Excerpt:

Shortly after arriving in the new world, Tocqueville wrote to one of his oldest friends about the flurry of conflicting impressions that greeted him in New York. He was struck by “a mixture of vices and virtues that is rather difficult to classify and that does not form a single picture” (Tocqueville 1985, 44). On the one hand, he was taken by the purity of American mores, especially as they pertained to marriage and religion. On the other, he noted a perpetual instability of desires, the most visible expression of which was a pervasive and immoderate preoccupation with wealth. Notwithstanding the evolution of Tocqueville’s thinking about America, these first impressions remain prescient: the mixture of virtue and vice characteristic of the American people does not form a single picture. As Tocqueville traces these conflicting tendencies to their root, he discovers a nation characterized not by one, but by two foundings, each of which is drawn from a radically different source-biblical religion and secular philosophy.

If the first New England settlers, to whom Tocqueville gives careful attention, were motivated by biblical zeal, the Constitution to which they acceded 170 years later bears the unmistakable imprint of secular developments in the science of politics. This dual parentage of America ensured the persistence of conflict for future generations, a conflict that could cease only with the complete victory of one of the antagonists. As America begins its third century of independent existence, it is a victory that neither side is willing to concede.

Tocqueville’s classic study of democracy in America is the first of any scope to give weight to America’s dual founding-biblical and philosophic. I argue that he is the first student of modern democracy to recognize, not merely the existence of this conflict in the root principles of American democracy, but also and especially the importance of conflict itself for the maintenance of healthy democratic politics, something that leads him to reflect on the natural state of religion in the dawning democratic age. Before turning directly to this topic, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of America’s better known Enlightenment inheritance inasmuch as it provides the context against which Tocqueville’s distinctive reflections on religion and democracy become visible.

Online:
The Journal of Politics