Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America likely rates as the ‘canonical’ work of political philosophy most esteemed by professional political scientists today. One often encounters those who have never read Aristotle’s Politics or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and Marx remains a much-controverted figure, but Tocqueville enjoys a privileged place.
He does have his critics, however. They tend to be captious. Following are the principal objections to his book, with replies.
1. Tocqueville doesn’t understand the American founding, which was intended to secure the unalienable, natural rights to equality—equality of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Tocqueville isn’t concerned with the American political founding as such, although he does devote substantial attention to the Constitution, offering what amounts to a good summary of The Federalist, a book seldom read in Europe, then or now. The ‘founding’ Tocqueville wants to understand is the founding of democracy in America—the establishment of a civil society in which there are no titled aristocrats, like himself, a society of civic equals—not equality of natural rights but “equality of conditions” (Introduction, p.3). Equality is the “primary fact,” “the generative fact” that influences American laws, the “maxims” of those who govern, and “the particular habits [of] the governed” (Introduction, p.3). The “social state” has “become democratic” (Introduction, p.9).
He wants to understand this because the aristocracies are in decline everywhere, but aristocrats continue to trouble European civic life. “A great democratic revolution is taking place among us,” among Europeans, and there are those “who hope to stop it” (Introduction, p.3, emphasis added). Europeans need to understand that “Equality can be established in civil society and not reign in the political world,” that political freedom can be lost under such conditions (II.ii.1). Political freedom is harder to maintain than civil-social equality. Without a strong aristocratic class located between central government and peoples, the regime choice now becomes that between “democratic freedom,” republicanism, and “the tyranny of the Ceasars,” “the unlimited power of one alone” (I.ii.9). Tocqueville seeks to persuade his fellow aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it: “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day” (Introduction, p.7). “The organization and establishment of democracies among Christians is the great political problem of our time” (I.ii.9). While Americans “furnish useful lessons in this,” Tocqueville’s adjuration has nothing to do with the American political founding, which Tocqueville admires; it is directed to Europeans, the French first of all.
This democratic or egalitarian civil society might support any number of regimes—rule of one, few or many, good or bad. The political history of France up to Tocqueville’s time, and of France and Europe for a century and a half, and of Europe again today, shows the urgency of his enterprise. “There is no question of reconstructing an aristocratic society, but of making freedom issue from the bosom of the democratic society in which god makes us live” (II.iv.7).
“I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions. I wanted to become acquainted with it if only to know at least what we [Europeans] ought to hope or to fear from it, ” given the advance of democracy in Europe (Introduction, p.13). The failure to see that the democracy considered in Democracy in America is civil-social equality and neither a natural right nor a form of government is, one might say, the primary error, the generative error, that readily leads to a host of cognate errors.
2. But the very feature you point to, Tocqueville’s emphasis on civil-social equality, denigrates the political, and especially denigrates the work of statesmen and of citizens generally because it focuses on the ‘given’ fact of the advance of that equality, downplaying the importance of the conscious, prudent choices made by political actors. That is, Tocqueville isn’t primarily a political scientist at all, despite his call for “a new political science for a world altogether new” (Introduction, 7). Unlike Publius in The Federalist, and despite his own extensive political career, he is really a mere sociologist, attempting to explain political life by attending to sub-political causes.
The fact that Tocqueville devotes one of his longest chapters to “The Federal Constitution of the United States” (I.i.8) should be sufficient to impress the contrary opinion upon even the dullest sensibilities. There, Tocqueville vigorously explicates and applauds the republican institutions designed by the Framers.
He also praises the jury system that long predated the founding. Juries are where the sovereign people meet law and “the idea of right,” here defined as “political virtue” or “duties toward society” which combat “individual selfishness” (I.ii.8). Juries put the people in contact with an “aristocracy” consonant with democracy: lawyers and judges, who teach them the nuances of law and how to apply the law.
