The Conceptual Structure of Democracy

The many subtleties of Schmitt's definition of the political, teleologically linked to the democratic/state pole during the 1920s,Footnote ²¹ cannot be grasped by concentrating only on hostility. In The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt states that everything may become political since the notion of friendship may emerge in any form of grouping, as long as it corresponds to the utmost degree of association.Footnote ²² Thus, the initial friendship has the reduction of pluralisms as a negative condition to the benefit of a single criterion of commitment to the group. The people, gathered around such a criterion, form a coherent national unity, with every nation having “its own concept of nation” and finding “the constitutive characteristics of nationality within itself.”Footnote ²³ According to Schmitt, the people is always a gathered one, a hypostatized people willing to be represented. He uses the expression “political unity” when he refers to the state or the national basis necessary to its survival.Footnote ²⁴

This idea of political unity is no stranger to Tocqueville's thought. Indeed, Tocqueville links good governance—in this case, good democratic governance—to a preset social and political unity. He argues that “the national unity eased the unity of the government and the unity of the government served the national unity.”Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the centralization that accompanied the advent of democracy created a political unity needed for this democracy to develop. He adds that in order to prosper, a nation needs a strong governmental centralization, a kind of centralization that must be understood as the management of general laws.Footnote ²⁶ Furthermore—and the comparison takes on all its meaning at this point—he recognizes that this unity has to be built around common values such as a national identity or a religion. This sense of unity is based not only on common habits but also on opinions, feelings, and common thoughts.Footnote ²⁷ Tocqueville develops the concept of the “point of departure” (idée mère) to emphasize the existence of such historical and cultural elements that condition the evolution of a society.Footnote ²⁸ Individuals are conditioned by the culture in which they evolve and cannot hide from their past—witness the Puritan origins of America, which have to be taken into account to fully grasp the national character of the Americans. On the contrary, if too deep, national diversity is a risk for democracy, since it can become too “painful” to endure the majority rule.Footnote ²⁹ By contrast with Schmitt, on this view the nation is composed of many distinct entities and benefits from the existence of minorities, the nation-state thus being the ideal degree of association necessary to good governance at the time. Yet this belief, shared by our two authors, in the necessity of a substantive identity to form a political society is not conclusive in itself, given that it is not exclusive to these two, nor does it allow us to characterize the uniqueness of each author's thought. It is therefore necessary to deepen our analysis. For both authors, political unity logically precedes the individual:Footnote ³⁰ it is a hypostatized identity, a requisite for the reading of the democratic phenomenon that strictly depends on notions such as homogeneity and equality, as will be seen below.

Carl Schmitt's concept of the state is the “democratic” state. The latter rests on a particular principle of equality involved in the democratic imagination: “Democratic equality [demokratische Gleichheit] is essentially homogeneity [Gleichartigkeit], in particular homogeneity among the people.”Footnote ³¹ In the jurist's reflections, homogeneity can be deducted from equality. Going from one notion to the other is eased by a German wordplay—gleich means “equal” and serves as a prefix to the two substantives, Gleichheit and Gleichartigkeit. Homogeneity then appears as the primary condition of an effective national unity—in this view, the people becomes a nation as soon as it fully acknowledges its political specificity and its will to exist politically. This notion of “substantial” equality between the members of the political body or community consecrates, in the first place, the absence of qualitative differences between governors and governed. According to Schmitt, modern democracy rests on a foundation that reverses the principle of substantial inequality characteristic of the monarchical form of government. It then implies that equality conceptualized as national homogeneity cannot be absolute; democracy does not ignore the concept of the outsider. The demokratische Gleichheit means that only the nationals can be “equal” within the democratic state; nonnationals are thus not invited to participate in public life. Even more, in order to comfort the homogeneity of the people, the democratic effort is held to depend on the “control of foreign entry and expulsion of unwanted foreigners”Footnote ³² which must be understood as the eviction of the “internal enemy.” Democracy would be unimaginable without the continuous and repetitive eviction of the enemy who, by his mere presence, neutralizes the political existence of the people.

It is well known that Tocqueville's democracy is less exclusive and more open to differences than Schmitt's. However, Tocqueville also conceptualized a circle of dependence between equality and homogeneity which is central to his considerations on democracy. But whereas Schmitt sees equality through homogeneity, Tocqueville considers homogeneity a possible consequence of equality originally perceived as the equality of social conditions. Indeed, democracy implies a growing individualism and, whereas the citizens feel more and more particular, they actually become more similar.Footnote ³³ Henceforth, one can witness a growing delegation of the power to define identity to the hands of the central government, as well as a deepening of centralization.Footnote ³⁴ This centralization is in turn responsible for the homogenization of the population and the strengthening of the perception of equality that links citizens together. Tocqueville furthermore argues that this logic of homogenization of the population is applicable to different neighboring nations and that two democratic peoples will inevitably become similar and end up being assimilated.Footnote ³⁵ Even though Tocqueville rarely uses the exact term “homogeneity,” the growing similitude he witnesses within the population is recognized by his interpreters as a process of homogenization of the population—or if not, at least as a deepening uniformity.Footnote ³⁶ Let it be noted that this is not a systematic phenomenon, by contrast with Schmitt's vision.

