For years Harper and Row featured a blurb on thefront cover of George Lawrence's 1966 translation of Alexis de Tocqueville'sclassic Democracy in America: "Tocqueville, whose brilliance has always been granted by academics, is now accessible to readers who don't mind brilliance as long as it is readable." Apparently, though, it's not been obvious to everyone that this accessibility has been a good thing. Reviews of a new translation published last fall by the University of Chicago Press have been overwhelmingly positive, and largely for the reason that it is more difficult to read.
What could possibly be better about a translation that's harder to readthan its predecessors? In their introduction, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., and DelbaWinthrop suggest that the ease of previous editions came at the expense ofaccuracy. Two English translations have appeared prior to this one: Lawrence's,almost 40 years ago, and another by an English contemporary and friend ofTocqueville's, Henry Reeve, well over a century earlier. Reeve was actuallyadmonished by Tocqueville himself for the very indulgence with which Mansfield andWinthrop charge Lawrence: interpretive license. As it happened, Reeve wasconsiderably less sanguine about the subject of Democracy than Tocqueville was, and the leanings of the translator came out in the translation. After the English publication of its first volume, Tocqueville wrote to Reeve from France:
Your translation must maintain my attitude; this I demand notonly from the translator, but from the man. It has seemed to me that in thetranslation of the last book you have, without wanting it, following the instinctof your opinions, very lively colored what was contrary to democracy and ratherappeased what could do wrong to aristocracy.
Reeve's translation was amended twice, once in 1862 by Francis Bowenand again in 1945 by Phillips Bradley. In 1957, J.P. Mayer--the editor ofGallimard's comprehensive French edition of Tocqueville's writings--decided thata new English version altogether was in order. When it came out in 1966, Mayerincluded the foregoing excerpt from Tocqueville's correspondence with Reeve inhis foreword, in order to indicate the standard he and his translator Lawrencehad set for themselves.
Alas, poor Mayer. According to Brian C. Anderson, writing in First Things, the new Mansfield-Winthrop edition is "the first accurate translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century masterpiece." A review by Roger Kimball in TheNew Criterion describes it only somewhat less categorically as a "superior translation." The Weekly Standard lauds the new edition as "a faithful rendering" that "allows English readers to appreciate for the first time Tocqueville's approach." More recently, the celebrated intellectual historian Gordon S. Wood reviewed it in The New York Review of Books, and no less positively. Though Wood spends only a short paragraph on the translation itself--moving quickly into a thoughtful meditation on Mansfield and Winthrop's 69-page introductory essay--he repeats the main compliment paid by the other three.
Neither Mansfield and Winthrop nor any of their reviewers claim that therelative shortcomings they find in the Bradley and Lawrence editions issuedirectly from political prejudice, as Tocqueville had suggested of Reeve's. Thestated aim of the new translation is not to correct a political bias as such butrather to preserve the literary and philosophical integrity of Tocqueville'sthought as he recorded it in French. "Recognizing that translation is alwaysimperfect," Mansfield and Winthrop explain,
we have sought all the more to be modest, cautious, andfaithful. Every translator must make many choices, but in making ours we havebeen guided by the principle, admittedly an ideal, that our business is to conveyTocqueville's thought as he held it rather than to restate it in comparable termsof today.>
It would seem that a consensus has quickly formed that Mansfield andWinthrop have hit their mark squarely.
Readers familiar with First Things, The New Criterion, or The WeeklyStandard will, however, recognize something of a pattern to the venues in which the Mansfield-Winthrop edition received such early praise. They are all resolutely conservative institutions. And those familiar with Mansfield himself will know that, in addition to being a professor of government at Harvard University, he is one of the country's best-known conservative intellectuals. Winthrop--who also teaches at Harvard and is Mansfield's wife of 23 years--is associated with the same conservative-intellectual community as her husband. What's more, so are each of the reviewers, with the exception of Wood. And the suspicion has been raised--by Caleb Crain in a dissenting piece in The New YorkTimes Book Review--that the Mansfield-Winthrop edition is less an authentic rendering of Tocqueville than it is "Tocqueville for the neocons."
Most of Crain's review is devoted to the text of the translation, in whichcourse he makes a number of intelligent and valuable criticisms of thetranslators' literalistic approach. One thing he maintains, however, is that"Mansfield and Winthrop have nowhere altered Tocqueville's meaning." But Crainsandwiches his analysis of the translation between intimations that aneoconservative agenda is nevertheless being perpetrated here. He begins byremarking on Mansfield and Winthrop's note of gratitude, in their introduction, tothe Bradley Foundation and to the John M. Olin Foundation, both of which arewidely known for their support of intellectual conservatism and endeavors alliedwith it; he closes with a suggestion that a "modern Tocqueville" would reject thepolitics of his contemporary neoconservative admirers; and he labels Mansfield andWinthrop's literalistic translation "arch-conservative." The point of Crain'spolemic is stark: The translators are arrogating Tocqueville into contemporarypolitical conservatism.
