The Democratic Soul: Spinoza, Tocqueville, and Enlightenment Theology 9780812299892

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The Democratic Soul

The Democratic Soul Spinoza, Tocqueville, and Enlightenment Theology

Aaron L. Herold

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Portions of this book have been previously published, in significantly altered form, in American Political Science Review and Political Research Quarterly. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Herold, Aaron L., author. Title: The democratic soul : Spinoza, Tocqueville, and Enlightenment theology / Aaron L. Herold. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058547 | ISBN 9780812253009 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. Tractatus theologico-politicus. | Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677—Political and social views. | Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805–1859. De la démocratie en Amérique. | Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805–1859—Political and social views. | Democracy—Moral and ethical aspects. | Liberalism—Moral and ethical aspects. | Enlightenment. Classification: LCC JC423 .H476 2021 | DDC 321.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058547

For Carly

Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it. That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

Chapter 1. Spinoza’s Liberal Theology

15

Chapter 2. Spinoza’s Democratic Republicanism

71

Chapter 3. Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the Enlightenment Project

123

Chapter 4. Tocqueville’s Political Science and the Democratic Soul

171

Conclusion

206

Notes

213

Bibliography

225

Index

235

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book that develops over a long time necessarily requires more expressions of gratitude than can be conveyed in a short paragraph. Among my teachers, I am most grateful to Thomas Pangle, whose mentorship and teaching were indispensable in the development of this book, and whose seminars on Spinoza are no doubt responsible for more of its insights than could be explicitly acknowledged. I would also like to thank my former committee members Russell Muirhead, Judd Owen, Lorraine Pangle, Devin Stauffer, and Jeffrey Tulis, as well as Clifford Orwin, whose seminar on Tocqueville nearly two decades ago provided the occasion for the first expression of some of the ideas in this manuscript, and Robert Bartlett, whose advice over the years on matters both practical and intellectual has been invaluable. I would like to convey my appreciation to the editors at Penn Press—especially Damon Linker, who was instrumental in helping me find a home for this project and for ushering it along, and Zoe Kovacs, who helped see it completed—and to two anonymous readers. Earlier versions of some parts of the book were previously published as “Tocqueville on Religion, the Enlightenment, and the Democratic Soul” (American Political Science Review 109:3 [August 2015], 523–34) and “Spinoza’s Liberal Republicanism and the Challenge of Revealed Religion” (Political Research Quarterly 67:2 [June 2014], 239–52), and I am grateful for permission to reprint them here. My greatest debt of gratitude is to Carly Herold, whose willingness to read earlier drafts and offer probing and unrelenting criticisms have made this a much better book and without whose love, friendship, patience, and support it might not have been completed.

Introduction

Liberal democracy presently finds itself in a state of crisis. A generation after the Cold War, predictions that this form of government would be the future of all mankind have given way to disenchantment and disillusionment, and even to warnings about its survival (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Snyder 2018; cf. Fukuyama 1992). Surveying the current landscape, it is easy to see how such warnings have become common. The United States is currently experiencing an alarming loss of confidence in its political institutions and in those serving in public office.1 Riven by polarization and ideological partisanship, the electorate has, in its distaste for politics, begun turning to outsiders promising wholesale and even revolutionary change—a development that is almost certainly both a result and an exacerbating cause of the weakening of the once moderating political center. On both sides of the Atlantic, a politics that was supposed to achieve the expansion of individual rights and resources has been disrupted by a surge in authoritarian populism and, where its proponents have come to power, by a trend toward “illiberal democracy” (Plattner 2019). And while the liberal West grapples with these domestic maladies, it continues to confront the political and theological challenge posed by radical Islam. The decline of moderation in contemporary politics appears to reflect broader anxieties about liberal democracy’s meaning and purpose, raising critical questions about national identity and political community (Fukuyama 2018). To be sure, the immediate causes of these anxieties are complex, combining political, economic, demographic, ideological, and other elements. Should some of these be adequately addressed in the near term, it is possible we could come through these difficulties unscathed. What I will argue in the present study, however, is that we are actually in the midst of a much deeper crisis, one that is partly at the root of our current disillusionment and that is certain to endure well into the future because its roots can be traced well into the past—indeed, to liberal democracy’s foundations. This is the disillusionment, which is now found across the political spectrum, with the political project of the liberal Enlightenment.

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This loss of confidence in the fundamental principles of our regime and way of life contains both a philosophical and a moral dimension. Following the alleged victory of postmodernism and historicism, today’s leading political theorists take it as beyond dispute that the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason as the basis for sound politics has been shown to be groundless and that our continuing attachment to liberalism must therefore be a matter only of mere faith or commitment. While such arguments are typically found on the left, a growing chorus of religious voices on the right have also embraced them (Lawler 1999), for if the liberal Enlightenment’s case for reason has been debunked, does the door not open again for the claims of revelation and orthodox religion that the early modern thinkers were once thought to have refuted? Some contemporary conservatives have thus sought to introduce a theological basis for modern politics and, in some cases, to do so while jettisoning liberalism itself (Deneen 2018; Kraynak 2001). Of course, an even more radical version of this thought may explain some of the attraction of radical Islam and other postmodern anti-democratic ideologies. But the deeper roots of our predicament can be found not in this theoretical rejection of Enlightenment rationalism but in a moral objection to the way of life modern liberal democracy has produced—a way of life that can be traced to the commercial republican vision of Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, and The Federalist. To be sure, the great material achievements of liberal democracy are undeniable. However many challenges remain, the United States has made great strides in realizing the ideals of toleration  and equal justice under the law. Thanks to modern medicine, technology, and  economics, inhabitants of the developed world expect to live longer and more prosperous lives than those of any society in human history.2 Yet in spite of this, in increasingly large circles there are nagging doubts about whether our great material achievements have been matched by comparable moral, spiritual, and intellectual accomplishments. To put it bluntly, it seems neither the left, the right, nor the center today can rest satisfied with Richard Rorty’s blasé conclusion that even if liberal democracy’s typical character types are “bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom” (1991, 190). Can freedom really survive—can it really be worthy of the name—if it fails to serve a goal that is loftier and more ennobling than the pursuit of prosaic ends like material enrichment and entertainment (however necessary some amount of these may be as equipment for living a truly good life)? With questions like this in the background, over the past several decades attention has grown among political theorists to the need

Introduction

3

to supplement liberal democracy’s teaching on individual rights so as to encourage civic, moral, intellectual, and artistic devotion.3 One sees this awareness, for example, in communitarian and civic republican theories of democracy, which seek not to jettison long-held notions of individual rights but to provide a new and hopefully firmer basis for these rights by deriving them from civic attachments and duties (see esp. Sandel 1996). Such theorists tend to blame the unchecked individualism and commercialism of modern liberalism for our most pressing ills—such as family and communal breakdown, corporate greed, and environmental destruction—all the while claiming that a reformulated republican or communitarian politics would both address those ills and nurture such quintessentially liberal principles as toleration and the rights of the individual against the state. Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there has arisen a religious and conservative counterpart to this (generally) left-leaning attempt to recover a sense of civic obligation. Among some thinkers on the Christian right, the dominance of “rights talk” (Glendon 1993) in our civic discourse has been faulted for cultivating a morally compromised, excessively self-regarding and libertine society, as found, for example, in abortion, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, and a decline in private moral restraints that has nonetheless greatly transformed the public square.4 Despite their stark political differences then, these left-leaning and rightleaning schools of thought share a common theoretical concern. They are united by a desire to rectify the dominance of our individualistic and rightsbased moral discourse by recovering an idea of duty or obligation: the notion that we as human beings and as citizens owe things, and therefore can be called upon to make sacrifices, to entities outside ourselves—to our families, to our communities, to our nation, or to God. Indeed, calls to supplement our emphasis on rights with attention to duties and with a call to honor self-sacrifice have a long pedigree in America. In the past century, such sentiments were voiced most memorably in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural declaration that we ought to ask not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country. But the growing popularity of such calls is also testimony to our internally conflicting attitudes.5 Rights and duties, after all, may and often do oppose one another: the one tells us what is owed to us, the other what we owe someone else; the one tends to be self-regarding, the other self-sacrificial. The tradition that gave us our modern notion of individual rights derived them from life in a pre-political “state of nature.” According to this tradition, government is an artificial creation, the product of a social contract that aims

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to secure the mutual self-interest of naturally apolitical individuals. Hence, Thomas Hobbes wrote that, when it comes to morality, there are no natural laws properly speaking: what men call natural laws “are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves” (Hobbes 1994, xv.41).6 Laws only exist where a sovereign can instill compliance through the prospect of reward and punishment—by making moral behavior “the best bargain” (in John Locke’s words; Locke 1965, 184, para. 245). Duties or obligations, by contrast, entail a sense that one is, in the most crucial respect, not a free and autonomous individual but a part of a greater whole to which one owes service. Thus, at the opening of the Politics, the seminal work in the tradition from which Hobbes broke, Aristotle declared that “the human is by nature a political animal,” in other words, that he belongs to the political community as a hand belongs to the body (1253a2, 1253a20–23). Both of these traditions are part of our political consciousness, but is it really possible to reconcile them? Or is our desire to do so instead testimony to our restless and naturally human desire to have things both ways? This problem becomes only more troubling when we consider the implications of this conflict for the subject of this study: the place of religion in democratic politics. On an individual or psychological level, the tension between self-regarding notions of rights and other-regarding notions of duties, between the desire for benefit and an attraction to self-sacrifice, points inevitably to the problem of religion. After all, only a providential divinity could successfully reconcile these conflicting notions by rewarding sacrifices made in this life with rewards in another. At the same time, though, there is inevitably a political dimension to this problem, and it poses a dilemma for those contemporary thinkers (whether left or right) seeking to preserve both rights and duties. Today’s civic republicans have criticized, as spiritually impoverished, the liberal state’s aspiration to be “neutral among ends” and have sought to replace it with a politics oriented toward a shared conception of civic virtue (Sandel 1996, 26–27, 290). But the notion of a publicly authoritative teaching about the good life cuts very much against the grain of our deeply embedded liberal ideals, to which these theorists remain firmly attached.7 This may account for why they often become vague or ambiguous when attempting to articulate the content of a new public teaching about the good life. Indeed, the tradition of republican thought to which they appeal had insisted that the freedom permitted by self-government, and the civic dedication required to maintain it, necessitates a public religious teaching. According to that tradition, civic virtue and the establishment of communal

Introduction

5

bonds require self-restraint and self-sacrifice, and these necessitate not just shared belief but also an intrusive, religiously based law.8 Just as civic friendship and mutual obligation require public piety (according to this tradition), so too a renewed emphasis on a public role for religion may be less friendly to liberal freedoms than is commonly thought. At least as traditionally conceived—prior to the early modern period—dominant interpretations of the Bible did not accommodate the rights of the individual. This claim is perhaps more controversial than the preceding one, for no doubt many, if not the vast majority, of religious authorities in the West today would emphasize the friendliness of Scripture to core liberal concepts like democracy and human rights. But the dearth of such arguments prior to the Enlightenment may be grounds for reevaluating whether that emphasis is justified.9 At the very least, the desire among some of today’s right-leaning religious thinkers to criticize the Enlightenment’s teaching on self-interest while preserving its core notion of rights constitutes another attempt to square the moral circle (Burns 2014a, 2014b).10 As is now becoming recognized, liberalism’s origins rested on a new theology, a novel and heterodox recasting of the Bible that attempted to make Christianity friendly to individual rights (Areshidze 2016; Herold 2014; Owen 2015; Pangle 2010; D. Stauffer 2018). This theology reconceived man’s relationship to God as one of rational and enlightened self-interest—even as a social contract—rather than as duty or obligation in the traditional sense (cf., e.g., Locke 1965, 176– 85, para. 243–45). It is therefore not by chance that as the concern with devotion has returned and as confidence that liberal self-interest is sufficient for a good human life has eroded, new religious challenges to liberalism have emerged. The Enlightenment’s theological foundations for liberal democracy have suddenly become shaky, and, recognizing this, we are now discerning that the whole structure is at risk. The theological challenge the Enlightenment sought to dispose of has returned, and it may even have been lying dormant beneath us the whole time. What we therefore most need is a fresh encounter with Enlightenment theology, one that can determine its integral connections to liberal democracy’s foundations and its potential links to our current crisis. We need to discover whether the religious outlook the early modern tradition bequeathed us is truly at the root of our vulnerabilities, or (alternatively) whether it might not contain the basis for a richer, more robust, and higher-aiming liberal civic life. If it does turn out that modernity’s theological basis contains big problems, and that these problems have come down to us in ways we now have trouble discerning, we will then need to examine the role a responsible and civically

6

Introduction

concerned political science can play in addressing our situation. That is what I aim to do in the present study. Through a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I will seek to reveal not only the foundations of our moral hopes for liberalism and democracy but also the reasons why those hopes seem to be unfulfilled in ways we ourselves often have trouble grasping—and what we can do about it.

The Plan of the Book Before embarking on this task, it is necessary to say a word about why I have chosen to focus on these two authors and why considering their two books can be helpful for addressing our main concern. Recent decades have witnessed a surge of interest in Spinoza among scholars of intellectual history and political philosophy (Balibar 2008; Den Uyl 2008; Hampshire 2005; James 2012; Smith 1997, 2003, 2005; Verbeek 2003). Most notably, Jonathan Israel has discovered in Spinoza’s thought the unifying element of the European Enlightenment—and the anti-religious and anti-monarchic arguments that toppled the ancien régime. In contrast to Locke, who had refused toleration to atheists and Catholics, Spinoza argued for the nearly unlimited liberty of thought and expression, and so, to Israel, he should be credited with originating the “quintessential values of western ‘modernity’”: “democracy, freedom of thought and expression, individual freedom, comprehensive toleration, rule of law, equality, and sexual emancipation” (2006, 42, 135-63; and 2001, 265–70). But the renewed interest in Spinoza has as much to do with the hope to rectify liberalism’s perceived shortcomings as it does with the effort to uncover its historical origins, for his thought articulates a rights-based vision of liberal democracy that also promises an ethic of civic dedication and an aspiration to intellectual flourishing (cf. Skeaff 2018). That promising political vision, however, is rooted in a confrontation with the Bible’s challenge to reason and to a purportedly rational politics. The Theologico-Political Treatise is the founding document of both modern liberal democracy and modern liberal religion (Yaffe 2004, 267), and it makes clear the necessary and inextricable connection between the two. Our understanding of liberalism’s foundational crisis must therefore begin with Spinoza’s Treatise because that work takes seriously, in a way most defenses of liberalism today do not, the challenge posed by the illiberal political claims of revealed religion. Moreover, as I will argue in Chapters 1 and 2, Spinoza’s case against the Bible’s politics is largely psychological and moral. He seeks to replace its vision of human

Introduction

7

excellence—a life of loving devotion to God—with one that celebrates the intellectual and political liberty of the individual. The Treatise culminates in a description of a participatory, and also commercial, democratic republic in which citizens are bound together by a moral commitment to uphold the right of each person “to think what he wants and to say what he thinks” (Spinoza 2004, xx.title).11 To indicate the foundations underlying this political vision, I devote Chapter 1 to an analysis of the Treatise’s preface, in which Spinoza indicates the motivations and aims of his political project, and to its first ten chapters, which begin his treatment of theology. In the preface, Spinoza articulates a psychology of religious belief that uncovers the roots of “superstition” in fear, ignorance, and a peculiar hope that affects people in desperate circumstances. These natural causes of belief led, in the Christian West, to a religious outlook placing the origin of political authority in divine right and castigating reason as “by nature corrupt” (pref.18). The result, to Spinoza, has been political dysfunction—a pendulum between religious tyranny and religious war—together with a profound threat to philosophy and the philosophic life. To vindicate both individual reason and a rational politics, Spinoza devotes chapters 1–10 of the Treatise to a critique of the Bible. Here, he effectively replaces the Bible’s teachings about the character of knowledge, law, politics, and nature (including human nature and “human blessedness”) with those derived from his own scientific insights and perspective. As I will argue, however, the core of Spinoza’s criticism of the Bible turns out to be not scientific but moral and psychological. In these chapters, he reveals the Bible’s quintessential moral teaching as one of devotion, and he asserts that this devotion is nourished and fostered by a psychological state of admiration and wonder. (In Spinoza’s usage the terms “devotion,” “admiration,” and “wonder” are always pejorative.) To supplant this morality, Spinoza propagates a new religious teaching for which he claims to find biblical support, the centerpiece of which is an individualistic, anti-devotional, and therefore anti-theological kind of pride. This pride celebrates the individual’s capacity to think for himself and rule himself, and its progressive development in future liberal citizens is the key element in a planned gradual liberation from the Bible’s authority and its devotional moral outlook. As I will argue, each chapter of the Treatise presents a stage in an education that Spinoza intends to unfold on two levels—that of the potentially philosophic individual and that of society at large. The discrepancy between these two audiences helps explain some of the Treatise’s contradictions, as does one other feature of this education: because it is meant to be progressive, many

8

Introduction

of its beginning and intermediate stages are intentionally self-undermining. Hence, as I show in Chapter 2, the Treatise’s theological chapters reach a peak when Spinoza articulates a civil religion—consisting of “the dogmas of the universal faith” (xiv.24)—but he then shatters the foundations of that faith when, shortly afterward, he purports to bring about the separation of philosophy from theology (xiv.37).12 In Chapter 2, then, which is an analysis of the second half of the Treatise, I examine the stages of this education and its intended results. In doing so, I also gather evidence for what I anticipate will be the book’s most controversial argument, namely, that Spinoza’s attempt to transform society by propagating a new moral and religious teaching has a theoretical, and not merely a political, intention. On the basis of some of the Treatise’s more unusual elements—its contradictions, its sarcastic digressions, its oblique references, its circular arguments—I suggest that Spinoza was aware that reason and the rational life cannot be vindicated through straightforward argumentation, so he turned to another means: the refutation of miracles and revelation through a historical project. That project, if successful, would show that because human beings can live without the experience of devotion—or at least that they can admire and take their bearings from a liberation from it— the Bible’s understanding of the human condition is false. This possibility, I argue, is the main thread connecting Spinoza’s civil religion teaching in chapters 11–15 and his teaching of natural right in chapters 16–20. To judge its potential for success, it is necessary to analyze how this latter teaching underlies Spinoza’s attempt to create a democratic republic marked by both individual freedom and civic devotion. Spinoza’s natural right teaching is far more radical and individualistic than Hobbes’s. It purports to derive morality not only from human nature (as Hobbes’s did) but also from the deterministic laws of nonhuman nature, and thus from conatus, the irrepressible drive each natural being has to “persevere in its state— doing so for its own sake and not for another” (xvi.4). Spinoza teaches that natural right is equivalent to power, but it is on precisely this basis that he promises to lay the foundation for a rich democratic communal and civic life. He claims calculations of power and benefit will lead citizens to “defend another’s right as their own” (xvi.14), to “put the public right ahead of private advantages” (xvii.16), and to long for the preservation of their republic as the “highest good [summum bonum]” (xvi.21). Spinoza’s thought is thus highly enticing and promises a resolution to our current dissatisfactions because he refuses to endorse the Hobbesian position that “there is no such Finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor Summum Bonum

Introduction

9

(greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers” (Hobbes 1994, xi.1). Though Spinoza agrees with and even far exceeds Hobbes’s radicalism in many respects, in speaking of a summum bonum he shows himself to be one of the “old moral philosophers” Hobbes derides. But unlike Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval rationalists, Spinoza married moral absolutism and a praise of philosophy as the best life to an attempt to undermine theocratic religion and establish liberal democracy. He uses the term summum bonum to refer both to the intellectual satisfaction achieved by the individual philosopher—“the true happiness and blessedness [beatitudo] of a human being” (iii.2)—and to the communal participation and dedication of the ordinary democratic citizen. On the surface, then, Spinoza attractively suggests that his work can overcome the fundamental problem recognized by the “old moral philosophers” prior to him: the natural tension between theory and practice.13 He begins the Treatise by stating that “it is equally impossible to take away superstition from the vulgar as to take away dread” (pref.33), but he ends it by declaring that the “ultimate aim [finem . . . ultimum]” of a liberal republic is enlightenment: “to free each from dread” (xx.11). At the end of Chapter 2, I take up the question of how far this enlightenment can go, and I conclude that Spinoza’s vision of a liberal democratic republic contains some tensions. Some of these he is well aware of, but there are others of which I suspect he is not. In the former category, I will argue, is the fact that however much he can narrow the tension between the individual’s greatest good and that of the community, some discrepancy must remain. Bluntly put, there are some sacrifices that a rational community requires but that an individual’s reason, fully cultivated, simply will not sanction. For this reason, even the most “progressive” liberal democracy in Spinoza’s understanding will still require socially salutary superstitions. Indeed, as we will see, one such superstition is Spinoza’s teaching of natural right itself, which anthropomorphizes nature by reading a moral teaching into it. Unlike past superstitions, however, this myth (in Spinoza’s expectation) will be friendly to the flourishing of philosophy because it will present itself as science. It will purport to show, on rational grounds, why the sacrifices that liberal democracy will call for from “enlightened” citizens will ultimately redound to their benefit—and thus why they will not really be sacrifices at all. In my estimation, however, Spinoza’s political vision suffers from at least three critical problems—and these are problems of which he is, I think, unaware. His vision of a participatory and intellectually rich liberal democracy is highly compelling and attractive, not least on account of the selfknowledge it can convey to us. It can show us what we most hope for from

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liberalism but also—I will argue—why those hopes have been, and perhaps must be, ultimately disappointed. Here I will simply list what I think are the three biggest problems in Spinoza’s political project (evidence for them will be gathered throughout Chapters 1 and 2). First, I believe Spinoza ends up drawing upon an aspect of human psychology that he cannot adequately explain. He closes the Treatise with a salute to the martyrs who will give their lives to defend the liberal republic and the freedom of thought that it makes possible (xx.35, 44). Insofar as this draws upon a genuine admiration for selfsacrifice on the part of the new liberal citizenry, I think it is indicative of a larger problem in his project. In fact, since that project rests on the propagation of a moral psychology whose centerpiece is a liberation from devotion, I think this is actually its Achilles’ heel. Spinoza cannot put to bed what he himself identifies as the main aspect of the Bible’s moral psychology, and this, I conclude, helps explain why revealed religion today has reemerged as a significant challenge to liberalism. Second, in the vision of philosophy and its relation to society Spinoza outlines in chapter 20 of the Treatise, I believe we can glimpse the origins of our modern dissatisfaction with reason itself. In that chapter, Spinoza indicates that, to protect itself, philosophy must undergo a dramatic transition or devaluation. It will need to present itself as an aspiration that a relatively large class of people can take up, and in the hands of these new intellectuals, it will need to present itself (through teachings like natural right) as a spokesperson for the existing order. In a mature liberal democracy there will need to be pseudo-rational superstitions claiming to show that the demands of good citizenship lead to individual happiness. But if, in the absence of a theological adversary, philosophy will need to disguise itself as ideology, might it be difficult for the potential philosopher to recognize the genuine article? Could the belief that reason is mainly an ism defending a set of political arrangements lead, ultimately, to a dissatisfaction with reason itself? And, perhaps counterintuitively, could the establishment of an open society and the absence of the challenge of revelation lead to a decline in the art of reading—and thus pose an obstacle to the kind of genuine liberation Spinoza regards as part and parcel of the philosophic life? Finally, there remains one last problem. While Spinoza’s argument for liberal democracy has been highly appealing, might he have failed to see that, in the world he was helping to create, democracy would prove more morally compelling than liberalism? At the present moment, after all, liberalism is in crisis, but the same can hardly be said for democracy. Liberal institutions today are facing a stern challenge, but that challenge is coming from a wave of

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populist sentiment (which has taken on both nationalist and religious forms). In this, I think, we are seeing the latest manifestation of a phenomenon Tocqueville diagnosed in the early nineteenth century. Put plainly, Spinoza and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers helped usher in our modern way of life, and to support it, they turned their attention to the education of the modern soul. But what Spinoza failed to see was that the kind of soul he was helping to cultivate would be, in the most decisive sense, democratic rather than liberal. To demonstrate this, and to understand its consequences, I turn in Chapters 3 and 4 to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The historical gap between Spinoza and Tocqueville might appear vast; to bridge it we may briefly mention Montesquieu—the most frequently cited author in The Federalist and a thinker with whom Tocqueville claimed to “live a little every day” (quoted in Mansfield and Winthrop 2000, xxx). Although Montesquieu vociferously denied the charge of Spinozism (which was leveled against him: Pangle 2010, 150 n. 9), his Spirit of the Laws opens with a definition of law identical to Spinoza’s (Theologico-Political Treatise, iv.1) and, on that basis, with an endorsement of Spinoza’s philosophical determinism. Laws “taken in the broadest meaning” are “necessary relations deriving from the nature of things” and are binding on all beings, even “the divinity.” Denying that God can suspend this necessity through miracles and revelation, Montesquieu begins his magisterial book arguing for liberal politics by endorsing the Spinozistic proposition that God is immanent in nature because his power is equivalent to his understanding (Montesquieu 1989, i.1; cf. Spinoza 1996, I, P17, Cor. 2, S). Because a world without such natural laws would cease to exist, Montesquieu says, “creation . . . presupposes rules as invariable as the fate claimed by atheists” (Montesquieu 1989, i.1).14 As we will see in more detail throughout this book, the political science that Tocqueville observed and evaluated in America begins from within Spinoza’s new theological and scientific horizon. Now, Tocqueville is sympathetic to the Enlightenment project and friendly to democracy, but he is also highly critical of both. As I will begin to show in Chapter 3, through his observations of political life in America, Tocqueville arrived at an understanding of human nature, and thus also a new framework for understanding modern politics, that differed sharply from that of his Enlightenment predecessors. Tocqueville saw in America the practical results of the Enlightenment project, but he analyzed those results in a way alien to that project’s spirit. By observing political life as it is and taking ordinary moral opinion seriously, he saw that the political science of the early modern philosophers had created new dangers that they were

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unaware of and so could neither control nor direct. In particular, Tocqueville discerned among the Americans the presence of a distinctly human religious psychology—a natural hope for immortality driven by a paradoxical and ineradicable desire to affirm and forget oneself simultaneously, or to seek a kind of happiness that is found, at least partially, in acts of self-sacrifice. While Tocqueville’s comments about this desire have been noted by a few scholars, they generally have not been analyzed in depth or brought to bear on his thought as a whole.15 But doing so, I will argue, is necessary for elucidating the guiding concerns, the underlying methods, and the practical solutions of his “new political science” (7),16 for that political science is designed to rectify the shortcomings of Tocqueville’s Enlightenment predecessors, who, in their belief that religion is rooted in poverty, ignorance, and oppression, had mistakenly predicted that the advent of a liberal and commercial republic would satisfy our deepest longings. Among these thinkers, the one Tocqueville identifies as articulating the ultimate trajectory of modern political and intellectual life is Spinoza. In Chapter 3, then, I indicate the character of Tocqueville’s critical assessment of the Enlightenment, as well as why he thinks a new political science is needed to correct its shortcomings. Looking first at Tocqueville’s introduction, I indicate the scope and methods of his political science, together with its broad practical and theoretical objectives. Then, to show how Tocqueville’s writing supplements the Enlightenment’s political science, I examine his treatment of the theoretical roots of American politics. I analyze the work’s puzzling second chapter, which attributes America’s “point of departure” not to the Enlightenment-influenced Founders of the eighteenth century but to the illiberal religion of the Puritans. But while this chapter indicates the need for traditional religion to counterbalance the political influence of modern rationalism, this is not Tocqueville’s last word. Looking next at his thematic discussion of religion in volume 1, I argue that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Christianity is quite weak in Tocqueville’s America. In their religious beliefs and practices, the Americans are as much influenced by modern rationalism as they are in their political arrangements. They are, however, also deeply dissatisfied, albeit in ways they cannot fully articulate. To make this clear, I end Chapter 3 by calling attention to the religious psychology mentioned earlier, which Tocqueville discerned not from the natural strength of American religiosity—as he suggests on the surface—but from its unnatural weakness. As I argue, it was by observing the dissatisfactions and anxieties resulting from this weakness that Tocqueville uncovered the presence in human nature of a natural and permanently

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enduring longing for immortality—a longing that can be dimmed and distorted but never eliminated. In his view, since the Enlightenment’s political science denied the existence of this longing, it also left it uncontrolled and undirected, and it left open the possibility that it would manifest itself in dangerous ways. In Chapter 4, I articulate the resulting dangers Tocqueville saw on the horizon for us as a consequence of this oversight, and I outline some of the solutions he posed as potential remedies. Looking mainly at volume 2, I spotlight some of the threats he discusses that have received relatively little attention from Tocqueville scholars. These include the dimming of ambition among democratic citizens, the attraction of potential tyrants and demagogues, and the seductive power of new and dangerous ideologies and religious outlooks (including rationalized religious outlooks like Pantheism—the theology most famously associated with Spinoza, which Tocqueville singles out for attack in a short but uniquely hostile chapter). But I also provide a new way of understanding the dangers to democratic liberty long familiar to students of Tocqueville: individualism (the temptation to social withdrawal), the power of public opinion, the unforeseen side effects of commerce and the conquest of nature, and—above all—the restiveness Americans feel in the midst of their well-being. Each of these threats, I argue, can be traced largely to the Enlightenment’s failure to carve out a place for human religious hopes. And, ultimately, they can be linked to the two greatest dangers Tocqueville warns against: soft despotism, which is marked by a decline in human spiritual and intellectual life, and hard despotism—whose threat, I argue, is not as muted in Tocqueville or as distant from soft despotism as it may appear. In the second part of Chapter 4, I turn to a discussion of the solutions Tocqueville proposes for preventing or mitigating these potential dangers and for creating healthy outlets for devotion and self-sacrifice. Here Tocqueville’s analysis speaks in broad outlines. He leaves the practical management of his new political science to students and followers who can adjust his recommendations to future circumstances. To make the parameters of these recommendations clear, I look first at Tocqueville’s practical teaching on the future of religion in the democratic world, and I articulate what I call his project of religious statesmanship. That project, however, is but one part of a more general attempt to preserve our distinctly human psychological outlook combining self-affirmation with self-transcendence. As I show, this attempt can be seen in such initially secular (and well-known) aspects of his political science as the use of associations, involvement in local government, and (encompassing them all) the doctrine of self-interest well understood.

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Indeed, religion is not the only possible manifestation of these twin desires, and I close Chapter 4 with a brief discussion of Tocqueville’s reflections on intellectual life, which centers on his praise of Pascal. Tocqueville’s discussion of Pascal not only reveals his blueprint for preserving intellectual longings within a democratic future; it also prepares the way for a set of considerations about the justice of democracy more generally. In my concluding chapter, I juxtapose Tocqueville’s project with Spinoza’s, and I reflect on how Tocqueville’s outlook can be useful to us today. To state my main conclusions, I believe Tocqueville is most helpful to us because his analysis can assist in recovering a kind of moderation sorely lacking in contemporary politics. It can show informed friends of democracy not only how to work within the existing order, finding real nobility where it can or does exist, but also how to guard against potential dangers when they arise. I believe Tocqueville’s moderation consists both in his acknowledgment of democracy’s very real claims to justice and in his simultaneous recognition that justice will never be perfect or unblemished. Tocqueville is thus helpful because he simultaneously lowers and raises our hopes for politics. He lowers them by revealing the need to abandon the quest for a perfectly just society (which quest, though perhaps latent in early modern thought, did so much damage to human well-being in the twentieth century). But he raises our hopes for politics because his account of our democracy can lead to a recovery of the longing of the soul for something dignified. This recovery can ennoble our democracy not only because it can enrich human life in a realm apart from politics, but also because it makes possible a moderate politics that is nonetheless devoted to fostering the dignity or greatness of the individual. In this way, I contend, Tocqueville points the way toward a recovery of liberalism in the most authentic sense.

