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Tocqueville and Gobineau on the Nature of Modern Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Aristide Tessitore
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Abstract

This essay takes its bearings from an epistolary dialogue between Arthur de Gobineau and Alexis de Tocqueville about the contours of modern politics. Their dispute illuminates in a remarkable way the theological-political problem that suffuses the emergence of modern politics and, as a consequence, provides a helpful frame of reference for understanding several contemporary controversies bearing on the relationship between religion and liberal democratic politics. Moreover, their correspondence casts new light on the underpinnings of Tocqueville's thought. The frankness of this exchange together with the relentless character of Gobineau's arguments, provoke in Tocqueville an articulation of the larger context within which he understands modern politics and, in so doing, reveals an important, though largely neglected, intellectual framework that informs much of his published work.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , Fall 2005 , pp. 631 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. For an excellent discussion of Gobineau's attempt to ground racial theory in social science and its subsequent influence, see Ceaser, James W., Reconstructing America: The Symbol of American in Modern Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. chaps. 4–6.Google Scholar

2. Tocqueville's correspondence with Gobineau has been translated into English by Lukacs, John, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, ed. and trans. Lukacs, John (Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958)Google Scholar, hereafter cited as Correspondence. I have referred to this edition wherever possible. Unfortunately, Lukacs′ book inexplicably excludes some key passages from Tocqueville's letters and an important letter from Gobineau. In such cases, I refer to Vol. IX of the French edition of Tocqueville's collected works edited by J. P. Mayer (Tocqueville, , Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville et d'Arthur de Gobineau, ed. Degros, M.. In Tocqueville: Oeuvres Complète. Vol. IX, ed. Mayer, J.-P. [Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1959]Google Scholar.Cited as Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville). As far as I can determine, the only English treatments to include substantive considerations of the Tocqueville-Gobineau correspondence are by Ceaser, James (“Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion.” Social Research 54 [1987]: 499–518)Google Scholar, Goldstein, Doris (Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville's Thought [New York, Oxford, Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific Publishing. Co., 1975])Google Scholar and Siedentop, Larry (Tocqueville [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1994])Google Scholar. Each is helpful although organized around the very different issues of race (Ceaser), religion (Goldstein), and historical context (Siedentop). Galston's argument comes nearest to the one offered here. But whereas Galston rejects “Tocqueville's linkage between Christianity and the moral basis of liberalism” (“Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion,” Social Research 54 (1987): 518Google Scholar; cf. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues and Diversity in the Liberal State [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991])Google Scholar, I contend that Tocqueville actually wished to sustain the uneasy relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and religion as the most promising—even if contentious—safeguard for public morality.

3. Tocqueville thought the correspondence significant. He asked Gobineau to preserve his letters, something that suggests their likely use as an outline for their projected study (Correspondence, 195Google Scholar).

4. Tocqueville's characteristic solicitude for salutary belief is in some sense akin to Aristotle's practical concern to fortify “praiseworthy opinions” (endoxa), especially evident in the latter's political works. The affinity between Aristotle and Tocqueville has been noted by Salkever, Stephen (Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990], esp. pp. 245–62)Google Scholar.

5. John Lukacs ranks the lifelong correspondence between Tocqueville and Gobineau among “the great dialogues of modern history,” comparable to those “between Machiavelli and Guicciardini, between Proudhon and Marx, between Burkhardt and Nietzsche” (Correspondence, 16Google Scholar).

