Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 11
Qui êtes-vous Monsieur de Tocqueville?
12
The Big Payoffs
16
On Method: What Happens after the Revolution?
18
A Final Word
20
1 Jansenism and Republicanism in Old Regime France
A Précis of the History of Jansenism
An Ideal-Type of Jansenism
The Jansenist Ethic and the Spirit of Resistance: Malesherbes’
Resistance to Maupeou’s Reforms
Conclusion: Jansenism and Republicanism in Old Regime France
23
24
38
47
52
2 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and French Political Culture, 1789-1859 55
Two Jansenist Categories: The Notes to Democracy in America
56
A Brief History of the Tocqueville Family and the Cultural
Influences Present in Family Life
59
The Family Library and the Education of an Aristocrat
63
The Study of Law and Two Friends from Versailles
65
Jansenist Themes in Tocqueville’s Life and Letters
70
Conclusion: Jansenism in the Life and Works of Alexis de
Tocqueville 76
3Providence
Jansenism and Providence: Secular History, Religious
Knowledge, and the Imperative to Struggle for the Good in the
Space Provided by Providence
The Dual Influence of Bossuet in the Nineteenth Century
Tocqueville’s Apology for Democracy: Contra Maistre on the
Nature of the French Revolution
Tocqueville’s Use of the Theory of Orders: Contra Bossuet
Conclusion: A New Political Science for a Democratic Age
79
82
85
88
97
100
4Sovereignty
Pascal’s ‘Conversation’ in the Nineteenth Century
The First Series of Debates: The Villèle Ministry and the Events
of 1822
Jansenist and Doctrinaire Responses: Grégoire and Villemain
Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans: Liberal Monarch, or Prince of the
French Republic?
The Liberal Monarch and his Ministers: The Doctrinaires
Tocqueville’s Trip to America and the Sovereignty of the People
Conclusion: The Modern Republicanism of Alexis de Tocqueville
5 Power and Virtue
The Liberal Challenge: Constant on the Liberties of the
Ancients and the Moderns
Tocqueville’s First Rejoinder: Individualism and Interest
Properly Understood
The Jansenist Toolbox: Pascal, Nicole, d’Aguesseau
From Subject to Citizen: The Moral Relations of the Republic
Conclusion: The Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
103
104
108
112
116
119
122
128
129
131
138
145
150
162
6 Religion (I)
167
Setting up the Problem: Stepan and Tocqueville as Third-Way
Democrats 169
The Freedom of Education and the Failure of Democratic
Bargaining, 1843-1844
175
Two Models of Education: Moral and Civic
181
Tocqueville’s Compromise
184
Conclusion: The Path not Taken, and Reconstructing the Right
to the Freedom of Education
190
7 Religion (II)
Tocqueville’s Antinomies and the Democratic Social State
The Political Utility of Religion
The Spill-Over Effect
The Separation Effect
The Restraint Effect
The Mechanism of Practice: A Brief Comparison of Religion
in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Bellah
195
196
202
203
205
208
211
The Ideal-Type in History: From America to France
Back to America: The Double Foundation and the American
Democratic Revolution
216
224
Conclusion 231
Tocqueville’s Modern Republicanism
233
Power, Non-Domination, and Realist Republicanism
241
Practical Experience, Political Activity, and Civic Virtue
248
Institutionalizing the Republic and the Prospects for Freedom
in a Democratic Age
255
Bibliography 263
Index 283
List of Tables
Table 1
Table 2
Table 3
The Affinity of Religious Jansenism and the Ideology of
Constitutional Monarchy
47
The Affinity of Traditional Jansenism and Democratic
Republicanism 53
The Contours of Liberalism and Republicanism
233
Introduction
Tocqueville in his Time
There is no small historical irony in the fact that Alexis de Tocqueville, a
French aristocrat, is the one of the most renowned observers of American
democracy. The many twists and turns in his personal biography that led
him to America inspire the imagination, while the length of his theoretical
vision has pushed generations of scholars to study his works. To many,
we need look no further than the words of the great text Democracy
in America to understand what Tocqueville can say to the twenty-first
century.
