Constant, Tocqueville, and Acton on the Enlightenment, Liberalism, and Religion

[This article is adapted from the final chapter of Raico’s book The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. The book was written as his PhD dissertation, under the direction of F.A. Hayek, and later published by the Mises Institute.]

Among the most interesting pages of Tocqueville’s little masterpiece, L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, are those which he devotes to liberal thought in the decades preceding 1789. He takes the Physiocrats as the group of Enlightenment reformers who most genuinely reflect the underlying principles and tendencies of the age, and passes in review their notions on government and society. Tocqueville notes that they were enemies of institutional limitations on governmental power, trusting to the education of the people in Physiocratic principles to act as an adequate replacement for “solid political guarantees of the nation’s freedom.” Most interesting is the connection which Tocqueville draws between these writers and the early socialists, particularly in regard to their admiration of a powerful government in the hands of enlightened reformers aiming at the conscious and scientific restructuring of society and even of human nature itself.

We have already noted the sense in which Constant was an opponent of many of the guiding principles of the eighteenth century. Acton, too, takes a similar stand on the subject, and in words which recall Tocqueville’s, he states:

all these factions of opinion [in pre-Revolutionary France] were called Liberal: Montesquieu, because he was an intelligent Tory; Voltaire, because he attacked the clergy; Turgot, as a reformer; Rousseau, as a democrat; Diderot, as a freethinker. The one thing in common to them all is the disregard for liberty.

Their remarks on this point are indicative of the fact that for all three liberals we have considered in these pages, the experience of France and of Europe after 1789 demonstrated that liberalism as the eighteenth century had known it required important modifications. The growth of a centralized and increasingly powerful state, with the parallel fading away of intermediate bodies and associations which might hinder its action— the whole process being backed up and justified by an appeal to the unlimited sovereignty of the people— this was a process of the dangers of which the eighteenth-century French liberals for the most part had had no inkling, and, indeed, which they in fact partially helped to bring about. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, it loomed as the central problem for liberalism, and the works of these three writers are in large measure a response to it.

The principles of traditionalist and theocratic conservatism, however, could not appeal to them (Acton, who provides a partial exception to this, sloughed off conservatism in his maturity, as we have seen). Rather, particularly in the case of Constant, they tended to see the ideas of a de Maistre or a Bonald as merely the mirror image of the revolutionary movement: both conservatives and left revolutionaries were united in proposing an authoritarian system of guidance and control over individuals; their differences had to do with which groups would exert control—whether the traditional elites of aristocracy and Church, or a new elite of revolutionary intellectuals. Moreover, the conservatives were blinded by their own interests in supposing that the danger of European society was to be found in anarchy and the disintegration of all structures of social and political authority. Constant and Tocqueville insisted (and John Stuart Mill was later to follow the latter on this) that, on the contrary, the more powerful current was towards a monstrously enlarged governmental apparatus untroubled by the slightest opposition and towards a social stagnation of the Chinese sort. (Acton, who strongly emphasized the role of the right of resistance to tyranny and of rebellion, may in this regard have also been thinking along these lines.)

In the face of the tendencies of modern society, the authors we have examined looked to religious faith to aid the cause of liberty. In the view of Constant and Tocqueville, the old quarrels of liberty and religion were obsolete; conditioned by historical circumstance, the older liberal mistrust of religion was, in the midst of an entirely new historical situation, misleading and dangerous. The break up of the alliance of Throne and Altar, which, if it had not been completed, could readily be foreseen, freed religious faith for political functions of a different sort. Given Constant’s and Tocqueville’s analyses of the dangers of the materialism and individualism that modern society will increasingly experience, and the threat these pose for liberal institutions, religious faith appeared as a welcome—indeed, an indispensable—ally.

Both French thinkers were, in addition, pluralists, and looked with favor on the flourishing of social institutions and authorities which might act as counterweights to the central government (and, with Tocqueville, to majority opinion as well), while fulfilling other important social functions. In an age in which the Church had been relegated to the ranks of a voluntary social institution, taking its place along with all others within the framework of an essentially secular state, there could be little danger in propping up its influence as much as possible in this way.

Acton, too, was a pluralist, but he was in a somewhat different position from the other two thinkers, to some extent precisely because of his own more serious religious commitment. As a Roman Catholic—and a Catholic under the pontificate of Pius IX—he could not so easily dismiss the threat which religion had traditionally posed for freedom. His own identification with the Catholic Church led him, on the one hand, to a preoccupation with the problem of religious persecution, which kept it, in his mature years, always before his mind; while at the same time, in view of the Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I, he had to take seriously the possibility of a future struggle between freedom and theology. Thus, ironically, of the three writers it is Acton who, in his later period, most sharply expresses his skepticism as to the alliance between liberty and religion.

In another important respect, also, Acton’s views diverge from those of Constant and Tocqueville. While Constant is a product of the French Enlightenment in his hostility towards ecclesiastical religion, preferring the individual experience of “le sentiment religieux,” and while Tocqueville does not make much of the distinction between feeling and form, in Acton’s historical analysis it is precisely the most powerful and highly organized form of Western religion— the medieval papacy—which is most to be credited with aiding the cause of freedom. Acton’s concentration on institutions rather than on psychological tendencies here is probably partially a reflection of the more sophisticated historiography of the nineteenth century. In addition, his analysis represents an advance in another sense: as we have seen, Acton makes it clear that the popes who tried to usurp royal and imperial power did not aim at liberal ends, and his use of the dialectical perspective appears to correspond more closely to the actual historical development than does Constant’s residual “philosophical” condemnation of the role of all priestly religions.

The most fundamental similarity among the three thinkers has to do with the ethical coloration of their liberalism. For all of them, liberty was to be valued chiefly as a means to the end of human excellence, whether this is conceived of as consisting of perfect obedience to conscience, in such qualities as energy, passion and a taste for grandeur, or (as with Constant) in something of a combination of these. Accordingly, Constant and Acton condemned utilitarianism, the former devoting a good deal of effort to the enterprise. For both thinkers, egoism furnished an inadequate foundation for liberty. For Acton, this conclusion was tied to his basic philosophical rationale for rights, which were seen as proceeding from one’s duties to one’s neighbors. Constant’s dread of the modern emphasis on egoism, on the other hand, stemmed from his view of the social conditions required for a liberal order. (Faguet, who states of Constant that “il a fait du libéralisme un égotisme intelligent,” is greatly over simplifying Constant’s complex thought in this area and, moreover, ignoring the clear meaning of various texts.)

Tocqueville followed Constant closely in his identification of egoistic individualism and the quest for personal enjoyment as a prime modern threat to freedom. (Indeed, the parallels between their thought in this whole area are so many—although unexplored by any scholar, to my knowledge— that a strong influence by Constant on Tocqueville must be presumed.) He appears at first to disagree with Constant in asserting that, given certain conditions, egoistic hedonism is an acceptable basis for ethics in the democratic age, faute de mieux. Ultimately, however, he finds that it is insufficient for the creation of the minimally necessary sort of human character, and must be supplemented by religion, by the cultivation of the sense of glory, etc. In fact, in the end, he grows silent concerning the potentiality even of religious faith to stem the modern attitude, and places his hopes rather in the practice of political democracy.

The recognition of the inadequacy of the ethical and metaphysical bases of eighteenth-century liberalism and the currents in nineteenth-century liberal thought that flowed from it, may be cited as the distinguishing mark of the three men whose ideas we have examined; of all of them, and not of Tocqueville alone, it may be said that “they were liberals of a new type.”