Chapter IV: Why The Americans Have Never Been So Eager As The French For
General Ideas In Political Matters

I observed in the last chapter, that the Americans show a less decided
taste for general ideas than the French; this is more especially true in
political matters. Although the Americans infuse into their legislation
infinitely more general ideas than the English, and although they pay
much more attention than the latter people to the adjustment of the
practice of affairs to theory, no political bodies in the United
States have ever shown so warm an attachment to general ideas as the
Constituent Assembly and the Convention in France. At no time has the
American people laid hold on ideas of this kind with the passionate
energy of the French people in the eighteenth century, or displayed the
same blind confidence in the value and absolute truth of any theory.
This difference between the Americans and the French originates in
several causes, but principally in the following one. The Americans form
a democratic people, which has always itself directed public affairs.
The French are a democratic people, who, for a long time, could only
speculate on the best manner of conducting them. The social condition of
France led that people to conceive very general ideas on the subject
of government, whilst its political constitution prevented it from
correcting those ideas by experiment, and from gradually detecting their
insufficiency; whereas in America the two things constantly balance and
correct each other.

It may seem, at first sight, that this is very much opposed to what I