CHAPTER 1

Spinoza’s Liberal Theology

We turn to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise to rediscover and reexamine liberal democracy’s theological foundations. That it has such foundations, liberalism’s current claims to neutrality notwithstanding,1 is suggested by the work’s somewhat awkward, hyphenated title, which implies that theology and politics constitute a single inseparable entity: the “theologico-political.”2 We can see this also from the Treatise’s overall structure, which consists of a preface and twenty chapters. Chapter 1 opens by endorsing the veracity of biblical prophecy and the revelation of the Mosaic Law (i.1, 10). Chapter 20, by contrast, begins by asserting Moses’s failure as a statesman, and it argues for a liberal and commercial republic where speech and thought are free, where judgments are made “by reason alone,” and where commerce and credit, rather than religion, cement the social bond (xx.5, 14, 40; Yaffe 1997, 160–62). The Treatise’s structure thus invites the preliminary suggestion that its main task is to move society from revelation and theocracy toward reason and liberal democracy, with its chapters serving as stages in this cultural and political transformation (cf. pref.33). Spinoza, however, also indicates on his title page that the ultimate goal of his Enlightenment project may be to benefit a certain elite. The Treatise’s subtitle states that the work will show “not only that the Freedom of Philosophizing can be Granted in keeping with Piety and the Peace of the Republic, but that it cannot be Removed unless along with the Peace of the Republic and that very Piety.” In both the Treatise and the Ethics, Spinoza uses the term “freedom of philosophizing” not only to refer to intellectual freedom in the ordinary sense but also to denote the perfection of those rare individuals living a fully self-conscious and rational life (cf., e.g., Spinoza 2004, Annotation 33; 1996, V, preface). If Spinoza’s political project is chiefly an educational project, he hints that it will unfold on two levels: while mass enlightenment

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produces a more rational politics, it will bring about a fuller and more complete liberation for the most promising. To appreciate what is most distinctive about Spinoza’s Treatise, it is necessary to consider the importance of this aim.3 Perhaps no other early modern thinker so emphatically stresses this combination of political reform and the philosophic life. If one reads the title page as announcing an enterprise aiming at what Spinoza calls true freedom, then the flourishing of philosophy would be the whole point of his political project. Moreover, as we will see more clearly throughout this chapter and Chapter 2, Spinoza understands philosophy not as the collective enterprise of Baconian natural science—the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate—but as a life of independent spiritual liberation characterized by “sound reason” and “doubting” (pref.9). Spinoza’s Enlightenment seeks to make possible the achievement of a good (philosophy) for the sake of which all other goods, including peace and toleration, exist in turn. But, as he will indicate in his preface, the possibility and choice worthiness of that endeavor and way of life faces a profound theological challenge requiring a biblically based response. Spinoza intimates how he will provide that response by affixing to his title page an epigraph from 1 John (4:13): “Through this, we know that we remain in God and God remains in us: that he has given us of his Spirit.” In the biblical context, John’s words refer to God’s love (agapē) of humankind, which led Him to send into the world and sacrifice His only begotten son, “that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). On Spinoza’s title page, however, “this” (hoc) most naturally refers to the freedom of philosophizing. The Treatise, Spinoza thus implies from the outset, will make the theological case for a kind of blessedness achievable in this world: Spinoza’s own way of life, which consists of private, solitary thought. As becomes clear from the way Spinoza here effectively revises John’s meaning, that way of life must be understood as opposing and seeking to supplant a rival form of existence that stresses devotional love and, connected to it, the hope for immortality. To make the case for the philosophic life—not just to set forth the political conditions for its flourishing but also to illustrate its very possibility—Spinoza, for reasons that are as yet unclear, will embark on a project of religious reform culminating in a new kind of politics with new corresponding human virtues.4 Hence, Spinoza’s epigraph also provides his earliest hint of the theological outlook he will spread: the pantheism for which he is famous, according to which everything is “in God.”5 In the service of fostering and defending philosophy, Spinoza’s Treatise will cultivate a new kind of citizenry wholeheartedly committed to

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republican government on the grounds that such government—and only such government—grants the “freedom of philosophizing”—that is, of doubting—“to each” (xx.23). On the basis of this commitment to intellectual independence, Spinoza suggests, that citizenry will endure great sacrifices to ensure the preservation of the republic, which it will view as its “highest good” (summum bonum; xvi.21). The Treatise thus culminates in an argument for a republic in which “each is permitted both to think what he wants and to say what he thinks” (xx, title)—an aim Spinoza lifts from Tacitus’s Histories but that Tacitus, in agreement with a pre-Spinozistic tradition, had considered realizable only in monarchies (Tacitus 1942, 419–20). According to that older tradition, the liberty of republics is made possible and can be prevented from degenerating into license only through the restrictions imposed by a legally established religion (see, e.g., Machiavelli 1996, 35). Spinoza’s break from that tradition compels us to ask how a commitment to intellectual independence and doubting all authority can create an ethic binding society together and leading citizens to sacrifice for the common good. As we will see, Spinoza’s defense of intellectual liberty is not unqualified. In chapter 14, he articulates a civil theology, and at the end of the Treatise he indicates that even a republic dedicated to liberty of thought and expression must inculcate support for those principles by restricting their exercise. Is it possible, then, that Spinoza, despite his call to make our age happy by freeing it “of all superstition” (xi.24), will be cultivating a popular superstition of his own? But would not such a “liberal” superstition, by cultivating an anti-theocratic and anti-theological kind of pride, contain inherent tensions? To begin addressing these questions, we must now delve into the Treatise, beginning with Spinoza’s preface.

Philosophy, Politics, and the Problem of Superstition (Spinoza’s Preface) Superstition, Vain Religion, and True Religion If the Treatise’s twenty chapters outline the steps of a project of theologicopolitical reform, the preface indicates why Spinoza chose to carry out that reform by writing it (cf. pref.13). The work’s first sentence specifies Spinoza’s guiding problem, but it also hints at a solution: “If human beings could regulate all their affairs with certain counsel, or if fortune were always favorable to them, they would not be bound by any superstition” (pref.1). Presenting his work as a Christian apologetic, Spinoza initially suggests that the Treatise

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is meant to oppose those who are “vulnerable to superstition and adverse to religion” (pref.3). It aims to combat a primitive, heretical, crypto-pagan kind of Christianity that continues to attract adherents even in his own time. Among the most rustic, he suggests, one still encounters the notion that “God” communicates His decrees “not in the mind” but through dreams, entrails, bird omens, the ravings of madmen, and other “childish idiocies” (pref.4). These theological errors, according to Spinoza, arise from the universally recognized tendency of human beings to long for “the uncertain goods of fortune . . . without measure” (pref.1–2). Our hopes for the goods of this world are rarely restrained by a sense of what is possible, and this is the psychological illness of which superstition is but the most common symptom. The most effective cure would be a stoic acceptance of the role of chance in our affairs, but assuming such an attitude could never become widespread, superstition could be dampened if social arrangements, by helping us rely on more “certain counsel,” could make us more fortunate. In the present world, however, human beings mostly cannot attain what they long for, and they find themselves alternatively “agitated by hope and dread” (pref.1). At their lowest points, when they are in circumstances so desperate that only a miracle could extricate them, they will look for deliverance anywhere and believe any advice, no matter how absurd (pref.1–2; cf. i.30). Just as gamblers down to their last pennies will entertain illusions that riches could be—indeed, will be—just one bet away, the desperate and the fearful often convince themselves that psychics and astrologers can provide an instant path to happiness. Superstition, in other words, is born of fear, but that fear ignites a hope in people that there is something out there that can help them escape their circumstances, and it may even be that this hope grows stronger the more the odds are stacked against them. But since the sole cause of superstition “is dread” (pref.5), it has no place at the other end of this psychological pendulum. It lasts “only while dread lasts” (pref.6). When humans are more fortunate, they become “overconfident, boastful and proud” (pref.1). Animated by a proud sense of their self-sufficiency, they spurn all counsel and consider offers of it insulting, and they no longer look for supernatural help, because they have no need of it (pref.2). Spinoza’s initial account of superstition provides an early glimpse of his understanding of human psychology: he locates its origins in the naturally controlling desire all people have to seek their own good. As he later states, utility “is the grit and life of all human actions” (xvii.84), and even if everything we do cannot be traced back to the pursuit of what is truly good for us, it is nonetheless a “universal law” that we will always select our actions with a view to what

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we think our advantage will be (xvi.15–16). Superstition is ubiquitous because the vast majority of us err in this calculation. Being ignorant of natural causes, we regard unusual events with admiration or “great wonderment” (admiratio), an attitude that inhibits us from seeking instead to understand them (pref.3). Since all men are born not only ignorant and self-interested but also conscious of their appetites, they give their imaginations free rein, imposing onto the universe the view that all natural things are a “means to their own advantage.” We are thus “inclined by nature” to embrace teleology—which, in its anthropocentrism, is superstition par excellence—because our fearful responses to misfortune lead us to imagine “a ruler, or a number of rulers” who designed nature to provide for us (Spinoza 1996, I, Appendix).6 To appease this ruler or rulers, when they “are caught in dangers and are unable to be of help to themselves” (pref.4), human beings who are “vulnerable to superstition and adverse to religion” (pref.3) will carry out “sacrifices and prayers” (pref.3). Spinoza thus strikingly suggests that “religion” involves neither sacrifice nor prayer; instead, it mandates a spirit of practical and intellectual self-reliance. Superstition and religion are equally self-regarding, but religion’s practitioners know that God’s decrees, which can show them the way to their utility, are not revealed supernaturally but inscribed “in the mind” (pref.4). By contrast, the “sacrifices” made by the superstitious would be better described as mercenary transactions that the ignorant seek to make with God or the gods. There is no such thing as a sacrifice strictly speaking, but it may be that, in their admiration and wonderment, human beings delude themselves into thinking such actions will ultimately be rewarded. Indeed, so great is the appeal of this belief that it affects nearly all those who we might think would know better. Thus, Spinoza’s sole example of a superstitious man in the preface is Alexander the Great, who ordered prognosticators to make sacrifices when he was wounded and near defeat (pref.5, quoting Curtius, History of Alexander 7.7.8). In highlighting Alexander’s example, Spinoza suggests that superstition is hardly a phenomenon limited to “the vulgar.” Or rather, he indicates that in his usage that term includes a great many whom we would ordinarily call elites. The “vulgar” and those “who struggle with the same emotions as the vulgar” (pref.34) include highly educated and influential human beings— even a great statesman tutored by Aristotle!—but who cannot restrain their imaginations and their hopes when facing adversity. Given this, it is no wonder superstition also contains the germ of a more sophisticated outlook that calls “human wisdom vain and reason blind,” since it cannot show the vulgar “the certain way to the vain things they long for” (pref.4). The goods of

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fortune—such as health, safety, and prosperity (iii.13)—can never be entirely assured, which renders superstition not only a perennial temptation of the human psyche but also a permanent rival of reason and the rational life (which regards such goods as “vain”). Thus, from the rudimentary problem of human misfortune, there arises a robust challenge to rationalism itself in the form of mystical doctrines that “interpret the whole of nature in amazing modes, as if it were going insane with them” (pref.3).7 It is to refute such doctrines, which condemn the natural light “as the source of impiety” (pref.20), that Spinoza claims to have written the Treatise. His main surface claim in the preface is that he will accomplish this through a fresh reading of Scripture, which will show that it actually celebrates reason and shares his own view of “religion” (pref.20–21). But Spinoza also indicates that his moral and psychological account of superstition may be somehow integral to the actual refutation of traditional revealed religion, for he now makes three intriguing claims about the lessons to be learned from people like Alexander: “And in this mode very many examples could be brought up which show . . . that only while dread lasts do human beings struggle with superstition; that all the things they have ever worshiped by vain religion have been nothing but phantasms and the hallucinations of a sad and fearful psyche; and, finally, that prognosticators have ruled among the plebs to the greatest degree, and have been formidable to their Kings to the greatest degree, in the greatest straits of the imperium” (pref.6; emphasis added). Spinoza’s analysis of superstition—which he now renames “vain religion”—has three components, which are, respectively, psychological, theoretical, and political. He claims his preceding analysis has shown that vain religion always accompanies fear, that its God or gods have been merely imaginary (i.e., false), and that the prevalence of these psychological delusions has engendered a series of political problems that are well known “among everyone” (pref.6). This striking statement provokes us to question what the connection between these three claims could be. Certainly, if it is true that that belief in providential deities is a psychological response to fear and misfortune, it would follow that these deities are imaginary. But Spinoza has hardly proven this. So far, aside from relating the brief anecdote about Alexander, he has provided no evidence for it at all! Indeed, we may be tempted to ask, what form could such evidence actually take? How could Spinoza adequately respond to a sincere (Greek) believer who pointed out that the connection between Alexander’s fear and his religious belief is only correlational and hence that it does not prove that the divinity Alexander sacrificed to was actually imaginary?

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With this question in mind, we must consider the third claim Spinoza makes in the preceding quotation, which underscores the Treatise’s ambitious project to transform society. This claim holds that because superstition is a psychological response to fear and misfortune, it has engendered a particular kind of political dysfunction in which “prognosticators” have effectively “ruled . . . the plebs” and rendered impotent the authority of kings. Claiming “these things have been spread enough among everyone” (pref.6), Spinoza appeals to an audience well versed in the early Enlightenment criticism of the political dysfunction caused by religion in general and Christianity in particular (cf. Hobbes 1994, xiv.31, xviii.16). According to his hypothesis, then, the theologico-political problems of seventeenth-century Europe can be traced to the same kind of superstition that plagued Alexander and his contemporaries, although adapted to different historical circumstances. And this thought leads to the following tentative but provocative suggestion: if a political science that took Spinoza’s psychological insight as its guiding premise could resolve those political difficulties—if it could launch a political project leading to a drastic weakening of religious conviction—could that prove, as a Machiavellian “effectual truth,” that the objects of Christian worship too “have been nothing but phantasms and the hallucinations of a sad and fearful psyche”? In other words, if political arrangements could be altered to replace Europe’s monarchies with liberal republics that, having improved the fortunes of mankind, were also characterized by a decline in revealed religion, would that demonstrate the truth of Spinoza’s religious psychology and therewith also his theoretical hypothesis (cf. Owen 2015, 107–9; Pangle 2010, 94–129; Strauss 1965, 28–31; 1995, 21–39)? We must leave these as open questions for now, but Spinoza adds an important element to them when he next contrasts his own view that “human beings are by nature vulnerable to superstition” with that of “others . . . who deem that it arises in that all mortals have some confused idea of the deity” (pref.7; emphasis added). Spinoza apparently denies that human beings are plagued by a restless concern with their mortality, and this denial is the foundation of both his political project and his theoretical hypothesis. Like Alexander, human beings generally look to superstition to escape death when its prospect is immediately before them, but when fortune is favorable they are so filled with pride and overconfidence they think little of it. This claimed insight is what separates Spinoza’s view of our psychology from that of the Bible, which describes us as unfulfilled in the present life and longing for communion with God, and also—as we will eventually see—from that of Tocqueville, who places a restive hope for immortality at the core of our psychology.8

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To Spinoza, the lack of an overriding concern with death renders superstition “variable and unsteadfast” (pref.7) and thus susceptible to manipulation and reform, but it also underlies the conception of human excellence that his rationalism posits and that he has thus far called “religion.”9 Although Spinoza places superstition’s origins in a desire for the goods of this world, his account of it is not silent about how we come to believe in another. As we have seen, Spinoza presumes his audience is well aware that superstition has historically enabled “prognosticators” to rule “among the plebs to the greatest degree” (pref.6). He asserts that this practice has led to the common opinion, which he now attributes to Alexander’s biographer Quintus Curtius, that there is actually nothing that “regulates a multitude more effectively” (pref.8), and yet, Spinoza’s account should initially lead one to suspect otherwise. Since “the vulgar always remain equally miserable” (pref.8), to cultivate superstition for a political purpose is to play with fire. Because those who assure the plebs they can improve their lot through the aid of supernatural powers are imposters, unless they are extraordinarily fortunate they inevitably find themselves in the embarrassing position of being unable to deliver on their promises. This, Spinoza concludes, “has been the cause of many tumults and atrocious wars,” for the vulgar can be counted on to turn tomorrow on those who are manipulating them today: they “are easily induced by a show of religion now to adore their Kings as Gods, and again to execrate and detest them as the common disease of the human race” (pref.8; emphasis added). Not theocracy but religious warfare would seem to be the major problem superstition poses. But Spinoza’s account continues. It is at precisely this point in his preface, when monarchy and religious violence become prominent themes, that Spinoza ceases to speak of “superstition” or “vain religion” and begins to refer simply to “religion.” Collapsing his earlier distinction (and dropping, for the time being, his use of “religion” to denote an outlook guided by reason), he declares that, to avoid discord, “immense study has been employed to embellish religion, true or vain, with worship and pomp so that it might be taken more seriously than any other motive and always be cultivated by everyone with the utmost observance” (pref.9; emphasis added). Faced with the problem of instability, kings have sought to control the harmful effects of superstition by radicalizing it and by giving it the greatest place in their subjects’ lives. This is why the transformation of superstition into religion is also one from polytheism into monotheism: it replaces the natural tolerance of paganism with a single, all-encompassing theology that can control human behavior by maintaining total control over thought. According to Spinoza,

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this solution has been cultivated with the greatest success “by the Turks, who consider it an impropriety even to dispute, and occupy each’s judgment with so many prejudices that they leave no place in the mind for sound reason or for doubting anything” (pref.9). In the Ottoman Empire, theocratic mind control has been perfected into a science that achieves complete social stability via the absolute stifling of all thinking and all intellectual independence. But Spinoza also says this strategy has been cultivated by the teachers of “true” religion—that is, Christianity—as well. Both Christianity and Islam are natural allies of monarchy because they persuade people “to fight for their servitude as though for their salvation” (pref.10; emphasis added). Their teaching of another life trumps all possible worldly promises, and it is therefore the logical solution to the political problem that paganism first incited. This would seem why, to Spinoza, “the spirit of the multitude” in his time is “still vulnerable to the superstition of the Gentiles” (pref.13). Christianity, in other words, is but the most mature version of the kind of piety with which Quintus Curtius was familiar—and so he was not altogether wrong to claim that nothing regulates a multitude more effectively than superstition. The Promise of Republicanism In its political effects (divine right monarchy) as well as its theoretical justification (theological anti-rationalism), traditional Christianity comes on stage as the foremost adversary to the regime and way of life (characterized by “sound reason” and “doubting”) that the Treatise aims to vindicate and establish. So it is at this darkest moment in the preface that a picture of that regime and way of life is suddenly illuminated for the reader. If “the highest secret of a monarchical regime”—which Spinoza has just exposed—“and its interest altogether” is to control minds through religion, in a “free republic . . . nothing can be devised or attempted more unhappily” (pref.11). There, citizens are so firmly attached to their intellectual independence that they raise seditions if—but only if—their opinions are criminalized (pref.11). Indeed, Spinoza now claims this republic’s possibility is “the chief thing I have set out to demonstrate in this treatise” (pref.12). While it would thus seem that his purpose in writing the Treatise is to reform society, he next strikingly insists that that is hardly the case, for he claims merely to be describing the Dutch Republic of 1670, “where nothing”— not religion, not even life itself—“is considered dearer and sweeter than freedom” (pref.12; emphasis added). This characterization of the Dutch Republic, however, is highly dubious. In a well-known letter, Spinoza claimed to have

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written the Treatise in part because freedom of speech in the Netherlands was “in every way suppressed” by religious authorities (Spinoza 2002, 844).10 In saluting that republic’s “rare happiness,” Spinoza presents the Treatise as a work of patriotism, but he changes the meaning of what that republic and that patriotism stand for. He replaces the religious spiritedness of the historical Netherlands with one that defines itself in opposition to the religious prejudices that he now baldly calls “the traces of ancient slavery” (pref.13). Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if more paradoxical, to say this republic will remain religious—if we agree with Spinoza that religion requires each person to use “his own free judgment” (pref.16) to settle theological matters for himself. In this way, Spinoza suggests that to liberate human beings from the Turkish solution to the political problem posed by superstition he will have to draw upon aspects of that solution for his own purposes. His envisioned liberal republic cannot be wholly or simply secular. It will need to use superstition to persuade citizens “to spend blood and soul” (pref.10), but—and here is the crucial difference—it will persuade them to do so for a republic, rather than a monarch, and in the name of their own freedom. Thus, in the next section of the preface, Spinoza again laments that what he now calls “the ancient religion” (pref.16) has been corrupted, and he attributes that corruption to the widespread “admiration” of pastors who incite hatred and intolerance by “picking at dissidents publicly” and by teaching only what is “new and unusual” and what the vulgar most admire (pref.15). Swearing an oath to “immortal God,” Spinoza draws upon the same anthropocentric thinking— the angry sense that the universe must be just and responsive to human needs—that he criticized at the Treatise’s opening. The “most inequitable thing,” he declares, is that piety and religion are said to “consist in absurd secrets; and those who completely despise reason, and reject and turn away the understanding as by nature corrupt, are believed to have a divine light” (pref.17). The outlooks of all seventeenth-century believers—“Christian, Turk, Jew, or Heathen” (pref.14)—impede the use of one’s own “free judgment” and thus turn human beings from rational beings into “beasts” (pref.16). Spinoza’s “ancient religion,” by contrast, sanctions the intellectual independence that he has claimed to find on display in the Dutch Republic, and it is thus on the side of humanity in the fullest sense. It directs us to the rational thinking and liberation from intellectual authority that Spinoza calls our summum bonum and finis ultimus (iii.1–2; iv.10). Spinoza’s liberalism, then, is anti-theocratic, but it is not, strictly speaking, anti-theological. The Treatise is both a plan for political reform and a

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religious apologetic—and these two ends will eventually unite in Spinoza’s articulation of a civil religion for a liberal republic (xiv.13ff.). To make the case for this new theologico-political outlook, Spinoza says he will “painstakingly set about to examine Scripture anew in a full and free spirit”—to investigate it with fresh eyes, without any preconceptions; to read it on its own terms, imposing nothing foreign onto it—and all in order to demonstrate that true piety vindicates our humanity because it commands us to develop our reason by thinking for ourselves. But this presentation of true piety as intellectual independence is also paradoxical, for it would seem to undermine the Bible’s authority even as it establishes it. Indeed, it would actually render the Bible redundant for those who follow it most closely! To the extent that Scripture remained an authority for someone, that person could not truly be said to be pious. And even for the rest, it would be, at best, a starting point—one that must eventually be set aside when no longer needed (cf. xii.11). The religious consciousness Spinoza is crafting is thus marked by a tension-ridden mixture of doubt and certainty. The attempt to cultivate this paradoxical outlook accounts for many of the contradictions in the Treatise’s twenty chapters, as well as in the summary of them that Spinoza presents near the preface’s end (pref.21–32). In those chapters, he encourages the doubting that he has claimed is the centerpiece of true religion. He teaches that the prophets only imagined God’s voice (chaps. 1–2), that miracles are impossible (chap. 6), and that the Bible is a product of human, and therefore fallible, historical sources (chaps. 7–10). This last claim allows Spinoza to assert that since there is nothing holy “outside the mind” (xii.12), to the extent Scripture conflicts with reason it is “nothing besides parchment and ink” (xii.13). At the same time, as we will see, these same chapters are filled with declarations of “certainty”—for example, about the impossibility of miracles and the eternal validity of the laws of nature, which Spinoza terms “God” (iv.3, 10–11; vi.7–19). The believers and citizens educated by the Treatise will thus be animated by a religious but also anti-theocratic kind of pride. They will have pride in their independence of mind and contempt for traditional or revealed authority, but they may also not realize how much they actually take on trust. Spinoza’s Audience and Aims By the end of the preface, Spinoza has indicated that life in a liberal republic will be more satisfying than a life of superstition because it will be characterized by a more truly or distinctly human belief in one’s independent-mindedness, but he has also suggested that there are natural and psychological limits to

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how widespread genuine independent-mindedness can become. Over the next twenty chapters, he will reveal those limits by testing them; he will initiate a Radical Enlightenment (Israel 2001; Jacob 1981), but that enlightenment will rest in crucial ways on the spread of a new kind of superstition—one that is more salutary than the old superstition because it is friendlier to reason and thus conducive to the genuine liberation of a select few. This consideration, I believe, helps make sense of a key paradox that emerges when, at the end of the preface, Spinoza makes some remarks about his audience. Speaking directly to the “Philosopher reader,” he notes “the utility of the argument, both of the whole work and of each chapter.” But he also says he left some things out of that argument because “the chief things [in the Treatise] have been recognized more than enough by Philosophers” (pref.33). But if philosophers have already learned “the chief things” Spinoza has to teach,11 why—to put it bluntly—has he written this book? What is the Treatise’s contribution to human wisdom? The answer begins to become clear as Spinoza continues reflecting on his readership. Yet I am not eager to recommend this treatise to others; for nothing I might hope for could please them for any reason. For I have recognized how tenaciously those prejudices that the psyche has embraced by a show of piety stay on in the mind. Furthermore, I have recognized that it is equally impossible to take away superstition from the vulgar as to take away dread. Finally, I have recognized that they are not regulated by reason, but are carried away by the impulse to praise or blame. Therefore, I do not invite the vulgar, and all who struggle with the same emotions as the vulgar, to read these things, since I would want them to neglect this book completely rather than become troublesome by interpreting it perversely—as they are used to doing with everything—and, while they in no way profit themselves, be an obstacle to others who would philosophize more freely if this one thing did not stand in their way: they deem that reason has to serve as handmaid to theology. For the latter, I am confident this work will be useful through and through. (pref.33–34; emphasis added) Dividing his readership into four groups—the vulgar, those who struggle with the same emotions as the vulgar, philosophers, and potential philosophers— Spinoza indicates he has written his Treatise with the outlook and preconcep-

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tions of each in mind. And while his seeming message to the first two groups could not be clearer—they should close the book immediately and read no further!—Spinoza provides evidence here that he hardly expects them to do that. The vulgar and those who share their emotions are “not regulated by reason, but are carried away by the impulse to praise and blame.” Does Spinoza here suggest that praise and blame are contrary to reason—that someone who leads a rational life will not make moral judgments or understand human action in terms of categories like right and wrong, just and unjust, noble and base? It is too early to answer that question, but Spinoza’s statement at least suggests that the moral impulse to praise and blame stands as a large obstacle to the life of reason, and thus that the road to rationality requires restraining or dampening our moral impulses, especially anger. Yet, after leading us to this implication, Spinoza pulls back and closes the preface by assuring the reader—and the censor—that he has written the Treatise with the utmost care and with “the ancestral laws” and “the common welfare” in mind: “I know I am a human being and could have erred. Yet I have been painstakingly careful not to err, and first and foremost in that whatever I wrote would altogether answer to the laws of the fatherland, to piety, and to good morals” (pref.35). Spinoza has crafted the Treatise with due attention to the moral categories he knows are central to the judgments of unphilosophic readers—who, perhaps believing themselves to be among the elite rather than the vulgar, cannot be trusted to take him up on his invitation to close his book. By thus drawing attention to the care with which he composed the Treatise, Spinoza cautions us not to regard the many contradictions that pervade this work as mere sloppy errors. He will engage not only in defensive esotericism to protect himself from persecution but also, as his remarks about his potentially philosophic readers suggest, in a combination of pedagogical and political esotericism as well.12 As he later writes, education in religious matters “can and has to vary in accordance with mental cast” (v.7). Knowing this, the “Philosopher reader” will understand the importance of “each chapter” for the gradual unfolding of Spinoza’s larger educational project. An outlook appropriate or helpful for someone at stage (or chapter) 1 may be considered childish by the time that person reaches stage (or chapter) 20, and so too for entire societies. With this consideration in mind, we can return to the paradox with which the preface closes: if the “chief things” in the Treatise have already been recognized by philosophers, why is Spinoza writing it? His initial answer is that the Treatise is a primer for his potentially philosophic readers, one that can liberate them from the prejudice that “reason has to serve as handmaid

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to theology.” But admirable as this aim may be, it cannot be the Treatise’s sole purpose, for as we have seen, Spinoza also suggests his work will break new ground: it will definitively rebut the claims of superstition and show that purported instances of revelation “have been nothing but . . . the hallucinations of a sad and fearful psyche” (pref.6). As Spinoza implied on his title page, his work will vindicate the possibility of true “freedom” against religious challenges. It would seem, then, that what philosophers can learn from this work is twofold. First, they can learn a new way to educate potential future philosophers, a way that entails a large-scale project of social and political reform. In grasping this lesson, however, they will also gain a decisive theoretical insight, if indeed it is the case that this educational and transformative project can somehow refute theology’s challenge to reason once and for all.

