Hugh of St. Victor: Disdascalicon: On the Study of Reading. Jerome Taylor translation. Preface, Books I-III: Liberal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

 

Saint Victor was a third-century Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and was martyred for his evangelical work in the army, work that attracted the malign attention of the Emperor Maximilian. The Abbey of St Victor was founded in Paris in the twelfth century. Hugh of St. Victor arrived there in the 1120s, quickly earning a reputation as an excellent lecturer. He wrote the Didascalicon as a guide for his students.

He begins by distinguishing several kinds of students: those whom “nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things,” some of whom do learn because they work hard and some of whom refuse to learn anything, ruled by “contempt of knowledge” derived from their “wicked will”; among those who do have ability, the most excellent are hard workers who become learned men, the others sluggards who do not. 

One learns in two ways, principally: by reading and by meditation. This book is on reading: what to read, in what order it should be read, and in what manner it should be read. Books being divided into secular and sacred, Hugh instructs the reader on how to read both. The first three parts address the origin of the arts, their description and division, identifying their authors. He ranks the works in order of importance and indicates the proper sequence of reading them, concluding by “lay[ing] down for students their discipline of life,” without which they will make little progress in their studies. The second three parts address Sacred Scripture, identifying and sequencing them, identifying their authors and explaining the titles of the books. These parts conclude with an explanation of “how Sacred Scripture ought to be read by the man who seeks in it the correction of his morals and a form of living” and how they ought to be read by “the man who reads in it for the love of knowledge.”

“Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.” This Form is Jesus, through whose wisdom God the Father created the world, including man. Jesus is “the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things,” but one that inheres in the divine Person, not independently, as some Platonists conceive the Idea of the Good. Unlike animals, who do not “understand that they have been created of a higher order than they,” man, created in God’s image, must learn to know himself as the ‘god’ Apollo advises: to “recognize himself” by examining himself. Whereas Plato in the Timaeus describes an “entelechy” or “World-Soul,” Hugh, understanding that the God of the Bible created the world out of nothing, redefines the entelechy as the human soul, which, like Plato’s entelechy, is partly “dividual”—divided into parts—and partly in-dividual—unitary. As a human being, I possess understanding, which “comprehends the invisible causes of things,” and particulars, which I perceive through sense perceptions, “picking up the visible forms of actual objects.” In this way, whether my soul “goes out to sensible things through its senses or ascends to invisible things through its understanding, it circles about, drawing to itself the likenesses of things; and thus it is that one and the same mind, having the capacity for all things, is fitted together out of every substance and nature by the fact that it represents within itself their imaged likeness.” The soul should not therefore be understood as being composed of the physical things; it ‘is’ them by its manner of understanding them. “The soul grasps the similitude [to all things] in and of itself, out of a certain native capacity and proper power of its own.” “Imprinted with the likenesses of all things,” the mind “is said to be all things.” That is “the dignity of our nature,” distinguishing humans beings the animals. However, “all do not equally understand” this, their minds having been “stupefied by bodily sensations and enticed out of itself by sensuous forms,” forgetting “what it was”—a condition also described by Socrates in Plato’s Meno. [1] “But we are restored through instruction, so that we may recognize our nature and learn not to seek outside ourselves what we can find within.” In one of his excellent notes to his translation, Jerome Taylor observes that Hugh’s “educational theory rests” on these “two postulates”: “the rational creature’s exclusive assimilation to the divine Wisdom, and its natural capacity to contain the rest of creation” in terms of ideas (p.187 n.42).

Philosophy is the pursuit of Wisdom. Philosophers not wise men, sophia, but lovers of Wisdom. “The whole truth lies so deeply hidden that the mind, however much it may ardently yearn toward it or however much it may struggle to acquire it, can nonetheless comprehend only with difficulty the truth as it is.” As Boethius has it, philosophy calls man’s mind back to itself, back to “the proper force and purity of [human] nature.” The soul has three powers: appetite, which forms, nourishes, and sustains bodies; sense perception, and reason, the distinctively human characteristic. Reason enables men to pursue Wisdom, which acts as “a kind of moderator over all human actions.” Whereas “brute animals, governed by no rational judgment,” guide their movements by sense impressions alone, “driven by a certain blind inclination of the flesh,” man’s reason empowers him to perceive Wisdom, God, albeit imperfectly, and regulate his morals and reach theoretical understanding “of all human acts and pursuits,” inasmuch as they partake of Wisdom, the image of God after which man alone was created. “Philosophy is the discipline which investigates comprehensively the ideas of all things, human and divine.” Hugh offers an example: “the theory of agriculture belongs to the philosopher, but the execution of it to the farmer.” Accordingly, human acts as governed by Wisdom have two dimensions: “restoring our nature’s integrity” and “the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject.” That is because man has two things in him: “the good and the evil, his nature and the defective state of his nature.” The good “has suffered corruption” and so “requires to be restored by active effort.” The evil, which is “not our nature, requires to be removed” or “at least to be alleviated through the application of a remedy.” These two efforts constitute the entire human task.

The “integrity of human nature” may be attained in knowledge and in virtue, “and in these lies our sole likeness to the supernal [i.e., angelic] and divine substances,” the element in us that truly is, that remains eternally. The other part is transitory, subject to change and eventually to death. In the world overall (and by “world” Hugh means all of creation, not only the physical universe), there are “three things that are”: the eternal, which has no beginning or end—God; the perpetual, which has a beginning but no end—corporeal and incorporeal nature; and the temporal, which has a beginning and an end. Nothing that has true being, true esse, suffers destruction; it is rather the forms of things that pass away, the being of them enduring change but not extinction, rather like what we would call the law of the conservation of matter and energy. “All of nature has both a primordial cause,” God, “and a perpetual subsistence.” While the human soul partakes of God’s likeness, likeness isn’t identity; for one thing, man lacks the power to create out of nothing. There is a certain parallel, if not an exact analogy, in the structure of the cosmos. The “superlunary” world contains the heavenly bodies above the moon, which “stand fixed by primordial law.” Astronomers call this “nature” proper. The sublunary world, our world, is “the work of nature” because “the varieties of all animate beings which live below by the infusion of life-giving spirit, take their infused nutriment through invisible emanation from above,” moving “in accordance with the movements of the superior.” Their term for the superlunary world is “elysium”; their word for the sublunary world is “infernum.” This is why man is subject to necessity with respect to that part of him that partakes of change (he must, for example, grow old and die), “whereas in that in which he is immortal, he is related to divinity,” free to make choices. His right choices are to “restore in [him] the likeness of the divine image” and to “take thought of the necessity of this life,” which can easily “suffer harm from those things which work to its disadvantage.” That is, a human being ought to choose those things that reorient his spiritual nature toward God, his physical nature toward healthful self-preservation.

Two things “restore the divine likeness to man: the contemplation of truth,” which connects him to wisdom and justice, God’s preeminent characteristics, and the practice of virtue. As to ministering to physical necessities, he must feed himself, fortify himself “against harms which might possibly come from without” and against those that “already besiege us.” “Every human action, thus, is either divine or human. Divine action, which “derives from above,” is intelligentia or understanding, a purely spiritual activity that can comprehend God with God’s graceful help, His revelation and the Holy Spirit. This has two parts: “speculative,” directed toward God Himself, and “practical” or “moral.”  “Human” action or scientia, knowledge, “a certain practical counsel,” “derives from below,” from sense impressions directed to the sublunary world of physical necessity, corporeal objects. Knowledge “pursues merely human works” and “is fitly called ‘mechanical’ ” or ‘adulterate'”—impure, clever and often hidden, as in the phrase, ‘tricks of the trade.’ To put it another way, God creates out of nothing, nature brings to actuality what was hidden (in morality, it brings out man’s potential for goodness), while artificers put together or disjoin already existing things in imitation of nature. While human art is lower than divine creation or nature, “man’s reason shines forth much more brilliantly in inventing these very things than ever it would have had man naturally possessed them,” and we rightly “look with wonder not at nature alone but at the artificer as well.” Mechanical work thus partakes of human dignity. Wisdom overall governs “all we do deliberately,” whether by understanding or by knowledge.

Nature has four dimensions. There is, first, “that archetypal Exemplar of all things which exists in the divine Mind, according to the idea of which all things have been formed.” Nature is “the primordial cause of each thing, whence each takes not only its being (esse) but its ‘being such and such a thing’ (talis esse) as well.” “Nature is that which gives to each thing its being.” Second, nature means “each thing’s peculiar being (proprium esse),” that is, “the peculiar difference giving form to each thing,” its own nature. That tree over there has being, but it also has its own being as a particular species of tree. Third, nature is a begetter, “an artificer fire coming forth from a certain power to beget sensible objects”; “all things are procreated from heat and moisture,” the sun and the ocean, symbolized in Virgil’s Georgics as Jupiter and Oceanus. Finally, there is logic, “the last to be discovered” by men but the first to be taught, since it is “essential” to understanding the first three. Hugh again cites Boethius, who remarks that the ancients often erred before they discovered logic because “real things do not precisely conform to the conclusions of our reasoning as they do to a mathematical count.” Mathematics is precise; words are not. What was needed was a way of making words more accurate, more nearly descriptive of nature—what Hugh calls “linguistic logic.” The natural human capacity to reason needed refinement in order for human beings better to understand the rest of nature. “The man who brushes aside knowledge of argumentation falls of necessity into error when he searches out the nature of things,” inasmuch as must first “come to know for certain what form of reasoning keeps to the true course of argument,” as distinguished from “what form keeps only to a seemingly true course, and unless he has learned what form of reasoning can be depended upon and what form must be held suspect, he cannot attain, by reasoning, the imperishable truth of things.” He must distinguish between logic and sophistry. 

