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Tocqueville on Intellectual Independence, Doubt, and Democratic Citizenship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2019

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Abstract

Some contend that politics functions best when deference is given to tradition and authoritative community norms, while others argue for the importance of independent thought and doubt about received sources of authority. Insight into this question can be found in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. While Tocqueville is often taken to regard the doubt characteristic of intellectual independence solely as a pathology, I show that he also saw it as a potential precursor to conversation, a stimulus to self-assured conviction, and a counter to distortionary abstractions. Nonetheless, Tocqueville also elaborates the destructive outcomes of too much doubt and intellectual independence. I identify the ways in which he seeks to discipline and educate the drive to independent thought so as to attain its benefits without falling victim to its pathologies. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways in which Tocqueville can be a guide to navigating the perennial tension between intellectual inquiry and authoritative community norms.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , Winter 2020 , pp. 49 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Thomas Pangle, Lorraine Pangle, Jeffrey Tulis, Dana Stauffer, Ruth Abbey, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to the participants at the various conferences at which I developed these ideas.

References

1 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New York: Library of America, 2004), 483Google Scholar. Cited henceforth as DA.

2 In his notes for Democracy in America, Tocqueville uses both the phrase “intellectual independence” and the phrase “intellectual individualism” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Nolla, Eduardo, trans. Schleifer, James T., vol. 4 [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010], 3:710a, 3:713dGoogle Scholar). I consistently use “intellectual independence” because it highlights the connection between Tocqueville's treatment of the phenomenon and his broader argument that a high degree of independence is associated not with strength but with weakness (DA 490, 497, 569, 596, 667, and 756). His more favorable references to individual independence elsewhere (DA 796, 822–23, 830) indicate that his opposition is not to independence as such, but to the pursuit of complete independence.

3 Roger Boesche contends that when Tocqueville insists on the need for moral authority, he is projecting onto the world “his own personal torment” and painful experience of doubt (Boesche, , The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987], 186Google Scholar); Sheldon Wolin argues doubt was “Tocqueville's equivalent of hell” (Wolin, , Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003], 81Google Scholar); and Dana Villa holds that doubt was for Tocqueville “a personal enemy of long standing” (Villa, , Teachers of the People: Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017], 210CrossRefGoogle Scholar). The only scholar that I am aware of who departs from this consensus is Olivier Zunz, who, in a critical review of Wolin's book, contends that Tocqueville “thrived on doubt; only religious doubt tormented him.” But, given that Zunz's review touches on many aspects of Wolin's argument, he does not develop this claim further. See Zunz, , “Holy Theory,” review of Tocqueville between Two Worlds, by Wolin, Sheldon, Reviews in American History 30, no. 4 (Dec. 2002): 569CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See his ranking of doubt as one of the three greatest miseries human beings can suffer, alongside death and disease (Tocqueville, , Œuvres complètes, ed. Gallimard, J. P. et al. , 18 vols. [Paris: Gallimard, 1951–2003], 5 [1]: 183; 15 [2]: 29Google Scholar), as well as his account of being plunged into an all-encompassing doubt as a young man upon delving into his father's library of Enlightenment philosophy, which he analogizes to an earthquake (OC 15 [2]: 513).

5 See, for example, DA 213–14, 345–47, 502–3.

6 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Boesche, Roger, trans. Boesche, Roger and Toupin, James (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64Google Scholar. In this article I treat notes and correspondence as being of comparable weight to Tocqueville's published texts. The notes and letters often find Tocqueville expressing himself more frankly than he does in published material, and thus provide insight into his thought process. Moreover, the notes reveal Tocqueville acknowledging the interconnectedness of different ideas in Democracy in America that the discursive nature of the argument in that work sometimes obscures.

