Alexis de Tocqueville is most known for the genius of his reflections upon America. Less attention has been given to his involvement in politics. Between 1839 and 1851, Tocqueville served in the legislature of King Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy and those of the short-lived Second Republic. For five months in 1849, he occupied the Quai d’Orsay as France’s foreign minister.
One lesson that Tocqueville learned in these years was the necessity of alliances with people who were not in 100 percent agreement with him, especially if his goal was to inject stability into a politics as unsteady as those of mid-nineteenth-century France. As a legislator and minister, Tocqueville worked with groups ranging from center-left republicans to conservative liberals like himself, as well as monarchists with a practical bent.
There were, however, limits to Tocqueville’s openness to political cooperation. The persistent violence of Jacobins and socialists following the 1848 Revolution, and their hostility to liberal constitutionalism and private property, convinced Tocqueville that the radical left was beyond the political pale. This much is evident from Tocqueville’s outspoken support for the government’s use of the French army to put down the June 1848 Paris insurrection of Jacobins and outright socialists that sought to radicalize the Second Republic. Tocqueville also made his enmity to socialism abundantly clear in a subsequent speech in the Constituent Assembly. Liberty, for Tocqueville, was built upon order—moral, political, and constitutional—not chaos, perpetual upheaval, or efforts to equalize economic conditions.
Yet Tocqueville’s clear-eyed view of the hard left’s destructive impulses did not blind him to the problems of the right. For example, though sympathetic to arguments that a constitutional monarchy might help steady French politics, Tocqueville maintained some political distance from those royalists (including family members) anxious to wind the clock back to a pre-1789 world.
There was, however, a then-newly emergent group on the right towards which Tocqueville adopted a position of polite but unambiguous opposition. If we were to ascribe these individuals a contemporary label, “altright” or even “groyper” would perhaps be the most apt. For like these contemporary far-rightists, such thinkers embraced a highly racialized view of the world. Tocqueville’s response to their arguments is a model worthy of emulation in our time.
From Royalism to Racialism
Arthur de Gobineau is not someone whose name is regularly invoked in contemporary Western political debates. But many of Gobineau’s theories about race foreshadowed some of the twentieth century’s most destructive pathologies, some of which have resurfaced over the past decade.
Born in 1816, Gobineau grew up in a family devoted to the legitimist cause of the Bourbon dynasty. After a childhood marked by parental separation and a descent into poverty, Gobineau tried his hand as a journalist in Paris. Much of his early writing lamented the rise of commercial society as a corrupting force. “Money,” Gobineau lamented, “has become the principle of power and honor … money governs; money salves consciences; money is the criterion for judging the esteem due to men.” Like many “ultras,” Gobineau held the expanding French middle-class in contempt.
Such sentiments were not unusual in hyper-royalist circles. But from the early 1840s onwards, Gobineau’s mind began drifting in distinctly racialist directions. In novels published during this decade, Gobineau made plain his belief that some races—most notably, blond Germanic peoples whom he called “Aryans”—were destined to rule others. He even resurrected mythologies of the French aristocracy as being the descendants of Franks who had conquered the inferior Celts and Gauls back in the fifth century.
This thinking formed the background to Gobineau’s most famous work, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Published in two parts in 1853 and 1855, the book posits that individuals, however talented, were unimportant. For Gobineau, race was everything: it was the driving force of politics, culture, and national destiny. The notion that humans were fundamentally equal qua humans was, Gobineau held, sentimental nonsense.
Tocqueville refused to accord any legitimacy whatsoever to such positions wherever they reared their heads in his time.
Not surprisingly, these ideas translated into deep antagonism to ethnic mixing. Significantly, nineteenth-century America constituted one of Gobineau’s primary targets. The United States, he claimed, was made up of the “human flotsam of all ages.” And Gobineau was not just appalled by any mixing of whites, blacks, and native Americans. He was equally horrified by the mingling of people from different European backgrounds. Any ethnic blending, Gobineau asserted, wherever it occurred, could only produce a fundamentally decadent society.
Politically speaking, Gobineau’s racialist principles led him to favor conspicuously authoritarian governments. Initially, Gobineau dismissed the Second Empire established in France shortly after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’etat of 1851 as a mere facsimile of true monarchy. By the mid-1850s, however, Gobineau was full of praise for Napoleon III’s regime. It exemplified, to his mind, the centralized authority that rulers needed to control unruly populations. The consequences for liberty were, to Gobineau’s mind, irrelevant.