“All sciences…were matters of use before they became matters of art,” taking “their rise in use” but “excelling it.” Each branch of knowledge consists of a right relation between a human ability and some aspect of reality, whether divine, natural, or mechanical/artificial. Theoretical knowledge “strives for the contemplation of truth”; practical knowledge “considers the regulation of morals”; mechanical knowledge “supervises occupations of this life”; and logical knowledge “provides the knowledge necessary for correct speaking and clear argumentation” about the other three branches of knowledge. Numerologists thus have ascribed the number four to the human soul.

Hugh now turns to a more detailed discussion of the several arts, beginning with philosophy, the love of Wisdom, meaning God, in whom “a single and simultaneous vision beholds all things past, present, and future.” God’s Mind forgets nothing and “is called ‘the primordial Idea or Pattern of things’ because to its likeness all things have been formed.” The arts aim at “restor[ing] within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature.” The more we practice the arts the more “we are conformed to the divine nature,” possessing Wisdom, “for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.” Philosophy is “the art of arts and the discipline of disciplines”: the art of arts because it knows the rules and precepts of all the other arts; the discipline of disciplines because it “investigates demonstratively the causes of all things, human and divine.” Philosophy aims at theoretical/speculative, practical/moral, mechanical/adulterate, and logical/linguistic. Theoretical knowledge in turn divides into theology or “intellectible” knowledge, mathematics or “intelligible” knowledge, and physics or natural knowledge. Theology or the intellectible knowledge is knowledge of what endures “of itself, one and the same in its own divinity,” apprehended by mind and intellect, never by the imagination or the senses.” Theology “contemplates God and the incorporeality of the soul.” Mathematics or intelligible knowledge “considers abstract quantity,” quantity separated from matter or “other accidents.” The objects of mathematics “once consisted of [the] primary intellectible substance.” But, “by contact with bodies,” mathematical objects have “degenerated from the level of intellectibles to that of intelligible,” “less objects of understanding than active agents of it.” The intelligible “does not itself perceive only by means of intellect” but “has imagination and the senses,” thereby “lay[ing] hold upon all things subject to sense.” It draws the visible forms of bodies “into itself through imagination,” thereby “penetrated by any qualities entering through hostile sense experience.” Nonetheless, given its connection to the intellectible, “it gathers itself into one,” becoming “more blessed through participating in intellectible substance.” 

To illustrate how this works, Hugh discusses the number Four, which “teaches us the nature of the going out and the return of the soul.” Here numerology is a key to understanding not a text but to understanding nature. If you multiply 3×1 you get 3; 3×3, 9; 3×9,27; and 3×27, 81. “See how in the fourth multiplication the original ‘one,’ or unity, recurs”; this will happen at every fourth stage of the ‘3x’ process, on to infinity. Since “the soul’s simple essence is most appropriately expressed by ‘one,’ which itself is also incorporeal,” and since the number three stands for Plato’s three ‘parts’ of the soul (reason, spirit, appetite), 3×1 indicates that the monad or essence of the soul “receives different names according to its difference powers.” This differentiation is the first “going out” or “progression” of the soul. The multiplication 3×3 or 9 is the second progression, the soul’s control of the body by its powers. The third progression, resulting in 27, sees the soul, having “poured itself out through the senses upon all visible things,” rules them by bodily actions. “But finally, in a fourth progression,” eighty-one, the soul, freed from the body, returns to the pureness of its simplicity” after death which is designated by the number eighty. QED.

A similar Pythagoreanism applies to the body, which also has the number four assigned to it. In its case, the number two fits the body because it, unlike the number one, is divisible, like the body and unlike the essence of the soul. Multiply 2×2, you get 4; 2×4, 8; 2×8, 16; 2×16,32—once again, the number you started with reappears at the end of the quaternary series, infinitely. The number four is divisible by two, the first divisible number. 

“And now you see clearly enough, I should think, how souls degenerate from being intellectible beings” in their essence “to being intelligible things when, from the purity of simple understanding clouded by no images of bodily things, they descend to the imagination of visible objects; and how they once more become more blessed when, recollecting themselves from this distracted state back toward the simple source of their nature, they, marked as it were with the likeness of the most excellent numeral, come to rest.” Imagination “is sensuous memory made up of the traces of corporeal objects inhering in the mind; it possesses in itself nothing certain as a source of knowledge.” Lastly “sensation is what the soul undergoes in the body as a result of qualities which come to it from without.” We learn from all of these sources, but less surely at each stage. This is exactly the opposite of what a materialist—whether an ‘ancient,’ Epicurus, or a ‘modern,’ Hobbes—would claim.

Hugh’s account of the soul fits the quadrivium, the second part of the liberal arts. Mathematics consists of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. “Abstract quantity” is form, “visible in its linear dimension, impressed upon the mind, and rooted in the mind’s imaginative part.” There is “continuous” quantity, “like that of a tree or a stone”; this is called magnitude. There is also “discrete” quantity or multitude, as seen in a flock or a people. A multitude might stand “wholly in itself,” such as any number does, or it might stand “in relation to another number,” as when we multiply or divide it. A multitude might also be “mobile,” like the heavenly spheres, marked by the orbits of the planets, or “immobile,” such as the earth, which Hugh took to be the stable center of the cosmos. Arithmetic concerns abstract quantity, numbers, magnitudes that “stand in themselves”; music concerns numbers that stand in relation to other numbers; geometry “holds forth knowledge of the mobile” (we are a few centuries away from the discovery of calculus); “astronomy claims knowledge of the mobile.” 

Considered in more detail, the etymology of the word ‘arithmetic’ recalls that ares in Greek means power and that numerus in Latin means number; “‘arithmetic’ means ‘the power of number.'” Number has power because God, the supreme One, created nature with number. That is the link between numerology and nature, why numerology explains nature.

The word ‘music’ “takes its name from aqua, water, because no euphony, that is, pleasant sound, is possible without moisture.” Music flows. There are three kinds. The kind that “belongs to the universe” characterizes the elements (their mass, number, and volume), the planets (their situation, motion, and nature), and the seasons (days, months, years). The kind called “the music of man” can characterize the body, the soul, or “the bond between the two.” The body’s music consists of its growth or “vegetative power,” its “fluids or humors,” and its activities, whether “mechanical,” shared by all “sensate beings,” or those of human, rational beings—actions that are “good if they do not become inordinate so that avarice or appetite are not fostered by the very things intended to relive our weakness.” “Music is characteristic of the soul partly in its virtues, like justice, piety, and temperance; and partly in its power, like reason, wrath, and concupiscence.” This indicates that there is “music between the body and the soul,” a “natural friendship by which the soul is leagued to the body, not in physical bonds, but in certain sympathetic relationships for the purpose of imparting motion and sensation to the body.” Good soul-body music “consists in loving one’s flesh, but one’s spirit more; in cherishing one’s body, but not in destroying one’s virtue.” True virtue or strength is less physical than soulful, since the soul rightly controls the body. The third kind of music, “instrumental” music, refers to bodily actions directed by the soul in relation to physical objects outside the body—whether touched, like strings and drums or blown into, like pipes—or in relation to the body itself, the voice. Musicians consist of those that compose it, those that play it, and those that judge it.

‘Geometry’ means earth-measure; it was invented by the Egyptians for measuring land, flooded periodically by the Nile, which obscured all physical boundaries. There are three kinds: planimetry, aiming at knowledge of flat surfaces, planes; altimetry, which measures vertical extensions, heights; and cosmetry, which aims at knowledge of spherically shaped things, like the cosmos, which is immobile when considered as a whole, related to no other physical thing because it encompasses all of them.  ‘Astronomy’ means “law of the stars” or “discourse [logos] concerning the stars”; the discourse can be true insofar as it aims at understanding nature (health and illness, calm and storm) but runs to superstition when it becomes astrology, attempting to understand chance and choice—which would make the indeterminate determined. These are all mobile magnitudes—the “spaces, movements, and circuits of the heavenly bodies at determined intervals.” 

All four elements of the quadrivium are ways of investigating nature, physis. Narrowly defined, the science of ‘physics’ “searches out and considers the causes of things as found in their effects.” More broadly, however, it is “the same as theoretical science,” philosophy, which consists not only of the study of natural causes but of ethics and logic. “All the arts tend toward the single end of philosophy,” although “they do not take the same road.” As already remarked, mathematics concerns abstraction from things, inasmuch as a real line isn’t the same thing as a mathematical line—the former being divisible but not infinitely so, the latter being infinitely divisible. Physics strictly defined “analyze[s] the compound actualities of things into their elements.” By “elements” Hugh does not mean elements in the modern sense, material entities,” but “the nature of each in itself.” There are four elements (fire, earth, air, water) but these material things are considered by ‘physicists’ not so much in their material appearance but in their pure essences. Finally, logic is “concerned with the species and genera of things,” classification, which in turn provides the basis for the principle of non-contradiction. Of these three elements of the quadrivium, “physics alone is properly concerned with things,” whereas logic “employs pure understanding on occasion” and mathematics “never operates without the imagination.” “Logic and mathematics are prior to physics, in order of learning and serve physics, so to say, as tools”; they “base their considerations not upon the physical actualities of things, of which we have deceptive experience, but upon reason alone, in which unshakeable truth stands fast.” (A modern example of this would be Einsteinian physics, which is anything but commonsensical.) Notice that Hugh mentions ethics but does not elaborate on it here as a theoretical matter. That is because ethical theory, as distinguished from practice, is part of theology, and he defers his consideration of sacred Scripture to Books IV-VI. He classifies matters of theology under the category of the intellectible, whereas mathematics is under the intelligible, and physics concerns bodies, initially perceived by sensation, but studied with the assistance of the quadrivium. All theory “studies the truth of things,” knowledge of which is wisdom.

