Literature hews to standards outside of the democratic logic. A canonical work does not attain that status by majority consent. Claims of merit do not require a reader’s consent to be authoritative. And the pursuit of sublimity, literature’s proper object, reveals that men have always been created unequal in their intellectual endowments.

Literary excellence is not inherently political, and its claims need not raise a direct challenge to democracy. Yet in a society that exalts equality and promotes self-expression for its own sake, literature stands uneasily at the margins—tolerated, perhaps ignored.

As part of his seminal survey of America, Alexis de Tocqueville lingers for a few chapters on the reciprocal influences running between democracy and literature. By the time he reaches literature, De Tocqueville has toured through adjacent subjects such as Americans’ pursuit of arts and sciences. He has been critical, but the professed friend of democracy takes pains to convince readers that the “irresistible” democratic revolution does not trail cultural poverty in its wake.

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Yet honesty compels De Tocqueville to acknowledge the tensions between American democracy and literary achievement—tensions that are only sometimes fruitful. De Tocqueville observes that America is a civilized nation where “people are least occupied with literature.” Americans of that era often mistake literature for a trade. Thus, they pursue it, if at all, in the same commercial and practical spirit animating all their undertakings. Commerce and politics exert on literature more influence than literature does on either. American book vendors are glutted with rudimentary treatises and pamphlets on topical political concerns.

American verve for commerce extends material prosperity, and the newly prosperous develop a certain inclination towards literature. But the sources of that prosperity undermine the nascent interest by making it insensible to subtler intellectual joys. American readers buy works that “one can enjoy at that instant,” and they crave subjects that are “new and unexpected.” They wish, in short, to be entertained.

The country’s great men, devoted to politics, make literature their diversion, not their vocation. Still, on the edges of the nation’s dark frontier, Americans tend small flames of literary devotion. When De Tocqueville muses how he first read Shakespeare’s Henry V in an American “log house,” the play’s presence in that setting is more revealing than accidental. More than tragedies, romances, or comedies, Shakespeare’s tale of martial triumph, of men rallied to great acts against long odds, captivates the American reader whose energies are bent on securing his precarious existence.

In De Tocqueville’s time, not only cabin-dwellers, but America’s cultivated set satisfy their literary appetites with English fare. Their forefathers reviled English writers like Samuel Johnson for Tory-ism, but De Tocqueville observes that Americans still rely on English authors to supply their literary wants, they mimic English literary fashions, and they defer to English judgment even of American writers. The reason is not just a common tongue—England remains “aristocratic,” resisting the democratic winds blowing from across the Atlantic and across the English Channel.

Aristocracy, because of its inequality, produces certain literary greatness. De Tocqueville warns that aristocracies’ tendency towards isolation could deprive them of power both literary and political. But aristocracies relieve the few of harrying commercial cares, enabling the acquisition of that “profound” knowledge of “literary arts” that eludes most among the “agitated multitude” of the world’s new democracies.

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De Tocqueville, though, retains hope for a truly American literature. He explains that as societies move between conditions, there comes a period, maybe brief but fecund, when democratic virility and aristocratic sensibility “reign in accord over the human mind.”

Have De Tocqueville’s observations on American’s relation to literature fared well? America, though rarely lacking oligarchs, has never been aristocratic. But across two-and-a-half centuries, America has produced her own great writers. Whitman, Melville, Eliot, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Hemingway are read, translated, and admired the world over. Several were Nobel Laureates.

And yet today there is cause for pessimism, much of it traceable to the same tendencies De Tocqueville identified in early 19th century America.

The fixation on equality has overcome the academy with demands for representation based on authorial characteristics having nothing to do with the quality of their work. Literature faculties retreat from standards faster than their students depart for other disciplines. American love of novelty and commerce brought us large-language model “artificial intelligence” to write for us about books we have not read. Democratic desire for narratives that agitate the emotions produces a digital universe of content broad in array but shallow in depth.

Americans understand the ills that stem from democratic excesses. In the Constitution, they tempered democratic politics with republican forms. Because the cultivation of literature relies on influences “alien or even contrary to equality,” a similar recognition and restraint are required. For Americans who still aspire to a literary life, the answer may be that ancient maxim: to be in the world, not of it.