Alexis de Tocqueville

16. Mahoney, Statesman as Thinker (13 August 2022)

by kurto

Holds up Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel as exemplary statesmen, demonstrating excellence of vision and execution through contemporary turbulence. Courage, moderation (temperance and prudence), and magnamity (greatness of soul, according to classic or Christian ideals) in pursuit of justice are the essential attributes of those who would command practical reason in service of ordered liberty. Aristotle’s is the classic statement of a gentlemen-statesman, the opposite of Weber’s charismatic leader. Modern political thought and social science cannot discern the requisite qualities, believing in a false realism: in ascribing every action to naked power, the ability to assess motivation is forfeit and consequently to distinguish the statesman from the tyrant. The study of humanity includes legitimate uses of authority, Aron observed: Napoleon’s tyranny demonstrates greatness unchained from humility. The unbounded will seeks to reshape nature and society, but energy without wisdom is of little use.

Cicero: contending with Caesar, the Roman served as prototype in exemplifying foresight via reflection not ambition or will.

Burke: Reason is to be tested against practical modifications; theory alone will fail: prudence needs principle as much as principle prudence. ‘Ingratitude is the first of revolutionary virtues’ (p. 40)

Tocqueville: a deterministic fatalism (‘democratic history’) cannot illustrate the role of greats in history.

Churchill: Berlin’s Mr. Churchill in 1940 is the consummate statement.

De Gaulle: depreciated ‘Nietzschean disdain’ for the limits of human experience, common sense, law, seeing instead the need for balance, what is possible, and mesure. The Maginot line was morally corrupt – effete. Where Aristotle’s magnamity countenances hauteur, de Gaulle’s great man was Christian.

Havel: the Czech’s genius was to identify and surmount the ideological traits of post-totalitarian (post Leninist-Stalinist) regime, no longer dependent on mass violence yet still repressive.

Reagan and Thatcher receive honorable mentions as conviction politicians.

Tocqueville retrospectives

by kurto

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to grapple with socioeconomic equality as a necessary outcome of emerging societies, most famously Jacksonian America. For Guy Sorman, ‘Democracy in America is, in fact, a meditation on how the contradiction between equality and liberty might be overcome, or at least eased, by American society’s civil and religious institutions—schools of self-governance in Tocqueville’s famous interpretation.’

Tocqueville missed industrialization and underplayed slavery. ‘…he sees a civilized man as someone who is attached to the land and cultivates it, transforming it by his labor and making it more valuable—the American pioneer, in other words. Tocqueville has the greatest respect for such an entrepreneur of the soil. Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman would agree: if I did not fear the anachronism, I would qualify Tocqueville, for all his lack of focus on industrial transformation, as a free marketeer.’

Concerned also with French Algeria and British India, Tocqueville is a liberal struggling to enshrine checks on the state: ‘A democratic government is such a dangerous machine that, even in America, we are obliged to take a great many precautions against the errors and the passions of democracy: two chambers, veto by governors, and judicial institutions.’

‘Nations in our day can do nothing to prevent conditions in their midst from being equal. But it is up to them to decide whether the equality of conditions leads to servitude or to freedom, to enlightenment or to barbarism, to prosperity or to misery’, Tocqueville added.

Having earned precious fame, his later studies of the 1848 revolution and the fall of the ancien regime, as well as his refusal to participate in Bonapartist politics, meant his views were those of the bypassed aristocrat, according to Carl Schmitt. He was restored only in the 1960s by Francois Furet and Raymond Aron.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tocqueville-then-and-now

Mansfield, conversely to Schmitt and Brogan, sees Tocqueville as alive to democracy’s sources of liberty in aristocracy. In a review of Lucien Jaume’s

    Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

, Mansfield points to nobles as establishing desire for self-rule, trial by jury, associations as derived from public obligations of feudal lords, and most prominently, desire for greatness and acclaim independent of the state. Tocqueville was alive to these and their dynamics, whereas Jaume sees only writing for Tocqueville’s contemporaries, only context and commonplace, leading to nostalgia for aristocracy, thereby discounting the author’s fundamental creativity.

25. Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (17 December 2023)

by kurto

Burke and Tocqueville laid down a set of principles, based on Christian natural law and finding virtue in the husbanding of tradition and community, which together constitute a proper philosophy. Its challenge is finding goodness in an imperfect, materialist society.
In Aristotle, virtue ensures rightness of ends; prudence, or practical wisdom in given circumstances, rightness of means. In Augustine, understanding is the reward of faith. In Aquinas, society’s checking base appetites enables development of virtue. Natural law holds society promotes character: conservatives defend regimes which respect customs as promoting individual virtue. The true conservative mistrusts individual reason, finding in prejudice proofs over time which are applicable to current circumstance, finding in custom God’s purpose as well as the nature of man.
Burke and Tocqueville, whose views are elaborately explicated, could oppose common practice while supporting society as it was, defending that which exists without sacrificing commitment to virtue. Burke’s opposition to the abstract really targeted idealization, which not only omits true qualities but also inserts falsehoods, for not only simplifying human nature but also supposing hoped-for but unreal qualities. Idealization equally undermines existing authority posits false ends, the enforcement of which is tyranny. Government is not the teacher of virtue but its guardian, the keeper of tradition, manners, prejudice.
For Tocqueville, individual character and well-ordered liberty could not be imposed but were habitual; he commenced with the individual himself, one step earlier than Aristotle’s family. Liberty depends on social institutions not political character, for laws are the children of custom, which grow upward from the local. In America, local practice prevailed; in England, the laws were good because they were old. Localism and legalism interceded between the individual and the state. Whereas in France, centralization enervated custom. By doing for citizens what they ought to do for themselves, the state enfeebled its residents. Conversely, public service demonstrates independence – what, when how – from egalitarian diktat. Tocqueville sought to recall French rulers to the pursuit of virtue. Tyranny of the majority restricts worthy contributors to social and political life. Such societies will have little true diversity, few great writers and statesmen. The conservative may consider his own society superior, even if others are virtuous.
The conservative affection for the particularistic, up through the nation-state, is not the same as the republican’s requisite service to the state, for public service can take many forms. But Strauss thought Burke’s identifying tradition with wisdom was conflating the good with the existing. Strauss rejected God in arrangements: natural law and philosophy does not require a deity.
Oakeshott saw man’s ability to act properly outside norms as highly limited. Rules are an abstraction of the essential activity, which resists the cataloging of all possible experience. The less to be discussed, the sounder the social basis. Social achievement is taking next steps consistent with what’s already been done. The search for social perfection results in chaos of conflicting ideas which society can’t survive (i.e., the analogy of Babel). But custom itself is rightful, not the container of higher truth. Oakeshott called a artists and philosophers to promote Platonic lies, unrealistically in Frohnen’s view. He could not reconcile himself to the practical role of religion in rightful conduct. Kristol could not identify a pole other than compromised materialism; Kirk was so concerned with the nature of beliefs that he overlooked the sense of good character.
Best as comparative study, though having raised Strauss’ dispute with Burke, Frohnen ought to have studied the paradox of why the contemporary right looks to both Burke and Strauss.
Burke: ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations … the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent natures of the remedies.’ Speech of Economical reform
Tocqueville: ‘… It is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, gentlemen, but the inner spirit of the government. Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep then. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God’s name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/