But even earlier than that, one might notice his treatment of the importance of estate law. “I am astonished,” the exclaims, “that ancient and modern writers have not attributed to estate laws a greater influence on the course of human affairs. These laws belong, it is true, to the civil order; but they ought to be placed at the head of all political institutions, for they have an incredible influence on the social state of peoples, of which political laws are only the expression.” That is why “the legislator regulates the estates of citizen once and he rests for centuries; motion having been given to his work, he can withdraw his hand from it; the machine acts by its own force and is directed as if by itself toward a goal indicated in advance”—by the legislator. Estate law makes the difference between an aristocratic and a democratic civil society. (I.i.3). And, of course, it is to be noted that the Framers of the United States Constitution outlawed primogeniture, thereby preventing the kind of aristocracy then seen in Europe from arising in America. More generally, American legislators “oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy” (I.ii.9: “Would Laws on Mores Suffice to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere Than in America?”).
The purpose of carefully describing and explaining democracy in civil society to Europeans is precisely to give them the basis for prudent and just legislation under modern conditions. Such democratic “penchants” as unpolitical “individualism” and statist centralization—the latter especially dangerous if animated by “the science of despotism,” which consists in satisfying the material desires of the people (II.iv.4)—are “not invincible”; “my principal goal in writing this book has been to combat them” (II.iv.3). “The whole art of the legislator consists in discerning well and in advance these natural inclinations of human societies in order to know when one must aid the efforts of citizens and when it would rather be necessary to slow them down. For these obligations differ according to the times. Only the goal toward which the human race should always tend is unmoving; the means of getting it there vary constantly.” (II.ii.15).
3. But what exactly is that “goal”? Here, Tocqueville fails to acknowledge the importance of unalienable natural rights, fails even to mention the Declaration of Independence in this very long book, fails to understand the Founders’ moral conception of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as rational. By failing to mention the Declaration of Independence, he takes no cognizance of the rightful goal of government, which is to secure unalienable natural rights for the citizens within a civil society.
It is true that Tocqueville never mentions the Declaration; he has no reason or need to do so, and some reason not to. The aristocratic statesmen of Europe in his day had seen enough of such declarations, particularly the French declaration of “The Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which had instigated a fair amount of violence against, well, aristocrats only a few decades earlier.
But that is hardly to say that Tocqueville denies the existence of unalienable natural rights or provides no sense of what the “goal,” the purpose, the telos of the human race should “tend.” “I conceive a society…in which all, regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble”—in the Declaration’s language, government by the consent of the governed; a society “in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine, and love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment. Each having rights and being assured of preserving his rights, a manly confidence and a sort of reciprocal condescension between the classes would be established, as far from haughtiness as from baseness. The people, instructed in their true interests, would understand that to profit from society’s benefits, one must submit to its burdens. The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be sheltered from both tyranny and license.” (Introduction, 8-9).
That is, Tocqueville shares with Aristotle an understanding of the indispensable effect political life, ruling and being ruled in turn, produces in the cultivation of human nature. In political activity, “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another” (II.ii.5). At the same time, political right, the freedom to form political associations, is not the same as natural right; natural right begins with the recognition that men and women everywhere are of the same species (II.iii.1). Accordingly, “What one calls a republic in the United States is the tranquil reign of the majority…. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights”—both of these “barriers” to tyranny recognized by the majority (I.ii.10: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). The exception to this is slavery, an instance of “the order of nature reversed” that was begun by Christians in the 16th century and imported to America in the 17th century (I.ii.10: “Position that the Black Race Occupies in the United States”). And even in “the America of the South, nature, sometimes recovering its rights, comes to establish equality between whites and blacks” (ibid.). Overall, however, Americans “believe that at birth each has received the ability to govern himself”; this ability owes its “moral authority” to “universal reason” among human beings by nature and its political power to “the universality of citizens” as distinguished from subjects (I.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”).
4. Tocqueville fails to recognize the Founders’ conception of morality, (e.g., the natural right to liberty) as rational, instead attributing morality to religion and liberty to the realm of political contestation.
