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BARBARIAN TRIBES,AMERICAN INDIANS AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION:
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES FROMTHE ENLIGHTENMENT TO TOCQUEVILLE
Nathaniel Wolloch1,2
Abstract: This article examines the change which occurred in discussions of culturaltransmission between the Enlightenment and the liberal outlook of the nineteenth cen-tury. The former is exemplified mainly by eighteenth-century historical discussions,the latter by the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. An interest in the influence ofadvanced Western cultures on seemingly inferior non-Western societies was consis-tent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was manifested mainlyin discussions of the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire on the one hand, andof European colonial policies on the other. The sources discussed here evinced aclear Eurocentric chauvinism, yet were inherently non-racial in nature. While manyEnlightenment intellectuals retained a generally positive view of cultural transmis-sion, Tocqueville’s post-revolutionary outlook was more pessimistic.
Keywords: cultural transmission, Enlightenment, liberalism, historiography,non-racial cultural chauvinism, conjectural history, stadial theory, Late RomanEmpire, barbarian tribes, North American Indians, French conquest of Algeria, colo-nialism, European views of China, Edward Gibbon, Alexis de Tocqueville.
In the modern, post-colonial world contacts between different cultures have
become ubiquitous. This has led to tensions, ‘clashes of civilizations’, but
also to unprecedented opportunities for spreading prosperity and progress.
Transmission of cultural influence, in any event, has become a central aspect
of modern reality. Contacts between cultures are of course nothing new. Fol-
lowing the early-modern European discovery of the New World, intellectuals
became increasingly preoccupied with the outcome of such contacts. Consid-
erations of cultural transmission, most significantly the influence of Western
civilization on non-Western societies, changed from the late Enlightenment
to the first half of the nineteenth century. This change is the subject of the
present study, focusing on Enlightenment historiography on the one hand,
and on Alexis de Tocqueville on the other. From about 1750 to 1850 a marked
change occurred in the debate regarding cultural transmission. While Enlight-
enment intellectuals such as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and others, retained
an overall optimistic world view, Tocqueville’s later outlook was more
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXXIV. No. 3. Autumn 2013
1 Email: nwolloch@yahoo.com.2 A lecture on some aspects of the topic discussed in this article was given at a meet-
ing of the ‘Migrating Knowledge’ research group at the Minerva Humanities Center,Tel Aviv University, in May 2011. I would like to thank my colleagues there for theirstimulating remarks. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpfulsuggestions.
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pessimistic. Tocqueville claimed that the eighteenth century had an exagger-
ated confidence in the ability of human beings to shape their destiny, whereas in
his own time they had moved to the other extreme, believing themselves ca-
pable of nothing. Tocqueville was in many ways an heir to the Enlightenment
and its ‘science of man’. Despite criticizing eighteenth-century culture, he
noted its great achievements to which his own era had not attained.3 He con-
tinued the Enlightenment sociological consideration of human development,
but in a more critical manner. During the period examined here, cultural trans-
mission was discussed most often in two contexts — first, the history of the
contacts between the Roman Empire and the Germanic barbarians; and sec-
ond, the ongoing colonial contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans.
Like his eighteenth-century predecessors, Tocqueville combined historical
discussions within a wider intellectual context, and studied history with an
eye to the future.4 Yet while Enlightenment intellectuals held to a steadfast
belief in progress, Tocqueville outlined a more guarded approach.
Progress and Stadial Theory
What did the notion of ‘cultural transmission’ mean before the twentieth cen-
tury (as distinct from the different modern sociological usage)? The term
itself was uncommon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it
508 N. WOLLOCH
3 See the letter to Arthur de Gobineau from 20 December 1853, in Alexis deTocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. JamesToupin and Roger Boesche (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 302–5. Also see Alexis de Tocqueville,The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. 1: The Complete Text, Vol. 2: Notes on theFrench Revolution and Napoleon, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. AlanS. Kahan (Chicago and London, 1998, 2001), Vol. 2, pp. 342, 368. For different assess-ments of Tocqueville’s view of the Enlightenment, see Harvey Mitchell, IndividualChoice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 135–6, 161, 233–7, 267; Harvey Mitchell, America AfterTocqueville: Democracy Against Difference (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 31, 86–7, 154, 172;Gita May, ‘Tocqueville and the Enlightenment Legacy’, in Reconsidering Tocqueville’sDemocracy in America, ed. Abraham S. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick and London, 1988),pp. 25–42.
4 For Tocqueville’s views on the study of history, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Recol-lections, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer and A.P. Kerr (Garden City, NY, 1970),pp. 37, 61–3, 75–6; and the chapter on historical writing in Alexis de Tocqueville, De ladémocratie en Amérique, ed. J.-P. Mayer, Introduction by Harold J. Laski (2 vols., Paris,1961), Vol. 2, pp. 89–92 (from Part 1, ch. XX). Also see André Jardin, Alexis deTocqueville, 1805–1859: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (Lon-don, 1988), pp. 457, 483; Edward T. Gargan, ‘Tocqueville and the Problem of HistoricalPrognosis’, American Historical Review, 68 (1963), pp. 332–45; James T. Schleifer,‘Tocqueville as Historian: Philosophy and Methodology in the Democracy’, in Recon-sidering Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ed. Eisenstadt, pp. 146–67; James T.Kloppenberg, ‘The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville’s “Philosophical History” andWhy it Matters Now’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), pp. 495–521.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 509
designates a general notion ubiquitous in cultural theorizing during that time.
Historians throughout the early modern period became increasingly occupied
not just with traditional political, religious and military topics, but with juridi-
cal, intellectual, artistic and, not least, material culture.5 By the eighteenth
century this interest constituted significant portions of the historical works of
such eminent figures as Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume and William Robertson.6
Intellectuals with different interests, such as the physiocrat François Quesnay
or the Scottish historian Robert Henry, both emphatically called for diversify-
ing historical inquiries.7 By the late eighteenth century the term ‘culture’ thus
came to have the multifarious meaning it has today. This underlay Tocque-
ville’s perception of three factors which formed American culture — geo-
graphical circumstances, laws and, most important, manners (mœurs).8
The notion of ‘transmission’, if not the term itself, encompasses essential
aspects of eighteenth-century cultural philosophy. To use Urs Bitterli’s terms,
we are concerned here with the relationship type of encounter between cul-
tures, specifically that involving acculturation.9 Enlightenment intellectuals
were often preoccupied with the consequences of contact between different
civilizations, primarily Western civilizations on the one hand, and seemingly
more inferior civilizations on the other. This contact led to mutual influences,
but it seemed obvious that in most cases it was the more advanced civilization
which influenced its weaker counterpart. Even in opposite instances, the
influence of the weaker party was usually a consciously manipulated diges-
tion of certain aspects of its culture by the stronger civilization, and on the lat-
ter’s own terms.10 It is doubtful whether ‘primitives’, then as now, would have
agreed with the way their cultures were comprehended by Westerners in dis-
5 See Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–22;Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (NewHaven and London, 1998), pp. 152–6.
6 See Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing inBritain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000). On Tocqueville and this new type of historiogra-phy see Mitchell, Individual Choice and the Structures of History, pp. 29–37.
7 See Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations(Cambridge, MA, 1963), pp. 66–70, 261; Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain,From the Invasion of it by the Romans under Julius Cæsar, Written on a New Plan(6 vols., London and Edinburgh, 1771–93), Vol. 1, pp. vi–vii, 429–30, and passim.
8 See James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America(Indianapolis, 2nd edn., 2000), pp. 65–81.
9 Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-EuropeanCultures, 1492–1800, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 20–51.
10 The primitivistic tradition was a prime example of this. On eighteenth-centuryprimitivism see, e.g., Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in EnglishPopular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1934); Peter France, ‘Primi-tivism and Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Scots’, Yearbook of English Studies, 15(1985), pp. 64–79.
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courses in which they themselves rarely participated.11 The superiority of
European culture was rarely contested. When unevenly-matched cultures
came into contact, it seemed evident that the stronger one exerted most of the
influence on its counterpart. Moreover, the eighteenth century initiated the
modern belief in the perfectibility of human beings, primarily through educa-
tion.12 Therefore, discussions of cultural transmission were concerned with
how Western societies influenced, either intentionally or unintentionally (and
the latter was often a result of the former) the weaker societies they encoun-
tered, and more often than not subdued. Aspects of material, religious, juridi-
cal, political, social and artistic culture were transmitted. The modes of
transmission ranged from inadvertent influences to intentional indoctrination.
The latter was occasionally, though definitely not always, well-intentioned.
The efforts of the Jesuits in Paraguay, for example, were extolled by
eighteenth-century historians such as William Robertson and the Abbé
Raynal.13 Yet almost invariably the non-Europeans stood little chance of
retaining their original culture in the face of overpowering Western influence.
Dror Wahrman has argued that towards the end of the eighteenth century
belief in racial mutability was replaced by a more rigid conception. Although
the more fixed racial notions of the following century had not yet emerged,
neither climate nor culture seemed capable of changing the characteristics of
different human races; yet earlier in the century this had been considered pos-
sible.14 Wahrman, however, is well-aware that his interpretation does not
510 N. WOLLOCH
11 Indicatively, Creoles, not American Indians, were largely responsible for the sym-pathetic eighteenth-century discussions of Mesoamerican and South American historydiscussed in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World:Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World(Stanford, 2001).
12 See J.A. Passmore, ‘The Malleability of Man in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, inAspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 21–46.
13 See William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the V,with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the RomanEmpire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (4 vols., 7th edn., corrected, London,1792), Vol. 3, p. 204; Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade ofthe Europeans in the East and West Indies . . . By the Abbé Raynal, trans. J.O. Justamond(6 vols., 2nd edn., London, 1798; reprint New York, 1969), Vol. 3, pp. 172–87, 280–3,306–8 (we will disregard here the multiple authorship of this work, in which many of themost emphatic political passages were probably written by Diderot). Earlier in the cen-tury this topic was addressed in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, A Relation of the Missionsof Paraguay, trans. anon. (London, 1759), esp. pp. 58–65, 130–6. Also see Gregory Lud-low, ‘The Legacy of the Spanish Conquest of the New World in the Histoire des deuxIndes: The Case of the Indigenous Peoples’, in Studies on Voltaire and the EighteenthCentury (Oxford, 2003), pp. 215–32. Tocqueville’s father generally disliked the Jesuits,but appreciated their activity in Paraguay; see Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 40.
14 See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture inEighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 2004).