In contrast to this approach, I have written this book with the conviction that to understand what Tocqueville can mean today, we need to step
beyond the words of the text and come to understand them in the context
and for the purpose of which they were written. In short, we need to understand Tocqueville in his time. Most importantly, we need to remember
that Tocqueville did not write Democracy in America for the United States:
he wrote it for France. We need to understand the France he wrote it for
as much as the America he saw, and it is above all to the political culture
of France that we must look to in order to make sense of his purposes and
meanings. Put differently, Tocqueville came to America with a certain
amount of cultural baggage. This baggage not only shaped what he wanted
to study, but also informed how he conceived of America.
The f irst goal of this book is to tell the story of just one part of this
cultural heritage. I argue that the French Catholic movement known as
‘Jansenism,’ which Tocqueville found largely but not exclusively in the
works of Blaise Pascal, was part of the baggage he brought with him to
America. Although there is historical value in adding this Jansenist element to Tocqueville’s intellectual biography, I also argue that this Jansenist
influence gives evidence of the fundamentally republican nature of his
political thought.
The second goal of this book is to make Alexis de Tocqueville’s political theory relevant to today. Indeed, even though Tocqueville was a great
predictor, we have in many ways moved beyond the length of his vision.
He predicted the United States would have about 100 million citizens in 40
12 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
states, ending well short of the Pacific Ocean.1 While he saw that the United
States and Russia would be the great powers of the future, he had a hard
time imagining the end of slavery in the United States. In order to make
Tocqueville useful to today, we need to perform an operation similar to his
trip to America. From what he saw in America, Tocqueville created a way
of thinking that he could use to diagnose French politics. To make sense of
what lessons he holds for the twenty-first century, we need to perform the
same act of translation. We need to move beyond ‘Tocqueville says America
is X’ to an analysis of Tocqueville’s method and then, in turn, we need to
use this method to diagnose twenty-first century political life. We cannot
suppose that the American institutions of 1830 are the right ones for today,
not any more than Tocqueville supposed these same institutions could be
imported whole cloth to France. To bring democracy to the twenty-first
century, we need to understand how Tocqueville sought to bring it to France.
La France was always Tocqueville’s point of departure. It must be ours
too.
Qui êtes-vous Monsieur de Tocqueville? 2
The argument that there is a Jansenist influence in Alexis de Tocqueville’s
life and works is not new, but in this book I study it in new way. In recovering
this Jansenist influence on Tocqueville’s political thought, however, I do
not move beyond contemporary scholarship that looks at Tocqueville’s
intellectual biography as a ‘mix’ of different elements.3
The most common way of parsing this mix comes from Tocqueville’s
letter to his cousin and intellectual companion Louis de Kergolay. ‘I spend
a little bit of time each day with three men: Pascal, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau,’4 Tocqueville writes. Although scholars disagree about how to
rank and substantively interpret these three influences, there is agreement
that they take pride of place in Tocqueville’s intellectual bibliography. It
1Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, p. 460 (hereafter DA followed by volume
number and page; DA refers to Reeve’s translation unless otherwise indicated). Although there
are several very good modern translations, this is the only one done during Tocqueville’s lifetime.
It is not perfect, however, and when necessary I refer to the original French.
2 This is taken from the title of the book by Manzini and Gosset, Qui êtes-vous Monsieur de
Tocqueville?
3 Engers, ‘Democracy in the Balance.’
4 Alexis de Tocqueville to his cousin Louis de Kergolay, 10 November 1836; œuvres complètes,
ed. Jardin, XIII. 1, 418.
Introduc tion
13
is impossible, in fact, to do a study of Tocqueville’s political thought that
does not take into account the influence of these three. This book mostly
looks at the influence of Pascal but does not ignore that of Rousseau and
Montesquieu.
The simple fact that Blaise Pascal lived at Port-Royal and helped to shape
the theological program of Port-Royal, seems to indicate this is a subject
worthy of study. And yet there is no systematic study of Jansenist influence
in Tocqueville’s life and works, although the subject has not been ignored
entirely. Cheryl Welch, Michel Drolet, Lucien Jaume, Françoise Mélonio,
and George Armstrong Kelly have all looked at it as a leitmotif.5 The Jansenist tradition is not exclusive to Pascal: Montesquieu and Rousseau also
engaged with Jansenist ideas and thinkers in profound ways, and historians
have found some strong ‘resonances’ of Jansenist themes in their political
thought.6
I am interested in more than just questions of Tocqueville’s intellectual
biography, however. The recovery of Tocqueville in the twentieth century
has led to remarkable advances in how we think about the American visitor,
but it has left open the question of the content of his political thought. As
with many great political theorists, arguments have been presented that
the substance of Tocqueville’s political theory is fundamentally liberal on
the one hand, or fundamentally republican on the other.