Conscious perhaps of this resemblance, Schmitt thought that Tocqueville would also have realized that revolutions endangered the homogeneity of the people, the egalitarian aspect of democracy. Indeed, “the situation that Tocqueville understood so well in 1830 … [revealed] its true side, the one of a civil war”Footnote ³⁷ no more than twenty years later. As the historian gives his testimony on the events that shook French society in 1848, he clearly recognizes that “he did not want any revolution.”Footnote ³⁸ However, Schmitt notwithstanding, this antirevolutionary comment is tempered elsewhere in Tocqueville's work. Revolutions in themselves are not to be feared, the author argues, and usually bring more good than bad. Far from fearing for the homogeneity of the population, when Tocqueville criticizes the revolution, he does so for the sake of liberty: “I know that, if a great revolution can build liberty in a country, several successive revolutions make any constant liberty impossible for a long time.”Footnote ³⁹

As stated above, the notion of the domestic enemy is irrelevant in Tocqueville's theory, and he would not recognize national minorities as a threat to democracy. Although he foresees that homogeneity might become the normFootnote ⁴⁰ and that internal conflicts will probably disappear with the development of democracy,Footnote ⁴¹ the presence of difference or minorities within a nation is a necessity even if a deep heterogeneity of the population might lead to a disruption of the democratic game. This is true also of the principles that guide a society. If they appear to be too different, Tocqueville sees nothing more than the collapse of said society: “When a society truly comes to have a mixed government, that is a government equally divided among contrary principles, it enters into revolution and dissolves.”Footnote ⁴² This ambivalence toward homogeneity and need to find a balance between a heterogeneous people that is still unified might explain why Schmitt is able to use part of Tocqueville's considerations in his own depiction of democracy.

One might think that their common use of homogeneity is only a matter of homonymy, an inconsequential use of a similar-sounding concept. What is argued here is that there in fact exists a definite conceptual convergence of their respective understandings of national homogeneity. Although the concept is well known in the literature on Schmitt, it is less obvious in that on Tocqueville, a fact we openly acknowledge. However, we do believe that a certain national homogeneity brought about by growing equality is necessary for Tocqueville's liberty to flourish, if only to ensure political unity. As he argued: “for a confederation to last for a long time, there must be no less homogeneity in the civilization than in the needs of the diverse peoples who compose it.”Footnote ⁴³ Here, Tocqueville explicitly recognizes the necessity of a certain homogeneity for the survival of a confederation, which is a fortiori true for more centralized nations. This ambivalence, one might even say contradiction, toward the national phenomenon in Tocqueville's theory allows certain authors to call him a “nationalist.” Indeed, his work on the colonization of Algeria is particularly relevant in this regard, and it is at the center of Todorov's argument when he states that Tocqueville's nationalism is nothing but the international continuity of his liberalism—a liberalism that rests on the pre-existence of a community willing to ensure its survival even through the principles of “national Greatness” (grandeur nationale).Footnote ⁴⁴ The idea that, in democracy, liberty must rest on specifically political foundations offers the contemporary possibility of a bridge spanning the two opposite traditions as they both care about the future of the concept of the political.

Whereas the French theorist tries to maintain a certain degree of unity within the population in order to protect this political liberty, according to the German jurist “a nationally homogeneous state appears … as something normal.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Given that the nation constitutes the substance of democratic equality, a state lacking this sameness “has an abnormal quality that is a threat to peace.”Footnote ⁴⁶ National homogeneity is the necessary prerequisite to an effective democratic state. Once the state form has been set up, the homogeneity of friendship becomes “democratic equality,” i.e., mainly that of a people aware of its political anchorage. This is so because, in Schmitt's thought, “for the people within the state to attain political existence, there must be some similarity [Gleichartigkeit], some homogeneity [Homogenität] in the people.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The democratic configuration of the state must suppose, on the one hand, a homogeneous nation and signify, on the other hand, the perpetual fight to maintain and preserve the initial sameness.