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 511
cover all aspects of late-Enlightenment culture. In what follows we will con-
centrate primarily on those aspects of eighteenth-century thought which
emphasized the ability of human societies to influence each other. Two
aspects of this topic have received abundant attention in modern scholarship
and lie outside the bounds of this discussion: first, the missionary attempts at
conversion of indigenous populations — we will be concerned with cultural
transmission in the broad sense, not excluding religious influences, but
centring more on social and material culture; and second, the complicated
issue of the emergence of modern racism — in what follows, the mere idea
that cultural transmission was possible, even if it proved unsuccessful, and
that savages and barbarians were capable of ‘bettering themselves’, empha-
sizes the non-racial outlook predominant in Enlightenment historiography
and later shared by Tocqueville. Moreover, the ‘turn to empire’ described by
Jennifer Pitts, despite its inherent cultural chauvinism, developed in a pro-
nouncedly non-racial manner, often with direct criticism of nascent modern
racial notions.15
The type of debates we will be considering here emphasizes the fact that
much of the discussion of non-Western societies before the mid-nineteenth
century was indeed devoid of racial notions in the modern post-Darwinian
sense. It has become common in recent scholarship to see the second half of
the eighteenth century as the time when modern racial ideas began to emerge.16
Such an interpretation risks seeing the Enlightenment, and subsequent liberal
thought, as culpable for the eventual development of modern racism. Yet even
if one accepts that racial concepts originated in the eighteenth century, in
my opinion this was more a distortion of Enlightenment liberal notions than a
‘dialectical’ perversion inherent in Enlightenment ideology itself. Ultimately,
most Enlightenment intellectuals, and their liberal continuators such as
Tocqueville, were animated by the desire to better the condition of all human
15 See Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britainand France (Princeton, 2005), pp. 19–21, 240–1 and passim. For a different perspectivesee Inder S. Marwah, ‘Complicating Barbarism and Civilization: Mill’s Complex Soci-ology of Human Development’, History of Political Thought, 32 (2011), pp. 345–66.
16 Many scholars have addressed this topic. To mention only a few: for an earlyexample see Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-CenturyRacism’, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 3: Racism in the EighteenthCentury, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (1973), pp. 245–61. For later interpretations see for exam-ple Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification inEighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), pp. 247–64; andmore recently, Snait B. Gissis, ‘Visualizing “Race” in the Eighteenth Century’, Histori-cal Studies in the Natural Sciences, 41 (2011), pp. 41–103; Paul Stock, ‘ “Almost aSeparate Race”: Racial Thought and the Idea of Europe in British Encyclopedias andHistories, 1771–1830’, Modern Intellectual History, 8 (2011), pp. 3–29. On how the con-cept of the malleability of nature influenced eighteenth-century ideas regarding racialengineering, see William Max Nelson, ‘Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of RacialEngineering’, American Historical Review, 115 (2010), pp. 1364–94.
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beings, non-Westerners included. Even when colonial contacts, and failures
in cultural transmission between Westerners and non-Westerners, led to disil-
lusionment in this respect, as we shall see happened to Tocqueville, the result-
ant cultural chauvinism often remained distinctly non-racial.
According to the optimistic outlook of many Enlightenment philosophers,
the transmission of cultural influence usually had a positive outcome. Accord-
ing to Turgot, despite periods of progression and regression, general progress
developed among humanity in general, and was occasionally transferred from
one country to another.17 The Comte de Volney claimed there was a general
positive direction in history despite the repeated fall of specific states.18 The
more sombre possibility of decline was nevertheless quite clear. Returning
from his travels in the Levant, Volney was struck by the contrast between the
desolate condition of the Turkish realm and the thriving and cultivated state of
France. But then he reminded himself that the Asian countries he had seen
desolate and barbarous were once flourishing and populous, and therefore
Europe stood the chance of one day experiencing the same reverse.19 Adam
Ferguson discussed humanity’s propensity for progress as a species, not just
as individuals. No culture could revert to absolute barbarism because absolute
barbarism did not exist. Barbarism and culture were in effect two sides of the
same coin.20 Turgot, Volney and Ferguson represented the common Enlight-
enment belief that different cultures in different places and times would
become the torchbearers of the general progress of humanity. The notion of
cultural transmission was obviously an inherent part of this outlook.
Eighteenth-century intellectuals developed a stadial conception of human
history. Stadialism was the most significant type of what came to be known as
‘conjectural history’, the attempt to surmise the possible origins of human
civilization.21 Rousseau’s two famous Discourses were among the most influ-
ential works of conjectural history. Similarly influential, though obviously
512 N. WOLLOCH
17 Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, ed. and trans. Ronald L. Meek(Cambridge, 1973), p. 41.
18 C.F. Volney, The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, trans. anon.(Exeter, 1823), pp. 93–104, also pp. 111–16 and passim.
19 C.F. Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt, trans. anon. (2 vols., London,1787), Vol. 2, pp. 497–500. See also Volney, Ruins, pp. 17–27.
20 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger(Cambridge, 1995), pp. 7–16. Also see Lisa Hill, ‘Adam Ferguson and the Paradox ofProgress and Decline’, History of Political Thought, 18 (1997), pp. 677–706.
21 See H.M. Höpfl, ‘From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the ScottishEnlightenment’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1978), pp. 19–40; Aaron Garrett, ‘An-thropology: The “Original” of Human Nature’, in The Cambridge Companion to theScottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 79–93; Christo-pher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2001), pp. 61–73;Frank Palmeri, ‘Conjectural History and the Origins of Sociology’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 37 (2008), pp. 1–21.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 513
not sharing Rousseau’s cultural critique, was the Comte de Buffon, who out-
lined a detailed conjectural depiction of the rise of civilization.22 The stadial
type of conjectural history, less pronounced in Rousseau and Buffon, and
more common among Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals, claimed that
human societies almost universally developed in an identical succession of
stages. Most common was the four-stage scheme, beginning with the hunting
stage, then the shepherding stage (pastoralism), agriculture and finally com-
mercial society.23 Some eighteenth-century historians, most prominently Gib-
bon, emphasized the transition between a vagrant existence (hunting and
shepherding) and a sedentary one (agriculture and commercialism), as the
crucial civilizing step.24 Earlier in the century Vico had already outlined a
typically idiosyncratic version of stadial theory, obviously cognizant of the
incompatibility of nomadism and advanced civilization.25 Montesquieu also
recognized the stadial scheme, though he did not elaborate it as much as intel-
lectuals in the second half of the century.26 Among the latter were William
Robertson and Robert Henry.27 The most sophisticated elaboration of the
22 See [Georges-Louis Leclerc,] Comte de Buffon, ‘Septième et dernière époque,lorsque la puissance de l’homme a secondé celle de la nature’, in Histoire naturelle,générale et particulière, Supplément, Vol. 5 (Paris, 1778), pp. 225–54.
23 See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976);J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires(Cambridge, 2005); Istvan Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: SamuelPufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the “Four-Stages Theory” ’, in TheLanguages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cam-bridge, 1987), pp. 253–76; Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 93–9;Roger L. Emerson, ‘Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers’, Historical Papers/Communications Historiques, 19 (1984), pp. 63–90.
24 See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in theDecline and Fall’, History of European Ideas, 2 (1981), pp. 193–202. For examples ofGibbon’s stadial observations, see Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fallof the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley( 3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1995), Vol. 1,pp. 238–9, 996–9, 1027–9; Vol. 2, pp. 819–20; Vol. 3, pp. 151–6, 449.
25 Giambattista Vico, New Science, Principles of the New Science Concerning theCommon Nature of Nations, Third Edition, trans. David Marsh (Harmondsworth, 1999),p. 15, also pp. 11–12, 98–9, 308–9, 470.
26 Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans andtheir Decline, ed. and trans. David Lowenthal (New York and London, 1965), pp. 27,98–9, 137, 164–5.
27 See Robertson, History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the V, Vol. 3, p. 204.Also see David Armitage, ‘The New World and British Historical Thought, from Rich-ard Hakluyt to William Robertson’, in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750,ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), pp. 52–75, esp. pp. 63–4;Neil Hargraves, ‘Enterprise, Adventure and Industry: The Formation of “CommercialCharacter” in William Robertson’s History of America’, History of European Ideas, 29(2003), pp. 33–54. For Henry see Robert Henry, History of Great Britain, Vol. 1, pp. 191,267–8, 308–17, 393, 397–8, 414–15; Vol. 2, pp. 383, 447, 542. On Scottish Enlighten-
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four-stage theory came from Adam Smith. Smith recognized that it was not
equally applicable to all historical situations. Some cultures, due to social or
even more to climatic conditions, developed to different degrees, and the four
stages were only fully realized in the best historical conditions. Nevertheless,
particularly regarding European history, this evidently had happened, and
Smith used the four-stages theory to explain topics ranging from military to
juridical history.28
Tocqueville’s use of stadial theory was sparse compared to eighteenth-
century historians, but it occasionally surfaced at key moments in his analyses
of cultural development.29 His most clear exposition of the stadial develop-
ment of human civilization was outlined in his Mémoire sur le paupérisme,
where he described the emergence of possession of land and the creation of
ever-increasing wants that accompanied progress, all of which led to social
inequality. Equality existed only at the two extremes of history — either com-
plete savagery or complete civilization, yet both these conditions, Tocque-
ville implied, were unrealistic abstractions. Therefore, while his discussion
was influenced by Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, he in fact evinced a
contrary interpretation: for Rousseau the desired condition of human society
was in between complete savagery and high civilization; for Tocqueville it
was only this intermediary state, with all its unavoidable injustices, that con-
stituted the field of human history and progress.30 Unlike Rousseau,
Tocqueville recognized the essentially historical-dynamic nature of human
societies at various stages of their cultural development, and this precluded
514 N. WOLLOCH
ment notions of progress see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London, 1990), pp. 284, 287–8.
28 See Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael andP.G. Stein (Indianapolis, 1982), pp. 14–16, 223, 244; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into theNature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner and W.B.Todd (2 vols., Oxford, 1979), Vol. 2, pp. 689–723. For Smith’s historical concerns, seeJ.G.A. Pocock, ‘Adam Smith and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to AdamSmith, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 270–87. For various perspectiveson Smith’s stadialism see J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 2: Narratives ofCivil Government (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 309–29; Pitts, Turn to Empire, pp. 25–58;Christian Marouby, ‘Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment: The“Ethnographic” Sources of Economic Progress’, in The Anthropology of the Enlighten-ment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, 2007), pp. 85–102.
29 For Tocqueville’s limited use of stadial theory see Mitchell, America AfterTocqueville, pp. 79–85, 108–11, 153–4. For a more emphatic case for his use of stadialtheory see Matthew Mancini, ‘Political Economy and Cultural Theory in Tocqueville’sAbolitionism’, Slavery and Abolition, 10 (1989), pp. 151–71. For examples of hisunsystematic stadial terminology, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire andSlavery, ed. and trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore and London, 2001), pp. 6–8, 24–6, 73.
