Emerson, Tocqueville, and the “True Nature of Man’s Greatness”
Of the many ambivalences in Democracy in America, perhaps the most intriguing is the
status of the individual. For while Tocqueville laments the majoritarian threat to healthy
“individuality,” he also attacks the corrosive effects of “individualism.”
1
The resolution of the
paradox lies in his insight that radical individualism tends to undermine true individuality,
replacing the “art of association” with isolation in a mass culture. Tocqueville offers a unifying
principle undergirding the decline of the “isolated and weak” (1969, 703) individual in his brief
chapter entitled “What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Toward Pantheism.” The
pantheism that concerns Tocqueville here is an Hegelian monism in which all individuals and all
matter are merely “several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of
the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him” (1969, 541). The term
“pantheism” is limited to one chapter of Democracy in America, but its spirit pervades the work,
and many of its most challenging concerns can be linked to the concept. Pantheism, as Ralph
Hancock puts it, is for Tocqueville the “vanishing point of democratic consciousness” (1991,
386).
Tocqueville writes that this pantheism, “although it destroys human individuality, or
rather because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies.”
Individuals become increasingly forgotten as equality grows and “unity becomes an obsession.”
Although Tocqueville often expresses a bemused indulgence toward the quirks of democracy, he
employs the strongest terms in condemning pantheism: “All those who still appreciate the true
nature of man’s greatness should combine in the struggle against it” (1969, 452). Given the
forcefulness of the phrase, Tocqueville’s readers have been naturally led to wonder precisely
what he feared from pantheism. It seems doubtful that he expected modern democrats to believe
1
The Oxford English Dictionary actually gives Tocqueville credit for popularizing the latter term.
Convention