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Immersed in a rapidly flowing stream, we stubbornly fix our eyes on the few pieces of debris still visible on the shore, while the current carries us away and propels us backward into the abyss. DA I, 61—62, G7. Force alone cannot be the foundation of a new government; good laws are necessary. After the warrior, the legislator. The one destroys, the other founds. To each his work. If the question is no longer whether in France we will have royalty or a republic, we have still to learn if that Republic will be agitated or tranquil, fair and steady or haphazard, pacific or war-mongering, liberal or oppressive, a menace to the sacred rights of property and family or one which recognizes and defends them.
This is a terrible problem whose solution is not only important for France but for the entire civilized world…. Yet, this problem, which we have only begun to think about, was solved by the Americans more than sixty years ago [Tocqueville is probably dating from the time of the ratification of the U. Where indeed could we find greater hope or greater lessons? I, 54, my translation. The stakes are high in and , as Publius makes clear, and Tocqueville, who served on a Philadelphia-like constitution drafting committee in , raises them further in his new Introduction that also presents a stark choice: Since I am firmly of the opinion that the democratic revolution to which we are witness is an irresistible fact, and one that it would be neither desirable nor wise to oppose, some readers may be surprised to discover how often I find occasion in the book to be quite severely critical of the democratic societies created by this revolution.
My answer is simple: People do not receive the truth from their enemies, and their friends seldom offer it. That is why I have told it as I see it. My premise is that many people will take it upon themselves to proclaim the new goods that equality promises to mankind but few will dare warn of the perils that it holds in the offing. I have therefore focused primarily on those perils, and being convinced that I had clearly made them out, I was not so cowardly as to hold my tongue about them.
I hope that readers will judge this second work to be as impartial as they seem to have judged the first. Amid the swirl of divisive and contradictory opinions, I have tried for a moment to forget the sympathies and antipathies that each of them may inspire in me. The obvious answer is that he writes clear, grammatical, idiomatic prose about a complex problem—Is democracy possible and under what conditions?
In a letter to his friend Kergolay November 10, , Tocqueville says that he reads a bit of Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau every day. Those are good prose models, and Tocqueville seems to have absorbed from them a thorough knowledge of the moves that matter in persuasive writing that any language teacher or MLA president would be thrilled to see appear in student prose. The prose is straightforward but not demotic or folksy, sharp but not snarky. And though Tocqueville is keen on exposing little-noticed cause and effect relationships, unexpected reversals, and the mechanisms of checks and balances, his presentations generally rank clarity over cleverness, acuity over cute, the tenor over the vehicle.
Indeed, his use of metaphor, such as the stream and rubble images quoted above, is restrained, and all the more powerful for its rarity. Unburdened by the need to seduce or conform, Tocqueville is free to move forward with his argument-driven essay as though he were trying to convince his best friends, siblings, or parents to accept what he has to say, and no doubt in part he was. Two recurring techniques are worth special mention. The first may be something he picked up from the deadpan Pascal, the pragmatic Publius, [41] or another political philosopher such as Machiavelli, Adam Ferguson, or Montesquieu.
Thus, the chapter in question concludes with a quick restatement of the whole argument once again:. Whether it really seems fair or not, in , , or , is almost beside the point; because the empirical truth of the matter becomes secondary to the theoretical point that Tocqueville wants us to go along with i. I agree with that assessment as well as with his remark that Tocqueville exhibits a keen desire to show that seeming contradictions or paradoxes e. One of the most important of the top twenty-five is the fact that in America religion and liberty are mutually reinforcing and not mutually exclusive as commonly believed in certain quarters of post-Enlightenment France and other dens of Europe.
As Tocqueville sees it, religious belief i. A healthy democracy respectfully acknowledges that religion provides life-affirming nourishment to the spirit soul or mind of man. When the majority recognizes no higher authority e. I know of no country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America…. In America, the majority erects a formidable barrier around thought.
Within the limits thus laid down, the writer is free, but woe unto him who dares to venture beyond those limits. He has no chance of a political career, for he has offended the only power capable of opening the way to one. He is denied everything, including glory. Before publishing his opinions, he thought he had supporters, but having revealed himself to all, he finds that his support seems to have vanished, because his critics voice their opinions loudly, while those who think as he does but who lack his courage hold their tongues and take their distance.