30 Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Mémoire sur le paupérisme’, in Mémoires de la SociétéAcadémique de Cherbourg (Cherbourg, 1835), pp. 293–344, esp. pp. 296–313. Also seeJardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 242–6.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 515
Rousseau’s idealization of an intermediate state, frozen at precisely the ‘right’
stage of development. On this point Tocqueville was in agreement with the
mainstream of Enlightenment thought. Where he diverged from most of
Rousseau’s contemporaries was in his less optimistic belief in the outcome of
contacts between Western and non-Western societies. As we will see, on this
point Tocqueville’s realistic and often sombre approach, evinced in his dis-
cussion of the American Indians, later became gradually quite pessimistic fol-
lowing his Algerian experiences. The eighteenth-century influence on his
thought was in this respect a mixed one. He accepted that non-Western societ-
ies, despite some commendable characteristics, could not remain in a static
state in the face of Western influence. Yet this outcome was not necessarily an
unmitigated blessing, and often exposed the Westerner’s moral deficiencies.
On this point as on many others, Tocqueville regarded progressive demo-
cratic civilization as a mixed, though overall mainly positive, blessing, and in
any case an inevitable one.
In any event, another eighteenth-century related stadial outlook claimed
that human cultures developed from savage societies, to barbarians and
finally to civilized culture.31 In recent years scholars have been increasingly
interested in the various concepts of ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’, ‘culture’ and
‘civilization’, which began receiving their modern range of meanings in the
second half of the eighteenth century.32 It is still instructive to recall Norbert
Elias’s discussion of the emergence of the eighteenth-century term ‘civiliza-
tion’, and the rising awareness that civilization was not a static condition but
an ongoing process.33 The emphasis on the progressive capability of human
societies, of the ability of even those consigned to the most abject savagery to
improve their cultural attainments, was one of the most important contribu-
tions of Enlightenment thought. It evinced an optimistic belief in the perfect-
ibility of humanity and in its ability to shape its destiny. Walter Goffart has
noted that the perception of a gradual evolution of civilization, offsetting civi-
lization and barbarism, is a modern idea which originated in the Enlighten-
ment and was foreign to classical antiquity. In antiquity ‘barbarian’ was an
31 See Palmeri, ‘Conjectural History’.32 See, e.g., Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the
Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 15–26, 126–37, 162–8, 202;Anthony Pagden, ‘The “Defence of Civilization” in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory’,History of the Human Sciences, 1 (1988), pp. 33–45; Bruce Mazlish, ‘Civilization in aHistorical and Global Perspective’, International Sociology, 16 (2001), pp. 293–300;Brett Bowden, ‘The Ideal of Civilisation: Its Origins and Socio-Political Character’,Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 7 (2004), pp. 25–50.Also see Frederick G. Whelan, Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-WesternSocieties: Sultans and Savages (New York and London, 2009), pp. 164–9.
33 See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford andCambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 3–28, 39, 41.
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appellation not related to time, which could either continue indefinitely, or
else be instantaneously bridged.34
In the eighteenth century the terms ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ were occasion-
ally interchangeable, yet also at times had distinctly different meanings. Bar-
barians, such as those of Tacitus’ Germania, were not savages, and already
evinced certain cultural traits which would later form the basis for their pro-
gress and development into the modern nations of Europe. The differentiation
between savages and barbarians was based on stadial terminology, with sav-
agery confined to the hunting stage, barbarism to pastoralism and occasion-
ally also agriculture, and advanced civilization equated with highly developed
commerce. Montesquieu, for example, differentiated between savages and
barbarians in this manner.35 Gibbon, in different contexts, either referred to
savages and barbarians interchangeably, or else differentiated between them
along similar lines, in which case barbarians were partially civilized savages,
already on the road to civilization.36 For him, Adam Smith and others, the
barbarians were primarily those who had toppled the Roman Empire, while
savages were first and foremost the inhabitants of the New World.37
The discussion of seemingly inferior cultures, whether savages or barbari-
ans, changed from the late eighteenth century to Tocqueville’s time. As his
famous disagreement with his racist friend Arthur de Gobineau testified,
Tocqueville totally rejected the idea of racial, biological determinism.38 His
discussions were based primarily on sociological, political and historical sup-
positions, and did not preclude either cultural decline or progress. Matthew
Mancini has justifiably noted the influence of stadial theorizing on Tocque-
ville.39 Yet there were also marked differences between eighteenth-century
thought and Tocqueville’s outlook. While the theoretical underpinnings rec-
ognizing the dynamic element of historical change remained consistent between
the Enlightenment and Tocqueville, the conclusions he drew from this were
much more somber than those of the Enlightenment.
516 N. WOLLOCH
34 See Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes,Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton, 1988), pp. 211–12.
35 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia CarolynMiller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 290–1.
36 See J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 3: The First Decline and Fall(Cambridge, 2005), p. 431 n; Pocock, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, pp. 11–16, 331;François Furet, ‘Civilization and Barbarism in Gibbon’s History’, in In the Workshop ofHistory, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Chicago and London, 1984), pp. 140–9.
37 Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 107.38 See Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, pp. 82–96.39 See Mancini, ‘Political Economy and Cultural Theory’, pp. 153–6.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 517
China, the Barbarians and the Roman Empire
Tocqueville was actuated by a non-racial sense of the basic unity of human
beings, which presupposed the possible positive influence of stronger on
weaker societies. However, historical reality, coupled with his view of the
superiority of European civilization, led him to rather pessimistic conclusions
regarding the chances of survival of various indigenous peoples in America,
North Africa and elsewhere. Cheryl B. Welch has claimed that Tocqueville
considered three models of the outcomes of collisions between unevenly civi-
lized peoples — the first, fratricide, was morally repugnant; the second,
imposing fraternity from above, was implausible and unrealistic; and thus the
only true possibility left was the third, domination without fellowship, an
ineluctable yet far from morally perfect choice.40 In an important passage
from Democracy in America Tocqueville summed up many of his views on
cultural transmission:
This difficulty which the Indians find in submitting to civilization arisesfrom a general cause from which it is almost impossible for them to escape.
If one looks attentively at history, one discovers that generally barbarianpeoples raise themselves, and by their own efforts, till they attain civiliza-tion.
When they come to draw Enlightenment from a foreign nation, they thenassume toward it the role of conquerors, not the position of conquered.
When the conquered people are enlightened and the conquerors are halfsavage, as happened with the invasion of the Roman Empire by the northernnations, or in the case of China by the Mongols, the power of victory pro-vided the barbarian enough to hold his own with the civilized man, and per-mitted him to march as his equal, till he became his rival; one has forhimself force, the other intelligence; the former admires the sciences andarts of the vanquished, the other envies the power of the conquerors. Thebarbarians end by introducing the cultured man into their palaces, and thecultured man in his turn opens his schools to them. But when the one whopossesses the physical force also enjoys at the same time intellectual superi-ority, it is rare that the conquered is civilized; he withdraws or is destroyed.
It is thus that one can say in general that the savages come searchingEnlightenment with arms in hand, but do not receive it.41
40 Cheryl B. Welch, ‘Tocqueville on Fraternity and Fratricide’, in The CambridgeCompanion to Tocqueville, ed. Cheryl B. Welch (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 303–36.
41 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, p. 346 (2.X): ‘Cette difficulté quetrouvent les Indiens à se soumettre à la civilisation naît d’une cause générale à laquelle illeur est presque impossible de se soustraire. Si l’on jette un regard attentif sur l’histoire,on découvre qu’en général les peuples barbares se sont élevés peu à peu d’eux-mêmes, etpar leurs propres efforts, jusqu’à la civilisation. Lorsqu’il leur est arrivé d’aller puiser lalumière chez une nation étrangère, ils occupaient alors vis-à-vis d’elle le rang devainqueurs, et non la position de vaincus. Lorsque le peuple conquis est éclairé et lepeuple conquérant à demi sauvage, comme dans l’invasion de l’Empire romain par les
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We will return below to discussion of the Indians, but first we will begin with
Tocqueville’s and his Enlightenment predecessors’ views on China and, more
importantly, the Roman Empire.
Despite the physiocrats’ and Voltaire’s Sinophile views, many Enlighten-
ment intellectuals developed a critical view of Chinese civilization as static
and immobile.42 According to Montesquieu, the Chinese amalgamated man-
ners, mores, laws and religion under a system of rites, and therefore conquest
did not make China lose its laws, because it was practically impossible to
change all these at once. Consequently, in China it was always the vanquisher
rather than the vanquished who changed.43 According to the historian Joseph
de Guignes, the Chinese resisted any novelty as a danger, remaining loyal to
their old way of life. When the Tartars conquered China they adopted the local
laws and customs, and no change of government altered the original Chinese
condition. The moment the Tartars left China, all the progress they had
acquired there disappeared and they reverted back to their ancient rudeness.
De Guignes, however, implied that this situation also prevented progress. In
China, despite projects such as the great wall, nothing was perfected.44
Other Enlightenment historians also questioned why the Tartar Empire in
China was short-lived. In Voltaire’s opinion the Tartars were not interested in
truly governing their conquered territories, and were left in the sixteenth cen-
tury with nothing but the knowledge that from their own country once issued
518 N. WOLLOCH
nations du Nord, ou dans celle de la Chine par les Mongols, la puissance que la victoireassure au barbare suffit pour le tenir au niveau de l’homme civilisé et lui permettre demarcher son égal, jusqu’à ce qu’il devienne son émule; l’un a pour lui la force, l’autrel’intelligence; le premier admire les sciences et les arts des vaincus, le second envie lepouvoir des vainqueurs. Les barbares finissent par introduire l’homme policé dans leurspalais, et l’homme policé leur ouvre à son tour ses écoles. Mais quand celui qui possèdela force matérielle jouit en même temps de la prépondérance intellectuelle, il est rare quele vaincu se civilise; il se retire ou est détruit. C’est ainsi qu’on peut dire d’une manièregénérale que les sauvages vont chercher la lumiére les armes à la main, mais qu’ils ne lareçoivent pas.’ All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. On this passage seeMitchell, America After Tocqueville, pp. 98–9, 111; Ralph Lerner, The Thinking Revolu-tionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca and London, 1987), pp.171–2. Also see the discussion of Tocqueville’s views on cultural contacts in PierreMichel, Les Barbares, 1789–1848: un mythe romantique (Lyon, 1981), pp. 267–91.
42 See Anthony Pagden, ‘The Immobility of China: Orientalism and Occidentalismin the Enlightenment’, in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff andMarco Cipolloni (Stanford, 2007), pp. 50–64. On Voltaire see Arnold H. Rowbotham,‘Voltaire, Sinophile’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 47 (1932),pp. 1050–65. On the physiocrats, Virgile Pinot, ‘Les physiocrates et la Chine au XVIIIesiècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 8 (1906/1907), pp. 200–14.