The Critique of Prophecy (Chapters 1 and 2) The Treatise’s first six chapters contain Spinoza’s exegetical treatment of the Bible. Beginning in chapter 7, Spinoza drops a bombshell: he argues that Scripture is an incoherent accumulation of historical sources, and he founds the modern discipline of biblical criticism. In chapters 1 through 6, however, he only hints at this ultimate destination (e.g., i.14; vi.51), and he reads the Bible in a way that seemingly defers to the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and that the books of the other prophets are autographic. He thus preserves the view that God, though communicating in different ways (ii.19) and often accommodating Himself to diverse mindsets (ii.52), always spoke with a single intent. That intent, as Spinoza presents it, was to sanction a common, universal moral teaching that celebrates the life of reason and condemns superstition. The main foundations of this argument are provided in chapters 1 and 2, which are devoted, respectively, to prophecy and prophets. Prophecy and Divine Knowledge Spinoza’s decision to treat prophecy and prophets in two separate chapters should, however, immediately send up a red flag. Why should the message of revelation and the character of its messenger be discussed separately (cf. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II.32–38)? One could ask something similar about Spinoza’s decision to divorce his treatments of prophecy and miracles and to arrange the chapters devoted to them as the bookends of this unit of the Treatise (chaps. 1 and 6). Spinoza begins chapter 1 with an

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orthodox definition of prophecy: “Prophecy, or Revelation, is certain knowledge of some matter revealed by God to human beings” (i.1). But, if prophecy or revelation entails the communication of supernatural or suprarational wisdom, would it not in fact be the most important miracle? Or, if that is not so, as Spinoza will ultimately argue, would not this claim depend on the refutation of miracles, which Spinoza defers to chapter 6? Does the structure of these chapters, in short, entail a kind of rhetorical legerdemain? These concerns become heightened when Spinoza immediately draws from his orthodox definition of prophecy a rather heterodox conclusion. If prophecy entails “certain knowledge” on the part of the prophet, the same is not true of his audience, which, unable to have such knowledge itself, “can only embrace the matters being revealed by mere faith” (i.1). Because prophets are orators and interpreters of God’s message, ordinary believers who have not had revelations face a substantial hearsay problem—an insight that underlies Spinoza’s decision to treat prophecy and prophets separately. The proof text he uses to justify his definition of prophecy, and the first biblical quotation in the Treatise, involves not God communicating to man but one man communicating to another in God’s name. When God instructed Moses to address Pharaoh, Spinoza says, He constituted Moses “the God of Pharaoh as it were” and made his brother Aaron his prophet (i.1). As Hobbes states, our faith in traditional accounts of revelation must be “faith in men only” (1994, vii.7). If Moses wrote the Pentateuch, its authority for us is entirely dependent on our assessment of his character and our trust that his revelatory experience was genuine—and as Spinoza will later point out, many of Moses’s contemporaries believed him to be an imposter (xvii.103; see also Yaffe 1997, 139).13 Now, while this argument may sow some doubt about revelation with a certain type of believer, as a conclusive debunking of the prophets’ authority it is hardly definitive. One could, after all, seriously entertain arguments for the view that “mere faith” is all we can attain and that we must therefore open ourselves to the possibility of receiving suprarational wisdom. More radically, one might consider that not faith but certainty, and the infusion of such superhuman knowledge, is available to those who read the Bible in the right spirit or with the gift of grace—and that all those, like Spinoza, who can do no more than interpret the words on the page as our minds can comprehend them are thus inherently stunted or deficient.14 But from the very outset of chapter 1, Spinoza makes clear that he will not respond to, much less refute, such arguments. Instead, from his orthodox initial definition of prophecy as certain knowledge revealed by God to human beings, he immediately draws

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the radical and counterintuitive conclusion that “natural knowledge can be called Prophecy” (i.2). Since scientific knowledge is dictated to us by “God’s nature, insofar as we participate in it” and by “God’s decrees . . . as it were,” it does not differ from prophetic knowledge in the ordinary sense, except that prophetic knowledge “extends beyond” the limits of natural knowledge “and the laws of human Nature considered in themselves cannot be its cause” (i.3). So while Spinoza, for the time being, grants that there could be revealed truths above reason,15 he insists there cannot be prophetic knowledge contradicting it: “In respect of the certainty that natural knowledge involves and the source from which it is derived (namely, God) it does not yield to prophetic knowledge in any mode.” But Spinoza then adds a surprising caveat—surprising not only for its content but also for its sarcastic tone. Natural knowledge will never yield to prophetic knowledge, he writes, “unless, perhaps, someone wanted to understand, or rather to dream, that the Prophets had a human body but not a human mind, so that their sensations and consciousness were of quite another nature than ours” (i.3). But is this not exactly “prophecy” as that term is ordinarily understood? In this sneering aside, Spinoza does in some way acknowledge this, but only to mock it. He treats the possibility of a robust anti-rationalism—that the prophets had a divinely transformed consciousness—with scathing contempt, as a possibility beneath consideration. But this is highly puzzling, since the promise Spinoza made in the preface—and the thesis of the entire book!—was that he would refute this very possibility. There are well-known passages in the Bible that appear to endorse the view that human reason is ultimately insufficient and that the wisdom we stand most in need of can only be attained through divine illumination.16 And while Spinoza had earlier stated that he would show this interpretation to be mistaken via a forthright and respectful engagement with Scripture, now—at the very beginning of this endeavor—he dismisses it with derisive laughter. In the forthcoming analysis of prophecy, the one claim Spinoza will not entertain is the very one he had originally promised to take most seriously. On the very first page of the very first chapter of the Treatise, he appears to pull the rug out from under the entire enterprise. How can this be explained? Could Spinoza have simply been boasting in the preface when he promised a refutation of contra-rational knowledge (and hence of the idea that reason must serve as handmaiden to theology)? That possibility, if true, would undercut the integrity of the Treatise in a way the author would certainly have recognized. As an alternative, it may be helpful to consider whether this very mockery, which will be repeated several times

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throughout the work (e.g., vi.1–5), may in fact indicate Spinoza’s awareness of the position of his adversaries at its most robust, as well as of his own inability to refute it directly. In the preface, Spinoza had conveyed a certain respect for the position he promised to refute, at least insofar as he had acknowledged that it needs refuting. He indicated his awareness that reason is not self-validating. After all, it cannot engage, much less debunk, the claims of those who reject its fundamental presuppositions (for example, causality, or the rule of noncontradiction) or who appeal to superhuman knowledge.17 By acknowledging this only indirectly, and in a way that seeks to drum up scorn for such claims, Spinoza overlays his admission of a crucial vulnerability that reason faces with a frankly propagandistic argument. It is therefore worth considering whether that propagandistic argument may be a crucial aspect of his attempt to provide a genuine vindication of reason. Put differently, if the Treatise is not to be read merely as a work of rationalist ideology, we must consider the possibility that Spinoza’s mockery of traditional revelation is intended to show that if he cannot refute such revelation directly, he must travel another path—one that is intimately connected to the cultivation and spread of a certain mindset among his audience. In this way, it is possible that the rhetorical and theoretical aspects of Spinoza’s writing are not as distinct as they at first appear or that Spinoza’s ridicule of orthodoxy is not meant to replace his refutation but rather “is itself the refutation” (Strauss 1965, 28–29). Just what such a refutation would look like is not yet apparent. But as Spinoza concludes this proem to chapter 1, he indicates that his forthcoming discussion of prophecy will be primarily crafted to affect a certain kind of reader—someone already scientifically inclined who would agree that “nowadays we do not have any Prophets” (i.7). Such a reader is likely to concur that reason “does not yield to prophetic knowledge in any mode” (i.3) because he will have undergone an experience to which Spinoza now appeals. Someone who has completed a mathematical proof, for example, “has tasted the certainty of understanding . . . within himself ” (i.5). This experience is likely to have convinced this reader that “everything we clearly and distinctly understand” through our reason is communicated from God “not in words but in a far more excellent mode” and “has the power to form some notions explaining the nature of things and teaching the conduct of life” (i.5). Finally, this experience is also likely to have indicated the superiority of scientific knowledge: while it is possible to embrace a geometric proposition through “mere faith” in Euclid’s authority, one who does so can hardly be said to understand it.

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It now appears that Spinoza’s task will be to address, refine, and cultivate the outlook of this type of reader: someone who accepts mathematics and the scientific method in ordinary life, who would never expect to receive a revelation, and who believes the world is now disenchanted—but who is plagued by uncertainty because he cannot discount biblical accounts of prophecy and miracles, for if those accounts are true, the lived experience of reason’s certainty must be purely provisional, its truth a temporary fixture of God’s will, subject to change at any time. Reason would then have to serve as handmaiden to theology. Spinoza’s primary strategy in chapters 1 and 2 will therefore be to shore up the belief, so to speak, of this kind of reader. His arguments will appeal to and to some extent redirect this reader’s extant presuppositions. And since, as he and his audience have now agreed, there are no remaining prophets to be interviewed, the only way to proceed is to “roll out the sacred scrolls” left to us by the biblical ones—to read Scripture literally and on its own terms, without imposing anything onto it. But no sooner does he say this than Spinoza adds a caveat, for doing so requires understanding, as a preliminary for all else, that the Bible was written by, or at least addressed to, people in the grip of a particular “vulgar” moral mindset: that of “devotion” (i.8). The Moral Critique of Revelation With this note of caution, Spinoza recalls the preface’s analysis of superstition. To understand the prophets, he says, we must situate them in their context, which means recognizing that, on account of their devotion, “the Jews never make mention of intermediate or particular causes” but instead “always have recourse to God. If, for example, they have made money in business, they say it has been bestowed on them by God; if they long for anything to happen, they say God has disposed their heart; and if they are even thinking something, they say God has said it to them” (i.8). Therefore, Spinoza insists, not every instance where the Bible records God speaking to human beings can be taken literally, and we can only identify instances of prophecy where Scripture “expressly says” this has occurred (i.8). But as Spinoza has just acknowledged, the Bible’s Jewish authors will say quite “expressly” that God spoke to them when they simply had thoughts. So how can we distinguish such instances from genuine revelations? Is Spinoza not here immediately violating his promise to read the words of the prophets literally and not to attribute to them anything “which they themselves did not clearly dictate” (i.7)?

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To answer this, let us now delve into the substance of Spinoza’s treatment of prophecy. Spinoza begins by stating that all instances of biblical prophecy fall into one of two categories: either the revelations were “true and outside the imagination of the Prophet” or they were “imaginary”—although in the latter cases, Spinoza acknowledges, the prophets thought what they were imagining was real (the prophet “was so disposed that he seemed to himself clearly to be hearing words or seeing something”; i.9). But if that is so, what justifies the conclusion that the Bible itself understands prophecy to be purely imaginary in these latter cases? Leaving that question aside for the moment, Spinoza turns first to the revelation of the Mosaic Law at Sinai, which he says was communicated “by a true voice” (i.10). Spinoza thus begins his account of prophecy proper by endorsing the veracity of the most important revelation in the Bible, and he acknowledges that to do otherwise would “impugn the force of Scripture” (i.14) for both Christians and Jews. Because of this, Spinoza initially insists on the genuinely revealed character of the Law despite noting that the words of the Decalogue in Exodus differ from those in Deuteronomy (i.14)—a fact he says once led him to suspect the Israelites did not actually hear God’s words (1.13). On the basis of this endorsement of orthodoxy, however, Spinoza immediately draws a heterodox conclusion: he insists “this voice alone—the one by which the law was produced—was a true one” (i.10). Appealing to the biblical distinction between Moses and the other prophets (Deut. 34:10–12), Spinoza concludes that Moses must be the only prophet who spoke to God; all others merely imagined the experience (i.11, 21). To understate considerably, this claim is highly suspect. Here again, Spinoza appears to foist his own, rationalistic mindset onto the Bible in exactly the way he cautioned against at the opening of chapter 1. It is not possible here to show how Spinoza does this in each of the biblical examples he provides, but a brief discussion of one of them may serve as an illustration. Spinoza claims that although the third chapter of I Samuel seems to narrate that the young Samuel truly heard God’s voice, the superiority of Moses’s prophecy compels the conclusion that the voice he heard was imaginary (i.11). And, he says, we can also deduce this from the fact that Samuel, hearing this voice while asleep, initially suspected it to be Eli, who was nearby. We know from reason and experience that nearby voices can creep into dreams and that in dreams “the imagination is most capable of imagining things that are not” (i.12). But here the biblical context plainly indicates not that Samuel dreamed God spoke to him but that God spoke to him in a

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dream (i.11; 1 Sam. 3:3–10). Having been called three times by God, Samuel did initially think he was being called by Eli (i.11), but at the fourth calling Samuel answered, and God revealed to him the impending destruction of Eli’s house that is narrated in the following chapter (1 Sam. 4:17–18). As this example indicates, and as a comparison of Spinoza’s other examples with their biblical contexts would also show, the Bible does not share the scientific perspective Spinoza attributes to it. His reading of Scripture is self-consciously inventive and even tongue in cheek. While giving grounds for most of his scientifically inclined audience to retain their belief in the Bible’s authority, he shows his more assiduous readers that Scripture rejects their perspective: it teaches that dreams, and even waking visions, can communicate wisdom and command us how to live. Alternatively, as Spinoza now shows, if we deny this, if we suppose (as he had earlier insisted) that the Israelites were not imagining things when receiving the Decalogue, the consequences are hardly more encouraging for the Bible’s rationality. Since any reasonable person who wished “to be made certain” of God’s existence would have insisted on seeing the source of His voice (i.16), it follows that the Jews, if they were reasonable, must have literally seen Him (i.18). And this is why the Bible speaks of God “descending” to the mountain (i.17) and of His speaking to the Israelites “face to face . . . as two human beings are used to communicating . . . , their two bodies mediating” (i.14, quoting Deut. 5:4). As Spinoza now reveals, Scripture “never enjoined us to believe that God is incorporeal” and in fact “clearly indicates that God has a figure” (i.17–18). So if we are to believe that the revelation at Sinai—which is foundational for both the Old and New Testaments—was real and not the product of an overactive and deluded imagination, if it was witnessed by and attested to by rational people, it must follow that God is corporeal, like the pagan deities propitiated by Alexander. If we take the Bible literally, as Spinoza has encouraged us to do, we cannot understand the distinction between Moses’s prophecy and all others without reference to such corporealism, for the Pentateuch’s last words attest that “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10; emphasis added). Spinoza’s accomplishment in the first part of chapter 1 is thus to put his scientifically inclined but still pious reader on the horns of a dilemma. Invited by Spinoza to read Scripture literally and with fresh eyes, such a reader will come to see that its picture of divinity is hardly less anthropomorphic than Greco-Roman superstition. Conversely, if this reader follows Spinoza’s surface presentation and reads the Bible as a rational document, he will, as a result of the impositions onto the text that are necessary to sustain this view,

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gradually find himself more and more alienated from its authority and its core teachings.18 That alienation reaches its first peak when Spinoza, throwing this reader a life preserver, turns very briefly from the Old Testament to the New and begins to present Christianity as a rational piety that contradicts the crude corporealism of the Hebrew Bible. God “communicates his essence to our minds with no bodily means employed,” and yet “if a human being were to perceive some things with the mind alone which are not contained in the first foundations of our knowledge and cannot be deduced from them, his mind would necessarily have to be more outstanding and far more excellent than a human one.” Such “perfection,” Spinoza now says, was achieved by no one “besides Christ” (i.22–23). “Therefore, if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man is used to doing with a friend (that is, with their two bodies mediating), Christ on the other hand communicated with God mind to mind” (i.24; emphasis added).19 By suddenly invoking “Christ” in the middle of this debunking chapter on the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza not only suggests that he is writing as a Christian, but also reaffirms his claim from the preface that original Christianity was a kind of rational piety. After thus recalling the possibility of this philosophic religion for the reader, Spinoza goes further than he has before. Seeming to forget his earlier claim that to deny the truth of the Mosaic revelation is to impugn all of Scripture, he asserts that “besides Christ, no one”—not even Moses—“received what was revealed of God except by the work of the imagination” (i.25; emphasis added). Just as Spinoza had previously used Moses’s authority to undercut the other prophets, he now uses Jesus’s to do so to Moses. But the way he discusses Jesus here points to a third and final stage in this debunking, albeit one that proceeds more subtly than the first two.20 After all, what would it mean to say that Jesus came to fulfill the law and the prophets (Matt. 5:17) if the Law itself, together with the messianic prophecies, were merely imagined to begin with? As Spinoza will soon state, the idea that God is a lawgiver is an irrational anthropomorphism (i.36). This is because, as he writes (in the most radical statement in chapter 1), it is only “on account of the weakness of the vulgar” that Scripture frequently depicts God “as like a human being” and attributes to him “a mind, a spirit and emotions of the spirit, as well as a body” (i.35; emphasis added). As a moment’s reflection shows, these descriptions obviously apply to Jesus in spades. In Spinoza’s formulation, Jesus’s voice can be called the “voice of God, just like the one Moses heard,” because God’s wisdom “has taken on human nature in Christ” (i.23). Being an incarnation of the divine mind made flesh, Jesus is a clear example of an

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anthropomorphic deity (much more so than the God of the Hebrew Bible, whom Jewish tradition at least regards as incorporeal). But even if we disregard this, Spinoza in the passage just quoted declares that the very idea of a divine mind is also a “vulgar” anthropomorphism. Therefore, if Jesus thought he spoke to God “mind to mind,” he suffered from the same ignorance that caused the Old Testament’s authors to attribute physical, emotional, and moral characteristics to divinity. And one could point to other such anthropomorphisms that pervade Jesus’s teachings, such as his claim that God is his father as well as his promises of mercy and grace, which Spinoza also says are human qualities mistakenly attributed to divinity (i.38). The Levels of Spinoza’s Teaching on Prophecy As this overview has made clear, Spinoza’s critique of revelation in chapter 1 is marked by numerous contradictions, and those contradictions help reveal the way this critique proceeds on distinct levels. At this point it may be helpful to summarize those levels as we have seen them and as they are further developed in the remainder of chapter 1. At the first and deepest level, Spinoza has indicated that he cannot directly refute the possibility that the prophets had a divinely transformed consciousness (i.3) or that Jesus possessed a “wisdom that is above human understanding” (i.23). Not only does Spinoza signal this by mocking rather than directly addressing the possibility of such suprarational knowledge at the chapter’s opening, but he also occasionally reminds the reader (however indirectly) of the possibility that wisdom of this kind could, theoretically, exist.21 On the second, intermediate level, Spinoza indicates, for a reader who is already scientifically inclined and who accepts the authority of reason, that all biblical prophecy, including that of Jesus, was a “vulgar” or primitive expression of imaginative delusions. He claims the prophets “perceived and taught almost everything parabolically and enigmatically” because the content of overactive and fearful imaginations is often nonrational, and they “expressed everything spiritual corporeally” because the “nature of the imagination” compelled them to do so (i.46). The characteristics we give to the gods we imagine are naturally and inevitably drawn from and cannot transcend the experiences we have of ourselves, which is why those deities are always anthropomorphic. Hence, not only the Old Testament prophets but also Paul, the Apostles, and (Spinoza implies) Jesus himself perceived God corporeally on account of their “vulgar imaginations” (i.46).22 In the remainder of chapter 1, Spinoza clearly applies the preface’s teaching about superstition’s psychological origins to the Hebrew Bible. He states

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that the Jews “were used to referring to God” everything that surpassed their grasp and of “whose natural causes they were ignorant” (i.30). They thus thought storms and lightning to be sent by God, and they called unusual works of nature “miracles,” or “works of God,” because they thought them “stupendous,” and they “admired them in the greatest degree” when they “opened the way toward salvation in extreme perils” (i.30). In this respect, the ancient Jews were no different from “the Heathens” (i.31). Their piety arose from and was characterized by a combination of admiration and devotion, both of which were products of ignorance. This in turn led them to believe in miracles and to endeavor to guide their lives by suprarational wisdom. While chapter 6 will provide a more extensive and official argument against miracles, it is evident from this discussion that, on this level at least, he has presented the matter as already settled. By applying the preface’s psychology to the Bible, he encourages his scientific reader to read Scripture anthropologically, as the poetic and literary expression of a prescientific people that can be understood “in universal terms” (ii.58) alongside the sacred texts of other ancient cultures (cf. i.31). Finally, at the third level and closest to the surface of chapter 1, Spinoza begins to provide an account of the Bible according to which Scripture is itself reasonable and supports a life of freedom and understanding, as opposed to devotion and admiration. He does this, first, by claiming that even though the prophets imagined God they still knew His mind (i.40)—which was also revealed in the Law (i.39)—and then by seeming to present Jesus, who spoke to God “mind to mind,” as “the greatest philosopher who ever lived” (Strauss 1952, 172; Frankel 2001, 301–3). Subsequently, Spinoza introduces the first of two biblical characters whom he will portray as exemplars of the philosophic life: Solomon, whom he later simply calls “the Philosopher” (vi.67) and whom he here says practiced a “natural science” that the Bible calls “God’s science” (i.29). (The second philosophic hero in the Bible, Paul, will come on stage in the next chapter). Even though he had just stated that it is a “vulgar” error to attribute a mind to God, when he mentions Solomon Spinoza says that “we too might perceive the mind of God” by understanding natural science (i.41). But he cautions, however, glossing Elihu’s words at Job 32:8, “Science is not exactly to be sought among the old, for I now find that it depends on the specific virtue or capacity of [a] human being” (i.26). This statement occurs in the middle of a list Spinoza provides of what he claims are the seven biblical meanings of the Hebrew word for “spirit” (ruach). The fourth and central meaning of this word, he says, is “virtue or capability,” and this is the usage Elihu employs when he asserts that it is

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because there is a “spirit” within a human being that science or knowledge is not to be found sought among the old. Spinoza thus presents wisdom as an intellectual manifestation of a more general kind of virtue that could be defined as an intrepid resourcefulness, or a capacity for self-reliance that is, given the nature of things, most frequently found among the young. If it would perhaps be going too far to associate virtue thus understood with the impetuosity Machiavelli had praised as virtù, Spinoza’s use of the term “virtue” here would still nonetheless appear to have much in common with his Florentine predecessor’s redefinition of it. As Spinoza presents it, “virtue and capability” entails the zealous and (one can add, considering Spinoza’s own example) courageous activity of pursuing the truth for oneself through one’s own determined efforts, in contrast with the passive hope to receive divine guidance. On this third level of his presentation, Spinoza claims, as in the preface, that the Bible sanctions such a moral outlook.23 But this again appears to be a self-consciously inventive imposition, and that compels us to ask: is Spinoza’s “refutation” of Scripture an instance of the kind of Machiavellian project recalled by his implied definition of virtue—a concerted effort to overturn traditional Christian piety and replace it with a new “effectual truth”?24 Religious Anthropology Spinoza ends chapter 1 by declaring that we can now “affirm without misgiving” that prophecy is a purely natural phenomenon (i.43), although he confesses to be “ignorant” of the specific “laws of nature” by which it comes about. In a tone that seems likely to instill a brash overconfidence in the reader, he says we actually “care nothing” about the identity of these natural causes (i.44). This is odd. It is as though Spinoza had said we know there is a natural law causing objects to fall to the earth but we need not concern ourselves with discovering the specific properties of gravity. Can one be as certain of a given phenomenon’s existence before and after experiencing a scientific demonstration of its nature? At the very least, uncovering such an explanation via the scientific method is apt to bolster one’s confidence in its truth. An object may fall to earth at 9.81 meters per second squared because it is compelled to do so by a natural law or because God wills it so for the time being, but one finds few physicists endorsing the latter position today. So it is to further the scientific education of his reader, as well as to bolster that reader’s confidence in this education, that Spinoza turns in chapter 2 to what he claimed was beneath his notice at the end of chapter 1. He articulates the

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beginnings of an anthropological account of prophecy that seeks to uncover the particular natural causes explaining the content of specific revelations. As he opens chapter 2, Spinoza declares, in a tone of angry defiance, that this enterprise is demanded not only by “Philosophy” and “the matter itself ” but also, primarily, by “the time” in which he is writing (i.2). The birth of the Enlightenment has made possible, and has even necessitated, a new cultural offensive on behalf of reason. A crucial component of that project is to convince a wider public that it is a great error to seek out “wisdom and the knowledge of natural and spiritual matters from the books of the Prophets” (ii.2). If prophecy is the product of imagination, this conclusion naturally follows, since “experience and reason” testify that those who are “rustic and without any learning” tend to imagine things very vividly, whereas “those who are powerful in understanding, and cultivate it the most” are able to temper their imagination and “hold it by the rein” (ii.1). Accordingly, the most visible accomplishment of chapter 2 is to elucidate the lack of sophistication—indeed, the crude ignorance—of the biblical prophets. Hence, Spinoza reveals that Solomon (whom he had called a natural scientist in the previous chapter!) was grossly ignorant of basic geometry: “like vulgar workmen,” he thought the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle was 3:1 (ii.29).25 Similarly, Joshua believed the sun revolves around the earth, and Adam, Abraham, and Moses all believed God to be something like a very big, very powerful human being, who was thus limited not only in time and space but also in knowledge of human affairs (ii.32, 34, 36, 41). Most radically, Moses was not even a monotheist (ii.37–38): he believed God was the chief of a pantheon of deities, and this opinion was shared by the Jews as late as the time of David (ii.39–40). As Spinoza points out each of these heresies, for that is exactly what he is suggesting a literal reading of the Bible teaches, he politely claims that specific revelations were “accommodated” to the opinions and capacities of the prophets (e.g., ii.31). Spinoza never dares suggest openly that the biblical God is ignorant, only that He had to communicate with the prophets in language and using ideas and imagery they could understand. And he says that this explains the massive contradictions between the various prophets, which he does not scruple to point out. Rustic and unsophisticated prophets, for example, imagined God very differently and communicated in different language from urbane and courtly ones (ii.19–20); prophets who believed in free will and moral responsibility believed God “indifferent to and unaware of future human actions” (ii.15), whereas those who did not received other revelations; and, in general, cheerful prophets foretold

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happy events, angry and melancholy prophets predicted awful judgments and sufferings, and female prophets predicted “God’s mercy” (ii.17–18). As Spinoza concludes, prophets “were more capable of these rather than those revelations with respect to the varying temperament of the body” (ii.18). In other words, prophecy is a natural result of overflowing and unrestrained emotions, which, rooted in material causes, determines the characteristics of particular imaginations. The wide range of affects humans are capable of undergoing explains the varieties of religious experience and thus also the diversity of religious beliefs in the world. Spinoza’s semirespectful claim that divine revelations were “accommodated” to the grasp of the prophets suggests that we can accept their ignorance and still be pious (ii.31). In fact, Spinoza goes so far as to assert that the prophets were themselves aware of their ignorance, which is why they “always” sought to confirm their revelations by a sign, although Spinoza acknowledges that “Scripture does not always make mention” of this (ii.10), and he infers it from only a handful of examples (ii.5 and context). Seeming to forget his statement in chapter 1 that the prophets thought what they were imagining was real (i.9), Spinoza speaks as though they knew they were imagining and so were always distrustful of their own revelations. They therefore made sure to ask God for some apparent miracle or “the outcome of some future thing” to attest their revelations (ii.5). But considering what Spinoza has already said about miracles (i.30), this too is hardly trustworthy: “Signs were given with respect to the opinions and capacity of the Prophet” (ii.12). Hence, in an addition to a vivid imagination and a sign, the prophets required yet a third thing: “a spirit inclined solely to the equitable and the good” (ii.10). In Spinoza’s formulation, then, the certainty of the prophets “was not mathematical, but only moral” (ii.6). The touchstone for distinguishing true from false prophecy is whether that prophecy contains a correct moral teaching. Hence, Spinoza’s official teaching in chapter 2 is that, although the Bible contains wildly irrational and contradictory claims about “merely theoretical matters,” those having to do with morality “are to be thought of quite otherwise” (ii.24). Scripture has one, coherent, and (we presume) rational moral message. Now, Spinoza’s claim that the biblical prophets, in spite of their diverse mindsets and levels of education, nevertheless espoused a common moral teaching, is often accepted at face value (cf. Donagan 1988, 24–25; Huenemann 1999; Mason 1997, 147–71), but Spinoza himself has already given us cause to doubt whether it can be his sincere view. To begin with, we may wonder whether the theoretical discrepancies among the prophets that

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Spinoza uncovers are really as morally irrelevant as he suggests: for example, whether God exercises judgment or mercy; whether He punishes wrongdoing; whether He is compassionate or jealous (ii.36 and 41, referencing the Decalogue: Exod. 20:5; Deut. 5:9); whether He is aware of the future and will forgive sins (ii.32) or repent of decrees (ii.34); and whether humans have free will or their actions are predestined (ii.35)—all these are theoretical matters having direct bearing on crucial moral questions, the potential answers to which are highly likely to affect how one lives. Second, as Spinoza makes clear, the biblical standard for whether an action conforms to “the equitable and the good” is of course the Mosaic Law (ii.6; Deut. 13:2–6), and Spinoza has provided considerable reasons to doubt that it was divinely revealed. If Moses’s theoretical opinions about God were as primitive and crude as Spinoza now says they were (ii.36–38, 41–45), how likely is it that he just happened to imagine a perfectly rational moral law? What grounds could there be for supposing such a happenstance? In fact, at the conclusion of chapter 2, Spinoza says explicitly that the Mosaic Law was as defective as can be, although it may have been appropriately geared toward the population it was meant to govern. Inverting his earlier suggestion that Moses was a rustic who dreamed up a reasonable law, he now presents him as a prudent and well-intentioned legislator who composed a code for a hopelessly backward and uneducable people. And surely it is not to be believed that human beings accustomed to the superstitions of the Egyptians, crude, and done in by a most miserable slavery, understood anything sound about God, or that Moses taught them anything but a mode of living—not as a Philosopher, that they might ultimately be compelled to live well on the basis of the freedom of the spirit, but as a Lawgiver, on the basis of the imperium of the Law. Therefore, the plan for living well—or true life and the worship and love of God—was for them more slavery than true freedom and the grace and gift of God. For he [Moses] bade them to love God and keep his law that they might bear past goods received from God (freedom from Egyptian servitude, etc.), and terrified them with threats besides if they were to be transgressors of those precepts; and if, on the other hand, they were to observe them, he promised many good things. Accordingly he taught them in the same mode in which parents are used to teaching children who lack all reason. Therefore, it is certain that they were ignorant of the excellence of virtue and true blessedness. (ii.46–47; emphasis added)

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Here Spinoza indicates in the strongest possible language the utter irrationality of the Mosaic Law and, by implication, that of all societies looking to the Bible as a moral authority. But, interestingly, Spinoza’s criticism focuses not on the content of that law—he will discuss this in subsequent chapters—but on the means it employed to procure obedience: rewards and punishments. Moses’s law was defective from the standpoint of philosophy because it sought to compel human beings to act in accordance with the law’s dictates by appealing to their desires for extrinsic goods having nothing to do with the goodness of those actions themselves. But this criticism obviously extends far beyond the Law of Moses. Insofar as all societies require the use of such rewards and punishments—the promise of civic honors to promote virtue, threats of fines or imprisonment to deter criminality—Spinoza’s philosophic criticism of the Mosaic Law is actually a criticism of law as such. Insofar as all morality teaches “nothing besides obedience alone,” as Spinoza says of God’s covenant with Abraham, it has nothing to do with knowledge of God as Spinoza understands it (ii.34). But even as he presents this very harsh criticism of law, Spinoza’s comments also hold out some hope for overcoming this diametrical opposition between reason and obedience, for in contrasting the aims of philosophy and law in this passage, he also (strangely or paradoxically) juxtaposes the ways that a philosopher and a lawgiver would legislate for an entire society. Whereas Moses relied on superstition and its promise of extrinsic rewards and punishments to procure obedience for the sake of political stability, a Spinozistic philosopher would promulgate a law to guide the members of a society toward the true freedom of the rational life. And this difference between Moses and Spinoza arises primarily from the characteristics of the populations receiving their laws: whereas Spinoza’s readership is living at a time when superstition is beginning to erode and the possibility of progress can be discerned (ii.2), Moses legislated for the political equivalent of “children who lack all reason”—children who are incapable of ever reaching maturity and liberation. That Spinoza suddenly raises the possibility of popular enlightenment here is highly puzzling, and for now it provokes more questions than it answers. To begin with, how far can the philosophic education toward “true freedom” or “blessedness” actually spread? One might suppose that such an education can ultimately liberate only a select few, but it is noteworthy that, in the present passage at least, Spinoza does not give this impression. More fundamentally, what could it mean for human beings to “be compelled to live well on the basis of the freedom of the spirit”? With this formulation, Spinoza

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appears to capture some part of the paradoxical experience of a philosophic education in an individual: one is confronted with the truth of certain propositions that one realizes cannot be denied, but one experiences that necessity as a liberation, as the foundation for—indeed, the activity of—a truly free human life. But what could this mean in the context of an entire society, and how could lawgiving relate to it? Could even the best philosophic legislator enable a whole polity to undergo this experience?26 The initial impression Spinoza gives here is that law could be reconceived as a kind of education, directing citizens (perhaps a few, perhaps all) toward the freedom that constitutes their greatest happiness—toward actions that may be in accordance with the law but that are not undertaken out of a spirit of obedience to it. To Spinoza, as we will soon see in more detail, only a law that facilitates and correctly directs the natural human drive to seek out one’s own advantage can be called rational, or truly suited to human beings. Just as the Mosaic Law was directed to the political analogue of “children who lack all reason,” most ordinary laws “have endeavored to curb the vulgar as a horse by the rein” (iv.6). But this means the rational or truly human attitude toward law will always be to view it as a means to the end of one’s own happiness; when it ceases to foster that end, it is no longer sensible to obey it. Thus, after presenting this critique of the Mosaic Law, Spinoza writes that Solomon, “who surpassed everyone of his age in the natural light,” thought “he was above the Law” and simply violated it (ii.48). Solomon’s wisdom, according to Spinoza, consisted in his teaching that “all goods of fortune are vain for mortals . . . , that human beings have nothing more outstanding than understanding, and that they are punished by no greater punishment than foolishness” (ii.48). Solomon held that the goods most of us seek—longevity, health, prosperity, and the like—do not themselves make us happy. Only wisdom can do this, and a key element of that wisdom is recognizing that there are no natural or supernatural punishments for vice as it is ordinarily understood. Virtue is wisdom and its own reward; foolishness is the only vice and the greatest misfortune anyone can suffer. Believing this, Solomon, in this presentation, saw in a more clear-sighted way than his contemporaries the need to seek his own advantage. Insofar as the Law called for sacrifices, he thought it perfectly reasonable (Spinoza does not say “just”) to ignore it. But, in spite or because of this recognition, “he erred” and “did what is not worthy of a Philosopher”: “he indulged in pleasures” (ii.48). The life of philosophy, Spinoza thus asserts unequivocally, is not hedonistic. Even so, Solomon’s example illustrates that when a certain “elite” from among the vulgar is given an education leading to a quasi-philosophic

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outlook, its members are likely to identify their good with pleasure and feel themselves liberated for its pursuit. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, only a rare few can consistently act on the belief that the goods of fortune are vain. Through Solomon’s example, Spinoza provides a preview of the education his Enlightenment project will seek to spread, but he also acknowledges the risks he is willing to run in that project’s service. Shortly afterward, Spinoza mentions Paul’s teaching according to which, as Spinoza presents it, there is no divine justice in the ordinary sense. When Paul refers to justice, “he corrects himself for speaking thus in a human manner and on account of the weakness of the flesh” (ii.51). Like its teaching of God’s corporeality, then, the Bible’s attribution to Him of anthropomorphic moral qualities—justice, mercy, grace, redemption, and so on—is a vulgar “accommodation” that the adherents of a future religion of reason might perhaps dispense with. But, as Spinoza ends chapter 2 by noting this, he again makes acute the pressing question of how widespread the freedom from such accommodations can become, or how far such a liberation can go. Can human beings who are brought to focus more and more on their own advantage successfully do without the belief in another life (as Spinoza may hint when he mentions Jesus for the only time in this chapter)?27 Or, from society’s point of view, if Spinoza’s new Solomonic elite becomes liberated from both an admiration for self-sacrifice and from the belief in particular providence that had previously supported it, how can the dangers following from widespread hedonism be avoided—or justified? In the course of explaining the Bible’s theoretical and moral outlook “in universal terms” (ii.58), Spinoza’s analysis in the first two chapters has raised those questions. The remainder of the Treatise will undertake to answer them. Chapters 3–6 mark an apparent descent from the universal to the particular; they are devoted ostensibly to things specifically Jewish: the choosing of the Hebrews, their divine law, and the miracles they experienced. In each case, as we will see, Spinoza treats the question of reason’s final authority as definitively settled. But as chapters 1 and 2 have also shown, the grounds for that confidence are shaky. Indeed, Spinoza himself may even indicate this indirectly when he states that the only certainty the prophets had was moral. Morality and politics, not physics or metaphysics or epistemology, is the plane on which the battle between reason and revelation, between natural and supernatural wisdom, must take place. Accordingly, the Bible’s teaching on political science and law becomes the theme of the Treatise’s next section.

