For Better or For Worse
The Nuclear Family in America’s Democratic Social State
Heather Sims
Honors Thesis
Department of Political Science
Dr. Brian Shaw
Davidson College
May 2, 2014
Acknowledgements
This Honors Thesis in Political Science would not have been possible without the
guidance, support, and assistance of numerous groups and individuals. Thank you to the
Davidson Research Initiative for funding the summer research that jumpstarted this
project, and I extend my thanks to Dr. Meghan Griffith and the Davidson College Human
Subjects Institutional Review Board Committee for their thoughtful consideration and
approval of my proposal to conduct personal interviews with single mothers at the Ada
Jenkins Center. Thank you as well to the Davidson College Political Science Department,
and especially Dr. Peter Ahrensdorf and Dr. Susan Roberts for agreeing to be readers for
this thesis.
I would especially like to thank Dr. Brian Shaw for first planting the seed of
writing an Honors Thesis on family politics during his course that started it all, Justice
and the Family. For committing to this project as much as I have, for spending a summer
reading and talking about a variety of texts, including Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la
Démocratie en Amérique, for dedicating an entire academic year to watching my toes tap
the ground in consternation and to listening to me talk in circles as I work through my
confusion – for all of this and much more, I will always be much indebted to you. This
thesis would not have been possible without your genuine interest, time, patience,
constructive criticism, and constant encouragement.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the two families who played instrumental
roles in the process of thinking about, researching, and writing this thesis. First, for my
mom, dad, and sister and their constant refrain of “You can do this!,” the depth of my
appreciation is unspeakably great. Each of you exemplifies to me every day what it
means to be a family and to be family to others. The second family I must acknowledge is
the group of extraordinary people I have befriended at the Ada Jenkins Center through
my research for this project. Program Directors, social workers, volunteers, and clientpartners alike, each person I have had the pleasure to meet at Ada Jenkins has contributed
immensely to this project, whether they know it or not. Most importantly, I owe more
than I can say to the single mothers who were gracious enough to answer my questions
and to tell me their stories with unparalleled honesty and dignity.
For trusting me and for challenging me – for trusting this project and for
challenging this project – I owe to each one of you my sincerest gratitude.
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Table of Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter 1: L’état social démocratique……………………………………………………9
Chapter 2: Pouvoir Secondaire – the Family in the Democratic Social State…………...25
Chapter 3: Individualism in Action………………………………………………………37
Chapter 4: Craving Equality of Conditions……………………………………………...61
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….85
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..91
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Introduction
What could a French aristocrat from the 19th Century possibly have to say about
20th and 21st-century changes in family structure in America? As it turns out, quite a lot.
When Tocqueville travelled to America in 1831, his primary intention of studying the
country’s penitentiary system reflected his overall goal of examining American society to
understand how America had successfully established a liberal democratic republic while
France endured violent tumult to establish its own democratic government. From this
motivation emerged Tocqueville’s nuanced observations of American society as a
political system: l’état social démocratique. For Tocqueville, the democratic social state
consisted of all American citizens as individuals as well as countless social and political
associations that worked altogether to maintain America’s burgeoning liberal democracy.
However, one association in particular caught Tocqueville’s attention: the modern
nuclear family. Tocqueville perceived that the democratic family, more than any other
civic association, plays a deeply nuanced and particular role in the democratic social
state. In fact, this role is so critical and specific that Tocqueville devotes several chapters
of Democracy in America’s second volume to describing the democratic family’s innerworkings and its significance in American society. By analyzing the internal dynamics of
the nuclear family and their effects in relation to the democratic social state, Tocqueville
reveals that the nuclear family is both the instructor and product of the principles of
liberty and equality undergirding America’s liberal democracy.
Almost 200 years after Tocqueville’s voyage throughout America, the nuclear
family is becoming once again a point of discussion and this time among Americans
themselves, only not so much as a point of praise but rather as a source of concern. Over
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the past three decades, a strong correlation has formed between low education levels, low
incomes, and an increased rate of single-mother households by out-of-wedlock birth. In
2012, the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project reported that “In ‘Middle
America,’ defined here as the nearly 60 percent of Americans aged 25 to 60 who have a
high school but not a four-year college degree, marriage is rapidly slipping away”
(Marquardt et al., “The President’s,” 2). “As recently as the 1980s, only 13 percent of the
children of moderately-educated mothers were born outside of marriage,” but as a result
of this decline in marriage among this sector of women, “[b]y the late 2000s, that figure
had risen to a whopping 44 percent” (Marquardt et al., “The President’s,” 2). Even more
concerning, this rate of out-of-wedlock births and, therefore, single motherhood
continues to rise but primarily among women less educationally and financially equipped
to maintain a financially-secure family. In fact, The New York Times reported that as of
2012 “more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage” and
that “The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in
their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree” (DeParle and
Tavernise). This trend’s primary growth among single women with limited incomes as a
result of their limited education presents “‘Middle American’ women” with a greater risk
than their married counterparts of falling down the social ladder into financial insecurity
(Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet, 7). In effect, this trend in the nuclear family threatens, if it
does not reverse altogether, the prospects of these women and their children to be
financially stable and upwardly mobile.
The fact that these women and their children face a higher risk of falling into
poverty than women who marry before having children proves problematic for
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Americans. These unmarried women have not broken any law or committed any crime.
On the contrary, they are living in accordance with liberal democratic principles. They
have acted on their individual liberty that America as a liberal democracy guarantees
them. To maintain this guarantee and, more fundamentally, to act on the second principle
of America’s democratic social state – namely equality – Americans have created and
continue to expand social welfare programs. Still, however, for single mothers and their
children the high likelihood that they will live in poverty, as defined by federal
government standards, at some point in their lives does not disappear. This potential
liability of acting in accordance with the fundamental tenets of America’s democratic
social state – liberty and equality – implies that these principles themselves play an
essential role in the familial and policy changes occurring in 21st-century America. An
analysis of these changes in relation to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
demonstrates that the dissolution of the conventional nuclear family structure along a
class line and the expansion of social welfare policy in America illustrate a playing-out of
liberal democratic theory and, in particular, of the democratic social state as Tocqueville
describes it. These familial and policy changes in turn pose potential problems to the
same principles of liberty and equality. The nuclear family thus possesses a certain
tension-ridden significance in America’s political society as both a product of its liberal
principles and one of their greatest threats. A complexity Tocqueville observed firsthand
even during America’s nascent years, the complex interplay between liberal political
theory, society, and politics manifests itself most clearly in the nuclear family.
To make this argument, this thesis consists of four chapters. The first two chapters
focus entirely on Tocqueville’s text as it relates to contemporary changes in family
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structure and the expansion of social welfare policies. The first chapter explains the
meaning of l’état social démocratique, its roots in l’égalité des conditions, its possible
progression into a social state of individualism, and its potential culmination as an état
tutélaire. The second chapter locates the nuclear family in this theoretical framework first
by showing how family members’ interpersonal relationships embody the principles of
individual liberty and equality and, second, by explaining Tocqueville’s fundamental
concept of mœurs and how the woman in the family “fait les mœurs” (Tocqueville, DA,
1: 397, 417). Though more explicative than argumentative, these two chapters are
essential to the overall argument as they provide the theoretical context without which
this thesis’ central argument would make little sense. The subsequent two chapters argue
specifically that Tocqueville’s theory of the democratic social state as explained in the
first two chapters helps explain the rise of single motherhood among low-income women
and the expansion of social welfare programs correlated with these changes in family
structure, programs such as free breakfast in public schools for children of low-income
families. Chapter 3 follows the logic of the democratic social state by explaining these
social and political transformations in terms of individualism and soft despotism. Chapter
4 deepens this argument by showing how these same transformations can ultimately be
explained in terms of what Tocqueville calls Americans’ “passion ardente, insatiable,
éternelle, invincible” for equality of conditions – the driving force behind the democratic
social state’s progression (DA 2: 123).
Because the former two chapters constitute a textual analysis whereas the latter
two chapters constitute a theoretical analysis, the sources used in each chapter vary in
nature. Chapters 1 and 2 draw on scholarly analyses of Democracy in America, such as
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Pierre Manent’s Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1996) and Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop’s various publications on the text, including their
introduction to their translation of the text. Chapters 3 and 4, however, incorporate a
much wider variety of sources, ranging from contemporary newspaper articles to in-depth
ethnographic studies to government-published explanations of social welfare programs.
In particular, Chapter 3 makes extensive use of individual interviews I conducted with 5
single mothers who have used the financial and family resources at the Ada Jenkins
Center, a small non-profit organization in Davidson, North Carolina committed to
helping local individuals and families build stable and successful lives. Like the larger
interview-based studies conducted with single mothers and single fathers in poor
neighborhoods in Philadelphia that inform much of the latter two chapters, these five
personal interviews provide the context necessary to apply Tocqueville’s abstract theory
to the particular experiences of low-income single mothers. These interviews as well as
the interviews other scholars have conducted with low-income single mothers describe
these women’s daily lives in America’s democratic social state such that one can observe
the theory of the democratic social state in practice.
Finally, “weak” or “fragile” families used to be as strongly correlated with race as
they were with poverty to the extent that in past decades one could not study family
structure without making racial distinctions. Daniel Patrick Moynihan forever enshrined
this fact in his groundbreaking report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(1965) in which he drew national attention to the unparalleled rates of family dissolution
among African-American families in America and the detrimental effects this
demographic trend was having on the life prospects of America’s African-American
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population. In 21st-century America, the rates of family dissolution for AfricanAmericans continue to increase, but they do so for Americans of all races and ethnicities,
including whites. As The Atlantic noted last year in an article reflecting on the
approaching fiftieth anniversary of Moynihan’s report, “Five decades after Moynihan’s
work, white families exhibit the same rates of nonmarital childbearing and single
parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm”
(Coates). Because family structure is now more than ever a cross-racial issue, this thesis
will not draw racial distinctions or conclusions. More fundamentally, this cross-racial and
cross-ethnic analysis further supports this thesis’ essential argument that changes in
family structure and social policies related to the nuclear family in America derive from
the liberal democratic principles of individual liberty and equality that undergird
America’s democratic social state. For if this thesis has merit, then it will apply to all
individuals in America who seek to live out these principles in their daily lives – racial
and even socio-economic factors aside.
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Chapter 1
L’état social démocratique
Democracy in America offers a unique description not only of democracy in 19thcentury America, but also of democracy as a theory of political organization. For
Tocqueville, l’état social démocratique defines American democracy as much as, if not
more than, any electoral system or institutional structure. A term that describes American
society as at once a political institution and a state of social existence, the democratic
social state embodies America’s political principles of individual liberty and equality
through the American people’s interactions with each other. The American people’s
understanding of equality and of the effects that it has on their relations with each other
best exemplify for Tocqueville the essence of democracy, how it works, and why
America’s democracy, compared to nascent democracies in Europe, has been relatively
successful since the country’s independence from England. The democratic social state is
the theoretical underpinning of Democracy in America’s second volume because the
democratic social state is for Tocqueville the “explicative de l’état present des societies et
aussi de leur avenir” – the understanding of American democracy he seeks to enlighten
France’s failed democratic revolution (Furet 29). Consequently, to understand certain
changes that have occurred in the American family structure and related social policies as
products of liberal democratic political forces, one must first understand the democratic
social state and its possible future within America’s liberal democracy. As Tocqueville
himself states, “Pour connaître la legislation et les mœurs d’un peuple, il faut donc
commencer par étudier son état social” – one must first study liberal democracy in
practice among the American people themselves (DA 1:107).
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As Tocqueville leads up to his formal introduction of the democratic social state,
his discussion of American society’s “point de départ” reveals the founding principle of
political and public life in America: individual liberty (Tocqueville, DA, 1: 84).
Individual liberty, as Tocqueville defines it, is civil and moral freedom (DA 1: 102).
“[C]’est la liberté de faire sans crainte tout ce qui est juste et bon” – a “sainte liberté” that
demands individuals live for this liberty and that they risk their lives for this liberty (DA
1: 102). Supplemented by “l’esprit de religion,” which undergirds “le monde moral” of
America, “l’esprit de liberté” forms the core of America’s “monde politique” (DA 1:
103). Drawing from these two senses an intentional distinction between the moral roots
of private life and public life in America, Tocqueville designates the establishment and
the preservation of individual liberty as the preeminent goal of America’s public realm.
“[T]out est agité, contesté, incertain” in the democratic social state because
“indépendence, mépris de l’expérience et jalousie de toute autorité” rather than an
“obeisance passive, bien que volontaire” govern men’s conceptions of each other and
interactions with each other in society (DA 1: 103-104). The social state exists as a
collection of individuals united in their equal liberty to live according to their individual
autonomy, free from the dictates of other individuals or social classes.
Because every individual regardless of his or her social class possesses the same
natural liberty to live for the sake of his own freedom, America’s social state is
preeminently democratic. America’s social state places a defining emphasis on equality,
and Tocqueville uses America’s laws of succession and his observations of Americans’
“intelligences” to illustrate this fundamental specification (Tocqueville, DA, 1: 113).
Contrary to an aristocracy’s laws of succession, which enact the right of primogeniture
10
and form a hierarchy among siblings, America’s laws of succession establish a “partage
égal” of the family’s land or possessions (DA 1: 110). In a democratic society, every
single member of the family, rather than the land the family owns, represents the family’s
inherent worth independently of any male in the home. As America’s egalitarian practice
of inheritance divides the nuclear family’s fortune equally among all of its members,
siblings secure equal fortunes, and as siblings marry outside the family and move to
different, smaller plots of land, a general equality of fortune diffuses throughout the
social state. The fact that equality also “s’étend jusqu’à un certain point sur les
intelligences elles-mêmes” illustrates the extent of equality’s preeminence throughout
America’s social state (DA 1:113). Even though “l’inégalité intellectuelle vient
directement du Dieu” and man therefore cannot control whether or not it exists or the
extent to which it exists among men, “les intelligences…trouvent à leur disposition des
moyens égaux” in America’s social state (DA 1: 114). With few “ignorants” and few
“savants,” “un certain niveau moyen” exists “dans les connaissances humaines” in
America (DA 1: 113-114). Like mediocrity of fortune, intellectual mediocrity appeals
more to Americans than extreme genius or imbecility. Such a state of equal existence,
whether by fortune or by intelligence, affirms the notion that the principle of individual
liberty implies: that every individual is of equal worth, consideration, and respect as a
result of their common possession of individual liberty. A society of individuals who
practice in their daily lives these same political principles of liberty and equality
constitutes the democratic social state. Though a “conséquence politique” of individual
liberty, the democratic social state concerns itself more with being egalitarian than with
being free (DA 1: 115).
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This equality that undergirds the democratic social state and according to which
individuals in the social state interact with and relate to each other is a particular type of
equality: “l’égalité des conditions” (Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 57). First and foremost,
equality of conditions is the “fait singulier et dominant” to which people attach
themselves and that “singularise ces siècles [d’égalité]” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 120). As “le
fait générateur” of American civilization “dont chaque fait particulier semblait
descendre,” the principle of equality of conditions gives birth to every law, habit or action
in the social state (Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 57). Equality of conditions is, as
Tocqueville describes, “sans cesse devant moi comme un point central où toutes mes
observations venaient aboutir” as the preeminently democratic nature of the American
people makes the “développement” of equality of conditions the end goal of every law,
habit, or action in the social state as well (Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 57, 60). Equality
of conditions is “un fait providentiel” that is “universel,” “durable,” and outside the
bounds of “la puissance humaine” (Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 60). Thus the
“comprehensive principle” of the social state, the principle of equality of conditions
creates “a democratic society or ‘social state’ separate from or even prior to politics”
(Manent xviii; Mansfield, Foreward, viii). The social state functions at once
independently of formal democratic institutions and as a democratic institution itself
because equality of conditions is at once the undercurrent as well as the end goal of
America’s liberal democracy.
When Tocqueville says “equality of conditions,” the particular kind of equality he
means is a form of social equality that speaks directly to the issues of social classes and
class distinctions among individuals in a democratic society. As a society that functions
12
according to equality of conditions, America’s democratic social state is not a classless
society, but rather a society with no “barrières” between classes and, therefore, between
individuals (Furet 30). Using the relationships between masters and servants in
aristocratic versus democratic societies to illustrate this idea, Tocqueville confesses that
“On n’a point encore vu de sociétés où les conditions fussent si égales, qu’il ne s’y
rencontrât point de riches ni de pauvres; et, par conséquent, de maîtres et de serviteurs”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 221).1 Even in America’s social state, arguably the most democratic
society in existence in Tocqueville’s time, inequalities of wealth, status, power, and
countless other forms were pervasive. “L’inégalité permanente des conditions” maintains
in a democracy the “échelle des êtres” characteristic of aristocracy, but unlike in an
aristocracy, a hierarchy of financial or social status does not translate into a hierarchy of
social value (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 223). Social mobility replaces social stagnation and
predetermination such that in the democratic social state “il y a encore une classe de
valets et une classe de maîtres; mais ce ne sont pas toujours les mêmes individus, ni
surtout les mêmes familles qui les composent; et il n’y a pas plus de perpétuité dans le
commandement que dans l’obéissance” (Manent 30; Tocqueville, DA, 2: 225). Negating
authority and servitude among all individuals, equality of conditions manifests itself in
the uniquely horizontal nature of democratic society, placing each individual to the side
of every other individual, in comparison to “la verticalité hiérarchique” inherent to an
aristocracy (Heimonet 39). Hierarchical distinctions between social classes remain, but
the regard every democratic individual has for every other individual is one of human
1
For a textual analysis of Tocqueville’s discussion of master and servant relations in aristocratic
versus democratic societies, see Manent 29-36 and Furet 30-32.