43 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, pp. 317–21.44 Joseph de Guignes, Histoire générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols, et des
autres Tartares occidentaux (4 vols. in 5 [Vol. 1 in two parts], Paris, 1756–8), Vol. 2,pp. 90–3; Vol. 3, pp. 243–4; Vol. 4, pp. 209–10.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 519
the conquerors of these rich provinces.45 According to Edward Gibbon, a pas-
toral mentality propelled the Tartar conquest, not an inherent civilizing pro-
cess. The Tartar empire remained essentially despotic, was influenced by
Chinese superstitious beliefs, and ultimately ‘the Mogul emperors were lost
in the oblivion of the desert’.46 Enlightenment historians perceived two main
reasons for the lack of long-term cultural influence of the Chinese on their
Tartar conquerors: the overwhelming influence of the static Chinese culture;
and the Tartars’ inability to retain this influence.
Tocqueville also evinced a critical view of Chinese civilization. Seymour
Drescher has noted that for Tocqueville power was an indicator of cultural
and political robustness. A country like China, which could be easily over-
come by the Europeans, was therefore defective and backward.47 Tocqueville
was highly critical of the physiocrats, who he regarded as forerunners of
socialism. He severely criticized their adoration of China and its government,
which he viewed as imbecile and barbarous, a tyrannical form of democratic
despotism.48 He noted the slow development of individuals in China. Due to
its centralist government China was unable to make the transition from a rea-
sonable to an excellent condition. Rome had perished due to the invasions of
barbarians, yet there were other ways for a civilization to perish. The most
probable danger for Europe was that this would happen gradually, in large
part due to the preference of applied science rather than higher theoretical sci-
ence which democracies tended to neglect. China was an example of such a
process, with the result that change and improvement had become impossible
there. The Chinese were stuck in a state of prosperity devoid of changes either
for better or for worse.49 The criticisms of China outlined by Enlightenment
historians and by Tocqueville were similar. When discussing the history of
Western civilization, however, Tocqueville’s outlook was less similar to that
of the Enlightenment. This was particularly pronounced regarding the history
of the Roman Empire.
Tocqueville never wrote a detailed history of the Roman Empire, but his
interest in it continued throughout his life. In an early letter to Beaumont from
1828 he gave a review of English history, in fact a general survey of the his-
tory of the West, in which he viewed Rome as a key stage in the rise of West-
ern civilization. The barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire created the
noble and serf classes. Later, the decline of the feudal system and the progress
45 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits del’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, ed. René Pomeau (2 vols., Paris,1963), Vol. 2, pp. 400–1.
46 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Vol. 3, pp. 804–7.47 Seymour Drescher, ‘Tocqueville’s Comparative Perspectives’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Welch, pp. 21–48, at pp. 23–4.48 Tocqueville, Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 213; Vol. 2, pp. 370–2.49 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, p. 91 n (1.V); Vol. 2, pp. 51–2
(1.X), 253 (3.XIX).
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of civilization were accompanied by the rise of the tiers état, who lived
mainly in republican urban settings. In this manner the history of feudalism
eventually led to equality, since ‘after all rational equality is the only state
natural to man’, and different nations achieved it in different ways.50 In TheOld Regime and the Revolution Tocqueville claimed that medieval feudal
laws were totally different from the Roman laws which preceded them.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages Roman law was revived because it
served rising monarchical absolutism. Roman law, the law of a very civilized
but subordinated people, improved civil society but degraded political soci-
ety.51
Tocqueville perceived the fall of the Roman Empire as a distinct and dra-
matic event, actuated both by invasions from without and by internal deterio-
ration. There were two ways for a people to decline into decadence or
barbarism — either due to invasion, or, more formidably, as a result of
self-collapse. The latter was also a possible threat for modern civilization.
The Romans, before being conquered by the barbarians, had already become
half-civilized.52 There were also two ways to conquer a country — the first by
subordination, the second by replacing the inhabitants. The Europeans usu-
ally adopted the second course, yet the ancient Romans had used both. When
the barbarians conquered the Roman Empire they took the land for them-
selves. It was absurd to apply the same laws to different nations. ‘At the time
of the Western empire’s fall, two laws ruled at once: the barbarian was sub-
jected to barbarian laws, and the Romans followed Roman laws.’ This was the
proper conduct in the transitional period necessary for two different civiliza-
tions to re-found themselves as one.53
It is often assumed that the first significant interpretation of the fall of the
Roman Empire as a more transitional and gradual occurrence was outlined in
Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne.54 According to the traditional
outlook, Enlightenment historians, not least Edward Gibbon, regarded it as a
distinct historical event. This interpretation has had a long influence on the
popular view of the end of the Empire, yet it is not based on sufficient under-
standing of Enlightenment considerations of this issue. As recent scholarship
has shown, eighteenth-century discussions of the Roman Empire were much
520 N. WOLLOCH
50 Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J.P. Mayer, trans.George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer (London, 1958), pp. 21–41, esp. pp. 21–3, 27–8. Alsosee Tocqueville, ‘Mémoire sur le paupérisme’, pp. 300–1.
51 Tocqueville, Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. 1, pp. 102, 257–8.52 Alexis de Tocqueville, Écrits et discourse politiques, ed. André Jardin, Introduc-
tion by J.-J. Chevallier and André Jardin (Paris, 1962), p. 509.53 Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, pp. 23–4, also pp. 61, 143.54 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (Cleveland
and New York, 1965).
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 521
more nuanced than has often been supposed.55 Furthermore, some historians
of the early Middle Ages have in recent years been questioning the very idea
of the fall of the empire, increasingly emphasizing the cultural continuity
between the Roman Empire and its barbarian conquerors even more than
Pirenne had previously done.56
To be sure, many eighteenth-century intellectuals did indeed view the fall
of Rome as a distinct event, noting both the devastation which the barbarians
brought in their wake, but also their positive contribution, specifically in
implanting a spirit of liberty which had important consequences for European
history (notions which were evinced by Tocqueville). Raynal, Adam Smith,
William Robertson, Montesquieu and others perceived the fall of the Roman
Empire as a distinct event.57 According to Montesquieu, servitude was some-
times necessary for preserving a conquest, but in the course of time the con-
quered and the conquerors were increasingly united culturally. Conquerors
therefore had to give the conquered a path to leave their servitude. This was
exactly what the Burgundians, the Goths and the Lombards did when they
conquered the Roman Empire. On the one hand they ‘wanted the Romans to
continue to be the vanquished people’, on the other they ‘made the barbarian
and the Roman fellow citizens’.58 The effects of conquests in northern Asia
compared with northern Europe were different, because the Tartars con-
quered as slaves to a master, but the Northern tribes as free people, who were
thus in fact the source for Europe’s eventually advanced civilization.59
55 See Pocock, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, on the Enlightenment view of theinvasions as the starting point for cultural recovery. Also see J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Barbariansand the Redefinition of Europe: A Study of Gibbon’s Third Volume’, in The Anthropol-ogy of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford, 2007),pp. 35–49; and Pocock, First Decline and Fall, for the history of the notion of translatioimperii. For a review of debates, from the Middle Ages to modern times, regarding thetransition between the Roman Empire and the barbarians’ culture, see Bryce Lyon, TheOrigins of the Middle Ages: Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon (New York, 1972). Also seeIan Wood, ‘Barbarians, Historians, and the Construction of National Identities’, Journalof Late Antiquity, 1 (2008), pp. 61–81.
56 See for example Brian Croke, ‘A.D. 476: The Manufacture of a Turning Point’,Chiron, 13 (1983), pp. 81–119; and Walter Goffart, ‘Rome’s Final Conquest: The Bar-barians’, History Compass, 6 (2008), pp. 855–83.
57 Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, Vol. 1, p. 9; Smith, Wealth ofNations, Vol. 1, pp. 381–9, 427; William Robertson, The History of America, sixth edi-tion (3 vols., London, 1792), Vol. 1, pp. 36, 40; Robertson, History of the Reign of theEmperor Charles the V, Vol. 1, pp. 243 n, 245–54; Montesquieu, Considerations on theCauses of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, pp. 26, 169 and passim. Alsosee David Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(Cambridge, 1988), pp. 9–19 and passim; Michael C. Carhart, The Science of Culture inEnlightenment Germany (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007), pp. 205–6.
58 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, pp. 139–41.59 Ibid., pp. 282–3.
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Other eighteenth-century historians also perceived positive aspects in the
barbarian cultures, though these were often viewed as resulting from contact
with the Romans, not as unique contributions of the barbarians themselves.
Such interpretations departed from the simple view of the fall of the Roman
Empire. According to Voltaire, when barbarians came into contact with the
superior culture of the people they conquered, they ultimately adopted that
culture rather than extirpated it, as demonstrated by the fifth-century barbari-
ans, the Normans in the ninth century, and the Turks who conquered the
empire of the Caliphs. He was more pessimistic, however, regarding the
Burgundians, the Goths and the Franks, who invaded Gaul and brought only
devastation in their wake, and lacked the impulse to ameliorate their civiliza-
tion following the Roman model.60 According to Robert Henry, the cultural
changes that happened when one nation was conquered by another were great
and sudden, but when one nation settled for an extended time in the same
place the changes, though slow and almost imperceptible, were eventually
conspicuous. ‘So beneficial, in some respects, it may sometimes prove to a
people who are but just emerging from the savage state, to be brought under
the dominion of a more enlightened nation, when that nation hath the wisdom
and humanity to protect, to polish, and instruct, instead of destroying, the peo-
ple whom it hath subdued!’ In this light he described the positive influence of
Roman rule in ancient Britain, but also the rapid deterioration after the depar-
ture of the Romans.61 Ultimately, he too accepted the discontinuity between
the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages.
