Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Kolnai, Tocqueville, and the Moral Foundations of Democracy

Daniel J. Mahoney, "Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Kolnai, Tocqueville, and the Moral Foundations of Democracy" in Democracy and Its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler.  (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004)

Excerpt:

“If society exists for the sake of anything at all, it exists for the sake of itself and thus for the sake of its ruling, leading and tone-giving members, and for the sake of the distinctively valuable, eminent, virtuous, ingenious and creative members emergent in its midst, and, last but not least, for the good of its members pure and simple.”

-Aurel Kolnai, “The Concept of Hierarchy”

This quotation confirms Kolnai’s debts to and affinities with conservative-liberal thought, including the greatest, most balanced and perspicacious of conservative-liberal thinkers, Alexis de Tocqueville. In fact, one of the strengths of Kolnai’s work is that it gives theoretical depth to some of Tocqueville’s most profound, but naive and “untheorized” observations. As John Hittinger has suggested, Kolnai provides more “conceptual and phenomenological clarity” than Tocqueville and philosophizes where Tocqueville relies on his powerful observations or on historical or sociological generalizations.

Nonetheless, the affinities between the two thinkers are quite striking. Both agree that the cause of liberty and human dignity is not strengthened by striving to maximize democracy at every turn. Both recognize the salutary dependence of democracy on what Tocqueville called “aristocratic inheritances” and on what Kolnai called “axioms, conventions, traditions, and habits (whether they be explicitly or tacitly respected) which transcend the liberal-democratic framework itself and impose certain `material’ or `objective’ limits on both individual liberty and popular sovereignty” (PL, 38). Both thinkers feared that these predemocratic inheritances or traditions would be eroded by the gradual democratization of society and by the dogmatic application of the principle of popular sovereignty. They feared that everything would come to be judged in light of the imperative of individual and collective consent. Tocqueville and Kolnai both appreciated that democracy was a metapolitical as well as a political phenomenon. They knew that democracy “democratizes” aspects of life such as the family, religion, and the intellectual life, which were once considered to be natural and hence, in crucial respects, beyond politics.

Both were committed to the idea of “a regulated and orderly freedom, controlled by religious beliefs, mores, and laws” as Tocqueville put it in his Recollections. Yet at the same time these wary partisans of liberty appreciated the discreet but deadly tyranny that democracy was capable of exercising over the human mind and soul. They knew that under the democratic dispensation, when push came to shove, there would be no resort to anything outside the collective judgment of the people or the ubiquitous claims of “public opinion.” Tocqueville went so far as to state that he did “not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign[ed] than in America.” Kolnai, for his part, was convinced that there were totalitarian premises lurking in democratic ideology. Democracy all too readily degenerated into a “religion of progress” and was defenseless against more consistent forms of historicism and materialism. The dream of a “world of man as such … unencumbered by the ballast of prejudice, bias, dogma, tradition and taste” was nothing less than an inhuman utopia in his view (PM, 200). To be sure, “Utopia in America, displays its more moderate face; but the protest of human nature against Utopia is most effectively silenced there” (PM, 201). In different ways, Tocqueville and Kolnai oscillated between a recognition that revolutionary despotism was the gravest threat to political liberty and human integrity in modern times (although Tocqueville did not live to see the ideological tyrannies of twentieth century but only the anticipation of totalitarianism that was Jacobinism) and a belief that a mild, democratic despotism was a far more subtle, insidious and dangerous threat to the integrity of human nature.

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