Those who view Tocqueville as a liberal usually do so from one of two
perspectives: Straussian or classical liberal. The excellent book by Rodger
Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, set the terms for
how Straussians use this theoretical mixture to defend a vision of Tocqueville as a ‘strange’ liberal who made recourse to a mix of non-liberal
arguments.7 Boesche has used Tocqueville’s mistrust of the bourgeoisie and
the ‘littleness’ of the modern individual in the face of democratic majorities
to make sense of Tocqueville’s anxieties of the loss of greatness.8 Next to
these are another group of liberals that note Tocqueville’s fear of majority
rule and desire to establish barriers to the exercise of arbitrary power.
They portray Tocqueville as a kind of classic liberal seeking to establish a
5Welch, De Tocqueville; pp. 36-37; Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform, pp. 166173; Jaume, Tocqueville, pp. 216-262; Mélonio, Tocqueville et les français, pp. 70-110; Kelly, The
Humane Comedy; McLendon, ‘Tocqueville, Jansenism and the Psychology of Freedom.’
6 Riley, ‘The General Will,’ p. 243; Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography.
7Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville.
8Lawler, The Restless Mind.
14 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
system of negative rights and rule of law in order to protect private life from
incursions by democratic majorities.9
Tocqueville’s political thought does have some strong liberal tendencies, but there is something lacking in these interpretations. Tocqueville’s
devoted love of liberty was very explicitly political liberty in the republican
mode. What liberals miss, republicans hang their hat on. Sheldon Wolin,
for example, cannot see in Tocqueville’s republicanism anything more
than ancienneté combined with a resigned acceptance of the modern.
He concludes pessimistically about the prospects for republican freedom
in the modern world.10 The recent book by Arnaud Coutant, Une critique
républicaine de la démocratie libérale, more persuasively traces Tocqueville’s
republicanism to the early modern Atlantic republican tradition.11
Both liberals and republicans draw from important themes in Tocqueville’s writings. Both groups also fail to see important elements of
Tocqueville’s political thought, elements that change how we conceive
of his political theory. Liberals miss his unabashed defense of political
liberty and can only with difficulty horseshoe him into the tradition of
liberalism. But one reason why Tocqueville so often has been mistaken
as a liberal is that we keep trying to fit him into early modern – or even
ancient – republicanism. While early modern republicanism is a better fit
for Tocqueville than liberalism, this backwards-looking republicanism is a
box he only fits in uncomfortably. What liberals recognize are Tocqueville’s
self-consciously modern elements, elements that they rightly demonstrate
fit poorly within the paradigm of early modern republicanism.12
There is not an insignificant amount of work that has viewed Tocqueville’s
political thought through the lens of early modern French political traditions.13 In the matrix of early modern political ideas, Jansenism and constitutional monarchy had a strong reciprocal relationship. Following this logic,
a Jansenist interpretation could be used to support interpretive frameworks
that see Tocqueville as a particular kind of constitutional monarchist. Recent
9Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America; Guellec, Tocqueville et les langages de la démocratie; Rivale, Tocqueville ou l’intranquillité; Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy.
10Wolin, Tocqueville.
11Coutant, Une critique républicaine de la démocratie libérale.
12 The recent work by Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to
Tocqueville, is the work that most resembles my own, but we look at different elements of
Tocqueville’s intellectual biography and arrive at different conclusions about the nature of his
political thought.
13Benoît, Tocqueville moraliste; La Fournière, Alexis de Tocqueville; Lacam, ‘Tocqueville, un
monarchiste.’
Introduc tion
15
research has confirmed the insight that Jansenism was a form of religion
particularly well suited to the psychic and political needs of the intermediate
orders in France, especially the law.14 Tocqueville might have viewed the
religious ideas of Jansenism as part of this more general political attitude:
I do not doubt that Protestantism, which places all religious authority
in the body of the faithful, is very favorable to republican government
[…]. And Catholicism submitted to the intellectual authority of the pope
and of the Councils seems to me to have more of a natural affinity with
a tempered monarchy than with any other government.15
Tocqueville himself was not so backward looking as an interpretation like
this seems to suggest. His motivation to travel to America was based on
this instinct: that there, in the world’s only functioning political democracy,
could he really see how democracy works. Convinced of the need to find
a new political science, he sought out the only laboratory where he could
watch it in action, with the hopes of discovering how to make democracy
from particularly French elements.
