The Man Has Become Like One of Us

Tocqueville thinks humans are by nature worshipping creatures and with Democracy in America poses the age-old question of The City of God or of Man?

The title may strike the reader as not relevant to the topic at hand, given that this article is on human nature. However, read in the context of where it is pulled, it strikes deep at the political, philosophical, and theological question of what man is and where his loyalties lie. This is what Tocqueville’s contemporaries meant when writing of an anthropological profession of faith^[2] (and the question they must decide on).

Tocqueville provides no “anthropological profession of faith” as other political theorists or political theologians from the nineteenth century do. In certain commentaries, these thinkers are accused of being protestant or protestant adjacent despite their own ardent Catholicism. Despite this, one can abstract from Tocqueville an understanding of human nature that is rooted in the tradition that Catholicism outlines; namely, that man is wounded from sin and not plunged into complete darkness due to sin.

Presuming that man is wounded as opposed to the permanent stain^[3] of sin, we can argue from an Aristotelian point of view that man can be made good and that, depending on the regime, man can be healed and rehabilitated, or his passions and delusions be maximized and prolonged. We can glean this much from Tocqueville thanks to his writings on soft despotism, where man is reduced to nothing but an “industrious pleasure machine.”^[4]

Joshua Mitchell in his book, Fragility of Freedom, makes the key insight that for Tocqueville man is disposed to two different poles: The indulgent excesses of political life (what Mitchell identifies with Pride),^[5] and the inwardness that individualism spurns. Mitchell terms this as the “Augustinian Self.” Owing to these two poles: Inwardness and Excess. Mitchell points us in the right direction as to what Tocqueville thought about the nature of man. But what does Tocqueville himself tell us?

Tocqueville, as mentioned above, gives no clear systematic treatise on human nature. Everything Tocqueville says is in reference to the democratic century and its effects on how humans behave. Tocqueville writes of the condition of the individual as a sort of managed state of nature.

As conditions are equalized, one finds a great number of individuals who, not being wealthy enough or powerful enough to exert a great influence over the fates of those like them, have nevertheless acquired or preserved enough enlightenment and goods to be able to be self-sufficient. These owe nothing to anyone, they expect, so to speak, nothing from anyone; they are in the habit of always considering themselves in isolation, and they willingly fancy that their whole destiny is in their hands.^[6]

This condition is precisely what Mitchell identifies with the sin of pride, namely, the notion that holding destiny purely in our hands gives way to an unfettered feeling of conquest. Leo Strauss argues that this pride manifests in the unabashed “conquest of nature.”^[7] This is only affirmed in Tocqueville’s writings on why Americans devote themselves to praxis and not theory.^[8] The devotion to the sciences, as Tocqueville argues, is to lessen the burden, so to speak, of working;^[9] it helps us access more easily the “daily hit” of equality that Tocqueville writes about.^[10]

Equality furnishes a multitude of little enjoyments daily to each man. The charms of equality are felt at all moments, and they are within reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensitive to them, and the most vulgar souls get their delights from them. The passion to which equality gives birth will therefore be both energetic and general.^[11]

This energy thus feeds back into a vicious loop. A loop that Hobbes argues only “ceaseth in death.”^[12] Tocqueville argues that this loop only ends with “free institutions” and “political association.”^[13] He writes,

When citizens are forced to be occupied with public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the midst of their individual interests, and from time to time, torn away from the sight of themselves. From the moment when common affairs are treated in common, each man perceives that he is not as independent of those like him as he at first fancied, and that to obtain their support he must often lend them his cooperation.^[14]

Tocqueville, like his ancient predecessors, even argues that habitually participating in the affairs of the public man will realize that he “cannot do without those surrounding him.”^[15] Tocqueville stipulates, though, that while men cannot be without other men, “he is by nature social and political,”^[16] the most opulent will be sure to keep themselves with others and do what they can to please them.^[17] This is driven out of private desire, Tocqueville argues. But private desire does not outweigh the commonweal. He writes,

It would be unjust to believe that the patriotism of the Americans and the zeal that each of them shows for the well-being of his fellow citizens have nothing real about them. Although private interest directs most human actions, in the United States as elsewhere, it does not rule all. I must say that I often saw Americans make great and genuine sacrifices for the public, and I remarked a hundred times that, when needed, they almost never fail to lend faithful support to one another.^[18]

This notion of sacrifice is central to this quotation. Sacrifice is a concept that, for the most part, belongs to religious belief. St. Paul in his letter to the Romans asked us to “sacrifice our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”^[19] For Tocqueville and Saint Paul, religion has this mysterious pull that asks you to leave the world behind and contemplate the next. Participation in public affairs has a corresponding role as elicited by Tocqueville.^[20]

