De Tocqueville feared, not for the failure of democracy in America, but for its success: not, like so many of his French contemporaries, for its propensity to release an unbridled égoisme, but for its propensity to 'unbend the springs of action' altogether. The citizen of the new republic, as Tocqueville saw him, 'exists only in himself and for himself'; he neither sees nor feels the others; he is, in this chilly sense, free. But if he is not at once paralysed by the vast possibilities thereby opened up to him, he soon becomes perplexed by the problems of realising any of them alone. Born free, chained, and then re-freed, he is again constrained by the very lack of constraint.

LRB 6 November 1980 | PDF Download