This alternative take on the new translation is spreadingquickly. In truth, though, there is not much textual support for it. It reposeson little more than the fact of Mansfield and Winthrop's politics. And itstrangely ignores a prior and glaring question, namely: What wouldneoconservatives need a new "neoconservative Tocqueville" for, given thatTocqueville has been a star of neoconservative thought for years?
Over the last half-century alone, Tocqueville has played leading rolesin a number of ideological settings. But one of the most enduring appropriationsof him has been on the New Right: as political theory's greatest critic of "biggovernment."
When Tocqueville came to study America in 1831, he did so out of an anxiousinvolvement with the problems of contemporary French politics. The four decadessince the French Revolution had been tumultuous: marked by the Jacobin Terror,the rise and fall of Napoleon, the subsequent Restoration of the Bourbons in 1814under Louis XVIII, and the July Revolution of 1830. But Tocqueville believed thata deeply seated malady lay beneath all the instability of post-1789 France--onethat would be even more threatening to French democracy in the long term. Itwasn't even postrevolutionary as such, but endemic to the country's history, asit had been at least since the reign of Louis XIV: Political liberty itself,Tocqueville thought, had been asphyxiated by the radical centralization ofpolitical power.
Louis XIV had effectively destroyed the residual influence of the landedaristocracy in the seventeenth century, depriving France of any loci ofindependent power against the crown. When the country's democratic revolutioncame in the late eighteenth century, its protagonists took over a highlycentralized form of state. The very idea of noncentralized political power waswidely seen as an aristocratic contrivance, the holdover of a feudal order. Andso there was a deep link in the minds of French democrats between theequality that their revolution represented, on one hand, and a centralized political authority that spoke and acted in the name of the people as a whole, on the other. This link was so pernicious, Tocqueville thought, not just because it ended up thwarting effective democratic participation on the part of the citizenry (though it did that), but because it eviscerated the citizenry's contact with, let alone its interest in, politics altogether. The central government governed and everyone else, increasingly, cultivated their own gardens.
This attenuation of noncentralized political clout is the same thing, forTocqueville, as the attenuation of liberty itself. Where there are no foyers ofpolitical power external to the central government, he thought, more and morepower will agglomerate in it. And when this happens, there are the makings ofdespotism. Modern despotism would be "mild" or "soft," coexisting with theexternal forms of democracy:
... it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them,and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itselfto one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it doesnot tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, andfinally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid andindustrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
Democratic despotism is not, according to Tocqueville, discretelycaused by hypercentralized government. But the question of a country'spolitical form--and its relative concentration or diffusion of power inparticular--is integral, for him, to the question of liberty itself.
In the America of 1830, Tocqueville saw what he was looking for:a democratic society that had yielded an alternative model to the centralizedFrench state. The constitutional structure of the United States ensured not onlychecks and balances at the federal level but, more important, the maintenance ofmultiple layers of governance. And beyond the federal-state division of powers,he discovered a great deal of political activity on the local stage. Moreover,Tocqueville noticed, there was a tremendous degree of voluntary, civicassociation among Americans. And where people combine for common purposes, hethought, they not only foster self-reliance but also sustain the very skills ofassociation that a vital citizenry requires.
It shouldn't be hard to see how it is that Tocqueville's analysis ofthe political and civic institutions of Jacksonian America has providedcontemporary neoconservatives with such an effective rhetorical template foranti-statist argumentation. There really is no discussion in his analysis of whatis or is not a "legitimate" purpose for a government to concern itself with;that's just not the kind of argument Tocqueville was engaged in. Nor is itobvious that even "Tocqueville the prescient" could have anticipated the range ofissues on which democratic societies would have to make decisions over the next160-odd years about appropriate areas and levels of government involvement. (Whoshould provide natural- disaster relief? Fund disease research? What about theregulation of airports?) But you can imagine the interpretive steps that bringTocqueville on board with the neoconservative opposition to "big government." Asformer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich once encapsulated the argument: "Thecore of the American system is to have the lowest possible tax, so you have thehighest possible take-home pay, so you have the greatest amount of free time, soas a parent, as a citizen, and as a volunteer, you can be engaged inTocqueville's vision of an American free society, without a government andwithout a bureaucracy."