Schmitt saw in the analytical decoupling of nation and democracy—of national-state sovereignty and popular sovereignty—the precursor of the depoliticizations to come. If the realm of the political fulfills itself in the unity of the nation, which is politically bounded following the enemy's appearance that, in turn, existentially negates what the citizens of a given people could be together, liberal thought is, according to Schmitt, “an entire system of … depoliticalized concepts.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, it sees in the individuals, and in the social plurality that they represent, the ultimate democratic subject, thereby changing the homogeneous nation into a uniform mass. In La Raison des nations, Pierre Manent protests against the fact that we have left “the Tocquevillian period” of democracy, which he characterizes as a continuing movement towards more and more equality.Footnote ⁴⁹ Since the September 11 attacks, we have reached a new democratic circle determined by the weakening of the concept of the “one people” and calling into question the will of the united nation. Yet, according to Manent, the notion of homogeneity allows us to define the nation, since “what differentiates the nation from the political order that preceded it [i.e., the city-state] is that it is a political body whose content is homogeneous or tends toward homogeneity.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This Tocquevillian concern with national homogeneity, which, we have argued, is not very far from Schmitt's, could be the sign of a bridge spanning the two authors' problématiques. Agreeing with the French historian, Manent can quote the two thinkers conscious of the dangers inherent in the democratic age. For Tocqueville, the political is dependent on the participation of the citizens in the collective decisions and their interactions. These two concepts require that the citizens remain partly different, to encourage the survival of minor conflicts and exchanges, and yet similar enough to accept to play the democratic game and sacrifice their private interest to the collective one. The decline of the political in democracy could endanger the liberty of persons, according to Tocqueville, whereas for Schmitt, this decline of the political would, on the contrary, contribute to the arrival of the individuals' liberty.

Thinking Borders in Democratic Times: Against the French Revolution's Legacy?

If, according to Schmitt, Tocqueville sits at the top of the class of historians, it is mainly owing to his “great prognosis [große Prognose] that can be found at the end of the first volume of his Démocratie en Amérique”Footnote ⁵¹ and that, according to Schmitt, he brilliantly formulated. Ahead of his time, in Schmitt's view, the French historian anticipated the globe's long march toward a centralized and democratized humanity: “Tocqueville's prognosis means that humanity will inescapably and uncontrollably continue on the road it has been following for a long time towards centralization and democratization.”Footnote ⁵² Not only did he predict this general trend, Tocqueville also designated the concrete historical powers capable of sustaining and imposing such a previously unseen development. In other words, Schmitt praises the thinker who sensed, before anyone else, the collapse of Europe and the emergence of two new powers: “The most astonishing part is that the French historian points together and in a concrete way the two new powers not yet industrialized, America and Russia. Two ascending giants, both marked by the European Spirit without being European, will come across each other above the borders and the head of little Europe.”Footnote ⁵³ The German thinker is categorical: Tocqueville was the first author to foresee the birth of the two new global powers and that the Russian-American junction in the European territory meant the democratic unification of humanity.

After 1945, Schmitt maintains that the opposition between American liberalism and Soviet communism is nothing but a façade. He even understood the Cold War as an “American-Soviet pax.” The USSR mainly tried to agree with this new American empire which was implementing the unification of the world, the Menschheitstaat. In Schmitt's opinion, there is no denying that people are arrayed according to the determining distinction between friend and enemy, thereby shaping the globe into a plurality, a pluriversum of states. Humanity is therefore unfit to be a rigorous criterion of association. “The political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In order to unify the world, the United States is in his view embracing a new humanitarian ideology resembling the use of the concept of humanity that is particularly convenient to imperialistic expansions. Besides, he also believes that the Russian revolutionary war, which undermined foreign governments and tried to subvert the social order of other states, was not so far distant from this will to unify a world, this will that resents state sovereignty,—further corroborating Tocqueville's brilliant intuition.

Tocqueville also criticizes the idea of a universal state. He knows that the emergence of a global state is possible and would be the result of a widespread democracy.Footnote ⁵⁵ “The Middle Ages was a time of division. … Nowadays, a contrary movement can be felt, the peoples seem to walk toward unity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ He nevertheless fears such a development, as Schmitt also would more than a century later. “It can be said that nothing is so contrary to the well-being and the liberty of men than great empires”Footnote ⁵⁷ since “the legislator must give the laws a uniform character unrepresentative of the diversity of places and mores.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, empires would endanger the liberty and the diversity of the global society. However, Tocqueville underlines three factors that will naturally hinder the realization of such a growing similitude within the populations: nationalism,Footnote ⁵⁹ the survival of certain national characteristics,Footnote ⁶⁰ and the growing weakness of the nations;Footnote ⁶¹ as he argues, “in the vast complication of human laws … extreme liberty sometimes corrects the abuses of liberty, and … extreme democracy obviates the dangers of democracy.”Footnote ⁶² As in Schmitt's post-1945 core reflections, humanity is not, for Tocqueville, a desirable criterion of association—not because humanity is by nature apolitical but because such a society would lead to the end of the political via an excessive homogenization of populations.

Tocqueville's belief in the fact that, for the reasons mentioned above, humanity will not unite seems strange to Schmitt. Could it be that Schmitt, purposefully or not, misread the French theorist? The famous prognosis reads:

Whereas Schmitt concentrates his argumentation around the last sentence of Tocqueville's argument, one can clearly see that Tocqueville is less engaged than Schmitt considers him to be. Schmitt uses this paragraph to explain something that happened long after Tocqueville's death: his interpretation is colored by the Cold War. And even though the French philosopher had envisaged a universal unification, this example is not the most relevant to argue for it, and must be put into perspective. Tocqueville talks about two growing peoples (in terms of geography and ideology) which assimilate individuals. These two peoples are in no way presented as hiding a common agenda or as symbols of a violent conflict to come, as Schmitt suggests.