We need to take seriously Tocqueville’s claim to be working on ‘a new
political science for an entirely new world.’16 From America, Tocqueville
expressed this sentiment to Kergolay:
It seems clear to me that reformed religion is a kind of compromise, a
sort of representative monarchy in matters of religion which can well fill
an era, or serve as passage from one state to another, but which cannot
constitute a definitive state itself and which is approaching its end.17
Tocqueville’s conviction that a new age has dawned can be seen in the
‘Author’s Introduction’ to Democracy in America, and even the Old Regime.
His attempt to make a new political science was ultimately an attempt to
make republicanism fit for the modern age. Like the broader mixture of
Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, he blends Jansenist elements with other
14 This literature is discussed at length below. For an example, see Bell, Lawyers and Citizens.
15Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of ‘De la démocratie en
Amérique,’ ed. Nolla, trans. Schleifer, p. 470 (hereafter DA (Critical Edition), followed by volume
number and page).
16Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, p. 43 (hereafter DA (Gallimard), followed by
volume number and page).
17 Tocqueville to Kergolay, 29 June 1831; œuvres complètes, ed. Jardin, XIII.1, 225.
16 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
political traditions in a new alloy, an innovative attempt to transpose early
modern political ideas into a democratic register.
In my effort to recover the religious origins of some of Tocqueville’s political ideas, I do not think that this story implies a larger personal religious
agenda, or even a deeply held set of Catholic beliefs. Not at all. This Jansenist
influence does not give evidence to rethink basic elements of Tocqueville’s
personal life. These have been most accurately treated by Tocqueville’s three
major biographers: Andre Jardin, Jean-Louis Benoît, and Hugh Brogan.18 As
for Tocqueville’s own Jansenism, it should be thought of as, in the words of
Lucien Jaume, ‘jansénisant,’ which is to say Jansenist-like.19 According to the
definition of Jansenism I develop in Chapter 1, Tocqueville is only a Jansenist
in a weak sense: he never embraced fully their view of the Catholic Church
or underwent a second conversion, for example. If we turn to some of the
Jansenist categories he did use, categories like Providence or self-interest
properly understood, he never simply borrows.
The Big Payoffs
While there is certainly value in getting Tocqueville right, in this book
I am also interested in contemporary questions of political theory. There
are two ways this book speaks to contemporary political theory. The first
is in the substance of Tocqueville’s modern republicanism; the second, in
his sociology of religion.
The first element of Tocqueville’s thought that the influence of Jansenism
brings to the fore is his modern republicanism. Tocqueville is ultimately a
republican on two counts: first, in his defense of what he calls ‘the dogma
sovereignty of the people’; second, in his claim that political experience is
transformative, and that there are some virtues that are only cultivated
in the realm of the political. The first claim might only make Tocqueville
republican in a more formal sense, but the second places him squarely in
the Aristotelian and Machiavellian tradition. While Tocqueville challenges
us to take seriously the key republican claim of the necessity of politics, he
does so in a way that we need not reject liberalism entirely. Tocqueville’s
conception of virtue is active and manly, but it does not require Spartan
self-denial in the pursuit of the common good. Rather, through recovering
18Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography; Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville; Jean-Louis Benoît, Tocqueville
moraliste.
19Jaume, Tocqueville, p. 257.
Introduc tion
17
elements of early modern Jansenist republicanism, Tocqueville articulates
a kind of enlightened patriotism that mingles personal interest with the
common good.
Once in politics, however, Tocqueville argues that participation gives
citizens experience with what can be thought of as the manipulation of
political objects. To Tocqueville, rights are tools and only through the use
of tools like the press or political association do citizens learn a basic set
of democratic virtues: public spirit, respect for the rule of law, and respect
for the rights of others. Put differently, the type of knowledge cultivated in
political space cannot be cultivated anywhere else. Tocqueville’s republicanism has some very liberal elements, but these liberal elements – even
the seemingly liberal notion of self-interest properly understood – rest on a
republican foundation. Tocqueville’s republicanism highlights the necessity
of the practices of politics; to him, politics is a game that is learned by
playing, and there is no substitute for experience.