6. See Tocqueville's letter to Claude-François de Corcelle in 1853 (Tocqueville, , Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Boesche, Roger, trans. Boesche, Roger and Taupin, James [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985], p. 295)Google Scholar. Zuckert, Contra (“Not by Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” Review of Politics 43 [1981]: 259–80Google Scholar; “The Role of Religion in Preserving American Liberty: Tocqueville's Analysis 150 Years Later,” in Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, ed. Lawler, Peter Augustine and Alulis, Joseph [New York and London: Garland Publishing 1993])Google Scholar, I maintain that religion remained a central feature of Tocqueville's analysis throughout his life. Mitchell considers religion to be part of “the cornerstone of Tocqueville's seemingly peculiar liberalism” (Mitchell, Joshua, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1995], p. 206)Google Scholar. Zuckert, however, is surely correct to point out that the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on American Christianity has moved American and, more generally, liberal religiosity closer to a kind of all-inclusive Deism (cf. esp. “Not by Preaching,” pp. 268, 275; “The Role of Religion in Preserving American Liberty,” pp. 228–33).

7. Strauss's writing often gives the impression that there is a radical break separating ancient and modern understandings of political philosophy. For example, his most widely read book, Natural Right and History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press [1953], 1965)Google Scholar, turns on the distinction between classical and modern conceptions of natural right (consider in particular, pp. 11–12). Strauss's most explicit account of the existence of a dynamic tension between philosophy and religion is found in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy” (The Independent Journal of Philosophy [1954]: 111–18)Google Scholar. Cf. “Jerusalem and Athens,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 377–405..Google Scholar

8. Among many differences, the most far-reaching is that both Tocqueville and Gobineau lack an appreciation for ancient political philosophy and, more specifically, the priority it assigns to theoria in its understanding of politics.

9. Consider, for example, Machiavelli's famous claim to have set off on “a path as yet untrodden by anyone” in search of “new modes and orders” (Discourses on Livy, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and NathanTarcov, [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996], p. 5)Google Scholar; Descartes′ rejection of tradition and decision to “study myself,” so as to discover a certain foundation for scientific knowledge (Discourse on Method, trans. Cress, Donald A. [Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co (1637) 1980], pp. 1–6)Google Scholar; or, more generally, Hobbes's effort to develop a new science of politics in the Leviathan.

10. Perhaps the most vivid expression of modern hopes for unlimited progress were voiced by the Marquis de Condorcet who maintained that with respect to “the progress of the human mind … nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes” (de Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicholas Caritat Marquis, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind in Enlightenment Reader, ed. Kramnick, Isaac [New York: Penguin Books, 1995], p. 28Google Scholar). Thomas Jefferson was scarcely less enamored. Reflecting at the end of his life (1824) on the steady gain in knowledge and improving human conditions, he writes, “[W]here this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth” (Writings, ed. Peterson, Merrill D.. Library of America Series [New York: Panguin Books, 1984, p. 1497Google Scholar). In sharp contrast, a characteristically premodern sensibility is expressed by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, where “blind hopes” (tuphlas elpidas) are said to accompany technological advance (in this case, the gift of fire) (250–256).

11. Although Tocqueville intermittently gives evidence for the priority of one or the other of these causes, he consistently shows the influence of both in such a way that suggests he has not fully decided the case for himself. Indeed, his notes on Democracy in America, completed three years prior to the correspondence with Gobineau considered here, explicitly raise an unanswered question as to whether a “social state” is the product of ideas or ideas result from a “social state” (cf. Democratie, De La, 35fGoogle Scholar). References to Democracy in America are to the English Mansfield- Winthrop edition (Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America [vol. 1 orig. pub. 1835; vol. 2 orig. pub. 1840], ed. and trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and Winthrop, Delba [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000]CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cited as Democracy) except where it is necessary to refer to the additional historical-critical materials contained in the French edition of Eduardo Nolla (Tocqueville, Alexis de, De La Démocratie en Amériaue, pt. 2, augmented with historical-critical apparatus by Nolla, Eduardo [Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1990].Google Scholar Cited in text as De La Démocratie). References are to Vol. 2 of the Nolla edition.

