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Tocqueville's Ideal Types
| Article
# : |
11407 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
6,322 Words |
| Author
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Robert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute. His most recent book was Conservativism (University
of Minnesota Press, 1986). |
Democracy in America was conceived and published at a time when reifications, typologies, entelechies, ideal types, abstractions, and generalities of all kinds flourished. New terms were introduced in descriptive and philosophical accounts of historical forces; old words with specific accustomed uses were assigned more general functions.
The waning of Christianity, perceptible to intellectuals from the middle of the eighteenth century, had much to do with this proliferation of abstractions. If God did not exist, if the traditional theological attributes had no possessor, then it became imperative to find other forces on which to base one's faith in man, in the present, and, above all, in the future.
Not since the Roman philosophers and historians of the fourth and fifth centuries of our era had there been such presentiment of crisis as at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Michelet, and other lay prophets warned apocalyptically of confusion, disorganization, and breakdown in the social order. Though alarmed, these prophets were not, however, without hope, and as soon as they declared one world dead or dying, they heralded a new one in which reason, science, and ethics would triumph. Where God had once served as the foundation of the world order, there were now required only such forces and powers as were inherent in man or manifest in history. In this climate of secular prophecy, generalities and abstractions were rife.
Aware of the general intellectual climate, Tocqueville characteristically saw these phenomena as rooted in democracy. "If aristocratic ages do not make sufficient use of general ideas, and frequently treat them with inconsiderate disdain, it is true on the other hand that a democratic people is always ready to carry ideas of this kind to excess and to espouse them with injudicious warmth." He uses himself as an example of the toll taken in writing by the indiscriminate use of general and abstract nouns:
I have frequently used the word equality in an absolute sense; nay, I have personified equality in several places; thus I have said that equality does such and such things or refrains from doing others. It may be affirmed that the writers of the age of Louis XIV would not have spoken in this manner; they would never have thought of using the word equality without applying it to some particular, thing; and they would rather have renounced the term altogether than have consented to make it a living
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