The French philosopher Paul Janet believed that Tocqueville was one of the free spirits “whose name has always been growing and whose importance is more and more appreciated, since actual facts have confirmed some of his gravest predictions.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Schmitt used the 1913 edition of Janet's book, and one can now imagine how his reading of the nineteenth-century historian was so captivated by a visionary Tocqueville. Yet according to Schmitt, the description Tocqueville gives of America in his magnum opus, and especially of the country's diplomacy, is not only partially void today but was never actually true. In his shorthand notes, Schmitt defends the idea that “in reality, nothing remains”Footnote ⁶⁵ of Tocqueville's sociological reports, which were only the illustration of his prejudices. “Something was right with regard to America, but not to democracy; something else in reference to diplomacy in general but not to America.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In spite of this, Schmitt still considered the historian a “good observer” whose fair sense excused the inaccuracy of his a priori sociological descriptions. What matters is that he managed to get away from the tainted visions of the time and thus to predict the Russian-American encounter over the head of Europe as well as the consequent unification of humanity around democratic values. Schmitt uses an eloquent comparison to qualify De la Démocratie en Amérique: “This book is more artistic and impressive, just as a painting can give a better representation of a landscape than a topographic map.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The Tocquevillian sense of observation seemed far more grandiose than all the “abstract, too rooted in the time and lacking in grand vision”Footnote ⁶⁸ predictions of his contemporaries, especially when this meant dealing with America's destiny to impose democracy on the old Continent weakened by the war and to the benefit of a soon-to-be unified humanity.

If Tocqueville's description of America was a failure, it was because his intentions lay elsewhere. Indeed, according to Carl Schmitt, De la Démocratie en Amérique was less a sociopolitical study than an attempt at edification. “He was in America and was writing on America. But his heart was in France and the thought of France, never absent from him, unconsciously colored every picture he drew.”Footnote ⁶⁹ By depicting democracy and not an accurate image of America, Tocqueville wanted to warn France against the dangers of the democracy that he clearly comprehended. Contrary to most historians, he did not sink into the historicism of the time because he was defeated, or so Schmitt argues. Indeed, the author of The Concept of the Political thought that fundamental historical knowledge was only accessible to those who experienced defeat,Footnote ⁷⁰ and Schmitt liked to say that Tocqueville “belonged to the social class which was defeated by the 1789 French Revolution.”Footnote ⁷¹ That is also why he understood that the values born from the Revolution would be the foundation on which the unification of the humanity would soon stand.

In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Schmitt points out, evoking Tocqueville, that “there were obviously no more dikes since 1789” against “the wave of democracy.”Footnote ⁷² Yet, via biased descriptions, Tocqueville tried to exhort the French people to reinstate its national roots and its former model of social organization, dismantled after the events of 1789. This return to a prerevolutionary situation rested on a serious warning, “a warning addressed to France, so that she would endow a moral and religious base for her national life and rebuild the social edifice overthrown by the Revolution.”Footnote ⁷³ If Carl Schmitt is to be believed, this was the core idea of the two volumes the French aristocrat dedicated to America. Tocqueville is described as a counterrevolutionary.

In his critique of political universalism, the conservative jurist more or less explicitly placed himself on Tocqueville's path, at least on the path he believed he understood. Tocqueville's aversion toward the values inherent in the 1789 Revolution are understood as a plea for a global plurality, a pluriversum of entities reconverted to the national-life doctrine. The Schmittian understanding of the Cold War thereby seemed to feed into Tocqueville's famous prediction, as well as the normative consideration that accompanied the prognosis. The criticism of empire gently recalls Schmitt's determined opposition to the coming unification of the world implied by the “American-Soviet pax.” Besides, according to Schmitt's reasoning, the guarantee of a “pluriverse” openly results from the coexistence of national homogeneous entities, dedicated to democratic equality. This conceptual chain partly explains the admiration that the conservative theorist held for the liberal historian of the nineteenth century. However, let us note that, if Tocqueville speaks out against a unitary worldwide political model that favors institutional uniformity at the expense of a necessary complexity, Schmitt goes further in this line of thought and condemns any universal morality, which can depoliticize plural areas of reference. He indeed ascribes all evils to the universalistic logic that he sees as the substitution of politics with morality. By invoking humanity in the hope of defeating their opponents, the dominant powers push those adversaries back away from the law and from the human species. This considerably hinders the friend-enemy distinction, which is itself the specific criterion of the political.

