I respect Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for its stories. I respect how it serves academic status claims and fetish games. I respect that this book by a French aristocrat flatters intellectuals and that they love playing with it in a way you can’t do with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. That text disciplines you. This text invites you to do anything you want with her. It’s flexible, warm and inviting. It says, take me right now, and have your way with me.
Democracy in America is a series of assertions, and nothing falsifiable is presented.
Tocqueville is part of the French intellectual fad cycle in American academia which runs roughly like this. A French thinker produces ambitious, beautifully written, unfalsifiable claims about how power, society, or the human condition works. The claims are vague enough to be applied to almost anything, precise enough in their vocabulary to signal membership in the right community, and sufficiently difficult to translate that American academics can spend careers arguing about what the original really meant. Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Lacan, Baudrillard: each generated an American academic industry whose primary product was exegesis of the master text rather than independent inquiry.
Tocqueville is the respectable ancestor of this tradition, which is partly why he survives across ideological lines in a way Foucault does not. Conservatives can cite him on the tyranny of the majority and soft despotism. Liberals can cite him on civic association and democratic participation. Communitarians can cite him on habits of the heart. Each reading is defensible from the text because the text never foreclosed any of them.
American academics are drawn to French intellectual fads partly because French intellectual culture rewards exactly the qualities that American academic credentialing rewards: systematic ambition, stylistic distinction, the appearance of radical insight, and sufficient obscurity to require professional interpreters. A thinker who can be understood by a diligent undergraduate on first reading generates no academic industry. A thinker who requires years of formation to approach correctly generates careers.
Darwin requires neither French nor obscurity. He just requires being right.
In the 2025 book Boudon Reexamined: Nuts and Bolts for Contemporary Sociological Science, Stephen Turner contributes an essay on the late Raymond Boudon’s work on Tocqueville. Turner argues that Boudon’s reconstruction of Tocqueville underweights the tacit. Boudon wants to assimilate Tocqueville to ordinary psychology and rational choice. Turner shows this cannot work because Tocqueville keeps running into phenomena, habits of the heart, the American dogma, the aristocrat who cannot see the servant as fully human, that resist reduction to epistemic voluntarism or market selection of beliefs. The closing section on social learning is the key passage. Turner argues that the experiences that produce the habits of the heart, the daily interactions of democratic equality or aristocratic separation, are not reducible to choices or understandable motivations. They are a diet of experience that produces a regime of feeling.
His tacit knowledge framework supplies the diagnosis of why democratic deliberation requires shared formation, but stops short of prescribing how that formation is cultivated or maintained. The Tocqueville paper shows him circling this problem. He notes that community is not self-sustaining, that it requires a certain kind of interaction, that some communities enforce conformity while others produce the mutual recognition that makes genuine deliberation possible. But he does not develop this into a positive account of institutional design.
Tocqueville’s observation that Americans follow Cartesian precepts without having read Descartes, that their philosophy is tacit and unreflective, maps onto my argument that Schmitt’s homogeneity requirement is better understood in Turner’s vocabulary as a shared tacit substrate rather than as ethnic uniformity. The paper gives you a textual grounding for that move in Turner’s own published work rather than in inference from his framework.
One specific passage is worth citing: Turner’s treatment of Mme Duchâtelet, who could undress before her servants because she could not convince herself they were fully human. Turner reads this as Tocqueville’s illustration of what happens when the social learning environment produces incommensurable mentalities. The aristocrat and the servant inhabit different tacit worlds. This is the dissolution of the shared substrate that makes mutual recognition possible. This is the dissolution of democratic deliberation stated in Tocqueville’s own terms and endorsed by Turner as an explanatory problem that ordinary psychology cannot resolve.
Does Tocqueville claim that democracy shapes Americans or that Americans shape democracy as the natural expression of who they are? Both.
The second volume of Democracy in America traces the psychological effects of equality as a social condition. Equal ranks produce men who think and feel in similar ways, who cannot imagine that another person’s suffering is incomprehensible, who unreflectively adopt a Cartesian philosophical method because democratic social conditions naturally lead them there. The American is not choosing this philosophy. The social state produces it in him without his awareness. That is shaping, not expression.
But Tocqueville also acknowledges powerful prior causes that operate independently of democracy. He is explicit that religion, the nature of the country, the origin of the colonists, their former habits, all shaped American character in ways unconnected to equality. The Puritan founding matters. The specific history of religious settlement matters. Americans did not simply receive democracy and become who they are. They brought something to democracy that made it work differently in America than it did elsewhere. The American dogma, as Tocqueville calls it, the unreflective Christianity that operates below the level of examination or discussion, precedes democratic equality and is not produced by it.
