“Barbarian Tribes, American Indians and Cultural Transmission: Changing Perspectives from the...

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: [email protected] 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.

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2011For personal use only -- not for reproduction

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.


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.


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).



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.


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.



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-


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.



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.


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.



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


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.



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).


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).



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.


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.



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.


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.



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


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.



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.


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.



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.


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



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).


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.’



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.


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’.



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’.


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.



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.


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.



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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