Friday, August 31, 2012

Individualism and the Academy



In 1944 my mother and I moved to Berkeley. My father’s ship, DD-649, was stationed out of Treasure Island. We lived up by the University. It was foggy, damp, cold, inhospitable a place. But as my father sailed out to what was to become the biggest naval battle of the War his major fear was that I was to become influenced by the Communists at the University. Strange that this was his greatest worry. Yet as I read the piece by one of it current economics faculty member I can now see the true basis for his terror. He feared the Japanese but little, the faculty at Berkeley a great deal.

This, in my opinion, somewhat rotund appearing instructor tells us

When the French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought that France was in big trouble and could learn much from America. So one can only wonder what he would have made of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Perhaps the author also means 1840 as well. de Tocqueville spent much time writing both volumes, often abridged and missing key points, and often poorly translated. The French is still somewhat dated and makes for less than direct interpretation. One must also consider a possible Skinnerian approach of the Cambridge School of seeing de Tocqueville in the context of those commentators about him as well as those who influenced his writing. I will comment more on that later. He continues:

For Tocqueville, the grab for centralized power by the absolutist Bourbon monarchs, followed by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Empire, had destroyed the good with the bad in France’s neo-feudal order. Decades later, the new order was still in flux.

In Tocqueville’s imagination, at least, the old order’s subjects had been eager to protect their particular liberties and jealous of their spheres of independence. They understood that they were embedded in a web of obligations, powers, responsibilities, and privileges that was as large as France itself. Among the French of 1835, however, “the doctrine of self-interest” had produced “egotism…no less blind.” Having “destroyed an aristocracy,” the French were “inclined to survey its ruins with complacency.” … Tocqueville noted that “Americans are fond of explaining…[how] regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the general welfare.” The French, by contrast, faced a future in which “it is difficult to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them,” and “into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves, lest they should have to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow-creatures.”

All of this was in the context of the individual and individualism and the free creation of associations for helping. This was a common thread in America, especially the frontier, and frankly still is. It is at the core of religious institutions and social institutions, why the Americans contribute more to charity than any other country. Americans are unique in their ability to see distress and to reach out a hand. This has not changed. But it was always voluntary; it was demanded of them from a moral level, not mandated by Government who took their place.

For Tocqueville, France’s sickness in 1835 stemmed from its Bourbon patrimony of a top-down, command-and-control government, whereas America’s health consisted in its bottom-up, grassroots-democratic government. Give the local community enough control over its own affairs, Tocqueville argued, and one “will see at a glance…the close tie which unites private to general interest.” It was “local freedom which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them.”

Nearly two centuries have passed since Tocqueville wrote his masterpiece. The connection between the general interest and the private interest of individual Americans has, if anything, become much stronger, even if their private interest is tied to a post office box in the Cayman Islands. Indeed, no private-equity fortunes were made over the past generation without investing in or trading with the prosperous North Atlantic industrial core of the world economy.
But the mechanisms that individuals can use to join with their immediate neighbors in political action that makes a difference in their lives have become much weaker. If, say, 25% of the 1,000 households in the 30-block Brookside “fiberhood” in Kansas City, Missouri, pre-subscribe, Google will provide all 1,000 with the opportunity to get very cheap, very fast Internet service very soon. But that is the proverbial exception that proves the rule.

The above Google comments is somewhat placed askance in his argument. What is he trying to say? Google wants customers and it will do whatever it can to get them. This is a sales gimmick not a commentary on social mores!

And the Republicans gathered in Tampa to celebrate the rule – to say that the America that Tocqueville saw no longer exists: Americans no longer believe that the wealth of the rich rests on the prosperity of the rest. Rather, the rich owe their wealth solely to their own luck and effort. The rich – and only the rich – “built” what they have. The willingness to sacrifice some part of their private interest to support the public interest damages the souls and portfolios of the 1%.