In the end, he gives in, he bends under the burden of such unremitting effort and retreats into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth…. Tyranny in democratic republics … ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else.
But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that.
You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death. Nowhere else does Tocqueville allow himself to be as over-the-top theatrical as here. The subtle ostracism and alienation that the omnipotent majority can provoke is familiar to anyone who has uttered, published, thought, or done something that goes against the mores of a dominant group.
Some may reject this claim out of hand because for them like for nineteenth-century feminists, s civil rights activists, or recent observers such as Thomas B. Edsall, Timothy Noah, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and the chorus of Occupy Wall Street protestors American inequality is so glaringly obvious and painful. In addition to the big three—1. A social state of equality where ordinary people are, taken singly, all relatively weak, gives rise to individualism, a rational concern for the security and well-being of oneself and an intimate circle of family and friends II, 2, 2.
Democracy may lack some grandeur and beauty, but it is more just, and justice is grand and beautiful II, 4, 8, People living in a democracy can be petty, envious, resentful, vindictive, shortsighted, impatient, inattentive, reckless or timid, bombastic or mousy; but they also can be honest, fair, open, relaxed, spontaneously helpful, generous, caring, and brave. People living in democratic times feel relatively equal, including all relatively weak and insecure, and therefore they tend to want to get the most they can now with the least effort and the least risk of loss II, 1, 3, While honor in aristocratic societies is derived from conquest in battle, or from being a descendant of a successful warrior Tocqueville could trace his family back to William the Conqueror!
Since democratic honor is derived principally from building and selling stuff industry and commerce and not war, a democratic society has two good reasons to want to avoid war: The only group in a democracy that wants war is the army especially those at the lower and middle ranks, who have little or no property at stake and few civilian career prospects , since it is their chance to do their job kill and conquer and get ahead with medals and promotions thanks to victory and attrition.
But these kinds of fortuitous and secondary causes are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complicated, less powerful, and consequently more difficult to sort out and trace in ages of equality than in centuries of aristocracy, where the only problem is to analyze the particular action of one man or a small number of men within a general context….
My own view is that in every period some of the events of this world must be ascribed to very general causes, others to very particular ones. Causes of both kinds are always encountered; the only thing that differs is their relative importance. General facts explain more things in democratic centuries than in aristocratic ones, and particular influences explain less. In ages of aristocracy, the opposite is true….
- La llum dAlexandria (Èxits) (Catalan Edition)!
- A Time to Forgive!
- Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age.
Historians who seek to describe what goes on in democratic societies are therefore right to pay a great deal of attention to general causes and to devote their primary effort to uncovering them, but they are wrong to deny the particular actions of individuals simply because it is not easy to find these out or trace their effects. II, 2, 20, , G A glance at the histories written nowadays would suggest that man has no power over either himself or his surroundings….
If this doctrine of fatality, which is so attractive to those who write history in democratic times, were to spread from writers to readers and thereby infiltrate the citizenry en masse and take hold of the public mind, it would soon paralyze the new societies and reduce Christians to Turks. I would add, moreover, that such a doctrine is particularly dangerous at the present time.
Our contemporaries are only too ready to doubt the existence of free will because as individuals they feel frustrated by their weakness no matter which way they turn, yet they are still quite prepared to recognize the strength and independence of men joined together in a social body. Turks need not feel too personally attacked here, since Tocqueville is using that group as a rather arbitrary heuristic mechanism, just as Montesquieu made use of Persians, and the Chinese served as a negative example for the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson and for Tocqueville as well in DA II, 1, Because although people would like to be both free and equal, they tend to have a stronger passion for equality than they do for liberty I, 1, 3; II, 2, 1.
The following passage that distinguishes these two types of equality is frequently quoted:. There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
Not that people whose social state is democratic naturally despise liberty; on the contrary, they have an instinctive taste for it. But liberty is not the principal and constant object of their desire. What they love with a love that is eternal is equality. They lunge toward liberty with an abrupt impulse or sudden effort and, if they fail to achieve their goal, resign themselves to their defeat.
But nothing could satisfy them without equality, and, rather than lose it, they would perish. Furthermore, when citizens are all almost equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressiveness of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the only guarantee of liberty is for everyone to combine forces. But such a combination is not always in evidence. But some sacrifices and compromises are more costly than others.
