Democracy in (North) America

“I think there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.

The Americans have no philosophic school of their own, and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names.

It is easy to see, nevertheless, that almost all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds in the same manner and conduct them by the same rules; that is to say, they possess a certain philosophic method, whose rules they have never taken the trouble to define, that is common to all of them.

To escape from the spirit of system, from the yoke of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and, up to a certain point, from national prejudices; to take tradition only as information, and current facts only as a useful study for doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone, to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained to the means, and to see through the form to the foundation, these are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans.

If I go still further and seek among these diverse features the principal one that can sum up almost all the others, I discover that in most of the operations of the mind, each American calls only on the individual effort of his reason.

America is therefore the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed. That should not be surprising.

Americans do not read Descartes’ works because their social state turns them away from speculative studies, and they follow his maxims because this same social state naturally disposes their minds to adopt them.

Amidst the continual movement that reigns in the heart of a democratic society, the bond that unites generations is relaxed or broken; each man easily loses track of the ideas of his ancestors or scarcely worries about them.

Men who live in such a society can no longer draw their beliefs from the opinions of the class to which they belong, for there are, so to speak, no longer any classes, and those that still exist are composed of elements that move so much that the body can never exert a genuine power over it members.

As for the action that the intellect of one man can have on another, it necessarily very restricted in a country where citizens, having become nearly the same, all see each other from very close, and, not perceiving in anyone among themselves incontestable signs of greatness and superiority, are constantly led back toward their own reason as the most visible and closest, source of truth. Then not only is trust in such and such a man destroyed but the taste for believing any man whomsoever at his word.

Each therefore withdraws narrowly into himself and claims to judge the world from there.

The American way of taking the rule of their judgment only from themselves leads to other habits of mind.

As they see that they manage to resolve unaided all the little difficulties that practical life presents, they easily conclude that everything in the world is explicable and that nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence.

Thus they willingly deny what they cannot comprehend.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840.