times of equality’(DA, I.1.v), religion prospersbecauseit is socially useful. That
would, however, be entirely incorrect. After all, democracy did not need
religion: on the contrary, Tocqueville regarded it as an irresistible—indeed,
‘providential’—force. Nor did religion need democracy: rather, Tocqueville
saw the search for faith as man’s most enduring feature, and—much as he
disagreed with de Maistre’s ultramontanism—he had no difficulty in repeat-
ing de Maistre’s contention that man needs beliefs and craves dogmas.
Instead, if religionflourished, it was not because it served democracy but
because democracy served it, creating propitious conditions for spiritual devel-
opment; and, placed in those conditions, religion thrived not by helping
democracy but by helping man—as Hugh Heclo puts it, for Tocqueville,‘The
value of religion is not just that it is useful to democracy; it is useful to
democratic man because it teaches truths about the human condition’
(Heclo et al. 2007, p. 17). Moreover, as democracy relies so heavily on self-
interest, which religion helps inform and transform, it serves democratic man
all the more. And by strengthening the family, religion creates the environ-
ment in which democracy’s‘softening’of mores can be transmitted from
generation to generation.^5
In short, in Tocqueville’s account, democracy might not erect impermeable
bulwarks against its own worst vices but it did cultivate stout defences of
practices, institutions, and beliefs. Indeed, the fundamental—and perhaps
most important—question about democracy was whether those defences
could hold over time, or whether, as democracy matured, growing apathy
would make them succumb to the new form of despotism discussed in
section 5.2.
In contrast, Hancock does not pay much attention to forces that might
blunt or discipline the excesses of Australian democracy. That omission is all
the more striking because Tocqueville’s list of institutions protecting democ-
racy should have seemed directly relevant. Voluntary associations, for
example, had proliferated from colonial times onwards (Davison 1978,
p. 98),^6 and, as of the end of the nineteenth century, there was a strong
movement in favour of activist local government and town planning
(Larcombe 1976). Even more important was religion, which had long been a
vigorous protagonist both in daily life and in the political and social contro-
versies of the day, with its role becoming more pronounced with the sectarian
conflict that followed the conscription referendums and the divisions over
(^5) On the crucial role of the family and more broadly of the laity in early nineteenth-century
French liberal Catholicism, a theme which echoes loudly inDemocracy in Americaand is
interwoven with Tocqueville 6 ’s discussion of religion, see Harrison 2014.
The widespread formation of returned soldiers’leagues during and after the First World War
made associations an even more powerful force in social and political life (Crotty 2010, pp. 170–1).
Henry Ergas