In addition to theoretical wisdom there is practical wisdom, prudence. Logic aids it when it serves as a handmade to rhetoric. Ethics concerns moral practice, “mechanics” what we would call technological practice. As in Aristotle, practice features ethical, economic, and political dimensions. Ethics consists of care for the soul, the “solitary science,” in which one “raises, adorns, and broadens” oneself “with all virtues, allowing nothing in life which will not bring joy and doing nothing which will cause regret.” Economics (literally ‘law of the household’) “assigns the householder’s tasks”; it is private. Political science “tak[es] over the care of public affairs, serves the welfare of all through its concerns for provisions its balancing of justice, its maintenance of strength, and its observance of moderation.”

There are seven “mechanical” sciences: fabric making, armament, commerce, and agriculture are the “external” or protective ones; hunting, medicine, and theatrics are “internal, providing, respectively, food and cures for the body and entertainment for the soul.” Hugh draws an analogy between the mechanical and the liberal arts, with the “internal” ones corresponding to the quadrivium—to concepts, things internally perceived—and the “external” ones to the trivium—to words, things that can be heard by others. “Every human activity is servant to eloquence wed to wisdom”; that is where logic comes in, even with respect to the mechanical sciences. His accounts of the seven mechanical arts need not detain us, except to note that he considers “the pursuit of commerce” as an activity that “reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes the private good of individuals into the common benefit of all.” Modern liberals did not discover that effect. And unlike the later Calvinists, he regards theatrics with indulgence, again for Aristotelian reasons, since “by temperate motion natural heat is stimulated in the body and by enjoyment the mind is refreshed.” In addition, and “as is more likely, seeing that people necessarily gathered together for occasional amusement,” the ancients “desired that places for such amusement might be established to forestall the people’s coming together at public houses, where they might commit lewd or criminal acts.”

“All knowledge…is somehow contained in philosophy.” Some kinds of knowledge are contained within a particular branch of philosophy, now enumerated, and others are common to any and all forms of cognition, to cognition simply. 

Hugh ends Book Two with a more detailed description of linguistic, as distinguished from mathematical, logic. Grammar, “the knowledge of how to speak without error,” is one branch of linguistic logic. Rational or “argumentative” knowledge consists of demonstration, probable argument—itself divided into dialectic, “clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false”) and rhetoric, “the discipline of persuading to every suitable thing”), and sophistry, which misuses logic to persuade others to unsuitable things.

In sum, “philosophy is divided into the theoretical, the practical, the mechanical, and the logical.” Given these divisions and their subdivisions, Hugh now turns to their founders and developers in Book Three. Among theologians, Linus was the founder of the discipline among the Greeks, Varro among the Romans, John the Scot (Scotus Erigena) among the British. Pliny founded physics, Pythagoras and Nicomachus arithmetic. Geometry came to the Greeks thanks to Euclid, to the British thanks to Boethius. Bubal founded music among the Hebrews, Pythagoras among the Greeks. The Hebrew, Cham, founded astronomy, which was revived by Ptolemy in Egypt. As for dubious astrology, Hugh regards its origins as murky, suggesting Abraham, the Chaldeans, Nemroth the Giant, and Atlas, according to Greek myth. Socrates and Plato founded ethics in Greece, while Cicero brought it to Rome. Logic owes its founding in Greece to Plato and Aristotle, with Varro and Cicero winning that honor in Rome. Demosthenes “devised rhetoric among the Greeks, Tisias among the Latins, Coryx among the Syracusans”; it was then systematized in written works by Gorgias, Aristotle, and Hermagoras in Greece and by Cicero, Quintilian, and Titian. Overall, “Egypt is the mother of the arts, and thence they came to Greece, and thence to Italy. Parmenides and Plato studied the liberal arts in Egypt.

Both ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’ signify viae or ways; “a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom” ‘via’ them. Although some among the ancients “studied these with such zeal that they had them completely in memory,” so that “they did not thumb the ages of books to hunt for rules and reasons which the liberal arts might afford for the resolution of a doubtful matter,” the “students of our day, whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study, and therefore we find many who study but few who are wise.” Philosophy and Christianity are ways of life.

Hugh therefore undertakes to recommend books to read and ways to read them, addressing students and also teachers. He much prefers philosophy to poetry, taking Socrates’ side in that old quarrel. “The man wishing to attain knowledge, yet who willingly deserts truth in order to entangle himself in these mere by-products of the arts, will find, I shall not say infinite, but exceedingly great pains and meagre fruit.” Jerome Taylor explains that Hugh positions himself against the school at Chartres, whose scholars were “much given to elaborate commentary on poets, fables, and histories, exclud[ing] from philosophy the entire trivium.” On the contrary, Hugh insists, “it is in the seven liberal arts…that the foundation of all learning is to be found” as “without them the philosophical discipline does not and cannot explain and define anything” (212 n.44). Indeed, “if only one of the arts be lacking, all the rest cannot make a man into a philosopher.” 

One needs to attend, first, “how one to treat of the art itself,” and second, “how one ought to apply the principles of that art in all matters whatever.” That is (for example) first learn grammar, then use it correctly. “Do not strike into a lot of byways until you know the main roads.” This again counters the approach of the Chartrians, who taught grammar and the other liberal arts by having their students read poets and historians (212-213 n.48), skipping formal study of the arts themselves.

As for the study itself, Hugh identifies three necessary characteristics: “natural endowment” (the “ability to grasp easily what they hear and to retain firmly what they grasp”), practice or the cultivation of that endowment, and discipline, “combin[ing] moral behavior with their knowledge.” One must take care not to allow one’s natural endowment to be “blunted by excessive work,” work that consists of “reading and meditation.” Reading “form[s] our minds upon rules and precepts taken from books.” Teachers read to the student; students read ‘under’ the teacher; they then read by and for themselves. Meditation means “sustained thought along planned lines,” considering the cause or source of each thing, its manner or way, and its utility. There are, potentially, three levels of every reading: “the letter, the sense, and the inner meaning,” that is, grammatical construction of senses, the “ready and obvious meaning” of the work being read, and “the deeper understanding which can be found only through interpretation and commentary.” These three inquiries should be undertaken when studying any text, secular or sacred. Only then should the reader meditate upon what he has read; “the start of learning…lies in reading, but its consummation lies in meditation, which, if any man will learn to love it very intimately and will desire to be engaged very frequently upon it, renders his life pleasant indeed, and” (with a nod toward Boethius) “provides the greatest consolation to him in his trials,” and giving “a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of the eternal quiet,” life with God. Meditating on morality, God’s commandments, and “the divine works” brings man “the greatest delight” to be had on earth. 

Do not, then, “my student,” “rejoice a great deal because you may have read many things but because you have been able to retain them,” to integrate them into your soul via memory. “Morals equip learning,” Quintilian writes, “joining rules for living to rules for study, in order that the student might know both the standard of his life and the nature of his study.” The scholar’s prime moral virtue is humility, “the beginning of discipline.” “Hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt” and “blush to learn from no man”; having attained learning, do “not look down upon everyone else.” Arrogance impedes learning because it tempts students to “appear wise before their time,” “break[ing] out in a certain swollen importance” and “simulat[ing] what they are not.” Do not preen yourself for having studied under a great thinker. In third-century Athens, such a student would “glory in having seen, not in having understood, Plato.” “Good for you! You have drunk at the very fount of philosophy—but would that you thirsted still!”

Humility should animate reading itself. “If some things, by chance rather obscure, have not allowed” the student “to understand them, let him not at once break out in angry condemnation and think that nothing is good but what he himself can understand.”

Generally speaking, the ancients’ “love of wisdom,” their philo-sophia, “was superior to ours.” When someone told a philosopher of those times that men were laughing at him, the philosopher replied calmly, “they laugh at me, and the asses bray at them.” In the soul of the true student and the true teacher, Wisdom rules, carried by Love and Hard Work (“because they bring a task to external perfection”) and Concern and Alertness (“because they inspire interior and secret reflection”). The four servants of Wisdom parallel the four elements: “masculine” fire and air, “feminine” earth and water. 

The modern philosopher, Emer de Vattel, longs for a world in which a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on earth and say, “This is my country.” The Christian-classical philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, insists on the contrary, “All the world is a foreign soil to those who philosophize.” Vattel has reached only the first stage of philosophy, “to change about in visible and transitory things.” But philosophy (and Christianity) would have us leave those things “behind altogether.” “From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.”

 

 

Note

1. On the Meno, see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws. “Author’s Foreword” and “Preface.” Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

 

The 1757 “Author’s Foreword” to The Spirit of the Laws constitutes a brief reply to his critics, the most formidable of these being the Vatican, which placed the book on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1751, three years after its publication. The “Preface” appears in the first edition.

The “Author’s Foreword” consists of three paragraphs, the first of these beginning with the sentence:

In order to understand the first four books of this work, one must note that what I call virtue in a republic is love of the homeland, that is, love of equality.

What Montesquieu calls virtue is, then, not necessarily what Montesquieu’s reader calls virtue, although it resembles a sentiment Machiavelli invokes at the end of The Prince, when he praises Italy and calls for its redemption. (What Machiavelli calls redemption is not necessarily what the Vatican calls redemption.) But why is the love of the homeland the love of equality? It could be that although human beings are not equal in the classical virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom, nor in the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, they are, or usually are, equally citizens of their country.