Are Mansfield and Winthrop participating in this sort of ideologicalarrogation? Toward the end of their introduction, they attribute to Tocquevillethe observation that "many individuals who are weak can easily become dependenton big government." This attribution is troubling for two reasons. One is thatTocqueville's analysis of the dangers of hypercentralized power was not cast insuch unsophisticated, quantifying terms as "big" and "small." The other is that"big government" is simply a loaded expression at the turn of the twenty-firstcentury; it has an ineluctably neoconservative message packed into it. To castTocqueville uncritically as an opponent of "big government" is therefore doublyinaccurate. And this is arguably a particularly egregious inaccuracy given thevery literalistic purpose of this translation: "to convey Tocqueville's thoughtas he held it rather than to restate it in comparable terms of today." (It shouldbe noted that they make no such error when referring to "gender roles," whichthey put in quotation marks in order to mark the anachronism of the term.)
But all this takes place in the course of two pages in theeditors' introduction--Democracy in America itself is more than 700 pages long--and there's little else in the new edition to suggest a neoconservative objective. In certain respects, it in fact does justice to Tocqueville in a way that prior editions did not. For example, in his analysis of the American practice of "association" and its importance in the maintenance of political liberty in the United States, Tocqueville refers to association alternatively as an "art" or a "science." The terms in French are, simply enough, l'art and la science. Tocqueville's usage might give the appearance that these terms are interchangeable, in which case his alternation between the two would seem needlessly confusing. In previous editions, the translators have at times "cleaned up" this discrepancy by translating both l'art de l'association and la science de l'association as "the technique of association." But if Tocqueville wrote l'art or la science then should we not see these in English as "art" and "science," respectively, instead of the generic term "technique"? To conflate the terms is to assume that there is no tension of meaning in the way Tocqueville deployed them.
But are these corrections representative of the new translation as awhole? No. Comparable examples are in fact extremely few--meaning that theprevious translations just aren't as presumptuous as this one would suggest.Where the new translation departs from Lawrence appreciably, it is almost alwaysa question of style, not one of ameliorating prior distortions. Mansfield andWinthrop are usually, perhaps, a little less elegant and usually a little closerto the original word order and phrase structure. But their relentless literalismrecurrently generates a problem of its own, one unknown to Lawrence: unneededdifficulty. For example, they have Tocqueville writing this:
The people that, face to face with the great militarymonarchies of Europe, would fragment its sovereignty, would seem to me toabdicate by that fact alone its power and perhaps its existence and its name.
Admirable position of the New World that enables man to have no enemies buthimself! To be happy and free, it is enough for him to wish it.
Get it? No? Here is the same passage in Lawrence:
A nation that divided its sovereignty when faced by the greatmilitary monarchies of Europe would seem to me, by that single act, to beabdicating its power, and perhaps its existence and its name.
How wonderful is the position of the New World, where man has yet no enemiesbut himself. To be happy and to be free, it is enough to will it to be so.
Literalism can render an author more authentically, true; but deployedas an overarching principle of translation, it can just as easily generatedilutions of an author's meaning.
Crain characterizes the Mansfield-Winthrop translation as "arch-conservative,"by which I take it he means that the style in which Mansfield and Winthrop haverendered Tocqueville is often wantonly abstruse. But in principle, it is no morepolitically "conservative" than I would be if I put on a top hat and monocle and started to read from the Lawrence translation in a snooty, pseudo-aristocratic tone of voice; the problem is that this style tends to be no less gratuitously distracting. Mansfield and Winthrop believe that if they translate Tocqueville word for word, or as close to it as possible, we will be able to confront his analysis more squarely on its own terms. The aspiration to fidelity is itself irreproachable; but by playing it up in the way they do, Mansfield and Winthrop suggest that the substantive problems with the prior translations are systematic in a way they are not. And so, like good advertisers, they insinuate that we very much need something new, even if we might actually be better off to fix up what we already have.
Either way, the latest edition of Democracy in America neither gives us a categorically authentic Tocqueville previously unknown in English nor distorts him through the terms of neoconservatism. If it should strengthen the contemporary association between Tocquevillean and conservative thought, this will be largely because of Tocqueville's new public affiliation with the high-profile conservatism of Harvey Mansfield. Whoever might find this association troubling would do best to quell any literary-conspiratorial suspicions he or she may harbor and to confront conservative appropriations of Democracy directly and vigorously. After all, the more dialogue there is on Tocqueville's thought across the political spectrum, the lesser the danger will be that he's lost in any translation.