12. Tocqueville famously contends that “America is … the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed” (Democracy, 403Google Scholar). For an insightful discussion of the relationship between Tocqueville and Descartes, see Wolin, (Wolin, Sheldon S., Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life [Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001], esp. pp. 76–91).Google Scholar

13. Cf. Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, ed. Furet, François and Mélonio, Françoise, and trans. Kahan, Alan S. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 100.Google Scholar

14. Consider Galations 3:27–28Google Scholar or Augustine's classic articulation of this position in the City of God.

15. Cf. The Genealogy of Morals, esp. First Essay, sections 7–8. Nietzsche also attributes the decisive dislocation in the West to the advent of biblical morality.

16. The transpolitical dimension of Christianity was claimed as a distinctive feature from its earliest recorded self-articulations. Consider Acts 10:34–48Google Scholar and the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus V, 1–17.Google Scholar

17. Cf. Tocqueville, , Selected Letters, p. 357.Google Scholar

18. This theme is cautiously developed in Machiavelli's political works. A particularly succinct statement, appropriately hedged, is found in Machiavelli's Preface to Book One of Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli is more direct when he contrasts the political consequences of ancient and Christian education in Bk. 2, chap. 2.

19. Strauss also speaks of the antagonistic relationship between philosophy and religion in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy.” However, whereas Strauss lays out a fundamental theoretical tension, Tocqueville's understanding of philosophy appears to be especially influenced by the practical struggle of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophers to overturn politically entrenched religious authorities. He records his jarring discovery at age sixteen of the great eighteenth-century philosophes, a discovery that provoked an enduring crisis of faith vividly described thirty-five years later in a revealing letter to Madame Swetchine (February 26,1857, O.C. XV, 2: 315; cf. Jardin, André, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Davis, Lydia with Hemenway, Robert [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, esp. pp. 61–64)Google Scholar. In sharp contrast, Strauss regards the philosophic refutations of religion that so unnerved Tocqueville to be theoretically deficient (“The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” pp. 116–18Google Scholar). He traces philosophy's most compelling account back to “philosophy in its original and full sense” (pp. 113–14)Google Scholar, that is, to an understanding and appreciation of classical philosophy that is absent from Tocqueville's writings.

20. Tocqueville, , The Old Regime, pp. 99–101.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 101.

22. Nietzsche makes much the same point about the derivative character of Christianity in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil, where he maintains that Christianity, is in fact “Platonism for ‘the people’” (Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter. [New York: Random House [1886], 1966, p. 3.Google Scholar

23. Whereas John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration arguably deploys the most famous and influential arguments for the disestablishment of religion, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Montesquieu, among others, also contributed—albeit in different ways—to the development of the characteristic liberal doctrine of separation of church and state.

24. Montesquieu writes, “a more certain way to attack religion is by favor, by the comforts of life, by the hope of fortune … not by what makes one indignant, but by what leads one to indifference when other passions act on our souls and when those that religion inspires are silent” (The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Cohler, Anne M., Miller, Basia Carolyn, Stone, Harold Samuel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], Part 5, bk. 25, chap.12, p. 489Google Scholar).

25. Gobineau later repudiates the propagandistic discourse of the “Voltairian way,” which, in its zeal to remake the world, succeeded only in destroying religion, law, industry, and commerce (Gobineau, Arthur de, Essai sur I'inéalité des races humaines, ed. Juin, Hubert [Paris: Pierre Belfond (1853–1855) 1967], p. 42Google Scholar).

26. Consider Bacon's, FrancisAdvancement of Learning (I, 5, 11)Google Scholar and Marx's “Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction” (esp. the opening seven paragraphs). The latter was written during the same year (1843) that Gobineau presents these arguments to Tocqueville.

