The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
this no more than 6 pages. Bryce, on the other hand, offered twenty-three chapters totalling 243 pages. And when it came to the structure and functions of the national government, Bryce produced a staggering 392 pages in thirty-four chapters; Tocqueville mustered only 75 pages in four chapters.
II
One cannot fully appreciate either Bryce’s scholarly objective or his literary achievement without first understanding his rejection of Tocqueville. The greatest weakness of Democracy in America, in Bryce’s judgment, was that it was decidedly unscientific, filled as it was with the Frenchman’s moral musings about democracy generally. Tocqueville himself had confessed as much: “I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom.” 21 Such a venture as that undertaken by Tocqueville led inevitably to “fanciful” pictures being drawn, “plausible in the abstract . . . [but] unlike the facts which contemporary America sets before us.” Bryce’s alternative was to “bid farewell to fancy” and endeavor to see things as they actually were in nineteenth-century America.22 Specificity, not generalization, was what was demanded; empiricism was the essence of Bryce’s science of politics.23
When and where Bryce first came across the works of Tocqueville is not clear. However, by the time of his third trip to the United States in 1883, he was sufficiently familiar with Democracy in America to conduct a seminar at Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Professor Herbert Baxter Adams. Adams’s graduate history seminar was a preeminent academic gathering, and among the students in Bryce’s class were John Dewey, John Franklin Jameson, and Woodrow Wilson.24 The seminar focused on Democracy in America; the concern was Tocqueville’s interpretation of America and his predictions about democratic government. Bryce pushed his students to question the assumptions that lay at the foundation of Tocqueville’s monumental and influential work.25 The fruit of the seminar was the publication in 1887 of “The Predictions of Hamilton and de Tocqueville” in the Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science. 26
In this important study, Bryce praised Tocqueville and his work. The author was “a singularly fair and penetrating European philosopher” whose work was one of “rare literary merit.” Democracy in America, observed Bryce, is “one of the few treatises on the philosophy of politics which has risen to the rank of a classic.” The great work was nothing less than “a model of art and a storehouse of ethical maxims.” 27
Niceties aside, Bryce plunged his critical dagger: “The first observation [about Democracy in America ] is that not only are its descriptions of democracy as displayed in America no longer true in many points, but that in certain points they were never true. That is to say, some were true of America, but not of democracy in general, while others were true of democracy in general but not true of America.” The weaknesses of Tocqueville were three. First, he had opted for the deductive method Bryce deplored: Tocqueville’s “power of observation, quick and active as it was, did not lead but followed the march of his reasonings . . . [so that] the facts he cites are rather illustrations than the sources of his conclusions.” 28
The second defect of Tocqueville’s study is that while he wrote about America “his heart was in France, and the thought of France, never absent from him, unconsciously colored every picture that he drew.” The result of this narrow view is that he “failed to grasp the substantial identity of the American people with the English.” Bryce was blunt: “he has not grasped, as perhaps no one but an Englishman or an American can grasp, the truth that the American people is an English people, modified in some directions by the circumstances of its colonial life and its more popular government, but in essentials the same.” Coupled with his deductive bent, this focus on France led Tocqueville into simple errors: “Much that he remarks in the mental habits of the ordinary American, his latent conservatism, for instance, his indifference to amusement as compared with material comfort, his commercial eagerness and tendency to take a commercial view of all things, might have been just as well remarked of the ordinary middle-class Englishman, and has nothing to do with a Democratic government.” 29
The third problem with Tocqueville’s work is the result of the first two: “ Democracy in America is not so much a political study as a work of edification.” As such, it is simply not an accurate “picture and criticism of the government and people of the United States.” In Bryce’s steely scientific view, Democracy in America failed the test of objectivity. “Let it be remembered that in spite of its scientific form, it is really a work of art rather than a work of science, and a work suffused with strong, though carefully repressed emotion.” The most damning deficiency, Bryce argued, is that Tocqueville “soars far from the ground and is often lost in the clouds of his own sombre meditations.” 30 As a result, his treatise offered more a colorful “landscape” than an accurate “map” of America. And whatever its great artistic and philosophic achievement, there was still the need for a map. It was precisely Bryce’s desire “to try and give [his] countrymen some juster views than they have had about the United States” that led him to craft The American Commonwealth as a grand atlas of American politics and society.31
The deficiencies Bryce found in Democracy in America spawned in him a sense of caution and modesty. Lest he fall into the same trap as Tocqueville, he was determined never to mistake “transitory for permanent causes.” While there was nothing in Tocqueville’s account that was “simply erroneous,” there was much distortion. Tocqueville tended to build too great a “superstructure of inference, speculation and prediction” on too slight a foundation: “The fact is there, but it is perhaps a smaller fact than he thinks, or a transient fact, or a fact whose importance is, or shortly will be, diminished by other facts which he has not adequately recognized.” 32 In Bryce’s estimation, the real world was far too untidy for such lofty generalizations as those Tocqueville offered. This was especially true when it came to his understanding of democracy itself.
For Bryce, the issue was simple: “Democracy really means nothing more or less than the rule of the whole people expressing their sovereign will by their votes.” 33 In his view, Tocqueville had painted with too broad a brush. Rather than speak of democracy as a form of government, he was wont to speak of democracy as a spirit of the age, something as irresistible as it was intangible. This Bryce rejected:
Democratic government seems to me, with all deference to his high authority, a cause not so potent in the moral and social sphere as he deemed it; and my object has been less to discuss its merits than to paint the institutions and the people of America as they are, tracing what is peculiar to them not merely to the sovereignty of the masses, but also to the history and traditions of the race, to its fundamental ideas, to its material environment.34
Bryce was only incidentally concerned with what Tocqueville had called the mores of the people; the Englishman cared more about institutions than ideology, more about the mechanics of politics than the manners of society.
Bryce conceded that part of Tocqueville’s problem—but only a part—was the time in which he wrote. The sober republicanism of Founders such as Alexander Hamilton had given way to the democratic intoxication of the Jacksonians. “The anarchic teachings of Jefferson had borne fruit,” Bryce explained. “Administration and legislation, hitherto left to the educated classes, had been seized by the rude hands of men of low social position and scanty knowledge.” 35 Thus, what Tocqueville took to be the inherent characteristics of the democratic spirit of the modern age were, in fact, merely the manifestations of a peculiarly perverted exercise of democratic governance during a particularly vulgar and raucous period of American history. The “brutality and violence” of those days had skewed Tocqueville’s account of his grand theory of the tyranny of the majority.36
Tocqueville’s study was influential and generated in his followers the belief that “democracy is the child of ignorance, the parent of dullness and conceit. The opinion of the greatest number being the universal standard, everything is reduced to the level of vulgar minds. Originality is stunted, variety disappears,