Abstract
Peter Strawson may be right to suggest that the skeptic voices his doubts as a “challenge to himself—to show that the doubts are unjustified, that the beliefs put in question are justified.”1 Still, I wonder if the aphorism isn’t somewhat overdrawn unless one concedes that the questioning is a continuous mental process: doubts may continue to lurk in the dark, or, under the right conditions, even bask in the sunlight, no matter how strong one’s beliefs are. Alexis de Tocqueville’s ideas on the psychological and political dynamic governing the exercise of religious beliefs in a democratic society in which the future of liberty, both private and public, which was in his view far from assured, may place him between firm beliefs and equally firm doubts. I am proposing to tie two matters together. The first is that skepticism, but skepticism of a special and surprising sort, was an important part of Tocqueville’s intellectual makeup. This becomes evident from a probing of contradictory passages from Tocqueville’s writings. The second is that his encounters with doubt were meaningful for him at two levels. At the first level, his struggles with doubt were existential and often private. At the second, he rarely isolated them from, or failed to integrate them within, the social, political and religious transformations of his time. He often synoptically described them by the term “incredulity” and which he saw even more fundamentally embodied in the notion of moeurs, appropriated from the eighteenth century and earlier. By moeurs, he meant more than the habits of the individual heart. His own words clarify his intentions. “I mean to apply it [the term moeurs] ... to the different notions possessed by man, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits. So I use the word to cover the whole moral and intellectual state of a people. It is not my aim to describe American mores; just now I am only looking for the elements in them which help to support political institutions.”2
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References
Peter F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (New York, 1985), 2.
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique,ed. Eduardo Nolla, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990), 1:223. Hereafter De la démocratie.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées,ed. and tr. Alban J. Krailshaimer (Harmondsworth, 1966), no. 200 (the no. order follows that of the ed. by Louis Lafuma).
Tocqueville to Corcelle, 1 August 1850, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres, Papiers et Correspondances (Oeuvres Complètes),ed. J.-P. Mayer, 18 vols. (Paris, 1950-), 15/2:29 (hereafter: OC,followed by volume, part, and page number).
Tocqueville to Bouchitté, 8 January 1858, Oeuvres complètes,ed. Gustave de Beaumont, 9 vols., (Paris, 1864–78), 7:175–77.
OC,3/2:551. The emphasis is Tocqueville’s.
Le Commerce,6 December 1844, in OC,3/2:579. 12 “Liberté d’enseignement” (no date), ibid., 559.
Sur la liberté religieuse,“ Séance du 28 avril 1845, Moniteur universel du 29 avril 1845, 1130, ibid., 599.
Séance de la chambre des pairs,“ Le Commerce,7 March 1845, ibid., 605.
De la démocratie1:226.
Ibid., the citations are to be found on 29, 30, and 35.
See Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987).
See T.J. Hochstrasser, “The Claims of Conscience: Natural Law Theory, Obligation, and Resistance in the Huguenot Diaspora,” New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge,ed.
John C. Laursen (Leiden, 1995), 15–51.
Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 29 June 1831, OC, 13 /1: 227–31.
Though not following in Tocqueville’s footsteps, Jeremy Waldron, writing some one hundred and sixty years later, held much the same opinion about the coexistence of religious groups, making the point that modem society is highly self-conscious of the rapid succession of moral outlooks in American society. See Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers, 1981–1991 (Cambridge, 1993 ).
Tocqueville to Gobineau, 22 October 1843, OC,9:57–62, 67–68.
Tocqueville to Gobineau, 5 September 1843, OC, 9: 45.
Tocqueville anticipates in part both Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness,tr. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley, 1982) and Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago, 1993), who argue that Cartesian doubt collapses truth into certainty, making truth entirely a subjective matter. In another close reading of Descartes, Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), 293, notes that Descartes’ answer to “hyperbolic doubt” was in essence a combination of the cogito argument with proof of God’s existence,“ a solution, Tuck fmds, that deals only with the ”epistemological side of perception,“ and not at all with the moral world.
Kergorlay to Tocqueville, 23 June 1832, OC, 13 /1: 257.
Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, 6 April 1838, OC, 11: 59–61.
On ataraxia in its original Pyrrhonian and in its modern contexts, see the opposing views of Myles F. Burnyeat, “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism,” The Skeptical Tradition,ed. Burnyeat (Berkeley, 1983), 117–48; and David R. Hiley, “The Deep Challenge of Pyrrhonian Scepticism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy,25 (1987), 185–213, esp. 193–95.
Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 5 August 1836, OC, 13 /1, 389.
Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 2 February 1838, OC, 13 /2: 12.
Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 18 October 1847, OC, 13 /2: 207.
Cf. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ont., 1991), who takes up this question, but does not look into the negative consequences of Tocqueville’ s endorsement of competing self-interest groups, though he is hardly unaware that these are the groups that command substantial power in modern political cultures.
For the claim that liberalism cannot be considered apart from its political stance, indeed, that it is primarily a political position, see Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism ( Cambridge, Mass., 1993 ).
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
Tocqueville to Gobineau, 5 August 1858, OC, 9: 295.
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Mitchell, H. (1998). Tocqueville’s Flight from Doubt and His Search for Certainty: Skepticism in a Democratic Age. In: van der Zande, J., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3465-3_20
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