Unscientific and Immoral
Gobineau’s adulation of Napoleon III put him in an entirely different political camp from Tocqueville. The latter never hid his antipathy to the Second Empire’s authoritarianism or the unconstitutional way the regime had come to power.
This clash of views, however, makes it all the more remarkable that Tocqueville had begun a correspondence with Gobineau years earlier in the early 1840s after reading articles that Gobineau had published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. At one point, Tocqueville even secured for Gobineau a job in the foreign ministry. As the late Sir Larry Siedentop observed in his short book on Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America felt “a tug of sympathy” for Gobineau, having also struggled to establish himself as a writer before the publication of Democracy in America’s first volume in 1835.
But from the very beginning of his acquaintance with Gobineau, Tocqueville made clear his firm disapproval of the younger man’s opinions. That especially concerned the racial determinism that steadily pervaded Gobineau’s writings. In a letter penned before Gobineau’s Essay appeared, Tocqueville wrote:
I have never concealed from you that I have a strong prejudice against what seems to be your leading idea which strikes me as belonging, I confess, to that family of materialist doctrines and to be one of its most dangerous members, since it involves the fatality of constitution applied not only to the individual but to those collections of individuals that are called races.
Tocqueville didn’t deny that there were often profound cultural differences between, say, Italians, Germans, Russians, Persians, Algerians, and Mexicans. But the notion that peoples have unchanging aptitudes and even fixed destinies by virtue of their ethnicity was described by Tocqueville as “unprovable.” For one thing, he noted, such claims ignored the hard-to-deny fact that historical changes have many causes, and that sorting out which ones are more important than others is always challenging. Monocausal explanations for political and social trends, Tocqueville thought, were invariably wrong.
This empirical criticism, however, was accompanied by Tocqueville querying Gobineau’s motivations for advancing his thesis of racial determinism. Point-blank, he asked Gobineau:
What possible interest can there be in persuading miserable people living in barbarism, idleness, or slavery that, by virtue of their race, there is nothing that can be done to improve their condition, change their mœurs, or modify their government? Don’t you see that from your doctrine derives naturally all the evils which permanent inequality gives birth to: pride, violence, scorn for one’s fellows, tyranny, and abjection in all its forms?
The unspoken answer to Tocqueville’s question was that Gobineau’s propositions had little to do with science or the pursuit of truth. Instead, they had everything to do with a desire to rationalize serious injustices and deny freedom to millions of people. For as Tocqueville wrote elsewhere, Gobineau’s racial determinism led to “a very great restriction, if not to a complete abolition of human liberty.”
Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”
A Line in the Political Sand
It is not difficult to see the connections between Gobineau’s beliefs and the type of race science that influenced radical ethno-nationalists from the late nineteenth century onwards. Certainly, other proponents of scientific racism, such as the Anglo-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the American anthropologist and lawyer Madison Grant, contributed to these trends. Gobineau, however, was one of the most willing to spell out race science’s horrendous implications for any society in which the essential equality of humans by virtue of the same human nature is considered a sine qua non for liberal constitutional order.
Few proponents of contemporary alt-right opinion, I suspect, have ever heard of Arthur de Gobineau. But the parallels between their attitudes—whether of the explicitly racial variety, or the type which posits that some people are destined to rule everyone else because of some inherent attributes—and core tenets of Gobineau’s ideology are clear.
In Tocqueville’s correspondence with Gobineau, we also find one observation by Tocqueville that is particularly worth re-stating today. “You know,” Tocqueville informed Gobineau, “that I cannot reconcile myself to your system in any way; and my mind is so fixed on this point that the very reasons you put forward to make it acceptable to me strengthen my opposition.”
In short, there was nothing redeemable about Gobineau’s race theories and their consequences for politics because the more Gobineau articulated them, the more Tocqueville recognized that they were marked by an inner logic that was not only empirically false but morally reprehensible. That made Gobineau’s racialist views something that could only stain any institution or political movement that flirted with them.
In his time, Tocqueville refused to accord any legitimacy whatsoever to such positions wherever they reared their heads. He also declined to let individuals advancing or tolerating such ideas off the intellectual and moral hook. In our time, there should be no hesitation on our part to do the same.