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...when they ratified the U.S. Constitution's creation an energetic federal government, democracy is variously depicted as arriving in the United States with the election of Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.
Hardly anyone touches the subject without invoking the elegant observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in his now classic Democracy in America. Arriving fifty-six years after Americans announced their independence, the twenty-six-year-old French nobleman marveled at the pervasive purchase of democratic mores and read that vigor back into the past. Astute as he was, Tocqueville did not escape the tendency of his age to naturalize social forces (and hence stoked Americans' own desire to romanticize their democratic mores). What Tocqueville missed or minimized were the bitter political fights leading to the electoral defeat of the Federalist founders and the triumph of a boisterous, democratic opposition. Instead, 'equality of condition' serves, in Democracy in America, as something of a deux ex machina, summoned to explain a variety of social preferences, habits of thoughts, and political practices.
In many ways American society was exceptional when compared with others in the world, but no complicated cultural transformation emerges naturally. Behind the democracy that Jefferson and his party espoused was a hundred-year-old transformation of basic ideas about human nature and social order. The democratization of economic opportunity after 1800 played an important role as well.
Underpinnings are not meant to be seen; they hold up the building but are not a conspicuous part. This is exactly the case with the underpinnings of democracy. As metaphors go, 'underpinnings' do a good job of pointing in the right direction toward supportive assumptions and undergirding convictions. They are not the arguments put forward by proponents or detractors, but rather the beliefs that had to be widely accepted before the intellectual object itself- democracy--could be considered a practical alternative to the reigning political theories.
That other common trope for talking about the substratum of a complex idea--roots--takes away the indeterminacy in this cultural change. The acorn has no choice but to become an oak. To speak of democratic roots would close out the history where paths were opened and doors closed in the everyday world of social choices. It would silence the vigorous opposition of those who continued to see democratic rule as chaotic, irrational, and profoundly unsettling to the hierarchical structure of the universe.
I intend to approach the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy at an early entry point, in the seventeenth century, when England was transforming itself into a modern nation. Delving into the rich literature produced by the economic and political changes of its century of revolution, we will find many fresh challenges to conventional ideas about political order.
In the eighteenth century the English created a constitutional monarchy in which the king, lords, and commons shared authority. Some English thinkers hearkened back to classical texts to construct a theory that showed how by balancing the one, the few, and the many, they had introduced checks against power plays from any one of these three components of the state. Connected to this description of England's delicate balancing act were affirmations of the need for disinterested leaders practicing civic humanism. Described as the capacity to put the interests of the whole before one's self-interest, civic humanism justified the leadership of the propertied few who did not constantly have to look out for themselves in order to survive.
This classical republican thought simply represented a fresh reworking of the very old traditional assumptions of human inequality, the fragility of public order, and the threat contained in change. In contrast, the core beliefs necessary to the widespread acceptance of American democracy at this time were that ordinary men could take care of themselves without the firm direction of ministers, magistrates, and fathers; that this capacity to look out for oneself is a part of the human endowment and hence universal and equal; and that social change was part of an evolutionary process that over time would enhance the entire human prospect.
Unproblematic as these propositions seem to us, they ran athwart the exaltation, even mystification, of authority, which a lot of wise men and women thought to be essential to maintaining order. They undermined a reverence for the past promoted by the Judeo-Christian narrative of the Garden of Eden and the educated European's esteem for the golden age of classical Greece. Instead, these ideas embraced change, inducing fear in those who held to the traditional beliefs that history was cyclical and that change usually came in the form of usurpations of power, foreign...
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More articles from Daedalus
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Tape measure.(Short story), June 22, 2007
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