I devote several chapters to placing in historical context some of the
elements of Tocqueville’s republicanism that this Jansenist perspective
brings to the fore, including ways in which Tocqueville is not a Jansenist.
Chapters 3 and 4 look at Tocqueville’s movement from the early modern
Jansenist and constitutional monarchist notion of divided sovereignty to the
modern and democratic defense of the sovereignty of the people within the
context of French political culture. I then turn to look at how the substance
of Tocqueville’s concept of self-interest rightly understood, while building
on some earlier Jansenist uses, is actually a response to the liberalism of
Benjamin Constant.
The second theoretical problem I take up in this book is a redescription of Tocqueville’s sociology of religion. The final two chapters use this
neo-Jansenist perspective on Tocqueville’s political theory to engage in
contemporary debates in democratic transition and the role of religion in
the modern civic life. In the first case, I look at Tocqueville’s participation
in debates over the freedom of education in 1843-1844. I argue that here we
see him trying to put this sociology of religion to work in a more directly
political manner, and that his writing on education hold valuable lessons
for young democracies today. In the second case, I reconstruct Tocqueville’s
ideal-type of the democratic social state by looking at the relationship
between enlightenment and enchantment in modernity, the social function
of religion in democratic political orders, and the role of political factors
in religion as a social form. The fundamentally republican nature of Tocqueville’s thought is again highlighted in his comparison of America and
France: in America, political experience gave citizens an arena in which to
18 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
test out and modify their religious ideas; while in France, the association of
religion with the monarchy in the old regime was one of the primary causes
of the antireligious nature of the French Revolution.
On Method: What Happens after the Revolution?
It has been more than forty years since the publication of The Machiavellian
Moment, and much longer since historians began recovering what J.G.A.
Pocock calls the ‘Atlantic republican tradition.’20 At the risk of reinventing
the wheel, I seek to tell the story of how the Machiavellian Moment was
imported into France, and how Alexis de Tocqueville picked up and refashioned the particularly French moment to think about modern politics. To
perform this task, I am forced to extend Pocock’s method of analysis. First,
in showing the road that runs from Florence to Paris, I need to demonstrate
the particular French topography. Early modern French republicans were
not blank slates who read and were impressed by republican ideas. Their
history constrained and shaped the reception of the Atlantic republican
tradition in significant ways. ‘Court’ ideology – to borrow Pocock’s English
term – was much more pronounced in France.
One of the most important factors shaping the reception of republicanism in France was the religious tradition of Jansenism. Codified in the
mid-seventeenth century by the group of lawyers, scientists, men of letters,
and nuns that lived at the monastery of Port-Royal, Jansenism came to be
an ideology intimately intertwined with that of constitutional monarchy
and the milieu of aristocratic republicanism in France. It was associated not
only with the parlementaires and but also with the corporations of lawyers
that made the parlements run. In many ways, it is the tradition of religious
Jansenism that gives early modern French republicanism its distinctive
flavor. Again using Pocock’s English term, Jansenism was a Catholic kind
of ‘Country’ republican ideology.
The second feature of the story I tell in this book is not related to space
but to time. Pocock tells the story of the early modern republican tradition.
Accordingly, his story is bound by a when as much as a where. While there is
an increasing amount of work that brings republicanism into the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the terms of analysis set by Pocock have made this
task more difficult than it might appear on the surface.
20Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. The literature is too immense to summarize here but
see also Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, and van Geldeen and Skinner, Republicanism.
Introduc tion
19
In Pocock’s terms, a paradigm is a language of politics, a relatively coherent system for thinking about political order.21 It helps political actors give
explanations for events and to structure political decision-making. Pocock
calls paradigms ‘languages of politics’ in order to highlight how the internal
elements of the system create a kind of coherence that makes a domain of
social life comprehensible, while also allowing for the adoption of systems
of ideas to new contexts. The core of how Pocock describes the paradigm
of republicanism is a cluster of three concepts: the distinction between
corruption and virtue, the connection between the institutional and moral
elements of the republic, and a defense of divided government.22
To combat corruption, the institutions of the republic invest all citizens
in the exercise of power, although in different capacities. Indeed, distinct
capacities of the citizenry are essential to making the republic work: the differences amongst the citizens give the republic the diversity of talents and
ideas that make it thrive. These differences in social status are enshrined in
the institutions of the republic, with separate decision-making bodies and
functions for the people, the nobles, and, when circumstances dictated, the
king. The tripartite structure of divided republican government is rooted in
Aristotle’s notion of a republic as a mixed constitution, but it was a typology
that was extremely malleable in application. In America, it was identified
with the Federalist system of divided government; in the Italian republics, it
was used to justify separate institutional spaces for patrons and the people;
in France, it was used to conceive of a kind of limited monarchy based on
consent of the people and the activity of the nobles.