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sympathy rather than class separation. The common bonds of humanity overshadow and
break down the conventional bonds of society.
The flexibility of social and class status within the democratic social state merely
reflects equality of conditions’ most fundamental meaning. Equality of conditions is at its
core what François Furet calls a “perception égalitaire” or an egalitarian way of thinking
about every other individual member of society regardless of class (31). This nuanced
and inferred understanding of equality of conditions derives from Tocqueville’s particular
wording when he describes the democratic social state. When Tocqueville clarifies this
term with the statement, “Quand un peuple a un état social démocratique, c’est-à-dire
qu’il n’existe plus dans son sein de castes ni de classes,” he intentionally emphasizes that
in a democratic social state the hierarchization of individuals in relation to each other
occurs within society but not within the individuals themselves (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
346). From within the depths of his bosom, every man develops an equal regard for every
other individual. Every person in the social state considers every other individual of equal
value, worth, and respect by virtue of their shared, same, and equal humanity. Even with
regard to masters and servants, “La démocratie n’empêche point que ces deux classes
d’hommes n’existent; mais elle change leur esprit et modifie leurs rapports” (Tocqueville,
DA, 2: 221). In this sense, equality of conditions constitutes social equality as it alters
individuals’ relations with each other on the basis of equality by first altering their
conceptions of each other on the basis of equality. As much as it is a commitment to the
reduction of differences between social classes, Americans’ passion for equality of
conditions is a way of thinking about one’s fellow citizens that then becomes “a way of
life” (Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short, 18). It becomes the democratic social state.
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Despite the admirable end of pure equality toward which equality of conditions
strives, an inherent tension emerges within this founding principle of the democratic
social state. Equality of conditions is, in fact, “l’égalisation des conditions” because a
serious disconnect exists between what Americans are born believing is a norm (the
inherent equality of all people) and the reality of living in a democratic society (the
inherent inequalities between people) (Furet 38; Vallaud 128). “Real equality” of
conditions “n’est jamais atteinte, mais toujours convoitée” because liberal democrats
transform “the mere fact of equal existence” into a “practical goal” (Manent 31, 130;
Furet 32; Mansfield and Winthrop, Introduction, lxvi-lxvii). The natural equality in which
democrats believe overpowers the “inégalité naturelle” visibly present in society, which
commercial democrats, such as Americans, judge most commonly according to
possessions of property and wealth (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 50). Americans practice and
believe in equality of conditions as though it is a universal truth, and to a certain extent it
is. Every human being is of equal humanity, of equal human condition, as every other
human being. However, this great equalizer breaks down in the face of daily life in a
social state “où chacun fait usage de toutes ses faculté pour s’enrichir” and, as a result,
“la richesse passera d’elle-même du côté des plus habiles” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 50).
Equality of conditions in both social and human terms can go only so far in a society that
equally values individual achievement for every individual and judges it according to
tangible, material gain.
As this incongruence between the theory of equality, its practice, and its reality in
America evolves, a tension between liberty and equality emerges as well. As Americans
work harder and harder to achieve equality of conditions, they develop for equality a
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“passion ardente, insatiable, éternelle, invincible” much stronger and more forceful than
their “goût naturel pour la liberté” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 122-123). Equality of conditions
has “donné naissance à une pensée mère” or “la passion principale qui agite les hommes
dans ces temps-là,” this particular passion being “l’amour de cette égalité” – the love of
equality of conditions (DA 2: 120). Democratic people’s “goût instinctif” for liberty,
which “s’est manifestée aux hommes dans différents temps et sous différentes formes,”
has no force against the “idéologie” of sorts that equality of conditions becomes as the
“fait singulier et dominant” of the social state and “des âges démocratiques”
(Tocqueville, DA, 1: 115, 2: 120; Furet 32). Although Americans’ passion for equality
governs social interactions in the democratic social state, the democratic “idéal” is neither
a full fruition of equality nor a simultaneous achievement of individual liberty and
equality of conditions independently of each other (DA 2: 119). The ideal is rather a
balanced harmony of mutually reinforcing liberty and equality such that “les hommes
seront parfaitement libres, parce qu’ils seront tous entièrement égaux; et ils seront tous
parfaitement égaux parce qu’ils seront entièrement libres” (DA 2: 119). The natural
imbalance between Americas’ sobered love of liberty and their impassioned “goût
dépravé” for equality constantly threatens to destabilize the democratic social state on its
path to liberty, if not derail it altogether (DA 1: 115).
In fact, equality possesses an inherent duality, an opposition of “tendances,” so
fundamental to America’s social state that Tocqueville specifically mentions this
opposition three separate times throughout his analysis of “l’influence qu’exercent en
Amérique l’égalité des conditions et le gouvernement de la démocratie sur la société
civile, sur les habitudes, les idées et les mœurs” (DA 1: 69). Tocqueville initially conveys
16
equality’s duplicitous nature with his direct statement that “Je vois clairement dans
l’égalité deux tendances: l’une qui porte l’esprit de chaque homme vers des pensées
nouvelles, et l’autre qui l’éduirait volontiers à ne plus penser” (DA 2: 28). In a subsequent
explanation of this dynamic, Tocqueville explicitly identifies “l’esprit de chaque homme
vers des pensées nouvelles” as liberty and Americans’ eventual lack of thinking as
despotism when he says, “De nos jours, la liberté ne peut s’établir sans [l’appui de
l’égalité], et le despotism lui-même ne saurait régner sans elle” (DA 2: 123). The same
passion for equality has the potential to lead democratic persons toward the realization of
the individual liberty they believe natural to all people and toward the complete and total
loss of this liberty in the form of despotism. Ultimately, Tocqueville conveys equality’s
potentially self-destructive nature with the shocking assertion that “L’égalité produit en
effet deux tendances: l’une mène directement les hommes à l’indépendance et peut les
pousser tout à coup jusqu’à l’anarchie, l’autre les conduit par un chemin plus long, plus
secret, mais plus sûr vers la servitude” (DA 2: 353-354). Democratic people would
renounce their liberty for the sake of and in the name of equality; “ils consentirait plutôt à
périr qu’à la perdre” (DA 1: 116). They would voluntarily agree to enslave themselves to
equality before living with inequality. Americans’ unparalleled passion for equality of
conditions, the defining feature of American society since its birth, has the potential to
undermine the liberal principle that gives life to equality as a political principle – that
gives life to the democratic social state.
While this inherent tension between individual liberty and Americans’ passion for
equality of conditions intensifies, from within the democratic social state emerges a
byproduct of this tension. Individualism, as Tocqueville identifies this idea, manifests the
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advancement of Americans’ passion for equality of conditions such that this pursuit
skews their understanding of individual liberty.2 When “[l]’égalité place les hommes à
côté les uns des autres, sans lien commun qui les retienne,” each citizen isolates himself
from everyone else (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 131). Although this “atomisation du corps
social” reinforces the logic of social equality, it creates individuals “enivrés de leur
nouveau pouvoir” of self-worth and filled with “une présomptueuse confiance” in their
capabilities as individuals (Vallaud 131; DA 2: 129).3 Though in a distinctly nonegotistical way, such individuals “ne songent qu’à eux-mêmes” and consequently forget
any future need they may have for “le secours de leurs semblables” (DA 2: 129).4 This
sense of sheer independence by virtue of equality “développe dans chaque homme le
désir de juger tout par lui-même” and “le mépris des traditions et des formes” and of
“toute autorité” (DA 2: 53, 353). In reality, however, every man is equally as “faible” as
he is independent (DA 2: 138). Without any relation to any other man, democratic
individuals “tombent donc tous dans l’impuissance” and “ne peuvent presque rien par
eux-mêmes” unless they learn “à s’aider librement” (DA 2: 138). The logic of equality
empowers each individual to realize that his existence in democratic society is of equal
value to that of every other citizen. Nevertheless, conditions among all individuals not
being equal, this psychological empowerment undermines each individual’s ability to act
2
For several insightful analyses of individualism’s particular relation to the democratic social state
see Manent 54, Coutant 229, and Hebert 113.
3
Max Lerner also refers to individualism as “the atomization of the society,” making that phrase a
common means of describing in physical and illustrative terms this very theoretical idea (70).
4
For Tocqueville’s discussion of the distinction between individualism and egotism, see
Democracy in America, Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 2, 125. 18
effectively on his independence.5 When acted upon without regard for others, individual
liberty becomes a means of achieving social equality rather than an end in itself.
More than a theoretical possibility of how liberty and equality evolve within the
democratic social state, individualism visibly alters each individual’s conception of
society and, therefore, his own personal relations with people. As “the reflection and
affirmation in the soul of each of this social condition” that esteems the individual,
individualism is an egalitarian way of thinking about oneself in relation to all other
citizens (Manent 54). Individualism is “un sentiment réfléchi et paisible” felt within the
depths of each man’s democratic soul, a feeling that “dispose chaque citoyen à s’isoler de
la masse de ses semblables et à se retirer à l’écart avec sa famille et ses amis”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). This “maladie de l’esprit” subconsciously encourages each
man to retreat as an individual from general society such that he himself and only he
himself is the reference point for all of his actions (Coutant 235). With only the “petite
société” that he creates “à son usage” – his closest friends and most intimate family
members – in his immediate surroundings, “il abandonne volontiers la grande société à
elle-même” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). Each individual concerns himself with only
himself and with those few other people that create his own personal world. Each
individual becomes an inactive member of society, terminates his active concern for the
well-being of all of his fellow citizens, and leaves society as a whole to take care of
itself.6
5
For Mansfield’s and Hebert’s discussions of this ironic independence imbedded in equality, see
Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short, 79 and Hebert 94.
6
For an economic perspective of individualism as a means of acquiring individual wealth and
material gain rather than a process uniquely social in nature, see Hereth 61.
19
This effect that individualism has on “la grande société,” not individualism itself,
is the most arresting and problematic characteristic of individualism. This severity
becomes most evident in the context of Tocqueville’s analysis of an aristocratic social
structure in relief to a democratic one. Unlike an aristocratic society which links
individuals in relations of mutual consideration “d’une manière étroite à quelque chose
qui est place en dehors d’eux,” that “thing” being a hierarchical social structure defined
by stagnantly unequal socio-economic conditions, America’s democratic social state
obliterates any awareness of one’s “concitoyens” or “semblables” that lie in the massive
space between one’s closest friends and family and “la cause de l’humanité”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 126-127). “L’aristocratie avait fait de tous les citoyens une longue
chaîne qui remontait du paysan au roi” that inherently fills any void that may isolate
individuals (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 126). Though an aristocracy ranks human beings, this
social inequality maintains a kind of social strength because each individual “se sacrifie
souvent à certains hommes” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 126). As Jospeh Hebert articulates,
“However corrupt in other ways, no man [in an aristocratic society] will succumb to the
delusion that his opinions or interests exist independently of his relation to his fellows,
and some simulacrum at least of the common good will be part of every individual
ambition” (113). Aristocratic society is not egalitarian, but no one is ever removed
emotionally or physically from other members of society. Aristocrats and their peasants
maintain allegiances to each other because they have a personal stake in each other’s
well-being.
In a democracy, on the other hand, individuals do not possess explicit emotional
or personal stakes in the welfare of other groups of people within the society as a whole.
20
This de-socialization of the democratic social state is ultimately the democratic social
state’s final step before it is faced with the choice between liberty and servitude, those
two possible paths Tocqueville envisions for America’s future. The fact that everyone is
“[né] égaux” “brise la chaîne” that affiliates people in an aristocracy to each other “et met
chaque anneau à part” such that “le dévouement envers un homme deviant plus rare: le
lien des affections humaines s’étend et se desserre” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 126, 130). This
isolation of each individual to the extent that he “renferm[e] enfin tout entier dans la
solitude de son propre cœur” does not necessarily imply that no man never sacrifices
anything for anyone or that no one is altruistic or mindful of others (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
127). Family members and close friends certainly devote themselves to each other’s wellbeing. Rather, individualism signifies “l’éclatement de l’espace social à notre époque” as
a result of the “desséchement” even more than the “desserrement” of the “lien social”
(Heimonet 36, 40). Individualism withers away each citizen’s awareness of others
beyond one’s own “petite société,” and “l’apathie générale” or “l’indifférence” becomes
“une sorte de vertu publique” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 131, 408). The social state may be
democratic – it may be egalitarian – but with the emergence of individualism it ceases to
exist as a vibrant community of individuals. Though in theory individualism, as it
manifests the “sovereignty” of the individual, epitomizes the crux of liberal society, in
reality individualism tips the scale toward the potential, though not quite inevitable, selfdestruction of the democratic social state (Hebert 91).7
7
Coutant discusses Tocqueville’s concern with whether individualism or even the future of the
democratic social state itself is or is not inevitable when he says, “En fait, même si l’individualisme trouve
son origine dans l’égalité, il n’en est pas la conséquence inévitable. Et là est toute la question de la
réflexion tocquevillienne” (238). Coutant also discusses the same relation of inevitability to soft despotism
or democratic despotism (377). The inevitability of individualism is somewhat unclear in comparison to
that of soft despotism, which Tocqueville explicitly says a number of different times is a possible future for
America and not an inevitable one (this will be discussed in full at the end of this chapter). As for
21
The “corps social” thus having been “réduit en poussière,” the deconstructed
social state possesses the perfect conditions for the rise of the tutelary state (Tocqueville,
DA, 2: 353).8 Individuals and society as a whole being too weak and dissociated to care
for themselves and for each other, the soft despot emerges to provide for and ensure the
people’s general welfare and satisfaction.9 Unlike standard despots and tyrants who
explicitly and indiscriminately attack the liberty of individuals to live as they choose, the
tutelary state “ne tyrannise point” (DA 2: 386). The soft despot “gêne, il comprime, il
énerve, il étient, il hébète” so that it ultimately lures into its “aboslu, détaillé, régulier,
prévoyant et doux” power each citizen such that it “l’avoir pétri à sa guise” (DA 2: 385386). This authority that the administrative state develops becomes so all-encompassing
that beyond working to assure each individual’s “jouissance” and “bonheur,” the state
“pourvoit à leur sécurité, prévoit et assure leurs besoins, facilite leurs plaisirs, conduit
leurs principals, divise leurs héritages” (DA 2: 385). Instead of each person himself, the
soft despot becomes “l’unique agent et le seul arbitre” of each person’s daily life (DA 2:
356). The tutelary state does not even give the people as individuals or as a society “le
trouble de penser et la peine de vivre” (DA 2: 385). The transformation of each individual
into such a state of apathetic social paralysis creates a nation that is nothing but “un
individualism, Tocqueville says that it is “une expression récente qu’une idée nouvelle a fait naître,” which
could lead one to believe that individualism, if not already in existence, will be so soon (Tocqueville, DA,
2: 125). However, just a few paragraphs following this statement, Tocqueville says that individualism
“menace à se développer à mesure que les conditions s’égalisent” (DA 2: 125). It threatens to develop as
conditions become more equal, but it will not necessarily do so.
8
A variety of names for the idea of soft despotism exist, two others of notice being administrative
despotism and the tutelary state, or something even hotly politicized such as a “nanny state,” to use the
term popularized by the former Prime Minister of England, Margaret Thatcher. For a more formulaic
interpretation of how individualism leads to soft despotism, see Hebert 94.
9
As I will explain in subsequent chapters, soft despotism’s traits are, in fact, quite familial in
nature. The familial language Tocqueville uses to supplement his description of soft despotism and its
purpose indicates that soft despotism arises as the family disintegrates and becomes too weak to provide for
itself and its members. I save this particular description of soft despotism for later analysis for which it is
more relevant and instructive.
22
troupeau d’animaux timides et industrieux, dont le gouvernement est le berger” (DA 2:
386). The soft despot is the shepherd or tutor, but the people “ont eux-mêmes choisi leurs
tuteurs” with their popular sovereignty (DA 2: 386). Men thus being “plus que des rois et
moins que des hommes,” they singlehandedly mollify and enslave themselves (DA 2:
388).10 The vexing nature of soft despotism is not as much that democratic men lose their
liberty, but that they unknowingly and willingly enslave themselves without needing,
wanting, or intending to do so. “[C]e n’est pas un homme ni une classe, mais le people
lui-même, qui tient le bout de la chaîne” (DA 2: 386). In the name of and for the sake of
equality, democratic persons have the potential to destroy the democratic social state and
to demean their own humanity by snuffing out the liberty – the essence – of man’s
democratic “soul” (Tocqueville, DA translation, 244).
This explanation of the social state and its possible future of soft despotism
provide a necessary and nuanced understanding of the political forces at play in
American society. Liberty and equality are undeniably two of the largest pillars of
America’s liberal democracy. Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic social state
reveals, however, that a particular form of equality (equality of conditions) and
Americans’ unparalleled passion to achieve it propel the democratic social state toward a
precipice. As democratic peoples such as Americans act in response to their passion for
equality of conditions, they potentially set themselves and their social state up for the
emergence of individualism and, therefore, the rise of an administrative government that
the people unknowingly use to squelch their own liberty. At least for the time being,
however, all hope is not lost. According to Tocqueville, a variety of mediating factors
slow the progression of this trajectory. In 21st-century America, one in particular merits
10
For an analysis of individualism predicated on this idea, see Hebert.
23
special attention as it, like equality, is evolving in controversy and at warp speed. This
particular mediating factor is the nuclear family.