This again confuses the social manifestations of morality and liberty with their substantive content. In America, everything is not permitted “in the interest of society” (I.ii.9: “Indirect Influence the Religious Beliefs exert on Political Society in the United States”). Tocqueville finds religion to be the social guarantor and social source of morality and of rights, especially in democratic conditions. And it is necessary for political freedom. “How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond is not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if has not submitted to God?” (ibid.). He does not claim that morality and rights have no content beyond moeurs, only that moeurs embody morality and rights. As to rationality, Tocqueville maintains that “There are no great men without virtue; without respect for rights, there is no great people: one can almost say that there is no society; for, what is a union of rational and intelligent beings among whom force is the sole bond?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in America.” Emphasis added.). Further, “the means of inculcating in men the idea of rights and of making it, so to speak, fall upon their senses” is “to give the peaceful exercise of certain rights to all of them” (ibid.). That is, first, the idea of rights is distinct from making that idea ‘sensible’ to them; there is no reason to assume that the idea itself is irrational; second, religion is not the sole source of making rights felt and respected. Political life as Aristotle defined it, ruling and being ruled, also does that. While some of the harsh religious laws enacted by the Puritans “bring shame to the human mind,” more generally in America, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom “advance in accord and seem to lend each other a mutual support,” whereby “religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man” and freedom “considers religion as the safeguard of moeurs; and moeurs as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration” (I.i.2). And this is quite natural: “Religion is…only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself,” “one of the constituent principles of human nature” (I.ii.9: “On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America”). The “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal” form part of human nature itself (II.ii.12). Further, religion rightly understood has rational content. “It submits the truths of the other world to individual reason” (I.ii.9: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). Consequently, “one ordinarily sees even in the midst of [Americans’] zeal something so tranquil, so methodical, so calculated, that it seems to be reason much more than heart that leads them to the altar”—a Pascalian wager essayed by persons who for the most part have never read Pascal (ibid.).
The tensions among equality and “human freedom” and religion exists not in America but in Europe. “Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God, will not be loath to see all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning” because in France the republican revolutionaries were animated by Enlightenment rationalism, their monarchist and aristocratic enemies by traditional Catholic piety. Tocqueville would correct both sides. The non-religious and often irreligious “partisans of freedom” understand freedom as “the origin of the noblest virtues” and “the source of the greatest goods,” but they need to “call religion to their aid” for two reasons: “the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of moeurs“; and moeurs cannot be “founded without [religious] beliefs.” Tocqueville aims at an alliance between ‘secularists’ and the pious for freedom—reversing the coalitions seen in the French Revolution. (Introduction, 10-12). Against the materialism of the Enlightenment philosophes who inspired the French revolutionaries, Tocqueville insists that “the soul must remain great and strong, if only to be able from time to time to put its force and its greatness in the service of the body” (II.ii.16); paradoxically, if you want the benefits materialists promise, you had better not become a materialist yourself. Along with political freedom, religion “is the most precious bequest of aristocratic ages,” directing the egalitarian souls ‘upward’ under conditions that pull them ‘sideward’ and ‘downward.’
5. Because he fails to recognize equal natural rights, he only envisions a possible civil war between the white and black races in America, not between non-slaveholding and slaveholding whites.
This ignores the fact that the American Civil War did in fact mobilize black troops against the whites of the Confederacy. It also ignores the fact that Tocqueville does not consider wars within confederal democracies such as the United States to be civil wars but “only disguised foreign wars,” given the power of the state governments in confederacies (II.iii.26). Accordingly, “the only case in which a civil war could arise” in America “is one in which the army, being divided, one part would raise the standard of revolt and the other would remain faithful” (ibid.). And of course this is exactly what happened, as seen in the tragic case of General Robert E. Lee, among others. But more tellingly still, although Tocqueville doesn’t predict the American Civil War, he does predict disunion, due to the difference of moeurs between North and South—a difference he attributes to the effect of the presence of large numbers of slaves in the South on Southern slaveholders, whom he regards as examples of aristocracy within democracy (II.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”). And disunion did happen, if not de jure (as Lincoln insisted) then de facto, for four years.
6. Since Americans’ “destiny” is “singular” in that “they have taken from the English aristocracy the idea of individual rights and the taste for local freedoms” (II.iv.4), this means that he supposes that they derive the substance of those rights from a civil-social class.