The Americans, Tocqueville says, are lucky that their circumstances and especially their mores have allowed sovereignty of the people to endure for more than sixty years; but other people, such as his countrymen, have not been so fortunate or wise. Furthermore, the passions for equality and liberty are at their highest among peoples who are experiencing or have recently experienced a social revolution, because the taste of greater equality can feed expectations for yet more equality, and suddenly requests turn into demands, and wishes become rights…or riots II, 2, 3.
Therefore, to know what those mores are and how they work, which for Tocqueville is the key to understanding that society, one must investigate the status and habits, thoughts and feelings of women. He recalls that in America there is a liberal constitution and a democratic social condition, and these give young American women more autonomy than anywhere else in the world.
He notes that all American youth, including women, are nudged toward independence early on, and this is viewed as normal and correct by both children and their parents II, The education of young women is allowed, and it is not as prettified or watered down as in aristocratic lands. He sees it as a trade-off: Tocqueville will have more to say about this in the final admonitory chapters of Volume Two. Generally, married American women are obliged to keep a stiff upper lip; i.
He observes a widespread you-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it attitude that leaves little room for public lamentation over their lot or self-pity among the women themselves. One gets the impression, he says whether he believes this conceit is another matter , that the American woman enters freely into her marriage and must accept the consequences, especially the low level of social liberty and professional opportunity outside the domestic circle: She bears her new condition bravely because she has chosen it.
In DA II, 3, Chapter Eleven, Tocqueville explains how equality of social conditions contributes to the enduring regularity and loyalty among married people in America. His short explanation is that women and men are too busy pursuing material advancement to have extramarital affairs. Therefore, once the choice is made there is the feeling of a contract that must be honored. He then repeats his conviction about the lack of dreaminess among democratic peoples. Tocqueville concludes this chapter with the claim that the French Revolution did more to strengthen the morals of the aristocracy than it did those of the revolutionaries themselves.
In the meantime, Tocqueville writes approvingly again of the American situation: His account can sound a bit stodgy, however, like the buttoned-up world of Mr. Banks before the arrival of Mary Poppins. In the next chapter DA II, 3, 12 , Tocqueville explains how in America men and women have not sought to be completely equal, and he says this would have been a mistake anyway since it would have led to weak men and dishonest women II, Tocqueville envisions a future equality between the sexes: Perhaps the most memorable sentence in this chapter comes on the next page where Tocqueville applauds the long, fearless, solitary voyage of young American women: Faced with the cruel irony that was not uncommon within the brutally civilized American genteel tradition, one has to admire the fortitude of the women who banded together in the ensuing decades to invent and struggle for more human dignity for themselves while also mourning the loss of those who desperately went off the deep end toward madness, murder, suicide, or self-exile.
It is my view that this focus on interpersonal relations will rightly become the most fruitful area of borrowing and learning from Tocqueville in the post—Cold War Internet age. After this long digression through sexual politics, Tocqueville turns back to politics in general i. The main ideas, abundantly developed by Cold War commentators so I can be brief, are these: But whatever they really think, do, or get done, Tocqueville predicts they will all feign a strong allegiance to the values of equality, liberty, and justice for all.
I have no doubt that in centuries of enlightenment and equality like our own, it will be easier for sovereigns to gather all public powers into their hands alone and to penetrate the sphere of private interests more deeply and regularly than any sovereign of Antiquity was ever able to do.
But the same equality that facilitates despotism also tempers it. As men become increasingly similar and more and more equal, we have seen how public mores become milder and more humane. When no citizen has great power or wealth, tyranny in a sense lacks both opportunity and a stage. Since all fortunes are modest, passions are naturally contained, the imagination is limited, and pleasures are simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and confines the erratic impulses of his desire within certain limits…. Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel in certain moments of great effervescence and great peril, but such crises will be rare and temporary.
When I think of the petty passions of men today, of the softness of their mores, the extent of their enlightenment, the purity of their religion, and the mildness of their morality, of their laborious and orderly habits, and of the restraint that nearly all of them maintain in vice as well as in virtue, what I fear is not that they will find tyrants among their leaders but rather that they will find protectors.
