Joshua Mitchell.  The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Excerpt:

The Delphic injunction, “Know thyself,” seems nowhere to have been more happily violated than in the American context. It was, after all, Tocqueville the Frenchman, the stranger in America, who was able to grasp the multiple valences of the democratic soul in this country as no American author had done before or has done since.  “The majority lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration,” Tocqueville says; “only strangers or experience may be able to bring certain truths to the Americans’ attention.”  And elsewhere,

 

“A foreigner does, it is true, sometimes meet Americans who are not strict slaves to slogans…but no one, except yourself, listens to them, and you, to whom they confide these secret thoughts, are only a stranger and will pass on.  To you they will disclose truths that have no use for you, but when they go down into the marketplace they use quite a different language.”

 

The language of the marketplace, its limitation, as it were, is doubly pertinent to this study of Tocqueville’s social and political thought.  Philosophically the stranger whose currency is not easily exchanged in the market is able to grasp its significance from afar more thoroughly than were he uncritically involved with it.  “Know thyself” is for the market-wary.

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