CHAPTER 2 Alexis de Tocqueville

For most of the great social thinkers of the nineteenth century, the changes in European society associated with the Industrial Revolution and the political upheavals of the modern age (including especially the French Revolution) were by no means isolated phenomena. Rather, they tended to see them as part of a much grander development, of whose continuing advance they themselves were living witnesses.¹ This is particularly true of Alexis de Tocqueville; from the beginning of his writing career to the end, he was profoundly aware of the fact that, as he puts it in Democracy in America, “the great revolution by which [modern society] has been created is not yet over.”² In his last great work, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, he repeats the idea, stating that “the Revolution is still operative.”³

What this Revolution consisted of in Tocqueville’s conception was largely a “progressive decay of the institution stemming from the Middle Ages”;⁴ to employ terms which sociologists have since made familiar, what Tocqueville saw was an ongoing replacement of the relationships, values, sentiments and ideas associated with Gemeinschaft, by those pertaining to Gesellschaft. Within the family, between landowners and their tenants, masters and servants, among those in the same profession, and between subjects and rulers, the old ways of traditional European society were giving way to new ones, loosening group ties and emphasizing the individual’s reason, well-being and will.⁵ At the center of this Revolution, Tocqueville placed the concept of democracy.

In a few famous lines in the introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville traced the great transition which had, since about the turn of the millennium, brought to the fore the principle of equality, and now seemed to be preparing its complete victory. With “a kind of religious awe,” he discerns the will of God in this seemingly inevitable historical evolution:

The gradual development of the principle of equality is, therefore, a providential fact. It has all the chief characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.⁶

Five years later, he repeats this view: “I am firmly convinced that the democratic revolution which we are now beholding is an irresistible fact, against which it would be neither desirable nor prudent to contend,” and adds that he intends to concentrate mainly on pointing out the dangers of this process and how they might best be avoided.⁷ It is in fact against this background of an inevitable trend towards democracy that Tocqueville seeks to make a place for the values which were closest to his heart. “No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country,”⁸ he wrote; but it was his hope that with knowledge, intelligence and spirit, the statesman and even the political philosopher can exert sufficient influence to make a difference.

What then were these values for which Tocqueville struggled? There is little need to emphasize that among the highest of these was liberty. “Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing,”⁹ he asserted; and, on another occasion, he wrote, “I regard, as I have always done, liberty as the greatest of all goods.”¹⁰ Towards the end of his life, in a touching passage in The Old Régime, he speaks of the love of liberty which noble spirits experience: “ils la considèrent elle-même comme un bien si précieux et si nécessaire qu’aucun autre ne pourrait les consoler de sa perte et qu’ils se consolent de tout en la goûtant.”¹¹ Freedom in the negative sense, the “liberty of the moderns” of which Constant wrote, which consists in the absence of coercion, was a principal value of Tocqueville’s.

Often, however, Tocqueville also uses the term “liberty” in the sense of the right to participate in political decision-making, generally on the local level. For example, in his chapter on “Why Democratic Nations Show a More Ardent and Enduring Love of Equality Than of Liberty,” in the second volume of Democracy in America, the sort of liberty that is referred to is this kind of political liberty.¹² This comes out most sharply, perhaps, in the foreword to The Old Régime. There, in discussing the evils which beset modern democratic society, he states, “Freedom and freedom alone can extirpate these vices. For only freedom can deliver the members of a community from that isolation which is the lot of the individual left to his own devices, and compelling [contraindre] them to get in touch with each other, promote an active sense of fellowship.”¹³ Here he is writing of political liberty, and the irony of using the term “liberty” in connection with compelling a more intense association among men appears to escape him. We will touch later on certain problems raised by Tocqueville’s exaltation of political participation; here I wish only to suggest that it represents a verbal connecting link, as it were, between liberty in the negative sense and his other controlling value, the realization of a certain sort of human personality.

No-one who has read the works of Tocqueville can fail to perceive that a profound admiration for energetic, passionate and heroic characters breaks through again and again. “I rejoice in finding [people] praiseworthy,” he wrote Gobineau, “and nothing is so delightful to me as are sentiments of admiration when they seem warranted.”¹⁴ What particularly evoked his admiration was the spectacle of grandeur in human character and action. He admits that he has been concerned, in his discussion of eighteenth-century France, to “throw into relief” virtues such as “a healthy independence, high ambitions, faith in oneself and in a cause” wherever he found them.¹⁵ Later he speaks with evident feeling of many of the men of that era:

this spirit of independence kept alive in many individuals their sense of personality and encouraged them to retain their color and relief. More than this, it fostered a healthy self-respect and often an overmastering desire to make a name for themselves. This is why we find in eighteenth-century France so many outstanding personalities, those men of genius, proud and greatly daring, who made the Revolution what it was: at once the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations.¹⁶

The same almost Renaissance respect for energy and force, largely irrespective of the end aimed at (so long as it was of great scope),¹⁷ is shown in response to Gobineau’s suggestion that France was a nation in decline: Tocqueville asks whether it had not “produced a constant stream of great writers during the past three centuries, stirring and moving the spirit of mankind most powerfully—whether in the right or wrong direction may be arguable, but their power one cannot doubt.”¹⁸

This appears to be above all the sense in which Tocqueville was an aristocrat in politics. It is not difficult to see a picture of himself in his description of the aristocratic posture:

Aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and inhuman actions, but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even while they indulge in them. The effect is to raise greatly the general pitch of society. In aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man.¹⁹

This aspect of Tocqueville’s thought is linked to a number of his recurrent preoccupations, for instance, his emphasis on the need to arouse pride in modern-day man, and relatedly, his horror of all theories which suggest that man is a helpless pawn in the hands of fate (this comes out most strongly, of course, in his dispute with Gobineau on racism). Here, I would like to indicate its manifestation in another, less appealing area of his thinking, and one which has only recently begun to receive the attention it ought to have: Tocqueville’s commitment to the imperialism of the European nations and his admiration of war.²⁰ Since they are relatively unexamined aspects of his thought, a somewhat extended discussion will be necessary to put them in proper perspective.

As far as imperialism is concerned, we should note that, practically, Tocqueville worked for the French government in connection with its pacification of Algeria. Theoretically, he went even beyond his friend Beaumont’s attitude, expressed in the latter’s book on Ireland: “What is an empire which consents to dismember itself? Is it not a power in decline which diminishes in extent, or does it not, in an event, appear to be?”²¹ Tocqueville believed positively in the value of empire, for its civilizing work, but more for the sake of the imperial power. While Nassau Senior, representative of the Little England position, wrote Tocqueville that it was his view that “India is and always has been a great misfortune to us; and, that if it were possible to get quit of it, we should be richer and stronger,”²² and much of English liberal opinion shared his view, Tocqueville was of a different position. The writer who had traced the discovery and settlement of the American continent by a free people found it possible to write to an English friend as follows:

There has never been anything under the sun as extraordinary as the conquest, and above all the government of India by the English, anything which from every corner of the globe more attracts the imagination of men to that small island of whose very name the Greeks were unaware. Do you believe, madame, that a people can, after having filled this immense space in the imagination of the human species, withdraw from it with impunity?²³

To Gobineau, Tocqueville confided that he saw European imperialism as another manifestation of God’s will; nations which had been savage hordes only a few centuries before have now undertaken the domination of the globe; he adds, characteristically, that they “are often the greatest rogues, but at least they are rogues to whom God gave will and power.”²⁴ When, in Democracy, he speaks of the nations which, through their conception and carrying out of vast designs have altered the course of history, those he mentions are the imperial peoples par excellence, the Romans and the English.²⁵

Even more surprising, perhaps, than Tocqueville’s enthusiasm for imperialist ventures is his defense of war as a valuable social institution. His belligerent attitude during the “Eastern Crisis” of 1840 earned him the censures of his friends, Senior and John Stuart Mill,²⁶ and the pacifism of the July Monarchy was one of the bourgeois traits he held against it. But Mill really had little reason to be surprised, having reviewed and presumably carefully read both volumes of the Democracy. In the second volume, after discussing the factors which made for less frequent wars under the conditions of modern society, Tocqueville states:

I do not wish to speak ill of war: war almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises its character. In some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth of certain propensities that naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are liable. War has great advantages.²⁷

Here Tocqueville is joining the ranks of other non-utilitarian liberals, whose love of individuality per se and of effective and energetic personalities was also sometimes so great as to lead them to mourn the seeming disappearance of war from the central place it had filled in European history in modern times. Wilhelm von Humboldt furnished a good example of this tendency when he wrote, towards the end of the eighteenth century:

Ist mir der Krieg eine der heilsamsten Erscheinungen zur Bildung des Menschengeschlechts, und ungern seh’ ich ihn nach und nach immer mehr vom Schauplatz zurücktreten.²⁸

This is closely linked to Humboldt’s disdain for the small-minded preference for pleasure over greatness of character and achievement. Rather naively he asserts: “Gewiss ist noch kein Mensch tief genug gesunken, um für sich selbst Wohlstand und Glück der Grösse vorzuziehen.”²⁹ The connection between these two positions is clear enough: war is the least self-indulgent and hedonistic of activities (at least when waged by relatively prosperous modern societies, which do not primarily engage in war for reasons of plunder; the taking of booty by modern armies is also very incidental to their main purpose), and while it develops the personality by promoting such virtues as comradeship, the sense of personal honor, etc., it represents above all the ultimate in self-sacrifice for the soldier. For this reason war was able to exert a certain appeal on those among the liberals who feared that hedonism was a danger to their ideal of personality; this was the case, for instance, with Benjamin Constant.³⁰

But neither Humboldt nor Constant went as far as Tocqueville did when he termed war a “necessary corrective.” Constant, in fact, explicitly asserts that the advantages of war pertain to particular stages of social evolution, which have now been superseded.³¹ It is otherwise with Tocqueville. Here, even more clearly than in the case of imperialism, we see that he is following out the implications of his commitment to energy, grandeur and passion as values independent of liberty. For he is under no illusions as to the problems created for a liberal society by engaging in war:

The democratic tendency that leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the right of private persons is much more rapid and constant among those nations that are exposed by their position to great and frequent wars than among all others.³²

What we have in the deliberate promotion of occasional wars is an instance of what Tocqueville suggests the statesman should look upon as one of his tasks. Considering that that which “is most to be dreaded is that in the midst of the small, incessant occupations of private life, ambition should lose its vigor and its greatness; that the passions of man should abate, but at the same time be lowered; so that the march of society should every day become more tranquil and less aspiring,” Tocqueville proposes the following:

I think, then, that the leaders of modern society would be wrong to seek to lull the community by a state of too uniform and too peaceful happiness, and that it is well to expose it from time to time to matters of difficulty and danger in order to raise ambition and to give it a field of action.³³

Here there is no suggestion that the purpose in exposing the community to difficulty and danger is to better maintain liberty; passionate and vigorous action are considered goods in themselves, deserving of cultivation by the political authorities.

