On the trail of US democracy

Biography:How many of those who analysed the political and social institutions of bygone centuries are still widely read today, not out of historical or academic interest, but for guidance on our own times?

The answer, now that Karl Marx is scarcely read (especially by his own dwindling band of followers), is precisely one: Alexis de Tocqueville. It is in some respects astonishing that Democracy in America, published in 1835 by a 30 year-old member of the decayed French aristocracy who had spent less than a year in the United States, should still be a touchstone of American political debate. Even more remarkable that Tocqueville, like the Constitution, is claimed by both right and left. Neo-conservatives took him up as a prophet of the inevitable, even providential, progress of US-style democracy. The left is inspired by his analysis of community, voluntary co-operation and civil society. To retain this keen edge almost 150 years after he died of tuberculosis at the age of 54, Tocqueville must have been some writer.

Yet the very fact that he is still vigorous enough to be worth claiming by opposite sides in contemporary debates makes it hard to see the great French traveller, writer and politician in his own terms. The difficulty is illustrated, with a nice irony, in the very subtitle of Hugh Brogan's compelling and magisterial biography. In line with the neo-conservative view, it claims Tocqueville as the "prophet of democracy". Yet the whole tenor of the book is, as Brogan himself puts it in an article in the current issue of Prospect magazine, that "Tocqueville is misread if he is turned into a prophet". When even his own publishers find it hard to accept the central thrust of his book, it is obvious that Brogan's task in trying to disentangle the man from the messianic claims of his followers is a tough one.

The need, nevertheless, to do precisely this arises from more than the exigencies of the biographical method, which is concerned to rescue an individual life from the distortions of hindsight. Brogan gets his own sharp edge from a distaste for utopian political ideals, including those expounded by Tocqueville himself. Even as he argues for Democracy in America as "the greatest book ever written on the United States", he criticises it for its stern, almost snobbish, distaste for the ordinariness of most citizens, and suggests instead that politics is "as natural a dimension of human life as eating, drinking, sex or commerce" and therefore "messy, never wholly successful, and necessarily incomplete". This level-headedness is important to any real appreciation of Tocqueville. To value him properly, we have to understand both his limitations and those of the America he explored.

The energetic curiosity that Tocqueville brought to the study of democracy, and that makes his work so richly readable, is that of an anthropologist visiting an exotic civilisation and finding its mores unexpectedly admirable. The key to his work, as Brogan argues, is that he was not a natural democrat. His contemporary and rival, the French politician, François Guizot, said to Tocqueville that "You paint and judge modern democracy as a conquered aristocrat convinced that his conqueror is right".

Tocqueville's background among the middle- ranking aristocracy of Normandy was impeccably monarchist. His father was a peer of France under the restored Bourbon monarchy of 1814-1830. The most famous member of his mother's family, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, served as chief defence counsel at the trial of Louis XVI and was guillotined for his pains in 1794. Tocqueville himself was immensely proud of his roots in the old elite, and confessed that he was always more comfortable with members of his own caste: "I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger." This implicit elitism limits Tocqueville's analysis of democracy, a system that he assumed would always be best run by wealthy, well-educated men like himself. His collaborator and travelling companion in the US and Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont (Engels to Tocqueville's Marx), studied and wrote passionately about the plight of American Indians, slaves and the Irish poor: the victims of the very "democratic" societies that Tocqueville was praising. Tocqueville himself abhorred anything that smacked of the welfare state, was relatively coy about slavery and racism, and never even considered the issue of whether a polity that did not grant the vote to women could be called democratic at all. He wrote of democracy as a "male virtue" and of the bonds that would hold together a democratic society as "manly mutual confidence". Humane, compassionate and open-minded though he was, Tocqueville was a man of his class and his times, and attempts to read him as a guide for the 21st century risk the same evasiveness that limits his vision.

HUGH BROGAN, BIOGRAPHER of John F Kennedy and author of the superb Penguin History of the United States, is acutely alive to these limitations. In his acknowledgements, he describes Tocqueville as "one of my oldest and dearest friends": he started working on a biography in the early 1960s and published a short, brilliant monograph in 1973. But, as he puts it with typical charm, "I use a friend's privilege to be frank about what I take to be his weaknesses". Thus, he writes of Tocqueville's "neurotic craving to seem original". He views his second major work, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, as "to some extent . . . the embittered utterance of a bad loser". Such friendly abuse is what makes the book such a pleasure to read, but also what makes it a wholly convincing case for Tocqueville's stature. Knowing the flaws, Brogan also knows precisely where the greatness lies.

Brogan's ultimate judgment is that Tocqueville "enlarges our sense of human possibility and of the meaning of human lives in everything he writes. His does so through his intellectual and artistic gifts, and through his passionate sincerity. So the accuracy of his conclusions is of limited importance, so long as he is not wilfully perverse, which Tocqueville never was". This will not please those who wish to read Tocqueville as a political philosopher who can teach us about our own times, but it should please readers of both Tocqueville and Brogan. Brogan's Tocqueville is above all an artist - a writer trying to make sense of his encounters and experiences in a language that conveys, not just his thoughts, but his own personality. His respect for his readers, the way he exemplified a new kind of public discourse about political institutions, is what makes him important to democracy. And the elegant, erudite, accessible and authoritative book that Brogan has fashioned from his long immersion in Tocqueville's work is ample proof that his influence, in this regard at least, remains entirely benevolent.

Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times journalist and author. His most recent book (written with Shane Hegarty) is The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising (Gill & Macmillan). His book White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America was published by Faber in 2005

Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution By Hugh Brogan Profile, 724pp. £30