Why the first four books? In them Montesquieu addresses, respectively, “laws in general,” “laws deriving directly from the nature of the government,” republican or monarchic, “the principles of the three governments”—that is, the passions animating republicanism (love of country), monarchy (love of honor), and despotism (fear), and “the laws of education,” which “should be relative to the principles,” the passions, “of the government. (In the United States, educator and dictionary author Noah Webster would cite Montesquieu on this point.) [1] Understanding the definitions Montesquieu offers in these preliminary books, his use of old and new words, first and foremost virtue, may clarify his critics’ minds or, perhaps, lead them to think more carefully. Elsewhere, he will announce that he writes his long book not to make people read but to make them think.

It is not moral virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue, and this is the spring that makes republican government move, as honor is the spring that makes monarchy move.

Montesquieu separates political virtue from moral and Christian virtue; in describing it as a spring, he implies a mechanism. Virtus in Latin means strength; love of the homeland strengthens republics physically, as honor strengthens monarchies physically. Montesquieu makes political science first and foremost a physical science, a form of physics, not of ethics. Political virtue is political strength or power. This enables him to separate both politics and knowledge of politics from the Church. Church and State had been distinct but not separate in the sense of, for example, the United States Constitution; European states, feudal and modern, featured established Christian churches. Montesquieu lays a foundation for disestablishment while defending himself against charges of impiety by the Vatican, ruler of the established church of France. I am speaking of a different sort of virtue than the type you uphold, he replies; hold me harmless. In politics, love is a mechanism, not spiritual; political love is not agapic love.

Therefore, I have called love of the homeland and of equality, political virtue.

The republican kind of virtue is political, Montesquieu writes in this central sentence of his first paragraph. This suggests that love of honor, the monarchic virtue, is not political, strictly speaking. In this, Montesquieu follows Aristotle, who defines the political as ruling and being ruled in turn, while identifying monarchic rule as either parent-child rule (kingship) or master-slave rule (tyranny). However, unlike Aristotle, Montesquieu identifies honor, often associated with the rule of the few, especially the aristocracy, with monarchy. Machiavelli denigrates the rule of the few, ‘the great,’ in favor of the regimes of the many (‘republics’) and the one (principalities). Montesquieu here simply ignores the few, silently accepting Machiavelli’s basic regime dichotomy, although he does add a refinement, alluded to above, between two types of the rule of the one: monarchy and despotism. In this, he also departs from Machiavelli’s admirer, Thomas Hobbes, who famously proclaims that tyranny is only “monarchy misliked.”

I have had new ideas; new words have had to be found or new meanings given to old ones.

Hence your confusion, my censors. But hence also a danger to you. If I replace the old meanings of old words with new meanings, I might brush aside the meanings you want those old words to have. And what are these new ideas? I have already suggested one: that one form of virtue, what I have called virtue, is a spring, a mechanism, quite distinct from your virtues, and that it is equally a spring in the republican and the monarchic regimes. More radically, what might this suggest regarding the human soul?

Those who have not understood this have made me say absurdities that would be outrageous in every country in the world, because in every country in the world morality is desired.

To use the word virtue in the mechanistic, political sense elides morality. In itself, love of homeland elides morality. In every country in the world, morality is desired (perhaps most of all by priests?), although this leaves open the question not only of the contents of morality (following Montaigne, Montesquieu will describe a great variety of moral code in a great variety of countries) but of whether those who desire morality desire it primarily for themselves, primarily for others, or both for themselves and for others. 

The second paragraph begins:

It should be observed that there is a very great difference between saying that a certain quality, modification of the soul, or virtue is not the spring that makes a government act and saying that it is not present in that government.

A spring is a cause. It is a mechanism that puts something in motion. The mechanism in which it is contained, or which it puts in motion from the outside, may have other features. A “certain quality,” “modification of the souls,” or “virtue” (in your sense of the word) might still be present in a republic or a monarchy, without being its spring, its motivating cause. This may imply that the moral and Christian virtues are less ‘effectual’ than the political virtue in a republic or than honor in a monarchy. 

If I were to say that a certain wheel, a certain gear, is not the spring that makes this watch move would one conclude that it is not present in the watch?

Surely not. But if I were to say that, would I also not say that the wheel or gear that you care about is not what makes the watch move, that neither moral virtue nor Christian spirit really motivates political movement? And would this not make both classical and Christian moralists, and classical-Christian moralists, profoundly uneasy about Montesquieu’s political science?

And centrally: Far from excluding moral and Christian virtues, monarchy does not even exclude political virtue.

Not at all, but monarchy, the regime of the regnant Bourbons, does exclude those virtues from the status of what Aristotle would call the ‘efficient’ cause of monarchic regimes, and of republican ones, too. They do not set regimes in motion.

In a word, honor is in the republic though political virtue is its spring; political virtue is in the monarchy though honor is it spring.

Christian virtue has disappeared with this sentence. It seems to have nothing to do with politics or with monarchy, in and of themselves. In this, Montesquieu concurs with Machiavelli. Honor in republics and love of homeland in monarchies are virtues set further down the causational chain than love of homeland in republics and honor in monarchies.

In conclusion, the third paragraph states:

Finally, the good man discussed in Book 3, chapter 5, is not the Christian good man, but the political good man, who has the political virtue I have mentioned.

The title of that chapter is “That virtue is not the principle of monarchical government.” There, Montesquieu “begs” his readers “not to be offended” by this claim. He wants to assure them that he simply means that because in a monarchic regime “the state continues to exist independently of love of homeland,” of virtue as he has defined it, “in a monarchy it is very difficult for the people to be virtuous.” Honor goes to the king (the “Sun King,” in Louis XIV’s formulation); “desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay” are replaced by laws fitted to the monarchic regime. This does not preclude good Christian men from existing among the people. In other words, Montesquieu gives and takes from his critics at the same time. He takes from them their charge of atheism or ‘Spinozism’ while silently indicating Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity—that it ruins politics in both republics and principalities by leaving no place for the spirit of the city, which Machiavelli redefines not as the ancient Roman’s virtus but as his own virtù—the desire to acquire made effectual. Montesquieu will refine Machiavelli’s teaching on this point, too, pointing republics and monarchies not to conquest, as in the ancient Rome of republican Cato and monarchic Caesars, but to commerce, the more effectual and lasting means of acquisition.

He is the man who loves the laws of his country and acts from love of the laws of his country.

It is the modern republic, the commercial republic with laws that support peaceful acquisition, that Montesquieu esteems the most. The passion of love for such laws is an effect of the love of peaceful acquisition.

The “Preface” to The Spirit of the Laws consists of sixteen paragraphs; consequently, there is no central paragraph. 

If, among the infinite number of things in this book, there is any that, contrary to my expectations might give offense, at least there is none that has been put here with ill intent.

An infinite number of things, indeed! Much information is provided in the course of it, through nearly 800 pages in the two-volume French edition I own and the 700 pages in one-volume the English translation. [2] The translator notes that he has translated espoir and its variants as “expectation” or, here, “expectations” rather than hope. Montesquieu is nothing if not a writer who prefers the concrete to the airy, in the case of espoir the expectation of something rather than some vague, idealized hope, mother of wishful thinking. On the other hand, it may also be that Montesquieu in this case does not really expect that he will not give offense but that he does hope that he won’t, given the malign consequences of offending the French regime and the Catholic Church. No “ill intent,” messieurs. It is quite possible that ill intent as defined by Montesquieu is quite different from ill intent as defined by the French regime and the Catholic Church, even as virtue means something quite different to him than it does to them.

By nature, I have not at all a censorious spirit.

The first mention of nature refers to Montesquieu himself, the individual. It is a Montaignian gesture, not Aristotelian and most assuredly not ‘churchy.’ This is also the first mention of spirit, again referring to Montesquieu the individual. Montesquieu’s “spirit” has a “nature.” What, then, is nature? Is it spiritual in the Christian sense? The references to nature and spirit, whatever they may mean, begin a bit of a joke and a jab. Those who take offense very often incline to censoriousness. I, Montesquieu, intend no ill to anyone. My critics, those honor-loving monarchists (or are they courtiers of a fear-inspiring despot?), those Christian-spiritual denizens of the Vatican, evidently do have censorious spirits. It is not I who acts with ill intent.

Plato thanked heaven that he was born in Socrates’ time, and as for me, I am grateful that heaven had me born in the government in which I live and that it wanted me to obey those whom it had me love.

That individual, Plato, piously thanked “heaven”—not exactly the gods said to dwell in that part of nature—that he was born in Socrates’ time, that is, in the time of the philosopher who brought philosophy down from the heavens, away from the cosmologically-centered philosophy that preceded him, to the polis, to consideration of human nature, a less speculative but crucially important topic for philosophers, since philosophers, being human themselves, must understand themselves, know themselves as one oracle famously put it, before they can soberly undertake the (then) necessarily speculative investigation of the heavens. Montesquieu’s gratitude (a passion neither ill-intended nor censorious) springs not from the presence of a philosopher in his time and place but from the government of France and those it wanted him to obey and love. This sentence might assuage any feelings, any passions or springs of offense that might have been taken by sensitive readers of the joke-jab immediately preceding.

I ask a favor that I fear will not be granted; it is that one not judge by a moment’s reading the work of twenty years, that one approve or condemn the books as a whole and not some few sentences.

Fear is the passion of despotism. Censorious men incline to, as one now says, ‘cherry-pick’ passages in building their case against authors. Censorious men have, by nature, a spirit of impatience as well as a certain libido dominandi. Don’t be that way, Montesquieu hopes without really expecting. At the same time, he offers sound and well-intended advice to serious judges: consider the argument I make as a whole argument. Just as Montesquieu will consider the laws not in isolation from one another but as they relate to one another, consider the words and sentences in my book as they relate to one another.