Thus, in considering Tocqueville’s profound wish to secure a place for religion in the modern world, we must be aware that freedom alone is not always what is on his mind; that sometimes, at least, he is willing to sacrifice it to his aesthetic ideal of human personality. Tocqueville writes not simply as a liberal, but, as he himself put it (but with a different meaning): “a liberal of a new kind.”

But, whether or not he was a liberal of a new kind, Tocqueville shared a number of the basic ideas of earlier nineteenth-century liberalism. Near, if not at, the center of the political problem is how government may be limited;³⁴ for the tendency of the state to increase its power is so clearly attested to by history that it may be regarded “in the nature of all governments to seek constantly to enlarge their sphere of action”;³⁵ it is an “instinctive desire” on their part.³⁶

In Democracy, Tocqueville dates the great increase of centralization and government regulation “everywhere” from about the outbreak of the French Revolution;³⁷ as far as France was concerned, however, it is a much older phenomenon, dating from the time of Philip the Fair.³⁸ Part of the great achievement of his work on the Old Régime, of course, was to show the extent to which there existed continuity between the policy and guiding principles of French monarchy and those of the French Revolution (with the exception of a brief period under the National Assembly) and, especially, Napoleon. Already by the eighteenth century in France the government had become a sort of “Divine Providence”;³⁹ both in regard to local institutions and authorities, and in connection with the private individual, it played “the part of an indefatigable mentor” and kept “the nation in quasi-paternal tutelage.”⁴⁰

This is a development which has continued into the nineteenth century; it has been promoted by reactionaries as well as revolutionaries. Just as there was reason for Louis XVI to rejoice at much of the work of the Constituent Assembly in demolishing the old immediate powers in France,⁴¹ the monarchs who combined against the Revolution nevertheless learned much from it, and in many respects, in the period in which Tocqueville wrote, were copying its methods.⁴²

In general, the process by which the aristocracy and aristocratic institutions were decaying or being suppressed led automatically to an increase in state power. In a democratic society, there exist only individuals and the state, and, everyone having been rendered isolated and equally helpless (or nearly so), it is natural that the central power finds its authority increasing. In fields such as charity, education, religious life, supervision of industry, government in modern society is taking on more and more functions, as groups which had previously been active decline and disappear.⁴³ This tendency is the normal one for democracies:

a democratic government increases its power simply by the fact of its permanence. Time is on its side . . . in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the products of art. . . centralization will be the natural government.⁴⁴

What this meant concretely Tocqueville clearly understood. The state for him was no metaphysical “coldest of all cold monsters”: rather, the increase of state power meant the increase in the authority of a particular class, the bureaucracy. Already before the Revolution they had in France formed a grouping with every mark of a distinct class:

Les fonctionnaires administratifs, presque tous bourgeois, forment déjà une classe qui a son esprit particulier, ses traditions, ses vertus, son honneur, son orgueil propre. C’est l’aristocratie de la société nouvelle.⁴⁵

The ideal of the future for most Frenchmen, he asserts, had become one in which “an all-powerful bureaucracy not only took charge of affairs of State but controlled men’s private lives.”⁴⁶

This tendency for the bureaucracy to gather all of society’s life and power into its own hands was not limited to France. It is part of the growing statism which characterizes the emerging triumph of democracy:

In proportion as the functions of the central power are augmented, the number of public officers by whom that power is represented must increase also. They form a nation within each nation; and as they share the stability of the government, they more and more fill up the place of an aristocracy. In almost every part of Europe the government rules in two ways: it rules one portion of the citizens by the fear which they feel for its agents, and the other by the hope they have of becoming its agents.⁴⁷

What was occurring in Europe, Tocqueville thought, was that the powers of the central government were becoming more absolute and more extensive, and the people becoming insensibly the servants of the administration, frightened of incurring the displeasure of the obscurest government clerk. Finally, summing up this development, Tocqueville presents, at the conclusion of the second volume of Democracy, his picture of the “Sort of Despotism Democratic Nationals Have to Fear,” of mankind being watched over by “an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.”⁴⁸

Tocqueville accepts Constant’s view that the danger of despotic government is closely associated with the growth of materialism and hedonism in modern society.⁴⁹ This phenomenon was one of the most striking which Tocqueville encountered in the United States, and he linked it to the rising influence of bourgeois ways and values throughout society:

The effort to satisfy even the least wants of the body and to provide the little conveniences of life is uppermost in every mind [in the United States]. . . . The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes; with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it is preponderant. From them it mounts into the higher orders of society and descends into the mass of the people.⁵⁰

A much more accurate prophet than Marx, Tocqueville saw that the future would not bring an accentuated polarization of classes, but rather a Verbürgerlichung of all classes, with the industrial and mercantile classes calling the tune for the rest of society. That this had occurred in the United States impressed itself forcefully on Tocqueville’s mind during his stay there: in America he had seen a whole people who had given themselves over utterly to business. He compared the Americans to a joint-stock company which had been “placed in the midst of a new and boundless country, which their principal object is to explore for purposes of profit,”⁵¹ and termed them “the most grasping nation on the globe.”⁵²

The results of this bourgeois mentality penetrating all of society are manifold. In the first place, there is in this sort of life a brutishness that provokes Tocqueville’s disgust. In Democracy we hear the cri de cœur of an aristocrat who sees the likely man of the future before him: “nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests—in a word, so anti-poetic—as the life of a man in the United States.”⁵³ He foresees the slow death of what aristocratic ages had conceived of as the truly human ideal:

to [the enjoyment of pleasures] the heart, the imagination, and life itself are unreservedly given up, till, in snatching at these lesser gifts, men lose sight of those more precious possessions which constitute the glory and greatness of mankind.⁵⁴

Tocqueville hastens to add that he is not suggesting that this will lead to transgressing the law or the moral code; rather, it is wholly legitimate pleasures which are the danger:

By these means a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul, and noiselessly unbend the spring of action.⁵⁵

This tendency of democratic ages is so pronounced that it is visible even in intellectual areas: a sort of intellectual hedonism gains ground, with men desiring to obtain high returns with little effort, and therefore slothfully having recourse to the relatively imprecise “general ideas.”⁵⁶

Thus, the striving for material gratifications which is characteristic of democratic times violates Tocqueville’s ideal of man, and he experiences the same sort of despair that Max Weber did in foreseeing the future world peopled by “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”⁵⁷ The mischief goes even beyond blatantly violating the ideal human personality that Tocqueville held dear, however. For the ramifications of this new value system extend into the political realm, and endanger also the preservation of the liberal society itself.

It is in this connection that we encounter a concept which is central to Tocqueville’s prognosis of the coming crisis of society: that of “individualism.” As was customary in his time, he used the term in a pejorative sense.⁵⁸ For him, individualism was the counterpart of the “Cartesian” tendency of the democratic man to trust to his own mind solely, ignoring traditional hierarchies of intellectual authority. In the democratic period,

all [man’s] feelings are turned towards himself alone. . . . Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.⁵⁹

The underlying cause of this new frame of mind is the progressive decay of the social structure inherited from the Middle Ages. Whereas in aristocratic ages there had existed an acknowledged and enforced hierarchy, from the lowest to the highest member of the community, democracy of necessity destroys this system of subordination. Moreover, it cuts every man off also from his ancestors and descendants (beyond one or two degrees), as well as from his contemporaries, for it is the individual, and not the family or professional, religious or other corporate bodies, which is regarded as the ultimate self-directing social unit. This process “threatens in the end to confine [the individual] entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”⁶⁰ As he no longer identifies himself with larger groups and no longer senses the ties of obligation which used to lead him to devote himself to ends and interests beyond himself, he retires into his immediate circle. So dangerous are the results of this “private selfishness which is the rust of society,”⁶¹ that Tocqueville states that his “chief object in writing” Democracy in America has been in combating them.⁶²

There are a number of ways in which the individualism and hunger for material goods characteristic of the present time conduce to the rise of despotism.

First, if it is true that it is in the nature of the central government to desire always to enlarge its own power, then it must be true that a posture of constant wariness is the only appropriate one for the citizen. But individualism militates against this, by drawing men from the participation in public life into their own private concerns. To the extent that this occurs, despotism sees the places of power vacated and steps in.

Furthermore, in situations of actual coup d’état from above or revolution from below, the habits of apathy produced by individualism will permit one or the other anti-liberal party to gain control. Thus, Tocqueville concludes, “the proper object. . . of our most strenuous resistance is far less either anarchy or despotism than that apathy which may almost indifferently beget one or the other.”⁶³ Otherwise, the complacent selfishness of the people is easily exploited by authoritarian and Revolutionary condottieri, who are still quite interested in wielding power.

Of particular importance in the modern period is another factor which would manifest itself increasingly. While conservatives might suppose that love of material enjoyments would lead the masses to become demanding and turbulent, the real danger is that they would instead come to fear the slightest breath of change as a harbinger of disorder and revolution. This point had already been noted by Constant; within the framework of Tocqueville’s thought, it can be looked on as the complement of the trend, already mentioned in Democracy, for property ownership to become more widespread, and thus for the masses to become more and more attached to the established order. If from one point of view this argued the eventual end of the era of revolutions, and thus the possibility of a permanent liberal order free of the peril of Communist-inspired uprisings from below, on the other hand, it tied the interests of growing numbers of people to the preservation of the status quo, regardless of its liberal or illiberal character: “If the slightest rumor of public commotion intrudes into the petty pleasures of private life, they are roused and alarmed by it. The fear of anarchy perpetually haunts them, and they are always ready to fling away their freedom at the first disturbance.”⁶⁴

These words are prophetic, for Tocqueville was to see this occurring practically under his own eyes in France, especially after June 1848. It was, indeed, a chief cause of the coming to power of Napoleon III. In 1853, in despair Tocqueville complained to Gobineau that every grocer now “keeps repeating that the people should be kept within bounds to impede the abolition of Property and Family, and to prevent them from ransacking his grocery . . . it is enough for an idea to seem dangerous and a sort of universal silence is drawn around it.”⁶⁵ In their blind cupidity, it was quite possible that the bourgeoisie of France would repeat the experience of their forebearers of the Old Régime, who had been eager to have the protection of the state against the people, and of whom Tocqueville concludes, “No one seemed to have the faintest inkling that the protector might one day become the master.”⁶⁶

To some extent, however, the desire for material well-being produces certain correctives for its own deficiencies, Tocqueville maintained. What these are, and the degree to which he had confidence in them, we will investigate later on. Enough has been said, in any case, to indicate the direction from which Tocqueville expected problems to come, both for the human qualities he valued so highly and for the free society he loved.

Summing up, Tocqueville outlined the aims of policy in a democratic age as he saw them:

To lay down extensive but distinct and settled limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons and to secure them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights; to enable individual man to maintain whatever power he still possesses; to raise him by the side of society at large, and uphold him in that position; these appear to me the main objects of legislation in the ages upon which we are now entering.⁶⁷

He had ascertained that among the Americans the causes that tended to maintain the republic fell into three categories.⁶⁸ First, there was the “peculiar and accidental situation in which Providence has placed” them. But this was obviously a factor of little relevance to a general theory. Second was “the law.” Tocqueville accordingly proposed, as had Constant (and, indeed, many other liberals), a comprehensive system of guarantees against the excessive extension of state power: it included encouragement of private association, secondary public bodies, freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and, in general, a respect for political forms.⁶⁹Of the most interest to us, however, is the third factor in the edifice of American freedom, “the manners and customs of the people.” It is among these that religious belief as a guardian of freedom is to be found.