If Schmitt uses Tocqueville to criticize the growing homogeneity of humanity, he may perhaps have twisted the Frenchman's words. Indeed, a “pluriverse,” even if Tocqueville does not obviously use the word, is necessary for diversity and liberty to survive and not to protect democratic equality per se. Schmitt wrote in 1944: “For Tocqueville, the 1789 revolution was the symptom of a process of irresistible centralization, which would serve all facets of the state, all political parties, and all ideologies, and would continue unabated.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Put back into the original context of Tocqueville's Souvenirs—i.e., the events of 1848 in France—this sentence specifically refers to the crises following the French Revolution and cannot be considered a criticism of the 1789 Revolution, despite what Schmitt implies.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even if Tocqueville did interpret the Revolution as the continuation, in France, of the phenomenon of centralization—a major theme of L'Ancien régime et la révolution—he is misunderstood on a certain point by the German philosopher who associates Tocqueville with counterrevolutionary thinkers. Schmitt holds that the French aristocrat was de facto defeated by the Revolution and therefore became a critic of it. However, Tocqueville is conscious that the Revolution was inevitable or “heaven-sent” (providentielle)Footnote ⁷⁶ and that it is useless to regret the ancien régime. He also makes it clear that “what he fears the most for the generations to come is not the revolution”Footnote ⁷⁷ but the stillness of a society deprived of such a way to implement new ideas—an immobile society where the absence of diversity, conflicts, and participation prevents any political evolution and isolates the citizens from the political sphere. Behind Schmitt's philological deficiencies appears the shared idea that a united humanity would entail the loss of political sense.

A Common Critique of Individualism and Popular Sovereignty

Tendencies to interfere with and criminalize the aggressor will inevitably accompany the advent of democracy: “Naturally,” Schmitt writes, “no democratic system can escape this original fall [Sündenfall]. The platform of democratic equality is nothing but the springboard to a new inequality. Here lies Tocqueville's personal anguish [die eigentliche Angst Tocquevilles].”Footnote ⁷⁸ The “liberal-democratic” equality would jeopardize the real equality, the one that concerns the nationals and that should characterize democracy. Any political orientation tended to appropriate democracy since the latter had no political substance; it was just a simple form of organization. However, by trying to fill it with content, the liberal bourgeoisie tried to move it from the political field to the economic one. “Truth to be told, it meant an essential transformation of the notion of democracy, since political points of view cannot be translated [übertragen] into economic relationships as long as contractual liberty and private law leads economy.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As soon as it stands on private law, democracy simply ceases to be political because the form it now composes strongly differs from the content of authority and publicity.

The socioeconomic groups that are willing to adopt a “democratic” organization can form a common subject—a “people”—only in an eminently abstract way. Concretely, they represent essentially heterogeneous masses. The sum of individual wills is unable to attain the political expression that needs the private interests of groups or the individual to disappear and merge with the Whole. Schmitt wonders if “a specific political idea can be derived from the pure and consequential concept of individualistic liberalism.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Of course, he opts for a negative answer. Democracy, according to Schmitt, has nothing to do with individualism and pluralism; it is first and foremost national homogeneity. Also, Schmitt argues that the bourgeois legal state, which ensures individual liberties, frames the existence of a plural people and thus endorses the borders of the antidemocratic. The acknowledgment of the primacy of the individual, inherent in liberalism, would change citizens into consumers. Schmitt maintains that nationals, isolated in their polling booth—and thereby dissociated from the political community—necessarily express personal belief. Individual liberties are totally opposed to what individuals are publicly, i.e., citizens, and liberal rights only estrange citizens from their political roots.

Schmitt clearly realized that Tocqueville was observing a comparable phenomenon in the nineteenth century. The French thinker's critique of individualism is as virulent as Schmitt's.Footnote ⁸¹ He does not speak of polling booths, but makes his now famous comparison with a broken chain.Footnote ⁸² However, this absence of hierarchy holds a different meaning for Tocqueville. These individuals are now adopting points of view because they no longer hold a predetermined place in society and because “they no longer expect anything from anyone.”Footnote ⁸³ Furthermore, by submitting themselves to the omnipotence of the majority, to the corrupted power of the popular sovereignty, the individuals enslave themselves, lose any will to participate in public life and even “renounce their rights as citizens.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Besides, a society driven by a frantic search for materialistic well-being, a society of consumers as Schmitt would say, would be Tocqueville's feared society; a society where materialism softens individuals. By way of his famous concepts of political participation and civil society, the French theorist still believes that the citizens can act as a group, especially through their belonging to associations, and this recalls his ambiguous view of homogeneity discussed above. In addition, whereas Schmitt blames liberty, Tocqueville blames equality and its deconstructive effect on the population, and counts upon “self-interest rightly understood” (l'intérêt bien entendu) to counter this excessive equality. This specific form of interest, a concept alien to Schmitt, implies that individuals combine “their well-being with their co-citizens”Footnote ⁸⁵ through an enlightened interest that is “amongst all other philosophical theories, the most appropriate to the needs of the man of the time,”Footnote ⁸⁶ i.e., the democratic man.