24
Chapter 2
Pouvoir Secondaire – the Family in the Democratic Social State
With the threat of soft despotism looming over the democratic social state,
Tocqueville commits himself to explaining not only how the democratic social state lends
itself to this threat, but also how the democratic social state slows or prevents altogether
soft despotism’s emergence. Tocqueville wants to “instruct and correct” America’s
democracy because he sees it as being dynamic and organic rather than fixed in a certain
form with a certain future (Tocqueville, DA translation, 7). Precisely because the
democratic social state’s end state is undetermined, Tocqueville devotes Democracy in
America’s second volume to identifying the elements of American society that guide
Americans down the path toward liberty rather than toward soft despotism. These
elements Tocqueville calls “pouvoirs secondaires” (DA 2: 355). Though oftentimes
overlooked as being of secondary significance to American democracy’s preservation,
pouvoirs secondaires are naturally “placés entre le souverain et les sujets” such that they
balance the government’s necessary laws and authority with each citizen’s individual
liberty (DA 2: 355). This mediating role proves essential to the maintenance of America’s
democratic social state as a free society.
Tocqueville identifies three pouvoirs secondaires that mediate the emergence of
individualism and, therefore, soft despotism: local self-governance, self-interest wellunderstood, and civic associations.11 For the purposes of this chapter’s analysis, civic
11
Local self-governance (political freedom) is not of particular relation to this thesis’ analysis, but
for Tocqueville’s explanation of this mediating force within the democratic social state, see Democracy in
America, Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 4, 131-135. However, the “doctrine” of self-interest well-understood
plays a significant role in the subsequent chapter and, therefore, merits explanation (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
153). Self-interest well-understood encompasses the idea that individual self-interest is best served when
confounded with the general interest such that “l’avantage individuel des citoyens…travaill[e] au bonheur
de tous” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 153). As a result of this reorientation of one’s own self-interest, “l’homme en
25
associations constitute the most significant of these three mediating forces because
Tocqueville considers the nuclear family one of the primary associations present in
democratic civil life. By first explaining the meaning and importance of civil associations
according to Tocqueville and then how the nuclear family operates as one within the
democratic social state, this chapter identifies and explains the critical role and
significance of the nuclear family in the theory of American democracy as Tocqueville
understands it. Although the principles of liberty and equality ultimately threaten the
nuclear family’s existence, the nuclear family as a civil association also incubates these
same principles in a particular way that is key for the continued fruition of the democratic
social state.
Before one understands how the nuclear family constitutes a civic association in
Tocquevillian terms, one must first understand what Tocqueville means by civic
association. Contrary to “[des] associations politiques” in America, “l’association dans la
vie civile” consists of “Les Américains de tous les ages, de toutes les conditions, de tous
les esprits, [qui] s’unissent sans cesse” around common interests and goals (Tocqueville,
DA, 2: 137). With this amount of public participation, “des associations commerciales et
industrielles” exist in great numbers, but there are “encore mille autres espèces” of
associations that fill American social life, including “de religieuses, de morales, de
graves, de futiles…pour donner des fêtes, fonder des séminaires, bâtir des auberges,
élever des églises,” and for countless other interests and needs (DA 2: 137). The extent to
which these inherently localized and social groups play a political role in the democratic
servant ses semblables se sert lui-même” and subsequently realizes “que son intérêt particulier est de bien
faire” (DA 2: 153). The individual does not neglect his or her own interest for the sake of altruism or the
well-being of others. Rather, the individual aligns his or her own interest with the general good such that
fulfilling his or her self-interest benefits society in general.
26
social state is unique to America. While in France “le gouvernement” sits “à la tête d’une
entreprise nouvelle” and “en Angleterre un grand seigneur, comptez que vous apercevrez
aux Etats-Unis une association” (DA 2: 137). Rather than relinquishing their autonomy to
a far-reaching government or an aristocratic lord, Americans create small (or not so
small) groups of themselves to accomplish goals that they are incapable of achieving
individually. The civic association is the primary and most effective means through
which individuals effect change particularly on a local level that benefits themselves,
their fellow citizens, and their greater communities.
Adding to their singularity, civic associations in America, including the nuclear
family, are personalized and participatory in nature. As a result, civic associations
embody the liberal democratic principles of individual liberty and equality in a way that
fosters these same principles among individual citizens and throughout the democratic
social state. Although overtime the notion of equality and its practice renders “chaque
citoyen…individuellement plus faible, et par consequent plus incapable de preserver
isolément sa liberté,” associations such as the family teach persons “l’art de s’unir à ses
semblables” so that they can defend altogether their liberty against the growth of the
tutelary state which compensates for individuals’ weaknesses (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 137).
Whether for commercial, religious, or communal purposes, this inclusive and egalitarian
unification of individual citizens on a voluntary basis reminds democratic citizens that
they are free to pursue and to effect their own interests. Moreover, when democratic
citizens do so in conjunction with their semblables on an equal basis, each individual
rediscovers that he or she, in fact, does possess the personal fortitude to realize his or her
individual goals in a way that reinforces, rather than negates, the interests, liberty, and
27
equality of everyone else. As will become clear over the course of this chapter, the civil
association that fosters most naturally this “action réciproque des hommes les uns sur les
autres” is the nuclear family (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 140). Consequently, the nuclear family
has the potential to reduce most effectively individual and communal weaknesses in the
democratic social state and, therefore, to prevent the dissolution of democratic society
that can occur as a result of the progression of the democratic social state’s individualist
and egalitarian ethic.
But Tocqueville being the Frenchman that he is, his close attention to nuance and
detail reveals that the nuclear family’s place in the democratic social state as a pouvoir
secondaire is not so clear-cut; indeed, it is rife with paradox. Tocqueville reveals the
family’s particularly precarious position in the democratic social state when he describes
individualism’s dissolving effect on the nuclear family.12 As the sentiment of
individualism extends itself throughout society, Americans’ relationships, which are
based “on individual interest and the transiently and accidentally complementary needs of
men who are in general like each other” become subject to individuals’ personal, selfinterested, and fleeting whims (Behnegar 345). The more individuals conceive of each
other as equals, the less they define their relationships according to a mutual sense of
“duty and permanent complementary dissimilarity and inequality” (Behnegar 345).
Without an aristocracy’s vertical chain of devotion tying individuals to their families’
past and future generations, to their families’ land, and really to their families at all,
12
To convey the significance of Tocqueville’s analysis of the nuclear family in relation to
individualism, it is worth noting here two details. First, this passage is one of the first times Tocqueville
specifically refers to the family in Volume 2, unlike in Volume 1 when the family serves as a continual
point of reference particularly in comparison to the aristocratic family. Second, Tocqueville discusses the
dissolutive effects of individualism on no other civil association, only with regard to the nuclear family,
which implies both the pre-eminence of the family as a civil association and the detrimental effects of
individualism’s emergence particularly on the nuclear family.
28
“Chez les peuples démocratiques, de nouvelles familles sortent sans cesse du néant,
d’autres y retombent sans cesse, et toutes celles qui demeurent changent de face”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 126).13 The family does not disappear altogether leaving the
individual to his own devices, but is rather “retir[ée] à l’écart” with the individual and
“ses amis” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). Because individuals who live according to
America’s liberal democratic principles of liberty and equality comprise the American
family, the family itself is intensely vulnerable to the fluidity and the potential “drying
out,” so to speak, of democratic individuals’ relationships. As it withers away
individuals’ consideration for each other, the sentiment of individualism naturally
weakens the nuclear family.
Although as the first and final boundary between the individual and society in
general the nuclear family is in severe risk of individualism’s dissolutive effect, this
particular position within the democratic social state perfectly situates the family to
operate as a civic association, as a pouvoir secondaire, to combat this threat. As the
egalitarian relations between father and son illustrate, the democratic family inculcates
and perpetuates the democratic principles of equality and liberty by recognizing and
valuing each of its members’ natural and equal independence.14 As the “[m]aître de ses
pensées” beginning “[a]u sortir du premier âge, l’homme se montre et commence à tracer
lui-même son chemin” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 239). Rather than reforming this individual
13
For Tocqueville’s description of such a “chaîne” existing in aristocratic societies and, therefore,
some of the central differences between aristocratic and democratic families, see Democracy in America,
Volume 2, Part 2, Chapter 2, 126.
14
The practice of equality within the nuclear family naturally raises the question of sexual equality
between men and women. Sexual equality in light of sexual difference is a defining feature of the
democratic family that has attracted much scholarly analysis, and Tocqueville’s devotion of an entire
chapter to the subject of equality between men and women in the family is no exception. Although sexual
equality despite sexual difference is essential to the role of the democratic nuclear family as a pouvoir
secondaire, I will discuss it in Chapter 4 in a more illuminating context.
29
will to be consistent with the family’s and society’s dictates, the family validates this
self-assertion and even considers it “un droit incontestable,” automatically establishing
each family member as an equal such that the family comprises a unit of equal
individuals (DA 2: 240). Authority naturally flows without “passions haineuses et
désordonnées” or “amertume” and “colère” between father and son such that when “le
père a aperçu de loin les bornes où devait venir expirer son autorité…il abdique sans
peine” (DA 2: 240). The son gains individual liberty from this relationship “sans
precipitation et sans efforts” because without “un droit politique” to supplement his “droit
naturel” as father, “le père n’est, aux yeux de la loi, qu’un citoyen plus âgé et plus riche
que ses fils” (DA 2: 240-241).15 By virtue of their equal social status and respect under
the law, both father and son respect each other as persons of equal autonomy. With
neither the need nor the right to claim authority over the other, both father and son –
parent and child – regard each other with a mutual and equal dignity.
A reflection of the horizontality of democratic relations, this same democratic
sensibility applies to relationships not only between generations, but also between
siblings in a democratic family.16 As a result of both their belief in equality and their
legal practice of it through “[l]a division des patrimoines,” siblings in a democratic
family are “parfaitement égaux” and, therefore, “indépendants” of each other
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 242-243). Tied to each other “par la communauté des souvenirs et la
libre sympathie des opinions et des gouts” rather than by inheritance and self-interest,
such siblings relate to each other with “l’amour filial” et “la tendresse fraternelle” such
15
For additional commentary on how these affectionate relations in the democratic family weaken
the family structure rather than strengthen the democratic social state, see Bloom, “Rousseau on Equality of
the Sexes,” 85, Bloom, “The Relation of the Sexes,” 242, and Berns 225.
16
For Tocqueville’s description of sibling relations in an aristocratic society as a foil to those in a
democracy, see Democracy in America, Volume 2, Part 3, Chapter 8, 243. 30
that “leurs âmes se confondent” (DA 2: 244). If, as Tocqueville claims, “l’esprit de
famille se matérialise en quelque sorte dans la terre,” then when the law divides the
family’s land equally among the family members, “l’esprit de famille” disperses with it
(DA 1: 110). With nothing tangible remaining to tie family members together, parents,
siblings, and children remain a family unit through the “douceur” of their natural
affiliations (DA 2: 245). Although siblings have the legal means and inheritance to part
from each other, their egalitarian sensibilities preserve their familial affiliation. Equals in
spite of their shared inheritance, each sibling values each of his or her other siblings for
their own individual sakes even more than for their shared family lineage.
The promulgation of personal relationships built on mutual respect within the
family makes possible the creation of similar relationships within society in general. The
mutual sympathy between individuals that keeps the democratic social state from
dissipating as a result of the primacy of the individual and the force of equality can come
only from the nuclear family because the family engenders within each of its members a
democratic and social sensibility that makes recoiling into “la solitude de son propre
cœur” nearly impossible (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 127). Being part of a nuclear family
naturally, gently – even somewhat subconsciously – forces persons to think of others and
to think of themselves in relation to others rather than as an individual operating in
isolation. William Mathie rightly states that as the douceur of the democratic family “is
extended” to the rest of society, “this feeling…is also weakened” because individuals’
feelings of attachments to their “concitoyens” are rarely as strong as the feelings they
have for their blood relatives. (DA 2: 245; Mathie 15). Tocqueville also expresses this
idea when he says, “La démocratie détend les liens sociaux, mais elle resserre les liens
31
naturels. Elle rapproche les parents dans le meme temps qu’elle sépare les citoyens” (DA
2: 245). Nevertheless, as Tocqueville argues with regard to political liberty, by practicing
egalitarian relations of mutual devotion within the family, what once “était calcul” or, in
this case, mandated by blood, “devient instinct; et, à force de travailler au bien de ses
concitoyens” and family members, “on prend enfin l’habitude et le goût de les servir”
(DA 2: 135). The instinct, habit, and taste for being mindful of other people derive most
fully from a place where this awareness of and active concern for others is both natural
and practiced on a regular basis. This particular democratic mindset derives from the
internal dynamics of the democratic nuclear family.
Democratic relations between individuals transcend the bounds of the nuclear
family and enter into general society because such relations become mœurs – established
habits of daily life. As one of the three “causes qui tendent au maintien de la république
démocratique aux Etats-Unis,” mores are not only “les habitudes du cœur,” but even
more profoundly “l’ensemble” of the different notions, opinions, ideas, and “dispositions
intellectuelles et morales” “dont se forment les habitudes de l’esprit” of each citizen
(Tocqueville, DA, 1: 379, 392, 413).17 Mores constitute the dispositions and sensibilities
of each individual that naturally incline each individual to act in accordance with
common social practice and belief. Mores themselves are common to almost all
Americans, and almost all Americans practice them in public on a daily basis
(Tocqueville, DA, 1: 417). Although a mœur is an internal inclination, this inclination
17
It is worth belaboring just how essential mœurs are to Tocqueville’s understanding of the
democratic social state. Mores are of such significance to Tocqueville’s analysis of American society that
he emphatically states in the midst of his discussion of the principle causes he believe maintain the
democratic social state, “Si je ne suis point parvenu à faire sentir au lecteur dans le cours de cet ouvrage
l’importance que j’attribuais…en un mot à leurs mœurs, dans le maintien de leurs lois, j’ai manqué le but
principal que je me proposais en l’écrivant” (DA 1: 417).
32
only really becomes a mœur when “les hommes apportent dans l’état de société” this
private habitual disposition such that it becomes a public habitual action (Tocqueville,
DA, 1: 413). As each citizen’s shared “practical experiences,” “habits,” and “opinions”
reflect each other in public, these norms of daily life naturally mitigate the progression of
the democratic social state into a fragmented society of indifferent individuals
(Tocqueville, DA, 1: 417). The practice of mores in the social state and as part of a social
state of being translates into “an ethos of democratic life, where the procedures of
democracy permeate daily affairs” (Maletz 13). The supremacy of mores over laws,
Providential circumstance, and religion as the “causes principales qui tendent à
maintenir” America’s democratic republic thus derives from the American people’s
voluntary adherence to majority opinion with the assumption that it tends toward the
general welfare (Tocqueville, DA, 1: 379). As a result, general public opinion coheres
with general public behavior, and an understood moral and social code of conduct
emerges from the people themselves such that they regulate and moderate the innerworkings of the democratic social state. The people regulate and moderate their own
beliefs and behaviors from within themselves as individuals and as a society.
Mœurs and the family are mutually integral parts of the democratic social state
because, according to Tocqueville, mores are taught by women within the family.18
Tocqueville identifies the woman of the family as the one “qui fait les mœurs” because
the woman’s familial role, as Tocqueville observes it, exemplifies the natural mediation
18
For analysis of this particular discussion of women in the family in terms of “subordination”
(Behnegar 342) to domestic responsibilities, male industry, and public opinion or expectations, see Brabant
86-87 and Janara 570-574. Although the cotemporary notion of “separate spheres” undergirds
Tocqueville’s discussion of women in the American family, his observation of women’s instruction of
mores rather than women’s specific roles in the family’s sexual division of labor is of singular significance
in this chapter. I devote a more gender-based discussion of the family in Democracy in America to an
analysis of the gendered language Tocqueville uses to discuss soft despotism in the subsequent chapters.
33
of tensions between individual and communal interests, a mediation that mores inherently
foster in the democratic social state (Tocqueville, DA, 1: 397). The woman’s democratic
education and her subsequent willing self-sacrifice for the sake of her family make the
Tocquevillian woman the ideal democratic citizen. Beginning when the woman is a
“jeune fille,” the Americans “ont cherché à armer sa raison” rather than rely simply on
her strong religious beliefs “pour défendre la vertu de la femme” (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
249). The young girl’s “mœurs pures plutôt qu’un esprit chaste” provide her a solid
foundation of self-assurance and self-assertion that, when supplemented by armed reason,
gives her a moral character strong enough to withstand the forces of public opinion while
still protecting her pure mores (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 248). Rather than consider as
oppressive this “inexorable” public opinion that relegates the woman to the domestic
sphere as a young girl, once married the woman uses “la fermeté de sa raison et…les
habitudes viriles que son education lui a données” to “se place[r] sous le joug” of
marriage and family (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 252). Although her choice is “circumscribed by
chance and necessity,” the woman invokes the reason, rooted in a democratic spirit, that
she matured while still unmarried not necessarily to sacrifice entirely her independent
interests for the sake of her family, but rather to locate her interests in and to derive them
from her family (Winthrop 243). The woman uses her democratic education and her
situation naturally “circumscribed by chance and necessity” to teach by example to her
family and greater society the significance and dignity of committing oneself to others
and to one’s family in particular as a reflection of one’s own liberty and egalitarian
consideration of others. The woman instructs mœurs because her natural sensibilities and
behaviors reflect those that undergird the democratic social state.