That Tocqueville attributed very high priority to reuniting the religious and liberal attitudes, which had been, he thought, artificially and perniciously set at odds by the eighteenth-century writers, has often been noted. In 1836, in explaining the basic idea of Democracy (the first volume of which had just appeared), he wrote his friend, Eugène Stoffels, as follows:

You seem to me to have understood the general ideas on which my programme rests. What most and always amazes me about my country, more especially these last few years, is to see ranged on the one side men who value morality, religion and order, and upon the other those who love liberty and the equality of men before the law.

Rather than being thus aligned against each other, in the true order of things they are united: “It seems to me, therefore,” he continues, “that one of the finest enterprises of our time would be to demonstrate that these things are not incompatible; that, on the contrary, they are bound together in such a fashion that each of them is weakened by separation from the rest. Such is my basic idea.”⁷⁰ It is à propos of this conception that Tocqueville, in the same letter, qualifies himself as a “liberal of a new kind.”⁷¹

Tocqueville repeats the same idea in the introduction to the first volume of Democracy, and the great importance of religious belief for liberty is underscored throughout both volumes of this work. But there are some more general observations respecting the role of religion in his thinking which ought to be made first, since they have to do not distinctively with the liberal social order, but with any sort of society.

Much as did Constant, Tocqueville proclaims that religious faith is an inherent principle of human nature. Man’s existential situation—the shortness of his life and the disparity between his heart’s desires and the merely partial fulfillment they can obtain from reality—constantly draws his mind to thoughts of a future state, out of which religion grows. “Religion,” he concludes, “is simply another form of hope, and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself.” Thus periods of unbelief (and presumably individual cases of it, as well) are to be explained by unusual circumstances:

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.⁷²

The glib liberal-progressivist view of the eighteenth-century philosophes (and of others), that religion, supposedly founded in ignorance and fear, would continue to retreat before the victorious forces of liberalism and science, was an illusion. Ignorance is by no means necessarily connected with religious faith, Tocqueville asserts, as is demonstrated by the fact that irreligion and a level of culture practically that of savagery coexist in certain parts of Europe, while, on the other hand, “in America, one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world, the people fulfill with fervor all the outward duties of religion.”⁷³ American civilization, which Tocqueville describes as the product of the spirit of religion and of liberty,⁷⁴ is thus a standing negation of the shallow philosophy of history which identifies the march of progress and enlightenment with the decline of religious faith. If any society may be said to presage the future, it is the American, and there religion was thriving.⁷⁵

Despite his confident assertions of the inevitability of religious belief, however, Tocqueville often speaks in such a way as to suggest that he had some anxiety as to the security of faith in the modern world.⁷⁶ Thus, in the introduction to Democracy, he lists as one of the “first duties” of modern statesmen, “to educate democracy, to reawaken, if possible, its religious faith.”⁷⁷ If religious belief and particularly the belief in individual immortality are as inherent in human nature as Tocqueville insists they are, it is curious that he expresses himself at a number of points as troubled by the possibility of their fading away. Furthermore, in discussing the French Revolution, he shows that traditional religious sentiments can be replaced by political ones, at least for many people. Thus, what is really involved in his statement that men “are invariably brought back to more pious sentiments” is unclear. Nevertheless, his formal position is one very much like Constant’s: there is “implanted” in man “the taste for what is infinite and the love of what is immoral. . . their steadfast foundation is fixed in human nature. . . . [Man] may cross and distort them; destroy them he cannot.”⁷⁸

Not only, however, is religious sentiment inevitably a part of human life, but Tocqueville goes on to assert that it is good that this is so; and it is good in the first place from the traditional point of view that—contrary to philosophers such as Bayle—a society of atheists is impossible. “Liberty cannot be established without morality,” he states, “nor morality without faith.”⁷⁹ In his letters to Gobineau, Tocqueville at one point admits that a certain amount of intolerance must accompany any positive religious faith. He adds, however:

Yet I am convinced that the eventual damage to human morality thereby caused is far less than what would result from moral systems that have emancipated themselves from religion altogether. The longer I live the less I think that the peoples of the world can ever separate themselves from a positive religion; and this growing conviction makes me less concerned with these inconveniences that are eventually inherent in every religion, including the best.⁸⁰

Like many another thinker who has taken this position, Tocqueville uses the alleged universality of religious belief as an argument for its necessity: “Laws, and especially religious laws, are thus so necessary that there has never been a people of any importance that could do without them.”⁸¹

In his analysis of the religious sentiment which is inherent in man, Tocqueville emphasized the role of the desire for immortality. This was, in fact, central to his view of what a religion is. In warning of the dangers of religious alliances with the state, he contrasts such a foundation for religious strength with the preferable situation, “when a religion founds its empire only upon the desire of immortality that lives in every human heart.”⁸² In his chapter (in the second volume of Democracy) on “How Religious Belief Sometimes Turns the Thoughts of Americans to Immaterial Pleasures,” he is almost exclusively concerned with the idea of immortality, and he bluntly (and oddly) states, “Most religions are only general, simple and practical means of teaching men the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.”⁸³ For Tocqueville, therefore, the idea of immortality was what he had most in mind when speaking of religious belief. Given his preoccupation with the ways in which religion conditions and directs human conduct, this was entirely to be expected.

What role, then, does he ascribe to the doctrine of immortality in helping preserve society?

In the first place, Tocqueville maintains that the idea of an afterlife, including supernatural rewards and penalties, is indispensable as a sanction for morality beyond those available on earth.⁸⁴ In Democracy, after discussing the doctrine of rightly-understood self-interest, which he holds to be a tenable basis for morality in the democratic period, Tocqueville indicates its shortcomings: “If [it] had nothing but the present in view, it would be very insufficient, for there are many sacrifices that can find their recompense only in another.” While conceding that not all followers of religion do so in order to further their own interests, he asserts that “self-interest is the principal means that religions themselves employ to govern men,” and he brings up Pascal’s wager as grounds for a rational man to restrict his actions within the limits of morality.⁸⁵

But Tocqueville’s chief interest in the doctrine of immortality is not as a sanction for morality in the ordinary sense. In a letter to Gobineau, the following curious passage occurs:

You seem to contest the social function of religions. Here we assume truly antithetical positions. You say that the fear of God does not stop people from murder. Even if this were true—and I doubt whether it is really true—what is the conclusion? Whether secular or religious, the function of law is not to eliminate crime (which is usually the product of deranged instincts and of such violent passions as will not be halted by the mere existence of laws). The efficacy of laws consists in their impact on society, in their regulation of matters of daily life, and in setting the general temper of habits and ideas.⁸⁶

Here Tocqueville foregoes any particular claim that religious sanctions tend to deter men from committing infringements on the rights of others, meanwhile advancing the strange view that secular sanctions do not deter, and that crime is always or usually a result of instinct or passion. In any event, this is a faithful representation of the relative emphasis he places on the different social effects of religious belief, and especially of the doctrine of immortality. Its most important effect in his view has to do not with adding supernatural sanctions to earthly ones, but with creating a particular sort of mentality.

This has two aspects, corresponding to two related dangers to character in the democratic age.

On one hand, there is a problem of “directing human actions to distant objects.” In the absence of belief in an afterlife, men will tend to become short-sighted and direct their attention exclusively to the here and now:

When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind. As soon as they have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires; and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist for a single day.⁸⁷

What is to be feared is that men will contract the habit of surrendering to each meaningless desire as it arises, and end by accomplishing “nothing great, permanent and calm.”⁸⁸

Ignoring the hyperbole of asserting that those who do not believe they will live forever will act as if they would not survive the day,⁸⁹ we may note that when Tocqueville emphasizes here the dangers of giving in to immediate desires, he does not speak of the effects of such conduct on the rights of others, but of its undermining the will and the capacity to create something grand and permanent in one’s own life. This was the role played by religion in the ages of faith: it led men to discipline themselves, suppressing momentary desires, in order to bring to pass some grand design which their mind’s eye had traced to the future. Tocqueville adds, “This explains why religious nations have so often achieved such lasting results.”⁹⁰

The second beneficial effect on the personality of the doctrine of immortality is one which pertains more precisely to any doctrine preaching the existence of a “supersensual and immortal principle, united for a time to matter.” Even doctrines maintaining that this principle is extinguished by fusion with the Deity, or that it is transferred to animals, or that it does not undergo rewards and punishments, have the sort of edifying result Tocqueville is discussing. This consists in the fact that it counteracts the dominant tendency of democratic ages towards excessive material gratifications.

In pursuing these tastes, enlightened and educated men, he concedes, will use “honest and lawful” means only; so, once more, we are not dealing with violations of the rights of others in the quest for self-gratification. Rather, the danger is “that in the end [man] may lose the use of his sublimest faculties, and . . . may at length degrade himself. Here and here only, does the peril lie.” So great is this peril, that

It should therefore be the unceasing object of the legislators of democracies and of all the virtuous and enlightened men who live there to raise the souls of their fellow citizens and keep them lifted up towards heaven.⁹¹

Materialists and others who preach that there can be no mind separated from the body are to “be marked as the natural foes of the whole people.”⁹²

In addition to the value attributable to the doctrine of immortality as an encouragement to habits of long-range planning and as a method of diverting men’s attention from physical enjoyments to higher pursuits, religious belief fulfills another role, not less important. It provides men with a coherent set of answers to the most important questions in life, and thus affects their minds and characters through this avenue also.

In regard to the manner in which such beliefs should be arrived at, and the spirit in which they ought to be held, Tocqueville freely admits that ideally the way of the rational man, fully aware of the claims of alternative beliefs, is best. He speaks of three distinct states of the human intellect. The first is one in which “a man believes firmly because he adopts a proposition without inquiry.” To this succeeds a state of doubt, which finally produces a situation of conviction once more, but now a conviction founded on rational examination. “This time he has not a dim and casual glimpse of the truth, but sees it clearly before him and advances by the light it gives.”⁹³ But Tocqueville qualifies this picture in two ways. In the first place, it is doubtful whether the sort of conviction characteristic of men who have thrown off their self-imposed intellectual minority “arouses as much fervor or enthusiastic devotion in men as does their first dogmatical belief.” Furthermore, and most important, it is a path which is reserved for an élite:

We may rest assured that the majority of mankind will always remain in one of these two states, will either believe they know not wherefore, or will not know what to believe. Few are those who can ever attain to that other state of rational and independent conviction which true knowledge can produce out of the midst of doubt.⁹⁴

And, in fact, in describing the condition of Europe in his own time, he paints it as corresponding to the second of the states described above. In evident anguish, he depicts an age in which all moral norms have undergone ruthless analysis, and none are accepted with any degree of assurance:

has man always inhabited a world like the present, where all things are not in their proper relationships, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor . . . where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?⁹⁵

This situation of “intellectual wretchedness” is characteristic of democratic times, Tocqueville believes. The “Cartesianism” rife in such periods acts as a solvent of all received truths, and many will spend a lifetime bereft of any firm conviction. Moreover, there is a constant social mobility in democratic societies, and the influence which social position has in creating opinions cannot act so as to fix them for an individual for any length of time.⁹⁶

Such a condition is likely to be merely transitional, however. Dogmatic belief “may change its object and its form; but under no circumstances will [it] cease to exist, or, in other words, men will never cease to entertain some opinions on trust and without discussion.”⁹⁷ This is evident from the common argument that, if one attempted philosophically or scientifically to demonstrate for oneself the truth of every proposition on the basis of which one acted, action would be indefinitely postponed (even assuming that all individuals had the ability to undertake such demonstrations). In addition, Tocqueville maintains that in order for a society to exist and prosper, it is necessary that the citizens should share certain general notions on a number of important issues,⁹⁸ which is quite improbable if each went about selecting his fundamental ideas for himself. Thus, for both the individual and for society, an acknowledged source of basic life-shaping ideas is required.