27. Commenting on the difficulty of sustaining disinterested attachment to the public good, Hume, David writes, “it is requisite to govern men by other passions, and animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury” (Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc (1777). 1987], p. 263;Google Scholar cf. Montesquieu, , Spirit of the Laws, Part 4, bk. 20, chap. 1, p. 338).Google Scholar Madison famously argues that the genius of the American Constitution lies in its ability to harness and direct darker human passions in such a way as to contribute to a common good (The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, Clinton [New York: Penguin Books, 1961], esp. p. 322).Google Scholar

28. Second Treatise of Government, chap. 5, esp. sections 37–51.Google Scholar Cf. Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, bk. 1, chaps. 1–2.Google Scholar

29. Notwithstanding his harsh criticisms of Christianity in 1843, fourteen years later Gobineau insists that he is a “convinced Christian” and takes offense at Tocqueville's observation that his scientific theories—especially regarding race—are antithetical to both the letter and spirit of Christianity (Correspondence, 305–306).Google Scholar

30. The secularization thesis maintains that as societies become increasingly consistent with their modern philosophic underpinnings, their pre-modern religious capital will gradually diminish and eventually evaporate. See the special issue of Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (1999)Google Scholar for a comprehensive assessment of the secularization debate at the close of the twentieth century.

31. Notwithstanding the profound differences between Tocqueville and Nietzsche, both maintain that the fundamental moral and political break in the Western tradition resulted from the triumph of biblical morality (in its Jewish and eventually Christian expressions) over the pre-biblical Greek and Roman ideal. See esp. Genealogy of Morals.

32. These arguments parallel in significant respects those made by Thomas Jefferson who distinguishes “the genuine precepts of Jesus” from a historical record comprised of “mutilated” fragments “even more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatising followers.” Cf. Jefferson's letter to Dr. Rush, Benjamin on 04 21, 1803Google Scholar (Jefferson, , Writings, 1122–26Google Scholar).

33. It is revealing that whereas Strauss speaks of the antagonism between Greek philosophy and Christian theology, Tocqueville emphasizes the more explicitly political dimension of this conflict as it involves the presence or absence of “ public virtue” (Correspondence, 192Google Scholar).

34. Cf. Selected Letters on Politics and Society, p. 357.Google Scholar

35. Nietzsche, writes: “With the French Revolution, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal, and this time in an even more profound and decisive sense: the last political noblesse in Europe … collapsed beneath the popular instincts of ressentiment” (On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Kaufmann, Walter and Hollingdale, R. J. [New York: Random House, (1887) 1969], I, 16, p.54Google Scholar). Although Tocqueville evaluates Christian morality far more positively than Nietzsche, both recognize a profound continuity between Christian morality and the ethical impulse of the Enlightenment, particularly as it finds expression in the French Revolution.

36. The sustainability of this split is a much-debated question. For Strauss's view of the matter, consider “Progress or Return?” in The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press [1952], 1989), pp. 239–40.Google Scholar

37. The dominant scholarly view describes Tocqueville as a Deist. See Zunz, Oliver and Kahan, Alan S., The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 5, 29–30Google Scholar and Jardin, , Tocqueville: A Biography, pp. 61–64, 528–533;Google Scholar cf. Goldstein, Trial of Faith. Whereas Rédier (Rédier, Antione, Comme Disait M. de Tocqueville [Paris: Librairie Académique, Perrin 1925])Google Scholar and Lukacs (Lukacs, John, “The Last Days of A. de Tocqueville,” The Catholic Historical Review 50 [1964]: 155–70)Google Scholar maintain that Tocqueville died a believing Catholic and that his Catholic beliefs are fundamental for understanding his ideas, Koritansky (Koritansky, John C., “Civil Religion in Tocqueville's Democracy of America,” Interpretation 17 [1990]: 389–400);Google ScholarAlexis de Tocqueville and the New Science of Politics [Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1986)Google Scholar and Kessler (Kessler, Sanford, Tocqueville's Civil Religion: American Christianity and the Prospects for Freedom [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994])Google Scholar describe him as a non-believing proponent of civil religion in the tradition of Rousseau. Hinckley (Hinckley, Cynthia J., “Tocqueville on Religious Truth and Political Necessity” Polity 23 [1990]: 39–52,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 42–43) carves out something of a middle position, maintaining that Tocqueville suffered “the anguish of a believer” deprived, however, of “the unwavering certitude that characterizes faith of the highest order.”