Throughout the eighteenth century, however, other historians evinced a
subtle yet significant difference in their perspective on this issue, perceiving
more of continuity than change between these two historical eras. They not
only perceived positive qualities in barbarian societies, they also implied that
the barbarians were able to perpetuate, in their own idiosyncratic manner,
many of the aspects of declining Roman civilization whose cultural heirs they
gradually became. Early in the century Pietro Giannone asserted that the
tribes who had overrun the Roman Empire were indeed barbarians, yet
deserved to be commended both for their many virtues and because they
respected and retained the Roman laws. While the Empire was declining, ‘the
Condition of a Roman became more vile and abject, than that of those who
were reputed Barbarians and Strangers’.62 The Abbé Dubos noted how the
Romans had attained peace with the barbarians by engaging them in agricul-
tural pursuits. The moment they had something to lose they became less enter-
prising and more circumspect. According to Dubos it was impossible for two
522 N. WOLLOCH
60 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, Vol. 1, pp. 338, 389.61 Henry, History of Great Britain, Vol. 1, pp. 85–6, 313–23 (315 for the quotation),
335–6, 345; Vol. 2, p. 536; Vol. 5, pp. 529–30.62 Pietro Giannone, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, trans. James Ogilvie
(2 vols., London, 1729–31), Vol. 1, pp. 115–16, 272–3.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 523
nations to come into contact for two centuries, one being civilized and the
other not, without the savage nation also becoming civilized, unless it was one
of those unhappy people whom the intemperate climate in which they lived
seemed to condemn to an invincible stupidity. Therefore the lengthy contact
between the Romans and the Franks on both sides of the Rhine ultimately
civilized the latter.63 Similarly, the Abbé de Mably noted how the northern
barbarians, as a result of their contact with the Romans, eventually acquired
new needs, and their subsistence could no longer be supplied by warfare.
They therefore began employing their slaves in cultivating the earth, and for-
sook the forests and marshes in favour of sedentary habitation in fertile
lands.64 According to Paul Henry Mallet the northern invaders brought with
them a spirit of independence, and of a rural and military life which had
already begun to decline in the Roman Empire itself. The Gothic government
was the ultimate source of the eighteenth-century European spirit of honour
and resistance to slavery.65
Most significantly, Edward Gibbon himself, who in modern times has
become almost synonymous with the very idea of the ‘decline and fall of
Rome’, was in fact ambiguous on this point. Throughout the lengthy text of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire there were indeed
many occasions where he outlined a clear picture of the fall of the Empire, yet
on other occasions he seemed much less certain. Scholars such as Glen W.
Bowersock and John Matthews have recently questioned whether Gibbon
really adhered to the simple tale of the fall of the Roman Empire.66 There are
various passages by Gibbon which support this interpretation. His view of
cultural transmission led him to a much more nuanced perception of the ‘fall’
of the Empire. Gibbon regarded the spirit of rivalry as a positive spur for pro-
gress. ‘In all the pursuits of active and speculative life, the emulation of states
and individuals is the most powerful spring of the efforts and improvement of
mankind.’ This lack of rivalry, and relative seclusion, led to the dismal condi-
tion of Byzantine civilization.67 The barbarians who replaced the Western
empire presented more of a success story. They evinced certain positive char-
63 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Histoire critique de l’établissement de la monarchie françoisedans les Gaules (2 vols., Paris, 1742), Vol. 1, pp. 165–6, 178.
64 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur l’histoire de France (2 vols., Geneva,1765), Vol. 1, pp. 1–4, 11.
65 Paul Henry Mallet, Northern Antiquities: or, a Description of the Manners, Cus-toms, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and Other Northern Nations, trans. anon.(2 vols., London, 1770), Vol. 1, pp. li–liv, 162–6.
66 Glen W. Bowersock, ‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome’, Bulletin ofthe American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 49 (1996), pp. 29–43; John Matthews, ‘Gib-bon and the Later Roman Empire: Causes and Circumstances’, in Edward Gibbon andEmpire, ed. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 12–33.
67 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Vol. 3, pp. 421–2.
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acteristics, even though their virtues were incompatible with high culture.68
Gibbon asserted that ‘before they can conquer, they must cease to be barba-
rous’. In other words barbarians, in order to accomplish a lasting conquest of
higher civilizations, first had to achieve at least some level of cultural pro-
gress themselves, most effectually by contact with their conquered victims. In
the long run the conquered influenced their conquerors perhaps even more
than the latter influenced them.69
Furthermore, the simplistic tale of the Empire crumbling before blood-
thirsty barbarians totally impervious to the charms of civilization, and indeed
to their own interests, seemed clearly inadequate. This was more appropriate
as an explanation for the Tartar failure to imbibe long-term cultivation during
their rule of China. Yet the western barbarians were more prone to civiliza-
tion, and appreciated the benefits of Roman culture with which they had
become familiar for generations. In the very last chapter of The Decline andFall, Gibbon claimed that the Goths and Vandals had no deliberate intention
to topple the Roman Empire and establish their own civilization on its ruins.
On the contrary, these nations of shepherds were integrated in the imperial
armies, became familiar with Roman culture, ‘and, though incapable of emu-
lating, they were more inclined to admire, than to abolish, the arts and studies
of a brighter period’.70 The fall of the Roman Empire was due more to internal
than to external circumstances. By the mid-fifth century Rome’s internal
decay was so incontrovertible that even without external pressure it was
doomed. ‘If all the Barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same
hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West:
and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of
honour.’71 For Gibbon, as for many Enlightenment intellectuals, it was the
progress of humanity in general which mattered, and conquerors who were
influenced by their conquered subjects became in effect the torchbearers of
the latter’s civilization.
Tocqueville, however, adhered to the more rigid separation between the
late Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the pos-
itive aspects of medieval culture, specifically the spirit of liberty which char-
acterized feudalism, resulted in his view precisely from those aspects of
barbarian culture not indebted to the despotic political culture of Rome; they
were due to the historical discontinuity resulting from the fall of the Roman
Empire. There had been a long process of cultural transmission between the
Romans and the barbarians. Ultimately, however, as corrupt Roman civiliza-
tion declined, the barbarians had enough independent cultural vitality to initi-
ate a new phase of historical progress. For Tocqueville, who had studied for
524 N. WOLLOCH
68 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 1028.69 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 514.70 Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 1068–9; Vol. 2, p. 284.71 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 356.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 525
years the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, the opti-
mism of the Enlightenment seemed totally unfounded. Comparing the Roman
and Napoleonic Empires, both presented for him a picture of the exploitation
of democratic ideas and passions, tales of passage from freedom to despot-
ism.72 Both Enlightenment historians and Tocqueville found reasons for opti-
mism in contemplating the long-term consequences of the end of the Roman
Empire, but for opposite reasons — the former because they perceived the era
of the late Empire and the early Middle Ages as one of historical continuity,
Tocqueville because he perceived it as discontinuous.
The North American Indians
The same discrepancy between the outlooks of the late Enlightenment and
Tocqueville was present in their respective views of the contact between the
Europeans and the indigenous societies they encountered and subdued in the
colonies, not least the North American Indians. Modern scholars have pre-
sented different interpretations of European attitudes towards colonial natives
in general, and the American Indians in particular. Some have emphasized the
bleaker aspects of this topic,73 others its more positive sides, such as criticisms
of the crimes perpetrated against indigenous colonial populations.74 Most
recent scholarship has remained attuned to the complicated relationships
between the Europeans and the non-Europeans, which from both sides often
ranged from extreme cruelty to quite benign efforts at mutual amelioration.75
72 See the comparison of the Roman and Napoleonic Empires in Tocqueville, OldRegime and the Revolution, Vol. 2, pp. 248–50.
73 See Saliha Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy’, American Historical Review, 110 (2005), pp. 322–49,who claims that between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the French becamedisappointed with their attempts at culturally assimilating the American Indians, whichled to the emergence of racial attitudes. Also see Melvin Richter, ‘Europe and The Otherin Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Politisches Denken Jahrbuch 3, ed. Volker Gerhardt,Henning Ottmann and Martyn Thompson (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 25–47; François Furet,‘From Savage Man to Historical Man: The American Experience in Eighteenth-CenturyFrench Culture’, in In the Workshop of History, trans. Mandelbaum, pp. 153–66, atp. 160.
74 See Pitts, Turn to Empire; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Prince-ton and Oxford, 2003); Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelersand North American Indians (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 13–38, 63–91; Michèle Duchet,Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius,Diderot (Paris, 1971), pp. 209–26. For a survey of eighteenth-century debates about theAmerican Indians, see P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind:Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1982),pp. 187–226.
75 For the North American scene in particular, see for example James Axtell, TheInvasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York and
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Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet outlined one of the most emphatic versions
of the optimistic Enlightenment view that savage non-Europeans would ulti-
mately benefit from their contact with the Europeans. According to Condorcet,
once all humanity would unite, the advance of the savage nations would be
inevitable and swift, since the means for progress will already have been per-
fected by the Europeans for the benefit of other societies. Despite past injus-
tices, the various savage nations in the colonies would therefore ultimately
profit from their contact with the Europeans.76 Condorcet, however, was far
from the first Enlightenment intellectual to present such an outlook, even if
others were not always as optimistic as he was. Montesquieu, for example,
claimed that conquerors had the moral obligation to improve the state of the
conquered, which by definition had to be defective in order for them to have
been vanquished in the first place. Conquered people could derive advantages
from the conquerors, if the latter ameliorated abuses among the former.
Regrettably, as the Spanish example in Mexico attested, conquerors did not
always follow a benevolent course.77 Voltaire outlined a similar view.78 A par-
ticularly emphatic criticism of European conduct in the colonies was repeat-
edly expressed by Raynal.79 Yet Raynal’s outlook was not Rousseauistic.
What he advocated was that the Europeans act in a manner more morally
appropriate regarding their powerful influence over non-Europeans. He did
not deny that ultimately, cultured society, with all its defects, was better than
the savage state.80 The virtues of primitive simplicity were untenable in the
long run. Therefore the serious philosopher had to try to make the transition of
savages to civilization, which was accelerated by contact with advanced cul-
tures, as smooth and morally unobjectionable as possible. Only by importing
cultural and economic improvement could the European invasion of the West
Indies be justified, and if in the French West Indies the government would
526 N. WOLLOCH
Oxford, 1985); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics inthe Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1995).
76 Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress ofthe Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (London, 1955), pp. 177–9. Also see Pitts,Turn to Empire, pp. 29, 168–73; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies ofEmpire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven and London, 1995),pp. 10, 160, 169–74, 189, 198–200.
77 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, pp. 141–2.78 On the cruelties of the Europeans towards the indigenous American populations,
see, e.g., Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris, 1957), p. 784. Also seeDuchet, Anthropologie et Histoire, pp. 319–21.
79 See for a typical example Raynal, Philosophical and Political History, Vol. 2,p. 361.
80 Ibid., Vol. 6, pp. 411–12.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 527
adopt a more considerate policy, then the local inhabitants would become the
prime movers of prosperity.81
Other eighteenth-century intellectuals, however, were more culturally chau-
vinistic and more sceptical about the prospects for civilizing savages in North
America and elsewhere. Particularly influential for Tocqueville were Volney’s
critical first-hand observations regarding the American Indians. Employing a
metaphor which Tocqueville later seemed to have learned from him, Volney
described the Indians as dissolving before the vernal sun.82 He depicted the
Indians as having indolent manners and lacking settled laws and government.
