Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Alexis de Tocqueville on Trump (and maybe, as well, the French Revolution)

     But sometimes in the life of nations there occurs a moment when ancient customs are changed, behavior patterns destroyed, beliefs upturned. The value of memories has vanished and where, nonetheless, education has remained in an imperfect state and political rights are ill-founded and restricted.  At such a time, men no longer perceive their native land except in a feeble and ambiguous light; their patriotism is centred neither on the land which they see as just inanimate earth nor on the customs of their ancestors which they have been taught to view as a yoke, nor on religion which they doubt, nor on laws which they do not enact, nor on the legislator whom they fear and despise. So, they can no longer see their country portrayed either under its own or borrowed features and men retreat into a narrow and unenlightened egotism.  These men escape from prejudices without recognizing the power of reason; they have neither the instinctive patriotism of a monarchy nor the reflective patriotism of a republic; but they come to a halt between the two in the midst of confusion and wretchedness.

     What’s to be done in such a predicament?  Retreat.  But nations do not return to youthful opinions any more than men return to the first tastes of their infancy; they may regret them but not rekindle them.  So one must move forward and hurry to unite, in people’s eyes, the interest of the individual with that of the country, for disinterested patriotism escapes never to return.

     Certainly, I am far from claiming that to achieve this result the exercise of political rights should be granted at once to every man; but I do say that the most potent, and possibly the only remaining weapon to involve men in in the destiny of their country is to make them take a share in its government.  In our day, civic spirit seems to me inseparable from the exercise of political rights and I believe that henceforth the increase or decrease in the number of citizens will be in proportion to the extension of those rights.[1]

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)



[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, tr. Gerald E. Bevan, intro. by Isaac Kramnick (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), pp. 275,276.