It is here that we begin to see the specific value religion should hold for those interested in preserving liberty. In democratic ages, the overwhelming temptation will be to seek the source in the views of the majority of people: “Not only is common opinion the only guide which private judgment retains among a democratic people, but among such a people it possesses a power infinitely beyond what it has elsewhere.” The long-range danger, then, does not lie in the direction of intellectual chaos (just as, politically, it is not anarchy that is ultimately to be feared), but in a monolithic tyranny of majority opinion; what must be avoided is the pitfall that for traditional religion is substituted pious obedience to public opinion, with the majority acting as the highest spiritual authority.⁹⁹ It is à propos of this danger that Tocqueville speaks of a new “physiognomy of servitude” that may be waiting to be discovered by democratic man and adds:

there is here matter for profound reflection of those who look on freedom of thought as a holy thing and who hate not only the despot, but despotism. For myself, when I feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know who oppresses me; and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men.¹⁰⁰

It is within this framework that we must view Tocqueville’s discussion of the value of religion as a means of providing men with “fixed and determinate” ideas on fundamental issues. In a democracy, the individual will find the source of such ideas either in a religious authority or in the majority of his fellow citizens, for the Kantian and liberal notion that the autonomous individual may with the aid of reason legislate for himself in these matters is an illusion.

Indeed, one of the greatest tasks for religion in the democratic age is to condition the majority to legislate for itself certain self-denying ordinances in the moral realm. This is the basic reason why the connection between religion and liberty in the United States, which Tocqueville found taken for granted by the Americans, is so instructive. Although when he is concerned to emphasize the dangers of the tyranny of the majority, he is skeptical of the extent of real freedom in the United States (e.g., his blanket statement: “freedom of opinion does not exist in America”¹⁰¹), at most other times he pictures it as a free country and links this freedom with the remarkable religiosity of the people. The fact is, he states, that the majority respects certain restrictions on its power: on the one hand, the established individual rights guaranteed by law and, on the other, the principles of “humanity, justice and reason.”¹⁰² Respect for Christian morality and equity sets up barriers to the heedless trampling on individual rights. It is ultimately because of these influences, he holds, that “no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants.”¹⁰³

The benefits for society, and particularly for democratic society, accruing from religious faith are nowhere treated more extensively by Tocqueville than in the chapter in the second volume of Democracy entitled (somewhat misleadingly, for its scope is much greater), “How Religion in the United States Avails Itself of Democratic Tendencies.” In this chapter he sums up and elaborates on a number of his chief notions on the subject, and it thus appears useful to consider the course of his argument in some detail.

Tocqueville begins by positing an extremely idealistic view of human behavior:

There is hardly any human action, however particular it may be, that does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures. Nor can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring from which all the rest emanates.¹⁰⁴

It would perhaps be best to modify this to assert that hardly any human action is unconditioned by such beliefs. So fundamental and pervasive are these ideas that “doubt on these first principles would abandon all their actions to chance and would condemn them in some way to disorder and impotence.”

At this point Tocqueville makes a decisive break with at least the implied position of liberals who have not seen religion as playing so crucial a role in the life of society: he denies the possibility or practicality of a rational solution to these questions. Tocqueville was all his life singularly unimpressed by the discipline of philosophy. To Gobineau, for instance, he remarks: “It is typical of philosophical debates that neither of the participants emerges dissuaded from his original opinions. Thus it is best not to dispute; it saves effort.”¹⁰⁵ In regard to the question immediately at issue, he observes, in the chapter we are discussing:

philosophers are themselves almost always surrounded with uncertainties . . . in spite of all their efforts, they have discovered as yet only a few conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years without ever firmly grasping the truth or finding novelty even in its errors.¹⁰⁶

Since all available evidence indicates that it is not possible to arrive at settled notions concerning these issues through the use of critical reason, and since Tocqueville is convinced of their overwhelming importance for human affairs, he concludes that at this juncture religion must enter: “The first object and one of the principal advantages of religion is to furnish to each of these fundamental questions a solution that is at once clear, precise, intelligible and lasting, to the mass of mankind.”¹⁰⁷ As he observes elsewhere, “What is most important to meet among men is not any given ordering, but order.”¹⁰⁸

So far Tocqueville has discussed the value of religion from the viewpoint, not of a liberal society, but of insuring qualities of mind conducive, as he himself states, to the “happiness and greatness” of mankind in this world. This was clearly implied in his calling on religion to supply the means of preventing all human action from being condemned “to disorder and impotence.” Now, however, he goes on to state that what he has asserted is “especially true of men living in free countries.” For, in the absence of religion, we have the intellectual chaos described above: “doubt gets hold of the higher powers of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Every man accustoms himself to having only confused and changing notions on the subjects most interesting to his fellow creatures and himself.” Tocqueville concludes that this situation will result, in the first place, in a cowardly refusal to continue thinking about the humanly most important issues: “in despair of ever solving by himself the hard problems respecting the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about them.”¹⁰⁹ Such a situation of moral confusion will have a tendency to lead to despotism, for the individual now finds himself burdened with an “excess” of freedom. He is called upon to decide too many things for himself, and, since certainty must constantly elude him, he is required to decide these all simultaneously and, as it were, continually:

When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. The constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts them. As everything is at sea in the sphere of the mind, they determine at least that the mechanism of society shall be firm and fixed; and as they cannot assume their ancient belief, they assume a master.¹¹⁰

From this he deduces, “I am inclined to think that if faith be wanting in [man], he must be subject; and if he be free, he must believe.”¹¹¹

Tocqueville already made a similar point in regard to the United States, where, he maintained, political freedom and independence of thought are only possible by virtue of a restriction of independence in moral and religious questions:

In the moral world everything is classified, systematized, foreseen and decided beforehand; in the political world everything is agitated, disputed, and uncertain. . . . These two tendencies, apparently so discrepant, are far from conflicting; they advance together and support each other.¹¹²

A related argument is given by Tocqueville at another point in Democracy. So far he has maintained that the fixity of views in the moral and religious areas is beneficial to the preservation of free governments because it removes possible sources of anxiety that might lead people to demand such fixity in the political area through despotism. He adds now that such determinateness is valuable also because it sets limits to the tendency of the human mind in a democratic situation to innovate in politics:

the human mind is never left to wander over a boundless field; and whatever way may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers that it cannot surmount. Before it can innovate, certain primary principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion. . . . These habits of restraint recur in political society and are singularly favorable to the tranquility of the people and the durability of the institutions they have established.¹¹³

A last argument along these lines is that, in the absence of certainty concerning the higher things, men are thrown back on the pursuit of their material interests, since these appear to them now as the only settled and tangible reference points in a chaotic world.¹¹⁴

The desirable state of affairs, where stable institutions furnish a backdrop to the calm and productive lives of the citizens, is to be contrasted with what obtained in France during the great Revolution. There all religious and political institution were simultaneously called into question and remodeled. As a consequence, total confusion prevailed, and all customary limits were removed. Out of this moral swamp there emerged a new and very sinister species of being: “Revolutionaries of the hitherto unknown breed came on the scene: men who carried audacity to the point of sheer insanity; who balked at no innovation and, unchecked by any scruples, acted with an unprecedented ruthlessness.¹¹⁵ Tocqueville thus interprets the Terror and the other excesses of the Revolution, not simply as a series of responses to such events as foreign invasion of France, the collapse of the currency, etc., but as a product of a deeper moral transformation in the people and, particularly, the leaders.¹¹⁶ The latter, whom Tocqueville characterizes as “strange beings,” did not pass away with the Revolution, however. Rather, that Revolution which first created them as it proceeds in its course, continues to bring them forth: “a new race of men who subsequently made good and proliferated in all parts of the civilized world, everywhere retaining the same characteristics. They were already here when we were born, and they are still with us.”¹¹⁷

Tocqueville’s analysis of the real character of the French Revolution and of the revolutionary movements which have continued it into his own day provides another, less obvious, argument for the necessity of religious belief and ought to be noticed at this point. For Tocqueville interpreted the Revolution as much more a religious than a political phenomenon in the traditional sense. The universality and comprehensiveness of its principles, its methods of propaganda, the fervor it aroused in its disciples, and its grand aim—to create a New Man by regenerating society—all stamp it as “a species of religion.”¹¹⁸ Significantly, Tocqueville connects the birth of this new religion with the eclipse of the old one: “When religion was expelled from their souls [i.e., the French], the effect was not to create a vacuum or a state of apathy; it was promptly, if but momentarily, replaced by a host of new loyalties and secular ideals.”¹¹⁹ As with religion at its purest, so too this new religion was able to rouse men to feats of heroism and self-sacrifice. In these few remarks, Tocqueville adumbrates what was to become a familiar religionist interpretation of the twentieth-century God that failed: the vision and fervor of totalitarian movements derive, it is alleged, from a warped and rechanneled religious impulse. Totalitarianism only becomes possible when the process of secularization of life has advanced to a high degree.

Most important among religion’s contributions to freedom, however, is the circumstance that all religion to one degree or another, but especially Christianity, implant in men a motivation which acts as a partial antidote at least to typically democratic attitudes. Tocqueville here raises once more the question of “individualism” (in the sense previously discussed), which “tends to isolate [men] from one another, to concentrate every man’s attention upon himself; and . . . lays open the soul to inordinate love of material gratification. The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire diametrically contrary principles.”¹²⁰ Because democratic people tend to be more pleasure loving than others, the value of religion as a means of raising men to a higher ground is greater among such nations.

It is clear from what has gone before that Tocqueville conceived of religion as offering a possible extra-rational and authoritative solution for some of the problems of democratic society. What is difficult to judge is whether he thought it necessary that such a solution should be resorted to as a substitute for rational persuasion.