This is an illogical inference. If, to oversimplify, one were to say that the American Founders took their ideas of rights from Hobbes and (even more) from Locke, would that not then mean that they took them from philosophers who lived in an aristocratic society, albeit one that was increasingly ’embourgeoised’? Yet, that has nothing to do with whether or not this conception of rights is right. Nor does Tocqueville suggest any such thing.
On the contrary. Tocqueville does indeed devote a section to “the idea of rights in the United States.” In it, he writes, “The idea of right is nothing other than the idea of virtue introduced into the political world. It is with the idea of rights that men have defined what license and tyranny are,” and idea by which men are “enlightened.” The right to property, for example, comes to be felt when the child who takes from others learns that others can take from him; politically, in America each individual owns property, and so does not advocate the expropriation of wealth from those who own more property than he. That is, rights are rational ideas, ideas of enlightened men, but that doesn’t mean that they will be respected simply because they are rational. (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”).
In modern, ‘democratic’ times, religion and morality will not serve as adequate sources of the respect for rights. “Do you not see that religions are weakening and that the divine notion of rights is disappearing? Do you not find that moeurs are being altered, and that with them the moral notion of rights is being effaced?” This is happening because religious “beliefs” now “give way to reasoning,” moral sentiments to “calculation.” “If in the midst of that universal disturbance you do not come to bind the idea of rights to the personal interest that offers itself as the only immobile point in the human heart, what will then remain to you go govern the world, except fear?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”). This is exactly what Publius inclines to say. That is, the ‘rational choice calculations‘ of individuals living in democratized and increasingly ‘secularized’ societies must be directed by prudent legislation aimed at securing rights. Neither Publius nor Tocqueville does it implies that rights are products of self-interest, any more than they are the products of religious beliefs or of moral sentiments.
Finally, while the Americans “took” the idea of individual rights—i.e., civil and political rights—and the taste for local freedoms from the aristocrats, they have transformed them into “that bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world had still not offered a complete picture” (I.i.2). The settlers were smallholders, not grandees. As to natural rights, Tocqueville quotes John Winthrop,” himself paraphrasing Aristotle, who wrote that “Liberty is not to do what you want: it must be good and just”—not only “civil” but “moral” (ibid.). From this has arisen (now glancing at one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters) a “natural aristocracy that flows from enlightenment and virtue” (ibid.).
7. Tocqueville speaks of rights as if they were given by human beings to one another, not by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And so, he writes, “I know only two manners of making equality reign in the political world: rights must be given to each citizen or to no one” (I.i.3).
Here, Tocqueville explicitly refers to the right to equality in politics, which he does not regard as divinely ordained, as he does not believe in ‘divine right’ of kings or of anyone else. He addresses a problem endemic to politics as conducted in democratic/egalitarian civil societies. In them, the passion for equality is stronger than the passion for liberty. The passion for liberty can be either “manly and legitimate” or “depraved,” dragging everyone down to the proverbial lowest common denominator. Political “absolutism”—in France, during the later decades of Old-Regime monarchism and more recently under the rule of Napoleon I—brought the people to “equality in servitude.” Even “inequality in freedom,” seen in feudalism, is preferable to that. Equality in freedom is better than both, but “when citizens are all nearly equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power,” since they are no longer shielded from the centralized modern state by the aristocrats. (I.i.3). [1] To avoid this danger, Tocqueville famously proposes the substitution of civic associations for the now-vanished feudal estates.
8. Tocqueville followed Rousseau in rejecting natural law, regarding all general ideas as false and attributing the equality principle not to nature but to Christianity, as when he writes that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (II.i.3). Insofar as he admits ‘generality’ into his argument, he endorses Rousseau’s General Will, not natural right or natural law.
The quotation itself suffices to show that Tocqueville regards Christianity as having made the equality principle understood, not that Christianity somehow invented it. He mentions this in reference to the doctrine of natural slavery, best known from a passage in Aristotle’s Politics. “The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each bears from birth” (II.i.3). But if human beings as a species bear an equal right to freedom from birth, then that can be nothing other than a natural right. Christianity impressed this truth upon Europeans when Europe was aristocratic and therefore disinclined to perceive it; it was the entering wedge of the principle of equality, leading over the centuries to the social condition of equality, as seen in Tocqueville’s history of France (Introduction, 3-6).
