The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Hawthorne once wrote of his workroom: "This deserves to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands and thousands of visions have appeared to me in it." Much of our life we pass in the prosaic light of day. But a part of it even the most normal of us pass in a haunted chamber. Hawthorne is the classic his- torian of this haunted chamber.

I should add that it will repay you to read or reread, in addi- tion to The Scarlet Letter, a few of Hawthorne^ somber alle- gorical shorter tales, particularly "Young Goodman Brown. . . ," The Ministers Black Veil," "The Birthmark," and "Rappaccin^s Daughter."

C.F.

71

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

1805-1859

Democracy in America

Had this Lifetime Reading Plan been compiled eighty or ninety years ago, Tocqueville probably would not have been represented. From the appearance in 1835 of the first part of his masterpiece he has never ceased to be read and studied. But it has taken considerably more than a century to disclose him in his true proportions, as one of the few supreme socio- logical and political observers and theorists of the American experiment.

Tocqueville^ family was of the lesser French nobility. Thus he preserved ali his life a deep attachment to the virtues of conservatism and aristocracy. The inexorable logic of his mind compelled him to discern in democracy the wave of the future, while his roots in tradition helped him to measure the origins and dimensions of that wave with a certain useful and lucid detachment.

On May 11, 1831, the young Tocqueville, accompanied by a brilliant colleague named Beaumont, reached our shores. Their avowed purpose was to observe and report on the American penal system. The pair traveled seven thousand miles in our country and Canada. They sailed home on February 20, 1832. In the course of these pregnant nine months Tocqueville saw us during one of our most interesting and criticai periods, that of the earlier phase of the Jacksonian Revolution. The outcome was the publication, in 1835 and 1840, of the two parts of his monumental work, Democracy in America. This, together with his briefer but no less seminal The Old Regime and the French Revolution, embodies the enduring Tocqueville. I might add that he wasted a certain amount of time from 1839 to 1848 serving as a member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and later held brief office as minister for foreign affairs.

Tocqueville may be described, very roughly, as a liberal aristocrat, a kind of Lafayette with brains. Democracy in America had a double purpose: to describe and analyze the democratic (which seems to have meant to him largely egali- tarian) system in America; and to turn that observation and analysis into a guide for future political thought and action in Europe, particularly in his native land. Many good judges believe his book is still (and by far) the deepest, wisest, and most farseeing ever written about this country.

He made, of course, many errors of observation. Nor have ali of his prophecies come true. Yet no thoughtful American can read his book today (and, by the way, it is a masterpiece of elegance and organization) without marveling at his sympathy, his understanding, his balance, and his prescience. Though in his time our modern capitalist structure was still only in embryo, he understood its future, its strengths, its weaknesses, and its capacities far better than did the later Marx [82]. More than a century and a half ago he warned us against "the possi- ble tyranny of the majority." He outlined the mass age in which we live. But he also saw how our system could mitigate and control the perils of political and social conformity, and he rec- ognized in it one of the broad paths his century and ours would largely follow.

His basic intuition is revealed in the statement "A new sci­ence of politics is needed for a new world." Such a new sci­ence, he felt, was developing, not always harmoniously, not without travail, in the United States. And he knew quite well what he was doing: "I have not undertaken to see differently from others, but to look further, and while they are busied for the morrow only, I have turned my thoughts to the whole future."

What probably interests us most, as we read Tocqueville, is the startling applicability of his insight to our present condi- tion. He foresaw, while America was still largely an agricultural country, the attraction that business and industry would have for us ali. He foresaw our materialism, but also our idealism.

He foresaw the inequities industry would bring in its train. And, most important, he foresaw our future power and, let us hope, our future greatness.

C.F.

72

JOHN STUART MILL

1806-1873

On Liberty, The Subjection of Women