The problem occurs primarily because of a chapter in the second volume of Democracy, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Self-Interest Rightly Understood.” Here he outlines how the more elevated and self-sacrificing ethical systems of aristocratic times have been replaced, in that laboratory of the democratic experience that is the United States, by another doctrine “that man serves himself in serving his fellow creatures and that his private interest is to do good.” This is an example of a modern people having become aware of the inevitability of a certain degree at least of “individualism” and having come to terms with it by turning it to advantage. The Americans

have found out that in their country and their age, man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and, losing all hope of stopping that force, they turn all their thoughts to the direction of it. They therefore do not deny that every man may follow his own interest, but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous.¹²¹

The linking up of personal hedonism in this way with social utilitarianism is another manifestation of the increasing “rationality” of the world. In words that might have been written by any number of social thinkers from Burke to Max Weber, Tocqueville asks:

Do you not see that religious belief is shaken and the divine notion of right is declining, that morality is debased and the notion of moral right is therefore fading away? Argument is substituted for faith, and calculation for the impulse of sentiment.¹²²

But, with the sort of resigned realism that contributed to distinguishing him from more conservative observers of the same process, he asserts that one must accept this new state of affairs as given and take advantage of some of its own features to mitigate its worst potentialities:

If, in the midst of this general disruption, you do not succeed in connecting the notion of right with that of private interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except fear?¹²³

Tocqueville concedes that this new ethical system is more likely to produce moderation and regularity than any spectacular acts of self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, it will serve its function if, while not generating many acts of saintly virtue, it induces the great majority of mankind to comply with the minimal demands of morality. He therefore gives it his endorsement:

I am not afraid to say that the principle of self-interest rightly understood appears to me the best suited of all philosophical theories to the wants of men of our time, and that I regard it as their chief remaining security against themselves. Towards it, therefore, the minds of the moralists of our age should turn; even should they judge it to be incomplete, it must nevertheless be adopted as necessary.¹²⁴

This endorsement is consistent with Tocqueville’s policy of acquiescing in those shortcomings of democracy which appear to be inevitable, and attempting to remedy them as much as possible. In the present case, we see emerging a rational, individualistic system of ethics, and a program of education is called for: “Educate, then, at any rate, for the age of implicit self-sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already flitting far away from us, and the time is fast approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to exist without education.”¹²⁵

In the United States, where education is widespread, the doctrine of rightly understood self-interest is effective, Tocqueville maintains; the average American “obeys society . . . because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow men and he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force.”¹²⁶ Similarly, with another area the temporary sacrifice of the individual’s interest for his own long-range greater interest is sometimes required; that of property. Here, too, Tocqueville asserts that the modern ethic adequately fulfills its purpose: “The lower orders in the United States understand the influence exercised by the general prosperity upon their own welfare.”¹²⁷ In America, “the doctrine of interest rightly understood . . . is as often asserted by the poor man as by the rich.”

The Americans have arrived at the final term of a process of the rationalization of the civic spirit. Tocqueville describes a sequence of three stages in the history of the individual’s association of his own fate with that of his nation. These stages correspond to those which he analyzed in the case of belief (which was to be expected, since these basic human attitudes are all undergoing the same transformation). It will be remembered that the progress was from “instinctive” belief to doubt and confusion and then on to rational belief. Similarly with the feeling of patriotism, there is a primitive sort of patriotic feeling which is founded on faith, comparable to a religion; there is, in addition, however, a more “rational” sort, based on the individual’s perception of the connection between his personal well-being and that of his country. In this case, patriotism becomes the product of egoism, resulting as it does from the benefits which the individual draws from his country and from his identification of himself with it.

Between these two stages, there may occur a situation much like that which Tocqueville so often ascribes to contemporary Europe, when the first sort of patriotism is dying or dead, and the second has not yet been fully accepted. Again, his realism leads him to side with the inevitable: “In this predicament to retreat is impossible, for a people cannot recover the sentiments of their youth any more than a man can return to the innocent tastes of childhood. . . . They must go forward.”¹²⁸

Although all this is clear enough from a number of important passages in Tocqueville’s works, nevertheless it is difficult to assess its significance, since he often writes in a contrary sense. At times, that is, he assumes that the individual must derive the great bulk of the rules of social morality not in a rational manner from a consideration of his own long-range self-interest, but rather in an “authoritarian” manner as imposed from above. He advises sincere liberals, for instance, who are personally anti-religious, to desist from attacking religious opinions, for “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot”:

How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?¹²⁹

At other times, moreover, he directly implies the inadequacy of enlightened self-interest by stressing the impulsiveness and shortsightedness of democratic nations. Thus, he declares that “the people are more apt to feel than to reason,” which makes sustained sacrifice, such as is often required in wartime, difficult for democracies.¹³⁰ This general tendency is easily observable in the United States, he asserts:

The difficulty that a democracy finds in conquering the passions and subduing the desires of the moment with a view to the future is observable in the United States in the most trivial things. The people, surrounded by flatterers, find great difficulty in surmounting their inclinations; whenever they are required to undergo privation or any inconvenience, even to attain an end sanctioned by their own rational conviction, they almost always refuse at first to comply.¹³¹

In discussing the dangers threatening property in situations of universal suffrage (where the masses are propertyless), he states that there will be a certain amount of legalized spoliation. At this point he unmistakably assaults the doctrine of rightly understood self-interest:

In vain will it be objected that the true interest of the people is to spare the fortunes of the rich, since they must suffer in the long run from the general impoverishment which will ensue. Is it not the true interest of kings, also, to render their subjects happy, and of nobles to admit recruits into their order on suitable grounds? If remote advantages had power to prevail over the passions and exigencies of the moment, no such thing as a tyrannical sovereign or an exclusive aristocracy could ever exist.¹³²

The same sort of disenchantment with rational self-interest as a sufficient guarantee of moral action is shown in another passage, strikingly contradictory to ones quoted above:

The inhabitants of the United States talk much of their attachment to their country; but I confess that I do not rely upon that calculating patriotism which is founded upon interest and which a change in the interests may destroy.¹³³

He adds that “A government retains its sway over a great number of citizens far less by the voluntary and rational consent of the multitude than by that instinctive, and to a certain extent involuntary, agreement which results from similarity of feelings and resemblances of opinion.”¹³⁴

How are we to reconcile these contradictory statements? On the one hand, Tocqueville maintains that the coming age will depend for the sense of political obligation, for devotion to country and to one’s fellow man, on voluntary and rational consent, based on the perception that one’s self-interest will be promoted by such a course. He asserts further that such a course is viable, given “education” in the new “American” morality.

On the other hand, he appears to hold that the masses are scarcely capable of far-sighted action, of letting the present good go for the sake of the greater future reward, and adds at one point an attack on the sort of calculating patriotism he has said is the inevitable (and acceptable) form that that feeling will take in the future!

It is obvious from this that Tocqueville himself had not decided the question of whether rational self-interest was a sufficient basis on which to build the ethical code of the coming democratic society. Sometimes, his patrician disdain for the limited moral resources of the masses of men overcomes his hopes for the future, and one can glimpse the fervent wish that things were not the way they are.

Indeed, there is evidence that Tocqueville came to doubt the view expressed in Democracy that rational self-interest as the basis is even compatible with—let alone complementary to—a fundamentally religious attitude, as shown by the fact that the two were joined inextricably in the ethos of the Americans. In discussing with Gobineau the character of various moral systems, he sharply contrasts those oriented towards the afterlife with those founded on self-interest:

When the vision of the next world becomes obscure it is again natural that people who are still unable to live without moral sanctions will try to find them on this earth and that they will thus create all these systems which may be different but which are all concerned with the doctrine of human interest. And when the vision of eventual heavenly rewards is accordingly lost, it is again logical that people should be more and more attached to the only prospects that remain before them, to the benefits of this world.¹³⁵

Tocqueville here links self-interest with the fading away of the religious outlook: “I think that something similar may have happened during the decline of paganism, and that it is typical of the decline of all religions. The mass comes forth and reveals its instincts, and it will find philosophers who will make doctrines to fit them.”¹³⁶ In fact, throughout the correspondence with Gobineau, which concerns itself at times with the question of religion and morality, Tocqueville displays a position much more “traditional” than in Democracy, and the viability of self-interest as the basis of morality in the future is not maintained.

At last, in The Old Régime and the French Revolution, Tocqueville, apparently having forgotten his earlier views altogether, states unequivocally, “Nor do I think that a genuine love of freedom is ever quickened by the prospect of material rewards.” Often, in point of fact, it is despotism that can provide—at least as a short-term matter—superior lures in this respect. What really attaches men to liberty is, simply, its intrinsic value, and genuine love of liberty is something that, Tocqueville confesses, “defies analysis.”¹³⁷

The measure of Tocqueville’s lack of faith in the efficacy of enlightened self-interest is in part his emphasis on the indispensability of religious belief in democracy. This emphasis receives added significance when we consider Tocqueville’s own religious views.

There is really no need to enter into the controversy revolving around Tocqueville’s Catholic faith or lack of it. While believing scholars have been at pains to depict him as one of theirs (one of them going so far as to indulge in a bit of pious fraud), the evidence seems conclusive on the other side. He never speaks in his candid moments of confession of faith, of any beliefs peculiarly Catholic, or even Christian; and to Gobineau he stated flatly, “Je ne suis pas croyant (ce que je suis loin de dire pour me vanter), mais tout incroyant que je sois.”¹³⁸ It is difficult to see why such a remark would be made by anyone who was “philosophically speaking . . . a Catholic with an aristocratic, Jansenist, Pascalian bent.”¹³⁹

The more interesting question is, given that Tocqueville did not himself believe in Christianity, what then is the status of his injunctions to “moralists” and others, to do their utmost to preserve Christian belief.¹⁴⁰ Is it the case that, as a number of more recent critics have charged, Tocqueville is proposing the employment of “social myths,” which he knows to be false, but which he strongly believes also to be necessary for the preservation of the sort of society he valued? One writer speaks of Tocqueville’s “acceptance of a deliberately manipulated myth designed to enforce or sustain a particular pattern of moral response”;¹⁴¹ another applies this analysis to other issues as well, concluding that, for Tocqueville, “Free society stands or falls by a specific obfuscation against which political philosophy necessarily revolts.”¹⁴²

There is no doubt that many remarks of Tocqueville’s would seem to confirm this interpretation. Thus, he states:

If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, it is not so to society. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of little importance to its interests.¹⁴³

This same attitude is implied in the fact that when Tocqueville himself discusses the bases of morality, he does not have recourse to a religious explanation, but limits himself to naturalistic terms. Thus, in distinguishing between the true moral code and the codes of “honor,” which vary according to class, nation and epoch, he states:

Mankind is subject to general and permanent wants that have created moral laws, to the neglect of which men have ever and in all places attached the notion of censure and shame: to infringe them was to do ill; to do well was to conform to them.¹⁴⁴

And in maintaining the existence of a standard of justice over and above the demands of a political majority, he asserts:

I hold it to be an impious and detestable maxim that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything. . . . A general law, which bears the name of justice, has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. . . . When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.¹⁴⁵

Although this argument for salvaging majoritarianism is perhaps a bit too ingenious, it nevertheless indicates Tocqueville’s personal reluctance to resort to a religious foundation for his ethical beliefs.

