Harvey C. Mansfield, “Nature and Fact in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,” Nature in American Philosophy, Jean De Groot, ed., Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America, 2004, 109-128.

Excerpt:

Today political science speaks of facts but studiously avoids speaking of nature or natural or what happens naturally.  Classical political science, however, rests on nature and never speaks of facts.  “Fact” is a modern term that seems to do the work, or some of the work, “nature” did for hte ancients.  Yet Tocqueville uses both terms.  He is not unique in this; teh practice of consulting “fact” was invented long before the term “nature” was abandoned under separate attacks from Nietzsche’s historicism and scientific positivism.  But Tocqueville’s use of the two terms, now considered mutually exclusive, shows his awareness of their opposed meanings as well as a wish to bring them together.  He was a modern liberal who took inspiration, in complicated ways, from liberalism’s two main enemies, Christianity and classical political science.

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