Harvey Mansfield on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2019

⏱️ 85 minutes

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Summary

Why is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the best book “ever written on democracy and the best ever written on America?” Why is it indispensable both for understanding the country as well as defending it? In this Podcast, Harvey Mansfield, co-translator of Democracy in America (with Delba Winthrop), presents a detailed exposition of Tocqueville’s masterwork. Mansfield considers the major themes of Tocqueville’s work, including Tocqueville’s treatment of the idea of rights, the role of religion, men and women, self-government, and the relationship of liberty and equality. As Mansfield explains, Democracy in America advocates a more “political” version of the liberalism propagated by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other modern political philosophers. Americans, in Tocqueville’s account, learn the practice of self-government through the institutions they inherit and build upon. American practice therefore elevates the country and citizens above the individualism and narrow materialism that can follow from a liberalism too literally applied from a theory—e.g., the “state of nature.” As Mansfield puts it, Tocqueville remains even in our time the greatest resource we have for “defending a defensible liberalism.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.
0:15.0	Welcome to Conversations, and I'm pleased to be joined again today by Harvey Mansfield,
0:20.0	Professor of Government at Harvard.
0:22.0	Thank you. It's always good to Government at Harvard. Thank you.
0:22.9	It's always good to be here, and with you.
0:25.1	Well, thank you.
0:26.9	So let's talk about Tockville's Democracy in America,
0:30.5	which you've translated with Double Winthrop and written about in several many
0:36.0	articles and I guess a short book on Talkville, all of which I recommend, needless to say,
0:42.2	but particularly about liberalism I mean you 40 years ago
0:46.7	you wrote a book the spirit of liberalism in which you said you wanted to I think defend
0:50.9	a defensible liberalism I think is that right I think that's right and I think you found Tocville to be
0:56.1	important in that enterprise. He's the man. Is that right? Okay, well we can end this conversation now. That's a very bold statement? He wrote 150 years ago, so he wrote 150 years ago, so we have to bring him up to date, but he's the one to start from anyway at the very least and more.
1:17.0	Okay, so why start with Tukville rather than other famous...
1:21.0	Well, he presents this defensible liberal
1:24.0	liberalism as I think a political liberalism.
1:28.0	So he tries to make liberalism more political.
1:32.0	And to see what that means you have to be more political.
1:33.0	And to see what that means, you have to begin from the standard theory of liberalism,
1:38.0	which I think is rather apolitical.
1:41.0	Standard theory is the 17th century founders of, founding philosophers of liberalism, like Hobbs and Locke and Spinoza.
1:55.0	But also you can see it in Democratic theorists today
	...

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