Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. - book review

Public Interest, Summer, 1996 by Daniel J. Mahoney

Some 20 years ago, in an important article in the American Scholar, Robert Nisbet wrote about the "many Tocquevilles," sometimes contradictory and of varying cogency and staying power, who have become part of our intellectual landscape since the Tocqueville "revival" began in North America near the end of the Second World War. Today, the situation is exacerbated by the manifest appropriation of Tocqueville by the full range of intellectual and political partisans who currently dominate political discourse, from the communitarian left to the neoconservative right to the theorists of a reinvigorated "civil society." But, while the content of these many "Tocquevilles" varies widely, the approach to this great thinker is almost uniformly ideological. Tocqueville is turned to less as a serious source of wisdom about the nature and problems of modern democracy than as a respected authority who can provide support for conclusions or political programs that already have been arrived at independently of Tocqueville's larger or fuller reflection.

It is in contrast to the range of partial or partisan appropriations of Tocqueville that the virtues of Pierre Manent's book, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy,(*) become particularly clear. Manent is the most penetrating and measured of the new generation of French post-Marxist political theorists. He is, among other things, a former assistant to the great French anticommunist political thinker Raymond Aron (who initiated the French rediscovery of Tocqueville in the 1960s), an independent-minded scholar who has contributed to the revival of liberal (in the older and larger non-American sense) political thought in France, a former editor of the important "neoconservative" journal Commentaire, and a serious Catholic deeply influenced by the work of Leo Strauss. Moreover, it is in no small part due to his efforts, as well as those of Francois Furet and Jean-Claude Lamberti, that Tocqueville's writings are now widely recognized in France as an indispensable guide for understanding modern history and society as well as a rich theoretical alternative to discredited Marxist-inspired critiques of liberalism.

While eschewing any traditionalist or reactionary rejection of liberalism, Manent nonetheless stands apart from the current crop of non-Marxist French political thinkers by his considered refusal to idolatrize "individual rights" as the spiritual lodestar of modern society. He is a conservative liberal (we might say a "neoconservative" with appropriate sensitivity to the distinctive French context) who appreciates the dependence of democratic societies on premodern moral capital and on qualities of human nature which are presupposed, but not sufficiently cultivated, by a liberal political order. Nor is Manent a typical adherent of the "social sciences," which, in their claim to scientific rigor, dominate the study of human affairs in the academy. In his latest work, The City of Man (to be published in translation by Princeton University Press in 1997), Manent explores the origins of the modern social sciences, which he argues are located in a fundamental, dogmatic, and unsustainable abstraction from the question of the nature of man.

This book was originally published in France in 1982 (and republished in 1993) in the midst of the French liberal revival that succeeded a long period of intellectual domination by neo-Marxist, existentialist, and postmodernist intellectual currents. Its delayed publication in this country is evidence of the intellectual conformism that characterizes much of the publishing world. Academic publishers, who fell over themselves trying to publish the most insignificant musings of Derrida, Althusser, Bourdieu, and their epigones simply ignored the most interesting current of contemporary French thought for a period of almost 20 years.

In Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Manent recognizes and highlights all of the themes that are of interest to contemporary "Tocquevillians": the importance of local liberties and political participation, the religious foundations of American mores, the associative art as a source of America's political greatness, and the danger of citizen apathy and the related phenomenon of dependence on an overgrown and meddlesome central government.

But the originality of Manent's approach lies elsewhere. Manent makes the simple, but radical and illuminating, claim that Tocqueville, who wrote over 150 years ago, presents an analysis of democracy - a "phenomenology" of democracy - which is a marvelously clear and accurate account of the essential nature and features of modern democracy. In his view, Tocqueville's classic work, Democracy in America, is best approached not as a historical account of the origins of modern democracy (although it is in part that) nor as a catalogue of observations and reflections about the bustling, egalitarian, commercial democracy that was Jacksonian America (although it is in part that too). Rather, it is an effort to describe the radically new situation of modern man in a political order that is not simply a political order but a radically new social state that transforms every aspect of human life.