The Political Thought of Michael Novak
Lecture Five: Are We Still A Tocquevillian Nation?
Joe Wysocki explores the issue touched on in the previous two lectures as to whether we are still a Tocquevillian nation. That issue rests on whether we still embrace freedom in the sense described by Tocqueville. Tocqueville, like Novak, was passionate about equality, well-formed souls, and human flourishing. Both supported classical liberalism, but not a liberalism that lowered the bar of political life to mere self-preservation and material comfort.
Wysocki reviews what Tocqueville perceives to be the threats to American democracy as well as its bulwarks against those threats. He laments those false and cowardly doctrines that “peoples are never masters of themselves … false and cowardly doctrines that can never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous nations.” He describes the threat of a soft despotism in America, one in which the administrative state “little steals from each citizen even the use of himself.”
In that regard, Wysocki discusses the decline of associational life in America—a narrowing of the individual’s concern outside his family and friends. Despite the fact that America has looming perils and evils to ward off, Tocqueville ends Democracy in America with hope. He is “more and more firm in the belief that to be honest and prosperous, it is still enough for democratic nations to wish it.”