If one wants to seek the design of the author, one can find it only in the design of the work.

The Spirit of the Laws and other authorial works have a design, a design indicative of the (true) design of their authors. In this way, books resemble buildings; they are architectonic, designed with “design,” with intent. My book will tell you what my intent is, enabling you to come to a just judgment as to whether its design, a reflection of my design, is ill- or well-intended. It may even incline you to redefine what you mean by the words good and ill.

I began by examining men, and I believed that, amidst the infinite diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone.

Individuals have natures and it may be that human beings taken as a group, despite the infinite diversity they exhibit in their laws and mores, have certain commonalities. It may be that there is an underlying nature to human beings as such.

I have set down the principles, and I have seen particular cases conform to them as if by themselves, the histories of all nations being but their consequences, and each particular law connecting with another law or dependent on a more general one.

The principles are the passions, of which there is a finite number of politically relevant ones. The histories or stories of all, not some, nations follow from those passions. Laws do, too, and systems of laws, connections or relations among the laws which help to constitute a regime amount to such consequences, complicated by the complex relations among the particular laws so caused. It seems likely that the Montaignian/Montesquieuian individual also enters into complex relations with other individuals and the laws caused initially by the passions and to some extent sustain by them.

When I turned to antiquity, I sought to capture its spirit in order not to consider as similar those cases with real differences or to overlook differences in those that appear similar.

Spirit, again, still undefined, although a clue to its meaning may have been offered in the mention of relations. Laws have a spirit, according to the book’s title, and a period of time, antiquity, may have one, too. The way words change meaning anticipates the way the spirit of a set of laws or of a time may change and thereby deceive those who inquire into other systems and earlier times.

I did not draw my principles from my prejudices but from the nature of things.

“The nature of things”; a glance at Lucretius, that great counter-Roman Roman, that Roman philosopher? To identify passions as “principles” surely partakes of no ‘idealist’ philosophy, although philosophy of any kind will attempt to clear away prejudices, unexamined or unreasoned opinions. Lucretian Epicureanism finds no favor with Churchmen, at least in their public writings, or in the Bible.

Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others.

More advice on how to read this book. The book itself is ‘relational,’ its elements related to one another in the manner of laws and mores. What is the “chain” connecting the truths to one another? What is the general principle or passion animating the book and its author, the forger of the chain? The truths, whatever they turn out to be, will be felt—a way of knowing distinct from sight (associated with knowing things that cannot be touched, ideas) and from hearing (associated with things that can be neither seen nor touched but revealed by speech). Machiavelli prefers knowledge by touch, felt knowledge, to either the philosophic knowledge offered by the ancients or the spiritual knowledge offered by the Bible. Montesquieu evidently concurs, to some extent, the reader will only feel the truths after seeing the chain, first. But what he means becomes clearer in the following sentence.

The more one reflects on the details, the more one will feel the certainty of the principles.

Reader, pay attention to the details, the particular truths. Then, reflect upon them, thinking rather than merely reading. See the chain that links those truths together. You will then feel those facts, really know them. And in such seeing and feeling, you then feel something beyond the particular truths, namely, the certainty of the principles of the nature of things that Montesquieu has discovered and now presents to you.

As for the details, I have not given them all, for who could say everything without being tedious?

You may be able to supply your own corroborating particular truths. You might even discover some principles of the nature of things not explicitly stated by the author but implied by him. To be too explicit with regard to principles might encourage unphilosophic thoughtlessness in readers, making them prey to prejudices, dogmas. And wouldn’t that, too, be tedious?

The salient traits that seem to characterize present-day works will not be found here.

The translators identify “salient traits” as a term from architecture. The architectonics of my book are not those of contemporary books. How so?

As soon as matters are seen from a certain distance, such salient traits vanish; they usually arise only because the mind attaches itself to a single point and forsakes all others.

The salient traits of present-day works—books to be sure, but perhaps others?—amount to mirages. Mirages emerge in the mind when it fixes on one point, rather as censorious persons fix on one or a few sentences, distorting an author’s intention. The principles drawn from the nature of things, too, might well be distorted by such fixations, a failure to consider the whole of nature because one has selected one or a few of the things. And to be sure, Montesquieu again eschews censoriousness:

I do not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever.

This, in marked contrast to the practice of Church-directed, Church-inspired conquests, inspired by censorious writings. Is the Bible itself censorious, in Montesquieu’s estimation?

Each nation will find here the reasons for its maxims, and the consequence will naturally be drawn from them that changes can be proposed only by those who are fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of a state’s constitution.

Despite the infinite variety of laws and mores, which may find their abridged expression in the term “maxims,” all maxims have underlying “reasons,” which are, as Montesquieu has insisted, are passions. For the first time, Montesquieu suggests that one might wish not only to understand but to change laws and mores, redirect or even change the passions that underlie them. Not anyone can do this, however. Only those “fortunate enough” to “fathom”—to probe deeply—”the whole of a state’s constitution”—the system of its laws and mores but also its still-undefined “spirit”?—will be able to propose such changes—sensibly, at any rate. That is, the reformer or ‘founder’ of new modes and orders will need a mind capable of both probing deeply and ranging widely. A man like Montesquieu? Surely not men like his censors.

It is not a matter of indifference that the people be enlightened.

Surely not, given despotism’s preference for rule by fear, aided by ignorance, and republicanism’s need for an education that offers genuinely salient reasons for loving one’s country, for loving equality instead quailing in subservience.

The prejudices of magistrates began as the prejudices of the nation.

Censorious rule by fear arises not from rulers but from the people they rule. The spring of prejudice, so to speak, may be seen in the people, a particular people, whose prejudices then become the secondary springs of the rulers who keep them prejudiced, ruled by fear, censored. Enlightenment must then reach the people, spread among them first, perhaps by the means of a book written by one fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of the existing, despotic state’s constitution, or whatever constitution may prevail in a given state.

In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods.

An “age,” which might or might not be distinguishable from a “time,” but evidently has some relation to one. Antiquity, the age of republicanism or love of homeland, might or might not have been a time of ignorance. Neither is an age of enlightenment, an age in which the people lose many of their prejudices, a ‘democratic’ or republican age in which a people or perhaps many peoples love their homelands and equality. Montesquieu now ventures a moral contrast that differs sharply from the moral contrasts in the minds of the ignorant and censorious. In times (and, no doubt, regimes) of ignorance, of rule by fear, one may do “the greatest evils” with the certainty of those who fixate on one point in nature, obedient to the mirage that such fixation conjures. But in an age of enlightenment, one feels as it were a salutary fear, questioning one’s actions even when they bring great goods. What will eventually be called ‘liberalism’ should be animated by this hesitation.

One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself.

The felt truths, the truth that the abuses are indeed abuses—very often felt as bruises and bleeding wounds—lead to a truth of sight, of perceiving the chains of a system that will end the felt abuses. But the reformer or founder of a new regime, a new set of laws, will see, perhaps even foresee, bruises and wounds inflicted by the new regime and especially those inflicted when the correction is being put in place. Montesquieu understands that if you want to make an omelet you must break some eggs; he is no ‘idealist.’ But neither is he a Jacobin (and much less a Stalinist) avant le lettre. He is a liberal, a liberator from regimes of fear, not a fomenter of regimes of ‘Terrors.’ He remains a liberal of mesure. Accordingly,

One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better.

Neither religious nor Cartesian certainty bodes well for political life. Thinking while you read is a habit well adapted to other kinds of action, as a measured caution leads to thoughtful moderation, away from fanaticism in thought or action.

One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results.

There is a purpose to attending to the particular truth: to see the whole and only then to judge it. That goes for reading Montesquieu’s book and to reading regimes. Parts are related to other parts and the chain which draws them together makes them a whole. If philosophy means love of wisdom, then to philosophize will mean an ardent inquiry into the nature of felt things understood only when seen as parts of a whole. To philosophize requires the virtue of love of homeland understood as love of the whole, attention to the whole.

If I could make it so that everyone had new reasons for loving his duties, his prince, his homeland and his laws and that each could better feel his happiness in his own country, government, and position, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.

“If”: it may not happen, the prudent philosopher acknowledges. The newness of the reasons means the replacement of the old meanings of words with new meanings, the virtues of the ancients and the Christians with new virtues, at least in the political realm, the realm of laws and the regimes constituted in part by laws. To introduce new reasons, especially in the political realm, endangers the one who introduces them. He must measure the risk and act, specifically write, with practical as well as with theoretical wisdom. 

If I could make it so that those who command increased their knowledge of what they should prescribe and that those who obey found a new pleasure in obeying, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.

“If,” again. This too may not happen. The people may be the source of the magistrates’ prejudices but the magistrates, the ones who rule, who command, are the ones who read such books as The Spirit of the Laws, with its extensive descriptions and recommendations respecting laws and regimes. They are the ones capable of knowing, if secondarily, from reading works of philosophers. Those who obey do not often read such books, unless they are philosophers who obey out of practical wisdom and in a way that accords with that wisdom. The ruled are, however, capable of pleasure if not knowledge, and they, who most immediately feel the abuses of misrule, may find pleasure in obedience. That may be what Montesquieu means by the consent of the governed. Such consent surely would make the duties of rulers easier to perform. They would need to depend far less on fear.

I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices.

Whether rulers or ruled, those who command or those who obey, men will be “able” to “cure themselves of their prejudices” only if they consent to understand what the philosopher, this philosopher among others, discovers for them. All must consent to be ruled by the new philosophers, Montesquieu very prominently among them, if they are to live happily, a condition that will itself make the new philosophers happy in their own way.

Here I call prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself.