I therefore believe that the kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples is unlike any the world has seen before. Our contemporaries will find no image of it in their memories. I search in vain for an expression that exactly reproduces my idea of it and captures it fully. The thing is new, hence I must try to define it, since I cannot give it a name.
I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country. Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate.
It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they only think of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances.
Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living? It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. Equality paved the way for all these things by preparing men to put up with them and even to look upon them as a boon. The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole.
Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. He seldom forces anyone to act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but prevents them from coming into being.
Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd. I have always believed that this kind of servitude—the regulated, mild, peaceful servitude that I have just described—could be combined more easily than one might imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to establish itself in the shadow of popular sovereignty itself.
As I said, for many this is the dramatic climax to Volume Two and the whole book, the passage where Tocqueville gets his whale, or it gets him. The first claim about the inevitability of equality of social conditions everywhere is something we will return to later. But Tocqueville knows that many people, harried democrats as well as nostalgic aristocrats, have a less dim view of those stable medieval times.
Nor does he try any more shock and awe scare tactics, hectoring, or pleading. Although he did not have children of his own, he tries nevertheless to behave like a liberal father who wants to see his children, here his readers and by extension all his countrymen, grow up to be independent, creative adults and not remain children forever. Tocqueville has spent nine hundred pages showing how democracy can or could go in many directions depending on the awareness and motives of the living actors, large and small, powerful and ordinary, who are involved in the process of government or simply living and working in civil society and making hundreds of conscious and unconscious decisions votes per day while going about their business.
And he explains why, in the last analysis, he favors the more mature, legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish for everyone to have the opportunity to be strong, free, and esteemed. This position may require him to sacrifice some types of grandeur and beauty, and accept a certain amount of vulgarity, monotony, mediocrity, and roughness, but it is, he believes, more just. Because he has come to believe, without needing to be told, that the pursuit and consecration of liberty and justice for all is itself grand and beautiful.
Readers are encouraged to compare my Internet Age interpretation to other commentaries some of which will be discussed in the next chapter. If you want to test yourself, before or after reading Democracy in America , here are the questions. The amount of secondary literature on Tocqueville does not equal the mountains of material devoted to many older canonical authors or even to some of his contemporaries such as Emerson and Marx.
It is however a substantial body of work, perhaps two hundred books and two thousand articles. Want to kill off democracy and replace it with a corporate, military, or mafia model? Want to keep democracy from being taken over by or merging with corporations or the mafia or the military? Want to keep democracy from committing suicide? Want to push democracy over the edge and its people too?
One, obviously, is by time period. Commentators from the pre era can be divided into four groups. Pierson, and Phillips Bradley. In the post era, there are many commentators who are publishing research on Tocqueville for their own reasons. Some are long-term projects that may have been started before the events of — and have little direct connection to them. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. And although it may not be as strong a habit within American academia, the role played by anniversaries in France—a centralized country long obsessed by both math and history—is not to be underestimated.
In many ways they resemble the eager, docile, anxious, pragmatic, and self-interested demoland citizens Tocqueville describes in DA II, 1, and elsewhere. In other words, ideal consumers numerous, predictable, and ready to spend , and for publishers this means being able to take risks on items that otherwise would have a harder time finding an audience. Consequently, there are professors who are going to hitch their wagon to a star and profit from the momentum, buzz, and sales that anniversaries routinely generate. It does seem to focus the mind, and it has the added benefit of regularly yanking the lazy narcissist in each of us away from the contemporary prose streaming through our consciousness by exposing us to thinkers and thoughts from the so-called past.
In the case of Tocqueville these would include the following: Another genre, perhaps the most frequently used today, might be called Tocqueville sauce, a tricky mixture of name-dropping allusion and paraphrase that can either carry or bury thinking. Similar to epigraph, but less cold and static, Tocqueville sauce is a direct mention or indirect allusion reference to the great man smoothly inserted into a sentence that creates various effects not necessarily all intended.
But in a democracy such willingness becomes rarer and, frankly, less desired because considered patronizing , and in its place there arises from different quarters a firm demand for social justice as fairness that replaces charity or at least competes with it. The writings on Tocqueville can also be grouped by language. Up until now, more has been written about Tocqueville in English than in French, though this might change during this century depending on who cares most about Tocqueville and democracy and in what language they express that care.