Again, the correspondence with Gobineau, where Tocqueville, as we have seen, admits his lack of faith and yet insists in the strongest terms on the indispensability of faith for social purposes, would seem to point in this direction. Moreover, the same point arises in a different context in these letters, for, in later years, their disagreements centered not on the social usefulness of religion, but on Gobineau’s racial theories. Here, too, Tocqueville emphasized the social effects of these ideas. He was particularly concerned, since he felt that, as a deterministic theory, it would tend to aggravate certain pernicious modern trends:

What I disapprove of in the book I told you before: it is less the work itself than its tendency, which I consider dangerous. If we were to suffer from excessive enthusiasm and self-confidence, as did our ancestors of 1789, I would consider your book a salutary cold shower. But we have disgracefully come to the opposite extreme. We have no regard for anything, beginning with ourselves; we have no faith in anything, including ourselves.¹⁴⁶

And he quite clearly disclaims the point of view that a theory of this kind is to be judged solely on its scientific merits: “by studying German I have not yet become enough of a German to be captivated so much by the novelty or by the philosophical merits of an idea as to overlook its moral or political defects.”¹⁴⁷ To this sort of attitude, Gobineau responded curtly: “My book is research, exposition, presentation of facts. These exist or they don’t. There is nothing else to say.”¹⁴⁸

But it appears to me that to speak of Tocqueville’s championship of “social myths” is to state the case too strongly; a somewhat different perspective, more compatible with the facts would, I think, eliminate whatever element of sinister mythmaking, suggestive of the Platonic “noble lie,” that might at first seem to lurk in Tocqueville’s position.

In the first place, the views which Tocqueville is castigating for their deleterious social consequences are not ones whose truth has been demonstrated. We have already noticed his judgment on the inconclusiveness of philosophical debates on the “big questions.” In regard to racism, Tocqueville in a letter takes up Gobineau’s own comparison of his theory to a doctor announcing to his patient that he is mortally ill. Tocqueville states:

You ask: What is immoral in that? My answer is that even though this act in itself may not be immoral, its consequences assuredly are most immoral and pernicious. . . . I must add that physicians, like philosophers, are often greatly mistaken in their prognostications; I have seen more than one person condemned by physicians who nevertheless became quite well subsequently and who angrily criticized the doctor for having uselessly frightened and discouraged them.¹⁴⁹

It seems possible to make out an argument for Tocqueville’s position along the following lines: We are dealing with issues on which reason has not decided, but which are of the utmost importance for man in society. Now, certain principles are conducive to human happiness, and indeed, to the very existence of human life, while some are not. Historically, these moral principles have been embedded in evolving systems of symbols. This is probably necessary for the majority of mankind, which cannot be expected to grasp the indispensable ethical principles except as symbolized within the framework of a religion. As Tocqueville puts it, “I firmly believe in the necessity of forms which fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths, and aid it in embracing them warmly and holding them with firmness.”¹⁵⁰ An analogy with chess is perhaps possible here. Someone might raise the objection to the game as it is customarily played that the use of material appurtenances somehow falsifies the game of chess, which in reality is one of purely ideal relationships, and could be played without actual pieces and board. But he would be missing the point of their use. The case with religion is similar. There is no question of demonstrating the truth or falsity of basic religious doctrines, such as the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, etc. Since these ideas are in fact conducive to a truly human life, they may be referred to as practical “truths.” It would be just as foolish to cavil at these truths being presented through the use of particular historically developed systems of symbols, as it would be for someone to object that bishops or rooks in chess ought not to look the way they do, since nothing in the ideal system of the game warrants them looking one way or another. Such an objection would represent a misunderstanding, since the purpose of the pieces is purely instrumental, and the particular form they assume is largely a historical “accident.” The same may be said of the particular concrete notions of the various religious, e.g., the stories concerning the life of Christ or the ritual of the Mass.

But even conceding that Tocqueville’s position on religion in a free society was by no means as Machiavellian as is sometimes suggested, there still remain a number of problems with his conception, problems of which, I believe, he became more conscious in his later years.

The most important of these has to do with the real possibility of religious belief independently exerting a significant effect on the course of social development.

Tocqueville’s conception of what brings about changes in society is not the most refined and polished imaginable; nevertheless, it is clear that he believes in some sense that social, rather than economic or technological, factors are of greatest importance. His best known statement on this question is:

Social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but when once established, it may justly be considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations: whatever it does not produce, it modifies.¹⁵¹

At another point, he states:

I do not doubt that the social and political constitution of a people predisposes them to adopt certain doctrines and tastes, which afterwards flourish without difficulty among them; while the same causes divert them from certain other opinions and propensities, without any voluntary effort and, as it were, without any distinct consciousness on their part.¹⁵²

It happens that Tocqueville provides a very good example of this process in outlining at one point the development of Christian belief: “it cannot be denied that Christianity itself has felt, to some extent, the influence that social and political conditions exercise on religious opinions.”¹⁵³ The existence of equality of conditions within society led man to “readily conceive the idea of the one God, governing every man by the same laws . . . while on the contrary in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes or families.”

The fact that Christianity appeared in the world in the midst of the Roman Empire, where a certain uniformity of law existed, and where each citizen, vis-à-vis the Emperor, was so weak as to produce a state of near equality, “necessarily predisposed” men to accept it. With the break up of the Empire and the emergence of feudalism, religion again took on the coloring of the surrounding society. It is not that the general conceptions associated with Christianity were forgotten, but the worship of saints and angels almost brought it down to the level of the superstition-ridden polytheism which it had replaced. As for the future, Tocqueville asserts:

It seems evident that the more the barriers are removed which separate one nation from another and one citizen from another, the stronger is the bent on the human mind, as if by its own impulse, towards the idea of a single and all-powerful Being, dispensing equal laws in the same manner to every man.¹⁵⁴

As with Christianity, so with skepticism and doubt: the movements by which the principle of authority in thought has been progressively dismantled in modern history— the Reformation, the scientific philosophy of Bacon and Descartes, the Enlightenment—are traced by Tocqueville to an ever-increasing equality of conditions in society. “Who does not perceive that Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire employed the same method, and that they differed only in the greater or less use which they professed should be made of it?” What, then, determined to what degree the method was employed in each of these cases? Why, for instance, did Descartes permit personal judgment in philosophical questions and not in political ones? Why did the eighteenth-century writers extend his method to the latter issues? What determined these facts was the condition of society and the predispositions which this set up in the minds of the public: philosophical doubt “could be generally followed only in ages when [social] conditions had at length become nearly equal and men nearly alike.”¹⁵⁵ In a similar way, Tocqueville held that the future democratic age would be particularly threatened by pantheism, the religious view most suitable to it.¹⁵⁶

He thus saw religious belief and unbelief as, to a large extent, socially conditioned; and this not peripherally, in regard to particular ideas and emphases, but fundamentally. This state of affairs would, of course, continue into democratic times, and he advised religious leaders to become aware of this fact, and take certain measures in view of it, e.g., religious forms must be kept to a minimum. Most importantly, however, religion must be careful not to irritate the masses gratuitously, by condemning the ends which they will inevitably pursue. The reason Tocqueville gives for this is interesting: “For as public opinion grows to be more and more the first and most irresistible of existing powers, the religious principle has no external support strong enough to enable it long to resist its attacks.” In America, the clergy are well aware of this situation, and they have accommodated themselves to it. Besides strictly abstaining from involvement in politics, they

know and respect the intellectual supremacy exercised by the majority; they never sustain any but necessary conflicts with it,. . . they readily adopt the general opinions of their country and their age, and they allow themselves to be borne away without opposition in the current of feeling and opinion by which everything around them is carried along.¹⁵⁷

The problem that this view raises is clear. If religious belief is so vulnerable to influence from society, and, in particular, from majority opinion (in democratic countries), how will it be able to fulfill its functions as a counterweight to the tendencies of society and of the majority? Tocqueville provides a possible resolution to this problem:

[T]he principal opinions which constitute a creed, and which theologians call articles of faith, must be very carefully distinguished from the accessories connected with them. Religions are obliged to hold fast to the former, whatever be the peculiar spirit of the age; but they should take good care not to bind themselves in the same manner to the latter.¹⁵⁸

The example of religion’s coming to terms with society which Tocqueville develops at greatest length is that concerning material well-being. This, as we have seen, is one of the prime characteristics of democratic society, and any religion which attempted to suppress this urge would itself be destroyed by it. Rather, “the chief concern of religion is to purify, to regulate, and to restrain the excessive” taste for enjoyments: “men cannot be cured of the love of riches, but they may be persuaded to enrich themselves by none but honest means.”¹⁵⁹

But this does not really solve the problem, for the question arises: Is contempt of riches, for instance, the sort of merely “accessory” opinion, the jettisoning of which is necessary in democratic times, but does not injure the core of Christian beliefs? Tocqueville states that the Americans, “having admitted the principal doctrines of the Christian religion without inquiry, are obliged to accept in a like manner a great number of moral truths, originating in it and connected with it.”¹⁶⁰ But when the American clergy seem to see the chief object of a virtuous life, not as a means of heavenly reward, but to happiness on earth¹⁶¹ are they not violating some important principle of Christian belief? It would seem that love of riches and greater care for success in this world than for the Kingdom of God are violations of fundamental Christian notions, brought about by the democratic state of society, and that even where the doctrines of Christianity are accepted, the “moral truths connected with it” are by no means immune to modification by social forces. But in that case, what Christian principles, important for the goal of compensating for democratic defects, are not susceptible to alteration at the hands of democratic society?

Religion is open to conditioning from society in another way, which also would appear to compel qualification of the great hopes Tocqueville, in Democracy, places in religious belief for a free society. Religious faith, as the example of France since the eighteenth century shows, can be decisively class conditioned.¹⁶²

It has on occasion been noticed, though not, I think, sufficiently appreciated, how closely Tocqueville’s thought at times comes to that of Karl Marx. Particularly is this true in regard to his notion of the inception and expansion of ideas in society; although he has nothing like a comprehensive theory of “ideology,” he often assumes that the perception of social class interest is crucial for the explanation of the spread of a particular idea at a particular time. This is quite to be expected in a thinker who held that “social condition” is “the source of almost all the laws, usages, and ideas which regulate the conduct of nations.”¹⁶³ Time and again, Tocqueville traces the assent of an idea to the social position of the individuals involved. This occurs especially in his account of the vicissitudes of religious belief in France since the eighteenth century, and it creates another dilemma for his general theory of the role of religion in a liberal society.

