romanticism. Adding to the differences, while Tocqueville was intimately
involved in the turbulent political life of post-revolutionary France, Hancock
was always an academic, albeit one with many links to the administrative
and political elites guiding the British Empire as it evolved into the Common-
wealth of Nations.
Stark as those contrasts are, there are, however, also important similarities.
Both considered their subject from the perspective of an outsider—
Tocqueville as a visitor to what was then an exotic land, Hancock as an
expatriate briefly and unhappily repatriated to Australia between lengthy
periods in the UK. Both were very young: Tocqueville was 30 when thefirst
volume ofDemocracy in Americaappeared; whenAustraliawas published,
Hancock was 32. Both intended their works to address and help form opinion
on the crucial issues of the day. Both had an underlying commitment to
liberalism, albeit (to adopt Oakeshott’sfine phrase) not as‘a creed or a doc-
trine but a disposition’, and with some hesitations, notably about its applic-
ability in non-European societies (on Tocqueville and the colonies see Pitts
2005, pp. 165–239; on Hancock, see Low 2001, pp. 58–83 and Dubow and
Marks 2001, pp. 149–79). And both were members of generations that faced
anguishing doubts in the wake of traumatic events.
It is always true that, as Karl Mannheim put it,‘age separates in an existen-
tial way due to the temporality of experience’,defining generations, each with
its own shared beliefs, values, habits, and attitudes (Mannheim 1952, p. 288).
But a vast literature suggests generational effects were especially strong for the
intellectual cohorts who came to maturity after the upheavals of the French
Revolution, on the one hand, and the First World War on the other (Wohl
1979; Spitzer 1987). It is worth spending a few moments on each of those
generations in turn.
Tocqueville was only slightly younger than the group commonly referred to
as‘the generation of 1820’, which included such distinguishedfigures as
Adolphe Thiers, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, and Honoré de Balzac; and his
trajectory intersected with theirs, as did the formation of his world view. His
generation, it might fairly be said, was one of thefirst to have a consciousness
of itself as a generation: a consciousness most clearly expressed by Alfred de
Musset in his 1836 autobiographical novel,La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle.
His contemporaries did not have first-hand memories of the Revolution,
Musset wrote, but they reached adolescence in the midst of a‘world in
ruins’. Left, after the collapse of the Revolution and then of the empire, with
no clear path from the horrors their parents had lived through to the future
they desired, they were gripped by what Musset famously described as the
mal de siècle, a despair at being cast on‘a troubled seafilled with wreckage...
where one cannot know whether at each step, one treads on living matter or
dead refuse’.
Tocqueville, Hancock, and the Sense of History