Piotr Leszczyński: You wrote a biography of Alexis de Tocqueville's thoughts – a nineteenth century French thinker, author of a classical work About Democracy in America, 1 of the most crucial political philosophers of the liberal mainstream. I get the impression that this return to Tocqueville has nothing in it from antiquarian curiosity, but is an effort to look – through a mirror of his work – to the modern world. Why did you compose this book?
Jan Tokarski: Tocqueville has been with me for about 20 years. I return to his works again and again; whenever I cease to realize what is happening around me. And all time I read it, I discover something new. Something I did not see in the text earlier, a layer of it that I had not previously dug into.
This sense of dissonance was a direct impulse to compose a book. little than 4 years ago, in the summertime of 2022, my household and I were traveling through France by car. We visited Paris, Mont-Saint-Michel, and I insisted that we must visit Tocqueville, the author's native town, as we drove through the sun-dipping and glistening Normandy. About Democracy in America. The accident wanted a technological conference to be held in the hotel-turned old castle. To my surprise, I found that he spoke on her... then the Polish Prime Minister (remotely, as it turned out, but what difference does it make?). How ironic, I thought. This is the political great-grandson of Louis Napoleon, an archetypical populist and man who committed a coup in France in December 1851, thus forcing Alexis de Tocqueville to “internal emigration” – he speaks to enlightened French elites in the family château A philosopher. Is it just an expression of pluralism and openness, or is it the signal that the West has lost its political busola, has ceased to know who is who?
When we think of today’s populism and look for historical references for it, we seldom scope to France in the mid-19th century. Comparisons to fascism dominate – most likely risky, due to the fact that they are more a measurement of the force of outrage than an expression of cold analysis. How did Louis Napoleon match populists today?
It seems to me that populism is worth trying to realize in the position of “long duration”. More – I would see in it a phenomenon in any sense not accidental, i.e. arising straight from the constitutional tensions for modern society.
The case of Louis Napoleon is meaningful in this context. Like contemporary populists, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew introduced himself as a typical of the “real people” opposed to the corrupt elites of the Second Republic. Like them, the legitimacy of power was seen in a direct relation with the masses, without intermediation of the institution of parliamentary democracy. He utilized the tactics of personalizing power and built a peculiar cult of the individual (not in the sense we know from totalitarian systems, of course). He presented himself as a “strong leader”, “savior of the nation”, “man of action”. He promised to reconstruct order and stableness in a troubled society, and thus – just like modern politicians: Trump, Orban or Kaczyński – he built his political strength on real or exaggerated crises and the promise to "restore normality" or "return to greatness". Finally, Louis Napoleon utilized democratic procedures to dismantle democracy. The December 1851 coup preceded a broad propaganda run in favorable media, legalistic rhetoric, and notorious appeal to the will of the people. Doesn't all that sound beautiful familiar?
Tocqueville saw these phenomena from close proximity. He was not only a writer, but since the late 1930s. The 19th century was besides an active politician. Due to its inaccessibility and its chronic inability to conduct the games essential in this area, it remained isolated. He had no major successes, and it is hard to believe that despite these restrictions he came to the position of abroad Minister. Another thing is, he's only held it for 9 months.
And yet his adventure with politics, I believe, was not just a disappointment. 2 reasons. Firstly, Tocqueville, already beginning his parliamentary career, had no peculiar illusions about what political life “from kitchen” looked like. Secondly, the experience gained was a essential complement to the fresh policy science, the main outline of which he outlined on the pages Democracy in America.
Before we decision to America, let's just stick to the 1851 French coup. W XVIII Brumaire Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx presented this event as a consequence of a class conflict between bourgeoisie on the 1 hand and proletariat on the other. He pointed to the interior contradictions of the bourgeois class itself, blowing up the strategy built around it from the inside. He wrote about low political awareness of individual layers of French society. The large revolution in the name of equality – he diagnosed – repeated itself as a farce. Many modern left-wing intellectuals would about sign up to a akin diagnosis of today’s situation. Populism, he would say, grew up on the basis of inequality caused by global capitalism and legitimizing its logic of neoliberal ideology. What key would Tocqueville usage to realize populism? Would he have attributed the primary importance of economics?
This kind of speculation should always be handled with caution, but I don't think I'm going to hazard much, claiming that Tocqueville would avoid simple, one-dimensional answers. Unlike Marks, he wasn't a determinant. He felt that in the long word the improvement of democracy understood as based on equality the social arrangement was something irresistible. The case remained open, however, in his opinion, which precisely took the political form – a free republic or a fresh variant of tyranny.