This mixed or balanced system was essentially a decision-making processes to ensure that self-interested desires of the various social classes
could be channeled into the interest of the whole political community. But
this institutional system of divided power not only produced a better policy,
it had a moral dimension as well. Through participation in public power
within the institutions of the republic, citizens develop political virtues
unavailable to them in other spheres of life. Only those persons invested
with the right to wield public power and speak in the name of the public
develop the virtues of leading and following. As the adage says, ‘practice
makes perfect.’
The version of republicanism identified by Machiavelli and Guicciardini
in the sixteenth century had a powerful influence on Atlantic political
thought for over two hundred years. By the end of the French Revolution,
21Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 35-41.
22Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 56-111.
20 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
however, the paradigm established by the early modern thinkers was
increasingly being questioned. Some of these challenges were practical,
some theoretical. Designed for use in conditions of city-states, the growth of
the nation-state was the greatest practical challenge to republican political
theorists. Theoretically, the growth of liberalism in the eighteenth century
and the notion that sovereignty was absolute and unified challenged the
early modern organization of republic ideas. The end of hereditary status
underneath the republican division of the few and the many, including the
idea of separate institutional spaces, created another set of conceptual and
institutional problems.
Reimagining the republican tradition needed to address these challenges,
but Tocqueville was not alone in his project of modernizing republicanism.
In many ways, the Federalists were challenged with the same issues. The
condition of political and social equality was a fact in the United States
earlier than other places, and the American framers went to great lengths
trying to identify a kind of natural aristocracy.23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau also
grappled with a similar set of difficulties of how to conceive of a republic
in modern conditions, especially in conditions of unitary and absolute
sovereignty. All of these answers provided Alexis de Tocqueville with fertile
material to use in this project of building a republic for the moderns.
A Final Word
The first part of this book is historical. It begins with the historical sociology
of Jansenism in old regime political culture. Drawing inspiration from Max
Weber and Lucien Goldmann, I argue that religious Jansenism shared a
strong reciprocal relationship with the political ideology of constitutional
monarchy in France. In Chapter 2, I show how Jansenism was an important
– but by no means hegemonic – cultural influence in Tocqueville’s family
and professional life. Based on this analysis, I argue that Jansenism was a
set of intellectual tools that Tocqueville felt free to borrow from but was in
no way limited to. Chapter 3 turns to look at how this Jansenist influence
takes shape in his œuvre, specifically the idea of Providence. Here I show
that Tocqueville’s use of the political rhetoric of Providence in Democracy
in America is best understood in the context of this Jansenist tradition, yet
modified to suit the needs of a democratic age.
23 Wootton, ‘Introduction.’
Introduc tion
21
These historical chapters set the foundation for the second part of the
book, which focuses on Tocqueville’s modern republicanism. Comprised
of four chapters and a conclusion, the second part of the book looks at
Tocqueville’s Jansenist-inflected republicanism in different contexts, from
the nature of sovereignty and civic virtue to the Jansenist influence in his
the sociology of religion. While Chapters 4 and 5 are still fundamentally
contextual analysis of political thought, Chapters 6 and 7 bridge the historical nature of this book with contemporary political science: Chapter 6 looks
at education policy in democratic transitions by linking Tocqueville with
Alfred Stepan, and Chapter 7 shows how this Jansenist influence takes
shape within Tocqueville’s sociology of religion.
In the conclusion, I argue that Tocqueville’s political theory can still be
a powerful interpretive tool to help make sense of political life. Indeed, his
modern republicanism is both an attractive philosophical ideal and a plausible description of modern political life. Much like contemporary republican
philosophers and political theorists, Tocqueville was self-consciously trying
to articulate a vision of republican freedom accommodated to the needs of
a democratic age. It is therefore puzzling that, except for a few scholars who
look specifically at America, the republican revival rarely finds inspiration
from the works of Alexis de Tocqueville.