Ideas for the intellect and emotions for the heart: The literary dimensions of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

• Main Author: HENDERSON, Christine Rodman
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Gustave de Beaumont; Marie; ou l’Esclavage aux Etats Unis; politics and literature; race; gender; Native Americans; religion; American frontier; Adam Smith; imaginative identification; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3586
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Alexis de Tocqueville’s lifelong friend and companion Gustave de Beaumont produced a literary work based on their visit to the United States. Beaumont’s 1835 novel Marie, ou l’Esclavage aux Etats Unis, explored themes of race, manners, and equality in American society. Although Democracy in America is not a work of literature per se, it does contain a remarkable number of literary vignettes that give the work a distinctively literary quality. As Christine Dunn Henderson argues in this chapter, Tocqueville’s literary portraiture is a consistent rhetorical device throughout the book. His recourse to literary vignettes as a way of illustrating dimensions of race, religion, and American manners demonstrates the evocative power of literature to convey moral lessons by appealing to emotions rather than reason. In this regard, Tocqueville’s rhetorical strategy of sympathy and imaginative identification is reminiscent of Adam Smith’s use of vignettes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.