Some authors have had their work on Tocqueville translated into other languages, sometimes more than one. The major works of Tocqueville and several of the most intriguing essays on poverty and colonialism, for example exist in many languages. A casual glance at the websites of online booksellers outside the U. One can also find recent work on Tocqueville published in German, Spanish, and especially Italian. To round out this taxonomy, we can list three final arrangements according to which what has been written about Tocqueville could be organized: Of all the writings on Tocqueville during the Internet age that I have been able to put my hands on and get to know, I have selected eight texts that can serve as examples of how to read and how not to read Tocqueville.
The four ways not to read Tocqueville can be summarized as follows. Instead of reading the text, 1 talk about how it was made; 2 talk about how it has been read by others; 3 talk about something else and use large helpings of Tocqueville sauce i. And because I am a teacher and not a salesman pushing product, and therefore open to the idea that there is something to be learned from mistakes and small achievements as well as from grand accomplishments, I have chosen four works that I consider to be flawed but interesting, and four others that I consider interesting but flawed.
To my knowledge, none of the French texts have been translated into English and vice versa. Rahe, and Emmanuel Todd. To me, the first four exemplify different ways of how not to read Tocqueville; the second four are examples of how to read Tocqueville. One way not to read Democracy in America is to talk about how it was made.
This is what Leo Damrosch decides to do, though I am not claiming that evasion was his motive nor that he entirely avoids talking about the text. There is certainly nothing wrong with doing an original retelling of a good story. How much and what kind? How much of that kind of exercise does the reader get from this book? Reading Damrosch, one is reminded that transatlantic travel in those days was calculated in days or even months, roads were often terrible, and river travel could be hazardous. It is a wonder, given all the adversity, that in two twenty-something French aristocrats, who could have just continued slouching toward whatever while living off the land labored by others in their service , would choose instead to go off to America for nine months like a couple of graduate students doing field research, get back alive, and write dissertations that people actually paid money to read instead of the other way around.
Over all, the book is informative and enjoyable, simply not all that probing or doubting, perhaps because really there is no argument. Therefore reception theory, generally understood to be a German-American import presented in the work of S. However it did find a home in sociology departments, notably in the work of Pierre Bourdieu — and his continuators who were interested in extending the Weberian analyses of the circulation, conservation, and transmission of power and prestige among the members of certain professionalized groups. But for anyone who seeks understanding, that vagueness soon becomes off-putting, and one realizes the only language users still attracted to the term are ideologues who seek to bash their enemies with it.
For them, her closing remarks can only be another one of the clever ruses by which the Tocqueville church enforces obedience and closes off dissent. What are you talking about? The upshot is a decisive rejection of Tocqueville and Tocqueville studies in the history it tells. Instead they sign off with a timid backward-looking hope:. By going on at length about an interpretive community whose vision they clearly disagree with, yet in the end offering no alternative interpretation of their own, the authors wind up lending even more prestige to their opponent since bad publicity still counts as publicity ; and no one will know whether their own vision was strong, weak, or somewhere in between, because they left the field without writing it up.
What does Paul A. Is it a dream that takes into account the inalienable rights of all men, women, and children—the tall and the small—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What would be, say, twelve measurable, achievable, relevant actions that he would like to see taken—and by whom?
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And what arguments could he offer in favor of his top twelve to someone who might possibly disagree with one or more of his choices and argue instead for a different list of policy initiatives? In pages of text plus another seventy pages of detailed footnotes, Rahe uses the question mark only twice , n Restated as questions, Rahe is asking: He offers a solution to our problem at the bottom of the next page:.
So Montesquieu was a wily practitioner of the arts of indirection, an ironist to put it bluntly; and Rahe proposes that we read carefully and pay special attention to how he was read by Rousseau and Tocqueville, i. But if we virtuously take individual responsibility as Rahe recommends , such as by reading carefully, we can cure ourselves and be well again. One would expect Rahe to lead by example and be a careful reader. I leave it to others to decide what they think about his treatment of Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, but when it comes to Tocqueville, my answer is No.
One symptom is that his text never doubts or questions anything that Tocqueville ever said or did. For him, it would seem, Tocqueville is an infallible prophet, his texts an oracle, a set of revelations that speak for themselves and thus need must! Again, this is unusual coming from a university history professor.