On a number of occasions—in his conversations with Nassau Senior, in his Souvenirs and in The Old Régime—Tocqueville examines the problem of how the Voltairean nobility of the ancien régime and the anticlerical liberal bourgeoisie of the Restoration and the July Monarchy had, by the mid-nineteenth century, turned once more to the Catholic faith. Discussing the almost personal hatred of religion manifested by some of the philosophes, he asks, “What Frenchman of today would dream of writing books like those of Diderot and Helvétius, and, supposing anyone were to do so, who would read them?” The reason for this altered state of affairs is, he thinks, to be found in the new use for religious faith discovered in the last sixty or seventy years by those who have come to fear for the stability of all social institutions, particularly property:

Trained in the hard school of successive revolutions, all the various classes of the French nation have gradually regained that feeling of respect for religious faith which once seemed lost forever. The old nobility, which before 1789 had been the most irreligious class, became after 1793 the most pious; first to be infected with disbelief, it was also the first to be “converted.” Once the bourgeoisie woke to the fact that its seeming triumph was likely to prove fatal to it, it, too, developed leanings towards religion. Thus little by little religion regained its hold on all who had anything to lose in a social upheaval and unbelief died out, or anyhow hid its head the more these men became alive to the perils of revolution.¹⁶⁴

It is true that the above—which is reproduced in similar terms in the other places mentioned—is not a completely “Marxist” interpretation of the issue: it seems to account, for instance, for the aristocracy’s tendency towards unbelief in the eighteenth century, not by its class interest, but by intellectual “fashion.” Nevertheless, he relies on class interest to explain the change.

But this interpretation entails certain difficulties for Tocqueville. In his conversations with Senior, he remarked that it took the Revolution of 1848 to reconvert the middle classes: “They too see the want of the religious sanction; they now wish to join the aristocracy in imposing its restraints on the people. None but the lowest classes now profess irreligion.”¹⁶⁵ But if the middle classes have come around to Christianity in response to the threat of the lower classes, as the nobility had in response to that of the bourgeoisie, on what basis are we to expect the lower classes to renew their religious faith? Tocqueville’s view that belief is the natural state of man, and unbelief an accident, is not helpful here; if that were truly the case, then it would have been employed to explain the conversion of the upper classes, and yet Tocqueville did not do so. Thus, on his class analysis of the causes of belief and unbelief, there is no reason to look for the conversion to religion of that class from which many of the pressures on the liberal social order may be expected to come.

How the newly found, opportunistic faith of the middle classes might be expected to effect the conversion of the lower classes is indicated by Tocqueville. Senior paraphrases his remarks as follows:

That the instinct which leads the mass of mankind to assume the existence and the influence of a supernatural Being is so strong that it will always prevail unless it is violently opposed. That a religious system which is taught in every school, preached from every pulpit, and treated by all the educated portion of society as if it were true, will be received without examination by nine-tenths of those to whom it is offered and adopted and retained by them without suspicion[sic].¹⁶⁶

But this is surely placing the prospects for a religious revival among the lower classes in too favorable a light. It assumes something like a monopoly of control of the means of communication of opinion, such as religious forces enjoyed in the United States, and which Tocqueville seems to have approved of there.¹⁶⁷ If it required actual threat to their chief values and way of life for the middle classes to be weaned away from Voltaireanism, why should mere propaganda from bourgeois sources be sufficient to accomplish the same thing for the working classes, particularly considering that Tocqueville foresees a great advance in educational opportunities for them, and, since, moreover, there is in existence an influential class of socialist publicists who will not conveniently oblige the middle classes in their campaign?

Finally, the dependence of religious belief on the general state of society also affects Tocqueville’s claim that it will provide an antidote for “individualism.” For, not only will religion itself undergo the same modifications and influences which have brought this kind of feeling to the fore in society at large, but Tocqueville seems clearly to be overestimating the effect that preaching and exhortation can have on social developments. We ought to recall how the older society forestalled the evil in question. In earlier times, the social system was so structured that almost everyone felt his fate bound up with that of a number of others: members of guilds and other professional associations; those in the feudal hierarchy with other nobles, and particularly with those above and below them in the system; citizens of the same city, enjoying special privileges which had to be conquered from authority and fought for even afterwards; aristocrats and their retainers; even lords and peasants. Individualism came into existence with the breakdown of this system.¹⁶⁸ It is the scheme of values, the “code of honor,” corresponding to democratic times, as sacrifice for the interest of the group corresponds to aristocratic times. Since the actual life conditions of people are constantly pushing them in the direction of withdrawal from social affairs, it seems far-fetched to suppose that mere preaching by religious authorities and the acceptance of certain theological doctrines by the people can make a real difference in this trend.

It is, of course, open to Tocqueville to insist that even if religion cannot make a great difference in stemming the tide of materialism and individualism, it can make some difference, and thus it is important for moralists and others to increase its authority wherever possible. But then this sort of subdued claim hardly justifies the assertion that the resurrection of religious belief is one of the greatest tasks of our age, nor supports the significance Tocqueville ascribed to his own work of reconciling liberalism and religious faith.

By the last years of his life, Tocqueville seems to have largely despaired of religion’s playing a key role in the preservation of freedom. For one thing, he observed with disgust the support given by the Catholic Church to the Second Empire. He remarks of the French in 1856:

we now have become extremely devout. Everyday the pastor of our village upholds from the pulpit the Christian virtues of the Emperor, his faith, his charity and the rest . . . At this time when we are more exclusively than ever preoccupied with the material goods of this earth we advance every day along this road of sanctimoniousness.¹⁶⁹

Particularly in the foreword to The Old Régime (1856) does this same disillusionment with religion appear. Here he expresses many of the old fears for the future of liberty; the great problem is still “individualism,” which is encouraged by the despot, since it plays so well into his hands. But now Tocqueville maintains that it is only participation in public affairs that can protect against tyranny. The individual practice of a Christian life is perfectly compatible with the existence of an unfree society; saintly Christians did, after all, live under the worst of the Roman Emperors. And that this was possible should not be difficult to understand, for “the patrimony of the Christian faith is not of this world.”¹⁷⁰ It is not unlikely that Tocqueville, the lifelong student of Rousseau, was well aware of how this notion echoes that in the Contrat social (in the chapter on “La religion civile”): “Le christianisme est une religion toute spirituelle, occupée uniquement des choses du ciel; la patrie du chrétien n’est pas de ce monde.”¹⁷¹

Instead, what Tocqueville attaches his hopes to is “freedom,” in the sense of the right to take part in public affairs. It alone is capable of elevating men above “mere mammon worship and the petty personal worries which crop up in the course of everyday life, and of making them aware at every moment that they belong each and all to a vaster entity above and around them—their native land.”¹⁷² In this way, Tocqueville appears to be edging towards an awareness of the dilemma presented by the Christian faith for anyone who attempts to stir men to heights of civic mindedness and a sense of responsibility to the commonwealth, a dilemma which Rousseau saw plainly. For, ultimately, Tocqueville’s thought is oriented more towards a re-establishment of community than towards making viable the new moral world of “atomistic” individualism. As one writer recently put it:

From Plato and Aristotle, through Burke and De Tocqueville, the therapeutic implication of social theory is remarkably consistent: an individual can exercise his gifts and powers fully only by participation in the common life. This is the classical ideal. The healthy man is in fact the good citizen. The therapeutic and the moral were thus connected in the Western tradition of social theory.¹⁷³

But, as Tocqueville had long understood, Christianity lacked any great interest in patriotism or the civic virtues: these pertained rather to antiquity, and had been replaced by Christianity.¹⁷⁴ Unlike the ancient republics, Christianity sets up a moral order superior to that of the state, and teaches that there is every man’s true homeland. In this way, the same element in the Christian worldview which liberals such as Laboulaye and Acton saw as the beginning of individual freedom—the institution of an ideal realm of moral obligation to whose claims those of the state were strictly subordinated—in the end proved to be at odds with Tocqueville’s demand for a rebirth of the civic spirit.

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¹Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 21–44.

²Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 349.

³Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1955), p. 20.

⁴Ibid., p. 16. He refers to the mid-eighteenth century as “that generation which had decisively broken with the Middle Ages.” Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. and ed. by John Lukacs (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1959), p. 190.

⁵Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 192, 196–198.

⁶Ibid., vol. 1, p. 6.

⁷Ibid., vol. 2, p. vi.

⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 269.

⁹Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), p. 8.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 20.

¹¹Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres Complètes, ed. by J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), vol. 2, pp. i, 217.

¹²Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 99–103.

¹³Old Régime, p. xiv. (Italics added.)

¹⁴European Revolution, p. 324.

¹⁵Old Régime, p. xii.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 120.

¹⁷This is not to imply that Tocqueville would have approved of these qualities in the service of what he recognized to be criminal ends—he does not appear to have had much admiration for a Marat or a Robespierre. But such virtues, when displayed by persons of a wide range of attitudes and aims, have an intrinsic value, he thought.

¹⁸European Revolution, p. 325.

¹⁹Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 45. That Tocqueville shared the caste feelings of the nobleman is unquestionable. Nassau Senior reports on a conversation with him in 1849, in which Tocqueville refers to the “freemasonry” existing among aristocrats: “When I talk to a gentilhomme, though we have not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger.” M. C. M. Simpson, ed., Correspondence and Conversation of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 (London: King, 1872), vol. 1, p. 69.

²⁰Melvin Richter has dealt with the former in “Tocqueville and Algeria, The Review of Politics 25 (July 1963), pp. 362–398. The subject is also discussed in Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

²¹Quoted in Drescher, op. cit., p. 114.

²²Simpson, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 214.

²³Quoted in Drescher, op. cit., p. 182.

²⁴European Revolution, pp. 267–268.

²⁵Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 245. It is significant that he explains this by citing the fact that they were governed by aristocratic institutions.

²⁶Drescher, op. cit., pp. 159–160.

²⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 283.

²⁸Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke, ed. by Andress Flitner and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960), vol. 1, p. 98.

²⁹Ibid., p. 72. It is no accident that the author of these words was the one minister at the Congress of Vienna who rejoiced at the news that Napoleon had returned from Elba, because “now we shall have some life.” Juliette Bauer, Lives of the Brothers Humboldt (New York: Harper, 1853), p. 351.

³⁰See, for instance, the comment: “Je reconnais volontiers [war’s] avantages. . . . A de certaines époques de l’espèce humaine, elle est dans la nature de l’homme. Elle favorise alors le développement de ses plus belles et de ses plus grandes facultés,” etc. Œuvres, p. 991.

³¹Ibid.

³²Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 318.

³³Ibid., vol. 2, p. 261.

³⁴By “government” and “state”, we must understand the central government. Tocqueville often writes in the spirit of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; that is, he separates out the powers of the central government on the one hand, and those of the local authorities and the people on the other. This is connected with his tendency to use “freedom” sometimes to designate participation in political decision-making by the citizens.

³⁵Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 311.

³⁶Old Régime, p. 58.

³⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 331.

³⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 371. Why, in that case, it does not begin to assume the characteristics of a “providential fact,” to which we must bow, is unclear.

³⁹Old Régime, p. 70.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 41; see also pp. 51 and 198.

⁴¹Tocqueville quotes with great effect a secret letter from Mirabeau to the king, praising the Revolution for (so far) having accomplished much in concentrating power in the hands of the monarchy; much of what it had done “would have pleased Richelieu.”

⁴²Ibid., pp. 8–9.

⁴³Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 321–324.

⁴⁴Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 312, n., 313.

⁴⁵Œuvres completes, vol. 2, pp. ii, 132.

⁴⁶Old Régime, p. 167.

⁴⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 323, n. The degree to which place-hunting was a mania among the French and other continental nations was a problem for Tocqueville. It aroused his contempt, as well as his fears for the effects on national character. See, e.g., ibid., vol. 2, p. 263; Old Régime, p. 91.

