I really liked Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution. He argues that the French Revolution itself was not transformative, but that even with the conservative political reaction came social transformations that had been set in motion beginning in the 1600s and that those explain France in the 1800s better than the ideology of the Revolution. He wanted to know why France was not as successful in modernizing (our term) as the U.S., and ended up positing an explanation for why French revolutionary thought continued to focus on equality while in the U.S. the key concept was liberty. He also worried that both societies were susceptible to a modern despot because of conditions of equality, even though the conditions were different in each country. So much seems like it’s here for the first time, like the idea that what motivates social groups to accept or reject the status quo is not how well-off or not they are, but their assessment relative to other groups or to expectations.
Tocqueville located the motive for change before the Revolution in France in the observation that each of the three estates had been changing, in such a way as to create envy and instability within each. The traditional nobles were undermined by the breakup of property estates and the creation by the crown of a new noblesse de robe beholding to the king. To some extent the crown did something similar within the clergy. Many in the bourgeoisie were as wealthy as nobles but without their privileges. Peasants were often smallholders of land, not serfs, but still chafed under the nominal rule of nobles who were often absent in Paris. There was no way within society for people to align their status to their material condition. Absolutist centralization meant there was no local political life as in the U.S. where people could channel these tensions into institutionally mediated negotiations or explore cross-class cooperation, through government or other associations.
The Revolution tipped over an already decaying order, and created new central institutions but no new locally-based order. It was unexpected but inevitable. Consequently political ideas of equality were accepted in the abstract but there was no widespread way to practice them, to “build” through “political education” (as put in my notes). Any vestige of the old order was suspect still, including religion, which in the U.S. Tocqueville found played a socially mediating role as one of a number of “associations” that built the capacity for self-governance. I’m intrigued by how Tocqueville, and to some extent Smith before, pioneered a look at religion not so much for its ideas and for its social function. I might be wrong about that; Tocqueville came to appreciate the contemporary church in France for shrinking into a religious realm where it could play a positive role or limit its old negative role.
I think Tocqueville regarded the American paradigm of “self-interest properly understood” as something possible in the U.S. because land holding and power could go together, and power in a concrete way an ideology of individual liberty that also built civic self-confidence. This was good, even though “individualism” without the civic component could detach people from one another and lay them open to despotism.
The question that ultimately occupied Tocqueville is one that concerns us — understanding how a modern egalitarian society slips toward despotism, how does it get out?
One thing that came up with regard to Tocqueville’s two major works was the difference between a sociological and a historical approach. I’m usually drawn more to the sociological and conceptual, and per the methods class as a corrective to putting too much stock in one particular historical happening or phenomenon or individual. Yet as was pointed out in class, the historical can point to where we might wonder about the effect of the individual or the one-off, and sometimes we do judiciously want to extrapolate from a small but robustly described sample.
I am finding John Stuart Mill to be difficult to pin down as a comprehensive theorist. I’m not going to try to summarize what I think my notes say his overall theory was. One thing I see so far is a theory of class integration through representative government. He believed that since humans need to reflect on ideas both new and traditional, in light of their impact on the overall happiness of society, people need to be exposed to as many ideas as possible. Education even of elites accomplishes only so much, because the ideas within any social class tend to homogenize and be justified apologetically. Within an ideal legislature, ideas are debated and tested against their putative social outcome, a standard that is outside any given class. Mill did in a normative way regard higher pleasures as better, and true utility as the “long term interests of man as a progressive being” (I’m quoting my notes, not sure if I am quoting Mill). Through representative government and freedom of thought and expression, society would be most likely to arrive at moral and policy stances that align with the true maximum utility properly understood. I don’t know that Mill valued social mixing in itself, but he did value it and the liberal political arrangements of legislatures, suffrage, and rights as a means to that end. I know there is more coming in terms of Mill’s economics and his take on Tocqueville too; I’ll leave that until I get there. I can say though that of all the theorists, I find myself relying on Mill’s sociology the least, though I think his ethical and political philosophy to the extent I am familiar with it is useful.
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