38. Tocqueville writes: “If it serves man very much as an individual that his religion be true, this in not so for society. Society has nothing to fear nor to hope from the other life; and what is most important to it is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion but that they profess a religion” (Democracy, 278).Google Scholar In sharp contrast to Toqueville's explicitly political treatment of religion in his published works, his personal correspondence reveals a serious and life-long engagement with the claims of Christian faith, an engagement that must take into account his explicit statement to Gobineau in 1843 that he was not a believer. Cf. Correspondance d'Alexis de Tocqueville, 57 with his letter to Madame Swetchine on 02 26, 1857, 2: 313–16.Google Scholar

39. According to Stark, Rodney (“Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 [1999]: 249–73, esp. 253–60, 269–70),CrossRefGoogle Scholar the preponderance of empirical evidence at the end of the twentieth century appears to support Tocqueville's expectation about the persistence of religion in the modern world (including Western Europe)—although not necessarily in their traditional forms.

40. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville emphasizes the usefulness of religion in his considerations of the destructive effects of individualism, excessive preoccupation with wealth, agitated melancholy, weakened capacity for long-range thinking, attenuated moral compass, diminished appreciation for the sublime, eroded sense of human dignity, and widespread appeal of philosophic materialism or fatalism. These aspects of his thought are well-known and do not require further elucidation for the thesis argued here.

41. Tocqueville maintains that religion has a natural basis in the human heart, arising from the always incomplete joys and satisfactions of mortal life. Since religion “is as natural to the human heart as hope itself,” it is “only by a kind aberration of the intellect” and “a sort of moral violence” that human beings are turned away from religious belief (Democracy, 284).Google Scholar For a discussion of Tocqueville's view of the natural state of religion, see Manent (Manent, Pierre, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. Waggoner, John [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996],Google Scholar esp. chap. 7) and Tessitore (Tessitore, Aristide, “Alexis de Tocqueville on the Natural State of Religion in the Age of Democracy,” Journal of Politics 64 (2002): 1137–52).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. When Gobineau later repudiates this position, he criticizes the thinness of the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and puts in its place human bonds forged by blood. This is reflected in his Essai, where “races, societies, and civilizations” are put forth as the fundamental units of analysis for social science (pp. 27–30; 109–21). Cf. Ceaser, Reconstructing America, esp. chap. 4.

43. If the antagonism between religion and philosophy was especially evident to Tocqueville from the writings of the philosophes, the potential for a constructive relationship between them may well find its deepest roots in his Catholic inheritance, particularly Catholicism's characteristic confidence in the ultimate harmony between faith and reason.

44. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is arguably the most influential work in political philosophy in the late twentieth century. In it, Rawls deploys the abstract idea of the pre-political individual, for which he has been insightfully criticized by Michael Sandel. Sandel maintains that Rawls' conception of justice rests upon an insufficiently critical acceptance of the abstract notion of an “unencumbered self” (Sandel, Michael, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no.l [1984]: 81–96).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. The atomization of society is thematic in much of the communitarian literature produced over the last two decades. For an overview of the communitarian movement as a whole, see Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and its Critics (New York: New York University Press, 1984)Google Scholar and Etzioni, Amitai, ed., New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995).Google ScholarPutnam, Robert (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000], p. 24)Google Scholar calls Tocqueville the “patron saint of American communitarians,” although Gannett (Gannett, Robert T. Jr, “Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township,” American Political Science Review 97 ]2003]: 1–16, esp.1–3)CrossRefGoogle Scholar points out that Putnam misreads Tocqueville by allowing a broader and more sanguine sociological understanding of association to stand in for Tocqueville's insistence on the importance of distinctively political associations as a measure of civic health.

