An ontology of Tocquevillean liberty (Alexis de Tocqueville)

Alexis de Tocqueville's political thought, in Democracy in America and throughout his writings, is devoted to the historical-sociological analysis of the irreducibly normative phenomenon of “liberty.” But its meaning in Tocqueville's analysis, I argue, is far from obvious. It emerges, in effect, as a theme that is only ever conveyed in its variations. The objective of my dissertation is to explain what “liberty” means in the terms of his analysis. I claim that Tocquevillean liberty is categorically unlike what we take liberty to be in Anglo-American liberal theory. Its subject is not straightforwardly the individual; the subject of liberty comprises also, and irreducibly, the political and civic institutions in relation to which the individual lives and his or her society more generally. By which I mean not the ontologically weak claim that “free” political and social forms are conducive to liberty as Tocqueville understands it, but that they are constitutive of it. Tocquevillean liberty, according to my thesis, consists not in a condition or set of conditions obtaining of individuals discretely, but in a reciprocally determining dynamic between individuals and the social and political circumstances that shape their lives.