Alexis De Tocqueville's Ancient Modern Liberty

Tocqueville’s discovery of a muscular, participatory citizenship in the United States is well known, as is his argument that such citizenship is vital to the success of democracy. This has been a source of both self-congratulation and anxiety among Americans, the anxiety stemming from worries about the progressive loss of this type of citizenship in the years since Tocqueville wrote. These anxieties should prompt us to reflect on how unusual is Tocqueville’s notion of democratic liberty among thinkers in the modern age. Montesquieu inaugurated, and Benjamin Constant took up in Tocqueville’s time, a distinction between “ancient” and “modern” liberty, according to which modern liberty was emphatically divorced from the vigorous, participatory liberty of the ancient world. Against this backdrop, Tocqueville’s description, and prescription, of vigorous, participatory citizenship appears as a dissent from accepted views. I look at Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and Democracy in America, together with Montesquieu and Constant, to clarify his position. Tocqueville’s neo-classic civic ideal owes something to Rousseau, but it is more apt to call it a new synthesis of the classical and the modern. The nature of this synthesis (and its ultimate plausibility) has important implications for anxieties over the state of American democracy today.