34
Tocqueville isolates the woman and her particular role in the democratic family
because she makes maintaining the family a mœur that transcends both self-interest and
communal interest. Rather than choosing between one or the other set of interests, she
chooses to locate her “primary interests in the group” or family such that she and the
family mutually benefit each other (Behnegar 387). By “embod[ying]” Tocqueville’s
notion of self-interest well understood for the particular sake of the family, the woman
renders the family not only the most effective and most natural antidote against the “selfabsorption [that] is naturally inevitable” in a political society that valorizes the
individual’s personal interests (Behnegar 346; Bloom, “The Relation of the Sexes,” 238).
The woman’s commitment to furthering the interests of her family, its members, and the
ways in which they benefit their general community counteracts the general apathy
Tocqueville fears could pervade American democracy. Because “la Providence n’a crée
le genre humain ni entièrement indépendent, ni tout à fait esclave,” every individual
encounters limitations to his interest (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 402). The woman accepts this
reality of the human condition, acts on her “rational interest in ‘social existence,’” and
encourages her family’s members to invest emotionally in their family and in each other
(Winthrop 244; Behnegar 347). Through the woman’s pioneering example, the family
links the individual and his interests to the community and its interests. As individuals’
consideration of others becomes habitual and a naturally-developed part of every
person’s social state of being, the family or at minimum the desire to form a family
becomes a habit of the heart – a mœur – and, therefore, an essential element of the
democratic social state.
35
The nuclear family thus holds a critical position within the democratic social
state. The family is the absolute last stopping point on the individual’s path toward pure
individualism – toward thinking only of oneself and of humanity in general as polarized
ends rather than as an individual within a social context. The family naturally and
intuitively forces individuals to think outwardly rather than inwardly, to think of one’s
place among other individuals rather than as an individual operating in isolation. As the
woman instructs and perpetuates mœurs within the family, making the family itself a
mœur, the family mediates between society as a whole and the individual – between
communal and individual interests – to maintain a democratic social state rooted in
individual liberty and working consistently toward a more complete form of equality of
conditions. But just like America’s social state, the family is always at risk of being
“reduit[e] en poussière,” reduced to individual and brittle fragments of a whole, under the
force of the democratic social state’s individualist ethic (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 353). As the
democratic social state devolves into a state of individualism and soft despotism, the
critical position the nuclear family holds in democratic society becomes doubly
precarious. Not only is the family itself subject to the individual’s predominance, but if
the family succumbs to this vulnerability, then the dissolution of the nuclear family itself
foretells the dissolution of the democratic social state.
36
Chapter 3
Individualism in Action
Fast-forward almost 300 years to America in the 21st Century. Since
Tocqueville’s voyage, much has drastically changed in American society, particularly
with regard to the role of women in the democratic social state. More women have
entered the workforce over the past few decades than ever before, and the Feminist
Movement has propelled the female to the forefront of America’s political and social
spheres. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in 1970 40.8% of women eligible to
work were employed whereas in 2013 53.2% of women were employed, an increase of
women’s labor force participation that reflects a continuous upward trend over time
(“Employment Status”; “Household Data Annual Averages”). As of January 2013, 23
companies in the Fortune 100 to Fortune 500 bracket have female Chief Executive
Officers, and 23 companies in the Fortune 501 to Fortune 1000 bracket have female
CEOs (“Women CEOs”). Indeed, it’s only a matter of time before America elects its first
female president, many political pundits say.
Although these public positions of authority that women increasingly hold in
America demonstrate increased (though by no means complete) sexual equality in the
public sphere, they are not the images of female headship that Tocqueville underscores.
As detailed in the previous chapter, the woman’s superiority lies in the private sphere
rather than in the public sphere because she is the ultimate source of mœurs, and mœurs
undergird the democratic social state. That is the reasoning that underlies Tocqueville’s
emphatic assertion: “je n’hésiterai pas à le dire…à quoi je pense qu’il faille attribuer la
prospérité singulière et la force croissante de ce people [les Américains], je répondrais
que c’est à la supériorité de ses femmes” (DA 2: 266). It is precisely the nature of this
37
superiority that is changing for American women. Now an actively engaged part of the
public sphere, the woman has diffused her domestic and moral superiority to
accommodate her additional work and social responsibilities.
This changing role of the American woman becomes distinctly clear when
understood in relation to contemporary changes in nuclear family structure in America.
According to his recent testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee
on the Budget, Ron Haskins reports that “Between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of 35
year old women living in married-couple families with children fell from about 78
percent to 50 percent while the percentage of women who were single and living with
children more than doubled from 9 percent to over 20 percent” (“Poverty and
Opportunity”). Detailing one part of broader changes in family life in America, such as
delayed and foregone childbirth, cohabitation, a bifurcated divorce rate, and one-person
households, these statistics indicate that the skyrocketing rate of single motherhood in
America is of particular interest as women’s conceptions of their roles in their families
and in society in general change. Unlike Tocqueville’s praiseworthy image of the
American woman who knows exactly what are her roles and responsibilities according to
social expectations of her as a mother and of her family, the single mother as a single
parent pieces together a joint parental, professional, and personal role that changes
according to her family’s day-to-day needs. Although the American woman Tocqueville
portrays possesses “une male raison et une énergie virile,” she also shares her reason and
energy with a husband (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 264).19 The American woman Tocqueville
considers to contribute most beneficially to the general public is married, and she and her
19
This gendered description Tocqueville offers of the American female necessitates in-depth
explanation, which I will provide in the subsequent chapter in the appropriate context.
38
husband together construct a household that reinforces the democratic social state. In
other words, the American woman’s unparalleled familial and social significance
continues to lie at the forefront of America’s 21st-century democratic social state, but in
circumstances that not only contradict those Tocqueville observed, but also undermine
them.
The liberal theory undergirding America’s democratic social state and the nuclear
family have converged, though in a way that proves mutually threatening rather than
mutually reinforcing. The rise of single mothers in contemporary America illustrates the
influence that the democratic social state’s individualistic ethic has on the nuclear family
and through the family on society in general. As several interviews I conducted with lowincome single mothers as well as other ethnographic studies of similarly situated women
reveal, the experiences of single mothers in low-income families reflect characteristics of
individualism as a sentiment or defaut de l’esprit, a defect of the mind, as Tocqueville
describes it.20 Furthermore, the expansions of certain social welfare programs, such as
free meals in public schools for children of low-income families, reflect the decline of the
male in the family and, more specifically, the evolving conception of parenthood in both
financially secure and insecure households. This trend correlates precisely with
Tocqueville’s description of soft despotism as “paternal” or even “paternalistic” in nature
20
As mentioned in this thesis’ Introduction, this chapter draws on interviews I conducted with five
low-income single mothers who either have benefited from or continue to benefit from resources at the Ada
Jenkins Center in Davidson, North Carolina. For privacy purposes, I have changed each woman’s first
name, which I indicated with this symbol (*) the first time I mention her name in this chapter. Furthermore,
the distinction I make in this chapter and in the subsequent one of single mothers who are “low-income”
requires specification. Highly correlated with educational differences between women, particularly whether
a woman has a four-year college degree, for the purposes of this thesis this term identifies individuals
according to the same income standards the federal government uses to identify low-income children in
need of free breakfast at school. With a household yearly income of $23,550 for a family of four defining
the poverty level for the period July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2014, any “low-income single mother” this
thesis describes will earn a yearly income that places her family teetering around this defined poverty level
such that she is neither homeless nor able to guarantee financial security for her family on a month-tomonth basis (“The School Breakfast Program”).
39
rather than tyrannical (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 385-386). The confluence of these three
progressions – that of the democratic social state to produce individualism, that of the
single mother’s emergence, and that of social welfare policies’ expansion – illustrates
that as the logic of individualism plays out in American society, it leads to a particular
type of soft despotism. It leads to a tutelary state with familial characteristics that
indirectly correlate with the dissolution of the conventional nuclear family.
Reflective of individualism’s progression, the isolation of women from their
greater communities and even from their own families before they become single mothers
is an essential part of the experiences of women who become single mothers. In their
ethnographic study of single mothers living in the poor neighborhoods of Philadelphia
and in Camden, New Jersey, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas draw attention to the
existence of what they refer to as “relational poverty,” a term scholars often use to
describe the lack of healthy interpersonal relationships that frequently exists in
impoverished communities (252).21 Both Edin and Kefalas recall that “[m]any mothers
tell us they cannot name one person they would consider a friend” (174).22 In
neighborhoods oftentimes crowded with people who share experiences of hardship,
young women lack the mutual trust to build genuine, durable, and personal relationships
21
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas note that the term “relational poverty” was first coined in Not
Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood by Elaine Bell Kaplan (1997) (252).
As the title of Kaplan’s book indicates, Kaplan originally used this term specifically in relation to AfricanAmerican communities. Although differences in race play a critical role in the general analysis of changes
in family structure, this thesis’ analysis intends to apply to all racial communities and, therefore, does not
draw explicit distinctions between the races of women interviewed or communities studied. In the context
of this thesis, the term “relational poverty” is being used to convey the general idea it represents rather than
the racial demographic from which it was originally derived.
22
When published in 2005, Edin and Kefalas’ in-depth study entitled Promises I Can Keep: Why
Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage was the first of its kind in its successful attempt “to make
sense of the biggest demographic shift in the last half century,” as Alex Kotlowitz commented on the study,
by drawing conclusions from interviews with the women themselves whose choices continue to this day to
baffle policy makers and academics. This study remains to date the only one of its kind in its sole reliance
on low-income single mothers themselves to explain in their own words why they put motherhood before
marriage, which makes its findings and interviews essential components of this thesis’ analysis.
40
with each other. Without these social bonds that transform communities of individuals
into networks of mutually supportive citizens, neighborhoods and society in general
dissolve as individuals live in increased emotional isolation from each other. One single
mother who frequents the Ada Jenkins Center, Lisa*, expressed this sentiment, though to
an even greater extreme, following a call she received from a friend in the middle of our
interview. “Everybody needs me for something, but as soon as I need somebody for
something, they ain’t got nothin’ to say,” Lisa explained (Lisa). Although Lisa finds
herself surrounded by friends, she lacks friendships. “I’m everybody’s mother, sister,
brother, dog, chauffeur, but if the situation is turned around, there’s nobody there for me”
– not even one of her five kids (Lisa). Although Lisa’s minimal income leaves her living
near the poverty line, the poverty she laments the most in her interview is that which
characterizes her relationships. Lisa, her friends, and even to a certain extent her family
members possess a certain indifference to each other until they need each other. These
dry and hollowed-out relationships are the precursors to a dry and hollowed-out social
state.23
Another single mother I interviewed expressed this same idea to me in a way that
illustrates the expansion of “relational poverty” beyond the bounds of the inner-city or
the stereotypically impoverished neighborhood. Unlike Lisa who was never married and
had five children by three different men, Susan* was married to her now ex-husband for
six years before having their first of two children. Susan explains that when she and her
23
The effect of individualism within the democratic social state could be thought of in terms of the
decline of America’s civil society in the social scientific sense of the term. Robert Putnam’s Bowling
Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) is perhaps the most comprehensive and
illuminating study of this possible decline. It is important to note, however, that this thesis does not argue
that American society is on a doomed path toward complete dissolution. Rather, this thesis draws forth this
threat American society faces to analyze changes in family structure in the context of principled tensions
within the democratic social state, tensions that also fuel “the collapse and revival of American
community.”
41
husband were married and even after they had children, “We made friends our family.
We shared holidays with them” because she and her husband did not live near either of
their families, a geographical expansion that Tocqueville identifies as common to
American families when children have no prospects of familial land inheritance (Susan;
Tocqueville, DA, 1: 113). Susan and her husband created together a life distinct from
their own original nuclear families and built for themselves a new community of
extended friends and family. Since Susan’s divorce, however, this community has
drastically changed for her. “I have found that [making friends family] so unbelievably
hard as a single mom,” Susan expressed with a sigh (Susan). “I don’t feel like the couples
with the children include us [she and her two sons] as much” as they did when she was
married (Susan). Although Susan does not believe that the married couples with kids are
“intentional” about excluding her from their social and friend groups, the dissolution of
her friend community has made her life “very lonely” (Susan). Both Susan and Lisa are
socially isolated and “renferm[ée] enfin tout entier dans la solitude de son propre cœur”
by no fault or intent of anyone in particular (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 127). The families with
whom Susan used to be friends are slowly retracting from society into a small unit that
consists only of similar families, and this small group will eventually shrink into the
individual families themselves. The more American society operates according to the
primacy of the individual, the more this individualistic orientation toward society
influences how families operate as well.
Because the democratic social state’s internal dynamics reflect those of the family
and vice-versa, over time America’s individualistic ethic trickles down into the family
such that single mothers’ own families often fail to provide emotional and communal
42
support. The family remains – it exists – but either emotional or physical distance
between family members undermines the family’s ability to provide such support. For
example, Lisa’s mother watches her two youngest children when she works or has other
commitments while they are not in school (Lisa). However, this situation is not one of
disinterested reciprocity. The grandmother requires her daughter to pay her for every
hour of babysitting, which only adds to the tension that already riddles the relationship
between the two women as a result of the grandmother’s drug use and neglect of her
daughter when she was growing up (Lisa). Even though Lisa lives surrounded by her five
kids, her mother, and one of her two sisters, her “social isolation” remains (Edin and
Kefalas 34). The only way she knows how “obliger ses semblables” – in this case her
family – “à lui prêter leur concours” in a time of need is by satisfying their “intérêt
individuel” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 138, 156). When persons become accustomed to
thinking of and taking care of only their individual selves, “l’intérêt bien-entendu”
becomes l’intérêt bien-payé (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 153-156).24 The more self-interest well
understood evolves into unqualified self-interest, the more the single mother lacks a
community of help and develops the sense of profound weakness and powerlessness that
Tocqueville identifies as both a precondition to and a byproduct of individualism’s
emergence. L’apathie générale, but not désintéressée, pervades the family as much as it
does the democratic social state in general.
For women suffering from relational poverty, their children are the primary means
through which they create for themselves the relationships of abiding commitment and
concern that they lack in their greater communities and families. Edin and Kefalas
24
Recall that self-interest well understood is one of the primary means through with Tocqueville
argues that Americans mediate the emergence of individualism. For an explanation of Tocqueville’s
“doctrine de l’intérêt bien entendu,” see Chapter 2, Footnote 11.
43
explicitly emphasize that many of the single mothers they interviewed believe they have
forged those missing social attachments through having children, regardless of whether
their pregnancies were planned or unplanned, because for these women their child or
children equates to “a self-made community of care” (174). Without much of any
prospective means of self-fulfillment, a low-income woman hopes that a child, a part of
her own self, will fill with a deep, unbreakable, human bond the void within her that
lacks genuine, trustworthy, and emotionally-fulfilling relationships. The majority of lowincome single mothers in Edin and Kefalas’ study refer to their emotional bonds with
their children not only as a promise, but also as the only promise that they know without
a doubt that they can keep (Edin and Kefalas 134). As the durability of interpersonal
relationships with friends and potential life-partners becomes less certain, the emotional
commitment a mother makes to her child counteracts the feelings of intense faiblesse and
impuissance that she experiences in the face of her communal and familial isolation, even
though Lisa’s experience demonstrates that a woman’s children may not reciprocate such
commitment. Having a child out-of-wedlock or in spite of the risk of divorce is the final
means by which low-income women ensure that they do not live adult lives devoid of
meaningful relationships – devoid of meaning itself.
Despite the sense of helplessness in isolation that they feel at times, low-income
single mothers possess the sense of sheer independence that Tocqueville also identifies as
a requisite characteristic of individualism.25 Hays, Edin, and Kefalas all report that the
25
Renowned American family scholar Andrew Cherlin offers a helpful analysis of this dual nature
of Tocqueville’s individualism by conceiving of the notion in terms of “utilitarian individualism” and
“expressive individualism” (The Marriage-Go-Round 9). While the former implies a “self-reliant actor, the
rugged individualist,” the latter focuses on “personal growth, getting in touch with one’s feelings, and
expressing your needs” (The Marriage-Go-Round 9). As this portion of this thesis shows, both strains of
individualism, as both Tocqueville and Cherlin distinguish them, appear in low-income single mothers’
experiences.
44
single mothers they have interviewed and studied exhibit a sense of “resilience” and
determination in spite of their oftentimes frustrating, overwhelming, and financially
unstable situations (Hays 114). As Edin and Kefalas recount of one of the women they
interviewed, “Yet despite the hardship involved, and perhaps because of it, Jen is fiercely
proud of what she’s been able to accomplish – especially since she’s done it largely on
her own” (195). Jen emphatically conveys her indubitable ability to provide for herself
and for her son without almost any additional help when she declares, “I don’t depend on
nobody. I might live with my dad and them, but I don’t depend on them, you know.
Everything Colin [her son] has, I bought. Everything he needs, I bought, you know?”
(Edin and Kefalas 195). Jen transforms her social isolation into steely determination and
self-reliance. Even though she benefits from assistance from friends and family, such as
receiving from them something as essential as a place to live, as a single mother Jen sees
only herself and her children as a “petite société” that operates “à son usage” and
increasingly abandoned from “la grande société” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). In
contradiction to the American “art de s’unir” or to associate that Tocqueville
recommends as the primary antidote to individualism, Jen and many other single mothers
act as though they “…ne doivent rien à personne [et] [elles] n’attendent pour ainsi dire
rien de personne; [elles] s’habituent à se considérer toujours isolément, [elles] se figurent
volontiers que leur destinée tout entière est entre leurs mains” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 127,
137). Feeling at once completely powerless to improve or strengthen her situation and in
complete control of her situation, the single mother finds herself caught in the throes of
her own paralyzing freedom.