Turner’s paper presses on exactly this point. Boudon wants to assimilate Tocqueville to a model where rational individuals adapt to social conditions, but Turner argues that the habits of the heart Americans brought to democracy are not reducible to adaptation. They were produced by a social learning environment, the daily interactions of a relatively equal society, but also by inheritance, by a founding that embedded specific tacit dispositions before the democratic conditions fully took hold.
So Tocqueville’s position is that causation runs both ways and that neither account alone is sufficient, which is part of why he is so hard to pin down and why so many interpretations have been imposed on him.
Tocqueville’s conditional laws are not really laws. They identify a condition and show surprising alterations from what the condition might be expected to produce, but they do not generate predictions that could be checked against contrary evidence. The spreading of Christianity in Rome, the persistence of American religiosity despite equality, the softening of democratic manners: these are observations organized into a narrative, not hypotheses tested against alternatives. Tocqueville is a great observer who constructs illuminating contrasts. He is not doing what Darwin is doing.
Darwin’s achievement in The Origin of Species is to provide arguments with falsification conditions. If the fossil record showed complex organisms appearing suddenly without precursors, the theory fails. If domestic breeding produced no variation, the analogy to natural selection collapses. If species showed no geographical distribution patterns consistent with descent from common ancestors, the whole structure is in trouble. Darwin knew what would break his theory and said so explicitly. That intellectual honesty makes the theory powerful rather than merely suggestive.
Tocqueville’s claims about how democracy shapes the human type, how equality produces conformism, how aristocratic separation generates incommensurable mentalities: none of these come with stated conditions under which Tocqueville would consider them refuted. Turner’s point is that Boudon had to reconstruct Tocqueville’s methodology because Tocqueville never stated it himself. The methodology is inferred from the practice because Tocqueville never committed himself to a form of argument that could be held against him.
This is also why Turner’s Tocqueville paper ends inconclusively. The tacit knowledge problem Tocqueville gestures at, how shared formation is produced and destroyed, is the interesting question his observations raise. But because Tocqueville never operationalized anything, that question remains a provocation rather than a research program.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory would see Stephen Turner’s Tocqueville paper as a coalition technology.
The first move is credentialing through association. Turner aligns himself with the most prestigious names in the interpretive tradition, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Boudon, while positioning himself as the one who sees what they missed. The paper’s structure is: Boudon got Tocqueville partly right but systematically underweighted the tacit. Turner supplies the correction. This is a dominance move dressed as scholarly dialogue. It establishes Turner above Boudon in the interpretive hierarchy while maintaining the appearance of collegial engagement.
The second is coalition signaling through shared enemies. The paper’s consistent target is culturalism and its Marxist variants, the hidden forces school, the view that humans are entirely conditioned by their environment. Turner and Boudon share this enemy even while Turner corrects Boudon. The alliance with Boudon against the culturalists is maintained throughout the paper even as Turner establishes his own superiority within that alliance. This is the transitivity criterion operating: Turner, Boudon, Weber, and Durkheim share rivals, which makes them natural allies even when they disagree with each other.
The third is the sacred value performance. Turner’s sacred value throughout is the tacit, the claim that explicit rational reconstruction always misses something irreducible that only his framework captures. The paper’s conclusion, that the social learning environment that produces habits of the heart is absent from Boudon’s account, is a defense of Turner’s own life work as the indispensable supplement to every other approach. The tacit is always what the other person left out. That is a very well-designed sacred value because it is unfalsifiable in exactly the way you noted about Tocqueville. You can never demonstrate that the tacit has been fully accounted for, so the claim that it remains missing is always available.
The fourth is what Alliance Theory would call the similarity criterion. Turner writes for a specific community, analytical sociologists and philosophers of social science, who share assumptions about what a good argument looks like, what the relevant classical figures are, and what the significant methodological debates are. The paper is maximally legible to that community and largely inaccessible to outsiders. That is coalition selection through vocabulary, the same function Pinsof identifies in vague bullshit: the paper recruits allies by being comprehensible only to people who already share the relevant formation.
The fifth is the expertise move. Turner knows Tocqueville and the tacit knowledge literature and he has intellectual stake in the tacit being important because his career is built on it.
What Alliance Theory cannot easily explain is whether the paper’s core argument is correct. Pinsof is explicit that coalition behavior and truth-tracking are not mutually exclusive. Turner’s observation that Boudon’s reconstruction loses the habits of the heart might be both a coalition move and an accurate diagnosis. Alliance Theory tells you to notice the coalition function. It does not tell you the argument is wrong.
