Abstract
This chapter contributes to the literature on Tocqueville’s “strange liberalism” by wondering: Would Tocqueville endorse a “free market of ideas”? In order to answer this question, it explores the salutary limits he would set to the democratic imagination through religion, mores, and the leadership and authority of public intellectuals. To do so, it enlists comparisons with Plato and Rousseau as thinkers similarly concerned with the relationship between ideas and political life. Standing at the margins of democratic and aristocratic society, Tocqueville tries to temper democratic materialism with spiritualism and aristocratic virtue and liberty. Given scholarship continues to try to define Tocqueville as belonging to one ideological party or another, it remains crucial to highlight where his normatively thick liberalism differs from that of other liberals.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on the interpretation of the Liberty Fund edition: There is a methodological debate to be had regarding the use of manuscript notes, as are included in the Liberty Fund edition, as opposed to using the final published text. In my reading of the manuscript notes alongside the published text, there is nothing of which I am aware, which I have pulled from the notes that directly contradicts the content of the published text. This I feel gives me a certain license to interpret the manuscript notes as included in the Nolla Liberty Fund edition as clarifications of or a working out of ideas that appear in the main text.
- 2.
Jean Yarbrough has a recently published article exploring these ideas, which I did not discover until after my original paper had been submitted, refereed, and returned with edits. Though we have similar concerns, our framing and upshot differ. That said, I nonetheless cite her now in this final draft of the paper.
- 3.
The original Winthrop: “There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint, by this liberty, Sumus Omnes deteriores; ’tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives.” Tocqueville (2000: 42).
- 4.
For helping me make this connection, I thank my colleague Dimitrios Halikias in the Department of Government at Harvard University, and cite his thoughts on the subject here: http://dhalikias.blogspot.com/2018/07/protagoras-and-marketplace-of-ideas.html
- 5.
From Tocqueville’s notes: “I am firmly persuaded that if you sincerely applied to the search for the true religion the philosophical method of the 18th century, you would without difficulty discover the truth of the dogmas taught by Jesus Christ, and I think you would arrive at Christianity by reason as well as faith.” Tocqueville (2010: 707).
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Gustafson, S. (2020). A Tocquevillian Marketplace of Ideas? Spiritualism and Materialism in Tocqueville’s Liberalism. In: Boettke, P., Martin, A. (eds) Exploring the Social and Political Economy of Alexis de Tocqueville. Mercatus Studies in Political and Social Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34937-0_6
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