Honoré Daumier (French, 1808 – 1879 ), Alex. Ch. Henri de Tocqueville, 1849, lithograph, Rosenwald Collection

Samuel Gregg, research director at the Acton Institute, recently published areview onthe new translation ofAlexis de Tocqueville’sRecollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermathin which Tocqueville, the “quintessential man of theory,” gets dirty aboutthepolitics of the French Revolution. Why would the man whowrote bothDemocracy in America(1835, 1840) andThe Old Regime and the Revolution(1856) write an explicit reflectionon hispolitical interactions? To answer, Gregg directly quotes Tocqueville:

I want to preserve the freedom to portray without flattery both myself and my contemporaries, in total independence. I wish to lay bare the secret motives that led me and my colleagues and others to act as we did, and when I have understood those motives, to describe them.

In RecollectionsTocqueville writes “uninhibited” and “brutally candid sketches” of hispolitical contemporaries. Tocqueville has something juicy to say on everyone from his intellectual mentor, historian Francois Guizot, to the flattery-loving, slightly insane Napoleon Bonaparte. Gregg states:

… Tocqueville turns out to have held almost all his fellow politicians in low regard. On numerous occasions, he underscores the greed for power and barely hidden corruption of the members of the political establishment.

While Tocqueville’scharacter sketches entertain, Gregg offersthe main purpose ofRecollectionsis to “do more than simply [react] to events and personalities around him”; Recollectionsis an intellectual’s attempt to promote a free and ordered society. Gregg reflects:

[Tocqueville’s]Recollections also seek to show that his primary political objective was to help establish a constitutional system that guaranteed liberty and order in a country seemingly unable bine these two mitments in a stable manner. To realize this end, Tocqueville worked with people from a variety of political persuasions…Tocqueville doesn’t disguise the fact that this coalition-building involved promises which he found deeply distasteful.

This is, of course, one dimension of politics that frustrates intellectuals. At different points, it clearly grated on Tocqueville, not least because he struggled to find men of principle with whom he could work to give life to his vision of a society characterized by ordered liberty.

…Tocqueville’sRecollectionsraise significant questions about the role of intellectuals in modern politics. It’s not that Tocqueville concluded that intellectuals were irrelevant. On the contrary, he resolved that clear thought and careful inquiry unclouded by either sentimentalism or the demands and temptations of office were, if anything, even more essential.

To see the full article on Library of Law and Liberty, click here.