⁴⁸Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 336.

⁴⁹Tocqueville does not refer to the ideas of Constant in regard to this problem, nor does he mention him at all in any of his major works, to my knowledge. But he can hardly have avoided reading such works as De l’esprit de conquête, by the leading French liberal of the generation preceding his.

⁵⁰Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 136–137. Besides wealth as a source of creature comforts, Tocqueville finds that it is valued also as the last remaining creator of status distinction in democratic societies. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 239–240. This is a factor that Constant seems not to have considered.

⁵¹Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 247–248.

⁵²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 360.

⁵³Ibid., vol. 2, p. 78.

⁵⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 141.

⁵⁵Ibid. In another place, however, Tocqueville seems to accept the modern taste for well-being: “Man cannot be cured of the love of riches, but they may be persuaded to enrich themselves by none but honest means.” Ibid., vol. 2, p. 27. It is here, he asserts, that the role of religion is to be found.

⁵⁶Ibid., vol. 2, p. 18.

⁵⁷Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 182.

⁵⁸Léo Moulin, “On the Evolution of the Meaning of the Word ‘Individualism’”, International Social Science Bulletin 6 (1955), pp. 181–185.

⁵⁹Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 104.

⁶⁰Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 104–106.

⁶¹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 295.

⁶²Ibid., vol. 2, p. 310.

⁶³Ibid., vol. 2, p. 388.

⁶⁴Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 149–150, also p. 277.

⁶⁵European Revolution, pp. 224–225.

⁶⁶Old Régime, p. 69.

⁶⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 347.

⁶⁸Ibid., vol. 1, p. 298.

⁶⁹Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 340–344.

⁷⁰J.-P. Mayer, Prophet of the Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 24–25.

⁷¹It will be seen that this is not literally true; that, on the contrary, Tocqueville’s thought in this area bears a great resemblance to that of Constant. But Tocqueville here was contrasting himself, not really with liberals such as Constant, but “with the majority of democrats of our day.”

⁷²Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 321.

⁷³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 319.

⁷⁴Ibid., p. 45.

⁷⁵Indeed, Tocqueville at times goes even further, maintaining that the crucial role of religion in American society proves something positive about religion in general: “There can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.” Ibid., vol. 1, p. 314.

⁷⁶Tocqueville proceeds in this way on a number of issues: he states as certain facts that elsewhere he demonstrates much less than total assurance about. Marvin Zetterbaum notes this and explains Tocqueville’s grand proclamations on questions of which he was really of two minds as attempts at self-fulfilling prophecies. “His first consideration,” he adds, “is always the effect his thought will have on society.” Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University, 1967), pp. 16–20.

⁷⁷Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 7.

⁷⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 142.

⁷⁹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 12. (Italics added.)

⁸⁰European Revolution, p. 206.

⁸¹Ibid., p. 212.

⁸²Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 321.

⁸³Ibid., vol. 2, p. 152.

⁸⁴Strictly speaking, the infinite prolongation of this afterlife, or “immortality,” is never necessary for Tocqueville’s arguments—merely that there be some substantial period of survival after death.

⁸⁵Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 133–135.

⁸⁶European Revolution, pp. 211–212.

⁸⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 158–159.

⁸⁸Ibid.

⁸⁹We may remark in passing that Tocqueville too frequently indulges in such hyperbole, verging on—or passing into—the absurd: e.g., “In Europe, almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life . . . the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society.” Ibid., vol. 1, p. 315.

⁹⁰Ibid., vol. 2, p. 158.

⁹¹Ibid., vol. 2, p. 154.

⁹²Ibid.

⁹³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 196. As we shall see presently, such rational conviction, even in the best of cases, is available to the individual only on a relatively few issues: uncritical faith on most questions must be the rule.

⁹⁴Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 196–197.

⁹⁵Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 13–14.

⁹⁶Ibid., vol. 2, p. 74.

⁹⁷Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 9–12.

⁹⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 9.

⁹⁹Ibid., vol. 2, p. 12.

¹⁰⁰Ibid., vol. 2, p. 13. Tocqueville is well aware that what is presented as the will of the majority is often simply the will of a party posing as the majority’s spokesman. What occurs is that a certain group of radical revolutionaries claim to represent the people, and then takes this to entail that it possesses the “right of doing whatever it chooses and despising what men have hitherto respected, from the highest moral laws to the vulgar rules of common sense.” Ibid., vol. 1, p. 434.

¹⁰¹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 275.

¹⁰²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 434.

¹⁰³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 316.

¹⁰⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 21.

¹⁰⁵European Revolution, pp. 210–211.

¹⁰⁶Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 21–22.

¹⁰⁷Ibid., vol. 2, p. 22.

¹⁰⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 194.

¹⁰⁹This is surely a strange direction for Tocquevilles argument to take: the whole point of the argument for religious faith which he is considering here is that certain key issues must be withdrawn from individual judgment and be accepted blindly. It is unclear why declining to think about these questions because one does not believe answers are possible is more ignoble than making the sacrifice of the intellect and refusing “to lift the veil of the sanctuary” of such questions.

¹¹⁰Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 22–23.

¹¹¹Ibid., vol. 2, p. 23.

¹¹²Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 142–143. At other times, however, Tocqueville is at pains to emphasize the fundamental stability of political principles in the United States, beneath all the apparent upheaval of ideas: “the general principles of government are more stable and the chief opinions which regulate society are more durable [in the United States] than in many other countries. . . . The same tendency of opinion has been observed in England, where for the last century greater freedom of thought and more invincible prejudices have existed in any other country in Europe.” Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 195–196.

¹¹³Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 315–316.

¹¹⁴Ibid., vol. 1, p. 197.

¹¹⁵Old Régime, p. 157.

¹¹⁶Ibid., p. 205.

¹¹⁷Ibid., p. 157. During 1848, Tocqueville had come into contact with some of this “new race”: Blanqui, who “seemed to have passed his life in a sewer” and the very “recollection of whom has always filled me with horror and disgust”; and Barbès, “one of those men in whom the demagogue, the madman, and the knight-errant are so closely intermingled . . . and who can only make their way in a society as sick and troubled as ours. I am inclined to believe that it was the madman that predominated in him.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 130–131.

¹¹⁸Old Régime, pp. 10–13.

¹¹⁹Ibid., p. 156.

¹²⁰Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 23.

¹²¹Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 129–130.

¹²²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 255.

¹²³Ibid.

¹²⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 131.

¹²⁵Ibid., vol. 2, p. 132.

¹²⁶Ibid., vol. 1, p. 67.

¹²⁷Ibid., vol. 1, p. 253.

¹²⁸Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 250–252.

¹²⁹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 318.

¹³⁰Ibid., vol. 1, p. 237.

¹³¹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 238. (Italics added.)

¹³²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 222.

¹³³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 409.

¹³⁴Ibid.

¹³⁵European Revolution, pp. 206–207.

¹³⁶Ibid.

¹³⁷Old Régime, pp. 168–169.

¹³⁸Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres Complètes, ed. by J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 9, p. 57.

¹³⁹John Lukacs, “Comment on Tocqueville Article,” French Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1961), p. 123, n.

¹⁴⁰Although he generally speaks in favor of the preservation of religious belief, for the Western world it is Christianity which is at issue, since Tocqueville reiterates the impossibility of founding a new religion in the present circumstances of society.

¹⁴¹Lively, op. cit., p. 197.

¹⁴²Zetterbaum, op. cit., p. 160. The words are quoted from Leo Strauss.

¹⁴³Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 314.

¹⁴⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 242. (Italics in original.)

¹⁴⁵Ibid., vol. 1, p. 269.

¹⁴⁶European Revolution, p. 270. (Italics in original.)

¹⁴⁷Ibid., p. 232.

¹⁴⁸Ibid., pp. 285–286.

¹⁴⁹Ibid., pp. 291–292.

¹⁵⁰Democracy in America, vol. 2, p. 21.

¹⁵¹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 48.

¹⁵²Ibid., vol. 2, p. 153.

¹⁵³Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 25–26.

¹⁵⁴Ibid., vol. 2, p. 26.

¹⁵⁵Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 5–6.

¹⁵⁶Ibid., vol. 2, p. 33. Constant, too, considered pantheism a dangerous and destructive force; see De la religion, vol. 3, pp. 27–29.

¹⁵⁷Democracy in America, vol. 2, pp. 27–29.

¹⁵⁸Ibid., vol. 2, p. 27.

¹⁵⁹Ibid.

¹⁶⁰Ibid., vol. 2, p. 7.

¹⁶¹Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 134–135.

¹⁶²Earlier, in the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville had traced the “unnatural” prominence of irreligion in France to the “close connection of politics and religion. The unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political opponents rather than as their religious adversaries” and propose a divorce of religion and politics. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 325. But, as he was to see later on (discussed below), it was not religion’s connection with politics per se, but rather its alliance with anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois forces, that caused its unpopularity with the middle classes. Later, the latter were to welcome religious support for their own claims.

¹⁶³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 48.

¹⁶⁴Old Régime, pp. 154–155.

¹⁶⁵Correspondence and Conversations, vol. 1, pp. 106–107.

¹⁶⁶Ibid., p. 107.

¹⁶⁷Freedom of opinion does not exist in America. The Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes any wish to publish them. . . . In the United States no one is punished for [licentious] books, but no one is induced to write them. . . . In this case the use of power is good.” Democracy in America, vol. 1, p. 275. The question is whether Tocqueville qualifies as “good” the suppression only of “licentious” books, or of anti-religious ones as well. In any case, this break with civil libertarianism would not be unique in his thought. Already at the beginning of Democracy, he quoted approvingly John Winthrop’s “fine definition of liberty,” which distinguished sharply between “liberty [for a man] to do what he lists . . . a liberty to evil as well as to good . . . that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against”; and, on the other hand, “a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest . . . the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.” Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 44–45.

¹⁶⁸That word ‘individualism,’ which we have coined for our own requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual necessarily belonged to a group and no one could regard himself as an isolated unit.” Old Régime, p. 96. He observes, too, of the middle classes in France, before the Revolution: “The utmost concern was shown for [the interests] of the group. For the members were acutely aware that they had to defend their group privileges and prestige; no individual could play for safety and make ignoble concessions, hoping to pass unnoticed. The stage on which each played his part was small but brightly lit, and there was always the same audience to applaud or hiss him.” Ibid., p. 115.

¹⁶⁹European Revolution, p. 293. This last sentence indicates that Tocqueville has either changed his mind on the notion in Democracy of the compatibility of great concern for material gratification and religious faith, or that he never really took that notion seriously.

¹⁷⁰Old Régime, p. xiv. At about the same time, in his notes for the continuation of this work, Tocqueville makes an allied point when he attacks moralists, “surtout parmi les chrétiens,” for ignoring the duties one has towards one’s country and one’s fellow citizens, and emphasizing only those towards humanity and one’s neighbor. The real value of patriotic feeling in promoting moral development has been completely neglected he complains. Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 346–347.

¹⁷¹Rousseau, bk. 4, chap. 8.

¹⁷²Old Régime, p. xiv.

¹⁷³Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 68.

¹⁷⁴European Revolution, p. 192.