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Reason and the Religion of Reason (Chapters 3–6) By chapter 3, Spinoza has already provided his treatment of the theological topics covered in the next set of chapters: the calling of the Hebrews, the divine law, and miracles. Speaking in “universal terms” (ii.58), he has associated them with an allegedly discredited ancient mindset of devotion and admiration. He has claimed that the Hebrews thought they were chosen by God because they believed each nation to have its own protective deity (ii.36–41), that they lived by a highly deficient law appropriate only for their childlike condition (ii.46–47), and that they considered unusual works of nature miraculous because they admired what they could not understand, especially when these unusual phenomena “opened the way toward salvation [or safety (salus)] in extreme perils” (i.30). Instead of reconsidering these conclusions, these chapters begin by articulating Spinoza’s philosophic teaching on human nature, political science, and physics, and they then evaluate the Bible’s understanding of these subjects from a rational perspective. At the same time, these chapters continue to present a positive religious teaching, grounded in a new reading of the Bible, that Spinoza intends to spread first to a certain elite and then (at least in some form) to the population at large. The propagation of this new religion of reason often dilutes or obscures the unvarnished philosophical perspective Spinoza elucidates in these chapters, but in doing so it also begins to make clear what he regards as the limits of popular enlightenment and the reasons why they are necessary. Moreover, as we will see, the dogmatism Spinoza engages in to craft this new religion acknowledges, in a way we might not otherwise expect, that the ultimate validity of his rational perspective is not yet adequately established. Law and the Summum Bonum Chapter 3 on the calling of the Hebrews begins with Spinoza’s philosophic thesis on human nature and virtue: “Each’s true happiness and blessedness [beatitudo] consists solely in the enjoyment of the good,” and not in the “glory” that comes from knowing that he alone enjoys it. That good, moreover, “consists solely in wisdom and knowledge of the true” (iii.1–2; emphasis added). Endorsing in his own name the position earlier attributed to Solomon, Spinoza affirms that the “goods of fortune” most of us spend our lives pursuing are wholly vain, for they depend for their existence on comparisons with others. Since wealth, honor, power, and prestige have only relative

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worth, they continually incline us to competition, and even to delighting in seeing others worse off than we are—which distracts us from what makes “each” of us truly happy as individuals. Such “tranquility of true life” is found solely in wisdom, the only good that can be acquired without depriving someone else of it, and one that can only be enjoyed on absolute terms: someone’s being wiser than another “does not enlarge his wisdom—that is, his true happiness—in any way at all” (iii.2). One might here of course object: are not at least some “goods of fortune” necessary for living a philosophic life? Without a certain amount of money and power—to help one attain more security, a longer life, and some respect in the community—might it not be very difficult to devote oneself to serious thinking? While Spinoza might grant a certain version of this objection— it would be difficult to think well if one were constantly starving or on the run from city to city (cf. Plato, Crito 53c)—his own biography is evidence that the amount of wealth and power one truly needs to live a rational life is actually quite small. Moreover, his suggestion at the start of chapter 3 is that once we give serious emphasis to the pursuit of such goods, they take on outsized importance and obscure what makes us truly happy. Once we start fixating on them, we must begin living in the eyes of others, measuring our self worth by the value our neighbors place on us (as defined by the degree to which we possess them; cf. Hobbes 1994, x.16). This effectively draws us into “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power” (Hobbes 1994, xi.2), a seductive struggle for wealth or prestige that distracts us from meditating on ourselves and on the wisdom that can make us happy and tranquil in this world. Spinoza thus clearly identifies himself as one of the “old moral philosophers” whom Hobbes ridiculed for believing there is a “Summum Bonum” consisting in “the repose of a mind satisfied” (Hobbes 1994, xi.1). Spinoza’s philosophic perspective thus stands in marked contrast, and provides an alternative, to the much criticized version of the Enlightenment that is rooted in Hobbes and culminates in the continual economic striving of modern capitalism that Strauss called “the joyless quest for joy” (Strauss 1953, 251). At the same time, the essential similarity between Spinoza and Hobbes— and the intramural character of their quarrel—should not be overlooked (Gildin 1980, 155–57). Spinoza’s subsequent chapter will show that he understands our summum bonum as a liberation from teleology, and thus as a paradoxical recognition that we human beings have no special excellence. Moreover, Spinoza’s starting point in chapter 3 is the happiness of “each.” Although he does not deny that a philosopher might to some extent benefit or learn from others, neither does he affirm it, and he leaves no doubt

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that the rational man would consider such benefits solely with a view to his own utility. Thus, while Spinoza follows the tradition of ancient and medieval thought in considering human beings as oriented toward the pursuit of a summum bonum and finis ultimus, he breaks from that tradition significantly by stripping the meaning of those terms of any concern for devotion to others. He continues and even radicalizes the modern liberation of the desires of the self-interested individual.28 Because the desire to attain the exclusive possession of any good is irrational, the Bible’s repeated statements about God choosing the Jews over others, according to Spinoza, should not be taken literally. Thus, when Scripture says God is close to the Hebrews “and not so close to others (Deut. 4:4, 7), that He has prescribed just laws only for them (Deut. 4:8), and, finally, that He has become known to them alone to the neglect of others (see Deut. 4:32), etc., it is only speaking to suit the grasp of those who did not recognize true blessedness. Surely they would not have been less blessed if God had called everyone to salvation equally” (iii.3–4). Similarly, when God tells Solomon that “no one in the future after him will be as wise as he,” He must be employing “a mode of speaking for signifying extreme wisdom,” for it is not to be believed—as a plain reading of the passage indicates—that God would promise the Old Testament’s epitome of human wisdom something so irrational (iii.5; 1 Kings 3:12). The desire to be the sole possessor of any good, “if it is not childish, arises on the basis of no other thing than envy and a bad [malus] spirit” (iii.1). Here, as in his discussion of prophecy, Spinoza simultaneously affirms and denies the irrational character of the Old Testament’s teaching. While casting the Bible’s message as accommodated to a “childish” people (iii.6), he discovers in Solomon a beacon of light in this darkness allowing him to find biblical support for the quasi-philosophical religion he now begins to construct. He does this by turning to the question of what it means to be “chosen” by God, which in turn serves as a vehicle for articulating in religious language his philosophic understanding of causality and determinism. “By God’s direction,” Spinoza says, “I understand that fixed and unchangeable order of nature or the chaining together of natural things” (iii.7) that governs the universe. These “universal laws of nature, in accordance with which everything comes to be and is determined, are nothing but God’s decrees, which always involve eternal truth and necessity” (iii.8). As Spinoza had indicated at the opening of chapter 1 and on his title page, philosophy and piety are identical because both acknowledge a God who is immanent in nature and whose decrees are permanent and unchangeable: “Whether we

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say that everything comes to be in accordance with the laws of nature, or that everything is ordered on the basis of God’s decree and direction, we are saying the same thing” (iii.8). Moreover, because human beings are “part of nature,” they have been determined—or chosen by God—to do what they can to preserve their being (iii.9). Because “no one does anything except on the basis of the predetermined order of nature” (iii.10), it is “absolutely” to be granted that “everything is determined” (iv.3), although this same determinism also makes it “necessary” for human beings, in the ordinary course of their lives, “to consider things as open possibilities” (iv.4). With these remarks, Spinoza introduces his reader to a new way of understanding the universe—one that constitutes a stark departure from ordinary moral experience. This is the pantheism that Spinoza systematizes in detail in the Ethics and that Tocqueville will criticize as particularly dangerous. To Spinoza, when each of us makes “choices,” we are in fact acting in ways that are predetermined. Each “choice” is but the latest inevitable link in a chain of causation dating back eternally. And if we name that nexus of causation “God,” as Spinoza does here and in the Ethics, we can envision ourselves as parts of a universe that is literally divinity itself. As links in this chain of causation, we can view our actions under an aspect of eternity—irrevocably decreed by what came before us and inevitably bringing into being what will come after. Thus, we can say we have received “God’s external help” when the causal nexus works out so something outside ourselves helps keep us alive, and we can speak of “God’s internal help” (iii.9) when we preserve ourselves through our own apparent efforts. But these are really two ways of describing a single thing: our part in “God.” To explain how we can understand God’s choosing of the Hebrews on the basis of this outlook, Spinoza articulates a tripartite hierarchy of human goods. “Everything that we long for honorably [honeste],” he says, “is related mainly to these three things: understanding things through their first causes, mastering the passions or acquiring the habit of virtue, and, finally, living securely and with a sound body” (iii.12). In describing the first of these goods, Spinoza further clarifies our “true happiness and blessedness” (iii.1). Attaining knowledge of “God” means discovering of each thing where it came from or what caused it.29 Our greatest happiness consists in uncovering the chain of causation as far back as possible. What Spinoza means by the second good in this hierarchy is more ambiguous, but “mastering the passions or acquiring the habit of virtue”—as distinguished from living virtuously after acquiring its habit—seems to refer to the continence or self-discipline needed to transcend the desires for wealth, honor, and pleasure that are the chief impediments to

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the philosophic life.30 If virtue or blessedness is thinking, the second good in this hierarchy is instrumental to achieving it. But be that as it may, it is only with regard to the third good that some nations are distinguished from others. No nation is naturally intellectually or morally superior to another—for “these gifts . . . are common always to the whole human race” (iii.12)31—but some peoples may enjoy more “gifts of fortune,” enabling them to live more securely. Nonetheless “human direction and vigilance can help much” (iii.13). To lessen our vulnerability to fortune—or to the workings of God through “external and unexpected causes” (iii.11)—“no mediocre intelligence and vigilance is required” (iii.14). Those societies that are guided by an adequate political science will be more stable and less vulnerable, whereas those that are not will be “less steadfast” because they will be more dependent on outside forces (iii.14). Spinoza’s main teaching in chapter 3 is that although God has chosen “only very few” for “virtue and true life” (iii.18), He has given the potential for understanding “to all” (iii.28) regardless of nationality. Chapter 3 thus articulates a universalistic theology, based on a reading of the Bible (especially Paul’s Epistles; iii.43ff.), holding that God has revealed himself to all peoples (iii.31ff., contradicting iii.6), and commended “true virtue alone” (iii.44, 31). Although this theology reintroduces various divine anthropomorphic qualities—“that God is propitious, merciful, longsuffering, full of gentleness and repentant of evil” (iii.20)—its moral teaching is identical to the philosophic conception he articulated at the opening of the chapter. Since God’s choosing “has to do with true virtue alone” (iii.52), it exalts only those who cultivate their own happiness through a life of thought. Everything else the prophets say—for example, “about sacrifices and other ceremonies” and even about the Messiah (iii.52)— are accommodations to their audience’s mindset. The theology Spinoza elucidates here supports and liberates the naturally self-regarding desire of each individual to pursue his own happiness and fulfill himself in this world as a rational being. It explicitly rejects as irrational and childish (cf. v.16) the idea that virtue entails sacrifices, and, moreover, that those sacrifices are in some way connected to any kind of redemption or salvation. Spinoza explains that the Hebrews’ choosing had solely to do with the third good in his hierarchy: the advantages of the body (iii.16ff.). God “chose” the Hebrews in the sense that, working through the laws of nature, He selected a certain area of the world for them. He gave them laws that were meant to help them live securely, and they were thus distinguished from other nations only insofar as “they managed those of their affairs that pertain to the security of life happily and overcame great perils, and did so mostly by God’s external help alone” (iii.17).

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Even as he articulates this heterodox view of the Hebrews’ choosing, however, Spinoza indicates a possible objection to it. After all, the Jews have survived as a people despite millennia of persecution. As Spinoza closes chapter 3, he provides a social scientific explanation for their survival (iii.53ff.), but in doing so he also acknowledges (however sarcastically) that there may be an alternative. If an ignorant and unscientific people “overcame great dangers and matters succeeded favorably for it, it will be unable not to admire and adore God’s direction . . . inasmuch as nothing happened to it but what was quite unexpected and contrary to opinion. Really, this can even be considered a miracle” (iii.15; emphasis added). If a people did in every case what reason or prudence would suggest not doing but nevertheless always managed to survive—indeed, if the religion of this people, in a modified form, eventually became authoritative for an entire civilization—can we really be sure this was merely the result of extraordinarily good luck? Here again, Spinoza effectively acknowledges that he has been unable to refute the contra-rationalist position at its most robust. And this can be seen even more clearly if we note, as Spinoza conspicuously fails to, the traditional Jewish understanding of the Hebrews’ choosing. In the very passages Spinoza invokes to suggest that their outlook was either “childish” or rooted in “envy and a bad spirit” (iii.1), the Bible plainly indicates that they were chosen to receive special commandments—to perform duties going beyond ordinary morality—that were to exalt them in the sight of other nations as a model of righteousness (see, e.g., Deut. 4:5–8). In claiming God chose the Hebrews only to survive in a given place and for a given time, and that He gave them a law merely instrumental to that end, Spinoza baldly ignores the traditional view that the Jews were chosen to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6; Smith 1997, 99), yet having been born and educated as a Jew, it is impossible to suppose he was unaware of it. According to this view, the Mosaic Law, with its regulations covering every aspect of life, separated the Israelites from other peoples as the only nation consecrated to God, and its demands for self-sacrifice—illustrated most clearly in the ceremonial law—make clear that holiness cannot be attained simply by following the teachings of reason. In fact, insofar as reason, to Spinoza, teaches in the first place that one ought to preserve oneself, the demands of reason and of holiness are antithetical.32 To see this more clearly, we may reconsider Spinoza’s claim that the Bible cannot be taken literally when it says that God promised Solomon a wisdom greater than all others, which he says would imply that Solomon was either childish or resentful (iii.5). In the biblical context, when God makes this

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promise to Solomon, He does so neither as a metaphor nor as a concession to envy but as a reward for Solomon’s selflessness. Given the opportunity to ask anything of God, Solomon requests not riches nor long life but knowledge of justice—and so pleased is God with this unselfish request that He rewards Solomon with the wisdom for which he asked, along with those other goods for which he did not (1 Kings 3:9–14). Moreover, for the biblical Solomon, not only is wisdom subordinate to justice, but its content stands in stark contrast to Spinoza’s teaching. As it is elucidated through his first and most famous act of judgment, Solomon’s wisdom teaches him that the true mother of a baby must be she who would rather see it raised by another than cut in two (1 Kings 3:16–28). Or, to extrapolate, the Bible teaches that human beings, despite their undeniable selfish inclinations, are conscious of having duties to others and that our desire for happiness is bound up with a pull of obligation to entities greater than ourselves—to family, to friends, and above all to God. As Spinoza points out in an annotation to chapter 3, in the New Testament especially, this conception of self-sacrifice is linked to a promise of immortality. Here he recalls Jesus’s statement that obeying the Ten Commandments is insufficient for eternal life. For that, one must “sell whatsoever thou hast, and give [the proceeds] to the poor” (A.5; Mark 10:21). Here, I believe, Spinoza is indicating that his true refutation of Scripture is moral and psychological rather than scientific. Indeed, I would even suggest that the former kind of critique is by its nature much more compelling than the latter. It is easy to imagine a scientifically inclined reader who agrees with Spinoza about the character of prophecy and the unscientific outlook of the Old Testament but who nonetheless continues to feel the tug of devotion. Such a reader might even agree with Spinoza’s forthcoming conclusions about miracles and the authorship of Scripture, just as today he might accept the evidence for evolution and the age of the earth, and yet, feeling the call of duty to something larger than himself, he may still find himself unable to agree with Spinoza that reason can be a sufficient guide for human life. To make the case to this kind of reader—who may not necessarily be the same as the one he had addressed at the opening of chapter 1—Spinoza must show that the appeal of devotion (and perhaps also the hopes for immortality with which it is linked) is not natural but historical, that it is rooted in some psychological mixture of ignorance and resentment. And one way to do this would be to show that, if their presumed root causes are addressed, such longings, at least among a certain segment of the population, can be made to disappear.

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Certainty and Doubt: The Divine Law This suggestion, admittedly radical, may require more evidence, but the need for an alternative defense of reason can be seen quite clearly from Spinoza’s descriptions of philosophy (or human blessedness) and the extent of our knowledge of “God” in chapters 3 and 4. As we have seen, philosophy to Spinoza is founded upon a sober recognition that human beings are a part of nature, that our actions and even our thoughts are ultimately subject to, because they are part of, the nexus of causation he calls “God.” Stripped of its religious coloring, this picture of our condition is as follows: we are part of a universe in which we enjoy no special status—indeed, the belief in such a status is the primary feature of superstition—and in which we do not possess the moral freedom that is prerequisite for virtue in the traditional sense. Like all other beings, we are thus compelled to preserve ourselves and seek our perceived advantage (cf. esp. xvi.15–16). However, since “the better part of ourselves is the understanding,” our capacity to preserve and benefit ourselves as human beings depends upon our ability to live as rational or thinking beings. If “we really want to seek what is useful for ourselves, we have to endeavor above all to perfect our understanding as much as can be done. For our highest good [summum bonum] has to consist in its perfection” (iv.10). As Spinoza will make even clearer in later chapters, this account of our summum bonum is highly paradoxical. If each human being is merely a minuscule part of a vast, morally indifferent universe (cf. xvi.10), what could it mean to speak of the “better part of ourselves”? How can the laws of nature as Spinoza conceives of them supply a standard for differentiating better from worse or for determining that any part of ourselves is superior to any other? Spinoza’s answer in chapter 4 is that our highest good “has to” consist in the perfection of the understanding because the attainment of such “perfection” is the ultimate “aim of all human actions” (iv.10, 13). Although not all recognize this, all human activity can be understood as arising from a desire, however latent, to understand things through their first causes. By contrast, when we are restive, anxious, or distraught, it is because we are not engaging in the only truly satisfying activity for us: “The wise alone live with a pacified and steadfast spirit, not as the impious do, whose spirit vacillates with contrary emotions” (iv.42). As we will see later, Tocqueville’s account of America contains a famous psychological description of restiveness, which he traces to a desire for everlasting happiness. Spinoza’s account is exactly the opposite: he attributes discontent to such unfulfillable longings, and he speaks of a philosophic tranquility

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that is achievable but in no way permanent. Paradoxically, nature permits us to become happy or blessed only insofar as we come to recognize that there is no cosmic support for what we would ordinarily call human dignity. To Spinoza, it is precisely by coming to grips with the realization that freedom of the will is but a necessary illusion that we can acquire the only kind of freedom, and the only kind of virtue, available to us. Thus, Spinoza’s paradoxical conclusion about human law applies also to the “natural divine law” (iv.18): one who recognizes the necessity of the laws “acts in a steadfast spirit and on the basis of his own decree,” whereas one who does not is held “as a horse by the rein,” for his lack of mental clarity about the roots of his own activity prevents him from attaining a distinctly human excellence (iv.7–8). True freedom of the spirit entails an intellectual liberation arising from the recognition that there is no such thing as freedom in the ordinary sense. Now, all this again raises the question of how widespread Spinoza thinks such liberation can become. Throughout these chapters, he presents this resigned and deterministic view of the world as characteristic only of a select few; but in speaking so openly of it and in such a laudatory manner, he also clearly puts it forward as an aspiration for a wider audience. But can Spinoza really intend even for relatively elite religious thinking to share this view of the world? If so, will it have to be compromised or diluted in some way? To begin reflecting on these questions, we can note that chapter 4 actually presents two descriptions of human perfection. Spinoza says our summum bonum “has to consist” in the perfection of the understanding, but he also writes that that perfection can be attained only if we “seek [quaerere] what is useful to ourselves” and “endeavor [conari] above all to perfect our understanding as much as can be done” (iv.10; emphasis added). As Spinoza first presents it, philosophy is a quest to discover the truth rather than a life spent with the satisfaction of knowing it. It is a continual striving on the part of individuals to seek their greatest utility and thus to cultivate to the greatest possible degree that part of themselves that is distinctly human. But all this is still question-begging. How do we know it is the cultivation of the intellect that does this? Indeed, might that not in fact be the most crucial question for a philosopher to investigate? In one of the most skeptical statements in the entire Treatise, Spinoza writes that “all our knowledge, and the certainty that really removes all doubt, depends solely on the knowledge of God—both since without God nothing can be or be conceived, and since we can doubt all things so long as we have no clear and distinct idea of God” (iii.10). All human knowledge, and any certainty we might possess, is founded on the premise that Spinoza’s “God”

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exists and the biblical God does not. Similarly, “our highest good [summum bonum] and perfection depends solely on knowledge of God”—that is, on the existence of natural necessities (iii.10). The very notion that human excellence consists in the quest for such knowledge presumes that its attainment is possible and thus that the universe is not subject to miracles but ordered in a way that permits us to understand things through their first causes. But how do we know this to be so? In his discussion of miracles in chapter 6, Spinoza makes clear the indispensable character of an answer to that question: “God’s existence is not selfevident” (vi.17). The simple observation that physical objects follow certain laws of motion or that our minds, when recalling one thing, also recall related things—to employ Spinoza’s two examples (iv.2)—does not itself demonstrate that these are manifestations of unchangeable necessities. Rather, as Spinoza writes, the existence of “God” must be demonstrated “on the basis of notions whose truth is so firm and unshakeable that no power can be given or conceived by which they can be changed” (vi.17). To repeat: Spinoza’s entire way of life, and all his theoretical conclusions, are dependent upon proving the existence of his “God”—and, to say the same thing, the nonexistence of the miracle-performing biblical God—“beyond a shadow of a doubt.” For if there were even a remote possibility that the natural order could “be changed by some power,” we might be able to doubt its existence, and we would “never be able to be certain of anything” (vi.17; emphasis added). Spinoza here admits that reason is not self-validating. His summum bonum depends upon a vindication of the basic premises of science, which cannot be provided by arguments that ultimately appeal to those premises themselves. Spinoza’s famous arguments against miracles, however, are all characterized by precisely this kind of circularity (Strauss 1965, 123–36). For example, as he begins to make his case that “nothing happens contrary to nature, but it keeps an eternal, fixed, and unchangeable order” (vi.6), Spinoza refers the reader back to chapter 4, where, he alleges, he had “demonstrated” that “everything God wants, or determines, involves eternal necessity and truth” (vi.7). But as we have just seen, far from actually demonstrating that claim, Spinoza’s argument there raises considerable doubts about it. To be sure, after raising those doubts, Spinoza begins speaking in a confident and even dogmatic way. He claims that because our highest good depends on knowledge of “God,”—because “nothing can be or be conceived without God” (that is, the laws of nature)—“it is certain” that nature expresses His essence and, accordingly, that “the more we know natural things, the greater and more perfect is the knowledge of God which we acquire” (iv.11; emphasis

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added). But this is by no means certain. Simply because our prospective knowledge depends on unchangeable natural laws does not mean those laws exist; it is also possible to hold, with Paul and the prophets, that our apparent knowledge is a deception and that unassisted human wisdom is impossible. In the same context, Spinoza argues that the study of nature must allow us to come to know God because God is “the cause of all natural things” (iv.11). But this again begs the question. Spinoza’s argument simply presumes the laws of nature are their own cause, just as he also relies on the assumption that we can infer the nature of a cause from its effect—something that is true only if there is such a thing as causation in the first place (cf. Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza 2002, 7). It is hard to overstate the importance Spinoza gives his own arguments against miracles. Because all his conclusions in the Treatise can be doubted if miracles are possible, these arguments “serve the intent of this whole work in no small way” (vi.6). But this makes it all the more striking that these arguments suffer from seemingly elementary errors in logic. To give just one more example, after claiming (incorrectly) that he demonstrated the existence of natural necessities in chapter 4, he concludes that no “sound reason” admits placing limits on those necessities: nature must be all encompassing—“For otherwise what else is being stated than that God created a nature so impotent and established such sterile laws and rules for it that he is often compelled to reinforce it anew if he wants it to be preserved and that things succeed one another on the basis of prayer: this, I figure, is very alien to sound reason” (vi.12; emphasis added). But, again, it is precisely the validity of reason itself that is at issue. Spinoza’s arguments here assume what they are supposed to prove, but this crucial weakness is covered over with repeated dogmatic affirmations of what we allegedly know and with ridicule of the superstitious “vulgar” who believe otherwise (vi.1–6). This polemical rhetoric gives his refutations of miracles an appearance of indisputability that a close scrutiny of them simply will not bear out. Here I would like to suggest, as in the discussion of chapter 1 above, that Spinoza is quite aware of what he has not been able to show and that his repeated statements to the contrary are not instances of sloppiness or boasting but instead a deliberate rhetorical tactic. By sarcastically recalling the possibility that things “succeed one another on the basis of prayer,” he effectively reminds us of the rival position, which he has hardly engaged with, much less refuted. But Spinoza’s clearest admission of this occurs (once again) indirectly when, in chapter 7, he quotes without contradiction Maimonides’s statement that “the world’s eternity is not shown by any demonstration” (vii.76). (Here,

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Spinoza attacks Maimonides for implying that he would have read creation out of the Bible if such a demonstration were forthcoming; but Spinoza is simply silent on this remarkable admission itself). From Spinoza’s arguments for the existence of the “divine law” and against miracles, it becomes apparent that our knowledge is not nearly as certain as he repeatedly claims. We cannot understand things through their first causes if causality itself is uncertain. We can only hypothesize that human blessedness consists in perfecting our understanding, for we cannot yet know for sure that the kind of understanding Spinoza speaks of is even possible—to say nothing of the possibility that philosophy could be a sin, a rebellion against a mysterious God who has reserved all such knowledge for Himself and those to whom He chooses to reveal it. Authentic philosophy, to Spinoza, must therefore be an enterprise characterized by the quest for knowledge (as he initially suggests; iv.10): an inquiry into the existence of nature itself. It consists only secondarily in the kind of geometric reasoning found in the Ethics, because that reasoning can be known to be certain only on the basis of the successful confrontation with the possibility of revelation that Spinoza undertakes in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise.33 Now, this suggestion must be preliminary, since a full illustration of it would likely require, among other things, a close reading of the Ethics (something beyond our scope here). But if it is correct—and I have sought to gather evidence for it thus far only from the early chapters of the Treatise—it would allow us to regard the apparently geometric character of Spinoza’s philosophy, together with his repeated claims to certainty, in a new light. Indeed, after his first description of philosophy in chapter 4, Spinoza makes an abrupt turn and provides a second presentation, which is both dogmatic and, indeed, religious. Speaking in teleological language, he claims “it is certain that everything in nature involves and expresses the concept of God in proportion to its essence and its perfection” (iv.11; emphasis added). Not only do we allegedly know that God is everything, it is also possible—indeed, desirable—not just to imitate Him but also to experience and even enhance His presence within us: “The more we know natural things, the greater and more perfect is the knowledge of God which we acquire” (iv.12). Spinoza now all but suggests that philosophy infuses us with the divine essence, since it enables us to participate in “God himself insofar as he exists in our mind” (iv.13). In this new presentation, philosophy does not merely consist of solitary thinking. On the contrary, again importing teleological language, Spinoza says a human being is “more perfect in proportion to the nature and perfection of the thing that he loves” (iv.12)—a surprising statement, considering

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that love did not enter into his earlier description of the summum bonum or his tripartite hierarchy of human goods. At first, Spinoza says someone “who loves above all the intellectual knowledge of God” has attained “the highest blessedness” (iv.12), but he then immediately revises this statement and attributes such perfection to someone who possesses “knowledge and love of God” (iv.12). But love of one’s knowledge of God and love of God are quite different. While the former may characterize a scientist who loves the knowledge of nature he has attained, the latter suggests a love of nature itself (an emotion that is not properly a part of, even if it may often accompany, scientific activity). But on the basis of this revision, Spinoza implies that all human activity that aims at knowledge and love of God can be conceived of as a part of a rational “plan of living” that Spinoza (giving a still new meaning to this term) calls the “divine law” (iv.13). Over the next several chapters, he will articulate what that plan of living is and how the “foundations of the best republic” can promote it (iv.13). But, as we will now see, his description of the divine law is fraught with deliberate ambiguities, and these can be traced to Spinoza’s attempt to craft a new and potentially evolving religious outlook— one that begins by rooting itself in the Bible’s authority but that will culminate in a liberation from it.34 The Religion of Reason Here we can only briefly trace the highlights of Spinoza’s use of Scripture to articulate a complex and evolving conception of the divine law and human blessedness. We begin by noting that Spinoza initiates his new reading of the Bible with a version of the crucial ambiguity noted above—which, as he presents it now, reintroduces certain devotional and teleological categories: “The idea of God dictates that God is our highest good or that knowledge and love of God is the ultimate aim toward which all our actions are to be directed” (iv.15; emphasis added). Can the laws of nature themselves truly be our highest good, or is knowledge of them—or even love of them—our greatest satisfaction? In addition, in chapter 4 Spinoza uses “divine law” in at least three different ways: to refer to the physical laws of nature, to the Law of Moses (iv.17), and to a purportedly rational “plan of living” (iv.13; cf. v.15). It is the last of these that now takes center stage in the last part of chapter 4, although it does so in a way that softens some of the hard edges of Spinoza’s initial description of the philosophic life. According to this presentation, the “sum of the divine law and its highest precept . . . is to love God as the highest good [summum bonum]” (iv.15). In

