Self-Interest Rightly Understood Was Tocqueville's Answer to Selfishness

Every few years someone announces that Americans have become too selfish to govern themselves, and every few years the proposed cure is a sermon on self-sacrifice delivered by people who would like a larger budget. The diagnosis is old. The cure is older. And the most perceptive visitor this country ever had looked at the same problem in the 1830s and concluded that the sermon does not work, but something humbler does.

Alexis de Tocqueville called it self-interest rightly understood. It is one of the least glamorous ideas in political philosophy and one of the most useful. It explains why a commercial, restless, ambitious people built more churches, schools, hospitals, fire companies and charities than any aristocracy that ever preached noble duty. Let me explain what the doctrine is, where Tocqueville put it, and why it answers both the cynic who says everyone is selfish and the utopian who says nobody should be.

Where the idea lives

Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont came to the United States in 1831, officially to study American prisons for the French government. They stayed about nine months. The prison report came out in 1833. The real fruit of the trip was Democracy in America, published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840.

The first volume is about institutions: townships, counties, courts, the federal Constitution, the press, juries. The second volume is about something harder to see, the habits of mind and heart that democracy produces. Its second part deals with the feelings of Americans, and a run of short chapters there forms a single argument:

• Chapter 2 defines individualism and distinguishes it from egoism.
• Chapter 4 explains how free institutions fight individualism.
• Chapter 5 turns to the use Americans make of associations in civil life.
• Chapter 8 explains how Americans combat individualism by the principle of self-interest rightly understood.
• Chapter 9 applies the same principle to religion.

Chapter 8 is the hinge. You cannot understand it without chapter 2, and you cannot finish it without chapter 9. So we will read all three, in that order.

Two words for two different problems

The first thing to define is the disease. Tocqueville distinguishes two vices that sound alike.

Egoism is the old one. It is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and prefer himself to everything. Tocqueville treats it as a vice of the heart, as old as the human race, found in every form of society.

Individualism is new, and Tocqueville says the word itself was new. It is a calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to withdraw into the circle of family and friends and leave the larger society to look after itself. It is not hot. It is not cruel. It is a quiet shrug. The individualist is not grabbing; he is simply absent.

Here is why the distinction matters. Egoism is a vice you can preach against, because everyone recognizes it as a vice. Individualism looks like a virtue. The man who minds his own business, raises his children, pays his bills and stays out of public quarrels appears respectable. Tocqueville's warning is that a nation of such men is exactly the material a centralized government needs. If nobody tends the common things, someone in the capital will offer to tend them, and will be thanked for it. That is the road to the soft, tutelary power he describes near the end of the second volume, which we have covered in Tocqueville Saw Soft Despotism Coming, a Power That Never Says No.

Tocqueville also argues that individualism is a democratic disease specifically. In an aristocracy, a man is tied by fixed ranks to a long chain of people above and below him, and to ancestors and descendants. Democracy breaks the chain. Each person stands on his own, owes nothing in particular to anyone, and begins to imagine his fate is in his own hands alone. Equality, the great achievement of the age, carries this cost inside it.

The doctrine, stated plainly

So what did Americans do about it? Tocqueville's answer surprised him. They did not preach the beauty of virtue. Moralists in aristocratic ages, he observes, liked to say that virtue is beautiful and that one should do good disinterestedly, as God does. American moralists did not much bother with that. They said, in effect: virtue is useful. Serving your neighbors serves you. Honesty is the best policy, and here is why.

Stated as premises, the doctrine runs like this:

1. People act mainly from interest. This is a fact about human nature, not a slander on it.
2. A person's interest is not only what he can grab today. It includes his reputation, his credit, the safety of his town, the schooling of his children and the health of the institutions he depends on.
3. A clear-eyed person who understands his interest broadly will find that it requires regular small sacrifices: time for the school board, money for the road, effort for the fire company, honesty in trade.
4. Habits of small sacrifice, repeated, form character. A man who has served on a jury for reasons of interest learns the habits of a juror.
5. Therefore a people taught to understand their interest rightly will produce a steady supply of public spirit, without needing a supply of saints.