Evoking stadial notions, he claimed that Indian tribes only rarely attempted a
sedentary agricultural existence. Volney noted the differences between the
Bedouins and the American Indians. The former, living in a more barren cli-
mate, were constrained to develop a pastoral life, which actually advanced
them more on the social road to civilization. The Indians, on the other hand,
living in a more fertile land, remained in the more primitive state of hunters.83
Other writers did not require first-hand observations to arrive at similar
Eurocentric perceptions. The Abbé Dubos claimed that ‘the Europeans, and
those who are born on the coasts bordering upon Europe, have always been
fitter than other people for arts and sciences, as well as political government.
Wheresoever the Europeans have carried their arms, they have generally sub-
dued the inhabitants’.84 Gibbon seemed more regretful of this cultural inferi-
ority of non-Europeans, but he still amply acknowledged it, writing: ‘[T]he
sober historian is forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled,
with some reluctance, to confess, that the pastoral manners, which have been
adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence, are much better
adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life’.85 According to
William Robertson, the original American inhabitants were at fault for not
cultivating their natural surroundings. Even the advanced Central American
civilizations were inferior to the Europeans in this respect.86 All the improve-
ments the Europeans brought with them could not avert the need for the
indigenous population to go through a long civilizing process which could
81 Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 158, 302–5, 390–1, 460. See also Pagden, Lords of All the World,pp. 3, 160, 163–77; and particularly Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, pp. 71–121.
82 C.F. Volney, ‘General Observations on the Indians or Savages of North America’,in View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of America, trans. anon. (London,1804), pp. 393–491, at p. 434.
83 Ibid., pp. 434–40, 445–50. Also see Furet, ‘From Savage Man’, pp. 162–5.84 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, trans. Thomas
Nugent (3 vols., London, 1748), Vol. 2, p. 115.85 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Vol. 1, p. 1025, and also p. 1033.86 Robertson, History of America, Vol. 2, pp. 14–16.
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only be shortened up to a certain point.87 Among Enlightenment historians
Robertson’s outlook was the most balanced on this issue. He retained a dis-
tinct sense of European cultural superiority, not least based on stadial notions.
Yet he did not dismiss the possibility that non-European peoples might bene-
fit from contact with their European conquerors, and consequently undergo a
civilizing process of their own. Nevertheless, even if this were to occur, it
would take a long time to unfold in a truly meaningful manner.
With few exceptions, therefore, Enlightenment intellectuals, to varying
degrees, retained an overall positive position regarding the possible ameliora-
tion of savage societies, although this outlook was rooted in a distinct notion
of European superiority.88 Once the Europeans ceased to commit deplorable
crimes, they could civilize the indigenous colonial inhabitants. Tocqueville’s
outlook was, however, more complicated. Writing at a time when the Ameri-
can Indians were rapidly losing the relative cultural independence they had
been able to retain until the late eighteenth century, he described, with an
unmistakable tone of regret, the disappearance of any meaningful vestiges of
Indian culture. At the same time he felt no compunction about extolling the
achievements of the Europeans in America. According to Tocqueville, the
emergence of modern equalitarian democracy constituted the inexorable
direction of human political and cultural development. This was a European
achievement, and once the Indians proved unable to attain it, their historical
disappearance, regrettable as it was, seemed unavoidable.
Modern scholars have discussed various aspects of Tocqueville’s views
regarding the American Indians.89 One aspect in particular should be noted,
and that is the parallel, even if limited, which Tocqueville seems to have per-
ceived between the old feudal nobility and the aristocratic qualities of the
Indians. Both displayed a cultural vitality which was lost in egalitarian
democracy, despite its otherwise favourable nature. Harry Liebersohn has
noted that Tocqueville found in the Indians a nostalgic parallel with the
lost European feudal nobility; he accepted the inevitability of progress, but
lamented the accompanying loss of the ancient noble ideals.90 Furthermore,
European aristocrats and the Indians shared a propensity for individualism
which served to counter the danger of ‘soft tyranny’, the majority tyranny of
528 N. WOLLOCH
87 Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 153–4. Also see Bruce P. Lenman, ‘ “From Savage to Scot” viathe French and the Spaniards: Principal Robertson’s Spanish Sources’, in William Rob-ertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stewart J. Brown (Cambridge, 1997),pp. 196–209.
88 On Eurocentrism see Whelan, Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-WesternSocieties, pp. 172–5.
89 See, for example, Lerner, Thinking Revolutionary, pp. 171–2; Mitchell, AmericaAfter Tocqueville, pp. 15, 69, 75–113, 116; Pitts, Turn to Empire, pp. 196–203.
90 Harry Liebersohn, ‘Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso,and Romantic Travel Writing’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 746–66;Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters, pp. 92–112.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 529
public opinion in large democracies.91 A similar outlook, as we saw above,
had actuated his criticism of the despotic nature of Chinese government.
Tocqueville evinced this sentiment when reflecting on the historiography of
his times. He claimed that in aristocratic eras there was relatively more room
for the actions of individuals than in collective societies, while in democracies
the situation was the opposite. Therefore aristocratic historical works focused
on the actions of individuals, while those of democracies depicted general
developments. Democratic historians tended to search for historical systems,
but Tocqueville claimed that this evinced the dangerous tendency to view his-
tory as inevitable and to deny individual free will. This might lead people to
servility, while the ancient historians had taught how to command.
Tocqueville wanted the historical writing of his own time to reanimate human
faculties rather than complete the prostration of people.92
Ultimately, however, he seems to have resigned himself to the fact that this
was the inevitable price of progress. According to François Furet, Tocque-
ville belonged to the generation defeated by the French Revolution, and his
work was actuated by a realization of the victory of democracy over aristoc-
racy, and reflection on the irreversible march of history.93 Indeed, an element
of resignation to the modern experience was one of the key differences
between Tocqueville’s outlook and those of his more self-confident Enlight-
enment predecessors. This underlined his views regarding the failure of the
cultural amelioration of the Indians. According to Tocqueville’s outlook, the
Indians’ individuality, like that of their European aristocratic counterparts,
was no match for the overriding influence of democracy. The European nobil-
ity, however, were not consigned to disappear, and were able to accommodate
to changing historical circumstances, perhaps even while retaining some
vestiges of their former uniqueness. Indeed, it seems that Tocqueville viewed
himself as personally embodying this possibility. The Indians, on the other
hand, were not a civilization which underwent an inherent transition to
democracy. For them relinquishing quasi-aristocratic individuality was a
dead-end, and recognizing this fact underlined Tocqueville’s resignation to
what he regarded as the inevitable disappearance of their culture.
As we have already seen, Tocqueville was continuously occupied with
the problem of conquest. During his journey to Ireland, after describing the
horrible condition of the Irish lower class, he wrote: ‘If you want to know
91 On this topic see Donald J. Maletz, ‘Tocqueville’s Tyranny of the Majority Recon-sidered’, Journal of Politics, 64 (2002), pp. 741–63; and the editors’ introduction toAlexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield andDelba Winthrop (Chicago and London, 2000), pp. xvii–lxxxvi, esp. pp. xxvii–xxviii,lii–lxxxvi, who at lvii–lxiii regard Tocqueville’s view of racial discrimination as anexample of his view of majority tyranny.
92 Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 2, pp. 89–92 (1.XX).93 François Furet, ‘The Conceptual System of “Democracy in America” ’, in In the
Workshop of History, trans. Mandelbaum, pp. 167–96.
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what can be done by the spirit of conquest and religious hatred combined with
the abuses of aristocracy, but without any of its advantages, go to Ireland.’94
Tocqueville discussed what characterized individual nations, with their inher-
ent social conditions, such as the English and French societies in America. If
the world ever became civilized then the human race would in fact be one peo-
ple, since reason, like virtue, did not vary at different times and places.
Nations which followed reason did not require the guidance of customs. Yet
Tocqueville wondered whether in the course of this civilizing process they
might not lose some of their national character and vigour. In any event, he
was convinced ‘that the greatest and most irremediable misfortune for a peo-
ple is to be conquered’.95
During his American journey he recognized the influence of the Jesuits on
the Indians. Those Indians who did not become Christians seemed, however,
better off the farther they were from the Europeans.96 Tocqueville noted the
Indians’ retreat before the whites, describing them, in metaphoric language
probably taken from Volney, as melting like snow in the rays of the sun.97
Although some of the Indians were uncorrupted and praiseworthy, most dis-
appointed Tocqueville, combining their natural barbarity with the vices,
mainly inebriety, which they had learned from the Europeans.98 They had
assimilated mainly negative Western influences, in the process losing their
own positive cultural attributes, and therefore contact with the whites had
done them irreparable damage. Some of Tocqueville’s most important obser-
vations regarding the Indians were made in the romantic journal essay ‘A
Fortnight in the Wilds’.99 He was initially disappointed with those he saw in
Buffalo. Again he noted that they were disappearing like snow in the sun-
shine, and criticized the hypocrisy of the Europeans who religiously preached
human equality while dispossessing the Indians.100 In the frontier areas one
530 N. WOLLOCH
94 Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, p. 122.95 Ibid., pp. 189–91, and p. 213 for the quotation: ‘. . . que le plus grand et le plus
irrémédiable malheur pour un peuple c’est d’être conquis’.96 Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyages en Sicile et aux États-Unis, ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris,
1957), pp. 72–5.97 Ibid., pp. 155–6, 204. Also see Furet, ‘Conceptual System’, pp. 180–2.98 Tocqueville, Voyages en Sicile et aux États-Unis, pp. 221–5. For positive points
about the Indians see pp. 261–6.99 Also translated at times as ‘A Fortnight in the Wilderness’. For relevant remarks
see Mitchell, America After Tocqueville, pp. 78–81; Ewa Atanassow, ‘Fortnight in theWilderness: Tocqueville on Nature and Civilization’, Perspectives on Political Science,35 (2006), pp. 22–30; Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 119–33. Also see George WilsonPierson, Tocqueville in America [originally Tocqueville and Beaumont in America](Baltimore and London, 1996 [1938]), pp. 229–89. For more on Tocqueville’s impres-sions of the Indians see also ibid., pp. 189–96, 293–308, 333, 593–8, 610–15.