45
Despite the paradoxically disempowering and empowering effects of the
individual liberty that every American naturally possesses, this same liberty is for single
mothers their only guaranteed means of achieving a sense of self-fulfillment. Susan’s
adult life has been made significantly more challenging emotionally and financially by
her decision not to complete her college education before marrying and having children.
Having never retained more than steady part-time jobs or full-time but temporary jobs,
Susan occasionally finds herself in need of help paying monthly rent or utility bills
(Susan). However, she pridefully defends her past choices because her children in
particular and even her dissolved marriage have provided her with a life she considers
more meaningful than a financially-secure one devoted entirely to completing her
education and a career. “My life was, I always felt, easier early on because I had met
someone I loved,” Susan asserts. “There was a security there,” an emotional one in
addition to a financial one, that her friend who finished her four-year degree before
marrying did not have and that Susan claims made her friend’s life harder to maintain
alone (Susan). Particularly among low-income women with very few professional
opportunities for personal development, “there is no more important job and no greater
accomplishment” and no greater source of meaning for their lives than motherhood,
which inherently connotes a sense of “social personhood” and self-worth (Edin and
Kefalas 167, 201). Unlike in an aristocracy, in which “social personhood” derives from
one’s family, in America’s fragmented social state an individual’s sense of social value
derives primarily from within oneself.26 The experiences of these single women as
mothers demonstrate that the meaning individual Americans create for themselves
26
See Edin and Kefalas 200-201 for their argument that approximately 60 years ago in America
women’s “social personhood” derived from marriage.
46
derives from their enactment of their individual liberty in their daily lives, even if the
enactment of one’s individual liberty threatens his or her financial security and class
status.
According to Tocqueville, when individual liberty becomes a means to achieving
one’s own ends rather than an end in itself, an individualist way of thinking about oneself
and one’s role in society in general emerges. This mindset of indifference to others in
isolation from others does not entail complete ambivalence to everyone’s well-being, but
rather a much more nuanced sentiment that redirects American individuals’ concern for
public welfare away from one’s immediate community and toward either oneself or the
public in general. As described above, even single mothers’ discussion of motherhood, a
deeply interpersonal relationship that cannot exist without at least two people, operates in
terms of their individual self-fulfillment, in terms of their individual selves, rather than in
terms of their families’ social function. In Edin and Kefalas’ study, one single mother
named Dominique implies that both motherhood and marriage are of second and third
priority, respectively, when she says, “Maybe one day I would get married, but I don’t
think about it” or the potential benefits it could afford her and her children “right now. I
wanna do what I need to do for me…. Get my associate’s [degree]!” (193). Without any
sense of egotism or self-involvement, her mindset is I; her mindset is me. Nothing but her
own personal development is the “cornerstone” on which she plans to build her future
and her children’s futures. Even education is a means to this end (Hymowitz et al., Knot
Yet, 4). Everything else, marriage especially, is simply a “capstone” to the life she is
working to establish for herself and her children (Hymowitz et al., Knot Yet, 4). Just as
Tocqueville describes of individualism, single motherhood “prend sa source dans les
47
défauts de l’esprit” – in the “defects of the mind” or the way in which one thinks of
oneself in relation even to one’s own children – more than in the egotistical or selfish
“vices du cœur” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125; Tocqueville, DA translation, 482).
This maladie de l’esprit weakens one familial relationship in particular: the
relationship between a child’s parents, the man and the woman whose coupling forms the
nucleus around which they create their family (Coutant 235). A general decline in the
quality and stability of this relationship has occurred as the individualist mentality has
progressed. Particularly among “women living in disadvantaged social contexts,” but also
among women at the opposite end of the social spectrum whose financial earnings
substantiate their independence, “Now, marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment, it is
something poor women” and financially-stable women “do for themselves” to complete
their happiness (Edin and Kefalas 136). Although this personal expectation for a
relationship is by no means unrealistic (no humane person would expect her to remain in
a relationship that causes her severe emotional detriment), rather than thinking about the
mutual emotional and economic benefits for themselves and their children that could
result from marriage, many men and women think of the long-term emotional and
economic costs of divorce for themselves. As Lisa plainly stated to me, “If I’m gonna be
with somebody, I’m gonna be happy” (Lisa). Without an indubitable promise,
commitment, or guarantee of a lasting and personally fulfilling relationship, for women
with limited personal and professional prospects, marriage is more of a hassle than they
believe it is worth. As the “ideal” of marriage for these women becomes “a luxury good,”
the ideal, fulfilled self becomes easier to envision in the absence of what becomes for
them in reality a binding, self-compromising, burdensome relationship (Mary; Edin and
48
Kefalas 135; Furstenberg 294). Even though marriage and family are still mœurs for most
Americans, Americans respect each other’s individual autonomy, agency, and dignity
such that they will never force persons to marry simply for the benefit of society – and
rightfully so. At the same time, however, as the mœur of interpersonal relationships
evolves to accommodate and to reflect the primacy that the democratic social state gives
to the individual and individual liberty, forming a family around a stable, committed
marriage becomes an imperiled process.
The dissolution of this relationship that forms the foundation of the nuclear family
is of particular interest in the context of the democratic social state’s progression because
this dissolution has a particularly detrimental ripple effect deep within the nuclear family
and, therefore, within the democratic social state as well. As the couple relationship
weakens, loosens, dries up, and ultimately dissolves, the father more often than the
mother dissolves from family life.27 When parents are unmarried, whether as a result of
divorce or out-of-wedlock birth, the general lack of fathers’ involvement in their
children’s lives is not new news. In 2012, 4% of children lived with only their biological
fathers while 24% lived only with their mothers (“Family Structure and Children’s Living
Arrangements”). Even in 1929 long before anyone seriously considered the possibility of
family dissolution and reformation as a norm, moral philosopher Bertrand Russell
predicted “the decay of fatherhood as an important social institution” as a “new [sexual]
morality” emerged, one that was both consistent with and a product of “democratic
27
The decline of the father, of “marriageable men,” and of men in families among all socioeconomic classes as contributing members of society and for families is of particular concern to Kay S.
Hymowitz, who has written on this subject numerous times. See Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has
Turned Men Into Boys (2012), Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a PostMarital Age (2006), and her most recently published op-ed in The New York Times titled “How SingleMotherhood Hurts Kids” in which she draws attention to the correlation between society’s “fatalism toward
men” and “entrenched” gender and socio-economic “inequality.”
49
theory” and “the emancipation of women” (78, 80, 89). Like all familial relationships,
fatherhood and parenthood in general cannot escape the dissolvent forces of liberty and
equality. As one recent study of changes in fatherhood finds, “Low-income men’s
relationships with the mothers of their children directly shape how they are involved with
their children,” and precisely because the couple’s relationship shrivels in the light of
individualism’s logic, the relationship between a father and his children threatens to do so
as well (Roy and Cabrera 303).
A recent study (published in 2013) of low-income single fathers living in urban
neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey provides revealing insight into
this trend in low-income fatherhood and, therefore, the dissolution of the family among
low-income individuals.28 This study finds that unmarried fathers increasingly define
their roles as fathers purely based on their relationships with their children. For these
men, simply “being there” for their children defines being a “good father” (Edin and
Nelson 142, 166). In the eyes of these men struggling to secure their financial and
familial situations, “Fatherhood is a relationship, not merely fulfilling the obligation to
bring home the bacon or dispense discipline and wisdom from a distant authoritarian
pedestal” (Edin and Nelson 208). As one father Edin and Nelson interviewed explained,
“A good father is not a person that gives the child everything they want. I mean, don’t get
me wrong, it feels good, and it’s a good thing to get a child a bicycle, it feels good to put
your kid through college. But at the same time, the good father is somebody like your
28
Sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson published their several-year-long
ethnographic study of single fathers in Camden, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 2013 as the
book Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City. The most recent and comprehensive study of
low-income single fathers to date, this book draws on Edin’s previous work with Maria Kefalas of lowincome single mothers in the same inner-city neighborhoods of Philadelphia to provide a comprehensive
understanding of increased out-of-wedlock births in financially disadvantaged communities.
50
friend” (142). No longer the traditional “provider, disciplinarian, and moral guide,” this
“new model” of the good father “projects an image of paternal warmth and implies a
more open and egalitarian relationship” (Edin and Nelson 145). This “new model,” new
practice, new mœur of fatherhood embodies in full form the sentimental, Tocquevillian,
democratic family built on the fluctuating douceur of natural affiliations. That “Ward
Cleaver norm…has been replaced by,” not merely “complemented” by, “a ‘doing the
best I can’ ethos of financial provision,” even when the possibility of paying for (or at
minimum trying to save for) his child’s future college education goes by the wayside
[emphasis added] (Edin and Nelson 221-222).
Most of these single fathers probably do not have the educational or personal
backgrounds necessary to build careers or at least to hold down stable jobs whose
resulting income with provide for his children and their expensive educational futures,
and this reality undeniably contributes to their fatherly emphasis on “being there” – that
necessary parental role that they can more successfully fulfill. The fact remains, however,
that someone has to provide an income at minimum for their children. According to Edin
and Nelson, most low-income fathers assert that “It is their children’s mothers who are
the chief breadwinners” (Edin and Nelson 221). Such is the case for four of the five
women I interviewed. Though all of them can or do receive child support, all but one of
them works at least part-time if not full-time to provide their families with a primary
source of income. Critically, however, none of the single mothers in Edin and Kefalas’
earlier study define motherhood as being a breadwinner. In fact, the low-income single
mothers they interviewed define motherhood the same way the single fathers define
fatherhood: as “being there.” For one of the single mothers Edin and Kefalas interviewed,
51
to be a “good” mother “You don’t have to be a super mom, just be there for them…. You
don’t have to have fancy this or a fancy that, just togetherness with your children” (Edin
and Kefalas 141). Again, this redefinition of low-income unmarried parents’ normative
understanding of parenthood is deeply paradoxical. Both the father and the mother
emphasize their individual personal relationships with their children as a result of the
weakening relationship between each other, other family members, and other people in
their immediate communities. Although sociological and psychological studies reveal
time and again that parents’ presence and involvement in their children’s lives are
essential to children’s development, a fine line exists between simply being involved,
being accessible, being present, and being loving to the best of one’s ability, and doing all
of these things with an equal effort to provide for one’s children the material things that
they do in fact need – things such as food, for example.
In addition to reflecting the weakening of the nuclear family as a civic association
under the force of individualism, low-income fathers’ and mothers’ definition of
parenthood as “being there” also emphasizes individual fulfillment to the extent that it
distorts the notion of self-interest well understood. “Being there” as a parent is the
triumph of a certain part of parental duty – to devote oneself to one’s child and to support
and love the child unconditionally. Indeed, material objects and money can never
compensate for a parent’s absence. On the other hand, however, “being there” as a parent
inherently satisfies parents’ innate desires to feel good about themselves as parents, to
feel like they are giving of themselves for their children’s well-being. The notion of
simply “being there” flatters the parent and serves a parent’s self-interest when that
parent struggles to and oftentimes fails to fulfill other conventional parental
52
responsibilities such as earning enough money to buy food for his or her family. In fact,
Edin and Nelson find that for low-income single fathers, “their assessments of how good
of a father they are…become less important to them than whether they are satisfying their
fathering desire” (178). The “sentiment of paternity” or maternity overpowers the
necessity of parental responsibility as “being there” becomes synonymous with the
fulfillment of parental responsibility (Russell 17-18). While “being there” is a necessary
component of parenthood and vital to children’s emotional development and well-being,
prioritizing the fulfillment of the parent’s sense of self-worth above every other parental
role, including financial provision, threatens to upend the mœur of parenthood. The
meaning of parenthood will almost inevitably change over time. This redefinition proves
problematic, however, when it refounds on individual interests an inherently social role
built on interdependent interests.
In fact, according to Tocqueville’s theory, this transformation of the mœur of
parenthood threatens to undermine the democratic social state. Without familial
associations and self-interest well understood to mitigate individualism’s emergence,
according to Tocqueville’s theory the prospect of a large administrative state looms on
the democratic social state’s horizon. In his explanation of the importance of voluntary
associations, Tocqueville explicitly states his understanding of the individual’s social role
in relation to the state’s as a zero-sum game when he says, “[Les Américains] prétendent
qu’à mesure que les citoyens deviennent plus faibles et plus incapables” to provide for
themselves and to guarantee their own happiness, “il faut rendre le gouvernement plus
habile et plus actif, afin que la société puisse exécuter ce que les individus ne peuvent
plus faire” for themselves or for others (DA 2: 139). When unmarried mothers and fathers
53
become weak in their ability to provide the financial resources for their children that
normally come standard with middle-class families with married parents, a separate entity
must assume this responsibility. Despite all the civic associations for which he advocates
and that he observes, for Tocqueville this entity is ultimately only the State, but the State
in a particular form: l’état tutélaire – the State that tutors, that teaches, that instructs, that
corrects, and that provides…just like a parent.
The language Tocqueville uses to describe the tutelary state’s characteristics
reveals that his concern for the emergence of such a form of government derives
specifically from the decline of the father’s conventional familial role.29 Following the
drying out of individuals’ relationships with each other which makes the existence of the
nuclear family itself conditional and speculative,30 all individuals and children in
particular rely on “un pouvoir immense et tutélaire” that emerges from this mass of
isolated individuals with the purpose only “d’assurer leur [the people’s] jouissance et de
veiller sur leur sort” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 127, 325). As an entity “absolu, détaillé,
régulier, prévoyant et doux,” this centralized government “ressemblerait à la puissance
paternelle” if only it had as its final responsibility “de preparer les hommes à l’âge viril”
[emphasis added] (DA 2: 385). But this welfare-oriented state has no need for such an
29
A centralized administrative government paternalistic in nature is not a new revelation in
Tocqueville’s description of soft despotism. The French and English absolute monarchies particularly of
the 17th and 18th Centuries, for example, demonstrated similar characteristics in their roles as both the
religious and political authority. Precisely because the English monarchy intruded into one’s personal life
particularly on religious grounds, John Locke devoted a significant portion of his Second Treatise of Civil
Government to differentiate between political and paternal power. What became for liberal political thought
one of the primary foundational texts (if not the foundational text), Locke’s Second Treatise thus
established for liberal representative democracy the separation of public and private life. For Tocqueville,
the emergence of a paternal form of democratic rule is, therefore, of serious concern because it signifies a
reversion to an un-free form of political rule that undermines not only the crux of liberal democracy, but
also the humanity of persons living in a liberal democracy (their humanity being defined by their
possession of genuine individual freedom and, therefore, human dignity).
30
Following his re-establishment of individualism while introducing soft despotism, Tocqueville
uses the conditional “if” to describe the nuclear family when he says, “s’il lui reste encore une famille, on
peut dire du moins qu’il n’a plus de patrie” (DA 2: 385).
54
additional responsibility because “il ne cherche, au contraire, qu’à les [les hommes] fixer
irrévocablement dans l’enfance” (DA 2: 385).31 Ensuring the people’s “bonheur,” “leur
sécurité,” “leurs besoins,” “leurs plaisirs” and “leurs principales affaires” like a father
normally does, the tutelary state “se charge” with the responsibilities capable adults have
for themselves and that all parents have for their children in some form (DA 2: 385). The
soft despot becomes the constant resource-providing, happiness-promising father that
many children of unmarried low-income parents oftentimes do not have on a consistent
basis. To extend a somewhat callous colloquialism, the administrative welfare state that
some people refer to as a “Hubby State” is at its core a “Daddy State” (Gavora).
This seesaw dynamic between the decline of the family, the father in particular,
and the growth of the State becomes painfully apparent in the context of relatively recent
policy additions to several public school districts across America.32 The Charlotte
Observer reported last September that the Boston Public School system had “joined a
program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that has spread to 10 states and the
District of Columbia that offers students two free meals every school day, whether or not
their families can afford them” (Murphy). This news came only three months after the
Charlotte Observer reported that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system planned to
use a “federal subsidy program for low-income students” to “offer free breakfast to all”
31
Tocqueville’s tutelary state uncannily resembles the emergence of a “welfare state” or, again,
what some English call a “nanny state.” Although this resemblance is of interest to this thesis, it is not the
object of this thesis’ analysis. Rather, this thesis’ analysis shows how the growth of soft despotism reflects
the decline of the nuclear family along a class line. For an explication of Tocqueville’s tutelary state in its
relation to a welfare state, see “Liberalism and Big Government: Tocqueville’s Analysis” in Tyranny and
liberty: big government and the individual in Tocqueville’s science of politics by Harvey Mansfield and
Delba Winthrop (1999): 1-32.
32
Although an in-depth theoretical analysis of American social welfare programs in general is
beyond this project’s purview, Elizabeth Ben-Ishai’s article “The New Paternalism: An Analysis of Power,
State Intervention, and Autonomy” (2012) offers a different but insightful discussion of American social
welfare programs following the 1996 welfare reform in terms of similar notions of paternalism and liberty.
55
of the school district’s students “regardless of family income” (Helms “CMS plans free
breakfast”). The correlation between “hunger pangs,” “classroom misbehavior,” and poor
academic performance is not a source of debate (Murphy). Children’s need for proper
nutrition and some parents’ financial inability to provide their children with filling,
healthy breakfasts, lunches, or the money to buy them at school are basic realities.
The concerning nature of these programs in a Tocquevillian sense, however, is the
reaction of parents to them and the message they send to parents about parenthood.
