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“Man Simply”: Excavating Tocqueville's Conception of Human Nature

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10457097.2012.720901

1930-5478

Alexander Jech,

European Political History Analysis

Abstract Abstract There is widespread disagreement about Tocqueville's conception of human nature, some going so far as to say that Tocqueville possessed no unified conception of human nature at all. In this paper, I aim to provide the essential principles of Tocqueville's conception of human nature through an examination of the way in which he describes the power of human circumstances, such as physical environment, social state, and religion, to shape human character by extracting the principles underlying these transformations. There is no "natural man" or man "in the state of nature" but instead a set of psychic operations that reveal a picture of human nature in which human freedom, or the ability to initiate action in pursuit of important objects, lies at the heart of human life. Keywords: Alexis de Tocquevillesocial statefreedomhuman naturephilosophical anthropology Notes 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, "A Fortnight in the Wilds," Journey to America, ed. J. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 365. 2. As in Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Matthew Sitman and Brian Smith, "The Rift in the Modern Mind: Tocqueville and Percy on the Rise of the Cartesian Self," Perspectives on Political Science 36 (2007): 15–22. 3. As in Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Human Condition: Tocqueville's Debt to Rousseau and Pascal," in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, ed. Eduardo Nolla (New York: NYU Press, 1992). 4. Pierre Manent, "Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply: Some Remarks on an Equivocation in Tocqueville's Thought," trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton, Perspectives on Political Science 27 (1998): 80. 5. Manent, "Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply: Some Remarks on an Equivocation in Tocqueville's Thought," 83. 6. See Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner Publishing Compnay, 1949), I.3, 6: "Better is it to say that the government most conformable to nature is that which best agrees with the humor and the disposition of the people in whose favor it is established." 7. Democracy in America, I.i.1, 22. 8. Democracy in America, I.i.1, 22-3. Tocqueville's description appears to be influenced by the Puritans' own descriptions of the land they found, such as William Bradford "hideous and desolate wilderness" (William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1899), 62, as quoted in Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 23–24. 9. Democracy in America, I.i.1, 22. 10. Ewa Atanassow, "Fortnight in the Wilderness: Tocqueville on Nature and Civilization," Perspectives on Political Science 35, no. 1 (2006): 23. 11. Democracy in America, II.iv.8, 676. 12. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. I, 193. 13. Tocqueville, Journey to America, 163. 14. Drafts, Yale, CVk, Paquet 7, cahier 1, 47–48; cited in James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000 [1980]), 88n18. 15. There are (of course) those who deny that Tocqueville gives much importance to the social. Wilhelm Hennis writes that "Nothing in [Tocqueville's] work evidences an affinity, everything evidences a decided enmity, toward the emerging sociological thought of his time" and concludes that it is a mistake to read Tocqueville as a sociologist ("In Search of the "New Science of Politics"," in Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1991), 31). But while it may be true that he "spoke only very condescendingly of Saint-Simon … and of Comte" (33), this only shows that Tocqueville was no friend of a certain kind of sociology. Hennis appears to allow there to be only sociologists and political scientists; there is no room for a political theory founded upon an understanding of the social. 16. Michael Zuckert, "On Social State," Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993), 6. 17. Zuckert, "On Social State," 6. 18. Democracy in America, I.ii.10, 314. 19. Zuckert, "On Social State," 15. 20. Zuckert, "On Social State," 16. 21. In this respect, Raymond Aron's treatment of Tocqueville's social thought is too political and not social enough, because he treats the "equality of conditions" underlying democratic social state as a state in which "there is no hereditary difference of conditions and … all occupations, all professions, all titles, and all honors are accessible to all" (Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver, vol. I (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 187). 