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matters which interest me little, and painful to discuss those in which I am
keenly interested." "There is no man for whom approval is more healthy
than for myself, nor anyone who needs more than I do to be helped by
public confidence and respect." "My dissatisfaction with myself, my weariness
and reserve, were taken for presumptuousness, a fault which makes more
enemies than the most glaring of vices." "All the party leaders whom I have
met in my time have with few exceptions appeared to me equally unworthy
of holding office." "Whenever I have ... been obliged to speak in defense of
a bad cause or to assist in bad measures, I have immediately found myself
deprived of all talent and ardor." "In France there is only one thing we can't
set up: that is a free government; and only one institution we can't destroy:
that is centralization." "He
U.
-J.
Ampere] had a deadly fear of bores, but
bigotry he detested from the bottom of his heart."
From the
Recollections
we do not acquire any due sense of the illnesses
which plagued Tocqueville's life. Jardin lists pleurisy, neuralgia (often crip–
pling), migraine, and finally tuberculosis in his last nine years among the ail–
ments that interrupted his writing and then political career. To these we are
permitted to add the doubt that assailed him in virtually every undertaking of
his life. He had become a religious skeptic in adolescence, and his passion for
politics, whether as participant or observer, only hardened this congenital
doubt. He might have had himself in mind when he set down in the Ameri–
can notebooks the three 'miseries' that afflict mankind: Disease, death and
doubt. He could never make up his mind about democracy, more specifically
equality. He could attribute to equality (rather than enlightenment) the rising
humanitarianism of modern European history; he could also attribute to
equality the soul-destroying leveling and homogeneity that he believed
threatened the world. At the end of Part Two of Democracy he in effect
turns the matter over to the "Almighty and Eternal Being . . . What appears
to me to be man's decline is, to His eye, advancement; what afflicts me is
acceptable to Him." (Despite the deference to God here, Jardin shows con–
clusively, I think, that Tocqueville even on his deathbed refused to recant his
lifelong skepticism.)
The nearest to a signal deficiency ofJardin'S biography is the lack of
sustained consideration ofthe milieu within which Tocqueville's writing and
deeper thinking took place. Admittedly this is a failing ofjust about all the
Tocqueville scholarship of the last fifty years. Those who have tried to make
him heir of the Enlightenment have not proved their case. It was Edmund
Burke, no principal of the Enlightenment or Revolution, to whom Tocqueville
accorded the praise of "powerful mind," "practical wisdom," and "masterful."
Jardin does offer some enticing hints of the possible influence on Tocqueville
of Lamennais and others who in the 1820s brought liberal, social Catholicism