Without hesitation, “Joshua Rivers, whose son is a second-grader” in the Boston Public
School system, reacted to the program’s announcement by saying that the program not
only provides his son with a full stomach, but also provides “one less weight and one less
burden for parents” (Murphy). Conventionally, a parent’s ability to feed his or her child
results from the father’s income or the father’s and mother’s dual incomes. Nowadays,
since neither the father nor the mother in low-income families consciously considers
being the “breadwinner” his or her primary parental role, as previously explained, almost
no one in the family willingly attributes to him or herself the responsibility of earning an
income that, quite literally, wins the family bread. When factors external to the nuclear
family, such as jobs, incomes, and cost of living, enter into the discussion, the “burden”
of breadwinning obviously becomes more complex than the relational dynamics within a
nuclear family. Nevertheless, when parents decouple feeding their children from being a
parent to the extent that parents now “require the intervention of the State to secure their
children from disaster” – from hunger that prevents them from learning – the critical
commitment of parenthood becomes a self-serving habit of convenience (Russell 204). If
a parent can’t be bothered to feed his or her child, particularly when he or she can even
56
with a government social service such as food stamps, then the State at any level (federal,
state, or local) becomes more than a “Nanny State.” It becomes the child’s mother and
father altogether.
This nuanced dynamic becomes starkly apparent as the tutelary state not only
provides free school meals for all children, but also becomes the “schoolmaster” for all
parents, including financially secure ones (Tocqueville, DA translation, 662). One
Charlotte-Mecklenberg School Board member stated in support of the expansion of the
free school breakfast program, “A hungry child may come from a million-dollar home on
the lake whose mom didn’t have time to fix breakfast” (Helms “CMS free breakfast
participation”). Although one or both parents in a financially stable family oftentimes
commit themselves to the conventional breadwinner role or, at minimum, fulfill it, by
reinforcing all parents’ inevitable weaknesses and imperfections, the tutelary state gently
coerces them to stop even trying to be the perfect parent – the “breadwinner” and the
“being there” parent. The tutelary state institutionalizes parenthood for all people as
“being there,” even if the parent is not “there” even long enough to give his or her child a
banana and a piece of bread to eat in the car or on the bus. All parents, therefore, begin to
outsource some of their most fundamental responsibilities to the State, and in doing so
they neglect what parents and American society used to consider as parents’ obligation,
their moral duty, to their children and to American society as responsible citizens. Any
semblance of mutually devoted “family feeling” goes right out the door with the hungry
children who then attribute their care to their school or the paternal State rather than to
their parents (Russell 237). The family living in the million-dollar home on the lake may
structurally reflect the conventional “Ward and June Cleaver” homes of the world, and a
57
good portion of the American population arguably lives in relatively upwardly mobile
households for which the State’s recent expansion of public school breakfasts is a fairly
distant concept. However, when mœurs, such as the mœur of parenthood, change, they
change for the majority, meaning that, as Tocqueville’s description of soft despotism
implies, the paternal State eventually creeps its way into those structurally-sound homes
as well.
The expansion of the tutelary state along a class line and its potential to expand
beyond a class line gets to the heart of where these demographic and political trends
converge. The income gap that most scholars identify as the source of the paternal
tutelary state’s growth is rooted in an educational gap.33 Education being the primary
means to better oneself and to achieve one’s personal and professional goals, this
educational and, therefore, income and class-based demographic trend thus reflects what
both of Edin’s studies in conjunction with Kefalas and Nelson conclude. The divergence
of family structure along a class-line reflects how each individual’s end goal of selffulfillment – a direct manifestation of persons acting on their individual liberty – plays
out in relation to the family. For financially-stable individuals, the family begins after
they have had a chance to attain all of the individual fulfillment they seek, hence the
increasingly delayed marriage age among college graduates. For low-income individuals
whose lack of education does not afford them many prospects of individual fulfillment in
the “working world,” so to speak, the family and children in particular are that means of
33
As a 2013 study conducted by The National Marriage Project reveals, “‘Middle American’
women – that is, moderately educated women with a high-school degree and perhaps a year or two of
college,” a demographic group that constitutes “more than half of the young women in the United States” –
are as a whole having “their first child more than two years” before marrying “to the point where 58
percent of their first births are out of wedlock” (7-8). Their college-educated counterparts, on the other
hand, still as a whole have their first child after marrying. For the complete study, see Knot Yet under
Hymowitz.
58
fulfillment. For both social sectors, the goal is the self, creating meaning and purpose for
one’s life, and ultimately individual happiness – indeed, the end goal of liberal
democratic society. The key for all American individuals, even those living in milliondollar homes on the lake, is the extent to which they allow their end of self-fulfillment,
their individual liberty, to overpower the cultivation of a family that naturally forces
individuals to associate with each other and to practice self-interest well understood – to
overpower that which naturally mediates against individuals’ unintentional perversion of
their liberty in a way that leads to individualism. The extent to which anyone becomes
consciously or subconsciously dependent on a paternalistic government correlates
directly with the extent to which individuals possess the maladie de l’esprit, the sickly
normative disposition that supplants the family with the self, that Tocqueville so ardently
cautions against.
The fact of the matter is that no one in America (or anywhere really) lives in a
cone of isolation that gives them complete liberty to pursue limitlessly their selfinterested ends. However, the way in which individuals conceive of liberal democracy in
America naturally produces a tendency for individuals to operate over time with
disinterested emotional and physical distance between each other. As a result of
American society’s general valorization of the individual over the communal, lowincome individuals are increasingly emotionally unable to make life-long and legal
commitments to each other, such as marriage, even though they still consider such a
commitment the “ideal” situation (Mary; Edin and Kefalas 136-137). This drastic change
in the nuclear family’s structure, specifically the decline of both the father’s income and
daily participation within the family, naturally necessitates a change in parental functions
59
and roles and, therefore, in the normative and habitual practice of parenthood such that
parenthood as a mœur changes in meaning. Only a paternal State, according to
Tocqueville, can fill any gaps in family life this change produces. But for Tocqueville, a
natural impetus even more profound and more powerful than liberal democracy’s
valorization of the individual is taking place. The primacy of the individual is merely a
manifestation of Americans’ egalitarian disposition. For society values each individual
only when each individual is of equal social and political worth. As the subsequent
chapter reveals, the dissolution of the conventional nuclear family and the emergence of a
tutelary state occur ultimately in an effort to achieve precisely that for which all
Americans most ardently long: equality of conditions.
60
Chapter 4
Craving Equality of Conditions
Although the rise of single mothers among low-income women and the expansion
of social welfare policies paternalistic in nature reflect characteristics of individualism
and its emergence in the democratic social state, recall that individualism is not a
principle of liberal democracy in America. Rather, individualism progresses with the
development of the democratic social state’s undergirding current: the tension-ridden
interplay between the principles of liberty and equality. Equality of conditions, not
individual liberty, is “le fait générateur” of America’s democratic social state
(Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 57). At liberty’s expense, equality of conditions and
Americans’ “passion ardente, insatiable, éternelle, invincible” for it drive “la marche de
la société” toward an end social state as democratic, as egalitarian, as possible
(Tocqueville, Introduction, 1: 57; Tocqueville, DA, 2: 123). As liberal democrats,
Americans believe that all persons naturally possess equal liberty, and freedom
constitutes the state of being that all Americans strive to maintain. What Tocqueville
observed and articulates, however, is that in Americans’ practice of liberal democracy,
equality supersedes liberty. Equality is the principle, the force, behind any political or
social marche in the democratic social state.
In fact, Tocqueville goes to great lengths to show that while individualism derives
in part from individual liberty, the ultimate driving force behind individualism is equality
of conditions. Although the equality democratic persons seek is “in liberty,” that is,
equally free from “the jurisdiction” or authority “of another,” Tocqueville clearly states
that “L’individualisme est d’origine démocratique” – of an origin in equality rather than
liberty (Hebert 4; Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). Indeed, individualism’s key characteristics
61
manifest democratic persons’ inherent proclivity to equality. Democratic persons believe
that they can “se suffire à eux-mêmes” and, therefore, are indifferent to their fellow
citizens for no one is “ni..assez riches ni assez puissants pour exercer une grande
influence sur le sort de leurs semblables” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 127). Relative equals in
terms of wealth and social or class status, Americans as democrats are not born indebted
to or dependent on anyone. “[N]és égaux,” they have no predetermined social need for
each other (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 130). That is why Tocqueville conveys the relationship
between individualism and equality of conditions as a direct and dynamic one such that
individualism “menace de se developer à mesure que les conditions s’égalisent”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 125). The more individuals isolate themselves from each other, the
more their behavior reflects their deep desire to live as the equals they consider
themselves to be. Consequently, the qualities of individualism becoming evermore
present signals the progression of Americans’ passion for equality of conditions.
Following this logic, if we are to understand the rise of single mothers along a
class line and paternalistic welfare policies that transcend this class line in terms of
America’s democratic social state, then these social and political trends demonstrate the
progression not only of individualism, soft despotism, or even Americans’ sober love of
liberty, but most fundamentally Americans’ “passion ardente, insatiable, éternelle,
invincible” for equality (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 123). These social and political trends are
products of Americans living out their passion for equality of conditions. As illustrated
by the rise of low-income single motherhood and expanding school meal and federal food
assistance programs, each of these trends reflects particular features of how Tocqueville
describes this progression of equality. First, the rise of the single mother as a legitimate
62
and socially acceptable family form manifests Americans’ passion for equality of
conditions in terms of sexual equality. Even though men and women constitute for
Tocqueville the most foundational form of inequality and difference, Americans’ passion
for equality naturally leads them to work towards the elimination of differences between
the sexes, primarily in social terms. Second, the expansion of public schools’ breakfast
programs illustrates the emergence of uniform legislation as a product of Americans’
compassion for their fellow citizens – a deeply democratic compassion that, according to
Tocqueville, replaces the devotion of citizens to each other that exists in aristocratic
societies (DA 2: 208). Thus, the democratic social state’s defining characteristic and the
American people’s greatest passion, equality of conditions exemplifies at once the
fruition of liberal political theory and its staunchest threat as it threatens to break apart
that which is liberal democracy in practice – as it threatens to break apart the democratic
social state.
Because Tocqueville devotes extensive analysis to the topic of sexual equality in
America, a preliminary explication of his understanding of this topic proves necessary.
For Tocqueville, sexual equality is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental forms
that Americans’ belief in and practice of equality can take. Having studied “comment la
démocratie détruisait ou modifiait les diverses inégalités que la société fait naître,”
Tocqueville asserts three different times that “cette grande inégalité de l’homme et de la
femme” has “ses fondements éternels dans la nature” rather than in society, culture, or
the law [emphasis added] (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 263).34 As people endeavor “d’égaler ainsi
34
Before delving fully into Tocqueville’s discussion of sexual equality, it is important to
recognize in full the controversial nature of his observations and claims, particularly when discussed in
21st-century America. His whole notion of sexual equality in light of or in spite of sexual differences
remains for many people, not just feminists, an unrealized notion of equality, though to feminists in
63
un sexe à l’autre,” Tocqueville believes that they instead make from two distinct and
valuable types of beings, which are “des œuvres de la nature,” a “mélange grossier” that
“dégrade tous les deux” (DA 2: 263). Because, according to Tocqueville, men and women
are inherently different human beings, made by nature to have fundamentally different
internal and external compositions that are also by nature complementary, to deny the
necessary distinctiveness of either sex is to degrade the social necessity and value of both
sexes. “[L]a nature avait établi” for Tocqueville the “grande variété entre la constitution
physique et morale de l’homme et celle de la femme” such that any effort to blur or erase
these sexual differences disfigure men by making them “faibles” and women by making
them “déshonnêtes” (DA 2: 263). These profound differences create an immense social
inequality between men and women, though the natural complementarity that men and
women possess as a result of these differences makes sexual differences socially useful as
well as naturally justified.
At the time of Tocqueville’s voyage, rather than negating or denying men and
women’s different moral and physical constitutions, Americans embraced them as an
effective means of organizing the nuclear family and, therefore, society in general.
Americans thought that the end goal of nature in creating “une si grande variété” between
men and women was to give “à leurs différentes facultés un emploi divers” according to
“le grand principe d’économie politique” of the time, the division of labor, “afin que le
grand travail social fût mieux fait” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 263-264). With women
occupying the “cercle paisible des occupations domestiques” and men devoting
particular Tocqueville’s analysis is a non-starter and essentially an example of the need for feminism in the
first place. For a discussion of the limits of Tocqueville’s argument about sexual equality in a liberal
democracy, see Brabant (1995). The value of Tocqueville’s notion of sexual equality, however, is the
insight it provides into the principle of equality as practiced in America, particularly when other
understandings of (sexual) equality oppose that which Tocqueville presents.
64
themselves to “une carrière politique,” “une profession,” or farming, Americans believed
they could progress more efficiently as a society while maximizing men and women’s
diverse and natural skill-sets (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 259). Endowed with the moral
“supériorité” that leads Tocqueville to attribute to them “la prospérité singulière et la
force croissante” of the American people, American women use their character to instill
in their children mœurs and to maintain a self-sufficient and industrious home-life
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 266).35 Similarly a reflection of their own particular moral and
physical attributes, American men apply their physical strength and intellectual acuity to
the public sphere as they cultivate from outside the home a “calculating” and “cool” but
also firm society.36 Practicing a “‘different but equal’ regime of the sexes,” or a version
of the contemporary term “separate spheres,” American men and women willingly devote
themselves to the social work that best suits their natures whose complementary traits
benefit society (Morton 312).37 As Tocqueville emphasized with poignancy in the context
of this thesis, “Il n’y a pas de familles si pauvres qui fassent exception à cette règle”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 264).
Americans’ recognition and acceptance of sexual difference and sexual
complementarity leads Tocqueville to praise the distinctive social roles of men and
women in America as a manifestation of – indeed, as a triumph of – equality. Although
American men and women possess completely different moral and physical constitutions,
they achieve a certain equality of social conditions in the eyes of society regardless of the
35
Refer to Chapter 2 of this thesis for an explanation of mœurs, their significance in American
society, and, therefore, the significance of women in American society as the persons who teach the mores.
Mathie (2001) and Winthrop (1986) are also excellent sources on Tocqueville’s discussion of American
women in Democracy in America.
36
For an analysis of Tocqueville’s description of the American male, see Wolfson (1996).
37
For an in-depth analysis of how, according to Tocqueville, the nuclear family “supports the
practice of democracy, and why a ‘different but equal’ regime of the sexes is essential to that function,” see
Morton (Morton 312).
65
relatively unequal social status of their sexual conditions. The two sexes follow “des
lignes d’action nettement séparées,” but at the same time society in general “a voulu que
tous deux marchassent d’un pas égal, mais dans des chemins toujours différents”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 264). Tocqueville expands this idea of sexually different but socially
equal when he says, “les Américains ne croient pas que l’homme et la femme aient le
devoir ni le droit de faire les mêmes choses, mais ils montrent une même estime pour le
role de chacun d’eux” (DA 2: 266). A reflection of his deeply nuanced sense of American
society, Tocqueville distinguishes between sexual inferiority and social equality.
Although Americans, at the time of Tocqueville’s writing, consider women the inferior
sex with not only different duties, but also different and fewer rights than men, American
men and American society in general esteem and respect women, knowing nothing “plus
précieux que l’honneur de la femme, et rien de si respectable que son indépendance” (DA
2: 266). Americans consider men and women “comme des êtres dont la valeur,” their
social worth and meaning as individual human beings, “est égale, quoique la destine
diffère” (DA 2: 266).
At the same time, however, Tocqueville senses the potential for Americans to
challenge their enlightened understanding of sexual equality by mistaking sexual equality
for sexual sameness. Expanding to sexual equality his discussion of people’s tendency to
conflate equality and sameness, Tocqueville comments that though not yet in America,
“Il y a des gens en Europe qui, confondant les attribus divers des sexes, prétendent faire
de l’homme et de la femme des êtres, non seulement égaux, mais semblables”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 263). As Tocqueville’s notion of semblables illustrates, democratic
equality possesses a “creative power” to mistake sameness for equality when, in reality,
66
people are not the same in every way, shape, and form, and, therefore, are unequal in
many ways as well (Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short, 49). Although physical
differences distinguish men and women, in consideration of them as equal human beings,
people understandably consider them interchangeable. This notion of “different but
equal,” so to speak, seems inherently contradictory, particularly when Tocqueville uses
explicitly gendered male language to describe American women. Even though they
“conservent en général une apparence très délicate, et restent toujours femmes par les
manières,” American women “font souvent voir une mâle raison et une énergie toute
virile” to the extent that “elles se montrent hommes quelquefois par l’esprit et le cœur”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 264). In the eyes of the American people, women’s possession of
male dispositions, sensibilities, and hearts render the two sexes the same and, therefore,
equals despite their physical differences. American women’s domesticity in no way
differentiates them from men in a demeaning way. If anything, for Tocqueville, it affords
them a moral strength that equals if not surpasses men’s physical strength, giving
credence to Americans’ fervent belief in sexual sameness and sexual equality.
