Extended Abstract
After the onslaught of some Enlightenment thinkers on religion, Tocqueville was one of the most impressive philosophers who tried to reconcile modern democracy with religion. He believes liberty cannot be established without morality, and morality cannot be established without faith. For Tocqueville, religious belief is an essential bulwark of freedom. He wanted to persuade French liberals that the Catholic Church was not necessarily the enemy of freedom and French Catholics that democracy was not necessarily the enemy of the Catholic Church. In his last years, Tocqueville’s pessimism about the future of liberty in France directly resulted from the stormy relationship between religion and democratic society in France. Tocqueville’s vision of religion’s enduring significance in democratic societies aligns him with those associated with “post-secular society” theories today.
This article analyzes Tocqueville’s personal beliefs, the causes of his attention to religion, the relationship between religion and the doctrine of “self-interest properly understood,” the relationship between religion and materialism, the relationship between religion and freedom, and the relationship between religion and state in Tocqueville’s philosophy. As Kahan says, moral issues (concerns about human character and its development) in a democratic society were at the heart of Tocqueville’s project. In putting the question of moral character at the center of his work, Tocqueville was placing himself within a long and distinguished French tradition that reached back to writers including La Bruyère, Pascal and Corneille and continued through figures such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Chateaubriand. If Tocqueville invented a “new political science,” it was in the service of his new moral science, a science intended to encourage democratic grandeur and preserve democratic souls from degradation. For Tocqueville, democratic societies faced a choice between despotism and freedom. His new political science was intended to help them choose freedom. His new moral science was designed to help them face a parallel and related choice between moral degradation and moral greatness. As a moralist, Tocqueville aspired to be not merely democracy’s political guru but its spiritual director.
Tocqueville is going to discover a road between two paths. The first path is materialism. It is concerned only with satisfying the needs of the body. The second path is spiritualism, i.e. to inflict suffering and privations on ourselves to live the life of the soul. He notices at the one end of this tendency, Heliogabalus, and at the other, St. Jerome, and he believes that the middle road (a path between Heliogabalus and St. Jerome) is the only one that can be suitable for humanity.
Tocqueville believes that man can never simultaneously bear complete religious independence and full political liberty. So, he thinks that man must have faith for freedom; if he does not, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe. As Zuckert says, in democratic times, religion can be preserved and exercise a salutary effect on morals - individual and social - only by combining it with economic calculation in public opinion, as in America. Democratic circumstances are not antagonistic to all tenets of faith.
On the contrary, similar and equal people can easily understand the notion of a single God, imposing on each one of them the same rules and granting them future happiness at the same cost. However, as Zuckert says, if religious beliefs were to be propagated and preserved by such a public consensus, the doctrinaire and formal aspects antagonistic to democratic tastes would have to be minimized. It would not suffice merely to separate church and state. The content and form of religious services had to be adapted to democratic conditions. Religious leaders would also have to work to synthesize secular and sacred beliefs. Rather than stressing how concern for their eternal salvation stands in opposition to the material interests of their congregations, preachers need to recognize the dominance of public opinion and explicitly align themselves with it in an emphatically nonpartisan way.
Tocqueville says Americans combat individualism with the doctrine of “self-interest properly understood.” Zuckert says this doctrine serves precisely the two functions for which Tocqueville had praised religion. Although it does not destroy the materialist desires of democratic people, it does make them pursue those interests honestly. It also works to overcome the “individualism” or isolation that economic pursuits tended to foster. The philosophers who teach this doctrine say to men that, to be happy in life, you must watch over your passions and carefully repress their excesses; that you cannot gain lasting happiness except by denying yourself a thousand passing enjoyments, and that finally, you must triumph over yourself constantly to serve yourself better. Tocqueville is not afraid to say that, of all philosophical theories, the doctrine of “self-interest properly understood” seems the most appropriate to the needs of his contemporaries. He sees it as the most powerful tool they have left to protect them from themselves. It should, therefore, be the primary focus of today’s moralists. He does not believe that the doctrine of self-interest as preached in America is self-evidently true in all respects, but it does contain many truths so evident that enlightened men cannot fail to see them. Enlighten them, therefore, regardless of the cost, for the century of blind self-sacrifice and instinctive virtue is fast receding into the past, and what he sees approaching is an age in which liberty, public peace, and social order itself will be unable to do without enlightenment.
Zuckert says that if religion survived in modern egalitarian societies, Tocqueville concluded that it would result from self-interested calculations that were generally effective through the force of public opinion. The specifically religious content of “self-interest properly understood” was minimal, but irreplaceable. To convince individuals to risk their lives for the common good, beliefs in God and judgment in the afterlife are beneficial, if not indispensable. The necessary beliefs are few, simple, and, we should note, not distinctively Christian. Indeed, when Tocqueville turned to discuss the basis of individual morality, he suggested that even belief in divine retribution or punishment was not essential.
Tocqueville thus minimizes the necessary content of a “civil religion” even more than Jean Jacques Rousseau did in Social Contract. He believes that most religions are only general, simple and practical means to teach men the immortality of the soul. In this respect, Tocqueville follows Montesquieu, who characterized Stoicism as a religion. Last but not least, like Montesquieu, Tocqueville also had serious doubts about the compatibility of some religions with human liberty, if for no other reason than that they do not allow for the necessary separation of religion and politics