The claim that Tocqueville adheres to Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will is based on an out-of-context misreading. The reference to “the sovereignty of the human race” comes in his discussion of majority tyranny. “I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything”—the maxim soon to be advanced in America by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. “Nonetheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of the majority. Am I contradicting myself?” Obviously not, since might, “power,” is not right, but Tocqueville puts it differently: “A general law exists that has been made or at least adopted not only by the majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. This law is justice,” which “forms the boundary of each people’s right.” “Therefore, when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not deny to the majority the right to command; I only appeal from the majority of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.” (I.ii.7). No competent student of political philosophy can fail to see that Tocqueville here refers to the law of nations. The law of nations is not the same as the law of nature but it in no way contradicts that law; in fact, it can and did incorporate it, as seen in what was then the most important recent treatise on the subject, Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations, subtitled Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs by Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, originally published in 1776. As Tocqueville observes, “only God can be omnipotent without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power” (I.ii.7).
Tocqueville makes this even more explicit in his chapter “On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies.” “The human race,” he writes, “feels permanent and general needs that have given birth to moral laws; all men have naturally attached in all places and all times the idea of blame and of shame to the nonobservance of them. Evading them they have called to do evil, submitting to them, to do good.” Evil “penchants” are “condemnable in the eyes of the general reason and the universal conscience of the human race,” although some of these might be condemned “only feebly” in a given civil society under certain circumstances; in the United States, “the love of wealth” is necessary in order “to transform the vast uninhabited continent” that Americans have come to possess (II.iii.18). This is only to recognize the adjustment of naturally derived moral laws to the variety of human conditions, as Aristotle commends in the Nicomachean Ethics.
9. Worse, Tocqueville doubts the truth of natural equality because he is a nominalist who rejects such a “general idea.” “God does not ponder the human race in general”; being omniscient, He “has no need of general ideas,” unlike mere humans. In reality, Tocqueville continues, “there are no beings in nature exactly alike”; ergo, there are no “identical facts” and “no rules generally applicable to several objects at once.” We humans are left with our “incomplete notions.” (II.i.3).
As Tocqueville good-humoredly acknowledges, his very “use of the word equality in an absolute sense” exemplifies this necessary human intellectual practice (II.i.16). The habit is especially strong among those who live in democratic conditions, partly because there really are more similarities among individuals in such societies. But this does not commit him to nominalism; it simply cautions his readers to pay attention to details, not to lose sight of individuals. There is a crucial political as well as a philosophic reason to do so: sweeping generalizations in political life can lead to tyranny. “To force all men to march in the same march, toward the same object—that is a human idea. To introduce an infinite variety into actions, but to combine them in a manner so that all these actions lead us by a thousand diverse ways toward the accomplishment of one great design—that is a divine idea” (Appendix XXIV, p.703).
10. If not a nominalist, then Tocqueville is a historicist, a sort of democratized Hegelian, propounding a claim that social equality is part of an inevitable ‘march of history.’
