Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 3): Tocqueville’s feudal assumptions
Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 3): Tocqueville’s feudal assumptions
Apr 26, 2025 12:32 AM

This is the third part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Read theintroduction and follow the entire series here.

Prior to delving into the text of Alexis Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, it behooves us to get some historical context so that we can understand his observations, analyses, and conclusions. Context also helps us grasp the significance of Tocqueville’s project, allowing us to see through his eyes.

Think about historical context like you might think about seeing a movie or reading a novel. When you’re following a story as it plays out, the context serves to situate your perspective within the story so you can understand it and follow it as it unfolds.

Recall that Tocqueville visited America between May 1831 and February 1832. Recall also that Tocqueville was born in 1805, and was in his mid-twenties when he made his journey. Finally, recall that he finished volume one in 1835 and volume two in 1840. In the next few posts, we’ll consider some salient contextual features of Democracy in America so that our perspective on the work can be centered. Tocqueville’s book—and Tocqueville as a person—will mean much more to us once our perspective is situated appropriately.

Let’s begin with a brief consideration of feudalism. When Tocqueville and Beaumont came to America, feudalism as a set of social, economic, political, religious, and military structures was largely swept away by various dynamics occurring over several centuries, such as the centralization of the military, the creation of the nation-states, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the middle class, and the globalization of the colonial system. But many feudal assumptions, such as those pertaining to class, were still prominent. Tocqueville was, after all, part of the aristocracy — even after the revolutionary cataclysms occurring in France between 1789 and 1830.

When Tocqueville came to America, he was struck by the absence of aristocracy and the prevalence of equality of condition (at least in the free states of the North). He was amazed by the absence of feudal structures — but also of the absence of the feudal mindset, particularly that of being tied down to the land. Americans were in constant movement, he observed, always in search of new lands and the attending promise of new wealth and prosperity.

The feudal system prevailed in Europe, generally from the death of Charlemagne until the end of the Hundred Years’ War. But its origins can be traced to the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the fifth century through very late in the modern period. Its real demise in Europe could be placed around the end of the First World War in 1918, but this is debatable. An argument could be made that feudal attitudes still exist in the UK, where hereditary title remains today.

In its predominance, feudalism was a class system of mutual responsibilities centered on land, which served as the principal source of wealth. These mutual responsibilities were sustained between lords and vassals by the honor code known as chivalry.

The manor (also known as the feudum, fief, or benefice) was the basis of medieval society and economy. A lord was the bestower of land and the vassal was its recipient. Lords and vassals entered into formal contracts with one another. The vassal promised to give aid and counsel (military and administrative duties) and the lord was responsible to provide protection and justice to his vassals. Serfs, those who worked the land, owed their lords a tithe of their produce in return for the privilege of living on and working a parcel of land, as well as protection.

You can envision the feudal class system as a pyramid. At the top was the king. Under the king were the king’s chief vassals: dukes, viscounts, counts, marquesses, etc. Under those were the rear vassals. These steps of the nobility would proceed down through aristocrats, who possessed title but not land. Serfs were at the bottom of the pyramid, and prised most of the population. They worked the land or provided goods or services on the manor.

The Church also possessed its own feudal hierarchy parallel to that of the secular nobility. Land was also the basis of wealth for the church during this period. The feudal system was predominant for many centuries, primarily because the whole system was hereditary. While only the king could strictly be said to formally own land, those who possessed the land, as members of either the secular or ecclesial nobility, possessed it through hereditary title and passed it down generation after generation through the practice of primogeniture — a practice that Tocqueville was surprised did not exist in America like it did in France.

This brief summary of feudalism is, alas, generalized and simplified. It often operated in much plex ways over time. But broadly speaking, these were some of the hallmarks of feudal assumptions, and Tocqueville was a product of those assumptions, which were exceedingly old. These assumptions were held mon by virtually all European people groups paratively recently in Tocqueville’s time. So when he encountered equality of condition in America, he was astounded and fascinated to see its effects. That es through in almost every page of Democracy in America.

In the next installment, we will consider the demise of feudalism and the Revolution of 1789. While Tocqueville was not yet alive to see those tumultuous times, his family suffered greatly, and that suffering formed many of Tocqueville’s attitudes toward revolution.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved