Lecture 4: Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) Alan Macfarlane c. 2004

(toc.red)

LECTURE FOUR: The Dream is Shattered. 1790 1840: DE TOCQUEVILLE

A curious gap of half a century.

a) Industrialism and its horrors (cf Malthus)
b) French Revolution turns to carnage (cf Burke)
c) Napoleonic wars and devestations of Europe

The shattering effect of the death of secular progressivist thought in the French revolution and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

In philosophy, poetry, art, music etc.the heady optimism of early Romanticism gives way to the conservative reaction of the Gothic revival. The project for a natural, progressive, history of man is abandoned, and sociology and anthropology go to sleep for half a century.

The Watershed: French Revolution: 1790 1835

As a number of historians have noticed (e.g. de Beer on evolutionism, Stocking on anthropology) many of the ideas of Darwinian period almost fully developed by 1790. Then a curious gap for half a century.

Anthropology lapses,the heretical ideas of Erasmus Darwin are expurged. The common explanation is the shattering effect of the death of secular progressive thought in the French Revolution and the aftermath in Napoleonic War.

In philosophy, poetry, art etc. the heady optimism of early Romanticism gives way to the conservative reaction of Gothic revival etc. The project for a natural, progressive, history of man is abandoned. The shock which administered this blow was very great.

Reasons for reaction in sociology and anthropology lasting fifty years.

'The French Revolution was no less shattering in its impact upon cherished dogma and traditionalist feeling...by its very nature the French Revolution was possessed of a suddenness and dramatic intensity that nothing in the Industrial Revolution could match. Taine did not err in describing the Revolution as the most important single historical event in Europe's history after the fall of Rome...the French Revolution was the first thoroughly ideological revolution...and it was combined with the first horrors of industrialism.

The reaction against optimism and evolutionism after the French Revolution. It looks as if the rapid development of evolutionary thought in political philosophy, law, economics, population etc. in the work of later eighteenth century Scottish and French philosophers and then into work of Paine, Godwin et al. was suddenly reversed and largely crushed by the reaction after the French Revolution. The period 1750 1790 can thus be seen as a period of optimism, progressive change and theories of the evolution of systems etc. The final burst was in the American Rebellion and the French Revolution in the belief in the perfectibility of man and in the work of the early Romantics, their first phase (Wordsworth, Coleridge etc.) Then came a savage reaction, politically, religiously, intellectually etc. in the works of Malthus, Paley, Burke and in the Gothic revival of Scott, Michelet et al. This broadly covered the period 1790 1830. To speak of permanent progress, perfectibility, triumph of reason etc. was heresy. Anthropology and sociology, as substitutes or alternatives to theology were stopped dead in their tracks.

The Christian concept of the Fall of loss of innocence etc. and the short time span also affected the study of man. Savages were no longer 'noble' or even born free: they were degenerates.


Political philosophy.

The conservative reaction of the early nineteenth century.
'The conservatives at the beginning of the nineteenth century form an Anti Enlightenment (e.g. Chateaubriand and Burke)...hatred of the Enlightenment and especially of Rousseau is fundamental in philosophical conservatism.

Malthus (1766 1834) 'The dismal science'.

First Essay in Population 1798. Reaction of Godwin's Utopianism??

fig.

Thus, muted gloom:

Conclusion.
The irony is that out of this gloom and horror and clash of armies at night there arose the new evolutionism.

How that occurred and how a chance reading of Malthus led to the most revolutionary and apparently ebullient evolutionism the world has even know next week.


EQUALITY; DE TOCQUEVILLE


Life
born in Paris, 1805

visit to America, 1831 2

published Democracy in America vol. I, 1835

longer visit to England, 1835

published second volume of Democracy in America, 1840

published Ancien Regime in 1856

died in 1859

Some contemporary events that influenced him:

the French Revolution (1789)

the American Revolution and rise of democracy in America

the power of Britain: industrial, imperial, freedom

imperialistic expansion in India, Africa etc.

the political turmoils in France, power of mob etc.

the Romantic movement

the horrors of industrialism and urbanism

the Napoleonic Empire


Contradictions in his personality and experience:

mind and heart

aristocratic and egalitarian

for and against French revolution

England, France and America

religion and agnosticism

Theoretical methodology:

belief in patterns and constraints; chance and necessity



patterns and central principles of law, central spirit



comparative method: France, America, Britain



holistic method; looking at integration of parts



structural and relational approach



the causes of things; geography, law, culture



point of departure



methodological dangers, in models



deduction and induction



A few of his conclusions:

America:

restlessness, pursuit of profit, attitude to work


calculative virtue

private and public benefit reconciled


pacification and the effects of wealth


effects of equality on time and history


future orientation and disinterest in the past


political unification and imaginary communities


associations and their value


the role of religion; the separation of religion and politics


development of the spirit of equality


effects of equality on:


parent children relations


gender relations


ecological destruction


debasement of culture



England:


its affluence, the result of India and industrialism

pursuit of profit, restless gambling


absence of caste, of peasants in Anglo America


peculiar political history of England


English justice and its virtues/vices


religious freedom


English prosperity and law


history of England, the effects of Roman law and divergence


odd English social structure


effects of islandhood, military despotisms


Liberty, wealth and equality:

fragility of liberty, the dangers of bureaucratic absolutism


individualism and equality; egoism, dangers of fragmentation


the balance of the centre and periphery


China and bureaucratic centralization


institutional checks on power, including associations


separation of religion and politics


the nature and importance of Civil Society