Tocqueville in Israel

"The great advantage of the Americans," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, "is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution, and that they are born equal instead of becoming so." Tocqueville knew about the American Revolution in 1776, of course, but his point was that it was merely a change in political arrangements and not a social revolution. In contrast to Europeans, he argued, Americans arrived at a "state of democracy" without having to violently dispossess a privileged class and dismantle a feudal society based on caste inequality. That difference, he argued, was crucial to the success of democracy in America. The absence of a feudal past allowed Americans, in the words of Claus Offe's recent commentary on Tocqueville, to "enter into a stable and virtuous circle" in which democratic institutions and democratic "habits of the heart" supported and reinforced each other. But past conditions in Europe made instead for a vicious circle in which violent revolt and bloody revolutionary excess set the stage for a return to despotic rule. After all, anyone who has to dismantle a despotic and inegalitarian society has already been formed by it and therefore in all likelihood lacks the "habits of the heart" that are conducive to and even necessary for democratic liberty. (That lesson is arguably being driven home once again by the violence in present-day Iraq, where Saddam Hussein and his Baathist supporters were violently dispossessed by an American "revolution from above" – a revolution that did little to cultivate the "habits of the heart" necessary for democratic self-government there.) In short, as Claus Offe sums up Tocqueville's line of reasoning, "in Europe … the demos must be educated 'to' democracy, while the American people are educated 'by' democracy."

Tocqueville pointed to three sets of factors that shaped the viability of democracy in America and elsewhere: the most important was habits and customs, followed by laws and institutions, and lastly external conditions. When it comes to external conditions, America and Israel obviously differ greatly. Tocqueville emphasized, for instance, that Americans lacked powerful and hostile neighbors and therefore fear of war and conquest, which clearly cannot be said about Israel (which makes the success of democracy in Israel that much more remarkable). However, when it comes to the interplay between habits and institutions, an interesting comparison is possible with David Ben-Gurion's brand of "constructive" (as opposed to revolutionary) socialism.

On the one hand, just as Tocqueville believed that the absence of a feudal past allowed Americans to arrive at a state of democracy without a violent revolution, Ben-Gurion believed that the absence of a fully developed capitalist system in Jewish Palestine allowed socialist Zionists like himself to build socialism there without revolutionary class warfare. As Shlomo Avineri put it in his book The Making of Modern Zionism, the emergent Jewish working class and the socialist Zionist movement that mobilized and spoke for it would "naturally become the hegemonic factor" in Palestine, "not through class warfare, but through creating its own economy" along "public and cooperative lines." Ben-Gurion seems to have expected a virtuous circle similar to the one Tocqueville described: to build and to be built in the Land of Israel, as the old slogan goes. Just as the absence of a feudal past made America the preeminent bourgeois society, so the absence of a fully developed capitalist system in Jewish Palestine would enable it to become the exemplary socialist society. (As my previous post about the education strikes in Israel suggests, this hope did not pan out, at least in the long run.)

On the other hand, Ben-Gurion was keenly aware that Jewish immigrants to Palestine were not blank slates, that they brought with them habits of the heart from their former host societies that were detrimental to the political project of socialist Zionism and which would have to be negated if the project was to succeed. He understood Jewish Palestine as a product of creative destruction, constituted by a negation of the Exile and a break with the past. "The very realization of Zionism," Ben-Gurion wrote in 1933, "is nothing else than carrying out this deep historical transformation occurring in the life of the Hebrew people. This transformation does not limit itself to its geographical aspect, to the movement of Jewish masses from the countries of the Diaspora to the renascent homeland – but in a socioeconomic transformation as well: it means taking … uprooted, impoverished, sterile Jewish masses, living parasitically off … an alien economic body and dependent on others [in Europe] – and introducing them into primary production, in industry and handicraft – and making them economically independent and self-sufficient [in Palestine].” In this way, the Land of Israel not only "provides for all her children," but "revives them, [and] makes them into citizens” (emphasis added). In short, Ben-Gurion insisted that in some ways the project of building socialism in Jewish Palestine did require the dismantling of the Old Regime, a regime that existed twice, in things and in minds, in the institutions that immigrants left behind but also in the habits and customs they brought with them; it was necessary not only to take the Jewish people out of Exile, but to take the Exile out of the Jewish people.