French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) is revered for his almost prophetic powers of foresight concerning countless aspects of modern society. Technology isn’t one of them. As Eduardo Nolla points out in his definitive new edition of Tocqueville’s masterwork Democracy in America, “there is perhaps no point on which modern critics of Tocqueville are in more agreement than on his ignorance of … matters of industry, of the process of urbanization, and the little attention that he gave to steamboats, canals, railroads and other technical progress.” Historian Garry Wills mocks Tocqueville for “[riding] around on steamboats without noticing how crucially they were changing American life,” and argues that Tocqueville’s relative silence in his great work about “American capitalism, manufactures, banking, [and] technology” shows that he simply didn’t “get” America. Even James W. Ceaser, whose Liberal Democracy and Political Science (1990) argues for the continuing relevance of a Tocquevillian understanding of politics, concedes that “Tocqueville seems to have underestimated the possibilities of modern technology.”
If true, the charge that Tocqueville didn’t understand technology would be devastating for his reputation as a thinker whose work stands the test of time. Indeed, why would we expect a Norman aristocrat — a man who lived in a castle and died long before James Watson or Bill Gates were even born — to offer anything of more than antiquarian interest to our biotech, digital age? Just as Tocqueville said that “a new political science” was necessary for understanding the then emergent world of democracy, a political science newer than Tocqueville’s would seem to be necessary for understanding the unprecedented techno-political challenges we now confront, from state-sponsored digital surveillance to the ethics of genetic engineering.
But is the charge true? Does Tocqueville overlook the significance of technology? On this point, Tocqueville’s critics usually argue that he failed to make the great technological transformation of his time, the Industrial Revolution, a focal point of Democracy in America, thus showing that he was blind to the importance of such change. In some of his minor works, however, the Industrial Revolution was plainly Tocqueville’s central preoccupation. His Memoir on Pauperism and Journeys to England and Ireland abound with penetrating observations of the economic, social, moral, and political life of the rising industrial cities Tocqueville visited in England in the 1830s — after he made his famous journey to the United States, but during the drafting of the second volume of Democracy in America. They also show that he considered the Industrial Revolution not as an isolated phenomenon, but as a paradigmatic example of the paradoxes of technological change in a modern, democratic society.
In these lesser-known works, Tocqueville argues that industrialization is an inevitable reality in democratic times, that it is intrinsically connected to the free political institutions and the distinctive moral and intellectual virtues of democratic peoples, and that it decisively contributes to the unprecedented levels of material prosperity enjoyed in the modern West. He also dwells on the Industrial Revolution’s darker side: its environmental consequences, the threat it poses to the equality of conditions, its narrowing effects on the minds of workers and the hearts of their employers, and its contributions to the growth of centralized political and economic power and the concomitant attenuation of human liberty.
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