Thus, Tocqueville and Schmitt share a common critique of individualism which, according to them, can depoliticize democracy, a similarity fully acknowledged by Schmitt in his postwar diary notes when he talks about Tocqueville's “personal anguish.” Nevertheless, their normative divergence with regards to the meaning and the role to give to equality in the democratic apparatus constitutes a serious stumbling block. Tocqueville's concept of democracy needs both liberty and equality to be sustained.Footnote ⁸⁷ Schmitt, by contrast, applies himself to demonstrating that true democracy has no liberal substance, so much is it opposed to the theoretical alternative that would lead to the inevitable atomization of a homogeneous people. Even if Tocqueville detected the dangers inherent in democratic individualism, he probably overlooked that by giving liberty a predominant place he destabilized the effectiveness of representation, that is, the process of identification characteristic of a democratic regime that should aim at the perfect identity between the governor and the governed. In his posthumous notes, Schmitt estimates that the great historian “has failed to grasp the substantial identity of the American people,”Footnote ⁸⁸ an obvious consequence of his liberalism.

Schmitt surprisingly failed to see that Tocqueville once more shared some of his interpretations of society, or at least, he failed to recognize that the French theorist recognized the limits of liberalism. Tocqueville did not grasp the substantial identity of the American people for the simple reason that, according to him, it had no common identity yet. The American federation rested at the time on the states' interests and was thus unstable. He wrote: “The inhabitants of the United States speak a lot about their love for their fatherland; I admit that I do not trust this patriotism of reflection that is based on interest and that interest, by changing of object, can destroy.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Interests can change, evolve, and even disappear. Tocqueville warns his readers against associations gathering too many different interests and, at the same time, against states too heterogeneous. To be considered a nation, a political association needs more than common laws: “society can exist only when a great number of men consider a great number of things in the same light, when they hold the same opinions upon many subjects, and when the same occurrences suggest the same thoughts and impressions to their minds.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Yes, Tocqueville was close to the liberal movement and did not adopt a strictly substantial vision of identity, but he still offers some limits to the liberal theory. Providence “has, to be sure, traced around each man a preordained circle [un cercle fatal] from which he cannot escape; but within those vast limits, man is powerful and free; the same goes for the peoples.”Footnote ⁹¹ Here, Tocqueville offers a clear limitation to a form of liberal view stating that everyone disposes of a complete free will and can discover their own individuality out of pure rationality. Everyone is limited by Providence and “points of departure” but this circle also appears as the guarantee that liberty can prosper, undeniably linking the survival of this liberty to the survival of the political. Nevertheless, popular sovereignty must have some limits: it is the materialization of the equalization of conditions, but it can also turn into a “tyranny of the majority.” The minorities are thus crushed under the power of the majority which is, in the end, the sovereign. For both authors—and for different reasons—the vertical structure of sovereignty, which goes from top to bottom, prevents the people from being the effective holder of power even though they are its origin.

According to Schmitt, the people are not ultimately sovereign in the strict sense of the word. More precisely, the power comes from them, in the sense that they express the voluntas that their representative will politically rationalizes with the help of decisions. Although Schmitt seems to contest the idea of the “tyranny of equality,”Footnote ⁹² it must be recognized that he can be ambivalent since he fears, more than anything else, the tyranny of the people, the affirmation of the constituent power of the people toward the constituted powers arguing for a limited version of popular sovereignty. For him, the people is evil by nature. It is cursed by the seal of the original corruption, and thus Schmitt legitimates the necessity of a government and the putting into perspective of popular sovereignty. For the Catholic Carl Schmitt, men were created in God's image, but it does not mean that they are good by nature. Submitted to the tragedy of their inclinations, they could not preserve their original purity. The affirmation of an anthropological pessimism constitutes the starting point of his youthful political-philosophical reasoning, since “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”Footnote ⁹³

In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt ends his chapter on the anthropological foundation of political theories with a reference to Tocqueville. “The aristocratic society in France before the Revolution of 1789 sentimentalized ‘man who is by nature good’ and the virtue of the masses.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The French historian described this rather strange situation with his characteristic eloquence and political sense: at the time, no one saw the Revolution coming. Schmitt is amazed, and so is Tocqueville, “to see the security and unsuspiciousness with which these privileged people spoke of the goodness, mildness, and innocence of the people when 1793 was already upon them—spectacle ridicule et terrible.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Using Tocqueville's words, Schmitt implies that, like counterrevolutionary thinkers, the French author shared a belief of the dangerousness of the people. The convergence of the two authors, however, stops here on that topic. As a Christian, “what he [Tocqueville] kept from the belief of his fathers given to him by baptism and tradition, he lost by succumbing to the scientific agnosticism of his time.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Schmitt holds that Tocqueville could not perceive that the European continent, downgraded by America and Russia, could recover its former glory if it was envisaged from the neotestamentary figure of the Katechon, which is, according to St. Paul, the force that holds off the violence of the Antichrist and ensures the continuity of history. By designating the enemy of the European “great space” (Großraum), the imperial center would ensure history's political-dialectical movement. It assures the durability of history and postpones the advent of the unification of the world undertaken by the American liberal power identified with the Antichrist. Liberal universalism would resort to any possible technical means to pursue the adversary of universal friendship, precipitating the end of the current eon. Tocqueville knew no Katechon, he “lacked the support of sacred history to preserve his historical idea of Europe from despair.”Footnote ⁹⁷ He was of course Catholic, affirms Schmitt, but his liberalism prevented him from seeing in this political doctrine, carried by the Americans, the historical incarnation of the Antichrist.Footnote ⁹⁸

