equality from a virtue into an uncontrolled passion, unleashing a force all the
more demonic as the traditional mechanisms that once legitimated social
distinctions and social deference disappeared. The resulting excess was anti-
thetical to the spirit of moderation that, at least since Montesquieu, had been
at the heart of political liberalism (Jaume 1997, pp. 544–51). And as only the
state could pursue the impossible degree of equality that was being sought, the
outcome was a centralization of power which threatened democracy itself.
But the convergence between the two works masks very significant differ-
ences. To begin with, though Tocqueville and Hancock share the dialectic that
converts virtue into vice, their methodologies are certainly not the same.
Tocqueville’s analysis built on two broad intellectual foundations. Thefirst,
which applied at the level of societies as a whole, was Montesquieu’s insight
that societies have an underlying coherence that links the nature of a govern-
ment with the crucial mores, norms, and passions it evokes and on which its
operation relies. Drawing on others—including Sismondi, Guizot, and the
Whig historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859) who, writing immediately
before him, renewed the application of Montesquieu’s approach to social
and legal development—Tocqueville used that approach in framing the con-
trast between aristocracy and democracy.
The second, which Tocqueville derived from Pascal (with whom he lived‘a
little every day’(Jaume 2013, p. 158), along with Rousseau and Montesquieu),
is that of the inherent limits on human understanding, which, by its nature,
combines a degree of insight (and hence of intentionality) with an inability to
fully grasp the ultimate consequences of beliefs and actions. In Pascal, and
more broadly in Jansenism, this limit corresponds to the‘hidden God’, whose
masked presence means all human affairs contain an element of mystery and
of indeterminacy, always yielding an outcome which is the result of human
conduct but not of human design. Combined with the then new idea of self-
interest, and the focus on explanations that—by separating the concept of
‘consciousness’from that of‘conscience’—took beliefs and motives into
account, the notion that intentional action led to results which were unin-
tended, and which could shape future results, was at the heart of advances in
social thinking in the eighteenth century, setting the methodological context
in which Tocqueville wrote (Sheehan and Wahrman 2015).
The distinctiveness of Tocqueville’s analysis arises from the way in which he
combines Montesquieu’s macroscopic perspective with an examination, from
the individual standpoint, of intended and unintended consequences. In
looking at outcomes, Tocqueville seeks both to reconcile them to what Mon-
tesquieu would recognize as the core‘principle’or‘virtue’of the social system,
and to explain them in terms of the processes by which individuals come to
act as they do. Tocqueville is, in other words, never satisfied with merely
observing and recounting social behaviour; rather, he invariably tries to
Henry Ergas