This essay examines in detail Tocqueville's paradoxical moderation by focusing on his rich correspondence and notes for Democracy in America. As Tocqueville's critique of the politics of the July Monarchy shows, he was a political moderate and an immoderate mind, and this uncommon combination explains the ambiguities and contradictions in his view of democracy. After exploring Tocqueville's views on moderating democracy, the essay examines the main elements of his new science of politics at the heart of which lies the idea of a wise balancing of various social elements, principles, and ideas. The final section comments on Tocqueville's elusive moderation and his search for greatness in modern politics.

This essay takes its bearings from an epistolary dialogue between Arthur de Gobineau and Alexis de Tocqueville about the contours of modern politics. Their dispute illuminates in a remarkable way the theological-political problem that suffuses the emergence of modern politics and, as a consequence, provides a helpful frame of reference for understanding several contemporary controversies bearing on the relationship between religion and liberal democratic politics. Moreover, their correspondence casts new light on the underpinnings of Tocqueville's thought. The frankness of this exchange together with the relentless character of Gobineau's arguments, provoke in Tocqueville an articulation of the larger context within which he understands modern politics and, in so doing, reveals an important, though largely neglected, intellectual framework that informs much of his published work.

Critics of liberal individualism have pointed out the many failures of “atomism” as a method in social and political philosophy. Their methodological criticisms have a tendency, however, to devolve into repudiations of moral individualism as such. In part, this is due to a misreading of Hegel and Tocqueville, two critics of individualism who nevertheless upheld the importance of individual rights and what Hegel called “freedom of subjectivity.” My essay brings these two very different theorists together in order to show how each deliberately dispensed with the ontology inherited from eighteenth-century social contract theory, the better to focus on associational life and public freedom. The end result is not a relapse into the rhetoric of civic republicanism, but a refurbishment of that tradition from the standpoint of modern liberty: the liberty of the individual. This common project links Hegel, the idealist philosopher, and Tocqueville, the liberal-republican, in unexpected but complementary ways.

In this essay, Lincoln's ideas on democratic leadership are examined in the light of Tocqueville's political theory. In certain respects, Lincoln's words and deeds help to confirm the wisdom of Tocqueville's ideas on the role of leadership in a democracy. But in other respects, Lincoln's thought exposes the weaknesses and limitations of Tocqueville's understanding of democratic leadership. Both Tocqueville and Lincoln believed that the task of leadership was to elevate and educate the citizenry. In order to accomplish this task, they both believed that leaders should rely largely—but not exclusively—on what Tocqueville called the doctrine of self-interest properly understood. Lincoln differed from Tocqueville, however, insofar as Lincoln suggested that leaders in a democracy must remain close to the people's fundamental values and aspirations. Lincoln was such an effective democratic leader in large part because he simultaneously critiqued and embraced those aspects of the American character which worried Tocqueville. Unlike Lincoln, Tocqueville usually failed to recognize the element of mutuality which effective democratic leadership requires.

In arguing for democracy's universal promotion in the world today, America's leaders simplify democracy's procedural requirements and reduce the nature and degree of participation required of its citizens. Tocqueville's more sophisticated analysis of the essential underpinnings of a healthy democratic society argues that the genius of American democracy lies in its juxtaposition of two separate democratic tracks, one national and the other local. On one track, to be sure, he situated the broad freedoms assured by our deftly balanced national constitution. But he assigned equal pride of place to a complementary track of robust “secondary liberties.” After recounting Tocqueville's lifelong effort to determine the appropriate levels of such local engagement, indexed to considerations of religion, national security, and the progress of civilization itself, the essay explains that Tocqueville never took for granted democratic political transitions, seeing them as products of human wisdom and choice, not historical necessity.

From right to left, from Reagan to Mitterrand, seemingly everyone wants to befriend Tocqueville and line him up on his on her side. No writer, except perhaps Orwell, has such appeal across political boundaries, and a judicious quotation from Tocqueville, no matter how much out of context, is believed to buttress any argument. While I too have spent a couple of decades of my intellectual life admiring and writing about Tocqueville,1 I have been unable either to forget or ignore a seamy side of Tocqueville, a dark side that has its roots both in his aristocratic heritage and also in his century's rush to global conquest. His two hundredth birthday is a good time to shed light on his embrace of war and empire.

Tocqueville describes the spirit of enterprise—along with the taste for material well-being—as “the distinctive characteristic” of the American people. This paper explores the American spirit of innovation and enterprise, beginning with the centrality of this spirit for America's commercial greatness. Tocqueville observes that the taste for innovation is a part of American national character, and its roots can be traced to the equality of conditions which characterizes democratic life. But the same equality of conditions which promotes the spirit of innovation also can also threaten it, for equality of conditions paradoxically encourages individuals both to rely upon their own judgment and to defer to the majority's. Although the effects of the spirit of innovation in the commercial realm are positive, its effects on other aspects of American life are more ambiguous.