André Doremus wrote about the presence of a potential Katechon in Tocqueville's view of history and argued that Schmitt was a bit too severe in his analysis. “A quick reading of Tocqueville's work can give the impression that Schmitt is unfair when he says Tocqueville had no Katechon.”Footnote ⁹⁹ As we have argued, Tocqueville does underline factors that would hinder the development of a worldwide humanity. However, whether such a proposition constitutes a Katechon or not, Schmitt misinterprets Tocqueville when he affirms that the latter is afraid of the people. He does fear the power of the masses and especially through the tyranny of the majority,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ but he has faith in individuals. James Schleifer shows how the French writer who initially thought that the most important causes of human behavior were the laws reconsidered his position after realizing that such a conclusion left no place to the willpower of individuals.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He later illustrates this argument with a quote from Tocqueville's correspondence with his friend Gustave de Beaumont: “One must not disdain man.”Footnote ¹⁰² Despite all of this, Schmitt seems to believe that for the nineteenth-century author, the people on its way to a certain “gentrification” (embourgeoisement) are a “troupeau d'animaux industrieux et timides.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Schmitt confirms Tocqueville's dark interpretation of the democratic age and tries to fix it, at first, by means of his theory of the “total state,” which appears to be “a way to curb the slow and definite evolution of society toward that kind of state that Tocqueville refers to as ‘democratic despotism’ and to which he attached administrative centralization”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ as well as the tyranny of the majority.

The evils of democracy are “the cause of the contemporary ‘total state,’”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ meaning a state quantitatively total which postulates the identity of the state and the society, and which worms its way into every aspect of human life.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ By politicizing the totality of every social relation, this kind of state tends to administer all aspects of economic and social life; it is nothing more than “a new form of political and social despotism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Tocqueville believed that this “democratic despotism” should be stopped by the stimulation of civil society, a remedy strongly condemned by Schmitt. In spite of all this, the situation decried by the German jurist echoes the despotic power described by Tocqueville, which, admittedly, does not destroy the existence of persons but hinders, suppresses, and deadens the people's minds until they become the slaves of an omnipotent government. On the other hand, Tocqueville recommended the return of the citizens to the political sphere, back in this very world they fled from, arguing that “life is neither a pleasure nor a pain, but a grave affair that we are burdened with and that we must fulfill with honor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ These words cannot but recall the “political existentialism” dear to Carl Schmitt, who saw in apolitical and even antipolitical doctrines a definite lack of seriousness in the existence that can only be assumed through the concept of the political.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Conclusion: A Shared Frame Drawn from the Theological-Political?

Through the use of key questions that are a priori opposed, located at two extreme poles of a fundamental problem of political theory, Schmitt and Tocqueville answer in their own way the concerns raised by the limits of the political in a democratic regime; or more precisely, the question whether the democratic phenomenon would provoke a dialectical self-dissolution of the political or not. One could imagine a point where their governing questions merge and which can be identified as the fear of depoliticization. Indeed, if the French historian worries about the preservation of liberty in a context of equality, he does not fail to underline that the survival of liberty depends on the survival of the political. Their respective key questions could be reformulated as a common one, for instance, how to avoid the reduction of the citizen to a simple consumer? How to save the political dimension of existence? Arguing from distant and diverging theoretical contexts, the two authors diagnose the difficulties that the political faces in remaining effective in democratic times; they both try to save what can be saved, developing on the way a kind of shared political soteriology aware of the potential consumerist degradation of the citizen. Even if he willfully distorts the words of the great Frenchman, Carl Schmitt obviously understood this convergence of problématiques which links him to the “greatest historian of the nineteenth century.”

This article illustrates that the irreducible opposition between liberalism and antiliberalism opens up to the circulation of common problématiques of ideologically different approaches even though the conceptual systematics of their main representatives cannot be confused. The idea stressed by Manent and other intellectuals close to Aron, namely, that the existence of human liberty is dependent on the survival of specifically political foundations in democratic times and that the dangers threatening those foundations are to be banned, validates the possibility of a shared problematic order without entailing the existence of a substantial connection. Whereas Schmitt sees the concept of the political as the reduction of pluralism to the benefit of a single criterion of national belonging, Tocqueville maintains that the political emerges out of minor conflicts that enliven the pluralistic civil society. While they share the fear of depoliticization carried by modern democracy, they remain at two extreme poles of a common problematic spectrum. Thus, they can only offer opposite solutions to repoliticize the threatened spaces: for Schmitt, building a strong state whose power grows out of new means of action on opinion; for Tocqueville, acting on the mores and the institutions, favoring associations and the decentralization of power.