That is, as with Socrates, for whom Plato was grateful, one needs to know oneself, to know the nature of one’s spirit but also the nature of human beings as such and the nature of the spirit of interactions among individuals living together in their homelands and according to their laws, laws rightly framed by men enlightened by the new philosophers.

By seeking to instruct men one can practice the general virtue that includes love of all.

Montesquieu is such an instructor, soon to present his thoughts on the nature of education in the several regimes. But his book as a whole will resemble the love of all, the charitable or agapic love seen in Christianity, which attends both to Jew and to Greek. Yet this charity may differ from Christian charity in its foundation; we have seen the word “divine” in these pages but not the word “God.” When we do see it, Montesquieu will write “god,” more or less as Spinoza inclines to do. Charity will become ‘secularized.’

Man, that flexible being who adapts himself to the thoughts and impressions of others, is equally capable of knowing his own nature when it is shown to him, and of losing even the feeling of it when it is concealed from him.

Man’s nature (as distinguished from the natures of plants and of beasts), founded on passions, partakes of the flexibility of passions, by their nature not usually steadfast, even if sometimes quite stubborn. Man’s natural flexibility gives the philosopher and the ruler reason both to hope and to fear. Such men undertake a task which will require a sort of Sisyphean persistence combined with patient mesure. Censoriousness and violence will not prevail in the long run because they attempt to fix a nature that is not readily fixed, and never permanently fixed. The fixations that comport with attempts to fix the ‘unfixable’ are mirages, prejudices that cannot prevail forever.

Many times I began this work and many times abandoned it; a thousand times I cast to the wind the pages I had written; every day I felt my paternal hands drop; I followed my object without forming a design; I knew neither rules nor exceptions; I found the truth only to lose it.

Hesitation, despair, futility, aimlessness, ignorance, confusion: Montesquieu has shared the dilemma of all men so far. Casting pages to the wind, the editors note, alludes to the Aeneid 6.75, when Aeneas, having escaped Troy, having wandered Odysseus-like throughout the Mediterranean, seeking safe landing at Latium, implores the Sybil not to write her prophetic verses “on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds.” With no prophetess to guide him, Montaigne himself threw his preliminary work to the wind. The paternal hands that drop allude to the Aeneid 6.33, where Aeneas recounts the story of Daedalus, father of Icarus, builder of the labyrinth in which the monster, the Minotaur, is imprisoned, now seeking to escape the prison of the Cretan tyrant Minos, “attempts to fashion” wings for himself and his son, so that they may fly to freedom. Daedalus succeeds in making the wings, famously to see his son disobey his advice to “take the middle way” between the sun and the sea, fly too high, too close to the sun, fatally. In seeking to free men from tyranny, intending them to take the middle way, avoiding both soaring fanaticism and lowly subservience to despots, Montesquieu’s hands faltered. His labyrinthine work, intended to confine political and clerical monsters, his set of wings, intended to liberate humanity from the prison of prejudice, his philosophic quest, nearly failed.

But when I discovered my principles, all that I had sought came to me, and in the course of twenty years, I saw my work begin, grow, move ahead, and end.

Latium found. Pious Aeneus’ journey took seven years; it was Odysseus’ journey that took twenty. Guided by the Sybilline prophecy, Aeneus found the ‘principle’ that enabled him to discover and settle Latium in the golden fruit of the Golden Bough; guided by his intellect, Odysseus returned home. The way of the intellect takes longer than the way of prophecy. But it is steady, like nature, with its beginning, growth, progress, and culmination. 

If this work meets with success, I shall owe much of it to the majesty of my subject; still, I do not believe that I have totally lacked genius.

Montaigne does not wish to be thought lacking in humility, even if that humility is not thoroughgoing. The spirit of the laws has majesty; it rules the laws. It attracts the attention of readers because they want to understand such a majestic thing. Genius, too, attracts.

When I have seen what so many great men in France, England, and Germany have written before me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage.

Who might these be? In France, Bodin? In England, Bacon, Locke? In Germany, Leibniz? That is, philosophers of the modern state, of commercial republicanism, of modern science? Wonder is the beginning of philosophy; nature as a whole and the philosophers who, each in his own way, seek to master nature, surely induce wonder, not the fear inspired by despotism. They strengthen one who would join them in philosophic inquiry, even if they might intimidate the one who seeks to philosophize, initially. 

“And I too am a painter,” have I said with Correggio.

So Correggio is said to have said, by the Correggio-obsessed art collector and historian Sebastiano Resta, in his Series of the Work of Eminent Painters, published in 1739. Correggio had been contemplating The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia by Raphael. In the painting, the martyr holds a lyre; of the five figures, she is the only one with her eyes fixed on Heaven. She is the saint who protects musicians. So, even in elevating himself to fellowship with philosophers, Montaigne strikes a faint note of piety, albeit piety toward a saint who loved the Muses along with God.

 

Notes

1. See “Educating the American Mind: The Founders’ View” on this website under the category “American Politics.”
2. De L’Esprit des lois. Two volumes. (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1949).

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America likely rates as the ‘canonical’ work of political philosophy most esteemed by professional political scientists today. One often encounters those who have never read Aristotle’s Politics or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and Marx remains a much-controverted figure, but Tocqueville enjoys a privileged place.

He does have his critics, however. They tend to be captious. Following are the principal objections to his book, with replies.

1. Tocqueville doesn’t understand the American founding, which was intended to secure the unalienable, natural rights to equality—equality of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Tocqueville isn’t concerned with the American political founding as such, although he does devote substantial attention to the Constitution, offering what amounts to a good summary of The Federalist, a book seldom read in Europe, then or now. The ‘founding’ Tocqueville wants to understand is the founding of democracy in America—the establishment of a civil society in which there are no titled aristocrats, like himself, a society of civic equals—not equality of natural rights but “equality of conditions” (Introduction, p.3). Equality is the “primary fact,” “the generative fact” that influences American laws, the “maxims” of those who govern, and “the particular habits [of] the governed” (Introduction, p.3). The “social state” has “become democratic” (Introduction, p.9).

He wants to understand this because the aristocracies are in decline everywhere, but aristocrats continue to trouble European civic life. “A great democratic revolution is taking place among us,” among Europeans, and there are those “who hope to stop it” (Introduction, p.3, emphasis added). Europeans need to understand that “Equality can be established in civil society and not reign in the political world,” that political freedom can be lost under such conditions (II.ii.1). Political freedom is harder to maintain than civil-social equality. Without a strong aristocratic class located between central government and peoples, the regime choice now becomes that between “democratic freedom,” republicanism, and “the tyranny of the Ceasars,” “the unlimited power of one alone” (I.ii.9).  Tocqueville seeks to persuade his fellow aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it: “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day” (Introduction, p.7). “The organization and establishment of democracies among Christians is the great political problem of our time” (I.ii.9). While Americans “furnish useful lessons in this,” Tocqueville’s adjuration has nothing to do with the American political founding, which Tocqueville admires; it is directed to Europeans, the French first of all.

This democratic or egalitarian civil society might support any number of regimes—rule of one, few or many, good or bad. The political history of France up to Tocqueville’s time, and of France and Europe for a century and a half, and of Europe again today, shows the urgency of his enterprise. “There is no question of reconstructing an aristocratic society, but of making freedom issue from the bosom of the democratic society in which god makes us live” (II.iv.7).

“I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions. I wanted to become acquainted with it if only to know at least what we [Europeans] ought to hope or to fear from it, ” given the advance of democracy in Europe (Introduction, p.13). The failure to see that the democracy considered in Democracy in America is civil-social equality and neither a natural right nor a form of government is, one might say, the primary error, the generative error, that readily leads to a host of cognate errors. 

2. But the very feature you point to, Tocqueville’s emphasis on civil-social equality, denigrates the political, and especially denigrates the work of statesmen and of citizens generally because it focuses on the ‘given’ fact of the advance of that equality, downplaying the importance of the conscious, prudent choices made by political actors. That is, Tocqueville isn’t primarily a political scientist at all, despite his call for “a new political science for a world altogether new” (Introduction, 7). Unlike Publius in The Federalist, and despite his own extensive political career, he is really a mere sociologist, attempting to explain political life by attending to sub-political causes.

The fact that Tocqueville devotes one of his longest chapters to “The Federal Constitution of the United States” (I.i.8) should be sufficient to impress the contrary opinion upon even the dullest sensibilities. There, Tocqueville vigorously explicates and applauds the republican institutions designed by the Framers.

He also praises the jury system that long predated the founding. Juries are where the sovereign people meet law and “the idea of right,” here defined as “political virtue” or “duties toward society” which combat “individual selfishness” (I.ii.8). Juries put the people in contact with an “aristocracy” consonant with democracy: lawyers and judges, who teach them the nuances of law and how to apply the law.

But even earlier than that, one might notice his treatment of the importance of estate law. “I am astonished,” the exclaims, “that ancient and modern writers have not attributed to estate laws a greater influence on the course of human affairs. These laws belong, it is true, to the civil order; but they ought to be placed at the head of all political institutions, for they have an incredible influence on the social state of peoples, of which political laws are only the expression.” That is why “the legislator regulates the estates of citizen once and he rests for centuries; motion having been given to his work, he can withdraw his hand from it; the machine acts by its own force and is directed as if by itself toward a goal indicated in advance”—by the legislator. Estate law makes the difference between an aristocratic and a democratic civil society. (I.i.3). And, of course, it is to be noted that the Framers of the United States Constitution outlawed primogeniture, thereby preventing the kind of aristocracy then seen in Europe from arising in America. More generally, American legislators “oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy” (I.ii.9: “Would Laws on Mores Suffice to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere Than in America?”). 

