[This article is adapted from the final chapter of Raico’s book The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. The book was written as his PhD dissertation, under the direction of F.A. Hayek, and later published by the Mises Institute.]
Among the most interesting pages of Tocqueville’s little masterpiece, L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, are those which he devotes to liberal thought in the decades preceding 1789. He takes the Physiocrats as the group of Enlightenment reformers who most genuinely reflect the underlying principles and tendencies of the age, and passes in review their notions on government and society. Tocqueville notes that they were enemies of institutional limitations on governmental power, trusting to the education of the people in Physiocratic principles to act as an adequate replacement for “solid political guarantees of the nation’s freedom.” Most interesting is the connection which Tocqueville draws between these writers and the early socialists, particularly in regard to their admiration of a powerful government in the hands of enlightened reformers aiming at the conscious and scientific restructuring of society and even of human nature itself.
The Place of Religion …
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