In his correspondence, Tocqueville mentioned Hegelians he had met in Germany, remarking shortly, “I detested the Hegelians.” [2] Hegelianism is a form of pantheism, and in the Democracy Tocqueville decries that doctrine. “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries; all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite in combat against it” (II.i.8). In the same chapter, Tocqueville criticizes the immoderate perfectionism that democratic souls to which human souls in democracy so often succumb. Pantheism plus perfectionism equal historicism incline the soul of man under democracy to such historicist doctrines as ‘Progressivism,’ which Tocqueville’s discussion anticipates. Tocqueville also rejects the materialist historicism of Artur de Gobineau, with whom he engaged in extensive correspondence. [3]
Far from being a historicist, Tocqueville regards historicism as a danger endemic to democratic conditions, as seen in his critique of “historians who live in democratic times,” who “take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate…subject[ing] them either to an inflexible providence or to a sort of blind fatality” (II.i.20). “It is not enough for them to show how the facts have come about; they also take pleasure in making one see that it could not have happened otherwise” (ibid.). Aristocratic historians, by contrast, “particularly those of antiquity,” make it seem “that to become master of his fate and to govern those like him, a man has only to know how to subdue himself,” to subject his passions to his reason (ibid.). But while “historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything than how to obey”; “if this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times, passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public mind, one can foresee that it would so paralyze the movement of the new societies and reduce Christians to Turks” (ibid.). Already incline to materialism, democrats “are only too inclined to doubt free will because each of them feels himself limited on all sides by his weakness,” pressured by a ‘mass’ society of equals, no longer the ‘vertical’ pressure from aristocrats above them but the ‘horizontal’ pressure of fellow democrats around them. Against this, one must “willingly grant force and independence to men united in a social body,” in civil and political associations, as “it is a question of elevating souls and not completing their prostration” (ibid.).
The charge of historicism leveled against Tocqueville usually arises in response to his passages in the Introduction, emphasizing the “providential” advance of democracy since Jesus of Nazareth laid down the principle of the equality of men under God. By Providence, Tocqueville means “a thousand circumstances independent of the will of man” (I.ii.9: “On the Accidental or Providential Causes Contributing to the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States”). In America, such circumstances include the absence of formidable neighbors, the absence of a large capital city, ancestors who imported the “love of equality and freedom” to these shores, and the sheer size of the continent, which makes “nature itself” work “for the people” by giving them places from which to escape from the rule of any aristocratic class that might form ‘back East’ (ibid.). But he immediately observes that these “providential” causes are not politically decisive; French Canada, also an egalitarian civil society, rests under monarchy.
Democracy has replaced aristocracy not because ‘History’ so dictates but because it is more natural. “One can change human institutions, but not men” (II.iii.13)—an observation that contradicts the Rousseauian doctrine of the malleability of human nature taken up soon thereafter by historicists. “The manners of aristocracy placed beautiful illusions over human nature,” illusions that could not withstand the slow workings of reality (II.iii.14), but “the constitution of man” is “everywhere the same” (II.iii.17). This goes right down to the most fundamental distinction among humans, the distinction between male and female: “The reason of one is as sure as the other, and her intelligence as clear” as his (II.ii.12).
In sum, to understand the American founding, the founding of a republic on a democratic civil-social base, one must go to the writings of the statesmen who effected it. They explained themselves, thoroughly and often eloquently. To understand democracy as a civil-social condition, its causes and effects, its advantages and its dangers, one must consult Tocqueville.
Notes
- See also II.ii.1: “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality Than for Freedom.”
- In a letter to Francisque de Corcelle from Bonn dated July 22, 1854, Tocqueville elaborates: “You are, of course, aware of the part played by philosophy during the past fifty years in Germany, and especially by the school of Hegel. He was protected, as, no doubt, you know, by the ruling powers, because his doctrines asserted that, in a political sense, all established facts ought to be submitted to as legitimate; and that the very circumstance of their existence was sufficient to make obedience to them a duty. This doctrine gave rise at length to the anti-Christian and anti-spiritual schools, which have been endeavoring to pervert Germany for the last twenty years, especially for the last ten; and finally to the socialist philosophy, which had so great a share in producing the confusion of 1848. Hegel exacted submission to the ancient established powers of his own time; which he held to be legitimate, not only from existence, but from their origin. His scholars wished to establish powers of another kind, which became, according to their views, equally legitimate and binding. This did not suit the official protectors of Hegel. Yet from this Pandora’s box [i.e., “this sensual and socialist philosophy’] have escaped all sorts of moral diseases from which the [German] people is still suffering.” That is, not only does Tocqueville detest Hegelianism, he also clearly sees that materialist historicism that derives from it (Marx being the preeminent example), as well as the denial of political liberty regimes established on the principles of historicism attempt to legitimate.
- Alexis de Tocqueville: Correspondence with Gobineau. John Lukacs, editor and translator: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.
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