the solitude so absolute.
Underlying everything else, the American wilderness convinced Tocqueville of
the ephemerality of all human things, and of all political things. Those events that had
seemed to have the most force in Tocqueville’s life only a year before, might have well
been dreams. Those dramatic happenings once seemed to bode dramatic changes, but
those events – and the apparent changes that they heralded – suddenly looked small,
evanescent. Political forms, Tocqueville came to see then, are conventional. The deeper
truths of nature will ever elude and outlast them. But democracy’s power, Tocqueville
saw, came from its character of aping nature – of appealing to the manifold desires of the
human heart. Democracy might be, then, that conventional form of human organization
that has atypical force because it promises to satisfy those desires of human life that are
not matters of custom or convention, but are matters of human nature. And because
human nature is what it is, that makes democracy perhaps the most appealing of all forms
of government but also the most dangerous. One must have faith, but one must also feel
terror.
33
Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilds” 403.
17
Convention