100 Tocqueville, ‘Quinze jours dans le desert’, in Voyages en Sicile et aux États-Unis,pp. 342–87, at pp. 343–5. For other early impressions regarding the cruel and unjust
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 531
could appreciate the Indians much more positively than in a place like Buf-
falo.101 In contrast with his expectations before coming to America, on arrival
Tocqueville realized that not all stages of the social development of humanity
were apparent there. On the contrary, in America more than in Europe there
was only one society. It made no difference whether it was rich or poor, agri-
cultural or commercial, it was everywhere egalitarian and exhibited the same
essential customs. This seemed to counter stadial analysis. Elsewhere, how-
ever, he denied the claim for the basic unity of the human race, citing as an
example the English and French in North America — the French Canadians
lived in harmony with their natural environment, much like the Indians, while
the English were more calculating, constantly competing with nature in an
effort to gain affluence and comfort.102
In Democracy in America Tocqueville developed most fully his discussion
of the American Indians, and of the predominantly negative impact of their
contact with the Europeans. In the very first chapter of the book he claimed
that rude people in polished countries were in fact more uncivil than in uncul-
tured countries because they were aware of the proximity of other people, rich
and enlightened, and this led to a feeling of humiliation. Among savage
nations, however, there was no such disparity. Therefore the American Indi-
ans, though ignorant and poor, were equal and free, and possessed a type of
aristocratic politeness. Utilizing stadial notions, Tocqueville claimed that
when the Europeans arrived in the New World they initially did not arouse
envy or fear amongst the Indians. Nevertheless, from that moment on their
destruction was preordained. They were hunters, not agriculturalists. They
occupied the land without possessing it. ‘Providence, in placing them [the
Indians] amidst the riches of the New World, seemed to have given them the
right to use it only for a short while; in a way, they were only waiting there.’103
The Europeans were those who would make proper use of America’s natural
treasures. Lockean and stadial notions combined to form Tocqueville’s justi-
fication of the European conquest of America, irrespective of his criticism of
American policy of Indian relocation, see Tocqueville’s letter to his mother while sailingdown the Mississippi River, in Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society,pp. 68–73.
101 Tocqueville, ‘Quinze jours dans le desert’, pp. 360–1. For further positiveremarks on the Indians see pp. 360–4, 366–8, 372–4, 385–6. For Indian independencesee pp. 379–82.
102 See the respective comments in ibid., pp. 346–8, 377–81. Also see Pierson,Tocqueville in America, pp. 314–45.
103 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, pp. 22–5 (1.I) : ‘La Providence, enles plaçant au milieu des richesses du nouveau monde, semblait ne leur avoir donnéqu’un court usufruit; ils n’étaient là, en quelque sorte, qu’en attendant.’ Also see thecomments at Vol. 1, pp. 316–17 (2.IX).
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the injustices involved.104 Unlike Rousseau, while he criticized the imperfec-
tions of Western democratic civilization, not least its often cruel treatment of
more vulnerable peoples, despite recognizing some commendable aspects of
primitive societies he nonetheless adhered to an overall preference of cultural
progress.
Tocqueville’s most consistent discussion of the Indians came in the famous
chapter on the three races in America. The difference between the situation of
the Indians and that of the African Americans emphasized the unhistorical
nature of the former’s culture. The African Americans were at the extreme
limits of servitude, while the Indians, not familiar with the concept of law,
were at the uttermost verge of liberty. Both were unable to resemble the Euro-
peans: the African Americans from inability, and the Indians from reluctance.
According to Tocqueville the Indians were doomed to perish in the same iso-
lation in which they lived, yet the African Americans’ fate was in some mea-
sure intertwined with that of the Europeans.105
In the section on the American Indians in the chapter on the three races in
America,106 Tocqueville claimed they were doomed to perish, and he regret-
ted their inability to cope with the deplorably exploitative policy of the
whites. The latter took unfair advantage of the Indians’ situation and used
duplicitous treaties to deprive them of their lands.107 On the other hand, when
the Indians attempted to become civilized they were no match for the Euro-
peans. The Spaniards in South America, despite their atrocities, did not suc-
ceed in exterminating the Indians or even in depriving them of all their rights,
yet the whites of North America succeeded on both counts without bloodshed.
As Tocqueville noted ironically, ‘[o]ne could not destroy human beings with
more respect for the laws of humanity’.108 Yet Tocqueville was also interested
in the attempts made by the whites to ameliorate the Indians’ condition. The
failure of these more benign policies was in a way even more depressing,
532 N. WOLLOCH
104 For Locke’s views on the possession of land see Barbara Arneil, John Locke andAmerica: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996).
105 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, pp. 331–6, 355–6 (2.X). African-American history, despite the horrors of slavery, was therefore in a way part of Westerncivilization’s history according to Tocqueville. For this reason his attitude towards theAfrican Americans is less relevant to our present discussion. For relevant remarks, seeLaura Janara, ‘Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy,Democracy, and Racism’, Political Theory, 32 (2004), pp. 773–800.
106 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, pp. 336–55 (2.X). See also the dis-cussion of Indian languages at Vol. 2, pp. 436–7 (Note C).
107 On the legal aspects of the mistreatment of the Indians, see Tamar M. Teale,‘Tocqueville and American Indian Legal Studies: The Paradox of Liberty and Destruc-tion’, Tocqueville Review, 17 (1996), pp. 57–66.
108 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 1, p. 355: ‘On ne saurait détruire leshommes en respectant mieux les lois de l’humanité.’
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 533
because it implied the inherent inability of the Indians to civilize themselves
according to European norms.
Utilizing stadial terminology, Tocqueville claimed that the Indians would
not succeed in civilizing themselves, or would do so too late to save themselves.
Civilization is the result of a long social labor operating in the same place,and which succeeding generations bequeath each in their turn. The peopleswho reach civilization with the greatest difficulty are the nations of hunters.The pastoral tribes move from place to place, but while migrating theyalways follow a regular order, and unceasingly return to the same places;the abodes of hunters change with those of the animals they pursue.
The attempts made by missionaries to educate the Indians had failed because
in order to civilize a people it was first necessary to settle them in a fixed place
and induce them to cultivate the land, a cultural prerequisite which the Indians
had difficulty acquiring. Nations used to the restless and adventurous life of
hunters were disgusted with the unceasing labour associated with agriculture.
The Indians recognized the achievements of the whites yet despised the manner
in which they had acquired them.109 As noted above, Tocqueville observed a
similarity between the Indians and the ancient and medieval European tribes,
not least regarding their political institutions.110 Yet this similarity was not
unlimited. Perhaps it was not their fault, yet the historical situation of the Indi-
ans, and specifically their contact with the rapidly expanding white society,
meant that they lacked the opportunities that the early medieval Germanic
tribes had had, even if the latter also had travelled a long and still unfinished
historical road to modern liberal culture. It was the tragedy of the American
Indians that they could not even commence on this journey, at least not with-
out completely forsaking any vestiges of their own culture. Moreover, the
cruel irony of their situation was that contact with European civilization, even
in its most well-intentioned forms, was precisely what condemned their cul-
ture, in any meaningful sense, to extinction.
Tocqueville described the mainly failed attempt of some Indians to acquire
civilization by engaging in agriculture. Unable to cope with the Europeans’
initial advantage, they usually gave up and returned to their original condi-
tion. The Indians were indeed capable of attaining civilization, but they were
unfortunately in contact with a people who were ‘le plus avide du globe’. In
their former state the Indians lived a life of danger and destitution, but free
109 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 342–3: ‘La civilisation est le résultat d’un long travail social quis’opère dans un même lieu, et que les différentes générations se lèguent les unes auxautres en se succédant. Les peuples chez lesquels la civilisation parvient le plusdifficilement à fonder son empire sont les peuples chasseurs. Les tribus de pasteurschangent de lieux, mais elles suivent toujours dans leurs migrations un ordre régulier, etreviennent sans cesse sur leurs pas; la demeure des chasseurs varie comme celle desanimaux mêmes qu’ils poursuivent.’
110 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 343–4.
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and devoid of a sense of inferiority. Yet the moment they attempted to live a
civilized life they became inferior, acquiring an unstable livelihood at the
price of what seemed degrading agricultural labour. They then fell back to
their former life, and the Europeans took advantage of this and despoiled their
land.111 The Indians’ ingenuity was not inferior to that of the Europeans, ‘but
nations, like men, need time to learn, whatever might be their intelligence
and efforts’. Therefore, the unequal contest with the Europeans ultimately
destroyed the Indians. They became an isolated minority in their own land.112
Unlike the ancient Germanic barbarians the Indians simply did not have the
required ‘time to learn’.
The contact between the Europeans and the Indians presented a story of
failed cultural transmission. In the lengthy quotation at the beginning of the
above discussion of the Roman Empire, taken indicatively from the section on
the Indians in the chapter on the three races of America, we saw that
Tocqueville described the Indians’ difficulty ‘in submitting to civilization’ as
resulting from general historical causes (for this systematic approach to his-
torical causation he was indebted in large measure to Montesquieu). Barbar-
ian societies usually advanced on their own towards civilization. When,
however, they came ‘to draw Enlightenment from a foreign nation’, they did
so as conquerors. In such historical situations the conquered were more cul-
turally advanced than the conquerors. The Mongol conquest of China and the
barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire presented situations in which the
victors were able to hold their own with the otherwise superior conquered, till
in time, due to mutual influences, a new type of culture emerged. ‘The barbar-
ians end by introducing the cultured man into their palaces, and the cultured
man in his turn opens his schools to them.’ Yet historical circumstances were
not always so favourable. First, the conquering barbarians had to possess an
inherent ability and inclination to imbibe such influences in the long run, and
the more civilized conquered nation had to be culturally flexible enough to
accommodate a fruitful engagement with their conquerors. These criteria
explained the different outcomes of the Chinese and the Roman examples.
Yet a different and even more preordained failure of cultural transmission
was also possible: ‘when the one who possesses the physical force also enjoys
at the same time intellectual superiority, it is rare that the conquered is civi-
lized; he withdraws or is destroyed’. In other words, the success of cultural
transmission depended on at least some parity of abilities between the con-
querors and the conquered. Human nature being what it was, Tocqueville
implied, it was simply impossible for a nation which was superior both mili-
tarily and intellectually to successfully transmit cultural attainments to their
conquered subjects. The temptations for abuse were simply too overwhelming.
534 N. WOLLOCH
111 Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 344–50.112 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 349: ‘mais les nations, comme les hommes, ont besoin de temps
pour apprendre, quels que soient leur intelligence et leur efforts’.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 535
Conversely, the conquered, inferior both physically and intellectually, receded
almost effortlessly into a listless decline. This observation accounted, in
Tocqueville’s view, for the dismal fate of the American Indians. They were
proud warriors, humiliated by recognition not only of their cultural, but also
of their military, inferiority. ‘It is thus that one can say in general that the sav-
ages come searching Enlightenment with arms in hand, but do not receive
it.’113
The Colonial Challenge
It is well-known that Tocqueville’s positive modern image has been severely
shaken by his support of the French conquest of Algeria. His position that
France needed colonial expansion both for internal reasons and to rival the
British Empire led him to accept acts of violence against the indigenous
Algerian population. Was Tocqueville therefore simply an intellectual who
failed to live up to his ideals? The answer seems to be more complicated.114
Cheryl B. Welch has discussed how once Tocqueville realized that the Arab
population were uninterested in cultural assimilation with the French, which
he thought they were capable of since they were not savages, he supported the
military occupation of Algeria despite the moral dissonance this entailed with
his more general views. As noted above, according to Welch, Tocqueville
considered domination without fellowship as the only realistic possible out-
come of collisions between unevenly civilized peoples; though this was far
from a morally perfect choice, it nonetheless underlay his support of the
French occupation of Algeria.115
The British experience in India supplied Tocqueville with a historical
example of colonial rule, and he studied it in detail.116 He claimed that the
Europeans, while trying to teach conquered peoples, often unintentionally
created a sense of tyranny. The conquered populations often preferred to
113 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 346. Also see Pitts, Turn to Empire, pp. 199–200. François Furethas noted, specifically regarding the doomed fate of the Indians, that Tocqueville waswary about the illusion that contact with European civilization benefited non-Europeans.See Furet, ‘Conceptual System’, p. 183.