Was his age not also subject to tough censorship laws, the clunky weight of inflexible Aristotelian logic, and peer pressure? Were not freedom of speech and freedom of association severely limited and under constant threat of further erosion throughout his lifetime? If the answers to these questions are Yes, then one would expect Rahe to be more careful, i.
Given his title and the whole drift , to borrow a term, of the second half of his book, one would expect Rahe to be scrupulously attentive here. He is certainly interested in quoting from these pages, and he does so four different times in different ways nearly always in English. Such talented people behaving like a herd of animals—astonishing!
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But, what about that herd metaphor? Many herd animals existed before man appeared, and perhaps some will outlive our species. Second, note the embryo metaphor that attempts to naturalize the history of the French nation as progressing in a deterministic way acorn to oak rather than in a more open, things-could-have-gone-differently way.
When I read the Tocqueville passage, it strikes me that one source of its seductive power is that it never specifies any particular time frame or people. Nevertheless, aside from the questionable use of Tocqueville sauce to sharpen certain complaints, Rahe does give the reader some important historical information and political judgments that are worth considering.
For example, besides the more commonly cited motives Tocqueville may have had for going to America, Rahe reminds the reader that Tocqueville was looking to confirm or refute democracy skeptics like his onetime teacher and future political adversary Guizot who believed that representative government would and should evolve toward an oligarchy of superior men like himself ruling over the ordinary masses. And though ultimately he fails to beat them definitively Democracy in America offers no knockdown argument for or against democracy , he nevertheless refuses both royalists and socialists and sides instead with God, a catholic God—small c—whom he has decided is a Democrat in favor of popular sovereignty and not a Republican who would prefer a grand guardian class of rulers, and this despite being himself the ultimate Ruler.
After all, in the course of the last century, we, too, contracted the French disease; and among us today, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the malady advances at a quickening pace. This development Alexis de Tocqueville did not foresee.
His worries concerning the United States were of another sort. He was a great proponent of administrative decentralization and local self-government, but it would be a grave error to think of him, in American terms, as an Anti-Federalist. In the s, when he pondered the American prospect, he worried far less about the dangers attendant on centralized administration than about the possibility that the American union would come apart.
Like Alexander Hamilton, for whose political perspicacity he evidently had great admiration, he was sensitive to the fact that state and local governments were present to the populace in a way that the national government was not and inspired a measure of loyalty that it could not match, and he was acutely aware of the tensions generated between the South and the North by the presence of slavery in the former and its gradual disappearance from the latter.
More interesting is the second paragraph, which continues for a little over half of the next page. Of course it does allow him, Rahe, to have the privilege of being the visionary when it comes to America, but could that be the only reason? At any rate, I agree with Rahe that it would be incorrect to think of Tocqueville as an Anti-Federalist. Remember how close the ratification vote on the Constitution was in several key states. Really the whole thing could have gone either way.
Like a lot of people, then , , , , , , etc. If in France the risk of getting the centralization versus regionalism equation wrong has sometimes been a debilitating quagmire of resentment, distrust, fear, antipatriotism, and low productivity that spreads out between Paris and the provinces, I agree with Rahe that Tocqueville saw plainly the potential dissolution of the United States over the slavery issue for economic as much as moral reasons.
The Kentucky and Virginia resolutions to disobey federal law and the rise of political parties, which Rahe mentions in the second half of this paragraph, are further symptoms of the fragility of the American union that Tocqueville was sensitive to.
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Tocqueville, who had his practical side just like Publius, renounces looking for the ideal Democracy or the ideal anything. Another aspect of this book that deserves more attention than I will give it here is the intellectual cover that Rahe offers to the questionable doings of the so-called Tea Party in the United States. Even though Rahe does not mention the Tea Party by name, it is plain to anyone who has followed American politics since that he is sympathizing with the indocility and some of the views of that loosely organized group. Since publishing his book, Rahe has continued to express that viewpoint in more direct forums on the Internet, especially Biggovernment.