This idea of sameness is the lynchpin for achieving equality of conditions in
relation to the sexes, particularly in the context of 21st-century America. If men and
women are the same more than they are different, then their social roles – their social
conditions – are interchangeable. Consequently, men and women’s conventionally
sexually distinct roles or, at minimum, sexually informed roles within the family and
within society prove unfounded. Following this logic of equality, “new understandings of
women’s nature and role” and “new understandings of sexuality more generally” on the
basis of equality rooted in sameness rather than difference have led naturally to
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“mutating” family structures (Harrington 81). “Most women no longer accept the idea
that fixed family forms should dictate and limit their place in the society” because the
liberal society’s “promise of equality” fuels their passion “to choose and shape their
places as individuals” (Harrington 81). Created as equals, no man is a better person than
any woman. Derivative of the individual’s primacy in liberal society rather than the
primacy of a particular sex, to challenge women’s capabilities, such as the ability to work
outside of the home while raising a family, on the basis of sexual difference frustrates
women’s passion for social equality at the same time as it appears to undercut one of the
foundational tenets of America’s liberal democracy. Hence the liberal acceptance of and,
arguably, validation or even valorization of single motherhood. Single motherhood
challenges the conventional nuclear family structure on the basis of egalitarian sameness.
For if men can be single parents, single dads, without incurring the discomfort of social
disapprobation, then why can’t women be single mothers?
The structure of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act of 1996 reflects Americans’ efforts to achieve equality of social
conditions for single mothers by writing legislation in the spirit of sexual equality.38 Out
of respect for and in acknowledgement of the single mother’s independence, her “mâle
raison,” and her “énergie toute virile,” Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF)
establishes within this reform a “Work Plan” and a “Family Plan” that attempts to
reconcile the “dual demands” of work and family – of conventional male and female
familial roles – that single mothers face (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 264; Edin and Lein 7; Hays
38
This act was the last major wave of welfare reform in America and marked the start of
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a change from the previous welfare program entitled
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
68
19). 39 According to a study Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein conducted with single mothers
adjusting to this reform, most single mothers not only “want to be good providers and
good mothers,” but they also believe that they can be both if they have the appropriate
income and childcare support (7). By enabling one person to perform the dual parental
functions that two individuals (a father and a mother) conventionally perform, welfare
attempts to eliminate the hardship many low-income single mothers encounter that
married women encounter less frequently. This welfare reform policy thus builds on the
already presumed equality of conditions between men and women by enacting both social
and sexual equality between women of different marital conditions.
Despite the efforts of welfare, the fact of the matter remains that, generally
speaking, married and unmarried mothers do not live according to equal social
conditions. As a result of expanding research over the past few decades and in recent
years, the uncomfortable reality that the dissolution of the American nuclear family and
the rise of single motherhood in particular are class-based issues – issues of (in)equality
of conditions – has become increasingly apparent. Levels of education, the likelihood of
marrying and staying married, having a child out of wedlock, and income levels all
correlate with each other (Marquardt 3; Hymowitz, Knot Yet, 6). The more education an
individual, especially a woman, has, the more likely she is to get married, stay married,
have her first child within her stable marriage, and at some point earn enough money
(particularly when combined with her husband’s income) to provide a stable and
financially-secure home for her 2.2 kids. Nevertheless, leaving individuals free to marry,
39
As Christopher Jencks notes in his Foreward to Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers
Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, “TANF’s most widely publicized feature is its requirement that
able-bodied welfare recipients work after two years” (xvi). At the same time, however, “Newly employed
mothers will usually have to pay for child care. (Most mothers who can get free child care are already
working, either formally or informally)” (Jencks xviii).
69
to divorce, and to have children according to their choosing, American society sets itself
up to maintain a certain social inequality. As Kay S. Hymowitz describes this duality,
“the breakdown of marriage in the United States” and “a nation of separate and unequal
families…destined for separate and unequal futures” puts the nuclear family in the
middle of the interminable class debate – like the child of a divorcing or separating
couple (Marriage and Caste 3, 16).40
Arguably the most recent scholarly edition to this discussion of family structure
and class, Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
confirms the dissolution of the American family as an issue of equality of conditions by
applying this correspondence between marriage and class that used to correspond
primarily with African-Americans to America’s white population. As Murray explains,
his book’s “curious specification of white America” and his analysis of a cross-racial
class divide illustrates how “race and ethnicity” are no longer “the reference point” for
social and demographic trends in America (12). Americans, according to Murray, are
now bifurcating along a class line rather than a racial or ethnic one, and “marriage has
become the fault line dividing American classes” (153). The fact that America’s class
divide now correlates more with marriage rather than race makes marriage and
individuals’ choices not to marry primarily class issues and class issues primarily family
issues. Moreover, since Americans’ “gout des jouissances matérielles” fuels their restive
spirits, Americans naturally gauge (in)equality of social conditions according to the
tangible, observable standard of material well-being (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 172).
Consequently, awarding low-income single mothers the same mutual respect,
40
For additional and varying kinds of analyses on this topic, see Haskins and Sawhill (2003),
Ellwood and Jencks (2004), and DeParle (2012).
70
consideration, and dignity as every other American while they frequent local charities,
churches, and food pantries simply ne suffit pas. As long as single mothers constitute a
growing sector of low-income rather than financially-secure Americans, the general
American public will always anxiously strive to improve the single mother’s social and
class status to try to fulfill Americans’ deepest, most agitating passion.
The progression of Americans’ passion for equality for conditions is, however,
more nuanced than a mere desire to eliminate extreme differences in social class or in
individuals’ material well being. Throughout his discussion of equality of conditions,
particularly as it correlates with the rise of soft despotism, Tocqueville repeatedly
mentions several other trends within the democratic social state that reflect Americans’
increasing efforts to achieve equality of conditions. Rooted in the connection democratic
persons draw between the ideas of sameness and equality, the first of these trends is the
expansion of uniform legislation. After they conceive of a government, “un pouvoir
unique et central,” as the most effective means of institutionalizing and ensuring equality,
democratic persons “se présent[ent]” rather “spontanément” with “l’idée d’une législation
uniforme” to execute and enact in daily life their belief in equality (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
355). Because every individual “se voit” not only “peu différent de ses voisins,” but even
more profoundly as “those like oneself,” quite understandably “il comprend mal pourquoi
la règle qui est applicable à un homme ne le serait pas également à tous les autres”
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 355; Tocqueville, DA translation, 483). The only real way for
democratic individuals to feel like they are equals as much as they believe they are equals
is for them to be treated as equals – for them to be treated in the same way by the same
authority. The only way for them to be treated equally in a guaranteed and
71
comprehensive fashion is at the hand of a centralized administrative state, such as
Tocqueville’s tutelary state. Thus, as Americans’ passion for equality of conditions grows
stronger and stronger, the tendency to make uniform legislation and regulation does so as
well.
The school breakfast legislation presented in the previous chapter clearly reflects
this logic. The newsworthy change related to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools free
breakfast program for the 2013-2014 school year was that if the school board approved
the program, which it did with a vote of 7-1, the free breakfast program would become
“universal” rather than serving only “low-income students” (Helms “CMS free breakfast
participation small”). While the policy would be ideally uniform if the breakfasts were
either free for all students or the same low-cost for all students, the supporters of this
expansion of the school breakfast program intend for it to reflect the school lunch
program in which all students have the same opportunity to eat the same meal at the same
time.41 School leaders believe that more “kids went hungry” and did not participate in the
program before its expansion because its availability “to only low-income students” led
the students who did eat the breakfast to “labe[l] themselves as being poor” (Helms
“CMS plans free breakfast”). Ultimately, school officials and national nonprofits
promoting the program considered the “stigma” participating students felt as concerning
41
It is important to note that the breakfasts are not universally free. The cost of breakfast increases
on a graduated scale according to family income. The United States Department of Agriculture specifies
the program’s student payment requirements in the following way: “Children from families with incomes at
or below 130 percent of the Federal poverty level are eligible for free meals. Those with incomes between
130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced‐price meals, for which students
can be charged no more than 30 cents. (For the period July 1, 2013, through June 30, 2014, 130 percent of
the poverty level is $30,615 for a family of four; 185 percent is $43,568)” (“The School Breakfast
Program”).
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as their hunger (Helms “CMS plans free breakfast”; Murphy).42 Before the program
became uniformly available, its student participants felt different from – not the same as
– the rest of their peers. They felt unequal to everyone else in terms of their socioeconomic class backgrounds; they felt poor in addition to being poor. Opening the school
breakfast program to all students, even to students who live in million-dollar homes on
the lake, and making the program uniformly applicable diffuses that sense of being
different, of being part of a low-income family, of being less worthy, of being unequal.
The derivation of this uniform legislation from a concern with stigma and shame
demonstrates the role Americans’ passion for equality of conditions plays in an issue as
contemporary and as critical as “food insecurity,” the effects of which public school
meals work to reduce for children in the classroom.43 A Place at the Table, a newly
released documentary on hunger in America and America’s federal food assistance
programs, offers insight into the correlation between Americans’ concern with equality
and this deeply political issue. In a recent interview on PBS NewsHour, the film’s codirector, Lori Silverbush, comments, “In this country, we tend to blame people for their
problems. We tend to make them feel like they’re somehow responsible, that they’ve
failed” even though a conglomeration of factors oftentimes contributes to their food
insecurity (Silverbush).44 The failure to which Silverbush is referring, the failure that
42
The primary nonprofit advocating for the universalization of the school breakfast program is
Share Our Strength/No Kid Hungry, which the Charlotte Observer describes as “a Washington-based
nonprofit promoting school meals as a means to ending childhood hunger in America” (Helms “CMS plans
free breakfast”).
43
Peter Eisinger defines people who are “food insecure” as “people who cannot count confidently
on obtaining adequate, regular food” and, therefore, those who are a “degree” of hunger less than “those
who suffer the real physical distress that we call hunger” (125).
44
The question does exist as to whether individuals fail to fulfill these conventional standards,
which implies that they technically are capable of and internally impeded from doing so, or whether they
are, in fact, unable to fulfill them due to external impediments, whether they be economic, institutional, or
73
evokes blame, stigma, and a sense of shame is the failure of food insecure individuals to
live according to certain mœurs that permeate American society. In the case of public
school meals and the personal stories on which the documentary focuses, the mœur that
individuals are not upholding is the conventional parental responsibility of providing not
only food for one’s own children, but also appropriate nutritional and eating habits. When
parents or guardians realize that they are not fulfilling the role that society demands of
them, a sense of inferiority, of inequality, and even more profoundly of less self-worth –
of an unequal, inferior, unworthy human condition – inevitably overcomes them.45
Take, for example, Barbie, a woman interviewed in Silverbush’s documentary. A
single mother from a low-income Philadelphia neighborhood (just like the single mothers
and fathers in Edin’s studies with Kefalas and Nelson), Barbie experiences extreme
financial and food-based hardship when, “Ironically, after going to work” in a full-time
position helping other people receive SNAP benefits “and fulfilling her side of the social
contract, as we like to call it, her children were hungrier than before, and she was cut off
[from her SNAP benefits] immediately” (Silverbush).46 Although she appears to be doing
structural in nature. Although this minute distinction is of critical significance to the discussion of solutions
to such social issues, further specification of such causes surpass the purview of this project.
45
Whether or not it is wrong, unfair, or even unjust, one might claim, that parents and, as a result,
their children are subject to blame and stigma because of their familial situations (oftentimes a situation
over which individuals have little or no control) is the source of much political debate. From a
Tocquevillian perspective, a stigma or personal feeling of shame is not, to a certain extent, problematic
because it reinforces the mœurs necessary to maintain a self-sustaining democratic social state. Ultimately,
the point of this analysis is not to take a definitive stance on the potential social benefit of something like
stigma that can have a detrimental effect on persons’ well-being, but rather (it is worth belaboring) to show
that Americans’ most ardent passion, that for equality of conditions, has the potential to undermine the
mœurs that maintain the democratic social state by considering the stigma that results from failing to
uphold them a source of social inequality.
46
Barbie’s experience in which her financially precarious situation is made significantly worse by
welfare policy is an exact illustration of the kind of work versus welfare debate inherent in the 1996
welfare reform that Hays (2003) and Edin and Lein (1997) describe. Though a reality of welfare policy, this
further descent into poverty does not occur for every single mother on welfare. In fact, since the 1996
reform, welfare rolls have declined in the millions, which makes the debate over the reform’s efficacy all
the more difficult to resolve (Hays 95).
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everything as proscribed to improve the social and financial conditions in which she and
her children live, Barbie suffers from the shame of feeling like she is not adequately
providing for her children or giving them the most fulfilling childhood available to them
– like she is not fulfilling her social responsibility as an independent adult and parent and,
therefore, not fulfilling her side of the “social contract.”47 Expressing the tension between
her individual goals, her familial responsibilities, and her financial limitations, Barbie
states with an understandably exasperated tone, “My dream is to go to college, but I can’t
tell my kids I’ll make sure you guys eat in two years. I’m struggling to even feed my kids
every day” (Barbie). Barbie’s poverty or near-poverty upsets her; it frustrates her; it
exhausts her. Both Barbie and the general public would withstand her poverty if only she
did not have to suffer the feeling of inadequacy and failure and diminished self-worth that
comes with it. “Ils suffriront la pauvreté” if only she did not have to suffer the sense of
“l’aristocratie” that comes with being classified as a financially insecure and food
insecure single mother (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 123).
Because a sense of social inequality is precisely that for which democratic
persons, such as Americans, will not stand, it is almost inevitable then that Americans
will work to diminish, if not eradicate altogether, the social expectation that leads to this
sense of inequality when individuals fail to uphold it. The expansion of public school
lunches to achieve a certain level of uniformity exemplifies exactly this effort to reduce
the expectation that parents will provide a nutritious breakfast for their children and,
47
Of course, one must note that as a single mother raising her two children completely on her
own, Barbie is fulfilling her end of the “social contract” much more than her children’s father. Furthermore,
Silverbush’s intentional invocation of the “social contract” directly grounds the issue of food insecurity and
related federal assistance programs like SNAP in theories of political association and liberal democratic
theory in particular. By invoking this tenet of liberal democracy in relation to these political and social
issues, Silverbush calls into question the efficacy of liberal democracy as it relates to Barbie’s situation in
particular, but more broadly as it relates to issues of hunger, food insecurity, and welfare policies.
75
therefore, to eliminate the stigma and shame felt by those who struggle to do so. Such a
policy affirms that a married mother who lives in a million dollar home on Lake Norman
can be and oftentimes is equally as incapable as a single mother on food stamps of
providing her child with a filling and nutritious breakfast. Despite differences in socioeconomic class status, neither mother is necessarily “better” than the other when the same
opportunities are available to them and when they are subject to the same oversight and
regulation. In other words, the women and their families share equal statuses of social
condition when they and their families are treated equally, the same, uniformly by all
persons and all laws at all times.
In Tocquevillian terms, this desensitizing process constitutes “the softening of
mores” both within the general public external to the family and within the family itself
as equality progresses (Manent 47). For Tocqueville, “L’égalité des conditions et
l’adoucissement des mœurs” are not simply “des événements contemporains” that occur
at the same time, but are more specifically “des faits corrélatifs” such that equality is the
driving force behind the softening of mores (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 205). “Les mœurs
s’adoucissent à mesure que les conditions s’égalisent” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 205). The
American “accept-and-prop-up response to single parent families” and to low-income
single mothers in particular constitutes a “moral latitude” toward issues of “sex and
generation” among a slew of other societal pillars “that is interwoven with our
[America’s] bedrock conception of liberal justice” (Hymowitz “How Single Motherhood
Hurts Kids”; Shell 130-131). In order to enact to their fullest potential and in direct
correlation with each other the liberal principles of liberty and equality, the general
American public adopts a new mœur of “ecumenical niceness” or political correctness
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(Murray 293). As a non-judgmental Protestant ethic pervades American society,
“democratic theory” has an increased potential “to overwhelm the mores that sustain the
family” (Mansfield and Winthrop, Introduction, lxxx).48 As the American woman leaves
her place in the driver’s seat of her family car as the instructor and perpetuator of
democratic mores, she takes a back seat – one might even say a car seat – to much more
docile, more pliable, less judgmental, “moins rudes” mœurs instructed and perpetuated by
an equally soft despot and its uniform legislation (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 205).
A strain of the Protestant ethic Tocqueville considers so fundamental to the
survival of the democratic social state, an additional component of this progression of
equality of conditions and the softening of mores constitutes democratic persons’
increased emphasis on compassion and compassion’s ultimate displacement of devotion
as a characteristic of interpersonal relationships among citizens of the democratic social
state.49 A reflection of the increasing “mildness of democracy,” the democratic soul’s
subversion of democratic devotion is both a product of and a means of reproducing the
sentiment and “perception of equality” (Manent 47-52; Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s
American Woman,” 246). Unlike in an aristocracy in which “chaque caste a ses opinions,
ses sentiments, ses droits, ses mœurs, son existence à part,” in a democratic social state
“tous les hommes [ont] à peu près la même manière de penser et de sentir” as a result of
48
Religion, Protestantism specifically and Puritanism in particular, constitute essential
components of Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy (see especially Volume 1 of Democracy in
America). Although the details of Tocqueville’s opinions on religion are not of much direct consequence to
this Chapter or thesis, the ripple effect of religion within society that Tocqueville pinpoints through mœurs
is exactly that which I describe here, though not in terms of mores. My use of the term Protestant ethic
here, though in a Tocquevillian spirit, is intended to convey the egalitarian sense of compassion found in
Protestantism that will be developed in the subsequent paragraphs. See Mary Eberstadt (2013) for an
analysis of the family’s relation to religion that reverses to a certain degree Tocqueville’s understanding of
this critical relationship.
49
In his seminal work The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau identifies compassion as a
central element of human nature as it operates to a certain extent as the counterpart to self-interest. This
French Enlightenment heritage was not lost on Tocqueville, whose theoretical sensibilities were informed
by Rousseau’s writings as well as that of Rousseau’s contemporaries.
