This is the second portion of our lecture on American Exceptionalism.
Here I want to focus on Alexis de Tocqueville. This is a French nobleman, who came to the
United States in the mid-nineteenth century. He toured the country, north and south. When
he went back to France, he wrote a very famous book. It’s still available in all bookstores
and university libraries. It’s called Democracy in America. In this book, de Tocqueville made
an argument that still resonates today, and that is this – The American people are fundamentally
different from Europeans, and he lists some of the reasons that we are different, and
why this difference has occurred historically.
So I’m just going to mention a couple of these to you, so you can use these ideas as
we go forward, to help you think critically about American history.
De Tocqueville said that the American people are obsessed with individual liberty – that
they don’t want anyone telling them what to do, they expect to have their own land,
they expect to be self-sufficient, and that personal autonomy is a virtue and a necessity.
De Tocqueville also said that the American people, unlike Europeans, are obsessed with
egalitarianism. Now this is a fancy word indicating equality. De Tocqueville said that Americans,
unlike Europeans, think they’re as good as the next guy. There’s a sense in America
that anybody can grow up and become President, and of course, we’ve seen the validity of
this argument – look at Bill Clinton; look at Jimmy Carter; Richard Nixon – the idea
that people should not ‘put on airs’ in America, that this is sort of a classless
society. Now we know this is not true. But we also know that the vast middle class in
this country doesn’t tend to resent the rich; they tend to want to become the rich.
So the sense of egalitarianism is quite strong.
De Tocqueville also said that, in the United States, populism prevails. You can look at
the prefix of this word, the Latin prefix ‘pop’, P-O-P, population. Populism here,
in de Tocqueville’s usage, points to the power of public opinion. De Tocqueville points
out that, in Europe, the sultans, the kings, the emperors could care less about public
opinion; but in America it’s quite different. Here de Tocqueville says that before a politician
takes a stand on any issue at all, that they test which way the wind is blowing – what
do the American people think about an issue? Once they determine that, then they can come
out and make a statement on the issue, and be safe. So the power of public opinion is
paramount in this country, and of course, we can see it today. Let’s face it, politicians
take a poll before they say anything to you.
De Tocqueville also said that in this country there’s almost a secular faith, and laissez-faire,
and we’ll put this word up on the screen for you. It’s obviously French. Taken literally
it means ‘hands off’. In the context of American history, it means the government
should keep its hands off your economic affairs. We continue to fight over this term. Your
politicians will not use it. The reason they won’t use it is that they don’t want to
sound educated. Your politicians want to sound like somebody that you’d want to go have
a beer with. They don’t want to use expressions and concepts that are above your head. So
you want hear the word ‘laissez-faire’, but you will constantly hear the Republicans
crying about the size of government and the role of government, accusing the Democrats
of wanting too much government. This is an old argument in American history, and it goes
on. The verbiage may change, but the ideas have not. Laissez-faire will dominate American
history up until the Great Depression, and once the capitalist economy collapses in the
1930s, FDR will come in and apply The New Deal to the Depression problem, and you’ll
see that laissez-faire no longer holds, or has quite the hold, on American people after
the Great Depression. But up until the Great Depression, it is a very powerful ideological
tool. It says the American people are better off with less government and that American
people are better off when the government tends to foreign affairs and leaves us alone
in our business lives.
Now in de Tocqueville’s book, Democracy in America, he points to the origin of this
Exceptionalism. He says Americans are fundamentally different from the Europeans because the American
people never experienced feudalism. This is a term you may have heard in high school.
Feudalism is how the Europeans organized themselves, for basically a thousand years, from the end
of the Roman Empire until the French Revolution. Feudalism – let me characterize it for you,
briefly. Feudalism is a hierarchy of classes, and you can see images of this on D2L, you
can ‘Google’ it yourself. Just print ‘feudalism’ and you’ll see a number of diagrams and
images illustrating this idea – a strict hierarchy of classes with the king and the
pope at the top, with the nobility and the lesser nobility, the knights, all the way
down to the vast peasantry at the bottom of this vast triangle. A strict hierarchy of
classes – there’s very little mobility in this hierarchy. If you’re born a peasant,
or a serf, you will NOT become king or pope. If you’re born in the nobility, you are
most likely to die as a nobleman. The average European peasant would never travel more than
twenty or thirty miles from his village, and he will die a peasant. So there’s very little
mobility in this hierarchy.
Now, let’s further characterize feudalism like this – not only is it a hierarchy of
classes, but it is a system of reciprocity – everybody owes everybody something in
this system. The king and the nobility dispense land and protection downward. The peasantry
and the nobility send food, service, and military service – upward. So the king is served
by his noblemen; they collect taxes and defend his kingdom. The peasantry feed this kingdom.
The wheat, the olive oil, the beer and the wine are produced by the peasantry, and sent
UP the hierarchy. So protection and land go downward; service and food go upward. This
system held sway for, like I said, a thousand years. De Tocqueville points out that the
American people never experienced anything like this. One of the reasons is that there
was so much land here that people could continue to move west, and acquire vast tracks of land,
where they could be self-sufficient and independent, and never have to serve noblemen. We don’t
have kings in the United States, and we don’t have an institutional church in the United
States, either, with its pope and cardinals and bishops and priests.
So the absence of feudalism makes American Exceptionalism possible, and with that, I’m
going to close this lecture on American Exceptionalism.
Thank you.