The purpose of carefully describing and explaining democracy in civil society to Europeans is precisely to give them the basis for prudent and just legislation under modern conditions. Such democratic “penchants” as unpolitical “individualism” and statist centralization—the latter especially dangerous if animated by “the science of despotism,” which consists in satisfying the material desires of the people (II.iv.4)—are “not invincible”; “my principal goal in writing this book has been to combat them” (II.iv.3). “The whole art of the legislator consists in discerning well and in advance these natural inclinations of human societies in order to know when one must aid the efforts of citizens and when it would rather be necessary to slow them down. For these obligations differ according to the times. Only the goal toward which the human race should always tend is unmoving; the means of getting it there vary constantly.” (II.ii.15). 

3. But what exactly is that “goal”? Here, Tocqueville fails to acknowledge the importance of unalienable natural rights, fails even to mention the Declaration of Independence in this very long book, fails to understand the Founders’ moral conception of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as rational. By failing to mention the Declaration of Independence, he takes no cognizance of the rightful goal of government, which is to secure unalienable natural rights for the citizens within a civil society.

It is true that Tocqueville never mentions the Declaration; he has no reason or need to do so, and some reason not to. The aristocratic statesmen of Europe in his day had seen enough of such declarations, particularly the French declaration of “The Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which had instigated a fair amount of violence against, well, aristocrats only a few decades earlier. 

But that is hardly to say that Tocqueville denies the existence of unalienable natural rights or provides no sense of what the “goal,” the purpose, the telos of the human race should “tend.” “I conceive a society…in which all, regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble”—in the Declaration’s language, government by the consent of the governed; a society “in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine, and love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment. Each having rights and being assured of preserving his rights, a manly confidence and a sort of reciprocal condescension between the classes would be established, as far from haughtiness as from baseness. The people, instructed in their true interests, would understand that to profit from society’s benefits, one must submit to its burdens. The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be sheltered from both tyranny and license.” (Introduction, 8-9). 

That is, Tocqueville shares with Aristotle an understanding of the indispensable effect political life, ruling and being ruled in turn, produces in the cultivation of human nature. In political activity, “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another” (II.ii.5). At the same time, political right, the freedom to form political associations, is not the same as natural right; natural right begins with the recognition that men and women everywhere are of the same species (II.iii.1). Accordingly, “What one calls a republic in the United States is the tranquil reign of the majority…. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights”—both of these “barriers” to tyranny recognized by the majority (I.ii.10: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). The exception to this is slavery, an instance of “the order of nature reversed” that was begun by Christians in the 16th century and imported to America in the 17th century (I.ii.10: “Position that the Black Race Occupies in the United States”). And even in “the America of the South, nature, sometimes recovering its rights, comes to establish equality between whites and blacks” (ibid.). Overall, however, Americans “believe that at birth each has received the ability to govern himself”; this ability owes its “moral authority” to “universal reason” among human beings by nature and its political power to “the universality of citizens” as distinguished from subjects (I.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”).

4. Tocqueville fails to recognize the Founders’ conception of morality, (e.g., the natural right to liberty) as rational, instead attributing morality to religion and liberty to the realm of political contestation. 

This again confuses the social manifestations of morality and liberty with their substantive content. In America, everything is not permitted “in the interest of society” (I.ii.9: “Indirect Influence the Religious Beliefs exert on Political Society in the United States”). Tocqueville finds religion to be the social guarantor and social source of morality and of rights, especially in democratic conditions. And it is necessary for political freedom. “How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond is not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if has not submitted to God?” (ibid.). He does not claim that morality and rights have no content beyond moeurs, only that moeurs embody morality and rights. As to rationality, Tocqueville maintains that “There are no great men without virtue; without respect for rights, there is no great people: one can almost say that there is no society; for, what is a union of rational and intelligent beings among whom force is the sole bond?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in America.” Emphasis added.). Further, “the means of inculcating in men the idea of rights and of making it, so to speak, fall upon their senses” is “to give the peaceful exercise of certain rights to all of them” (ibid.). That is, first, the idea of rights is distinct from making that idea ‘sensible’ to them; there is no reason to assume that the idea itself is irrational; second, religion is not the sole source of making rights felt and respected. Political life as Aristotle defined it, ruling and being ruled, also does that. While some of the harsh religious laws enacted by the Puritans “bring shame to the human mind,” more generally in America, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom “advance in accord and seem to lend each other a mutual support,” whereby “religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man” and freedom “considers religion as the safeguard of moeurs; and moeurs as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration” (I.i.2). And this is quite natural: “Religion is…only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself,” “one of the constituent principles of human nature” (I.ii.9: “On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America”). The “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal” form part of human nature itself (II.ii.12). Further, religion rightly understood has rational content. “It submits the truths of the other world to individual reason” (I.ii.9: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). Consequently, “one ordinarily sees even in the midst of [Americans’] zeal something so tranquil, so methodical, so calculated, that it seems to be reason much more than heart that leads them to the altar”—a Pascalian wager essayed by persons who for the most part have never read Pascal (ibid.). 

The tensions among equality and “human freedom” and religion exists not in America but in Europe. “Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God, will not be loath to see all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning” because in France the republican revolutionaries were animated by Enlightenment rationalism, their monarchist and aristocratic enemies by traditional Catholic piety. Tocqueville would correct both sides. The non-religious and often irreligious “partisans of freedom” understand freedom as “the origin of the noblest virtues” and “the source of the greatest goods,” but they need to “call religion to their aid” for two reasons: “the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of moeurs“; and moeurs cannot be “founded without [religious] beliefs.” Tocqueville aims at an alliance between ‘secularists’ and the pious for freedom—reversing the coalitions seen in the French Revolution. (Introduction, 10-12). Against the materialism of the Enlightenment philosophes who inspired the French revolutionaries, Tocqueville insists that “the soul must remain great and strong, if only to be able from time to time to put its force and its greatness in the service of the body” (II.ii.16); paradoxically, if you want the benefits materialists promise, you had better not become a materialist yourself. Along with political freedom, religion “is the most precious bequest of aristocratic ages,” directing the egalitarian souls ‘upward’ under conditions that pull them ‘sideward’ and ‘downward.’

5. Because he fails to recognize equal natural rights, he only envisions a possible civil war between the white and black races in America, not between non-slaveholding and slaveholding whites.

This ignores the fact that the American Civil War did in fact mobilize black troops against the whites of the Confederacy. It also ignores the fact that Tocqueville does not consider wars within confederal democracies such as the United States to be civil wars but “only disguised foreign wars,” given the power of the state governments in confederacies (II.iii.26). Accordingly, “the only case in which a civil war could arise” in America “is one in which the army, being divided, one part would raise the standard of revolt and the other would remain faithful” (ibid.). And of course this is exactly what happened, as seen in the tragic case of General Robert E. Lee, among others. But more tellingly still, although Tocqueville doesn’t predict the American Civil War, he does predict disunion, due to the difference of moeurs between North and South—a difference he attributes to the effect of the presence of large numbers of slaves in the South on Southern slaveholders, whom he regards as examples of aristocracy within democracy (II.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”). And disunion did happen, if not de jure (as Lincoln insisted) then de facto, for four years.

6. Since Americans’ “destiny” is “singular” in that “they have taken from the English aristocracy the idea of individual rights and the taste for local freedoms” (II.iv.4), this means that he supposes that they derive the substance of those rights from a civil-social class.

This is an illogical inference. If, to oversimplify, one were to say that the American Founders took their ideas of rights from Hobbes and (even more) from Locke, would that not then mean that they took them from philosophers who lived in an aristocratic society, albeit one that was increasingly ’embourgeoised’? Yet, that has nothing to do with whether or not this conception of rights is right. Nor does Tocqueville suggest any such thing.

On the contrary. Tocqueville does indeed devote a section to “the idea of rights in the United States.” In it, he writes, “The idea of right is nothing other than the idea of virtue introduced into the political world. It is with the idea of rights that men have defined what license and tyranny are,” and idea by which men are “enlightened.” The right to property, for example, comes to be felt when the child who takes from others learns that others can take from him; politically, in America each individual owns property, and so does not advocate the expropriation of wealth from those who own more property than he. That is, rights are rational ideas, ideas of enlightened men, but that doesn’t mean that they will be respected simply because they are rational. (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”).

In modern, ‘democratic’ times, religion and morality will not serve as adequate sources of the respect for rights. “Do you not see that religions are weakening and that the divine notion of rights is disappearing? Do you not find that moeurs are being altered, and that with them the moral notion of rights is being effaced?” This is happening because religious “beliefs” now “give way to reasoning,” moral sentiments to “calculation.” “If in the midst of that universal disturbance you do not come to bind the idea of rights to the personal interest that offers itself as the only immobile point in the human heart, what will then remain to you go govern the world, except fear?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”). This is exactly what Publius inclines to say. That is, the ‘rational choice calculations‘ of individuals living in democratized and increasingly ‘secularized’ societies must be directed by prudent legislation aimed at securing rights. Neither Publius nor Tocqueville does it implies that rights are products of self-interest, any more than they are the products of religious beliefs or of moral sentiments.

Finally, while the Americans “took” the idea of individual rights—i.e., civil and political rights—and the taste for local freedoms from the aristocrats, they have transformed them into “that bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world had still not offered a complete picture” (I.i.2). The settlers were smallholders, not grandees. As to natural rights, Tocqueville quotes John Winthrop,” himself paraphrasing Aristotle, who wrote that “Liberty is not to do what you want: it must be good and just”—not only “civil” but “moral” (ibid.). From this has arisen (now glancing at one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters) a “natural aristocracy that flows from enlightenment and virtue” (ibid.). 