As an excellent scientist of the fresh society, whose origin he saw in America, Tocqueville understood that the more social conditions equalize, the more unbearable any remaining inequality will be. He besides saw the creation of a fresh aristocracy of money in democracy and feared its far-reaching effects. Both in Volume 2 About Democracy in America, as well as in the little well-known reports on poverty, he stressed that deep economical dissection was incompatible with the rule of equality based on a fresh democratic society. In his opinion, therefore, the divisive modern democracy could return with these doors.
At the same time, Tocqueville was very skeptical of socialist theories. There is no indication that he read Marx himself, but in the concepts of French socialists he saw dehumanizing determinism and the simplification of human nature to its economical dimension. Above all, he did not believe that the State could freely form economical reality. As he wrote, it could not origin prices to halt rising in request for a given good precisely as it was incapable to origin the drop not to drain through a tilted shaft. He was so a proponent of the market’s mitigation of inequality, but did not believe that it could be replaced by any another mechanism.
How, then, would Tocqueville diagnose the cultural sources of populism? What would Trump see in America?
I think he would consider this phenomenon closely related to the very essence of modern society. Democracy is not so much the power of the people to Tocqueville, but the establishment of an area of equality between citizens. This levelling movement is in his opinion powerful, pushing him forward with his own logic, which orders him to cross further barriers. In a sense, it can be said that there are no limits.
At the same time, Tocqueville maintains that in order for liberal democracy to exist, it must be based on certain customs, based on common beliefs. It requires, in another words, a political community. That is why the imagination of isolated individuals afraid the French philosopher so much. They became apolitical, uninterested in the common good, willing to sacrifice freedom and choose a safe, prosperous life entirely focused on pursuit of individual happiness. The equivalent of specified an individual is no longer any political association, but humanity – the full population of the planet Earth.
Tocqueville so sees the tension between the universal claims of modern democracy and, by necessity, the peculiar form it always takes. He understands that in order for a liberal-democratic order to function properly, it cannot support itself solely on abstract rules, but besides on the self-identified “we”. Without a certain simple community of beliefs or values, there is no society but a population. This society was to form itself, not on an cultural basis, but on a republican basis, as a community of citizens whose common good is the freedom-providing state constitution.
So the success of populists would be primarily from the erosion of this sense of belonging to a political community? Is this how we should translate the Renaissance of nationalisms that we are dealing with today? This makes America – a long standing of liberal institutions – have Donald Trump's face today?
It sounds convincing to me, but it's surely not the only reason. However, it clearly explains the success of the right-wing "identity policy" over the last 10 years. He besides explains why Trump and his acolytes with specified ostentatiousness support, for example, the actions of their anti-immigration militia, ICE, in Minneapolis. It is not just about "normalising" violations of constitutional rules. The performance, whose effects are to be beneficial for the present administration, is besides important. First, they are to intimidate those who want to actively argue power. Secondly, ICE's actions are to be a demonstration of the cause. The paper reads: “Here we are, we are able to tackle the problem of immigration, which the politically correct liberal-democratic West cannot cope with!” (the diagnosis of its ineffectiveness seems to be correct.) Thirdly, we are to reunite this “we” which seems to have fallen apart. Populism from the very beginning – and not only in America – feeds on resenty. Its “to be or not to be” depends on having an enemy by which it gains identity. Take the populists distant from their enemies and they won't know who they are.
What can be the meaning of Tocqueville for liberals today?
To any extent, yesterday's neglect of liberal elites is liable for today's populist successes. What exactly? Their prideful belief that they know everything; their blind belief in the benevolence of the free economical element; their prometean delusions of the anticipation of installing democracy under any latitude.
But let us not be besides harsh and one-sided about this political trend. There are liberalisms, there is no 1 liberalism. Liberalism is not just Friedrich von Hayek and the imagination of an unfettered marketplace element. It is besides not just John Rawls and his completely disconnected from all references to the tradition or continuity of cultural justice theory. There is besides liberalism in the kind of Alexis de Tocqueville – or although liberal reasoning in the spirit of the author About Democracy in America. I am not saying that this author will find answers to all the problems of our time. But if we want to come out of the current crisis, I think it is hard to have a better guide. So it is worth reading his work again, again.
Jan Tokarski - A historian of ideas. He published, among others, “Did Liberalism die?” (2021) and “In the shadow of disaster. „Encounter», the legislature of Cultural Freedom and Memory of the 20th Century” (2023) and “Tocqueville. Biography of Thought’ (2025).
