, he is deeply unhappy; the wholly mental punishment inflicted on him fills his soul with a fear far deeper than that of whips and chains. Is it not thus that an enlightened and humane society should punish?' Here Tocqueville was not harking back to feudal cruelty. He was writing as one of the progressive thinkers of the time - as he did when he wrote condoning the savagery that accompanied the conquest of Algeria. As Brogan notes, Tocqueville may never have been able to shake off a certain nostalgia for the ancien régime. He was always caught between a past that never wholly lost the qualities of an idyll and a revolutionary present whose upshot was uncertain. But he was the reverse of a reactionary, and embraced what he believed to be enlightened and modern with a righteous enthusiasm.

It is hard to do justice to the artistry with which Brogan renders this complicated character. Tocqueville's friendships and ambitions, his passionate and anxious marriage, his restless cyclothymic personality as a result of which he passed regularly through moods of melancholy and elation - all this is beautifully brought out. His lifelong attachment to his devoted friend Beaumont, to whom he wrote begging him to visit when he was dying in Cannes, is charted with great subtlety. Brogan's delicate touch does not desert him when he recounts Tocqueville's exchanges with Arthur Gobineau, the intellectually gifted but repulsive author of the two-volume Essay on the Inequality of Man, which was to have a baleful influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a kind of encylopedia of racism. The book is also rich in delightful vignettes, as when Tocqueville is described drinking in the Gothic scene of Oxford at night. Though I have read Tocqueville on and off over many years, I felt as if I knew the man behind the writings for the first time. Brogan has given us a masterly reconstruction of the European milieu by which Tocqueville was formed, and the definitive biography of one of the nineteenth century's most representative thinkers.

It is a study of the life not the work, but Hugh Brogan's book leaves the reader with some fascinating questions about Tocqueville's view of America. Would he not be appalled by the power of fundamentalism in the US today? Tocqueville seems, at the end, to have been a believer; but like most European intellectuals at the time he aspired to be reasonable, and believed being modern went with growing rationality. It is hard to imagine him being other than horrified by the spectacle of a country a quarter of whose population rejects Darwinism and lives in expectation of Armageddon. If he were confronted with it as it is at the start of the twenty-first century, would Tocqueville change his view of America? Or would he revise his beliefs about what it means to be modern? It is impossible to tell. Still, it is not difficult to envisage this inquiring thinker concluding that America is not the paradigm of modernity he imagined it to be but a one-off experiment, which seems destined to remain different from Europe and the rest of the world.