I truly do not understand this diatribe. The “wealth” of those who took risks to create businesses that may have endowed them with some wealth was and is of their making. It was their risk taking, their delayed satisfaction that made it happen. Frankly the employees who were hired by entrepreneurs took little if any risk. They entered the open market placed and took a “job” at a competitive salary. They did not put their homes and lives at risk; they just took one of many possible paths with defined compensation. Not so for the entrepreneur. My salary was always less than any one’s else, and often for years no salary. People got paid before I received a penny. My money was at risk, my children helped without compensation. This economist clearly shows not a single inkling of how entrepreneurs work.

Perhaps the moral and intellectual tide will be reversed, and America will remain exceptional for the reasons that Tocqueville identified two centuries ago. Otherwise, Tocqueville would surely say of Americans today what he said of the French then. The main difference is that it has become all too easy “to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them” and “into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves.”

de Tocqueville had truly mixed views of America; he was after al a Frenchman of the First Estate and was concerned deeply about democracy and specifically democracy as perceived in the French Revolution.

Now any true and capable intellectual, or even a reasonable person, would examine de Tocqueville a bit deeper. One does no more than read the work of Schleifer[2]. The author of the above seems not to have done so.

As Schleifer states:

Curiously, in the United States (and to a lesser degree in England) the term would have a heavily positive connotation quite at odds with the typically pejorative use of indvidualisme Tocqueville and most other Frenchmen. To Americans, especially as the nineteenth century progressed, the word would conjure up images of extensive political and economic freedoms. Tocqueville's own diary remarks about the "fundamental social principles" in the United States of self-reliance and of individual independence and responsibility had captured something of what Americans would later mean by "indi­vidualism."5 But Tocqueville's own understanding of the term would consistently be quite different.

In 1840 Tocqueville would begin his explanation by attempting carefully to distinguish egoisme and individualisme.

Egoisme is a passionate and exaggerated love of self which leads a man to think of all things in terms of him and to prefer himself to all.

Individualisme is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.

Egoisme springs from a blind instinct; individualisme is based on misguided judgment rather than depraved feeling. It is due more to an inadequate understanding than to perversity of heart.

Egoisme sterilizes the seeds of every virtue; individualisme at first only dams the spring of public virtue, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others too and finally merges in egoisme.

Egoisme is a vice as old as the world. It is not peculiar to one form of society more than another.

Individualisme is of democratic origin and threatens to grow as con­ditions get more equal.

Key elements in this definition were the peaceful and reflective na­ture of individualism and Tocqueville's insistence that, despite ap­parent prudence, individualism arose from short-sighted and erro­neous judgments.

Thus the individualism of de Tocqueville was an outward looking self-reliance as compared to egoism which is inward looking self-acclaim. The latter, egoism, was rampant in the French Courts. Individualism was rampant in the American frontier. It was not however in such places as Boston and the large plantations of the South. For it was at this time that the Bostonian, Alexander Wendell Holmes father, declared themselves the new intellectuals, called the Boston Brahmins, the intellectual elite of the New World, the first set of what we today would call the Public Intellectual. This self-anointed clan still exists despite the massive changes in society over the past two centuries.

Now back to de Tocqueville, he saw and despised the individualism. The main reason one could surmise was the rejection of the family lineage. American individualism was no respecter of ones ancestors, any American had equal opportunity, and yes to do it themselves.

The conclusion is that we often see these self-acclaimed Public Intellectuals opine on things which they seem less than capable of understanding. There are many authors who have attempted to use de Tocqueville but again have misinterpreted him. Albrecht has espoused an extreme left wing version of individualism in a Sophist manner and then critiqued it[3]. Similarly one should read Manent on de Tocqueville as it provides perhaps a more even tuned approach[4].




[2] Schleifer, J., The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 2nd Ed, Liberty Fund Press (Indianapolis, IN), 2000.
[3] Albrecht, J., Restructuring Individualism, Fordham Press (NY) 2012.

[4] Manent, P., An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Princeton (Princeton) 1995, and Manent, P., Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Rowman and Littlefield (Lanham, MD) 1996.