Abstract
In his introduction to De la démocratie en Amérique, Alexis de Tocqueville announces that democracy is to be understood as ‘a providential fact’.1 He perceives democracy as being part of an overarching order. This order is not the creation of the human will and imagination, but a providential, given order, which means that humans can only fulfil their given potentialities within and not outside this order.2 Democracy, being divinely planned, is in accordance with the ‘hidden law of Providence’,3 that is, reveals ‘God’s laws in the conduct of societies’.4 Indeed, Tocqueville shows traits of a classical, theocentric thinker, with strong Aristotelian and Augustinian or Pascalian inclinations,5 who sees the field of human activity as being embedded within a greater order or ‘a general and constant plan according to which God guides the species’.6 Democracy, which he understands as a ‘state of society in which everyone more or less would take part in public affairs’,7 must be carefully distinguished from aristocracy. Tocqueville interprets aristocracy, a state of society in which not everyone has the right to take part in public affairs, as a human — all too human — creation.8
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Notes
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 6.
Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol. I: The Original Text, ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 190.
Françoise Mélonio states that ‘Tocqueville’s God was like Pascal’s, a hidden one — but Nature carries within herself the knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Mélonio, Tocqueville and the French, trans. Beth G. Raps (London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 64.
Letter to Louis de Kergorlay January 1835. All references from Tocqueville’s letters, which I use here, can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. James Toupin and R. Boesche (London: University of California Press, 1985). This quote can be found on page 93.
‘Providence, which doubtless wished to present the spectacle of our passions and misfortunes as a lesson to the world.’ Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Volume II: Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 65.
Ibid., p. 275. See for a further elaboration on this specific theme, Ossewaarde, Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought: New Liberalism (London: Routledge, 2004).
Agnès Antoine, L’impensé de la démocratie: Tocqueville, la citoyenneté et la religion (Paris: Fayard, 2003), pp. 172–4.
Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Tocqueville, L’Inde, in: Oeuvres complètes, ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951-), 3, I, pp. 448–9. Hereafter abridged as OC.
Oliver Hidalgo, Unbehagliche Moderne: Tocqueville und die Frage der Religion in der Politik (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2006), pp. 66–73.
Ossewaarde, ‘Tocqueville’s Christian Citizen’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 8(3) (2005), pp. 5–17.
My reading of Molière is based on David Whitton, Molière: Le bourgeois gentilhomme (London: Grant and Cutler, 1992).
Francesco Spandri, ‘Le rôle de l’imagination dans l’idéal égalitaire’, in Tocqueville et la Littérature, ed. Françoise Mélonio and José-Luis Diaz (Paris: PUPS, 2005).
Victor Hugo, Hernani, ed. C. Eterstein (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), preface.
Arthur Kaledin rightly points at Tocqueville’s ‘professed disdain for romanticism as a cultural movement (he believed it too would lead to a willful derangement of order and to decadence) and his refusal even to read its lit. erature’. Kaledin, ‘Tocqueville’s Apocalypse: Culture, Politics, and Freedom in Democracy in America’, in Laurence Guellec (ed.), Tocqueville et l’esprit de la démocratie (Paris: Sciences Po Les Presses, 2005), p. 55.
Tocqueville, ‘Conversations avec Nassau Senior’, 26 August 1850, in Tocqueville, Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, ed. M.C.M. Simpson (London: King, 1872).
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© 2007 Ringo Ossewaarde
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Ossewaarde, R. (2007). Democratic Threats and Threats to Democracy. In: Geenens, R., De Dijn, A. (eds) Reading Tocqueville. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599123_6
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