the palpable and the particular, about individual people, places and problems’
(Meaney 1985, p. 11), more like a witness giving evidence about what hap-
pened than‘as a judge delivering a verdict from which there is no appeal’(Roe
1978, p. 131).
5.5 Democracy under God
There is, however, a further difference, betweenDemocracy in Americaand
Australiawhich is both substantive and methodological. Having set out the
main forces at work in Australian democracy, Hancock has relatively little to
say about limiting principles: that is, about factors that explain why tenden-
cies go as far as they do, but not further. Indeed, readingAustralia, one would
expect every process to be pushed to extremes. In effect, Hancock empha-
sized that:
The tendencies of the age have always worked rapidly in Australia, for they have
worked over a smooth surface where the past has left no historic obstacles to divert
them or to dam them back. (Hancock 1930, p. 126)Tocqueville too was well aware of the risks that the absence of inherited
obstacles created in new societies, and he graphically depicted the future to
which those societies might tend; but he also identified factors that could
hinder, if they were unlikely to entirely suppress, democracy’s inherent
pathologies.
Some of those factors were institutional: the‘schools of democracy’he saw
in the proliferation of voluntary associations, in town hall meetings, in the
prevalence of jury trials. But no counterweight was of greater importance than
‘mores’, a term by which he meant not only the
habits of the heart, but also...the various notions that men possess,...the diverse
opinions that are current among them, and...the whole range of ideas that shape
habits of mind. Thus I use the word to refer to the whole moral and intellectual
state of a people’(DA, I.2.ix).Indeed, so crucial were mores to Tocqueville that he considered demonstrating
their significance his‘principal goal’.(DA, I.2.ix) And central to mores was religion.
It would be fair to say that Tocqueville’s discussion of religion inDemocracy
in Americais far removed from the religious reality of the Jacksonian era.
Although he was touring America in the midst of the political fallout from
the Second Great Awakening, he‘hardly seemed to take notice’; and while he
claimed religion had been kept out of politics, vehement evangelical Christian
crusades were underway which led opponents to complain about the
‘Christian party in politics’(Heclo et al. 2007, p. 19, and, on the Second Great
Henry Ergas