The Spirit of Religion and the Spirit of Liberty: The Tocqueville Thesis Revisited by Zuckert Michael P.; & Michael P. Zuckert

Author:Zuckert, Michael P.; & Michael P. Zuckert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:47:01.364000+00:00

Tocqueville then pointed out the disturbing implications of this powerful inclination that tends to make individuals obsessed with single causes and unity at the expense of particularity and leads them to embrace determinism. First, pantheism represents a formidable if invisible threat to preserving liberty and human greatness in democratic societies. “Among the different systems by the aid of which philosophy seeks to explain the world,” Tocqueville opined, “pantheism seems to me the one most likely to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries. All those who remain enamored of the true grandeur of man must join forces and struggle against it” (2010, 3:758). Second, pantheism tends to foster fatalism and thwarts the people’s ability to change or reform the world in which they live because it attributes to individuals “almost no influence on the destiny of the species, or to citizens on the fate of the people” (853). At the same time, it gives “great general causes to all the small particular facts” and tends to present all events as “linked together by a tight and necessary chain”; thus, it ends up “by denying nations control over themselves and by contesting the liberty of having been able to do what they did” (853). As such, third, pantheism tends to foster uniformity and centralization of power among democratic peoples who have seen the principle of equality triumph among them.

Religions, Tocqueville argued, must always hold firm in this regard. They may not compromise the principal opinions that constitute their fundamental beliefs, but they should be at the same time flexible enough with regard to the incidental notions linked to them. This middle ground seems to have been his preferred solution for reconciling religion (authority) and philosophy (liberty) and for combating the nefarious effects of pantheism: “As men become more similar and more equal, it is more important for religions, while still keeping carefully out of the daily movement of affairs, not unnecessarily to go against generally accepted ideas and the permanent interests that rule the mass… . In this way, by respecting all the democratic instincts that are not contrary to it and by using several of those instincts to help itself, religion succeeds in struggling with advantage against the spirit of individual independence that is the most dangerous of all to religion” (Tocqueville 2010, 3:752–53; emphasis added).

The example of America also taught Tocqueville another important lesson about religion in democracy: religion can act as a countervailing power to the mixture of this-worldly attitudes, excessive individualism, and materialism that can be found in democratic times. Tocqueville noticed the Americans’ melancholy demeanor amid their material abundance and attributed it in part to their restlessness. The equality of conditions opens up new opportunities for everyone while increasing at the same time the competition for a limited set of resources. Since democracy tells everyone, in the spirit of equality, that there is no limit to one’s right to pursue one’s desires as long as they do not harm others, democratic life is bound to promote

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