Tocqueville is candid about the limits. The doctrine does not produce great acts of heroism. It does not make many people extraordinarily virtuous. But it makes very many people orderly, temperate, moderate, foresighted and self-controlled. If it does not lead the will directly to virtue, it leads it there by habit. He thought it the doctrine best suited to the needs of his century, and he warned that moralists in democratic times had better teach it, because they were not going to get anything nobler to stick.

That is a deeply conservative judgment. It takes human nature as it is and asks what can be built on it, rather than demanding a new human nature first.

Why it worked in American practice

The doctrine was not a pamphlet. It was a practice, and Tocqueville found its schools in the township and the association.

In the first volume he describes the New England township, where citizens elected their own officers and handled their own roads, schools and poor relief. A man who has to vote on the cost of a bridge learns quickly that the bridge serves him and that he serves the bridge. Local liberty, Tocqueville argues in chapter 4 of the second volume's second part, drags people out of their private circle by making them responsible for something near enough to see.

Then come the associations. Americans of every age and condition, he writes in chapter 5, constantly form associations, for public safety, commerce, morals, religion, hospitals, schools and the founding of churches. Where in France you would find the government at the head of a new undertaking, and in England a great lord, in the United States you would find an association. This is the pattern we trace in Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads, and it fits the older insight Burke put in his line about the little platoon, discussed in The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now.

Notice what self-interest rightly understood does inside an association. A merchant joins a volunteer fire company because his store might burn. Within a few years he is drilling with men he would never otherwise have met, trusting them with his life, and caring about the company for its own sake. Interest got him in the door. Habit and friendship kept him there. The motive was modest. The result was civic.

Religion as the brake on appetite

Here the cynic objects, and he is half right. If everything rests on interest, what stops interest from turning short-sighted? A man who understands his interest can still decide that cheating pays this once.

Tocqueville saw the objection and answered it in chapter 9. Self-interest rightly understood has to be extended across a long horizon, and religion is what extends it. American preachers, he observed, constantly spoke of the next world, yet also stressed how religion favors liberty and order in this one, so that it was often hard to tell from their sermons whether the main object of religion was eternal felicity or prosperity here. He reported it as a fact about American religion rather than as a scandal.

The mechanism matters more than the joke. Religion teaches people to sacrifice a present pleasure for a future good, to master their appetites, and to think of their lives as a whole rather than a series of moments. That is precisely the discipline self-interest rightly understood requires. A person trained to defer gratification for heaven finds it easy to defer it for his own old age, his children's education and his town's credit. In the first volume, Tocqueville goes further and calls religion the first of America's political institutions, because although it takes no direct part in government, it shapes the mores that make liberty usable.

The Founders said the same in their own words. George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 put it plainly:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.

John Adams, writing to the officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade in 1798, was blunter:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Read alongside Tocqueville, these are not pious decorations. They are engineering notes. A constitution of limited powers assumes citizens who govern their own appetites, so the government does not have to. We make the longer version of that case in Self-Government Starts With Governing Yourself, the Founders Insisted.

The best objection, stated fairly

The strongest critique of the doctrine comes from people who take virtue seriously, so let me state it the way they would.

Teaching people that virtue pays corrupts virtue. The moment you justify honesty by its usefulness, you teach that honesty is a strategy, and strategies are dropped when they stop paying. The great moral traditions, Jewish, Christian, classical, all insist that some things are owed regardless of reward. A society built on calculated benevolence will produce calculating people, and calculating people will abandon the common good the moment the math changes. Tocqueville himself admitted the doctrine produces no heroes. A nation needs heroes.

That is a serious argument. Here is the answer in four parts.