These matters have little direct bearing on Tocqueville studies, except perhaps for the biographical similarity that one might see between the careers of Tocqueville and Rahe insofar as they both drifted from the library and classroom to more contested areas and arenas over the course of their lives. One may wonder if Professor Rahe will go all the way, as Tocqueville did, and seek elective office to actually try and implement some of the policy recommendations that he casually puts forward in the final ten pages of his astonishing book.
The Breakdown of the American Order In France, however, he often participates on the public intellectual circuit radio, TV, glossy magazines , though less frequently than some, attuned as he no doubt is to the economics of scarcity. He has an enviable record as a debunker and fortune-teller.
If Todd acted on his own speculation, like Mike Burray, he has probably become very wealthy by now as a short seller, but that kind of speculating may not interest him. For example, as literacy rates go up, birthrates tend to go down; equality matters more to a universalist people e. That message goes something like this: So where does Tocqueville fit in?
Todd has clearly read Tocqueville and may even be indebted to him for certain things. Indeed, they seem to be kindred spirits in some ways cosmopolitan, restless, contrarian. Of the other three, one is a polite difference of opinion: Todd underlines higher literacy rates as one of the main material changes that contributes to expanding equality of social conditions, whereas Tocqueville used the catch-all fudge term providential to describe that long-term evolution though he does discuss access to education, property, and other material causes.
The second mention is a note of scholarly debt to Tocqueville for the interesting definition of Russia he sends in a letter to Beaumont: The first is by far the longest and most interesting. The second and third are two quick slaps that reinforce the negative assessment made earlier. This is all that is likely to register with the general reader since the actual content which requires knowing what happened on a certain August 4 is elliptically presented.
The adjective banal has several meanings in French. Chacun sait de quoi se compose un soulier. Une paire de souliers de paysans, et rien de plus. Il y a dans les choses naturelles une belle harmonie, une perfection. Si on prend les analyses de Kant: Elle est ce que nous voyons. Mais en , les artistes avant-gardistes , justes sortis des Beaux-arts vont faire une expo portant pour titre Vivre ou laisser mourir, ou la fin tragique de M. La servante est assez jolie: Il le fera donc travailler, mettons, 12 heures par jour.
On ne peut rien imaginer de pire. Elles sont des produits historiques et transitoires. Soit parce que la technique a une fin qui lui est propre: Alors que la physique pense du quantitatif.
Historique de la ville
Tout cela en fait des sujets, des sujets de droits face auxquels nous avons des devoirs. La nature ne donne rien en vain. Mais pour Sartre, ces deux arguments ne tiennent pas: Et ce mot semble recouvrir une image correcte: A voir aussi ici le texte de Bergson en p On peut en effet montrer: La raison faisant obstacle au bonheur et faisant que nous avons le sens du devoir, elle nous indique notre destination: Tels sont mon argument et ma conviction.
Quelle fin est en accord avec ma nature? La peur de souffrir. La Vertu net la pomme. Mais Nietzsche souligne lui les limites de cette conscience de soi, via son origine. Pour Nietzsche, Descartes est victime de la grammaire. Du je au moi: Attention de ne pas confondre: Bien avant freud, on parle de cela: Le traitement de Anna O. Le fait pour un processus de devenir conscient garde ainsi son sens purement descriptif. Le surmoi est donc une sorte de conscience morale inconsciente!
Popper est un philosophe des sciences , mort en On pourrait y ajouter celle de Sartre: Moi et le monde: Entre la nature et nous, que dis-je? Je poursuivais imaginairement le dialogue interrompu par la catastrophe. Ainsi fait tout homme normal dans une situation normale. Les phares ont disparu de mon champ. Mais en un autre sens non,. Platon, Protagoras , cc,.
Mais , il y a alors la place pour une maturation. Son discours fait scandale. Peut-on ne pas penser? Peut-on ne pas philosopher? Le cas de Socrate semble confirmer cela: Principes de la philosophie , Descartes, Les horloges mobiles retardent par rapport aux horloges fixes. Pourquoi se pose-t-on ces questions? Puis le droit moral et parfois le droit divin.
Pour lui, les hommes depuis la chute originelle ne savent plus ce qui est juste. La fin justifie les moyens. La connaissance historique A. Il y a une providence divine, un plan divin. Critias , texte 1 p Texte 3 p Parole humaine et langage animal. Pouvons-nous dire tout ce que nous voulons dire? Tout le monde dessine, fredonne….