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James Bryce's American Democracy
| Article
# : |
13005 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
6,742 Words |
| Author
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Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. His most recent book was Conservativism (University
of Minnesota Press, 1986). |
When studies of American democracy are mentioned, two titles instantly come to mind: Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-1840) and James Bryce's The American Commonwealth (1888). Today, Tocqueville's work far exceeds Bryce's in popularity. Many educated people might not even recognize Bryce's name. Tocqueville's fate was the same in this country and had been for close to seventy years until the Tocqueville revival began at the end of the 1930s, commencing a period of renewed popularity that shows no sign of coming to an end. It is highly unlikely that Bryce's great work will enjoy a similar resurrection, which is no reason for the kind of neglect it currently suffers.
We still go to Bryce for piquant and cogent answers to the questions of why great men are not chosen presidents and why the best men do not go into politics in America. The answers Bryce gives to his chapter's questions have not lost their trenchancy. Nor have his treatments of public opinion in the United States, the "supposed" versus the "true" faults of American democracy, the influence of democratic laws and customs on creative thought and on traditional culture, the uniformity in American life coupled with the pleasantness of life in America, the reasons why socialism has never caught on in America as it did in Europe, how equality is interpreted by Americans, and what Bryce called in a fascinating chapter "The Fatalism of the Multitude" in America. The great merit of his consideration of these, and all other topics, is the freedom from the kind of abstraction that at times becomes overpowering in Tocqueville. There is a concreteness, an unmistakably and distinctively American flavor, to Bryce's book that is in welcome contrast to books written by Europeans who were and are to this day more interested in exploring their European ancestry than the empirical realities of American life, whose own bellyaches are transposed not to the cosmos but to the America they pretend to praise.
Bryce's book had eighteen years of thought and research behind it, which included three substantial visits to this country. He was already a famous scholar when he made his first visit in 1870, and doors were opened to him by Americans of every station and career. Even if he had not been a man of note, he certainly would have made his way, as he did, from one end of America to the other in order to seek out as many and as great a variety of Americans as he did. For Bryce loved America from the outset, and he never wearied of conversations everywhere, including the railroad stations he waited in and the trains he took to all parts of the country. He estimated that four-fifths of his book came from conversations with the Americans and one-fifths from books
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