7 Here I build on scholarship that identifies the centrality of the concept of “social state” in Tocqueville's thought. See Zuckert, Michael P., “On Social State,” in Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, ed. Lawler, Peter Augustine and Alulis, Joseph (New York: Garland, 1993), 3–21Google Scholar; Manent, Pierre, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. Waggoner, John (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 1–11Google Scholar; and Bilakovics, Steven, Democracy without Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See, for example, Schaefer, David Lewis, “Montaigne, Tocqueville, and the Politics of Skepticism,” Perspectives on Political Science 31 (2002): 204–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hebert, L. Joseph Jr., “Individualism and Intellectual Liberty in Tocqueville and Descartes,” Journal of Politics 69 (May 2007): 525–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cooper, Laurence D., “Every Man a Socrates? Tocqueville and the Conceit of Modernity,” American Political Thought 1 (Fall 2012): 208–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jack Lively is an exception. See The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 72–79Google Scholar. I expand on his contribution by treating the issue in greater detail, as well as showing how remarks from sections of Democracy in America other than the one where Tocqueville discusses the “philosophic method of the Americans” further illuminate his view of this theme.

9 In an 1852 speech, Tocqueville does assign primary responsibility for social change to intellectuals. See “Speech Given to the Annual Public Meeting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences on April 3, 1852,” trans. Hebert, L. Joseph Jr., in Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of Democratic Statesmanship, ed. Danoff, Brian and Hebert, L. Joseph Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 17–29Google Scholar. Nonetheless, the more complex analyses in Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution belie the straightforwardness of this account. In Democracy in America Tocqueville contends that it was the preaching of Jesus that first made people understand that all members of the human race are equal, but then asserts a few pages later that people's shared status as “weak” and “small” subjects of the vast Roman Empire was key to making them receptive to this notion (DA 496, 505). This suggests that ideas cannot spread widely if social conditions are not conducive to people accepting them. In a note to a draft of this passage, Tocqueville indicates that he had not decided for himself whether the social state was the result of ideas, or ideas the result of the social state. See De la démocratie, 3:749f.

10 Tocqueville's account of democracy's tendency to produce conformity and stagnation is well known; for his clearest statement of this point, see his argument on why intellectual revolutions will be rare in democracy (DA 753–60). As I will show, though, it is a mistake to think that this is a more pressing concern for him than an excess of intellectual independence, precisely because it is an excess of intellectual independence that causes these effects.

11 Villa and Boesche note that participation has intellectual benefits, but do not develop a sustained account of what those benefits are, or how they come about. See Villa, Dana Richard, Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Boesche, Strange Liberalism, 154–55.

12 In a note for a draft of the beginning of volume 2, Tocqueville writes that “audacious doubt is eminently democratic” (De la démocratie, 3:834h, emphasis in original).

13 Goldhammer translates le fait générateur as “the original fact”; I translate it more literally so as to better express the sense of causal origin that Tocqueville is trying to convey.

14 See note 8 above for examples of recent works of Tocqueville scholarship that focus on the intellectual rather than social origins of the democratic tendency to independent-mindedness.

15 Although Tocqueville thinks that democracy limits most people's intellectual progress, he indicates that it may not necessarily always limit everyone's. At one point he states that though democracy does not encourage people to cultivate science for its own sake, “it does vastly increase the number who do cultivate it. It is inconceivable that from such a vast multitude there should not on occasion arise a speculative genius impassioned solely by the love of truth. One can rest assured that such a genius will strive to penetrate nature's deepest mysteries regardless of the spirit of his country and his times. There is no need to aid his development; it is enough to stay out of his way” (DA 527).

16 Tocqueville's treatment of the connection between democracy and envy has not figured prominently in the secondary literature, and the authors who do examine it do not consider it in relation to democratic peoples’ habit of independent-mindedness. See, for example, McLendon, Michael Locke, “The Politics of Sour Grapes: Sartre, Elster, and Tocqueville on Frustration, Failure, and Self-Deception,” Review of Politics 75 (Spring 2013): 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Elster, Jon, Alexis de Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 62–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recognizing the connection between these different portions of the text helps us better perceive Tocqueville's nuanced understanding of democratic psychology.

