Copyright by Jonathan Andrew Wensveen 2020 The Dissertation Committee for Jonathan Andrew Wensveen Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Making History Safe for Democracy: Understanding Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History Committee: Jeffrey Tulis, Co-Supervisor Maurizio Viroli, Co-Supervisor Devin Stauffer Dana Stauffer Making History Safe for Democracy: Understanding Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History by Jonathan Andrew Wensveen Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2020 Dedication For Avra Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my committee for believing in this project and affording me the intellectual leeway to develop and execute it in the way that I have. I am grateful for all of their comments, suggestions, and criticisms, from which I have learned much and am still learning. Second, I would like to thank my family for encouraging me to pursue my passion and for their unwavering support throughout my time in graduate school. In particular, I would like to thank my mom, Mary Anne, for all of the countless hours she spent proof reading my work. If the final product is less than perfect, it is because I did not heed her advice enough. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Avra. There is no person with whom I would rather navigate life’s valleys or climb life’s peaks. I could not have done this without you by my side. v Abstract Making History Safe for Democracy: Understanding Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History Jonathan Andrew Wensveen, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Jeffrey Tulis, Maurizio Viroli This dissertation examines the problem of historical determinism in the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. In Volume 2 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville criticizes historians in democratic centuries for undermining man’s belief in his ability to control his own fate by reducing both individuals and nations alike to the playthings of either an “inflexible providence” or “blind fatality.” And yet, as a cursory reading of both the Introduction to Democracy in America and the Introduction to The Ancien Regime and the Revolution reveals, Tocqueville himself appears to engage in the same practice. Whereas in the former he argues that men are but “blind instruments in the hands of God,” in the latter he argues that men are being “driven by an unknown force.” As many scholars therefore note, there appears to be a contradiction at the heart of Tocqueville’s thought: on the one hand, he is overtly critical of historical determinism; on the other hand, he appears to embrace some form of it. The question that this dissertation therefore addresses is: how should we understand this contradiction given Tocqueville’s oft-stated claim that his overriding concern, as both a statesman and a writer, is for the preservation of “liberty and human dignity” in a democratic age? Does Tocqueville differ from the democratic historians he criticizes? Or does he too succumb to what he calls the “mania of the century” and advance a theory of history that, whether he realizes it or not, reduces both individuals and nations alike to cogs in a historical machine? vi Table of Contents Chapter One: Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History .........................1 The Debate over Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History ...........5 Tocqueville’s Audience ............................................................................................12 “Neutrality and the Use of History:” Zetterbaum on Tocqueville’s Theory of History ................................................................................................................16 Structure and Argument of the Dissertation .............................................................26 Chapter Two: On the Origins and Rise of Democratic History: Voltaire’s Attack on Ancient and Christian World History ..........................................................................31 “Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries:” Tocqueville on the Methodological Tendencies of Democratic Historians .......33 Tocqueville’s Democratic Historians: François Mignet and The Restoration Liberals ...............................................................................................................41 The Rhetorical Advantage of History .......................................................................48 “Spiritual Crisis” and the Search for Meaning .........................................................51 Democratic Historians as Secular Prophets: Augustin Thierry and François Guizot .................................................................................................................58 The Origins of Democratic History: Christian World History .................................69 Voltaire’s Attack on Ancient and Christian World History .....................................80 The Rise of Democratic History: From the “Doctrine of Providence” to the “Doctrine of Progress” ........................................................................................86 History in Democratic Times: “Christian by Derivation, Anti-Christian by Consequence” .....................................................................................................98 Chapter Three: The Allure of Democratic History: Tocqueville on Pantheism and Its Historical Analog .......................................................................................................104 The Strange Persistence of Democratic History .....................................................107 The Philosophical Method of Democratic Man ......................................................114 The Mores of Democratic Man ...............................................................................118 vii The Self-Negating Tendency of Democratic Man ..................................................128 The Psychological Fate of Democratic Man: Restlessness unto Death ..................135 The Future of Democratic Man: Liberty in Faith or Servitude in Reason ..............148 The Allure of Pantheism .........................................................................................152 The Allure of Democratic History ..........................................................................159 The “Strange” Persistence of Democratic History Reconsidered ...........................169 Chapter Four: The Danger of Democratic History: Voegelin, Tocqueville, Gobineau, and the “Gnostic Attitude” of Democratic Historians ...............................................175 Eric Voegelin and “The Gnostic Attitude” .............................................................182 The Gnostic Attitude of Democratic Historians .....................................................186 Tocqueville’s Confrontation with The Gnostic Attitude: Arthur de Gobineau and Race as the “Master-Key” to History .........................................................199 From the Eclipse Reality to The Eclipse of Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Tocqueville on the “Practical Consequences” of Historical Determinism, Part 1 .................................................................................................................217 From the Eclipse of Free Will and Moral Responsibility to The Eclipse of Liberty and Human Dignity: Tocqueville on the “Practical Consequences” of Historical Determinism, Part 2 .....................................................................231 The Persistent Danger of Democratic History: On the Practical Consequences of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man .............................247 Chapter Five: Making History Safe for Democracy: Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History, Reconsidered .........................................................258 Tocqueville, The Restoration Liberals, and Spiritual Crisis ...................................266 History Understood as a “Moral Science:” Tocqueville and Gobineau on the Relationship between Theory and Practice .......................................................275 Tocqueville’s Method: Neither ‘German’ Nor ‘American’ ....................................283 In the Footsteps of Montesquieu: Tocqueville on Causality in History .................297 Tocqueville and the Problem of Free will and Predestination ................................307 viii Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History ..................................314 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................321 ix Chapter 1: Tocqueville’s “Profoundly Ambiguous” Theory of History You have not reproached me as I anticipated for seeming to fall in to the mania of the century. But I reproach myself for it because I do not want to fall into it. You absolve me, and I accuse myself. I wake up every morning obeying a general and eternal law that I did not know existed the day before. Unfortunately, there are some of those laws.1 - Tocqueville to his editor, Democracy in America In the Introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observes that while a “great democratic revolution is taking place among us,” it has essentially evoked two responses. While some people, he