asserts that Tocqueville sought new sources of moral greatness for the new democratic age, and he contends that in Tocqueville’s treatment of religion broadly understood, we find a major source of greatness in democratic eras, as well as significant modifications of his Pascalian sources. By contrast, Nolla finds more direct indebtedness to—and less modification of—Pascal in Tocqueville’s tone and his teaching.
Filippo Sabetti’s essay, found in the second part of the present volume, also touches on these themes of influences and beginnings, but Sabetti highlights a pre-American voyage—Tocqueville’s 1827 voyage to Sicily—as the beginning of the Frenchman’s intellectual journey. In his notes from that voyage, which Sabetti explores, we see the birth of Tocqueville’s hallmark comparative analytic perspective, as well as his awareness of the significance of situational particularities, and many other traits associated with Tocqueville’s mode of proceeding in Democracy in America. Not only does Sabetti remind us of the importance of Tocqueville’s youthful Sicilian journey to his mature thought, but he also draws attention to the influence of Tocqueville and his method in nineteenth-century Italy and to the continued relevance of Tocquevillian modes and ideas in contemporary social science.
Having a textual window into the development of Tocqueville’s thought through the historical-critical edition also invites us to a fresh consideration of Democracy in America. Among the many things we discover from the historical-critical edition is that the work’s original opening was “The work that you are about to read is not a travelogue, <the reader can rest easy>.” The passage continues, “You will also not
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find in this book a complete summary of all the institutions of the United States; but I flatter myself that in it, the public will find some new documentation and, from it, will gain useful knowledge about a subject that is more important for us than the fate of America and no less worthy of holding our attention.”4 What kind of a work, then, is Democracy in America? More broadly, what is its purpose, and what kind of useful—and new—knowledge did Tocqueville believe he was presenting?
Many of the essays collected in this volume offer responses to the question of what type of work is Democracy in America. For Green, Tocqueville is the philosopher of liberalism, who understood the American experiment’s innovation in tempering nature with art or in combining equality of conditions with the principles of ordered liberty. At the heart of Tocqueville’s famously “new political science,”5 suggests Green, is the recognition that the principle of equality is not merely confined to the political realm, as popular sovereignty, but that it orders or shapes the world beyond politics. Moreover, one of Tocqueville’s key discoveries was that equality was both the potential problem and the best hope for a solution. As Nolla observes at the end of his essay, this is a quintessentially Tocquevillian mode, of applying more of the problematic principle to remedy the problem itself.
Harvey Mansfield follows Green in casting Tocqueville as a philosopher, yet Mansfield finds Tocqueville’s philosophy a “modest” one, designed not to make the world new but to adjust to the new age of democracy and to shape that new world of equality in a way supportive of liberty rather than destructive of it. According to Mansfield, Tocqueville felt the need to hide the philosophic teaching of Democracy in America, but that teaching is a philosophy that is a moderation of liberal foundationalism in the name of liberty itself. Ceaser as well seems to cast Tocqueville as a philosopher, and he gives us an account focusing on Tocqueville’s development of a Customary History that recognizes and responds to the fixity of the human, social, and political
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material and that serves as a “counterdoctrine to modern philosophy.” Despite its opposition to modern philosophy, however, the act of composing a customary history is a philosophic endeavor in that it constitutes a deliberate effort to school democratic society; thus, Tocqueville’s own political-philosophic art consists in shaping and guiding democracy so that it can avoid falling into “one form or other of democratic despotism.”6
By contrast with these accounts of Tocqueville explicitly as a philosopher, Zuckert and Kahan, respectively, characterize him as a political scientist and a moraliste. Zuckert’s chapter suggests that Tocqueville’s voyage to America was undertaken to learn what laws, habits, mores, and ideas could preserve liberty in an age of equality, particularly against the danger of soft despotism. Democracy in America details those protections; its political science is an analysis of the social state resulting from equality of conditions and an attempt to isolate and analyze the factors (geography, laws, and above all, mores) determining whether the political results of this social state would be free or despotic. Kahan characterizes Tocqueville’s project less in political terms than in moral ones, and he proposes that Tocqueville’s primary concern was to ensure that human greatness, rather than human degradation, was “the outcome of democracy.”7 Among the sources of greatness in democratic times Tocqueville discovered and sought to encourage were religion and spirituality broadly understood, poetry, and associative life. Kahan emphasizes the utility of religion or, more broadly, spirituality as a source of democratic grandeur, capable of doing for the majority of humans what aristocracy had only been able to do for a few.
Yet perhaps there is ultimately less opposition between these accounts of Tocqueville and the characterizations of him explicitly as a philosopher, for Mansfield, Zuckert, and Kahan all emphasize a philosophic dimension to Tocqueville, perhaps most especially in the role of knowledge and art to shape nature and to create in an age of equality societies that would be conducive to political and individual liberty.
Tocqueville concluded the 1835 edition of Democracy in America with a long chapter on “Some Considerations on the Present State
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and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States.” This chapter stands somewhat apart from the rest of the 1835 work, not merely because it far exceeds the other chapters in length, but because it treats rather exceptional topics, which Tocqueville notes in the chapter’s opening pages “are American without being democratic.”8 The chapter is also remarkable for, as Nolla reminds us, it seems to have been rapidly composed and was not part of the material critically read by Tocqueville’s family or his friends Beaumont and Kergorlay. Thus, the chapter gives us, in Jennings’s words, Tocqueville in his “most unmediated form.”9 Three essays in the first half of this volume focus on this exceptional chapter and are, in their own way, a distinctive subsection to it.
Barbara Allen examines Tocqueville’s treatment of the three races within the context of his greater narrative of the universalization of equality of conditions, noting that both slavery and the plight of the Native Americans invite us to reconsider the inexorability of equality’s march as well as the extent to which the democratic ideal “buffers the counter-current of prejudice.”10 She notes that, on the one hand, Tocqueville’s writings on race offer rich insights into the advance of democracy’s equality of conditions as well as the problems of adaptation and transculturation, but on the other hand, Tocqueville’s own analytic framework limited his analysis and blinded him to the potential of individuals to transcend contexts of imperialism and enslavement.
Jean-Louis Benoît’s chapter focuses on the Native Americans and on the paradox of the denial of their right to self-determination within the greatest modern democracy. He sees Tocqueville’s chapter on them in two lights: as a lawyerly brief of carefully documented facts, assembled by Tocqueville to denounce the Americans’ injustice to the Native Americans; and as an effort to convince the French aristocracy that it must adapt to the inevitably increasing political and social democratization of the world. Like both Allen and Cheryl Welch, Benoît also emphasizes the international dimension to Tocqueville’s chapter on the three races, by showing Tocqueville’s application of the lessons learned
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from
