Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Toqueville

Barrister over at Maggies posted this excellent article from Tablet. It grabs one by the shirt collars and upends some easy assumptions we make. 
It is too simple to say that Tocqueville presented equality and freedom as principles sometimes in tension with one another. His point was different. Equality was not merely a moral principle. Nor was it merely a material fact. More fundamentally, equality was a passion that gave rise to a certain dynamic in politics. Freedom, on the other hand, he portrayed as a set of skills and habits that required practice, an art that could be learned but also forgotten. The danger of democratic life, Tocqueville thought, was that the passion for equality would lead us to stop practicing the art of freedom.
Toqueville believed that the art of freedom was learned by Americans in their smaller associations of New England towns, juries, and voluntary organisations. It is a romantic and repeatedly popular idea (and not only in America), that salvation comes from outside the city. It is one theme of the Old Testament, and of Islam. But is it so? Is it not the cities where cooperation is exponentially more necessary, and the balances of freedom and equality more under stress and thus strengthened?

Different arts, different stresses, different meaning of freedom and equality, perhaps.

2 comments:

engineerlite said...

Equality demands comparison with someone else. In today's politically correct, materialist version of equality, this often leads to greed, followed by envy (sometimes encouraged), which leads to covetousness, which leads to theft, and money and power for the thieves.

Strange, no one seems to advocate for equality of hard work, self discipline, or personal responsibility.

james said...

"Is it not the cities where cooperation is exponentially more necessary, and the balances of freedom and equality more under stress and thus strengthened?"
I don't think stress necessarily strengthens or develops the balance of freedom and equality. On the contrary, it seems likely to force the balance away from freedom. In a society based on laws rather than traditions, the temptation for the rulers to expand the net of laws has no obvious limit.
Unless.
If the rural part of the land is regarded as having equal importance and equal say, then you can get a tension and a balance. IIRC the Electoral College and the Senate were established precisely to arrange for that kind of balance.