7. Tocqueville speaks of rights as if they were given by human beings to one another, not by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And so, he writes, “I know only two manners of making equality reign in the political world: rights must be given to each citizen or to no one” (I.i.3).

Here, Tocqueville explicitly refers to the right to equality in politics, which he does not regard as divinely ordained, as he does not believe in ‘divine right’ of kings or of anyone else. He addresses a problem endemic to politics as conducted in democratic/egalitarian civil societies. In them, the passion for equality is stronger than the passion for liberty. The passion for liberty can be either “manly and legitimate” or “depraved,” dragging everyone down to the proverbial lowest common denominator. Political “absolutism”—in France, during the later decades of Old-Regime monarchism and more recently under the rule of Napoleon I—brought the people to “equality in servitude.” Even “inequality in freedom,” seen in feudalism, is preferable to that. Equality in freedom is better than both, but “when citizens are all nearly equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power,” since they are no longer shielded from the centralized modern state by the aristocrats. (I.i.3). [1] To avoid this danger, Tocqueville famously proposes the substitution of civic associations for the now-vanished feudal estates.

8. Tocqueville followed Rousseau in rejecting natural law, regarding all general ideas as false and attributing the equality principle not to nature but to Christianity, as when he writes that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (II.i.3). Insofar as he admits ‘generality’ into his argument, he endorses Rousseau’s General Will, not natural right or natural law.

The quotation itself suffices to show that Tocqueville regards Christianity as having made the equality principle understood, not that Christianity somehow invented it. He mentions this in reference to the doctrine of natural slavery, best known from a passage in Aristotle’s Politics. “The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each bears from birth” (II.i.3). But if human beings as a species bear an equal right to freedom from birth, then that can be nothing other than a natural right. Christianity impressed this truth upon Europeans when Europe was aristocratic and therefore disinclined to perceive it; it was the entering wedge of the principle of equality, leading over the centuries to the social condition of equality, as seen in Tocqueville’s history of France (Introduction, 3-6).

The claim that Tocqueville adheres to Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will is based on an out-of-context misreading. The reference to “the sovereignty of the human race” comes in his discussion of majority tyranny. “I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything”—the maxim soon to be advanced in America by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. “Nonetheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of the majority. Am I contradicting myself?” Obviously not, since might, “power,” is not right, but Tocqueville puts it differently: “A general law exists that has been made or at least adopted not only by the majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. This law is justice,” which “forms the boundary of each people’s right.” “Therefore, when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not deny to the majority the right to command; I only appeal from the majority of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.” (I.ii.7). No competent student of political philosophy can fail to see that Tocqueville here refers to the law of nations. The law of nations is not the same as the law of nature but it in no way contradicts that law; in fact, it can and did incorporate it, as seen in what was then the most important recent treatise on the subject, Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations, subtitled Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs by Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, originally published in 1776. As Tocqueville observes, “only God can be omnipotent without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power” (I.ii.7).

Tocqueville makes this even more explicit in his chapter “On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies.” “The human race,” he writes, “feels permanent and general needs that have given birth to moral laws; all men have naturally attached in all places and all times the idea of blame and of shame to the nonobservance of them. Evading them they have called to do evil, submitting to them, to do good.” Evil “penchants” are “condemnable in the eyes of the general reason and the universal conscience of the human race,” although some of these might be condemned “only feebly” in a given civil society under certain circumstances; in the United States, “the love of wealth” is necessary in order “to transform the vast uninhabited continent” that Americans have come to possess (II.iii.18). This is only to recognize the adjustment of naturally derived moral laws to the variety of human conditions, as Aristotle commends in the Nicomachean Ethics.

9. Worse, Tocqueville doubts the truth of natural equality because he is a nominalist who rejects such a “general idea.” “God does not ponder the human race in general”; being omniscient, He “has no need of general ideas,” unlike mere humans. In reality, Tocqueville continues, “there are no beings in nature exactly alike”; ergo, there are no “identical facts” and “no rules generally applicable to several objects at once.” We humans are left with our “incomplete notions.” (II.i.3).

As Tocqueville good-humoredly acknowledges, his very “use of the word equality in an absolute sense” exemplifies this necessary human intellectual practice (II.i.16). The habit is especially strong among those who live in democratic conditions, partly because there really are more similarities among individuals in such societies. But this does not commit him to nominalism; it simply cautions his readers to pay attention to details, not to lose sight of individuals. There is a crucial political as well as a philosophic reason to do so: sweeping generalizations in political life can lead to tyranny. “To force all men to march in the same march, toward the same object—that is a human idea. To introduce an infinite variety into actions, but to combine them in a manner so that all these actions lead us by a thousand diverse ways toward the accomplishment of one great design—that is a divine idea” (Appendix XXIV, p.703).

10. If not a nominalist, then Tocqueville is a historicist, a sort of democratized Hegelian, propounding a claim that social equality is part of an inevitable ‘march of history.’ 

In his correspondence, Tocqueville mentioned Hegelians he had met in Germany, remarking shortly, “I detested the Hegelians.” [2] Hegelianism is a form of pantheism, and in the Democracy Tocqueville decries that doctrine. “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries; all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite in combat against it” (II.i.8). In the same chapter, Tocqueville criticizes the immoderate perfectionism that democratic souls to which human souls in democracy so often succumb. Pantheism plus perfectionism equal historicism incline the soul of man under democracy to such historicist doctrines as ‘Progressivism,’ which Tocqueville’s discussion anticipates. Tocqueville also rejects the materialist historicism of Artur de Gobineau, with whom he engaged in extensive correspondence. [3]

Far from being a historicist, Tocqueville regards historicism as a danger endemic to democratic conditions, as seen in his critique of “historians who live in democratic times,” who “take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate…subject[ing] them either to an inflexible providence or to a sort of blind fatality” (II.i.20). “It is not enough for them to show how the facts have come about; they also take pleasure in making one see that it could not have happened otherwise” (ibid.). Aristocratic historians, by contrast, “particularly those of antiquity,” make it seem “that to become master of his fate and to govern those like him, a man has only to know how to subdue himself,” to subject his passions to his reason (ibid.). But while “historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything than how to obey”; “if this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times, passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public mind, one can foresee that it would so paralyze the movement of the new societies and reduce Christians to Turks” (ibid.). Already incline to materialism, democrats “are only too inclined to doubt free will because each of them feels himself limited on all sides by his weakness,” pressured by a ‘mass’ society of equals, no longer the ‘vertical’ pressure from aristocrats above them but the ‘horizontal’ pressure of fellow democrats around them. Against this, one must “willingly grant force and independence to men united in a social body,” in civil and political associations, as “it is a question of elevating souls and not completing their prostration” (ibid.). 

The charge of historicism leveled against Tocqueville usually arises in response to his passages in the Introduction, emphasizing the “providential” advance of democracy since Jesus of Nazareth laid down the principle of the equality of men under God. By Providence, Tocqueville means “a thousand circumstances independent of the will of man” (I.ii.9: “On the Accidental or Providential Causes Contributing to the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States”). In America, such circumstances include the absence of formidable neighbors, the absence of a large capital city, ancestors who imported the “love of equality and freedom” to these shores, and the sheer size of the continent, which makes “nature itself” work “for the people” by giving them places from which to escape from the rule of any aristocratic class that might form ‘back East’ (ibid.). But he immediately observes that these “providential” causes are not politically decisive; French Canada, also an egalitarian civil society, rests under monarchy. 

Democracy has replaced aristocracy not because ‘History’ so dictates but because it is more natural. “One can change human institutions, but not men” (II.iii.13)—an observation that contradicts the Rousseauian doctrine of the malleability of human nature taken up soon thereafter by historicists. “The manners of aristocracy placed beautiful illusions over human nature,” illusions that could not withstand the slow workings of reality (II.iii.14), but “the constitution of man” is “everywhere the same” (II.iii.17). This goes right down to the most fundamental distinction among humans, the distinction between male and female: “The reason of one is as sure as the other, and her intelligence as clear” as his (II.ii.12).

 

In sum, to understand the American founding, the founding of a republic on a democratic civil-social base, one must go to the writings of the statesmen who effected it. They explained themselves, thoroughly and often eloquently. To understand democracy as a civil-social condition, its causes and effects, its advantages and its dangers, one must consult Tocqueville.

 

 

 

Notes

1. See also II.ii.1: “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality Than for Freedom.”
2. In a letter to Francisque de Corcelle from Bonn dated July 22, 1854, Tocqueville elaborates: “You are, of course, aware of the part played by philosophy during the past fifty years in Germany, and especially by the school of Hegel. He was protected, as, no doubt, you know, by the ruling powers, because his doctrines asserted that, in a political sense, all established facts ought to be submitted to as legitimate; and that the very circumstance of their existence was sufficient to make obedience to them a duty. This doctrine gave rise at length to the anti-Christian and anti-spiritual schools, which have been endeavoring to pervert Germany for the last twenty years, especially for the last ten; and finally to the socialist philosophy, which had so great a share in producing the confusion of 1848. Hegel exacted submission to the ancient established powers of his own time; which he held to be legitimate, not only from existence, but from their origin. His scholars wished to establish powers of another kind, which became, according to their views, equally legitimate and binding. This did not suit the official protectors of Hegel. Yet from this Pandora’s box [i.e., “this sensual and socialist philosophy’] have escaped all sorts of moral diseases from which the [German] people is still suffering.” That is, not only does Tocqueville detest Hegelianism, he also clearly sees that materialist historicism that derives from it (Marx being the preeminent example), as well as the denial of political liberty regimes established on the principles of historicism attempt to legitimate.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville: Correspondence with Gobineau. John Lukacs, editor and translator: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.