Tocqueville's 'new political science': A critical assessment of Montesquieu's vision of a liberal modernity (Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu)

What is “new” about the “new political science” that Tocqueville claimed in Democracy in America was “necessary for a new world” is best understood via a comparison with the thought of Montesquieu. Fundamental to the latter's Spirit of the Laws is a critique of the illiberal character of the classical republic, and an analysis of how a distinctively modern type of popular government became possible via institutional forms that emerged out of European feudalism. Tocqueville, with the benefit of post-revolutionary hindsight, shows how the fundamental nature of modernity, understood now as the democratic social condition [ état social], has made Montesquieu's vision of a liberal modernity—and its legacy in the liberalism of Constant, Royer-Collard, and Guizot—inadequate. As “a liberal of a new kind,” Tocqueville seeks to narrow the divide that Montesquieu and his liberal successors had asserted lay between classical and modern republicanism. According to Tocqueville, vital to the health of modern liberal democracy are institutions and practices that moderate or even run counter the fundamental tendencies of modernity: direct political participation, a modern form of civic virtue, intermediary bodies between the citizens and the government, and mores and religion. This approach to the question of modern liberty thus does not fit easily within the categories of modern liberal thought. Rather, there are surprising resonances in Tocqueville's thought with the procedure of Aristotle's Politics, in which political science appears as a judge between the claims of the various parties and regimes. Although for Tocqueville “philosophy,” or a fully self-sufficient, trans-historical, and completely satisfying form of life appears to be impossible, he does not fall prey, as is sometimes alleged, to complete “historicism.” In order to bring into focus the limitations of the modern or democratic point of view, he displays it in the light of its opposite, that of “aristocracy.” Proceeding by “seeing not so much differently, as further, than each of the parties,” Tocqueville shows how modern democracy's self-improvement can and must be grounded in theoretical consideration of the merits of past alternatives.