17 Elster construes Tocqueville's understanding of envy in democracy unduly narrowly, arguing that, for Tocqueville, it mainly arises from differences in wealth. See Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville, 62. In Tocqueville's account, one exception to Americans’ unwillingness to recognize superiority is the deference accorded to the legal profession (DA 302–11). He speaks about how lawyers and the legal spirit moderate democracy's negative tendencies, but says little about how this class of people is able to escape the lack of deference to superiority that he highlights elsewhere. Given his emphasis on the importance of America's debt to the English common law system, it may be that the deference accorded to lawyers arises from America's particular cultural heritage.

18 Cooper, “Every Man a Socrates?,” 212.

19 Manent, Nature of Democracy, 40.

20 Jaume, Lucien, Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 67Google Scholar.

21 De la démocratie, 3:700f.

22 Hebert, “Individualism and Intellectual Liberty,” 528.

23 Goldhammer makes this passage more dramatic than it is in French by translating environnés as “plagued” rather than “surrounded.”

24 Tocqueville, Selected Letters, 64, emphasis in original.

25 De la démocratie, 4:1281e.

26 See Nicomachean Ethics 1094b11–27, 1095a30–b14, 1098a20–b8. For a discussion of similarities between Tocqueville and Aristotle, see Salkever, Stephen G., Finding the Mean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 244–62Google Scholar.

27 De la democratie, 3:715f, 762d.

28 Tocqueville, , The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 129Google Scholar.

29 Note how one of the pernicious effects of the future form of despotism he fears is to rob citizens of their ability to think on their own (DA 821).

30 Villa, Teachers of the People, 206. Villa is highly critical of Tocqueville on this point, alleging that he “fears … the critical questioning of regnant norms and beliefs,” and that he “was no rationalist, not even the kind sensitive to historical context” (Villa, Teachers of the People, 183, 221).

31 Reinhardt, Mark, The Art of Being Free (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 81Google Scholar, emphasis mine.

32 Ibid., 77, 81–82, 84–85.

33 Despite the emphasis on religion in his published writings, Tocqueville's private correspondence indicates that he was not a traditional believer. In an 1857 letter, he recounts that he was a devout Catholic until age sixteen, when, after studying the Enlightenment classics in his father's library, he lost his faith. In a letter written to Gobineau in 1843, he prefaces his defense of the utility and beauty of Christian moral teaching with the declaration that he is “not a believer.” In the 1857 letter, he professes a sort of deism, but admits that sometimes he doubts even that (OC 9:57, 15 [2]: 315).

34 Marvin Zetterbaum makes this point in Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 120–21Google Scholar. For the relevant passages from Democracy in America, see DA 635–36, 639.

35 De la démocratie, 3:713e.

36 Aristide Tessitore makes this suggestion regarding a fructifying tension between faith and reason, but does not elaborate what it would look like. See Tessitore, , “Tocqueville and Gobineau on the Nature of Modern Politics,” Review of Politics 67 (Fall 2005): 652–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. and ed. Lukacs, John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959)Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 192, 206.

39 Tocqueville declares repeatedly that intellectual inequalities come from God and are beyond the power of human beings to efface (DA 59, 627).

40 Note also his remark that the only effective way for governmental leaders to honor the “dogma” of the immortality of the soul “is to act every day as though they believed in it themselves” (DA 636–37, emphasis mine). This formulation implies that at least some of the leaders of whom he speaks may not actually believe in this dogma to which they outwardly express obeisance, but may nonetheless be able to live satisfactory lives.

41 I intend this phrase to encompass both Tocqueville's discussion of democratic peoples’ participation in the formal institutions of self-government as well as in civil and political associations, themes he treats separately but that nonetheless have much overlap.

42 See, for example, Gutmann, Amy, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 30Google Scholar, and Macedo, Stephen, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 267–69Google Scholar.

43 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Deneen, Patrick J., Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.