In conclusion, this common frame could be traced back to a theological-political teaching inspired by a certain Augustinianism present in the two authors' thought. Indeed, their vision of society as the continuity of the premodern era is built on the necessity of a system of a religious nature (civil or not) able to sustain the existence of the political.

The first sentence of the third chapter of Political Theology I is famous for articulating the Schmittian theorem of secularization: “All the pregnant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Searching within modernity for what could be seen as borrowed from the ancient era, Schmitt denied its newness. For the Westphalian jurist, modern political conceptuality has inherited the structure of the theological-religious sphere. The modern age could not affirm itself on the strength of its own resources, so that from a structural point of view it undeniably depends on theological conceptuality.Footnote ¹¹¹ Although the Schmittian reading of Tocqueville shows that the jurist considers liberal rights as emanating from the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the determining categories of public law are in Schmitt's thought indebted to notions coming from the premodern era, themselves driven by theological or metaphysical ideas. While worrying about Krabbe and Kelsen's immanentism, the German jurist refers to Tocqueville, who would not have denied the metaphysical origin of the political sphere. “In his painting of the American democracy,” says Schmitt, “Tocqueville still declared that within democratic thought, the people glides above the life of the entire state like God above the world: as the causes and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns.”Footnote ¹¹² The autonomous political sphere is seen by Schmitt as a true “gift from God,” as a providential gift and “not an accidental” one, thanks to divine grace.Footnote ¹¹³ Men who have lost their Edenic perfection are regrouped into categories and the world can be at best political. God manifests himself to man by sending him hostility, the specific criterion of the political, as his pardon on earth. Following the appearance of the enemy, individuals who feel existentially threatened entrench themselves under the protection of the state which is able to defend them and domesticate their corrupted nature. Carl Schmitt is actually located on the borders of a radical Augustinianism of Lutheran or Pascalian tradition. Because men are by nature evil, they need to be governed. The Adamic sin is at the origin of the state (without which men will tear each other apart in the state of nature), an Augustinian theme par excellence. As the Bishop of Hippo would have said, the state represents the remedium peccati—the remedy to the dark fate of humanity.

Tocqueville would agree with Schmitt's thesis that modernity is not the result of drastic changes but rather the continuity of the premodern era. “Everything that the Revolution achieved would have been done without it; it was a violent and quick process thanks to which the political state was adapted to the social state, facts to ideas, and laws to mores.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Furthermore, Schmitt rightly underlines the comparison that Tocqueville draws between the people and God. Indeed, he does compare the people to God in his chapter dedicated to popular sovereignty, saying that “the people rules over the American political world just as God over the Universe.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In a letter to his cousin and confidant Louis de Kergolay, Tocqueville cites Pascal as one of his “three main sources of inspiration.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ On the basis of his understanding of Pascal, he maintains that men cannot understand and know themselves based on their own experience; this weakness means that democratic man becomes prisoner of his own idea of “indefinite perfectibility.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Men are not gods—democracy cannot be thought on this premise. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of the word “Providence” when talking about the inevitability of the advent of democracy is not innocent.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Authors such as Joshua Mitchell and Lucien Jaume have explored the theological-political side of Tocqueville's analyses. Whereas Mitchell clearly links Tocqueville to the Augustinian thought via a common interpretation of an irrational or immoderate man erring between two extreme ways of life (a self-enclosed one on one side and a restive one on the other),Footnote ¹¹⁹ Jaume ingeniously studies the recurrence of a religious vocabulary in Tocqueville's work. He especially concentrates his analysis on the word dépôt when dealing with the democratic authority which holds a significant meaning in the nineteenth-century historian's argumentation. On three occasions, Tocqueville uses the word and always with reference to religion, thereby evoking the emergence of a new civil religion, or so Jaume argues. Indeed, Jaume believes that the great historian was invoking a religious vocabulary so as to reinforce the idea that democracy, and in this particular case public opinion, is a new God, a new religion.Footnote ¹²⁰ Although Tocqueville's Augustinianism or Pascalism is subject to debate,Footnote ¹²¹ his use of a religious lexicon as well as his belief in certain acts of Providence bears witness to the fact that the French aristocrat anchors his political observations in a theological perspective.

Given that, according to the two thinkers, the state-democratic form is of a providential nature and that the post-1789 conceptuality seems to maintain the essential aspects of the theological systematicity (the sovereign acting as God, from the king to the people), it would not be thoughtless to venture that their respective understandings of democracy share a common discursive pattern. Still tainted by their original traces and structurality, the concepts participating in the definition of the democratic phenomenon can only adopt a corresponding scheme. However, one must keep in mind that Tocqueville also confided in his cousin that man is neither good nor evil, but that it is his duty to find a balance between these two extremes, underlining once more the faith he places in individuals and their free willFootnote ¹²²—and thereby confirming the insuperable difference that exists between himself and Carl Schmitt.