22. In light of this passage, I do not understand why Peter Lawler contends that Tocqueville's explanation of the changes of the human race consists in the idea that "Human history is the destruction of illusion and the growth of misery" (Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Human Condition: Tocqueville's Debt to Rousseau and Pascal," in Liberty, Equality, Democracy, ed. Eduardo Nolla (New York: NYU Press, 1992), 9). Lawler believes that in general Tocqueville follows Rousseau in thinking that "human beings, over time, become more human or historical or self-conscious and less natural or subordinated to instinct or merely brutish desire" (9). What underlies the change then is this single process of becoming self-aware, or becoming self-conscious, or at any rate becoming reflective and less natural. But even if this describes humanity's intellectual development, it is hard to see why we should interpret Tocqueville as taking such development as the engine of history, since he explains our increased reliance upon individual reflection in terms of changes in social state (Democracy, II.i.1). 23. Democracy in America, I.i.2, 30. 24. Compare this with Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, XVIII, "Of Laws in the Relation They Bear to the Nature of the Soil," chapter 1ff, and XXI, chapter 3, "That the Wants of the People in the South are different from those of the North." 25. Democracy in America, I.i.3, 47. 26. Democracy in America, I.i.3, 47. 27. Democracy in America, I.i.1, 24. 28. Democracy in America, I.i.1, 24–25. 29. Democracy in America, II.ii.5, 490. 30. This belief is the glory and shame of aristocracy: glory because it is in this that the aristocratic guarantee of liberty resides but shame because this belief is based on a lie: The aristocrat is not essentially powerful and free but has come to be so through an unjust social system that makes him seem so. 31. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J. Meyer, trans. Alexander Teixeria de Mattos (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 183. 32. Arguably Democracy II is a treatise upon the soul of the democratic man. 33. Tocqueville makes both claims in numerous locations, but you can find all three of these attested to in II.i.1, 403–5: he says that in democratic ages human beings become "almost alike" (II.i.1, 405) and because of this the citizens do not perceive "in anyone among themselves incontestable signs of greatness and superiority" (II.i.1, 404), and he mentions "the continual movement that reigns in the heart of a democratic society" (II.i.1, 403). 34. Democracy in America, II.i.1, 404. 35. Consider II.ii.10, esp. 507. 36. See Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, trans., ed., Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), Author's Foreword, 13. 37. Cf. Democracy in America, II.ii.10, 507 on the fear of losing wealth that occupies the rich. 38. Democracy in America, I.ii.6, 228. 39. This doesn't imply that Tocqueville thought that all action was motivated by self-interest, only that all human beings possess such interest. See Democracy in America II.ii.8, 502 40. See Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), Chapter 7. 41. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, 154–55. 42. Pace Raymond Aron, who seems a bit too quick to me in saying that "it is not difficult to state [a careful definition of what Tocqueville meant by liberty] precisely" (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. I, 189). 43. "Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it" (The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, trans., ed., Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 15). 44. Democracy in America, I.ii.9, 284. 45. Democracy in America, I.ii.9, 283. 46. Democracy in America, I.ii.9, 284. 47. See Democracy in America, II.i.7, 425–6. 48. Democracy in America, II.ii.15, 519. 49. Democracy in America, II.ii.15, 520. 50. Democracy in America, II.ii.15, 519. 51. Democracy in America, II.i.7, 426. 52. Doris S. Goldstein, "The Religious Beliefs of Alexis de Tocqueville," French Historical Studies 1, no. 4 (1960): 379–93, at 385. 53. Democracy in America, II.ii.12, 510–11. 54. As in Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, third ed. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). 55. Democracy in America, II.ii.5, 490. 56. Democracy in America, II.ii.17, 523. 57. Democracy in America, I.ii.9, 278. 58. Democracy in America, II.ii.17, 522. 59. Democracy in America, II.ii.17, 522. 60. Mansfield and Winthrop, "Tocqueville's New Political Science," The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 83. 61. Democracy in America, I.i.2, 34. 62. Democracy in America, II.ii.16, 522 63. Democracy in America, I.i.2, 32. 64. Democracy in America, I.i.2, 39. 65. Democracy in America, II.ii.15, 519. 66. See George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), Intro. §13, 43–44, and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), trans. Paul Guyer, A139 / B178. 67. See, e.g., "I therefore do not believe that the sole motive of religious men is interest; but I think that interest is the principal means religions themselves make use of to guide men, and I do not doubt that it is only from this side that they take hold of the crowd and become popular," Democracy in America, II.ii.9, 504. 68. Democracy in America, I.ii.4, 181. 69. Not the general kind of dependence which each person has upon others, but the relationship of dependence in which one party cannot act without the other party's approval.