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contrast to the biblical divine law, the “natural divine law” (iv.18, 20) does not command love of one’s neighbor (cf. Matt. 22:39–40; Mark 12:30–31; Gal.  5:14). Although one can follow it living among others, “we can [also] conceive it . . . in a human being who lives a solitary life” (iv.18). It thus cannot be characterized as a moral law, properly speaking. Indeed, according to Spinoza, its biblical expositors—Solomon, Paul, and Jesus—understood and taught that God is not a “lawgiver” or “just” (iv.30) but spoke only metaphorically and exoterically of divine justice and grace (iv.30). (By contrast, Moses and all the prophets did not recognize this; iv.30.) The “highest reward of the divine law is the law itself—namely, knowing God and loving him out of true freedom and a full and steadfast spirit—the punishment being deprivation of these and slavery of the flesh, or an unsteadfast and vacillating spirit” (iv.21). Or, as the “wise man” (iv.41) Solomon taught, the source of “true life” is the understanding “and the punishment of fools is foolishness” (iv.41, glossing Prov. 16:22). This is the “universal” religion that Christ was sent to teach to “the whole human race” (iv.26). But considering the elite character of “true life” as Spinoza here describes it, such a religion cannot aim at universality without undergoing considerable dilution. Thus, almost as soon as he introduces this new reading of the Bible, Spinoza immediately reintroduces moral and teleological categories. He writes, for example, that the notion of divine justice detracts from God’s “perfection” (iv.37), but then, bringing the argument full circle, he states that God’s perfection allows us to understand—and, he implies—to practice true “justice and . . . righteousness” (iv.45, glossing Prov. 2:10). Spinoza’s new theology, in other words, seeks to accommodate those readers who cannot—or cannot yet—jettison their belief in an ultimately moral universe. To this end, it must address the concerns of the vast majority of human beings, who cannot accept Solomon’s view that virtue is its own reward and that the goods of fortune are vain. Hence, we now learn that Solomon also taught that, in addition to “tranquility of spirit,” a life of wisdom “gives length of days directly” and “riches and honor indirectly” (iv.42). Virtue pays materially because a true understanding will teach us to rely “not on the imperium of fortune (that is, on God’s external help), but on one’s own internal virtue (or God’s internal help): namely, since by watching, acting, and consulting well, one preserves oneself to the greatest degree” (iv.46). As Paul teaches, the natural light teaches us “what to seek or what to flee” (iv.48). The semipopular theology of chapter 4, then, combines Machiavellian prudence with a residual belief in a moral universe, together with an overriding admiration for the philosophic life. In chapter 5, this dilution of human

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blessedness continues further as Spinoza draws much more explicitly on a subrational devotion to something greater than oneself, along with the desire to have that devotion rewarded. For although chapter 5 opens by removing “all kinds of sacrifices” from the divine law, it does so while associating “purification of the spirit” and “the practice or habit of virtue” with “good actions,” including “bringing help to the poor” (v.4, glossing Isa. 1:10, 16–17; cf. v.16). Love of one’s neighbor has now returned to join love of God to compose the sum of the divine law, and that divine law is accordingly now permeated by a set of tensions requiring resolution from a God who “exercises compassion, judgment and justice in the world” (v.13, quoting Jer. 9:23). Hence, Spinoza states that the prophet Isaiah commends not only “freedom” but also “charity towards oneself and one’s neighbor.” But the demands of “charity towards oneself ”—a formulation that now moralizes a hitherto purely self-interested conception of virtue—may often conflict with those of charity toward one’s neighbor, and so in return for the latter, Spinoza says, Isaiah promised renown and even political empire on earth as well as “God’s glory even after death” (v.10, with n. 11). Even more explicitly, the New Testament teaches that obedience to “the natural law by which all mortals are bound” will be rewarded in “a heavenly kingdom” (v.13–14). By reintroducing notions of charity and justice, together with a hope for immortality, chapter 5 renders the religion of reason more accessible to the extent that it becomes further removed from the purely self-regarding rational life that Spinoza had previously called our summum bonum. In crafting this theology, Spinoza cultivates a deliberate ambiguity between intellectual and moral virtue—between “purification of the spirit” understood as rational thinking and understood as “good actions,” like helping the poor (v.4). This version of the religion of reason thus seeks to instill a broader admiration for philosophy by teaching that those who carry out their moral duties to others fulfill themselves as rational or thinking beings. But the less than fully rational character of that fulfillment can be seen from the way it is joined to the un-Solomonic expectation of extrinsic and even otherworldly rewards for virtue. Now, considering how often Spinoza speaks disparagingly of “the vulgar” or “the plebs” in these chapters (e.g., v.37), it would seem that his intended audience for this new theology is not the population at large but a new subphilosophic elite—the class of opinion leaders we would today call the intelligentsia. But how large that new intellectual class can become, how close to the authentically philosophical outlook its views can be, and how much influence it can have on those of the larger population appear to be open

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questions. For popular or semipopular religious education “can and has to vary in accordance with the mental cast of each nation, as experience sufficiently teaches” (v.7). It cannot be known in advance how far religious beliefs can go in their liberation from devotion and teleology and how many people can eventually adopt them. Spinoza will begin to address these questions later in the Treatise, but as he closes chapter 5 he calls not only for the transformation of popular opinions about the Bible but even, quite explicitly, for editing Scripture itself. The “vulgar” need new “Pastors and ministers” who can pick and choose appropriate biblical stories for them on the basis of “the salutary opinions that follow from them,” a purpose for which “some histories can be more outstanding than others” (v.44–45). From here, it is but a step to the view that a rational religious ethic could dispense with Scripture entirely, since secular or at least non-biblical literature might fulfill this function equally well. Spinoza thus closes chapter 5 by noting that his new clergy must also teach that someone who is “plainly ignorant” of the Bible but nonetheless “has salutary opinions and the true plan of living, is absolutely blessed and really has Christ’s Spirit in him” (v.46). It is not surprising, then, that chapter 6 provides the fundamentals of such a post-biblical piety and at least a broad vision of a new popular pantheism. After purporting to refute the possibility of miracles, Spinoza goes on to argue that we can know God’s essence, existence, and providence “far better from the fixed and unchangeable order of nature” than we ever could from miracles (vi.5; emphasis added; cf. also vi.16, 26). Or rather, as mentioned previously, if miracles were possible and nature did not keep a fixed order, we could never “be certain of anything” (vi.17), whereas (on the contrary) our certain knowledge of the existence of Spinoza’s “God” makes the attainment of human blessedness possible (vi.19, 23).35 Here again, as in chapter  1, Spinoza writes that the biblical accounts of miracles must be understood as accommodations to a “vulgar” mindset characterized by devotion and admiration (vi.44). But even as he says this, Spinoza appeals to a version of this very mindset on the part of the members of the new scientific elite— whom he now repeatedly calls “philosophers” (cf. vi.58)—that he is seeking to cultivate. Though it was obscure to “almost all the prophets,” the predetermined order of nature “was always quite clear to Philosophers, who endeavor to understand things not on the basis of miracles but on the basis of clear concepts—to those, no doubt, who set true happiness in virtue and tranquility of spirit alone, and are not eager for nature to obey them but for themselves to obey nature—inasmuch as they know for certain that God directs nature as his universal laws require and not as the particular laws of human beings

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require, and thus that God has a plan not for the human race alone but for the whole of nature” (vi.34; emphasis added). Here, as before, Spinoza presents philosophy as liberation from anthropocentric teleology. This is why he continually mentions the miracle in Joshua when the sun stood still at human command (vi.15, 55; Josh. 10:12–13): by conveying the understanding that we are at the center of everything, this miracle is the miracle par excellence. Yet, as the above quotation also indicates, Spinoza is simultaneously watering down this core meaning of philosophy, for he attributes to the philosophic outlook a communion with nature—and a devotion to it—that is just as anthropocentric as the “vulgar” outlook that these new “philosophers” are being encouraged to contemn. This is evident in part from the fact that here, for the only time in the entire Treatise, Spinoza speaks of obedience as a virtue and attributes it to the philosophic outlook. Previously, as we will see more clearly below, Spinoza had claimed that the truly free man will never obey anything (iv.7–8; v.25; cf.xiv.37; xv.21–23)— and indeed, that even, or especially, one who recognizes nature’s determinism will act in accordance with it freely, or with the full consent of his spirit. Solomon, who in previous chapters was said to be at worst a prophet and at best the wisest man of ancient times, is now referred to as “the Philosopher” (vi.67; emphasis added), and Spinoza, hinting at the progress that could accrue should Solomon’s insights conquer elite opinion, states that the Jews’ affairs “were in the utmost vigor” during his reign (vi.33). In the Ethics, Spinoza articulates this pantheistic determinism in greater detail. Beginning from axioms and definitions that formally identify its elements and implications, he purports to demonstrate its consequences “in geometric order.” In so doing, he outlines this new rational theology in greater specificity than in the Treatise, and—especially through his scholia— he provides a running commentary on its advantages, both for the purportedly free or enlightened individual and for society as a whole. As we will see later, in an implied criticism of Spinoza, Tocqueville singles out pantheism as a doctrine that is as powerful in his time as it is potentially harmful. Tocqueville claims that pantheism, if spread widely, is likely to foster an unhealthy humility, diminishing the individual’s sense of his own importance and fostering his subjection to the state. But Spinoza claims, on the contrary, that the spread of this doctrine is likely to promote both a robust and prideful attachment to freedom on the part of the citizen and the counterbalancing virtues of compassion and tolerance. He predicts that popular determinism will encourage toughness or resilience in the face of adversity, since it holds that all misfortunes, whether or not they involve human beings, “follow from

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God’s eternal decree with the same necessity” as the laws of geometry. But this can also foster a gentleness that is not at the same time servile. This doctrine contributes to social life, insofar as it teaches us to hate no one, to mock no one, to be angry at no one, to envy no one; and also insofar as it teaches that each of us should be content with his own things, and should be helpful to his neighbor, not from unmanly compassion, partiality, or superstition, but from the guidance of reason, as the time and occasion demands. . . . Finally, this doctrine also contributes, to no small extent, to the common society insofar as it teaches how citizens are to be governed and led, not so they may be slaves, but that they may do freely the things which are best. (Spinoza 1996, II, P49, S) As he will later in the Treatise, Spinoza here blends notions of intellectual and political freedom. By spreading pantheism as a popular theology, he gives the citizens of his future liberal republic a way of viewing liberty in a way analogous to that of the philosopher—as a primarily if not exclusively intellectual quality that allows them to fulfill themselves as rational beings. In this way, political freedom can be founded on the Solomonic view that apparently chance incidents are really parts of a providential divine “plan for the whole of nature” (vi.34). “Philosophy alone,” Spinoza says, teaches that God cares “equally for all” (vi.37). With such formulations, Spinoza encourages the members of his new intelligentsia not only to think of themselves as “philosophers” but also to view nature as a quasi-mystical object of devotion, a source of spiritual fulfillment and an object of religious longing containing “all perfections” (vi.58).36 Far from placing a limit on what we can know or do, nature’s laws, he now claims, extend “to infinite things” (vi.25)—not just to “matter and its dispositions” but also to “infinite other things besides matter” (vi.10, n. 11)—so it is possible for us to conceive of those laws “under some aspect of eternity [sub . . . specie aeternitatis]” (vi.25). Here it is easy to see how Spinoza, despite his debunking arguments about the Bible, was eventually regarded as a “God-intoxicated man” (in Novalis’s words), for his pantheism, which here approaches nature worship, cultivates a wonder or admiration for the scientific order, together with a sentiment of devotion and even of self-sacrifice to a divinely enchanted universe in which all things are possible. By recognizing that we live in a universe that takes no particular account of our fate as individuals, we effectively lose ourselves in this larger cosmic whole. But by doing

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so, Spinoza suggests, we gain the opportunity to achieve some as yet vague and undefined spiritual greatness—some communion with a mystical nature unavailable to vulgar or purely corporeal human beings (cf. iv.16). As this new “rational” piety looks to nature as the only thing divine and permanent, it also opens the way to looking down on Scripture as merely human and therefore fallible and ephemeral. “The Philosopher” Solomon teaches “that nothing new happens in nature” and that “there is no memory of the ancients among us nowadays, nor will there be any of those nowadays among posterity” (vi.67). Thus, the Bible is destined to perish eventually, and human beings can (and should) hasten its demise by regarding it as an incoherent and corrupted amalgam of historical sources. Providing a preface to the deconstruction of the Bible that he will undertake in the next set of chapters (7–11), Spinoza now informs his new elite reader that much in Scripture cannot be trusted. Where it records miracles, for example, we can regard those passages as “inserted in Sacred Writ by sacrilegious human beings” (vi.51). Although Spinoza does write in chapter 6 that Scripture teaches that everything happens through natural laws, and hence that the Bible itself denies the existence of miracles (!), he understandably cannot stick to this message and soon contradicts it. Even the view that the Bible’s accounts of miracles are intended exoterically simply will not stand up to scrutiny, for “many things in Scripture are narrated as realities, and are even believed to be realities,” that are plainly the products of irrational imaginations (vi.57; emphasis added). In fact, as Spinoza admits near the chapter’s end, a plain reading of the text shows that Scripture often “seems to be narrating nothing but miracles” (vi.63; cf. vi.49). This, however, is not surprising, since human beings in every age imprint their beliefs and prejudices onto their writings (vi.55). In articulating the religion of reason, then, Spinoza provides a theological basis for the historical and anthropological deconstruction of the Bible. Natural religion by definition does not require Scripture, so Spinoza’s argument that it can be found in the Bible is likely to serve only as a temporary way station. But that Spinoza believes it necessary to cultivate a purportedly rational piety suggests that he understands there to be an eventual limit on the prospects for popular enlightenment. Even among a new cultural and scientific elite—whom he is here willing to call “philosophers”—superstition, and the sentiments of devotion and admiration that are part and parcel of it, must remain present. Yet, that Spinoza believes it possible to cultivate this elite, and that he is willing to dilute philosophy’s meaning by attaching its name to this group, suggests that a certain substantial benefit can accrue from liberating human beings to a great extent from the Bible’s moral outlook. And

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here we can glimpse the paradoxical character of this new religion of nature, for by cultivating it, Spinoza seeks to cater to the sentiments of devotion and admiration in order to undermine them. There is something odd and tension-ridden in the image of an intellectual who greatly admires a philosopher who in turn looks down on all admiration, or an intellectual who claims loving devotion to a universe the knowledge of which promises a human excellence founded on the idea of overcoming all such devotion. It can thus be expected that the best and brightest among this new intelligentsia will eventually begin to wrestle with these contradictions and see through them. But it is also possible that even those who do not take this step will still live a life that is closer to what Spinoza regards as authentic human happiness, and that is thus genuinely better, in his estimation, than one that is more imprisoned by the imagination and the affects. To understand more clearly why Spinoza seeks to engender this two-track liberation, and why he believes life in a rational polity will be more satisfying for both groups, we need to turn now to a more direct encounter with his political science as he presents it in these early chapters.

Spinoza’s Politics and the Bible’s Spinoza’s thematic articulation of his political science begins in chapter 16 with his teaching on natural right (and we will examine this in Chapter 2), but its underlying principles are made apparent much earlier, in chapter 5, when Spinoza effectively contrasts the Bible’s moral and political teaching with his own, rational one. This part of chapter 5 is devoted to a discussion of the Hebrew ceremonial law, which, according to Spinoza, was invented to resolve the political problem whose attempted solution defines every regime. That problem reveals itself once one recognizes that human beings require laws not because they are invariably selfish but rather because they interpret that selfishness poorly: “All do seek what is useful to them, yet hardly on the basis of the dictate of sound reason” (v.21). If people really were rational calculators of their advantage—if they were “so constituted by nature as to long for nothing except what true reason indicates”—“society would need no laws,” for they could agree on a distribution of economic goods conducive to everyone’s long-term benefit (v.20). Unfortunately, “human nature is constituted quite otherwise;” our conception of what is good for us is typically assessed “solely on the basis of lust and the emotions of a broken spirit” (v.21). Irrational longings and emotions cause us to miscalculate our advantage and

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do things that have the appearance—but only the appearance—of willful selfsacrifice. Thus, human beings often long to bring harm to their rulers “even though it comes with great evil to themselves as well,” and they can “least of all abide serving their equals and being regulated by them” (v.22). All in all, humans beings are naturally animated by a kind of democratic pride—an irrational sense of independence which, if not properly directed, can manifest itself as resentment and a stubborn, self-destructive refusal to submit to authority:37 “Each deems that he alone knows everything, and wants everything to be modified on the basis of his own mental cast, and figures something is equitable or inequitable, a propriety or an impropriety, insofar as he judges it to fall to his profit or harm; out of glory, he despises his equals and will not suffer being regulated by them; out of envy for better praise or fortune, which is never equal, he longs for evil to another and delights in it” (xvii.15). To overcome this recalcitrance, legislators have just two options: “either the whole society has to hold the imperium collectively, if it can be done, so that all are bound to themselves and no one is bound to serve his equal; or, if a few or one alone holds the imperium, he has to have something above the common human nature, or at least endeavor . . . to persuade the vulgar of it” (v.23). In other words, although political regimes can take a number of forms, they can all be understood with a view to this question: do they concede to our proud sense of independence and attempt to channel it in a healthy direction, or, do they try to overcome it by persuading the population that its rulers are divine? The latter path, to Spinoza, is the classical solution to the political problem, and it explains why the Greeks and Romans eventually lost their liberty. Alexander and Augustus, he says, were merely being prudent when they claimed to be gods (xvii.21ff.), for republican freedom produces an instability that almost cries out for theocratic absolutism. But the history of the Greeks and Romans after the loss of their freedom was not simply one of servitude; it was also one of constant fighting and civil unrest. According to Spinoza, this is easily explained, for “unless they are completely barbaric, human beings do not suffer being duped so openly and becoming slaves” (xvii.24). If a legislator cannot succeed to the extent that the Ottoman Turks have at eradicating our capacity for independent thought (pref.9), he will face a dangerous prospect, for we cannot stand being told what to do or think by those whom we believe to be no greater than we are. But here, as Spinoza suggested in the preface, Christianity can step into the breach, for people have now been persuaded “more easily that Majesty is sacred and plays the role of God on earth” (xvii.24). As Spinoza had suggested in the preface, monotheism can succeed where paganism fails

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because it has the tools to defeat the latter at its own game. And, as he now emphasizes once again, it is not surprising that Christian political theorists embraced the divine right of kings, for the moral teaching of both the Old and New Testaments is not one of freedom but “devotion.” As we now apply this insight from the Treatise’s earlier chapters to Spinoza’s teaching on morality and politics, it is helpful to begin by considering the political aspects of those chapters that we have thus far overlooked. Beginning in chapter 3, Spinoza’s official teaching is that the Mosaic Law, unlike the New Testament, was concerned exclusively with corporeal ends. Here Spinoza appears to provide a biblical basis for the separation of religious and secular matters that is the hallmark of liberal societies. Indeed, because he claims the Hebrew polity was concerned only with security and other worldly goods (iii.20–21), Spinoza has often been taken to find in Moses a good legislator who crafted at least the potential for liberal democracy (cf. Frankel 2001, 314– 15; Smith 1997, xiii, 23–24, 115, 147; see also Rosenthal 1997, 209–10). Spinoza does occasionally present Moses as a statesman who “labored to institute a good republic” (vii.33)—someone who took a broken people just liberated from slavery and gave it a law that provided the beginnings of an education toward self-government (v.27; cf. Frankel 2001, 293–98, 309). But when he follows his general considerations about political science in chapter  5 with a discussion of the reasons for Moses’s legislation, Spinoza presents a very different picture. He claims that because Moses recognized that “human nature does not abide being simply compelled” (v.22), he “introduced religion” into the Hebrew polity “so that the populace would do their duty not so much on the basis of dread as on that of devotion” (v.29). To ensure the people would obey “spontaneously” (v.28), he educated them “from the beginning” so they would depend entirely on his commands (v.25, 30). So while Spinoza does claim that “the whole law of Moses” was concerned only with “the advantages of the body” (v.31), it did not leave thought free. Indeed, Moses recognized that, because what we do is a product of what we think, his Law would have to inculcate certain thoughts and emotions. The result of this was “a continual cult of obedience” (xvii.88). By regulating every aspect of life, the Mosaic Law impressed upon the people that they could “do nothing at their discretion” (v.30) but only at its command. In so doing, it made them confess through each of their actions “that they were nothing in their own right but were altogether part of another’s” (v.31). Thus, they were forbidden to eat, drink, shave, or “do absolutely anything” except when the law mandated it; they were bound to place signs on their doors, their hands, and their foreheads “which admonished them to

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obedience always” (v.30); and they were required to “give themselves to leisure and rejoicing” at certain times so they would feel genuinely happy, not on the basis of their own spirit but in accordance with God’s commandments (xvii.89–90). To procure this last sentiment was, to Spinoza, the Law’s most important aim: “I do not deem that anything more effective can be devised to influence the psyches of human beings. For psyches are taken by no thing more than by the joy that arises on the basis of devotion, that is, on the basis of love and admiration together” (xvii.90; cf. Spinoza 1996, III, P52, S). Here Spinoza makes clear, more explicitly than ever before, that his view of devotion is unambiguously negative. It is mentioned frequently in the Treatise, but never favorably (cf., e.g., vi.3, 44; ix.34; xii.40; xvii.81). In this last statement, where Spinoza defines it most fully, it is the joy of a slave who would fight for his chains because he does not see that his psyche has been “taken” by another. It is a product, in part, of admiration (or foolish wonder), which, as we have seen, is itself a characteristic of an irrational and imaginative mindset that causes the ignorant to exalt what they cannot understand (cf. again i.30; ii.47; vi.3; Spinoza 1996, I, Appendix). Far from sanctifying the Israelites, the way of life it created was “more slavery than true freedom” (ii.47; cf. Exod. 19:6). “[He] alone is free who lives with a full spirit solely on the basis of the guidance of reason” (xvi.32), but the Hebrews were required to accept the Law’s edicts “without any consultation with reason” at all (xvii.92). Spinoza thus presents the Mosaic Law as an instance of the Turkish, or theocratic, solution to the political problem: it sought to control the prideful individuality of human beings by eliminating their ability to think independently, and Spinoza also claims this same intention can be discerned in the Christian ceremonies (v.32). To be fair, Spinoza also states that he does not know whether Christ instituted any ceremonies, and he leaves the reader with the suggestion that they were corruptions of the faith introduced by a less than spiritually minded Church. He provides a more far-reaching critique of the New Testament, however, when, in chapter 7, he turns for the only time in the work to the authoritative source of Christian ethics: the Sermon on the Mount. Spinoza claims that “when Christ says, Blessèd are the mourners, since they will receive consolation,” his meaning can only be understood in reference to his subsequent teaching “that we not be worried about anything except God’s kingdom alone and its justice, which is commended as the highest good” (summum bonum; vii.30; Matt. 5:4, 6:33). Since Jesus equated justice with the kingdom of God, or with immortality, we can conclude that by “mourners” he was referring only to “those who mourn for the kingdom of God and the

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justice neglected by human beings. For only those can mourn for it who do not love anything except the divine kingdom, or equity, and plainly despise the rest of fortune” (vii.30; emphasis added). Spinoza thus implies that Jesus’s teaching about an afterlife must be understood as arising from a desire to see this world conform to an egalitarian conception of justice. Humans, as he presents them, look to the law not just for the protection of their lives and possessions but also to secure the sense of dignity that is present wherever freedom and the enjoyment of these goods are guaranteed. Thus, when they live in “a good republic”—which he now says Moses established—where the law is enforced and it is known that crime does not pay, they will take great pride in themselves and in their country. To be “held just” by their fellow citizens (vii.33), they will not turn the other cheek but requite injuries “before a judge . . . not on account of vengeance . . . but in the spirit of defending justice and the laws of the Fatherland, and for it not to be expedient for evil men to be evil” (vii.33). Unfortunately, Jesus lived not in that kind of regime but “in a corrupt republic,” so Christianity’s moral teaching cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it was originally directed to “oppressed human beings” (vii.32). Because there was no hope of justice in this world for those living under the tyranny of the Caesars, Jesus’s audience, Spinoza suggests, was naturally attracted to the consolation of another. Moreover, Spinoza also says this applies to Jesus’s injunction to turn the other cheek “and what follows further” (vii.31). “What follows further” are the following commandments: if someone should take your coat, give your cloak as well; love your enemies and “do good to them that hate you;” and, in short, be “perfect, even as your Father . . . in heaven is perfect” (Matt. 5:40, 44, 48). In other words, Jesus teaches that human perfection, like divine perfection, consists in total selflessness, or in complete devotional love, and that it is only through such self-abnegation that one can attain immortality. But Spinoza claims this moral outlook arose only because, in Jesus’s historical context, tyranny had nearly deadened the proud desire for independence that human beings naturally feel. In the absence not only of freedom but also of the robust sense of independence and spiritual self-expression that freedom allows, some of the ancient Jews thought that if they gave up on this world, if they gave their rulers all they asked for and more, they would be rewarded in a life after this one. It therefore follows that in a better regime, such as the one Spinoza is seeking to establish, hopes for immortality will be significantly muted, and morality, though still spirited and even animated by a sense of duty, will be fundamentally self-regarding.

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The central task of Spinoza’s political science will thus be to lay the moral foundations for the kind of free republic mentioned earlier: where “the whole society” governs collectively, where laws are passed “by common consent,” and where “no one is bound to serve his equal” (v.23, 25). If the Mosaic polity was “a continual cult of obedience,” a Spinozistic republic is one where “obedience has no place” because no one has the authority to compel human beings through the use of fear or devotion (v.25). On the contrary, when citizens are motivated not “by dread” but by “the hope of some good that they long for very much,” “each will long to do his duty” because each will understand that duty as part and parcel of his own rational advantage (v.24). Now, Spinoza does not actually affirm here that this harmony between the individual’s good and the common good will truly exist. He does, however, prompt the reader to ask how citizens could come to hold such an opinion in a future society where the Bible’s teaching of selfless devotion is no longer authoritative. Since all political communities require sacrifices from their citizens, how can those who are called upon to serve their country come to see their duty and their advantage as synonymous? In the present discussion, Spinoza does not answer this directly, but he provides a hint as to where he is going when he twice states that the government of a good republic will remain “moderate” because, “as Seneca the Tragedian says, no one holds a repressive imperium together for long” (v.22; xvi.29–30). In Seneca’s Troades, these words are spoken in angry protest by Agamemnon after being told the gods require a human sacrifice. After a long argument, Agamemnon agrees to let a priest decide the matter—and when the priest says two people must be killed he falls silent, never to speak again (Troades 258–59; 349ff.).38 By invoking this line as a rallying cry for republican citizens, Spinoza seeks to ensure that Agamemnon’s conviction that religion is on the side of humanity will finally become authoritative in the world. As we will see in Chapter 2, Spinozistic citizens will compel their government to consult only “the common good” through the threat of the revolution that would occur were it to command “absurd things” (xvi.29), and they will be willing to start such a revolution because they will possess a spirited attachment to their own preservation as human beings. They will resist bestial cruelty conducted in the name of religion as well as attempts to turn them from rational beings “into beasts” by preventing them from thinking (pref.16; vii.1–5). The legislation of absurdities is less to be feared in a democratic republic because it has a peculiar “foundation and aim, which . . . is none other than to avoid the absurd things of the appetite and to confine human beings within the limits of reason, as far as can be done” (xvi.30;

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emphasis added). Spinozistic republicanism is thus a great experiment in anti-theocratic politics. Drawing on the proud sense of independence characteristic of human beings, it seeks to push them away from the acceptance of revelation (of the imaginative and affective life) and toward an embrace of reason. Exactly how far that push can extend, however, is a question with tremendous implications for practical politics. It is to this, then, that we must now turn.

CHAPTER 2

Spinoza’s Democratic Republicanism

The second half of the Treatise is devoted to the question of the necessary limits of enlightenment. This question is provoked in the first place by the arguments of the first six chapters purporting to undermine the possibility of revelation, and, second, by the apparent consequence of those arguments in chapters 7–10. This is Spinoza’s historical deconstruction of the Hebrew Bible and his founding of what came to be called higher criticism. Subjecting the biblical text—or, rather, texts—to reason and the scientific method, Spinoza concludes that “the Sacred Books” were written by various authors over a period of “almost two thousand years, and perhaps much longer” (xiv.2) and are therefore filled with the kind of contradictions, inconsistencies, and purposeless digressions one would expect in a work not composed with a single guiding intention.1 Or, as Spinoza summarizes: “God’s word is faulty, truncated, adulterated, not consistent with itself,” and “we have only fragments of it.” Reflecting on these chapters, he predicts (rightly) that those who believe the Bible a product of a single divine mind will “shout that I have committed a sin against the Holy Spirit” (xii.1). To this theological objection Spinoza provides only the most minimal response. He repeats his claims from earlier chapters that everything rational must be divine and that the true transcript of God’s word is therefore inscribed in the human mind (xii.3) rather than on “parchment and ink” (xii.5). This, he now states plainly, is just what Scripture is, no more and no less. Indeed, he goes so far as to single out the belief in Scripture’s divine coherence—which would entail the need to affirm contradictories or impossibilities—as an “intolerable superstition” that it is necessary to eradicate: “If this were not so, plainly I would have decided to be silent about these matters” (xii.3; cf. viii.9). Spinoza had ended his dissection of the Bible in chapter 11 with a clarion call for Enlightenment: “Happy indeed would our age be now . . . if we were to see it free . . . of all superstition” (xi.22). But whether an age whose

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public philosophy approximates the truth will also be a happy age may not yet be self-evident, so it is not surprising that at the opening of chapter 12 he considers a second objection to his biblical deconstruction, one that focuses on its moral and social effects rather than its theological rectitude, for, as he acknowledges, “some profane human beings” might take his deconstruction of the Bible as “a license to sin” or “yield to pleasure” (xii.6), which could have politically harmful consequences. That is an objection that might be posed by Spinoza’s moderate Enlightenment allies, who would agree with his overall assessment of Christianity’s truth and the social harm it has done (cf. xi.22) but who would foresee a need to preserve it in some form to provide liberalism with moral support.2 Spinoza’s remaining theological chapters (12–15) are thus directed to his friendly critics, and they culminate in the puzzling teaching that he says is the “chief thing” he is “aiming at” in this Treatise: the separation of philosophy and theology, which is achieved in chapter 14 and elaborated upon in chapter 15 (xiv.40). As we will see, however, that separation will be achieved on grounds of morality and politics rather than metaphysics—or rather, it will continue Spinoza’s moral and political case against revelation, for, as he writes in what may be the Treatise’s most radical statement, nothing “outside the mind is sacred . . . except with respect to the mind itself ” (xii.12). Hence, if “a book” ceases to have a religious use and thus no longer moves human beings “to devotion,” it will by that very fact cease to be “sacred.” If that book’s “usage perishes so that the words do not have any signification or else the book is completely neglected, whether from malice or since human beings do not need it, then both the words and the book will be of no use and no holiness. Furthermore, if the same words are otherwise disposed, or else the usage prevails for taking them in a contrary signification, then both the words and the book which before were sacred, will be impure and profane” (xii.11; emphasis added). Here Spinoza frankly contemplates the possibility that there could come a time when the entire Bible—and not only its more fantastical or mystical portions—might be entirely disregarded if not wholly forgotten. If new moral foundations could be uncovered elsewhere, and if it thus ceased to move human beings to devotion, Scripture as a whole might one day be regarded merely as a collection of old stories akin to those found in Homer and Ovid, to say nothing of Orlando the Furious.3 But Spinoza’s remarkable statement goes still further, asserting not just that the Bible could one day be forgotten but also that that very act of forgetting would be sufficient to refute its “holiness.” The remarkable and controversial character of this claim must be underscored. To draw an analogy, it is one thing to say the worship of the

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biblical God could one day go the way of the worship of Zeus. It is quite another to say that the fact that nobody alive today worships Zeus conclusively proves that Zeus was always a fiction. But this is precisely what Spinoza implies of the Bible. Of course, Scripture itself teaches that human beings can and do become sinful and forget God; much of the drama of the Old Testament revolves around this theme. So how can Spinoza be sure that the success of his political project will actually prove that the biblical God has always been nothing but the superstitious product of fearful imaginations (cf. again pref.6)? How can he be assured that a future world without orthodox piety will not demonstrate only that fallen human beings can lapse into vice and unbelief for long periods of time? At the conclusion of this chapter, I will provide some critical and sympathetic reflections on these and other potential objections to Spinoza’s long-term strategy. Here, however, I would like to suggest that his answer to them must again have to do with the moral and psychological case against the Bible’s vision of human life that he has been building and that he will bring to completion in the Treatise’s second half. The Bible would deny that human beings can ever be truly happy in God’s absence. It understands our desire for happiness as inextricably tied to an experience of loving devotion, to a longing for a kind of completion that can be attained only in communion with divinity. Spinoza’s political project, by contrast, aims to show that human beings can live, and live happily, as selfcontented wholes, fulfilled in the self-absorbed activity of rational thinking. By demonstrating that we can eventually forget the moral experiences of devotion and admiration—that we can look down upon them as characteristics of bygone ages—Spinoza’s project intends to prove the falsity of the Bible’s portrait of the human condition. Because it seeks to accomplish this, Spinoza’s political project is part and parcel of his theological project, which may be why he refers to both the separation of philosophy from theology and the establishment of a liberal republic as “the chief thing” the Treatise will demonstrate (cf. xiv.40; pref.12). Indeed, as we turn now to a discussion of civil religion, we should consider whether Spinoza’s planned enlightenment goes much farther than that of his more influential contemporaries (like Locke, and even Hobbes4) because he believes this radicalism is necessary to prove his theoretical point. His teaching on the state of nature and the foundations of political society is more radical than that of those thinkers, and Spinoza introduces it as part of his explanation of the separation of philosophy and theology (xvi.1). Before coming to this, however, we must examine that separation itself.