46. The secularization thesis has been voiced from many points of view (see note 30 above). Richard Rorty echoes Gobineau's thesis when he writes: “In its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained” (Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 45).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Tocqueville, , Selected Letters, p. 295.Google Scholar

48. Reflecting on Tocqueville's exchange with Gobineau, Galston emphasizes not only the continuity between Christianity and modern liberalism, but their essential identity: “At its heart, then, Tocqueville suggests, liberalism is the political expression of… Christian teachings, the true'social gospel.'” This appears to overstate the case, since Tocqueville is also aware of the formative role of anti-religious philosophic developments in the genesis of modern liberalism. Galston does, however, perceptively note that Tocqueville seems, in an understated way, to undercut his own emphasis on this continuity (“Tocqueville on Liberalism and Religion,” p. 508).Google Scholar

49. The uncertain, even unsustainable, character of Christianity in a democratic age is argued most forcefully by Pierre Manent. Without denying the strategic importance of religion in Tocqueville's thought, Manent maintains that healthy and durable religion must be part of a political order, and that the rigorous separation between religion and politics brings with it a gradual withering away of vibrant religion. See Manent, , Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, esp. chap. 7;Google Scholar cf. Kessler, , Tocqueville's Civil Religion, esp. chap. 8.Google Scholar

50. Tocqueville's preoccupation with something akin to Aristotle's notion of education “relative to the regime” is reflected in his persistent contrast between democratic and aristocratic sensibilities. A particular example is found in the importance that Tocqueville attributes to the legal profession in America. He describes lawyers as bearers of an acceptable range of functionally “aristocratic” sensibilities, a professional association capable of moderating some of the most extreme tendencies of democratic societies (Democracy, 251–58;Google Scholar cf. Gannett, , “Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township,” esp. pp. 11–12).Google Scholar

51. Cf. Gannett, , “Bowling Ninepins in Tocqueville's Township,” p. 9Google Scholar; Lawler, Peter, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 1993), pp. 106–108Google Scholar; and Wolin, , Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, pp. 294–95, 92–93, 100–101.Google Scholar

52. Whereas John Stuart Mill regards Democracy in America as “the first philosophic book ever written on Democracy” (“De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II],” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 18: Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, J. M. [Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press (1840), 1977], p. 156Google Scholar, emphasis added), Sheldon Wolin's magisterial study of Tocqueville situates him within a tradition of political thought reaching back to ancient Greece. Wolin notes that Tocqueville “built on the Aristotelian premise … all but forgotten with the emergence of the early modern nation-state … that the city is the nursery of politics” (Tocqueville Between Two World, p. 211Google Scholar). The degree of continuity between Tocqueville and classical studies of politics should not, however, be overstated. In addition to his failure to appreciate the importance of theoria mentioned above, Tocqueville explicitly embraces modern liberalism and his contribution to the distinctively modern discipline of sociology is substantive, particularly his elucidation of the importance of the pre-political dimension of politics, generally described under the rubric of “civil society.” Nevertheless, in a decisive respect Tocqueville shares with classical authors an appreciation for the primacy of the political over the sociological in the study of politics. See Ceaser for a discussion of this distinction in the Tocqueville-Gobineau correspondence and its continuing relevance in contemporary debate (Reconstructing America, esp. chap. 6Google Scholar).

53. It is in fact a debated question whether Tocqueville should be considered a “philosopher” or a “political sociologist.” The parameters of this debate can be seen in Zuckert, (“Political Sociology Versus Speculative Philosophy,” in Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. Masugi, Ken [Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991]Google Scholar) and Kessler, (Tocqueville's Civil Religion, esp. pp. 38–41Google Scholar); cf. Lawler, (“Was Tocqueville a Philosopher?” Interpretation 17 [1990]: 401–14)Google Scholar. Lawler maintains that Tocqueville was not himself a philosopher but that, like Pascal, he sought a middle course between the philosopher's pride and the atheist's despair, without, however, the benefit of Pascal's faith in a Redeemer, (The Restless Mind, pp. 92, cf. 107–108)Google Scholar.

54. Strauss, Leo, “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy (1979): 111–18, 111, 113)Google Scholar.