77
the relative equality of their “rangs,” their individual selves (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 205206). These relatively equal and similar ways of living allow each citizen to “juger en un
moment des sensations de tous les autres” as he merely “jette un coup d’œil rapide sur
lui-même; cela lui suffit” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 206). Rather than in an aristocracy in
which “les hommes se dévouent” across castes as a result of entrenched social hierarchy,
democratic man’s “imagination le met aussitôt à leur place” (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 206,
208). Instead of solely devoting themselves to each other on an individual basis, in the
aggregate Americans “montrent une compassion générale pour tous les membres de
l’espèce humaine” as well (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 208-209). As Americans’ ardent belief in
the “valeur…égale” of their fellow citizens fuels their compassion for all and detracts
from their devotion to a few, the combination of Barbie’s sheer exhaustion, frustration,
independence, and impuissance becomes all the more agaçant for the American people
(Tocqueville, DA, 2: 266). As equals, the American people empathize with her and every
other single mother in a similar situation.
This pervasive compassion in the democratic social state is not necessarily a bad
thing. Compassion leads the American people to concern themselves with improving the
social conditions of their fellow citizens and to ask critical questions geared toward
remedying these pressing social and policy issues. PBS NewsHour anchor Ray Suarez
posed one of these types of questions to Lori Silverbush, the co-director of A Place at the
Table, in an interview about the documentary. “You sympathize, you empathize, and then
what?” Suarez asked (Silverbush). Compassion instigates action. As democratic
individuals witness their semblables like Barbie lacking material comforts and reprieve
from financial hardship, sympathy and empathy evoke a sense of obligation to help their
78
equals improve their situations. Sympathy and empathy evoke a sense of moral duty to
one’s fellow citizens; they evoke a moral duty to uphold the principle of equality.
As Suarez’s question implies, however, the action that results from compassion
proves ambiguous and weak, particularly when individuals effect the action out of
compassion rather than devotion. Democratic compassion carries both the individuals and
families in need of assistance and the general public only so far before leaving them all
empty – whether in their stomachs or in their souls. As “le grand lien de l’humanité se
resserre” in the name of compassion, the drying out of the democratic social state that
leads to and characterizes individualism rears its ugly head yet again (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
400). Compassion further separates individuals from each other on a personal basis, and
compassionate individuals much more easily can “soulager les douleurs d’autrui” and
“[prend] plaisir à le faire” when they enact universal, uniform, equality-seeking policies
regardless of whether they are directed towards low-income children or their single
mothers (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 209). Once again concerned preeminently with themselves
and their immediate circle of friends and family, democratic persons care more and more
for their fellow citizens but with less and less personal motivation and agency to
contribute personally to the improvement of their social condition. The action that
compassion instigates occurs broadly and uniformly to maintain the equality Americans
strive so ardently to achieve.
The interpersonal interaction and commitment Americans lose when compassion
outweighs devotion is, for Tocqueville, the great concern. “[I]t’s not at all obvious that”
those same expansions of government support “sho[w] much concern for tomorrow’s
[children],” and “l’action réciproque des hommes les uns sur les autres” that Tocqueville
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identifies as the only way that “l’esprit humain…se développe” succumbs to general
society’s overweening need to fill their democratic souls with a fleeting sense of selfconsolation (Hymowitz, “How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids”; Tocqueville, DA, 2:
140). Democratic persons need compassion to devote themselves to each other, but
compassion alone is not enough; compassion alone is not a mœur. Only when coupled
with public expression or action by the individual does the sentiment of compassion
become a reciprocal and socially beneficial habit of the heart.
In the context of Tocqueville’s emphasis on equality, low-income single mothers
and hunger in America are particularly compelling lenses through which one can analyze
changes in family structure and related social welfare policies. Both of these trends, facts,
or issues (however you want to refer to them) in their individual ways challenge the
existence of equality of conditions in America and, therefore, pull intensely and almost
incessantly on Americans’ democratic heartstrings. As reported in September 2013, the
fact that “The median income for a family headed by a single mother was $25,493 in
2012, which means roughly 5 million single mothers earn less than $25,000 a year”
drives the egalitarian fanatic inside every American absolutely berserk (Casselman). This
epitome of individual liberty, the paragon of freedom of choice, can’t seem to move past
the remedial, inferior, unfair, and unequal starting line of living “paycheck to paycheck,”
so to speak. The subsequent fact that “one out of every two kids in the United States at
some point will be on food assistance” only frustrates Americans even more as their
continued efforts to ensure liberty and social equality for all people, especially the
country’s most vulnerable citizens, only continue to come up short (A Place at the Table).
As family policy scholar W. Bradford Wilcox recently asked in an essay on increasing
80
family poverty in America, “What gives?” (“Women’s Wages Are Rising”). As
Americans work for so much liberal “good,” how can so much go awry?
Although no one can say for sure, Tocqueville alludes to the idea that the problem
at least in part arises when Americans’ passion for equality of conditions itself becomes a
mœur. “[B]ehavior suggested by thought and prompted by feeling,” a mœur is exactly
what equality has become in America (Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short, 72). Recall
Susan, one of the single mothers who I interviewed at the Ada Jenkins Center, and her
statement that since her divorce, “I don’t feel like the couples with the children include us
[she and her two sons] as much” as they did when she was married [emphasis added]
(Susan). Susan wants to sense her dignity as an individual, equally as vulnerable as
everyone else to financial insecurity, food insecurity, and shame and equally as capable
as everyone else of improving her situation, of proving and living according to her
inherent self-worth. It’s that feeling, that sentiment, that internal sense of equal self-worth
that these single mothers – and their children eating breakfast at school – lack and that
Americans as egalitarians who value the equal dignity of all persons rightly believe all
persons should have. In the depths of their democratic souls, these women and their
children long for a kind of existential equality.50 Imbued with the thought of “the
fundamental truth of human equality” while also struggling to admit “that human
inequality is also a fundamental truth,” thus making social inequality a fundamental
reality as well, Americans strive tirelessly to make the democratic inner thought, feeling,
and instinct for equality an ever-present reality – a pure, tangible fact (Mansfield,
50
This notion of existential equality is deeply Tocquevillian in nature as it parallels individuals’
existential liberty that Tocqueville is so concerned to protect from the tutelary state. Tocqueville discusses
liberty in an existential sense in relation to the threat tyranny of the majority poses to Americans in Volume
1, Part 2, Chapter 7, 354. Tocqueville’s consistent discussion of Americans’ “souls” or âmes throughout
both volumes of Democracy in America also reinforces the existential nature of Tocqueville’s analysis.
81
Tocqueville: A Very Short, 72). Following the Tocquevillian process of mothers
instructing mœurs and their children practicing them in public – or in the lunchroom at
school – Americans’ efforts to achieve equality of conditions have become habits of
every day life rooted in the compassion of their democratic souls.
And yet the disconnect remains between that for which Americans strive and the
results they achieve. Exactly so, Tocqueville might say, for Americans’ innate sense of
equality can never actually be achieved in the way in which Americans envision it and
seek it. It grows from within the individual whereas Americans seek to impose it through
external means, such as uniform legislation and compassionate appeals to political
activism (e.g. the documentary A Place a the Table). As persons born in an age of
equality, Americans have “les instincts que fait naître l’égalité” (Tocqueville, DA, 2:
173). Although persons with aristocratic dispositions and sensibilities always exist, most
Americans regard their fellow citizens with a sense of relative equality and shared
dignity. However, when Americans couple this inherent state of being with their “amour
du bien-être,” an “opposition constante” emerges between these same egalitarian and
democratic instincts and “les moyens” available to them to achieve in daily life the
equality they desire in terms of material well being – not “de vastes palais” for all, but
rather “de rendre à chaque instant la vie plus aisée et plus commode” without “la gêne”
and in the satisfaction of “les moindres besoins” (DA 2: 163, 166,173). This goal seems
simple enough to achieve, but because its end state of physical and emotional comfort is
such a personal and individual preference, “les hommes ne fonderont jamais une égalité”
of well being, material or otherwise, “qui leur suffise” and that applies to every individual
in the same exact way (DA 2: 173). Like a material object itself, equality becomes
82
something to achieve rather than a state of being to live in relation to one’s fellow
citizens. Indeed, Tocqueville notes, equality of social conditions will always be the
ultimate goal of a fundamentally democratic society because “les plus fortes inégalités ne
frappent point l’œil,” but “quant tout est à peu près de niveau, les moindres le blessent”
(DA 2: 174). Equality of conditions in practice in no way will ever equal the equality of
conditions in passion that subsumes the American spirit and fuels the marche of the
democratic social state.
This passion being so ardent and the end state being so flou, the opposition
between them has only one end result: it “tourmente et fatigue” the well-intentioned
“âmes” of the American people (Tocqueville, DA, 2: 173). Equality of conditions “recule
chaque jour devant eux [the Americans],” and “C’est pour cela que le désir de l’égalité
devient toujours plus insatiable à mesure que l’égalité est plus grande” (DA 2: 174). For
Tocqueville, the continuous process of l’égalisation des conditions is “pourquoi les
Américains se montrent si inquiets au milieu de leur bien-être,” are impatient with
welfare policy, and possess a political and social “mélancolie” that threatens to stifle the
democratic social state’s social progression (DA 2: 170, 174). As the American people
exert themselves less and less in the direct assistance of their neighbors, as the tutelarylike state works harder and harder to eliminate social inequality, and as unequal social
conditions become more and more glaring, the American people succumb to that same
sense of sheer independence and impuissance – only this time not on an individual level
but as a nation, a social state, as a whole. As Jeff Bridges asserts in reference to the
documentary’s call for political action to reform the federal SNAP program, “It’s about
patriotism, really. If another country were doing this to our kids, we would be at war” (A
83
Place at the Table). Inequality of conditions is indeed a “homegrown” problem,
beginning with every family as much as with every individual in the democratic social
state (Silverbush). For as long as the American people pursue equality rather than liberty,
they will always be at war with themselves – and only hungry for more.
84
Conclusion
Understanding the rise of single motherhood among low-income women and the
expansion of the public school breakfast program in terms of Tocqueville’s notions of
individualism, a paternalistic tutelary state, and Americans’ ardent passion for equality of
conditions demonstrates how America’s founding principles of liberty and equality put
the democratic social state in a catch-22. While in theory liberty and equality seem
principally benign, in practice these two founding tenets of the democratic social state
threaten to undermine the democratic social state. They threaten to do so by changing the
ways in which individuals relate to each other and associate with each other. They
threaten to do so by undermining the nuclear family.
As the final two chapters of this thesis have shown, Americans’ efforts to live out
the principles of America’s democratic social state – individual liberty and equality –
produce socially unequal families. By acting on their individual liberty and agency,
Americans retract themselves from general society and prioritize their individual interests
over others’ interests and communal interests. As this spirit of individualism loosens
individuals’ societal relations with each other, the nuclear family becomes subject to this
individualist way of thinking as well. The correlation between marriage and social class
illustrates the socio-economic repercussions of this way of thinking as it translates into
individuals’ ways of living. Both equally free, a middle-class woman who chooses to
marry before having children puts herself in a position to have a less financially
vulnerable family (especially if she remains married) than a middle-class woman who has
a child out of wedlock. To remedy this inequality between families and any stigma
individuals feel as a result of their different marital and social statuses, Americans create
85
expansive and uniform social welfare policies, such as breakfasts for all students in
public schools. Although these programs derive from the liberal democratic principle of
equality, the programs maintain inequality between families and between individuals,
such as the students. The low-income students and the students who live in a milliondollar home on a lake may have equally full stomachs, but when they go home at the end
of the day, the social conditions in which they live remain unequal. That basic reality
keeps the American people striving ever harder to achieve equality of conditions for all
families and for all individuals.
It is at this point in Americans’ efforts to achieve equality that the family’s critical
role in the democratic social state becomes painfully apparent. Recall that the family is
not simply a product of liberty and equality. As a civil association, a pouvoir secondaire,
the sentimental democratic family practices these principles as well, a social role that
Tocqueville’s description of the nuclear family’s internal dynamics makes clear. Thus,
when the nuclear family changes in structure as a result of these principles, such as when
the nuclear family dissolves as individual liberty becomes in practice the sentiment of
individualism, the family will also change the way in which it practices these principles.
Without a husband and a wife, for example, a family’s members can no longer practice
the principle of equality in terms of sexual equality despite sexual differences.
Consequently, family members come to understand the principle of equality as its
members sense it or feel it – as their passion for equality of social conditions rather than
as a belief in equality in principle. When this altered understanding of liberty and equality
that one learns in the family is coupled with Tocqueville’s claim that the woman in the
family fait les mœurs, the fact that Americans’ ardent passion for equality of conditions
86
has become a mœur is not surprising. Even Tocqueville’s mœurs are subject to the
dissolutive and transformative effect of liberty and equality. The critical juncture between
the individual and general society, the nuclear family absorbs changes in how individuals
conceive of liberty and equality at the same time as the family and its members operate
according to these altered conceptions of the democratic social state’s founding
principles. The nuclear family and the democratic social state are interdependent, and the
cyclical dynamic between them can be either mutually reinforcing or mutually
destructive.
This nuanced placement and irreplaceable role of the family in the democratic
social state makes it exceedingly difficult to gauge what constitutes just family policy or
just social welfare policy as it relates to the family. If, like individuals, the family as a
democratic institution is left free to morph according to the principles of liberty and
equality but in doing so weakens the democratic social state, or even threatens its
viability altogether, then that same catch-22 emerges. Although Americans make choices
and behave in ways that can weaken the democratic social state or threaten its viability
altogether, Americans are severely limited in the extent to which they can use a law or
mœur to curtail or disincentivize this behavior precisely because it accords with the
democratic social state’s founding principles. As Jean Bethke Elshtain explicitly
recognizes, the nuclear family structure that appears most beneficial to America’s
democratic social state can exemplify illiberal practice: “Ironically, what [some] analysts
fear is what I here endorse: a form of familial authority that does not mesh perfectly with
democratic principles. That form, I contend, remains vital to the sustaining of a diverse
and morally decent culture” (Elshtain, “The Family and Civic Life,” 41). To compel one
87
type of family structure or to eliminate all normative restrictions on family structure “is to
jeopardize the social goods that democratic and familial authority – paradoxical in
relation to one another – promise to citizens and their children” (Elshtain,“The Family
and Civic Life,” 41). The family poses an inherent “problem” to liberal democratic theory
as much as it proves necessary to achieve liberalism’s ends for every individual:
autonomy, equality, and the freedom to pursue one’s own sense of happiness, one’s own
sense of the “good” (Elshtain,“The Family and Civic Life,” 33).
Though a clear example of this “problem,” to use Elshtain’s term, in light of
social inequality, the increase of single motherhood among low-income women and the
expansion of public schools’ breakfast programs are by no means the only changes in
family structure and social policy fueling debates about family policy in America today.
Though beyond the purview of this project, the bifurcation of the divorce rate along a
class line, gay marriage, reproductive technologies, access to abortion, an increased rate
of cohabitation, and adoption laws all instigate policy debates that relate to changes in
family structure. More significantly, each of these issues demonstrates the same tension
between the theory and practice of liberty and equality. As individuals practice these
principles and as these principles subsequently evolve in meaning, the democratic social
state is at risk of becoming increasingly atomized and socially stratified while its citizens
become increasingly subject to the expansive, uniform, mollifying directives of a
paternalistic tutelary state. This logic follows one possible path of Tocqueville’s
democratic social state. But notice – regardless of whether the policy debate concerns
marriage, reproduction, or free school meals, the nuclear family is the common
denominator in each of these debates. Consequently, the family plays the same critical
88
role in Tocqueville’s more optimistic or hopeful projection of the democratic social state.
To exist in liberty, the democratic social state needs individuals who practice self-interest
well understood and who willingly and naturally associate with each other for their
individual benefit as much as for the benefit of others. The democratic social state needs
families that instill in its members understandings of liberty and equality moderated by
the interests of others.
This is not to say that a family headed by a single mother, for example, cannot or
does not practice liberty and equality in ways that reinforce the democratic social state.
Tocqueville never indicates that the conventional nuclear family structure is the only
family form that should exist in the democratic social state. In fact, recall that in his
discussion of individualism Tocqueville explicitly acknowledges that families in an age
of equality emerge and dissolve quite frequently. Though a potentially problematic
reality, these changes are nonetheless realities of living according to the principles of
liberty and equality – of living in America’s democratic social state. This fact makes the
challenges family dissolution and family policy pose so contentious and difficult to
navigate.
One then wonders what the most just course of action concerning family policy
really is when America’s liberal measures of justice seem to lie at the heart of the
problem. America’s democratic social state is founded on principles Americans believe to
be just, but the practice of these principles threatens to undermine these same principles
as the practice of them perpetuates and exacerbates social inequalities, an unintended
consequence that incites Americans to strive ever more passionately to achieve equality
of conditions. The family and family-related policies are the mediums through which this
89
tension manifests itself, which also means that, as Tocqueville’s emphasis on the family
implies, the family is the most effective means to mediate and moderate this tension. The
first and most natural form of democratic society, the nuclear family determines to a large
degree whether America travels the path toward liberty or the path toward soft despotism.
To this extent, the fate of the family foretells the fate of the democratic social state.
Indeed, the changes in family structure that split America’s democratic social state along
a class line and the tension-ridden political debates that emerge as a result of these
changes are deep-seeded. For better or for worse, they are as deeply rooted – as
homegrown – as the founding tenets of America’s liberal democratic état social born in
America’s nuclear family.
90
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