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Civil Religion and the Limits of Enlightenment (Chapters 11–15) In turning to the Treatise’s second half, we confront some of its most pronounced and puzzling contradictions. Here it will be helpful to mention two. First, the theological portion of the Treatise seems to reach its peak in chapter 14, where Spinoza articulates the content of a civil religion consisting of the seven “dogmas of the universal faith” (xiv.24) that all human beings, “none excepted,” can and must accept (xiv.29). Spinoza thus apparently suggests that the foundations of a liberal republic must be theological (Bagley 2008, 225–26) and that the possibilities for popular enlightenment are constrained by the requirements of social well-being, which necessitate the universal—and not merely the popular—acceptance of a religious creed. However, when Spinoza turns to his political teaching in chapters 16–20, he appears to forget this. His teaching on nature and natural right in chapter 16 never refers back to the civil religion of chapter 14. Instead, it uncovers the basis for liberal democratic politics in a scientific moral teaching that equates right with power and regards God as the indifferent order of nature—which allows human beings to lie, cheat, and steal; which permits the big fish to eat the small fish by “the highest natural right”; and within which each of us is but a “particle” (xvi.2, 10). When Spinoza finally reaches chapter 20, he considers how far freedom of speech and thought should extend in a liberal democracy, but he makes no mention of chapter 14—which seems to have explicitly answered this question. Spinoza’s Apostolic Dilemma We will turn to a more direct consideration of this contradiction in the following section. To make sense of it, we must first confront a second and more immediate tension: within Spinoza’s teaching of the civil religion itself there is a massive incongruity concerning the reasonableness of its foundations and substance. For the civil religion to be embraced by “everyone” (philosophers included), it must be rational. Accordingly, Spinoza repeatedly claims that it is (e.g., xv.24). But, as I will outline in more detail below, in the very sections where he makes these assertions, he also repeatedly claims that it is not! Hence, if accepting the civil religion is necessary for obedience to law, Spinoza seems, often in a single breath, to say that the wisest human beings both can and cannot “obey” (for one of the clearest examples, see xv.44–45). Spinoza thus appears to pull the rug out from under his teaching on civil religion—a

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teaching that he also declares to be absolutely necessary for the establishment of a healthy political order. Why, then, does he do this? My proposed answer is that he does this as part of his educational project and also because the establishment of a healthy political order is not his primary goal. Some preliminary light on Spinoza’s approach in these chapters is shed by chapter 11, the theme of which is effective teaching. The official lesson of that chapter is that the apostles wrote their Epistles as teachers rather than as prophets, and so unlike Moses—who never made a rational argument (xi.7)—these purveyors of Christ’s message “reason everywhere” (xi.4). Spinoza cautions, however, that necessity “absolutely required” the apostles to “accommodate” their message to the capacity of their audience by employing “signs” (xi.8, 15)—that is, tricks or phony miracles. So while the content of Christianity is reasonable according to this presentation, the manner of its communication is not. Spinoza here continues his strategy of presenting his own teaching as identical to a rationalized and universal Pauline Christianity, which he juxtaposes to a highly critical and parochial portrait of Judaism, the religion only of a particular people (xi.11). This distinction suggests a benign reason for why Spinoza omitted the New Testament from his textual deconstruction of Scripture: if Christianity does have a coherent message rooted in natural knowledge (xi.12), such a deconstruction would obviously be impossible. Spinoza also indicates, however, that, rational though it was, the apostles’ behavior also created a large difficulty, the roots of which can be understood by reflecting on some universal truths about education. On one hand, Spinoza says, someone who has the authority to teach something also necessarily has the authority to choose how to teach it (xi.18). On the other, his choice of method may be limited by the circumstances and prior education of his students. All teachers, Spinoza says, most desire “to teach those who are plainly raw and have not begun to learn . . . from anyone else” (xi.20). The most effective instruction would therefore begin when students’ minds are blank slates (cf. Hobbes 1994, xxx.6; Locke 1975, I.3.22). But this was not the situation faced by the apostles, who had to cater their message to the various preexisting opinions of their students, “lest the newness of its teaching greatly hurt their ears” (xi.23). They had to pretend to perform miracles for the same reasons Spinoza, as a latter-day Paul, must pretend to be a Christian. But in Spinoza’s case, this strategy is not employed solely with a view to the vulgar. His primary audience is composed of certain potential philosophers who are held back by the powerful prejudice “that reason has to serve as handmaid to theology” (pref.34).

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In the case of the apostles, the need to build on alien (and conflicting) foundations created a problem. It led to numerous contradictions on fundamental matters—for example, whether human beings are justified on the basis of works or by faith alone “and, further, the whole teaching about predestination” (xi.21). In Spinoza’s presentation, it was “impossible” for the apostles to avoid such disagreements (xi.23). They built the same religion on divergent foundations (xi.21) because they had to cater to the contrasting mindsets of their audiences. Hence, Paul “philosophized” because he preached “to the peoples,” whereas those who preached to the Jews—“who despise philosophy”—“taught a religion stripped of philosophical theories” (xi.22). But even if the origins of this divergence were impossible to avoid, the result has nonetheless been catastrophic: “There is no doubt that from this [practice of appealing to different foundations] . . . many quarrels and schisms have arisen, by which the church has already been unceasingly vexed since the times of the Apostles and in fact will be vexed for eternity, until religion is someday at last separated from philosophical theories and reduced to the very few and very simple dogmas that Christ taught as his own” (xi.22). Spinoza thus calls for the (re)establishment of a religion of reason that is purportedly identical to the original Christianity of the Gospels. As the evangelist of this new religion, however, Spinoza faces the same dilemma confronted by Paul and the other apostles. Since the potentially philosophic members of his audience are not “raw” but have had their mindsets shaped by Christianity—a religion responsible for discrediting even reason itself by making it theology’s handmaiden—how can he avoid the same fate as those he now appropriates as his predecessors? On the social level, this problem is even more acute, for, as he will go on to state unequivocally, all societies need certain core beliefs to hold themselves together. Just as Paul was a Greek with the Greeks and a Jew with the Jews, Spinoza is a Christian with the Christians (Strauss 1952, 190), but this means he must navigate a potentially perilous dilemma; he must both do and not do what Paul did. To have his message received, he must cater to his audience’s preexisting beliefs and speak as a religious authority. But if he is to avoid the inherent dangers of dogmatism, if he is to succeed where Paul failed, he must work toward calling those beliefs into question, for if these superstitions can be undermined after they are accepted, if they can be replaced with beliefs that approach a rationalistic view of the world, the result may be the eventual complete liberation of a few. An analogous process of progressive enlightenment may have the benefit of preventing Spinozism from suffering the twin drawbacks of transforming philosophy into a public religious authority: on the social level, the risk of

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ideological conflict and the attempt to tyrannize minds; on the individual level, the loss of the idea of intellectual liberation as the summum bonum for human beings. As we will now see, though, this strategy of deliberate selfundermining will entail considerable risks. Truth, Obedience, and Civil Religion As previously noted, chapters 12 through 15 are crafted as a moral apologia for Spinoza’s debunking of revealed religion. Accordingly, as a champion of a more moderate Enlightenment might demand, this section of the Treatise culminates in a civil theology that Spinoza says is integral to his paramount goal of separating philosophy and theology. Thus, at first glance it appears Spinoza has responded to the objection that his deconstruction of Scripture is morally dangerous simply by conceding to it and by retracting most of his earlier arguments! As he now writes, while the Bible may have no coherent or believable theoretical teaching, regarding moral matters Scripture has one clear, fundamental, and undoubted message: “that God exists, that he provides for everything, that he is omnipotent, and that by his decree it goes well for the pious and badly for reprobates, and that our salvation depends on his grace alone” (xii.36; cf. xiii.6). Seeming to forget his assertions in chapters 1–6 that God has no human qualities like grace, love, or justice, he now explicitly states that God cares for human beings and exercises judgment over them. There is a “universal faith” that everyone—philosophers included—can accept, and this religion teaches “that there exists a highest being who loves Justice and Charity and whom all, so that they may be saved, are bound to obey and adore by the cultivation of Justice and Charity toward their neighbor” (xiv.24; emphasis added). In chapter 6, by contrast, Spinoza had said philosophy teaches that God cares “equally for all” (vi.37), that is, that he makes no distinction between the just and the unjust. As Spinoza concludes chapter 12, he appears to retract most of his major conclusions from the first half of the work. He claims that Scripture teaches “the whole universal divine law” and that it has “reached our hands incorrupt” (xii.38); that the antiquity and authenticity of the biblical books “are well recognized by everyone;” and that even Christ’s miracles “and his passion” must therefore be genuine—“unless the greatest part of human beings have agreed to what is unbelievable” (xii.39). Any inaccuracies in Scripture must therefore concern merely theoretical matters or be attempts to move the spirits of the plebs to devotion (xii.40). By contrast, “the universal or catholic religion of the whole human race” (xii.18) was communicated by

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Christ through his passion and is “natural in the greatest degree” (xii.24; emphasis added). Even as he makes these extraordinary claims about the Bible’s authenticity, however, Spinoza makes a startling and seemingly tangential admission: he says even a tyrant or an arch-criminal would have a clear interest in endorsing morality and religion for selfish purposes. Although no outrage can be devised that is so execrable as not to have been committed by someone, still there is no one who, to excuse his outrages, would try to eliminate the laws, or introduce as an eternal and salutary lesson anything that might be impious. For we see the nature of human beings so constituted that if anyone (whether he is a King or a subject) commits anything shameful, he is eager to embellish his deed with such details as to be believed to have committed nothing contrary to what is just and decorous. We conclude, accordingly, that absolutely the whole universal divine law that Scripture teaches has reached our hands incorrupt. (xii.38; emphasis added) If Spinoza’s critique of revelation in the earlier chapters did not already demonstrate his true beliefs, he here gives an overt indication that his current praise and endorsement of it is crafted solely with a view to social utility. As he indicates several times in chapters 13–15, a belief in God’s providential justice is “salutary” and “necessary . . . in a republic” if human beings are to “live peacefully and harmoniously together” (xiv.34; cf. also xiv.47). But this raises an obvious question: if social cohesion requires civil religion, why has Spinoza dedicated the first half of the Treatise to articulating a teaching that so clearly undermines it? Having come as far as he has, can he really put the genie back in the bottle? If he is serious here, should he not have written a different book, one more along the lines of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity? To answer these questions, we should look more closely at what Spinoza now says about the relationship between truth and “obedience.” Spinoza on several occasions indicates that his civil religion—what he calls the universal faith—absolutely “agrees with reason” and contains nothing in conflict with it: it “is universal for everyone” (xv.24; emphasis added). Accordingly, he also asserts that “all human beings”—philosophers and non-philosophers—“can obey God” in accordance with the prescription of the divine law mandating justice and charity (xiii.8; cf. also xv.45; pref.13). Moreover, without such a

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belief in divine law, “human beings necessarily have to be stubborn, or at least without the discipline of obedience” (xiii.8). Yet later on, Spinoza indicates the complete contrary: he says someone led by reason cannot believe in the kind of God who would decree and enforce a moral law, for reason cannot demonstrate the existence of a God “who constitutes rights as a prince” (Annotation 34). “Obedience,” as Spinoza had earlier defined it, “consists in someone’s executing commands solely on the basis of the authority of the one commanding”—which is why it “has no place” in a free republic founded on reason (v.25). According to this presentation, then, reason and obedience are simple opposites. Reason entails living one’s life according to one’s own lights, with what Spinoza calls a full and free spirit (cf. xvi.32). Obedience, on the other hand, entails surrendering the use of one’s intellect—the “better part of ourselves” whose cultivation constitutes our perfection (iv.10)—and placing one’s spirit in the care of another. Obedience is thus the epitome of slavery, just as reason, to Spinoza, is synonymous with freedom (see, e.g., Annotation 33). This adversarial presentation of the relationship between reason and obedience also explains why Spinoza had claimed in the preface that obedience (the sole object of revelation) “is completely distinct from natural knowledge and has nothing in common with it” (pref.27), just as it also shows why he mocks the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament—which sought to convince the Jews “that they were nothing in their own right but were altogether part of another’s” (v.31)—as a “continual cult of obedience” (xvii.88; cf. v.30, 32, where, as we have seen, Spinoza extends this critique to Christianity). But is the dichotomy between reason and obedience really so stark? As Spinoza reaches the core of his civil religion teaching, he does provide some indications that it may not be, for although, as he reiterates, the purpose of both the Old and New Testaments is “nothing besides the training of obedience,” perhaps this obedience can be understood in a variety of ways— which might make it possible to “obey out of a true spirit” (xiv.6). Perhaps there can be gradations of irrationality, the accumulation of which—to go one step further—might allow a given person or a given people’s outlook to ascend upward over time. Thus, as Spinoza says, the Old Testament only gave “the first Jews” a law written on tablets, in which obedience was guaranteed through the crudest kinds of rewards and punishments, because they were “no doubt . . . considered just like children.” But Moses, and later Jeremiah, recognized that this would not always be the case. Because children can mature and eventually acquire the use of reason, these prophets preached “a future time for the Jews when God would inscribe his law on their hearts,”

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which is to say, their “minds” (xii.3). Thus, while Moses and Jeremiah promised that things would go well or poorly for the Jews depending on their obedience to written law (xiii.21–22), Paul subsequently taught that God’s epistle is inside human beings “on the fleshy tablets of the heart” (xii.17), and John claimed that “he who has charity, really has and recognizes God” (xiii.22). The Hebrew Bible originally refers to God as El Shaddai—He “who suffices” (xiii.10)—because it is appropriate for different people with different levels of intellect and education to regard Him and His justice in whatever ways are sufficient for them. At the lowest level of this educational ladder is the Mosaic view, which regards God as a judge doling out rewards and punishments for ordinary moral behavior. But at a somewhat higher level can be found the view John expressed in the Treatise’s epigraph: “Through this . . . we know that we remain in him and he remains in us: that he has given us of his Spirit, namely Charity” (xiv.17; 1 John 4:13). In Spinoza’s gloss, John teaches a moral pantheism that anticipates the teaching of the Ethics: since “God is Charity” (xiv.15; 1 John 4:8), one who loves his neighbor literally takes God into himself or participates in His spirit (xiv.17). Yet, this pantheism draws on and nourishes the sentiment of devotion that Spinoza throughout the Treatise has defined as irrational, the very object that escape from which forms the centerpiece of a philosophic education. The Greek word Spinoza translates as “charity” is agapē. Moreover, although John promises a reward that is less crude than Moses’s piety—one that is intellectual and spiritual rather than material—it is a reward nonetheless, and one that is promised to some and not others. It therefore remains, to Spinoza, fundamentally irrational. How, then, can we make sense of the various tensions in Spinoza’s teaching on civil religion? On one hand, Spinoza indicates that social cohesion in a republic will always necessitate the acceptance of some kind of superstition in the minds of most people (xiv.34)—indeed, everyone (“none excepted”; xiv.29). But on the other, he indicates there might be room for flexibility in these views. Although social demands make the superstitious inculcation of obedience absolutely necessary, it may be possible for greater and greater numbers to approach the outlook of those who live lives of complete spiritual and intellectual independence. When Spinoza finally outlines the seven dogmas of the universal faith in chapter 14, he indicates that there is room for progress in the direction of rationality—but only to a point. At first glance, these dogmas appear replete with the kind of subrational and anthropomorphic beliefs about God that Spinoza holds to be alien to reason. Thus, for example, all must believe first not only that God—“that is, a highest

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being”—“exists,” but also that he is “highly just and merciful, or the model of true life,” for without these beliefs no one will “obey him, or know him to be judge” (xiv.25). Second, all must believe he is unique, for the belief that God or a highest being is more excellent than “the rest” is “absolutely required” for instilling “devotion, admiration, and love” toward Him (xiv.25). Additionally, all must believe that God or the highest being “holds the highest right [jus] and dominion over all things,” that He bestows mercy and grace on us (xiv.26, 28), and that He is forgiving (xiv.28). His worship consists only in actions, in works of justice and charity, and all who obey Him “by this plan of living are saved, whereas the rest, who live under the imperium of pleasure, are lost” (xiv.27). But while these seven dogmas seem patently superstitious at first, on closer inspection they contain considerable ambiguity. The first dogma, for instance, presents the believer with interpretive options: God is to be seen as just and merciful, or the model of true life. Indeed, Spinoza says it “has nothing to do with faith” (and hence law-abidingness) if one believes that God (or that highest being) is “fire, Spirit, light, thought, etc.” (xiv.30). Similarly, although Spinoza insists it is necessary to believe that those who practice justice and charity are “saved,” whereas those who do not are “lost” (xiv.27), he never defines these terms (salvos could simply mean “safe,” just as perditos means “lost”), and he even suggests it could be acceptable to believe these sanctions are natural rather than supernatural (xiv.31). Given the right conditions, a society could encompass a great diversity of religious opinion, and that diversity could extend even to such fundamental questions as the existence of an afterlife. It might even be possible, in Spinoza’s estimation, for a belief in another world with rewards and punishments (at least in the usual sense) to disappear without any serious consequences for “obedience” or public order. Since, in Spinoza’s account, faith is important (and can be discerned) only with a view to the actions it produces, believers can and even must accept more or less enlightened versions of the civil religion depending on their level of rationality: “Each is bound to accommodate these dogmas of faith to suit his own grasp, and to interpret them to himself in the mode in which it seems easier to him to be able to embrace them . . . with the spirit’s full consent” (xiv.32). Thus, the question of why and how God is the “model of true life” is irrelevant to faith: “whether it is on account of his having a just and merciful spirit, or since all things are and act through him, and consequently we understand ourselves through him as well, and through him we see that the true is the equitable and the good” (xiv.30). By raising this last possibility, Spinoza suggests it would be perfectly in keeping with

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the demands of public morality for citizens—perhaps even a great number of them—to adopt a philosophically oriented, but by no means fully rationalistic, system of ethics—one that would define God as thought and would believe Him to be providential insofar as, by allowing us to think, He permits us to become one with Him and achieve our summum bonum by understanding ourselves. Even though this outlook would embrace determinism and hold that God does not “rule as a prince” but merely “teaches eternal truths,” and even though it would hold “that the reward of the good and the punishment of the evil are natural” rather than supranatural—two possibilities Spinoza here says are perfectly in keeping with faith (xiv.31)—it would remain, in the decisive sense, superstitious. By claiming that the universe is constituted to allow human beings to achieve their greatest good, it still retains the anthropocentricism Spinoza places at the origin of the belief in miracles and revelation. It would seem, then, that while Spinoza would still prohibit the propagation of a thoroughgoing atheism—which will have serious consequences for the freedom of speech of thinkers like himself—he would nonetheless permit and even encourage a kind of semi-enlightened “spirituality” purporting to find divine meaning in nature. In the Ethics, Spinoza famously articulates such a doctrine, but he also hints at it here and elsewhere in the Treatise (see, e.g., Spinoza’s notes at vi.10 and vi.22). But as he repeatedly reminds us throughout these chapters, there can be no doubt as to the ultimate status of such a belief. And here we must finally confront the most puzzling contradiction pervading Spinoza’s account of the civil religion. For even as he introduces what he asserts is the Bible’s fundamental moral teaching, he also says its message is geared to “the slowest” human beings (xii.3) and that, according to the Bible itself, one who trusts in God’s providence will not have “an intellectual or accurate knowledge of God” (xiii.9). On the contrary, since the Bible’s goal is only to instill obedience, and since obedience is by no means a philosophic virtue, Scripture “condemns only stubbornness, not ignorance” (xiii.7). Thus, Spinoza says, the Bible extolls the “credulity and the faith” of the ignorant Hebrews, while also making clear that, because Moses “had grander thoughts about God,” he “doubted the divine promises” (xiii.14). Spinoza thus not only claims that the Bible’s lessons about obedience are noble lies but also makes the doubly shocking suggestion that Scripture itself shares that understanding. Moreover, he then goes on to speak about his own civil religion in the same way. He states, for example, that John’s pantheistic outlook is nonetheless accommodated to his less-than-enlightened mindset (xiv.17). As he is presenting the seven dogmas of his civil religion—which,

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again, it is necessary for all to embrace, otherwise obedience is impossible (xiv.29)—he states that “faith does not require truth so much as piety” (xiv.33). The seven dogmas are “salutary” and “necessary” “in a republic” (xiv.34), but what is pious and salutary is determined solely “by reason of obedience” (xiv.33), not truth. And as he extols the need for obedience, he recalls quite bluntly that it is the polar opposite of philosophy. For “no one can be wise on the basis of a commandment” (xiii.15), and one who claims to know God through the revealed law is therefore akin to “a Parrot or a puppet,” speaking “without mind or sense” (xiii.17). Scripture, he again recalls, was written mainly for the vulgar, whom it “is not eager to render learned, but obedient” (xiii.26). Indeed, even the seven dogmas of Spinoza’s civil religion may “not have even a shadow of truth,” although this is irrelevant “so long as he who embraces them is ignorant of their being false. Otherwise, he would necessarily be rebellious” (xiv.20). But of course, by proclaiming this so openly, is Spinoza not undermining the belief in their truth and thus encouraging this very rebelliousness? This problem is only compounded, rather than resolved, by the rather bizarre doctrine Spinoza now presents as his official teaching: the separation of philosophy and theology. Theoretically, the idea that philosophy and theology could simply be “separate” would seem puzzling. Since the truth must be either rational or contra-rational, it is nonsensical to assert that neither philosophy nor theology is superior to the other: this “separation” itself would require a grounding in either reason or revelation (cf. xv.9). In Spinoza’s summary, however, the idea of the separation of philosophy and theology amounts to this: reason or philosophy “is the realm of truth and wisdom, whereas Theology is that of piety and obedience” (xv.21). Philosophy teaches “nothing but truth” (xiv.38); that is, it does not teach obedience in any way. Conversely, faith or theology—by which Spinoza understands “precisely revelation” (xv.24)—teaches “nothing but obedience and piety” (xiv.38); that is, it has not even a shadow of truth. Thus, that philosophy and theology “disagree totally” (xiv.37) has an unsettling civic implication. Obedience is manifest in actions, but, insofar as actions spring from beliefs, good citizenship requires a foundation in thought that is philosophically suspect. Of course, as Spinoza’s own life shows, philosophers may largely keep to themselves, but the lack of harm they do others should not be confused with a willingness to carry out positive obligations or even to obey the law when doing so would be to their disadvantage (even if the law in a liberal republic will minimize such occasions). By the same token, the patriotic sacrifices of citizens depend in a crucial respect on their less than complete enlightenment. There is simply

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an insuperable tension between the demands of philosophy (the summum bonum) and those of republican politics. But if popular acceptance of the civil religion is necessary for a healthy politics, why does Spinoza nonetheless proclaim so openly that his dogmas are only for the ignorant (cf. Matheron 1971)? Does he not thereby take a great social risk, even or especially if his own statements about the requirements of civil order are to be believed? I would like to suggest that the answer to this question is yes, and that Spinoza is undertaking this risk because the well-being of society is not his first priority. Bluntly put, Spinoza wants to undermine his own civil religion and to do so by cultivating a kind of believer who will think through the contradictions in his beliefs. Such a believer may well begin by accepting Spinoza’s repeated declarations that the civil theology “is universal” and “agrees with reason” (xv.38; cf. also 53), but that same admiration for reason’s authority (and a thoroughgoing intellectual honesty) will lead him to accept Spinoza’s simultaneous declarations that the foundations of theology “cannot be demonstrated mathematically” (xv.37).5 This tension, as it is manifest in the minds of the most capable and promising Spinozistic believers, will result eventually in a liberation from the dogmas of the civil theology—and, in so doing, it will instill an appreciation for why a civil theology in particular cannot, in the last analysis, be granted the imprimatur of philosophy.6 To see this, we can briefly compare Spinoza’s argument here to Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity. Whereas Locke, who calls morality reason’s “great and proper business” (1823, 7:140), repeatedly claims (though without ever giving a demonstration) that Christian revelation is reasonable and that it contains a unified moral teaching of tolerance and good works,7 Spinoza regards such attempts as ultimately deleterious to philosophy. In the final analysis, they would “call on reason for help in repelling reason and endeavor by a certain reason to render it uncertain” (xv.38). Although, as Spinoza acknowledges, revelation is certainly “necessary in the greatest degree” for the political utility it provides and for the “solace” it gives “those who are not so strong in reason” (xv.37), for philosophy on that account to mythologize or give its imprimatur to miracles (cf. Locke 1823, 7:135) would be for it to endorse its own undoing. Besides being intellectually perverse, philosophy’s endorsement of unreason would abandon its station in the hierarchy of human goods. Becoming a servant of society, philosophy would then be on the cusp of transforming itself into a tool for the procurement of the “goods of fortune,” which ordinary people mistakenly believe constitutive of happiness (pref.1). In other words, had Spinoza lived to see the results of Locke’s

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more moderate Enlightenment and Locke’s ultimately more successful political project, he might not have been surprised that it eventually resulted in a world in which philosophy had self-consciously ceded its authority to a technologically oriented scientific enterprise. After all, the same civic inclination that caused Locke to give his philosophic endorsement to Christianity also led him to surrender philosophy’s status as the summum bonum and to present it as a tool for improving society’s security and prosperity.8 If Spinoza’s liberal republic is less stable and peaceful than Locke’s, if it is filled with the tensions and contradictions that are reflected in Spinoza’s own self-contradictions in these chapters about the relationship between reason and obedience, those tensions and instabilities might ultimately be essential in his view for allowing liberalism to achieve its true purpose: the authentic spiritual liberation of a select few. To sum up, then, when Spinoza says, at the close of chapter 15, that there are “very few” human beings who can “acquire the habit of virtue from the guidance of reason alone” (xv.45), he blurs philosophic virtue and ordinary civic virtue while fostering an admiration for both. He encourages a line of (muddled) thinking that will admire the justice of philosophers but do so, at least in part, out of an admiration for their liberation. He assures unliberated human beings that philosophers remain moral and on the side of society, but he also encourages them to think in ways that are more and more rational and thus self-interested. In other words, in claiming not only that reason and revelation each enjoy the dignity that comes from inhabiting their own realms, but also that these realms are equivalent to truth and obedience respectively, the otherwise nonsensical idea of separation encourages a respect for religion, on one hand, and a healthy contempt for it, on the other. By undermining his civil religion as he argues for it, Spinoza encourages a number of his readers— how many may be as yet unclear—to think through its tensions and undergo an educational ascent. As it is elaborated in the next five chapters, the final stage of that ascent will produce an outlook that comes as close as any popular ethos can to approaching the simultaneously self-interested and resigned outlook that characterizes the philosophic view of the world.

Nature and Natural Right (Chapter 16) Chapter 16 marks a major transition in the Treatise. Having completed his discussion of theology, Spinoza now turns to politics. Chapters 16–20 begin with a discussion of nature and natural right, and they culminate in the proposed

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creation of a liberal democracy. Spinoza’s surface impression, then, is that, having cleared away theological objections to his political project in chapters 1–15, he can now begin constructing a rational politics, one that builds upon and puts us back in touch with human nature undistorted by theology. But just as politics was ever present in the first fifteen chapters, Spinoza does not leave the Bible behind in its final five. In fact, as he opens chapter 16, he indicates that his turn to politics will actually be a continuation of his theological teaching. “So far,” he writes, “we have taken care to separate Philosophy from Theology and show the freedom of philosophizing which the latter grants to each. Therefore, it is time for us to inquire how far this freedom to think, and for each to say what he thinks, extends in the best Republic” (xvi.1; emphasis added). Although the seven dogmas from chapter 14 will not be mentioned again, Spinoza’s articulation of a civil theology, as I will suggest below, will be transformed, but not eliminated, in chapter 16. Moreover, his teaching on natural right, and his proposed creation of a liberal democracy, will continue and extend his engagement with revelation and will bring to a conclusion his justification of the intellectual freedom that he regards as the core of the philosophic life. Right and Power: The Morality of Necessity If Hobbes and Locke predicted that their teachings on the state of nature and natural right would be considered strange (cf. Hobbes 1994, xiii.10; Locke 1982, sec. 9), Spinoza’s seems calculated to strike the reader as downright bizarre. For while Hobbes had defined the natural state as a realm without government, where human beings have a right to those things that law has not yet denied them, Spinoza finds natural right (jus) in the very order of nature itself—an order that is not limited to the affairs of human beings, let alone those living in a hypothetical, pre-political state. The “Right and Institution of nature” is the regime “under which everyone is born and for the most part lives.” It is identical to the “eternal order of the whole of nature”— the deterministic necessity that compels “all individuals” to exist and operate “in a certain mode” and of which each human being is merely “a particle” (xvi.9–10). Thus, when human beings form political communities, they do not leave the state of nature but instead agree to be bound by the laws of human reason, which aim at their utility, and which do not encompass, but rather are encompassed by, the laws of nature properly understood (xvi.9–12).9 But this assertion only makes Spinoza’s language about natural right all the more puzzling, since he stated in chapter 4 that “right” “more properly” refers not to

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laws of nature but to those laws that depend on human willingness and that we make for ourselves in view of some aim (iv.1). Spinoza’s equating of natural right with what all natural beings cannot help but do (xvi.5) therefore cuts very much against the grain of ordinary moral discourse. If Hobbes (1994, xiii.4) had difficulty convincing people that a human being has a right to kill someone whom he merely thinks may be intending to harm him, that claim had at least remained one about human action and human choice. Spinoza, however, insists not only that justice can be found among what would usually be considered amoral necessities, but also that it exists among the irrational, the insane, and even among animals and inanimate objects (xvi.5). Since justice and injustice in the ordinary understanding are human qualities, some might question whether the innocent deserve to be subjected to earthquakes. But few would claim an earthquake has a right to injure someone or simply to shake the ground. Yet this is precisely Spinoza’s teaching. Spinoza therefore breaks from Hobbes, and goes well beyond ordinary moral discourse, because he equates natural right simply with reality.10 His teaching makes what ought to be identical to what is. Spinozistic natural right is synonymous with “longing and power” (xvi.7). Since “the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing besides the power of all individuals together, . . . it follows that each individual has the highest right to everything it can do, or that the right of each extends as far as its determinate power extends” (xvi.4). Natural right grants all beings whatever they wish to attain and can attain, and it “prohibits nothing except what no one longs for and what no one can do” (xvi.9)—it permits everything possible and forbids everything impossible. A hurricane that destroys a house, a falling rock that injures someone, and a lion that eats a gazelle all act according to natural necessity and therefore according to natural right. Furthermore, because nature is a competitive struggle, claims of right can be similarly contested. Big fish eat small fish “by the highest natural right” (xvi.2; emphasis added). Small fish have a natural right to swim away or fight back, but on the whole they will be less successful, and the justice of the event is determined solely by its outcome. As Spinoza thus presents it, the idea of might makes right is not a cynical denial of all morality but a real claim about natural, and indeed, divine justice. Since “the power of nature is the very power of God, who has the highest right to everything” (xvi.3), everything that occurs in nature, no matter how “ridiculous, absurd, or evil” it may appear from our point of view (xvi.11), should actually be seen as a manifestation of divine right and will. Less superstitious and anthropocentric than the ordinary understanding of divine justice, Spinozistic natural right provides a moral

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approximation of the outlook of sober resignation characteristic of the philosophic life. This, however, only underscores just how discordant such a teaching is. After all, what Spinoza here paradoxically calls natural right effectively turns what we usually call morality on its head. As he now notes, the greatest necessity governing us compels us to pursue our own good above all else, especially to take actions ensuring our survival—actions that we choose with our own good alone in view (xvi.4; xvi.15–16; cf. also Steinberg 2018, chap. 2). Hence, in an important endnote, Spinoza tips his hand and reveals that he cannot be entirely serious in speaking of natural rights as rights. He writes that once the truth about the causes of natural things become known to us, these “divine rights” actually “cease to be rights, and we embrace them as eternal truths, not as rights: that is, obedience goes over into a love that arises from true knowledge, as light from the sun” (A.34). As previously noted, Spinoza holds that a free or rational man can never truly obey, in the fullest sense, any divine or moral rules. And so, as it would appear, even the “love” Spinoza speaks of here—the “love” a philosopher would feel for a pantheistic God—will lack any devotional element. Instead, his love for the universe would primarily entail appreciation or satisfaction. The philosopher will appreciate the laws of nature that make his understanding possible in the way someone might appreciate the sun for allowing him to see. To go further, however, by developing a sense of gratitude toward the universe, would be to accept the anthropocentrism that is at the root of superstition. But the massive surface teaching of chapter 16, conversely, appears replete with just such anthropocentrism. Or rather, it provides a critique of anthropocentrism that also caters to it by incorporating certain anthropocentric terminology and ways of thinking. While acknowledging that each human being is a mere “particle” of a deterministic nature and thus without moral significance (xvi.10), Spinozistic natural right simultaneously and paradoxically endows this natural order with moral and divine meaning. Spinoza thus here continues the articulation of his pantheism from previous chapters, and in so doing he also makes its inherent tensions even clearer. This, I suggest, may help bring a potentially philosophic student with moral attachments closer to a liberation from them, but it also poses a more radical version of the same practical problem Spinoza confronted in the previous set of chapters: to what extent can this teaching of natural “right” be accepted, and how far can it spread? Or, to repeat the practical dilemma Spinoza poses in chapter 16, how far do freedom of speech and thought extend in “the best Republic” (xvi.1)?

