Tocqueville on Mores and the Preservation of Republics

The chapter Tocqueville originally intended as a conclusion for the Democracy in America of 1835 is devoted to the causes that maintain a democratic republic. His main findings concern the political role of "mores." Conducting an implicit dialogue with Montesquieu and working from evidence available to no previous student of democracy, Tocqueville finds commercialism less supportive of democracy and mores (especially those connected with religion) more useful to democracy than his great predecessor had believed. Moreover, he draws attention to a "practical" form of "enlightenment" seen in the broad public internalization of democratic practice and norms. These discoveries did not lead to confident predictions about the republic's future, largely because much of what is useful in mores seems beyond direct political control. They did inspire his argument that modern democrats are best advised to make use of, rather than repudiate, the inherited mores. These mores, if adapted to new conditions, may help to support effective democratic practice.     

Tocqueville on the Good of American Federalism

If Tocqueville emphasizes, at times, the tendency of Americanfederalism toward consolidation and, at other times, its tendencytoward disintegration, this is not because he is confused butbecause he is keenly aware of the difficulty of combining theadvantages of bigness with those of smallness. Americans havesucceeded in producing such a combination, not through a simpleaggregation of institutional mechanisms but through a synthesisthat reaches to the heart of American civilization–a fusionof dynamism with comfort, of the ideology of popular sovereigntywith the practice of responsible self-government, of calculatedself-interest with spontaneous public virtue, and of enlightenmentwith tradition. Because the Enlightenment, the embodiment ofthis synthesis, provides no ground in its pure form for humandignity, Tocqueville seeks to speak on behalf of those institutionsof federalism that root the idealism of citizens in the realexperience of responsible self-government.     

Freedom, Interference and Domination

Interference and domination make persons less free. This paper discusses how they do so. It considers and rejects two influential recent accounts of freedom, one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-interference and one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-domination. Against these accounts, the paper argues that both interference and domination play an important role in reducing freedom and that neither concept can be reduced to the other. To bolster this argument, the paper presents and defends an account of freedom that relates both concepts back to a common source. This account shows that while interference and domination have independent significance for judgments of freedom both reduce freedom by obstructing the ability of persons to plan their lives.     

Alexis de Tocqueville on the Covenantal Tradition of American Federal Democracy

Perhaps no analyst of democracy's potentials for despotism andself-government understood better than Alexis de Tocquevillethe importance of the "favorable circumstances" of America'srepublican and religious origins. America's covenantal heritageinspired the public philosophy of federal liberty and the federalprinciple used to establish governments and political associationsin colonial New England. The Puritans, Tocqueville explained,created the bonds and the liberties of citizenship by theirassent to eternal, transcendent principles, as well as by theirconsent to government. The principles of covenant ultimatelyprovided the institutional and conceptual foundation of constitutionalgovernment, making America's federal democracy less vulnerableto possessive individualism and democratic despotism. Federalprinciples fostered an important indirect role for religionin American politics. Tocqueville not only analyzed the tensionbetween the requirements of faith and democratic norms, butalso distinguished covenantal ways of negotiating these concernsfrom the approach taken by later advocates of religious freedom,fames Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He argued that federalism'smoral foundations will be difficult to preserve if this tensionis resolved in ways that promote individual autonomy by underminingcovenantal thinking.     

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.     

Republican Freedom,Popular Control,and Collective Action

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game‐theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory.     

Alexis de Tocqueville and the American Character: The Problem of Reconciling Excellence and Consent

Although Tocqueville was deeply concerned about the adverseconsequences of democratic equality and the tyranny of the majority,he nonethless believed that the character of the American people-reinforcedby America's customs, laws, circumstances, constitutional heritage,and favorable geography-would help Americans to achieve a decent,liberal, constitutional polity. Culturally, however, Americanswere deficient in reconciling excellence and consent. Less friendlycritics have argued that a democracy cannot reconcile excellenceand consent. It is, however, possible to move beyond Tocqueville'squalified confidence in American democracy, and his reservationsabout the ability of Americans to reconcile excellence and consent,by arguing that there is a fundamental concord between excellenceand consent, that there is significant popular acceptance andpractice of excellence in a democracy, and that creative democraticleadership can advance excellence in a democratic society.