3
firm and reliable ground furnished by passion. Building upon the fundamental instinct of
all living beings for self-preservation, Hobbes deduces a series of natural laws—or, more
properly, “conclusions or theorems” that constitute the “true moral philosophy” and
provide the basis for a genuinely scientific understanding of politics (100).
Whatever one might say about the new political science exhibited in
Tocqueville’s works, one would be hard pressed to understand it on the basis of a
mathematical model. Nor is it characterized by an explicit reflection on human nature
that subsequently becomes the basis for deducing a comprehensive teaching about
politics (contra Hobbes 1994, part 1, esp. chap. 13). As a result, Tocqueville’s approach
to the study of politics lacks the systematizing tendencies of Hobbes’s political science.
Indeed, as I hope to make clear, Tocqueville’s political science in some sense defines
itself over against the mathematical, abstract and systematizing tendencies of the new
science of politics that first saw light in the 17
th
century.
The following essay explores the newness of Tocqueville’s political science by
focusing especially on the question of genre. I identify and develop three distinct ways of
describing Tocqueville’s project—artistic, political, and philosophic. I believe there is
merit in approaching Tocqueville’s corpus from each of these perspectives and, taken
together, they bring to light the novel character of Tocqueville’s project as a whole.
I. Tocqueville as Artist
Tocqueville announces at the very beginning of Democracy in America that his
aim is not, or not simply, to present an empirically accurate account of America, but to
use America as a means for exploring an essentially theoretical phenomenon. He writes:
“I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of
Convention