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The Best Republic and the Social Contract (Civil Religion II) These questions lead to an even more difficult one, once we consider the ways Spinoza’s aim of “the best Republic” differs from that of the other early modern social contract theorists. Eschewing the relativism of Hobbes and Locke, Spinoza retains the characteristic theme of classical political philosophy—but unlike those of Plato and Aristotle, his version of the best regime is meant as more than a thought experiment. Spinoza purports to attain something like the goal of classical idealism by constructing it on the foundations of modern realism. He suggests that a regime characterized by the flourishing of our summum bonum can come into being in practice if human beings come to recognize that the universe is amoral, indifferent, and non-teleological and that it therefore in no way points to that summum bonum. But this raises a puzzling theoretical question that cuts to the heart of Spinoza’s teaching: how can human beings possibly have a finis ultimus that can be attained only through the recognition that the universe does not support that end, because we are merely determined particles with no special status? Or, expressed in political terms, how can a negative conception of liberty lead to the achievement of a high-aiming purpose? The aim of Spinoza’s republicanism is for human beings to live both “securely and best” (xvi.14). Accordingly, the social contract engendering it requires naturally atomistic individuals not only to make the Hobbesian promise “not to do to anyone what they do not want done to themselves” but also to pledge to “defend another’s right as their own” (xvi.14; cf. Hobbes 1994, xv.35). Spinoza’s republic will protect private rights while also fostering positive obligations. Anticipating to some degree the teaching of Rousseau’s Social Contract, Spinoza suggests that his natural right teaching can transform naturally selfish and apolitical creatures into beings who identify their own good with that of the collective.11 He writes that if society were governed by reason, “everyone would altogether stand by his compacts in the highest faith, on the basis of a longing [cupiditate] for this highest good [summum bonum]—namely, preserving the Republic—and would above all keep faith, the highest bulwark of a Republic” (xvi.21). In an annotation to this chapter, he takes this thought to its extreme, declaring that a life of full enlightenment—or of liberated self-interest—entails complete devotion to the common good: “The more a human being is led by reason, that is, the more he is free, the more steadfastly will he keep the city’s rights and execute the commands of the highest power whose subject he is” (A.33).

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In chapter 14, Spinoza baldly stated that when Moses sought to obligate the Israelites “by a compact” he did not do so by reason, clearly implying that obedience to a social contract can never be fully rational (xiv.7). And here in chapter 16 he declares that “no compact can have force except by reason of utility” (xvi.20). All people will always be guided by the paramount consideration of their own good, and because right is equivalent to power, the ignorant have as much moral authority to judge that utility as the wise (cf. xvi.6). Moreover, as Spinoza now reaffirms, the vast majority of human beings are unwise, “for each is pulled by his own pleasure; and the mind is very often so occupied by greed, glory, envy, anger, etc., that no place is left for reason” (xvi.22). As he later states, Those who have but experienced the varied mental cast of the multitude almost despair over it, since it is not governed by reason but by emotions alone, is brusque toward everything, and is easily corrupted by either greed or luxury. Each deems that he alone knows everything, and wants everything to be modified on the basis of his own mental cast, and figures something is equitable or inequitable, a propriety or an impropriety, insofar as he judges it to fall to his profit or harm; out of glory, he despises his equals and will not suffer being regulated by them; out of envy for better praise or fortune, which is never equal, he longs for evil to another and delights in it. (xvii.15; emphasis added) Since our opinions about justice and morality are always filtered through the prism of self-interest, and since that self-interest is hardly ever conceived of rationally, how can natural right thus understood serve as the basis for a genuine republican devotion to the common good? How can we “set up everything so that everyone, whatever his mental cast,” will “put the public right ahead of private advantages” (xvii.16)? Given its inherent contradictions, to accomplish such a task on the basis of reason alone would seem impossible. Indeed, as Spinoza recalls, past republican societies had resolved this dilemma only through the invention of civil religions, which eventually caused them to degenerate into theocratic monarchies (xvii.17–24). These considerations provoke the suspicion that even the most “enlightened” Spinozistic republic will ultimately have to rely on some kind of superstition, though it will have to be a superstition of a new kind if this republic is to avoid the fate of Augustan Rome. A key difference between the old superstitions and Spinoza’s new one can be seen in the way Spinoza in chapter 16 consistently affirms that the obligation created by the social contract is rational, as well as

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from his unflinching declaration of the thoroughly self-interested character of reason’s teachings. He states that it is an iron law of human nature—“among the eternal truths that no one can ignore”—that human beings will always seek their perceived advantage (xvi.15–16). Since in choosing our actions we naturally consider only our own benefit (xvi.3), those entities we in society find ourselves embedded in throughout our lives—the family, the political community, and especially religion (xvi.52–67)—are purely artificial, products of conventions created to further our individual interests. Contracts can be effective only where they continue to offer utility to the contracting parties (xvi.12, 20), and “no one will promise without a ruse to yield the [natural] right he has to all things.” Hence, human beings always retain the right, wherever they retain the power, to break their promises when doing so will benefit them (xvi.16). Unlike Hobbes, who had argued that contracts made out of fear are valid, Spinoza says that cannot be the case when the original conditions in which the contract was made have changed. If I promise a robber at gunpoint to pay him tomorrow, when I am out of his power, in exchange for my life today, “the right of nature” guarantees me the liberty to break that original agreement when his threat to me is no longer credible (xvi.17; cf. Hobbes 1994, xiv.27, xv.4–5). Because human beings always wish to preserve themselves, and because they will never act against their interests when they are free, if Spinoza’s government were based purely on considerations of rational advantage, it would be even more absolute than Hobbes’s. The knowledge that “more harm than utility” will follow for the one who breaks his word “has to have the greatest place in the Republic to be instituted” (xvi.21, 24). A government founded on reason alone would be a police state. But since that is emphatically not the kind of society Spinoza is arguing for, and since he has already given us reasons to doubt that any society can be grounded on fully rational foundations, it is necessary to consider an alternative. If the only options to rely on are fear or “a ruse” (xvi.16), we must conclude that a free society will require the latter and thus that some of what Spinoza presents as considerations of reason and utility in chapter 16 are not in fact wholly so. To see this, we can begin by considering the way Spinoza speaks of utility or self-preservation. As he presents them, every natural being endeavors to survive not only physically but also metaphysically—each being endeavors “to persevere in its state” (xvi.4). This fundamental drive, which Spinoza calls “conatus,” compels all beings to exist and operate as they are and thus to strive to survive in a richer and more demanding sense than mere biological preservation. Cats strive to be cats, trees to be trees, and human beings—who may also be conscious of this—want to remain alive as human beings. Conversely,

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no being naturally desires to be other than itself: just as cats do not wish to be lions and lions do not wish to be cats (xvi.7), we human beings wish to be neither less nor more than we naturally are. We would not consider it living to survive as mere brutes, but we also do not long to become gods. Whereas Tocqueville will claim that human beings are distinguished by a disgust with their natural condition and a desire to transcend it, Spinoza emphatically denies this. To Spinoza, we have no natural inclination to sacrifice ourselves or to devote ourselves to anything greater than ourselves; we are therefore not naturally restless beings, at least when our desire to continue existing and operating in a way that expresses our humanity is being satisfied.12 While this presentation of conatus encapsulates Spinoza’s authentic view, in a filtered-down form it provides the basis of a popular outlook that underlies the social contract and is less than fully rational. As now becomes clear, Spinoza’s social contract will be rooted not only in considerations of utility but also in a widespread pride that each member of the political community will take in being rational—in living as a truly human or thinking being. When humans enter society, he writes, they “state and compact very firmly” to “direct everything solely on the basis of a dictate of reason (which no one dares conflict with openly, lest he seem to lack a mind)” (xvi.14). Spinozistic citizens will identify the social contract calling for them to “defend another’s right as their own” (xvi.14) with reason itself, and they themselves will be governed by a deep sense of honor, or a pride in being rational, that will be enforced in turn through the newly created power of public opinion. Fearing the social disapproval that will come with being labeled irrational or superstitious, those with doubts about the social contract’s rationality will remain quiet, and this in turn will keep those doubts closely contained. Instead, the vast majority will believe themselves rational and enlightened and their society just because it is based on reason or natural right, which commands us to preserve the republic as our summum bonum (xvi.22). Spinoza thus goes so far as to identify the greatest good of the democratic citizen with that of humanity itself. Taking up the objection that this teaching is just another superstition, or that “by this plan, we make subjects into slaves,” Spinoza responds that “this . . . is not absolutely true” (xvi.32). This is because action “on the basis of a command—that is, obedience” (xvi.33)— is slavish only where it is harmful to the one being commanded. Where it is beneficial, that person “is not to be said to be a slave . . . but a subject” (xvi.34). Hence, in a society with rational laws promoting the utility of all, “each can be free” because each can “live with a full spirit on the basis of the guidance of reason” (xvi.34).

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But this claim that everyone in a Spinozistic republic can be rational, if it is not to contradict his earlier repeated statements about the irrationality of the multitude and the rarity of philosophers, entails a radical watering down of reason’s meaning. Spinoza here equates reason not with living by one’s own lights and achieving one’s own greatest benefit, but with being led to do so for reasons one cannot comprehend. Indeed, he immediately likens the condition of democratic citizens in this respect to children (xvi.35)! We are thus led to conclude that Spinoza’s suggestion that everyone can be rational constitutes a new superstition that will provide the basis for his liberal democratic republic. The most important component of this new rationalistic superstition will hold that “a subject is one who does what is useful for the community, and consequently also for himself, on the basis of the command of the highest power” (xvi.35; emphasis added). Even if the highest power were to draft a subject into the army and place him on the front lines, that must— somehow, in some way—be beneficial to the subject himself (cf. xvi.18). This is the key component of Spinoza’s ruse. Anticipating the doctrine Tocqueville calls “self-interest well understood,” Spinoza here suggests that future democratic moralists will have to invent elaborate scientific theories purporting to show that by working for society’s good the individual actually furthers his own. The citizens of a Spinozistic liberal democracy are therefore “not to be said” to be slaves because all political communities require noble lies, but—and here is the difference between this superstition and those of former ages—Spinoza’s republican lie is noble because it most closely approximates the truth. The myth it inculcates as a supplement for utilitarianism pretends to be utilitarian, and so even as it obscures the lack of freedom subjects possess, it also brings them closer to an awareness of the psychological engines that drive them and therewith to the possibility of authentic liberation. For this reason, as Spinoza will now show, such an outlook is also most conducive to political freedom. Whereas Tocqueville looks to religion as a crucial supplement to the doctrine of self-interest well understood, Spinoza identifies the outlook of his citizen body with a prideful hostility to intellectual authority. Although he had claimed in chapter 14 that belief in the seven dogmas is absolutely necessary for good citizenship, he never refers to them in the present context or, indeed, in the remainder of the Treatise; he writes the rest of the book as though he had never made this fundamental claim. Whereas in his discussion of that civil theology he had occasionally called it natural and rational, at the end of chapter 16 he claims the state of nature “is prior to religion both by nature and in time” (xvi.53), implying that there is no such thing as natural

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religion and that human beings are natural atheists. Religion or superstition in all its forms is nothing but a conventional psychological imprint on our minds. By stating this so bluntly, and by thus effectively calling on future democratic citizens to take their bearings solely from what is natural, he encourages them to rid their psyches of these artificial impositions. He says revealed divine law, like all law, is the product of a contract, and, to repeat, contracts need only be honored insofar as they remain useful for those who sign them (xvi.57, 59). Such reasoning could of course apply to the seven dogmas from chapter 14, and, when combined with the pride in rationality Spinoza has described, the resulting belief in their own liberation can endow democratic citizens with an important source of spiritedness. To see this, consider the paradoxical teaching on the extent of governmental powers Spinoza provides beginning in chapter 16. As we have seen, Spinoza first suggests that, given the variability of the perceived self-interest of human beings, the powers of government must be absolute (xvi.20). Indeed, in chapter 17 he goes even further in this respect than Hobbes: because human beings must surrender all their rights (i.e., all their power), the government must also retain control not only over their lives and estates but also over their thoughts and sentiments as well (xvii.7–9). But even though Spinoza initially says a regime’s highest powers retain the legal right to pass laws about “the most absurd things” (xvi.27), he breaks definitively from Hobbes’s absolutism by declaring (again quoting Agamemnon’s angry words from Seneca protesting a human sacrifice; cf. v.22) that because “no one holds a repressive imperium together for long,” such things are much less to be feared in a democratic republic (xvi.29–30). This is partially because “agreeing to any one absurd thing is almost impossible for the greater part of one assembly, if it is large” (xvi.31; emphasis added). As James Madison would observe, the more religions there are in a society, the more difficult it becomes for one to impose itself on the rest (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, 321). But Spinoza provides a second, more fundamental reason for this claim. He says the legislation of such absurdities is less to be feared in his proposed democracy because it has a particular “foundation and aim, which, as we have shown, is none other than to avoid the absurd things of the appetite and to confine human beings within the limits of reason, as far as can be done” (xvi.30). Because the citizens of a Spinozistic republic will take pride in their presumed rationality and will have gone as far as any multitude can toward a scientific worldview, they will be animated by the following thought: the government has the power (and hence the right) to oppress them in every way and hence also to command them to carry out religious absurdities, such

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as the human sacrifice in the Troades. But because they will be fully aware of this, these citizens will not only distrust the government but also expect anyone with power to try to become a tyrant. Hence, they will consider it their right (because it is within their power) to be constantly on guard against this, which in turn will persuade the government “to consult the common good” and “direct everything on the basis of the dictate of reason,” if only “to look out for themselves and retain the imperium” (xvi.29). Because of this, “the highest powers’ right to everything” must always remain “merely theoretical” (xvii.1), for “no one will ever be able to transfer to another his power, and consequently his right, so as to stop being a human being” (xvii.2). Because we seek to preserve ourselves as human beings—as independent, thinking beings who strive to live “full of [our] own sense of things” (xx.4)—whenever our spirits are not completely enslaved or broken down by superstition we can be counted on to display a self-assertive, selfaffirming concern for our individual dignity. Any government seeking to rule a population educated on the basis of chapter 16 would “in vain . . . command a subject to hate one who has done him a favor, to love one who has borne him harm, not to be offended by insults, not to long to be freed from dread, and many other things in this mode which follow necessarily from the laws of human nature” (xvii.2). The natural emotions of love and hate, pride and resentment, fear and hope, are all products of our desire to benefit ourselves, and they are also what, until now, have made human beings nearly ungovernable (cf. again xvii.15). Hence, as Spinoza suggested in chapter 7, Christianity had sought to suppress these emotions almost entirely by commanding us to love our enemies. But Spinoza’s teaching is that, if properly directed, this irrational pride—the pride each democratic citizen will possess in his own status as a dignified, independently living and thinking being—can become an ally of reason and can be channeled in its support. Spinoza can therefore claim that human beings in a correctly ordered democracy retain the freedom of the state of nature, and he can present the state of nature as a positive standard for freedom under government, because he understands human nature as positively directed, at least in a sense. He identifies a commonality between the independent-mindedness and spiritual freedom of the philosopher and the prideful desire to live by his own lights that distinguishes the democratic citizen. In chapter 16, Spinoza rhetorically erases the distinction between these two by referring to the good of the republic as the summum bonum (xvi.13, 21), but in that republic they will come as close to overlapping as they can. The citizens will see themselves as self-legislating and freethinking individuals—individuals who follow the

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law freely because they understand it as the product of a community of freethinkers, who have, collectively, imposed a set of obligations on themselves. Moreover, because these citizens will also view these obligations as ultimately advantageous, this way of thinking will put them in touch with their natural psychological engines. Thus, in addition to forming the foundation of a free society, Spinozistic natural right, with all its paradoxes, provides a moral education that shapes human beings in a way most approximating their natural condition. By taking pride in ruling themselves, Spinoza’s citizens will achieve a positive civic end via a negative conception of liberty. Spinoza thus outlines the blueprints of a society in which rights form the basis for duties. In the following chapters, he will show how such an achievement is practically possible, and how a regime that merely guarantees the freedom to philosophize can ensure the flourishing of humanity’s summum bonum.

From Biblical Theocracy to Liberal Democracy (Chapters 17–20) Chapters 17–20 articulate Spinoza’s practical teaching for the arrangements of a healthy republic. They show how a society can be formed in which the government is restrained from becoming tyrannical by an engaged and spirited citizenry devoted to the common good. But Spinoza presents this teaching in a very strange manner. Instead of simply describing the characteristics of a good constitution, he claims to have discovered a historical example of one in the Hebrew polity of the Old Testament. Presenting an innovative teaching as conservative, he claims we need only consider what “divine revelation long ago taught Moses” about political science. With perhaps only a few modifications, he suggests, we can emulate the “successes” of what the title of chapter 17 calls the Hebrew “republic” (xvii.12). But of course, Spinoza’s earlier chapters (esp. 2, 5, and 11) have already presented the Bible’s politics as anything but healthy, rational, and republican, and—as if to underscore this—chapter 17 opens by effectively restating the teaching of the preface. Spinoza introduces the Hebrew regime with an account of the development of the idea of divine right as rooted in a progressively developing series of pious frauds (xvii.18–25). But to suspect that this chapter will hardly present a straightforward praise of biblical politics, we need look no further than its contradictory title, which declares that the divine republic was ultimately a failure: it could “scarcely subsist without seditions” and eventually became a monarchy! In the course of his account, Spinoza notes that its laws were

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bad—in fact, a divine punishment (xvii.95–97; Ezek. 20:25)—that it was not republican but “theocratic” (xvii.41, 60), and that it should not be imitated, in part because it is incompatible with “commerce” (xviii.4). Additionally, some other signs of Spinoza’s irony in these chapters bear mentioning. In chapter 17, Spinoza dutifully applies his natural right teaching to the founding of the Mosaic polity: he claims that after leaving Egypt, the Jews reentered the state of nature and made a social compact with God agreeing to His rule (xvii.28). But chapter 16 had also taught that a healthy democratic republic would be characterized by a balance of power (or right) between the government and the people, and in chapter 17 Spinoza does look for this balance in the Mosaic polity (xvii.1, 75–76). However, if the government were really held by an omnipotent God, as Spinoza says it was (xvii.30), no such balance could be possible. As his previous treatments of biblical politics have shown, God’s rule is absolute. In this chapter, in other words, Spinoza will provide further indication that the Bible actually contains an anti-republican teaching—and therefore also that his own species of republicanism must be anti-biblical. Coming at the end of the Treatise and after his teaching on natural right, Spinoza’s discussion of the Hebrew regime contributes to his political case against revelation by encouraging his citizen-reader to look down on the Bible in the name of political and intellectual liberty. Indeed, in another contradiction to the idea that the Israelites could have made a social contract with God, chapter 16 had concluded by teaching that there is no religion in the natural state. That the Hebrews believed themselves to have entered into a covenant with God therefore says more about superstition’s natural origins, and its political effects, than it does about the arrangements of a republicanism based on natural right. Or, to go further, the Treatise’s final five chapters will help Spinoza’s reader take up his invitation to consider for himself whether biblical piety continues to be “useful for him and necessary for his welfare” (xvi.57). The Republic of the Hebrews Spinoza’s account of the Hebrew polity actually catalogues not one but four regimes: a short-lived true theocracy in which God held the sovereignty (xvii.26–33); a regime in which Moses held “the role of God” (xvii.37) and exercised absolute power in His name (xvii.34–41); a loose confederacy of states that ruled after Moses’s death and that Spinoza presents as the peak of the Hebrews’ history (xvii.42–92); and—finally—the monarchy, characterized by the loss of freedom and constant civil and religious warfare (xvii.93–115).

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In Spinoza’s narrative, after the Exodus the Jews found themselves back in the state of nature and able to transfer their recovered natural rights to a new sovereign (xvii.26). This they very quickly did, resolving (on the basis of Moses’s counsel) to transfer their sovereign power directly to God (xvii.27). Although Spinoza cautions that they made this promise freely, without being “compelled by force or frightened by threats” (xvii.28), he adds that they were persuaded to accept God as their sovereign only after “they had experienced his wondrous power, by which alone they had been preserved” and without which they believed they would surely perish (xvii.29). In this state of awestruck wonder and perceived helplessness, they (as Moses helped interpret their experience for them) believed themselves utterly dependent on God and entirely within His power. Thus, they transferred “all their natural power to preserve themselves—which previously they had perhaps deemed they had from themselves—and consequently all their right” to Him (xvii.29). Spinoza, however, immediately cautions that this new social contract, however theocratic it may have been in theory, was actually democratic in practice, for the right to consult God, and to interpret and enforce the divine law, was held by everyone “absolutely equally” (xvii.33). But at the very first instance when the nation tried to do these things, that democracy was immediately abandoned! When the Jews first approached God to hear His commands, they became “so terrified” and “thunderstruck” that they were convinced they were about to die, and they promptly abandoned all their political rights and gave absolute power to Moses, whom they now deemed to have “the role of God” (xvii.34–37). Echoing Machiavelli’s presentation in chapter 6 of The Prince, Spinoza suggests the Jews’ primitive fearfulness and their credulous trust in a politically cunning Moses led them to assent to his absolute authority as the only person who could speak to and for God.13 In Spinoza’s presentation, however, this theocracy lasted only a generation and soon gave way to a kind of religiously based republicanism. Moses left no successor (xvii.41), and after he died there arose a regime marked by a division between the secular powers, who administered everything, and the religious authorities, who guarded the law that held the people’s hearts and minds. It is this separation of religion and politics, Spinoza first suggests, that kept the populace from becoming rebellious and the rulers from becoming tyrants. The primary feature of this regime was the temple or “palace of God,” where “the supreme Majesty” was located (xvii.42). The temple’s high priest, chosen by heredity from Aaron’s line, was “the highest interpreter of the divine law,” as well as “the one who gave the populace the answers of the divine oracle” and “supplicated God” on its behalf (xvii.43). But while the Levites

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and priests thus retained total moral authority and were therefore held “in the greatest honor by the common plebs,” they were deprived of all direct political power. Forbidden from owning property, they were fed and housed at public expense and had no ability to put the divine commands into practice (xvii.44). That executive authority was held, in emergencies, by a commander in chief (Joshua) who ruled temporarily over all the tribes, who had the right to ask for God’s answers (but only through the high pontiff), and who could proclaim these commands and “compel the populace to do them” (xvii.46). In ordinary times, this power resided in the princes of the various tribes—or perhaps in some “councils,” whose character Spinoza does not fully describe—who had to receive God’s answers officially before they became law. Conversely, while the pontiff had the right to consult the oracle, he could only do this when “asked by the commander or the highest council or the like” (xvii.49–50). As this synopsis makes clear, however, Spinoza leaves ambiguous where executive authority rested in the various tribes, and he gives at least two contradictory answers to the question of who had the right to communicate God’s answers to the population (cf. again xvii.43 and 46: was it the secular executive or the pontiff?). Or these powers may have been contested and thus distributed differently at different times (cf. Beiner 2010, 128–29). The ambiguous boundary between religious and secular power was probably a major problem, not only because religion had such a hold over the common people, but also because, as Spinoza now articulates, biblical Judaism had a predominantly martial character. “God among the Hebrews was called the God of armies,” and in battles where “the victory or defeat of the whole populace” was at stake, the physical presence of the Ark of the Covenant— and hence of “their King” Himself—impelled the Hebrews to “fight with the utmost strength” (xvii.48). Their spiritedness, and their zealous dedication to the common good, Spinoza now indicates, was a product of their militant religiosity. Moreover, because the identity of the final interpreter of their religion was uncertain, nothing prevented their militant piety from becoming a source of violence and inhumanity. After Joshua’s death the tribes of Judah and Simeon (the people now consulting God for themselves) were instructed to wage a separate foreign war in the course of which they were reprimanded for the “sin” of failing to “exterminate everyone” (xvii.56). Whereas Joshua as a strong executive could exercise some control over the divine answers the people heard, without this steadying hand there was nothing to contain their savage religious spiritedness. In the absence of a true commander in chief, religion became the only bond uniting the tribes, and whenever one of the tribal princes was perceived by the others to have transgressed the divine law,

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he “could be considered as an enemy by the rest” (xvii.70). There thus arose civil wars rooted in theological hatred—the “greatest hatred” (xvii.65)— during one of which all the tribes invaded the Benjaminites and “butchered everyone, perpetrators and innocents equally” (xvii.57). These latent problems notwithstanding, Spinoza’s overall picture of the Hebrew regime at this point is—on the surface—positive. After Joshua, the polity became a confederacy of small republics whose solemn friendship was ensured by shared religion. “With respect to God and the Religion,” Spinoza writes, the Hebrews were “fellow citizens. But with respect to the right that one tribe had over another, they were nothing but allies—in much the same mode (if you take away the common temple) as the Sovereign Confederate Orders of the Netherlands” (xvii.54). In his preface Spinoza identified the results of his political project with an idealized Dutch Republic, and he now purports to discover in ancient Israel a league of small states, governed democratically and defended by citizen militias, whose citizens fought beside one another with “virtue, labor, and great loss of . . . blood” for the sake of “the freedom and glory of the imperium” (xvii.67). But in saying the Hebrew regime would be like his idealized Dutch Republic if only it lacked its “common temple,” Spinoza is suggesting that it could achieve political greatness if—and only if—it were shorn of its most important source of civic unity and dedication. This apparent compliment is thus thoroughly backhanded, and by offering it Spinoza invites the reader to reflect on how a free republic could be established only after the effective overthrow of biblical piety (the metaphorical destruction of the temple) and on what could replace that piety as a locus of civic spirit for a free people. At the opening of chapter 18, he says the Hebrew regime should not be imitated, on both the pious grounds that the New Testament has declared it obsolete and on the rational grounds that it is incompatible with “commerce.” It is suitable only for those who would “enclose themselves within their own limits and segregate themselves from the rest of the globe” (xviii.2). In the Dutch Republic, as Spinoza will note in his final chapter, commerce and credit, not religion, cement civic bonds (xx.40). We are therefore led to suspect that what will replace the Hebrew temple in a Spinozistic liberal republic will be a version of the spirit of commerce—of the commitment to individual utility—that Spinoza has alluded to in chapters 5 and 16: a spirit marked by a zealous attachment to the pursuit of self-affirmation and by a fierce dedication to political and intellectual independence. Spinoza’s description of the actual Hebrew regime, though interspersed with signs of what it could perhaps become in the temple’s absence, quickly

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becomes a cautionary tale revealing its crucial deficiencies, since many of this regime’s features are highly antithetical to the commercial spirit. Its political safeguards, which Spinoza first presented as healthy checks and balances, have a lot to do with hatred. The rulers were deterred from becoming tyrants because they feared their subjects’ “theological hatred,” which is usually the greatest hatred (xvii.65), and the sacrifices of the republic’s citizen soldiers (xvii.66–67) sprang from “the most antagonistic hatred” toward other nations—a hatred the Hebrews “also believed to be pious” (xvii.77). Indeed, their religion, as Spinoza now makes clear, was not just militant and patriotic but also deeply xenophobic. The Jews believed God could be worshipped only within the fatherland, so much so that living abroad was considered a humiliation worse than death (xvii.77–79). That worship consisted largely of “daily faultfinding,” a litany of invectives about other nations whose effect was to inculcate a hatred against them which “arose on the basis of great piety or devotion and one which was believed to be pious: surely none greater than it or more tenacious can be given” (xvii.81). Finally, this hatred—especially when it was naturally reciprocated (xvii.81)—was ultimately responsible for firming up “the Hebrews’ spirits for tolerating all things with a special steadfastness and virtue on behalf of the Fatherland” (xvii.82). In short, as Spinoza dares to write (albeit through the mouth of Tacitus), it was the “superstition” of the Jews that ultimately led them to fight with such heroism on behalf of their country (xvii.83). But even as he elucidates this, Spinoza also invites the reader to compare this theological militancy to another, more favorable foundation for spiritedness that he also claims to uncover in the confederation of Hebrew tribes. In these small communities, “matters of both war and peace were administered by the same human beings. One who in camp was a soldier, therefore, in the marketplace was a citizen; and one who in camp was a general, in court was a judge; and, finally, one who in camp was a commander, in the city was a prince [or the first citizen; princeps]” (xvii.74). In an urban, liberal, and commercial republic—where citizens spend peacetime in the commercial marketplace and which is governed by courts of law rather than priests— the spirit of commerce, or of individual, prideful independence, can provide the basis for a spirited defense of the common good while keeping excessive religious zealotry in check. When things were well ordered, Spinoza writes, prophets were allowed to preach only where their message conformed to (i.e., merely repeated and reinforced) established law—otherwise they were justly condemned to death (xvii.72). At these times, the Levites, guardians of the rule of law, were naturally restrained because their “whole fortune and