114 For the incompatibility of Tocqueville’s liberal views with his support of Frenchcolonial aspirations in Algeria, see Melvin Richter, ‘Tocqueville on Algeria’, Review ofPolitics, 25 (1963), pp. 362–98; Pitts, Turn to Empire, pp. 189–96, 204–39, 254–7. Alsosee Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 316–42.
115 Welch, ‘Tocqueville on Fraternity and Fratricide’; Cheryl B. Welch, ‘ColonialViolence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria’, Political Theory, 31(2003), pp. 235–64.
116 Tocqueville, Écrits et discourse politiques, pp. 441–553 (his various notes onIndia). Yet there were limits to the similarity between the English and French nations; seeTocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, pp. 1–4. Also Pitts, Turn to Empire,pp. 219–26; Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 338–42; Richter, ‘Tocqueville on Alge-ria’.
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retreat rather than submit. This had happened with the American Indians, but
had to be avoided in Algeria. ‘Civilized peoples often oppress and dispirit bar-
barous peoples by their mere contact, without intending to and, so to speak,
without knowing it.’117 Tocqueville also proposed learning from the English
when in 1843 he advocated emancipating the slaves under French colonial
rule. The black population in the British colonies had proved that one could
be optimistic about the ability of emancipated slaves to quickly acquire
advanced cultural manners. ‘With enlightenment and the regularity of mores
must come the taste for well-being and the desire to improve one’s condition.’
Once free, the former slaves ‘lost no time in displaying all the tastes and
acquiring all the needs of the most civilized peoples’. Moreover, it is quite
indicative that the main reason Tocqueville recommended emancipating
slaves only gradually was an economic one, meant to ease the financial diffi-
culties of the slave owners during the transitional time until full emancipation
ensued. If anything, this serves to underline just how much confidence
Tocqueville had in the cultural attainments former slaves imbibed from their
Western owners, which evidently only needed emancipation in order to find
expression.118
Regarding his views on Algeria, however, Tocqueville’s views gradually
took a more pessimistic turn. In 1837 he was still optimistic about possible
positive influences of the French on the indigenous Algerian populations.
This optimism was particularly relevant in the case of the Kabyle, who
prompted Tocqueville to write about ‘the almost invincible attraction that
draws savages toward civilized man at the moment they no longer fear for
their liberty’.119 The Arab population seemed more problematic, but they too,
according to Tocqueville, could ultimately be brought to assimilation with the
French, even to the point of forming a single people from the two races, given
a sufficiently patient and tolerant policy towards them.120 Such an aspiration
in itself proves the non-racial underpinning of Tocqueville’s consideration of
the Arabs. Nevertheless, when four years later he made his first voyage to
Algeria, his first-hand experience of the country led to an almost complete
change in his hopes for cultural assimilation of the indigenous population
with French colonial society. This also prompted his support of harsh mea-
sures towards the local population, meant to ensure control of Algeria, which
536 N. WOLLOCH
117 Tocqueville, ‘First Report on Algeria (1847)’, in Writings on Empire and Slavery,pp. 129–73, at p. 144.
118 Tocqueville, ‘The Emancipation of Slaves (1843)’, in ibid., pp. 199–226, quota-tion at p. 212.
119 Tocqueville, ‘Second Letter on Algeria (22 August 1837)’, in ibid., pp. 14–26, atp. 20.
120 Ibid., pp. 20–6.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 537
he considered vital for France.121 By 1847 his scepticism regarding the
chances of attaining cultural unification between the French and the Arabs
was entrenched, and he recommended that the French in Algeria rule with jus-
tice but also rigorously. ‘Half-civilized peoples have difficulty understanding
forbearance and indulgence; they understand nothing but justice.’ It was use-
less and dangerous to try to teach European culture to the Muslims, it simply
did not suit them.122 The reasons for this were cultural, not racial. The histori-
cal, religious, jurisprudential and cultural differences between the Europeans
and the Arabs were simply too divisive to entertain any hopes of uniting both
populations. This was exacerbated by the hatred created among the Arabs by
foreign domination. It was the community of interests, mainly economic, not
the community of ideas and practices, which offered grounds for guarded
optimism regarding conciliation with the Algerian Arabs. This, however,
necessitated a just but forceful colonial rule.123
Like his Enlightenment predecessors, Tocqueville viewed the Europeans
as the apex of human civilization, not only for what they had achieved, but
also because Western civilization seemed to offer the only possible route to
future progress.124 According to Jennifer Pitts, between the Enlightenment
and the mid-nineteenth century, theories of progress became much less cul-
turally tolerant and nuanced, giving way to the pressing need to establish lib-
eral democratic governments, and to an enhanced sense of European cultural
supremacy, even if among liberals this outlook did not succumb to racism.125
In Democracy in America Tocqueville on various occasions expressed guarded
optimism about the future of humanity. He viewed the new democratic situa-
tion of the world as an improvement compared to the past, though still replete
with danger. In modern societies there were more equality and abundance;
this was a more just, if less elevated state. The bonds of race, rank and country
were relaxed, yet the great bond of humanity was strengthened.126 As we have
seen, however, when he discussed the fall of the Roman Empire or the dispos-
session of the American Indians, Tocqueville was well-aware that historical
progress was habitually inconsistent. Therefore, although his support of
French colonialism was perhaps inconsistent with the more theoretical aspects
of his liberal political philosophy, it was more consistent with what he had
learned from his historical studies.
121 Tocqueville, ‘Essay on Algeria (October 1841)’, in ibid., pp. 59–116, esp.pp. 59–88.
122 Tocqueville, ‘First Report on Algeria (1847)’, pp. 141–2.123 Ibid., pp. 142–6.124 See the remarks on levels of civilization in Tocqueville, ‘Notes on the Voyage to
Algeria in 1841’, in Writings on Empire and Slavery, pp. 36–58, at p. 56.125 Pitts, Turn to Empire, pp. 240–1.126 Tocqueville, Démocratie en Amérique, Vol. 2, pp. 336–9 (4.VIII) and passim.
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It is interesting to note that during his short tenure at the head of the French
foreign ministry, Tocqueville, according to André Jardin, seems to have
attempted to implement the coexistence of the Catholic Church with modern
liberty, which in Democracy in America was viewed as necessary for the exis-
tence of democratic society. This happened during the French intervention in
the Roman revolution of 1849, with the generally failed attempt to impose lib-
eral institutions in the restored Papal States.127 One might view this as an
attempt to enforce cultural transmission, though Tocqueville probably recog-
nized it was likely to fail. Nevertheless, the mere attempt to do so implied a
guarded optimism in comparison with his views on the cultural inadequacy of
the American Indians and the indigenous Algerians. Here his different out-
look compared to Enlightenment philosophers became evident. Both they and
Tocqueville believed in the progress of humanity and recognized that differ-
ent civilizations were, in their turn, torchbearers of this progress. Yet while
most eighteenth-century intellectuals were optimistic about the ability of all
human societies to ultimately attain progress and civilization, Tocqueville’s
outlook was more pessimistic and consequently more Eurocentric (signifi-
cantly in that order). In his view, if cultural transmission had any realistic
chance of success, it was only among Western nations.
Tocqueville’s views on cultural transmission, and specifically his gradu-
ally enhanced support of colonialism, offer some interesting insights into the
nature of colonial cultural encounters in general. There is no doubt that the
crimes perpetrated by Europeans in various colonial settings at different times
were often actuated by a distinctly racist attitude. Nevertheless, as Tocque-
ville’s example amply demonstrates, this was not always the case. Eurocentric
cultural chauvinism was not tantamount to racism by any means, even if at
times they were concurrent. This remains as true today as it was in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The nineteenth-century liberal outlook adopted the
Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of humanity on the one hand, but on
the other the view that such progress would happen only by following the
Western cultural model. This position regarded colonial reality, despite its
many deplorable circumstances, as an opportunity for disseminating Western
ideals through a process of cultural transmission to other less advanced soci-
eties, irrespective of their racial identities. Tocqueville’s later, more pessimis-
tic post-revolutionary pessimism was not a rejection of these Enlightenment
aspirations, but rather a more realistic consideration of their potential for suc-
cess. Yet it should be emphasized, again, that the grounds of Tocqueville’s
pessimism were distinctly cultural, not racial. It was inherent cultural propen-
sities and social customs, mœurs, historically embedded in non-Western soci-
eties, which proved resistant to the cultural transmission of Western ideals.
Indeed, in our own era this is evidently still the case. Tocqueville regarded
this situation as unavoidable and regrettable both for Westerners, but even
538 N. WOLLOCH
127 Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 437–44, 448.
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BARBARIAN TRIBES, AMERICAN INDIANS 539
more so for non-Westerners, who thus lost the opportunity of joining in the
march of progressive democratic civilization.
The global reality of the early twenty-first century has created a political
and cultural discourse situated between notions of pluralism and multi-
culturalism on the one hand, and of the spread of democracy and nation-
building on the other. Problems of cultural transmission have become both
pressing and unavoidable. While no clear solution has so far emerged to the
often deplorable circumstances resulting from the constant friction between
different cultures, it might be helpful to realize that discussions of these prob-
lems are not new. During the Enlightenment the modern types of historical,
political and sociological research began to emerge. This resulted in increased
interest in aspects of cultural transmission, evident both in historical studies
and in debates regarding European colonial policy. For Enlightenment intel-
lectuals the overall consideration of cultural transmission was subsumed in
their general optimistic Weltanschauung. Tocqueville’s post-revolutionary
perspective led him to a more guarded and pessimistic outlook, which in ret-
rospect sadly seems to have been more realistic. Modern reality regrettably
precludes the hope that there are shortcuts to civilization. The challenge facing
us today is to try to retain the optimistic vision of the Enlightenment, tempered
by Tocqueville’s clear analyses and the horrible experiences of the modern
age.
Nathaniel Wolloch
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