Tocqueville begins this discourse on religion by observing that everything stops on the seventh day. Time has reached a sort of timelessness. Pope Benedict XVI in his masterwork, The Spirit of the Liturgy, makes a similar point in that the liturgy is an escape from the burdens of the daily, “workaday world,” and the “liturgy is a kind of anticipation, a rehearsal, a prelude for the life to come, for eternal life.”^[21]

Tocqueville had recognized the institutional importance of religion earlier in Democracy in America as the only thing holding back our temptation to use the law for anything. “The law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything, and forbids them to dare everything.”^[22] Tocqueville argues that ordinary men are able to cast their eyes beyond this world due to the centrality of religion. He further argues that one should not “shake” religious belief.

Therefore when any religion whatsoever has cast deep roots within a democracy, guard against shaking it; but rather preserve it carefully as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries; do not seek to tear men from their old religious opinions to substitute new ones, for fear that, in the passage from one faith to another, the soul finding itself for a moment empty of belief, the love of material enjoyments will come to spread through it and fill it entirely.^[23]

It is the task of the statesman, the good one, to sustain and help the institutions built on the “rock” known as religion. Tocqueville says as much that spiritual and religious opinion should reign supremely. He writes,

It is easy to see that it is particularly important in times of democracy to make spiritualist opinions reign, it is not easy to say what those who govern democratic peoples ought to do to make them reign.^[24]

It would now seem that the two poles that Joshua Mitchell originally posited, inwardness and outwardness, are really, for Tocqueville, an excessive materialism against Religious belief. Although Tocqueville denies the providentialism or the anti-religious nature of the French Revolution, he is in fact working against himself, especially when the seminal figures in the revolution construct for themselves a new religion, one that opens the doors to the excessive materialism Tocqueville writes of above. One could argue that the excessive materialism that Tocqueville dreads is an anti-religion or a warped facsimile. I shall argue this point briefly.

Tocqueville, in his writings on soft despotism in an unpronounced way observes that the total tyrant sits above society in a way that resembles Thomas Hobbes’ frontispiece. A state that has achieved near^[25] perfect peace and security. He asks, “Can it (this state) not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?”^[26] This quote from Democracy in America certainly suggests that the excessive individual materialism that the democratic centuries will soon wreak upon the world is a kind of warped theo-political experience; but instead of spending your time paying deference to God, the ultimate Judge, we pay it to ourselves.

As mentioned above, the only true respite from the “workaday world” that Tocqueville and others outline is the respite achieved in the theological and political experience. Which leads me to my concluding thoughts; the theo-political experience that Tocqueville (aided by Ratzinger and Mitchell) outlines, gives us an insight into what his view of human nature truly is. The question of human nature is a complex one and should not be regarded as a simple and technological fix and Tocqueville does not treat it as such, rather, in the process of writing this I concluded that Tocqueville thinks humans are by nature worshipping creatures and with Democracy in America poses the age-old question of The City of God or of Man?

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^[1] Genesis 3:22.

^[2] See, Juan Donoso Cortes, Essays on Catholicism, Socialism and Liberalism: Considered in Their Fundamental Principle, trans. William McDonald (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1862).

^[3] Genesis 4:15.

^[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 663 (Hereafter, DA). Industrious in this sense means profitable and Tocqueville says as much when he writes about the preference for industry contra agriculture in that the immediacy of industry will induce men to pursue their base pleasures.

^[5] Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 43.

^[6] DA, 484.

^[7] Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 92.

^[8] DA, 433-9.

^[9] DA, 436.

^[10] DA, 481.

^[11] DA, 481.

^[12] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994) 50.

^[13] DA, 485.

^[14] DA, 486.

^[15] DA, 486.

^[16] Aristotle, Politics, 1253a

^[17] DA, 487.

^[18] DA, 488. Emphasis mine.

^[19] Romans 12:1-2

^[20] In this way one could contend that Tocqueville himself was a political theologian if we are to define political theology as political symbols and conflict as mirroring or corresponding to theological symbols and conflicts.

^[21] Joseph Ratzinger and Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy: Commemorative Edition, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020).

^[22] DA, 280.

^[23] DA, 519.

^[24] DA, 520. Tocqueville stipulates though on DA, 521: “I believe that the only efficacious means governments can use to put the dogma of the immortality of the soul in honor is to act every day as if they themselves believed it; and I think it is only in conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that they can flatter themselves they are teaching citizens to know it, love it, and respect it in small ones.” There is no image more powerful than practice, it is also along these lines that Tocqueville and Kierkegaard are close intellectually.

^[25] See, 1 Thessalonians 5:3. “When people are saying, “Peace and security,” then sudden disaster will come upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

^[26] DA, 663.