1. Tocqueville never claimed the doctrine was the whole of morality. He presented it as the doctrine that works on most people most of the time in a democratic age. Chapter 9 explicitly pairs it with religion, which supplies exactly the unconditional obligations the critic wants. The calculating clause and the sacred clause were meant to operate together.
2. Habit transforms motive. Aristotle made the point long before Tocqueville: we become just by doing just acts. The man who first joins the fire company for his store becomes, over years, a fireman who would run into his neighbor's house. The doctrine is a door, not a destination.
3. The alternative has a record. Regimes that demanded pure, disinterested devotion to the collective did not produce a nation of saints. They produced informers, black markets and cynicism so deep it outlived the regimes. Demanding heroism from everyone is a reliable way to get hypocrisy from most.
4. The doctrine does produce heroes, just not on schedule. It produces the conditions in which ordinary men become extraordinary when the moment calls. A people practiced in self-government and mutual aid are the people who fill the ranks when the country needs them.

The objection mistakes a floor for a ceiling. Tocqueville built the floor. He left the ceiling to faith.

Answering the cynic and the utopian at once

The doctrine's real elegance is that it refutes two opposite errors with one move.

The cynic says that since everyone is selfish, talk of public spirit is a con, and the clever man looks out for himself. Tocqueville's reply: you have misunderstood your own interest. The cynic who cheats his customers loses them. The one who skips the school board meeting gets the school he deserves. The one who ignores local government will find the state government, then the national government, delighted to take over, and will pay for it. Narrow selfishness is not shrewd. It is stupid, in the precise sense of failing to see consequences.

The utopian says that since selfishness is the problem, we need a new kind of person who acts from pure concern for the whole, and a government powerful enough to make him. Tocqueville's reply: you will not get the new person, and the government you build while waiting for him will be the soft despotism that reduces a people to a flock of timid animals with the government as shepherd. The utopian plan takes away exactly the local responsibilities that teach self-interest rightly understood, and then complains that people have become selfish.

Adam Smith, who wrote a whole book about conscience before he wrote about markets, would have recognized the move. We cover that book in Before The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Wrote a Book About Conscience. Smith saw that commerce rewards serving strangers, a point we press in Markets Reward Serving Strangers, and That Is a Moral Achievement. Tocqueville saw that self-government rewards serving neighbors. Both men refused to choose between a low view of human nature and a high one. They took the true view: mixed, improvable, and dangerous when flattered.

What it means for a family now

A doctrine about the 1830s matters today only if it changes what a household does. This one does.

• Teach children the long horizon. The core skill of self-interest rightly understood is seeing how present choices land on future selves and on other people. Saving, keeping promises and finishing what you start are its daily exercises.
• Keep the local things local. Every function that moves from the town to the state, or the state to Washington, removes one school of public spirit. When a school board, a library board or a zoning hearing asks for volunteers, the doctrine says show up, because it is in your interest and because showing up is how citizens are made.
• Join something. A congregation, a service club, a coaching roster, a volunteer ambulance squad. Robert Nisbet argued that a people stripped of such communities will seek community in the state, a warning we read in Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging.
• Do not apologize for interest. A conservative does not have to pretend people are angels. Federalist No. 51 did not pretend either; it said that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. The task is to arrange things so ordinary interest pulls toward the common good, and to keep the faith that lifts some people above interest altogether.

Tocqueville's doctrine is not inspiring in the way a war poem is inspiring. It is inspiring in the way a well-run town is inspiring: quiet, durable and full of people who would be surprised to hear they were doing anything noble.

The case in brief

1. Tocqueville distinguished egoism, the old vice of grasping, from individualism, the new democratic habit of withdrawing from public life, and he feared the second more because it looks respectable and invites centralized power.
2. Americans answered individualism not by preaching self-sacrifice but by teaching self-interest rightly understood: that serving neighbors and the community serves oneself over the long run.
3. The doctrine works through habit, in townships and voluntary associations, and it relies on religion to extend people's horizon and govern their appetites, as Washington and Adams also insisted.
4. The objection that calculated virtue corrupts virtue mistakes a floor for a ceiling: habit transforms motive, faith supplies unconditional duty, and regimes that demanded pure selflessness produced cynicism instead.
5. The idea refutes both the cynic, who misreads his own interest, and the utopian, whose central power destroys the local schools of public spirit.

What you can do: find your town or county's list of boards and commissions on its official website, pick one meeting this month, and attend it in person.