Saving democracy from itself: The moral and intellectual horizons of Tocqueville's new science of politics (Alexis de Tocqueville, France).

摘要

Alexis de Tocqueville identifies the desire for equality as the generative principle of democracy. Unchecked, this desire leads to a compression of human existence, and ultimately, to democratic despotism. But while this may be the “natural” termination of the democratic impulse, it is not the only course that may be taken by democracy. The great political question of our times, according to Tocqueville, is how to make liberty proceed from a democratic state of society and thereby avert the new despotism that lurks within democracy.; Tocqueville's remedy is a “new science of politics.” Since Tocqueville does not present his new science in a systematic way, the reader is left to determine the meaning, method, and scope of this science from Tocqueville's scattered remarks regarding “science” and his analysis of the components of the “new science of politics.” The dissertation devotes a chapter to the meaning of “science” for Tocqueville and to each of the elements that Tocqueville explicitly associates with the “new science of politics”—education, religion and morality, and statecraft. The dissertation contends that the possibilities and limitations of democracy are most fully revealed in the moral and intellectual horizons of the new science. Finally, the dissertation looks to Tocqueville's chapters on women as symbolic of the “new science” and the moral and intellectual qualities that are necessary to save democracy from itself.