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honor depended” on its true interpretation (xvii.64). Like the Supreme Court described in Hamilton’s Federalist 78, their sole source of power was the moral capital generated from the people’s respect, which could be earned only by doing their job well and remaining within their circumscribed bounds. In this version of the Hebrew republic, “no one could desire war for the sake of war, but for the sake of peace and to protect freedom; and perhaps a Prince abstained from new undertakings as much as he could, so as not to be bound to approach the high Pontiff and to stand before him with loss of dignity” (xvii.75). Here, sacred law has been transformed to serve and protect freedom, and citizens show themselves willing to undertake great sacrifices because they long for peace and liberty—which exist, in turn, for the sake “of utility, which is the grit and life of all human actions” (xvii.84). Spinoza thus draws a picture of a civic piety serving our natural ends. “For nowhere did citizens possess what was theirs with a greater right than did the subjects of this imperium, who had a part of the lands and fields equal to the prince’s; and each was owner of his part forever” (xvii.85; emphasis added). This idealized Hebrew republic could claim the unconditional and self-sacrificial loyalty of citizens because it recognized and gave an outlet to their pride and sense of self-worth. The Jews in this presentation were attached to their property not primarily for the sake of well-being, and still less for greed, but because they saw it as the locus or representation of their dignity—a dignity that could never be taken from them, for the law mandated that anyone compelled to sell his land on account of poverty was required to have it restored to him every seven years (xvii.85). Spinoza thus suggests that in a liberal republic the preservation of the spirit of commerce might require placing some limits on commerce itself. These limits are necessary because the aims of commerce are spiritual rather than strictly commercial: they seek to foster a sense of individual pride and self-affirmation, which is also linked to a sense of eternity. But if Spinoza’s description of the Hebrew republic shows how this concern for dignity could be given a healthy outlet, it also warns of what could happen when this solution is not embraced. He claims one of the chief things deterring the Hebrew princes from becoming tyrants was “the fear of some new Prophet,” for “such men could easily pull an oppressed populace to themselves”—and when they did, they assumed the same absolute power Moses had. The prophets thus were lightning rods for the superstition of those who were discontented or suffering under misrule, and they needed only to provide “superficial signs” to persuade such people “of whatever they wanted” (xvii.71–72). But whereas poverty and misrule created religious pressures among society’s lower rungs, when “things were correctly administered,”

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as previously mentioned, the princes could assert their authority to control the prophets. Because the prophets lacked a popular following during good times, the secular government could either put them to death under the law or accept them on the basis of its own legal authority (xvii.72). This situation, however, was the exception rather than the rule. For most of its history, the Hebrew state sought to keep the populace under control not by providing an outlet for its demands for dignity and prosperity but by seeking to crush those demands through the “cult of obedience” described in chapter 5 (xvii.88)—a cult that sought to control every facet of the Jews’ daily lives and thus instill in them the slavish “joy that arises on the basis of devotion, that is, . . . of love and admiration together” (xvii.90). In the end, though, this cult was a failure, and a backlash against it was responsible for the discords and civil wars that followed (xvii.95). Drawing on one of the stranger verses in the Bible (Ezek. 20:25), Spinoza now writes that the intrusive Jewish Law was intentionally defective, a divine punishment meant to inflict suffering. The problem, as God (in this presentation) knew, was that people could not stand to live under a regime in which they were constantly told not only how to act but also how to think. They bristled under the theological authority of the Levites, who numbered “many thousands” and “were in the habit of reproving them continually” (xvii.99). After the golden-calf incident, Moses, failing to appreciate the egalitarian pride that motivates human beings and subject to the same irrational religious anger as the people, reversed his original plan to place the center of spiritual life in each family. He took the religious authority away from the firstborn of every household and entrusted it to the Levites (his own tribe), a decision Spinoza now highlights as the source of everything unstable about this polity (xvii.101–4; Yaffe 2004, 338–39). Moses’s decision to give this authority to his brother’s descendants in perpetuity was a wound to the dignity of the common people, who saw it as a continual reminder “of their own defilement and repudiation” (xvii.98), and it engendered resentment against this newly formed censorious elite (xvii.96–97). The Israelites thus chafed under their rule, and not only when “grain was costly” (xvii.99). Rather, it was especially “in times of leisure, when manifest miracles ceased” and when no prophets appeared, that the Jews “at last abandoned” a religion that had become “ignominious and even suspect to them” (xvii.100). With wealth and the free time provided by it, the members of the upper class discovered a concern for their individual dignity. When during Moses’s time the populace enjoyed “leisure in the desert,” the Jewish elite rebelled against his authority and his religion. Taking his nepotism for evidence, they accused him of being an imposter and

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a pious fraud, shouting at him “that everyone was equally holy and that he had raised himself above everyone contrary to right” (xvii.103). Perhaps paradoxically then, Spinoza indicates that the concern for an egalitarian notion of dignity can be expected to arise first and foremost among an educated, leisured elite.14 But he also juxtaposes that notion of dignity to Moses’s characteristic mindset, since, as he also notes, Moses was not able to satisfy these rebels and so had recourse to a miracle. This, however, only fanned the flames; it led to “a new and universal sedition,” this time “of the whole populace,” who now believed this so-called miracle had been a fake. At last, a “worn out” Moses was able to put down this rebellion only “after a great disaster or pestilence, yet so that everyone preferred dying to living” (xvii.104). And it was in this state of spiritual decay, brought on by the Bible’s characteristic solution to the problem of human pride, that the Israelites finally gave up on freedom and begged God for a monarch (xvii.106). “Yet,” Spinoza concludes, “here was immense material for new seditions, on the basis of which the ruin of the whole imperium followed at long last” (xvii.107). Monarchy engendered its own sources of spiritual discontent, and the Hebrew kings were accordingly constantly challenged with religious pressure from below. Before the monarchy, “there were very few prophets” in Israel, but during its reign there were often hundreds at the same time (xviii.20), and even pious kings found them “intolerable” (xviii.13). Kingship also gave new direction and impetus to political ambition (xviii.19), which added particularly dangerous tinder to an atmosphere in which a mere nod from a prophet could produce a conflagration—as Saul learned when David usurped his kingdom at Samuel’s command (xvii.108). The result was a constant cycle of religious tyranny and civil war (xvii.111) as kings sought to break the authority of the prophets and the Levites—who “had an imperium within an imperium” (xvii.108)—by fostering the cults of other gods. The prophets would then denounce the kings as heretics and call for their overthrow, replacing them with new rulers who, not wishing the same fate, would rule repressively, thus beginning this vicious cycle anew (xvii.110–11). The political lesson Spinoza draws from this survey of the Hebrews’ history is twofold. On the one hand, he writes, government must maintain a monopoly on religious authority. Hence, his main teaching in chapters  18 and 19 is that “the ministers of the sacred matters” must be denied all political offices and limit themselves to “teaching and practicing only what is acceptable and most usual” (xviii.22). Piety must only sanction and reinforce the accepted morality of a democratic republic. It should be located “solely in works”—in cultivating “charity and justice” (xviii.26) toward one’s

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neighbor and performing one’s civic duties. Since “the welfare of the populace is the highest law, to which all laws, human as well as divine, have to be accommodated” (xix.24), whatever serves the public good is accordingly pious.15 On the other hand, Spinoza notes that placing piety solely in works will “leave each a free judgment concerning other things” (xviii.26), and so it is necessary—indeed, a pious duty—for the government to recognize the right to freedom of speech and thought. For where opinions are criminalized, “one is ruled very violently,” and Spinoza goes so far as to claim that this kind of repressive political atmosphere led to Christ’s crucifixion (xviii.23). Yet, when this statement is put together with what Spinoza had said about Jesus in chapter 7 (vii.30–34), it would also appear to be what led to Jesus’s appearance in the first place. As Spinoza indicates when he quotes Tacitus’s description of the Jews’ religious spiritedness under Roman rule (xvii.83), the same theologico-political problems besetting the Hebrew monarchy lasted well into the first century AD. Applying his description from chapters 17 and 18 to a time when the Jews were subjugated by a foreign monarch, one can discern the way Christianity probably arose as an even more intense and radicalized version of the same subterranean religious pressures that challenged the Old Testament kings. Indeed, as Spinoza indicates, that Jesus preached not political rebellion but a kingdom in another world did not make his teaching any less seditious than that of the Jewish prophets preceding him. In chapter 19, Spinoza notes that the conflict between religious and secular authority, the source of all the trouble in the Hebrew regime, has always been endemic to Christianity. It can be traced back not just to the quarrel between Ambrose and Theodosius (xix.2) but to “the very origins of the Christian religion” (xix.51). Of course, to any truly pious Christian “the very origins of the Christian religion” are divine, and here Spinoza almost explicitly places the blame for political dysfunction on God Himself, as he did when discussing the faults of the Hebrew laws (xvii.95–97). He says “the first to teach the Christian religion were not kings but private men” (xix.52) who thus acted impiously in spreading their religion without the sanction of secular authority, and from this seed there grew a quarrel between church and state that plagued Europe until Spinoza’s time. Or rather, Spinoza insists, the apostles would have acted impiously, but they can be excused from this charge because they had authority from Christ (xix.31). But this claim, of course, is question begging. Since Jesus was a private man who preached without a commission from the civil authorities, Christianity itself is impious according to the theology of chapter 19.

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As a universalistic and apolitical religion that looks to a higher standard than justice in this world, Christianity is a radicalized and more destabilizing version of the religion that proved such a thorn in the side of the Hebrew kings. Its “two kingdoms” problem has engendered more than a millennium of political discord. Spinoza’s depiction of the dysfunctional Hebrew confederacy in chapters 17 and 18 is thus a fitting allegory for the religious wars and the cruelty committed in God’s name of Spinoza’s time. Like ancient Israel, pre-Enlightenment Europe was composed of a group of polities divided by the very religion that was supposed to serve as its source of unity and concord (cf. pref.14; vii.1–5). The alternative theological outlook Spinoza proposes in its stead is best summarized by one of his most famous statements: since God rules over human beings only through the mediation of earthly government, and as experience testifies, “no traces of divine justice are found except where just men rule” (xix.20). This maxim is the culmination of Spinoza’s efforts over the last nineteen chapters to bring the religious attitudes of ordinary people as close as possible to a philosophical view of the universe. Here again Spinoza invokes Solomon, who observed that in the absence of just rulers, “the same fate happens to the just and the unjust, the pure and the impure,” which “has made very many doubt divine providence who deemed that God rules over human beings immediately and directs the whole of nature for their use” (xix.20). But on the basis of this thoroughgoing skepticism, Spinoza presents a teaching that, far from denying God’s justice, actually claims to vindicate it at long last. He suggests that divine right is real but can be made manifest only as a Machiavellian effectual truth: God has commanded human beings to make for themselves in this world what the Bible promises in a fictitious life to come. And because piety is rooted in a concern for justice, as Spinoza suggested when he contrasted Jesus and Moses in chapter 7, wherever rights are secured and the law is enforced people will not challenge the government’s authority in the name of something otherworldly. In other words, under a regime that does not insult people’s dignity by telling them what to think, there will be no more crucifixions of people like Jesus, but there will also be no more people like Jesus to crucify. Liberation and a New Superstition Spinoza’s teachings in his last two chapters—that the government must have exclusive control over religion, but that freedom of speech and thought should be guaranteed—may not be as contradictory in practice as they seem

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in theory. Or rather, the contradiction may be a dynamic one resulting in a healthy political tension. When citizens in a republic have a certain amount of prosperity, and when that prosperity helps foster a sense of individual dignity, the power of the state over religion will not be dangerous because people will no longer take religion all that seriously. Believing religion to be on the side of the public welfare—of peace, humanity, and freedom of expression—they will grant the government the power to take whatever actions are necessary to support those ends. Moreover, in a truly democratic republic, such power will be exercised not by an officially established church but by the power of public opinion to shape souls (xvi.14; Gildin 1973, 385– 87). Psyches in every regime “are in some proportion under the imperium of the highest power, which can in many modes make the greater part of human beings believe, love, hate, etc. whatever it wants” (xvii.9). And in a democracy, where that “greater part” exercises the highest power in the name of all (cf. xx.38), and where everyone is accordingly both a subject and a citizen, this intellectual power will be wielded in practice by the majority on the people’s behalf. But as we have also seen, the highest powers are just that. Just as big fish will not always be able to eat small fish, no government can control every mind: “In whatever city a human being may be, he can be free” (A.33). Thus, Spinoza opens chapter 20 declaring that “no one can transfer to another his natural right—or his faculty—of reasoning freely and judging anything whatever, nor be compelled to do so” (xx.2). Hence, “an imperium that intrudes into psyches” seems to do injustice when it mandates that its subjects accept what is true or false or what “devotion to toward God” requires, for “these are a part of each’s right which no one can yield even if he wanted to” (xx.3). Immediately after making this statement, however, Spinoza appears to take it back. “I confess that judgment can be predisposed in many, almost unbelievable modes, so that, although it is not directly under another’s imperium, it still so depends on the mouth of another that, to that extent, it can deservedly be said to be under his jurisdiction.” Again, all regimes have the power to control thoughts in indirect ways—by shaping what we love, hate, hope for, aspire to, and so on, and Spinoza even says such influence could be guaranteed by an art (xx.4). Yet although the Treatise’s preface had claimed that Ottoman Turkey had perfected this art of direct mind control, here Spinoza contradicts this: “But, whatever is technically possible in this matter, it still has never come about that human beings fail to experience that each is full of his own sense of things, and that there are as many distinctions among heads as there are among palates” (xx.4).

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To resolve this contradiction, I suggest the following. In chapter 20, Spinoza, even while indicating that this is technically untrue, teaches that it is scientifically impossible to curtail the freedom to think—as well as to speak—and “what cannot be prohibited is necessarily to be granted” (xx.24, 27). This teaching, I suggest, is itself the centerpiece of a new superstition that Spinoza intends to impose using the same age-old method as his theocratic adversaries. Liberal democracy is a particular regime, and as such it will instill in citizens certain unproven dogmas and assumptions about morality and human life. Unlike under previous regimes, however, these democratic dogmas and assumptions will purport to be rational, and Spinozistic citizens will therefore believe themselves free from all such unexamined foundations. Thus, Spinoza describes the outlook of liberal republican citizens as though it were that of human nature simply. He claims the pursuit of intellectual independence is natural and that the democratic republic that fosters it “most approximates” the natural state (xx.38). At the same time, however, there is a certain truth to this teaching. The civic outlook of chapter 20, while superstitious in the decisive sense, is a political approximation of Spinoza’s own worldview. As such, it can enable the genuine liberation of those with the capacity to take the final steps away from superstition itself: “The arts and sciences, which are highly necessary . . . for the perfection of human nature and its blessedness” (v.19), “are only cultivated with happy success by those who have judgment that is free and minimally predisposed” (xx.26; emphasis added). For those capable of achieving that blessedness, Spinoza’s dogmatism in this chapter, as chapter 14’s civil religion was for a larger group, will be intentionally self-undermining. Spinoza’s task in chapter 20, then, is to articulate and inculcate this new, final form of superstition and to show how it can serve as fertile soil for the authentic liberation of potential philosophers (pref.34). The very last mention of the Bible in the Treatise, which comes at the start of this chapter, concerns the ultimate failure of Moses and “other monarchs” as statesmen; even though they were “believed to be divine” or to speak with divine authority, they still could not escape the discontent of their people (xx.5). Here, unlike at earlier moments, Spinoza’s criticism of the Old Testament is not followed by an authoritative appeal to the New Testament. From here, Spinoza’s readership will leave the Bible behind, regarding it as an outdated and ineffective template for politics and human life, its authority to be replaced by a purportedly rational teaching about democracy and the social contract. Now, as just indicated, even in this final chapter Spinoza suggests that attempts to control minds actually have the frightening potential to succeed.

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Theocracy, with its accompanying moral teaching of devotion, is the classic solution to the problem of regime stability (pref.8–9; v.28–29; xvii.17–25, 88–90; xx.4). Conversely, the civic freedom of a democratic republic entails “some disadvantages,” although no society is free of flaws (xx.24). Spinoza is willing to establish a political order that is less stable than Hobbes’s, and potentially more prone to conflict, for the sake of its greater intellectual advantages. This is especially the case because, as Spinoza here reaffirms, such a regime will be characterized by a balance of power (or right) between the government and the people. Describing once again the dynamic contradiction noted in chapter 16, Spinoza acknowledges that the highest powers technically have the right to “consider as an enemy everyone who does not absolutely think as they do in everything; but we are not disputing about their right, but about what is useful” (xx.6): “For I grant that by right they can rule most violently and lead citizens to the slaughter for the flimsiest of causes: but everyone will deny that this can come about in keeping with the judgment of sound reason. Indeed, since they are unable to do these things without great danger to the whole imperium, we can also deny that they have the absolute power to do these and similar things, and consequently the absolute right as well. For we have shown that the right of the highest powers is determined by their power” (xx.7). Firmly convinced of the moral as well as the material aspects of this balance of power, Spinoza’s citizens will be animated by a fighting spirit. Although their highest aspirations in life will be utilitarian and commercial, they will not hesitate to abandon those pursuits for military ones whenever the government intrudes into their psyches (xx.3) or tells them which emotions to exhibit (xx.6)—and their watchful zealotry in this regard will likely deter the government from making such attempts in the first place. As Tocqueville will illustrate at greater length, a society could be more peaceful and prosperous but as a consequence far less free. Spinoza thus describes citizens who are willing to make sacrifices for their community because that community exists to allow each of them to live “full of his own sense of things.” To repeat, in this pluralist society “there are as many distinctions among heads as there are among palates” (xx.4). Because both the philosopher and the citizen are deeply attached to their own spiritual independence, Spinoza’s liberal republicanism will foster an atmosphere friendly to the former by legitimizing the sense of individuality he shares with the latter. Rather than lowering ideas to the level of tastes, Spinoza’s liberalism will raise tastes to the level of ideas. It will protect serious thinking by cultivating, and conferring dignity upon, a personal attachment to all human sentiments, even those that the philosopher regards as grounded in

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unreason or emotion. Spinoza thus envisions a world in which ordinary people are encouraged to develop and take pride in their own tastes; to form judgments about literature, philosophy, the arts, and other similar pursuits; and to become offended when anyone, especially the government, challenges those judgments or tells them what to think. In the new ethos, such challenges will be considered dehumanizing because they imply a denial of one’s capability to form such judgments or to live as an independent, dignified, thinking being. Spinoza makes clear that this mindset will be the product of a shared commitment to reason and rational discussion. Disagreement with an idea in no way entails the denial of its proponent’s humanity—provided such a challenge is posed in the name of reason rather than from mere emotion or superstition, it is in fact a reaffirmation and a vindication of that humanity. In the preface, Spinoza had ambiguously declared that “it is equally impossible to take away superstition from the vulgar as to take away dread” (pref.33). Here at the Treatise’s close, he states that the “ultimate aim [finem . . . ultimum]” of a liberal republic is “to free each from dread” (xx.11). Its aspiration is to bury superstition once and for all, to enable all human beings to live according to their own “free reason and not struggle in hatred, in anger, or with a ruse, and not bear an inequitable spirit toward one another” (xx.12). A liberal republic will therefore embrace free and rational debate, but that means it will necessarily have to exclude some arguments. Each citizen will have the liberty to think, judge, and speak against any existing law, “provided that he only says or teaches and defends it simply, and by reason alone, not by a ruse, in anger, in hatred, or in the spirit of introducing something into the republic on the basis of the authority of his own decree” (xx.14). Appeals to emotion, superstition, or revelation—to traditional Christianity, or even to Spinoza’s own civil theology from chapter 14—will be outlawed in the public square. But Spinoza also indicates that the belief of citizens in their own rationality, or in their freedom from all ruses, will itself be the product of a ruse. As chapter 16 had suggested, each citizen will believe that reason, or selfinterested calculation, requires him to follow the law in all cases—even when he “has to act against what he judges and openly thinks is good” (xx.16)— on the grounds that such action, as the product of democratic deliberation, will ultimately bring some advantage to him, however obscure or remote (xx.16–18). And while this will certainly be true in many instances—for if the social contract unravels, “the ruin of the republic,” as well as of all its citizens, will follow (xx.17)—to risk one’s life fighting for the freedom of others may bring about one’s own demise, and much sooner. Hence, “sovereignty

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can be harmed by words as well as by deeds,” and even if it is impossible to abridge freedom of speech completely, it is also “very pernicious to grant it altogether” (xx.10). Moreover, in addition to the restrictions on speech that will need to remain even in the best republic, because actions always flow from beliefs, there must be limits on thought as well: “For example, if someone thought the highest power was not within its right, or that no one had to stand by his promises, or that each must live on the basis of his own decision, and other things in this mode which directly conflict with the aforementioned [social] compact, he is seditious not so much on account of the judgment and the opinion, as on account of the deed that such judgments involve: viz., since by that same token—that he thinks such a thing—he dissolves the faith given tacitly or expressly to the highest power” (xx.21; emphasis added). To Spinoza, of course, to live according to one’s own rational decisionmaking is the very essence of freedom. The Spinozistic philosopher will always or almost always act in conformity with the law of a liberal society, but he will never obey the law simply for its own sake or when he is not convinced of its benefits. This is why in chapter 14 Spinoza spoke of the need for a civil religion and why he suggested there that a social compact cannot be rational (xiv.7). His account of the separation of philosophy and theology spotlighted an inevitable tension between the philosopher and the political community. And while chapter 20 indicates that that tension can be considerably narrowed, it can never be eliminated. Whereas in chapters 14 and 15 Spinoza had taken the extraordinary step of casting doubt on his civil religion, here in the Treatise’s final five chapters he only hints at the social contract’s irrationality. Indeed, he goes out of his way to advertise its conformity to reason and the utility to be gained from following it. If Spinoza’s students are to come eventually to a liberation from liberal dogmas, that is a step they will need to take on their own. Even in the best or most permissive regime, some need for esotericism on the part of philosophers like Spinoza will still remain. There can never be a world entirely without superstition. At the same time, Spinoza is convinced that a liberal society—where the superstitions that do exist are less zealous and friendlier to reason and where philosophers face less need to hide their teachings—will prove fertile soil for cultivating authentic rationality. He argues for freedom of speech (as distinguished from freedom of thought) on the dubious grounds that it is simply impossible to force people to stop talking: “Not even the most experienced, to say nothing of the plebs, know how to be silent” (xx.8). But this claim is obviously contradicted by Spinoza’s manner of writing in the Treatise, which bears witness to the ability of an independent thinker to craft his message

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delicately in awareness of government censorship (pref.35; xx.47). Caute was the motto on Spinoza’s personal seal, and he here calls the tendency of human beings to speak when there is need for silence “a common vice” (xx.9). But chapter 20, like chapter 17, attempts to foster virtue by building on the inescapability of vice. Spinoza claims that “luxury, envy, greed, drunkenness, and other similar things” are also vices, but they must be “borne with” since law cannot eliminate them. “Therefore, all the more does freedom of judgment have to be granted: in fact it is a virtue and cannot be suppressed” (xx.25). Freedom of thought may be a virtue, and the tendency of human beings to wear their opinions on their sleeves may be a vice, but the morality of a Spinozistic republic will blur the two. Its public ethos will not only permit but also encourage citizens “to function safely in their functions” (xx.12) and preserve themselves as truly human beings—as intellectually expansive beings who take justified pride in living according to their own purportedly rational sense of things. Because “the best republic grants the same freedom of philosophizing to each” (xx.23), it will ultimately protect the lives and ideas of potentially serious thinkers who “do not know how to dissemble” (xx.35). Although some need for esoteric writing will remain under liberalism, the Treatise will also help create a world in which the idea of it is unknown (see also Melzer 2014, 235–84). At the same time, Spinoza also acknowledges the price he is willing to pay to protect philosophy. He has suggested that future philosophers will need to articulate rationalistic theories—it would be better to call them ideologies— purportedly demonstrating the commonality between the individual’s good and society’s. As an aspect of this, and in accordance with the remaining need for some esoteric writing, these philosophers will need to follow Spinoza’s example and claim to be patriotic (cf. pref.12–13; xvii.54; xx.39–42). And as good citizens of a democracy, they will also have to endorse the view that the freedom to philosophize is available “to each” (xx.23). While not denying the existence of the summum bonum or human blessedness, they will need to maintain that everyone has the potential to achieve it—and they will accordingly need to describe philosophy as it appears from the point of view of the citizen, as more or less indistinguishable from ordinary freedom of thought and speech. Philosophy will thus come to be seen not as any special set of insights but simply as a highly rigorous engagement with ideas, and thus devalued and democratized it will become a pursuit available to all with the time and desire to take it up. With benign neglect, ordinary liberal democrats will view philosophers as innocuous if perhaps somewhat peculiar citizens who “write only for the learned” (xx.42), although the “learned”

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in a Spinozistic society will compose a relatively large class of people. In sum, “philosophy” in the future will become a term denoting the activity of a new class of scholars, academics, and public intellectuals, rather than a way of life characteristic of truly elite minds. But although philosophy in becoming popularized will become somewhat transformed and devalued, Spinoza is convinced it will still be far better off than it was in the closed societies of the past. For in a republic where the vast majority of people admire reason, philosophers will be free to pursue their private happiness just as they have always done, but with less fear of persecution and thus also in greater numbers. Moreover, Spinoza is also confident that the diffusion of an intellectual and commercial spirit among ordinary people will create a robust and impressive civic life. He closes the Treatise by again presenting an idealized picture of the Netherlands, especially “the city of Amsterdam,” as the model of a place where human beings who “openly think contrary things” can live together peacefully (xx.39–40): “For in this most flourishing Republic and most outstanding city, all human beings of whatever nation and sect live with the utmost harmony; and for them to trust their goods to someone, they care to know only whether he is rich or poor and whether he usually acts in good faith or by a ruse. Otherwise, Religion or sect does not move them at all, since it does not help at all in winning or losing a cause before a judge” (xx.40). In the new society Spinoza envisions, commerce and credit, supplemented and protected by the rule of law and the threat of lawsuits, will cement the social bond. And although what Spinoza describes here might initially be seen merely as a means of restraining members of different religions “from hurting one another” (xx.39), it can soon become much more. The spirit of commerce can lead to the “utmost harmony” among citizens by instilling a new common outlook, a new understanding of piety and what is valuable in human life, and consequently also a common view of the character and roots of that outlook’s adversary: traditional, intolerant religiosity. Hence, as Spinoza relates, although Amsterdam was once convulsed by a religious schism between two sects, its citizens soon came to the shared understanding that all such religious passions are the product not of “eagerness for truth” but of the “lust to rule” (xx.41). The apparent diversity of a Spinozistic society will therefore be grounded on a more fundamental theologico-political uniformity. Popularized rationalism and the spirit of commerce will soften the majority religion (Christianity) and remove its characteristic tendencies toward interreligious strife and the persecution of unbelievers. And for Jews and other religious minorities, assimilation via the acceptance of a rational theology will be the eagerly

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paid price of toleration and full citizenship. The essential features of different religious communities that formerly set them apart and at odds—Jewish dietary laws, Christian doctrines and professions of faith, ceremonies (like being “dipt in the right Fashion”)—will now be regarded as “indifferent things,” in Locke’s memorable phrase (1983, 35–36). Believing that all human beings are naturally self-interested, Spinozistic citizens will have not only a healthy skepticism of claims to religious orthodoxy but also a fierce commitment to their personal dignity, and these together will lead them to have some contempt for a sole focus on acquiring material goods and bodily pleasures. As previously mentioned, although this republic will tolerate vices like “luxury, envy, greed,” and “drunkenness” (xx.25), its public ethos will not abandon the idea that these are vices. On the contrary, it will salute and admire “those whom good education, integrity of morals, and virtue have made freer” and disdain those “whose highest salvation is contemplating money in the bank and having an overfull stomach” (xx.28). Because Spinoza, unlike Locke and Hobbes, maintains the idea of a summum bonum, he promises that his liberalism will not be characterized by popular relativism or indifference. Indeed, since the commercial spirit of Spinozistic citizens will view moneymaking as an aspect of personal dignity, it will foster and even require not just restrictions on commerce (xvii.85), but also, in extraordinary situations, major sacrifices. Perhaps surprisingly, Spinoza ends the Treatise by providing a moving but therefore also puzzling appeal to the beauty and nobility of these sacrifices. He writes that in a liberal society, the most honorable and upright citizens will be willing to become martyrs to the cause of free speech and thought. In so doing they will transform the scaffold, formerly “the intimidator of evil men,” into “a most beautiful theater for showing the highest example of tolerance and virtue.” “Those who recognize themselves to be honorable do not fear death or beg for mercy as criminals do” but rather “deem it honorable, not a punishment, to die for a good cause, and glorious to die for freedom” (xx.35–36). Tolerance, a word formerly used to denote mere sufferance, can now become a positive virtue and the centerpiece of a new moral outlook inspiring the most impressive examples of civic devotion. Reflections on Spinoza’s Project With this stirring picture of a new liberal morality, complete with its own set of liberal heroes and martyrs, Spinoza concludes his political and educational project. Over the course of twenty chapters, he has articulated in broad outlines

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an agenda for both popular and philosophical enlightenment—one that, in seeking to lead society as close to a rational outlook as it can come, will also enable the genuine liberation of a smaller number, those who would philosophize more freely were they not held back by the suspicion that reason must serve as theology’s handmaiden (pref.34). The construction of a liberal republic, first as it is outlined in theory in chapter 20, and then as Spinoza intends it to be established in actual fact, thus also completes Spinoza’s intended vindication of reason and his refutation of Scripture: the separation of philosophy and theology into their respective realms of truth and obedience, which has been his chief task in the Treatise. Since reason cannot directly refute revelation by showing prophecy and other miracles to be impossible, he has sought to discredit the Bible indirectly by effecting a moral and political revolution. In a liberal republic where human beings see themselves as taking their bearings from reason alone, and in which a morality of devotion and admiration has accordingly been replaced with one of freedom and understanding, Scripture’s portrait of the human condition will be rendered obsolete. Although Spinoza closes chapter 20 with a salute to liberal martyrs, these are martyrs his society will avoid making. The peace of a liberal republic may theoretically rest on the willingness of citizens to die for freedom, but in practice that peace will render such acts all but unnecessary. On a daily basis, Spinoza’s citizens will live side by side as independent, self-regarding, self-fulfilled beings. Now, on the political level, this project may be faced with some practical difficulties. If the freedom of a liberal republic depends on the willingness of citizens to fight and make sacrifices but is also likely to result in that willingness becoming merely theoretical, could there be a danger of the ethic underlying this regime becoming self-undermining? Additionally, we have seen that these sacrifices are to be rooted in a myth, the essential element of which is the belief that civic devotion is rational and self-interested. But a “rational” superstition is potentially both strong and weak. It is potentially strong because it plays to the same emotions that have kept superstition strong in the past, but it is potentially weak because it fosters the exclusive concern with one’s own good, which is centerpiece of the rational life. Whether such a superstition can actually provide an adequate foundation for the kind of sacrifices Spinoza envisions would thus seem to be an open question, and he may be taking a certain political risk that he thinks is justified by his larger theoretical goal. Initiating a project that will endure after his lifetime, he cannot be assured of its success, and (as we will also see of Tocqueville’s project) he will hand down its practical management, and the negotiation of its contradictions, to future philosophically informed clergy and statesmen.

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In concluding this chapter, I would like to focus on some questions that can help us assess Spinoza’s project, beginning with what I have called his moral and psychological refutation of the Bible. As I have articulated it, that refutation begins from Spinoza’s self-reflective awareness that reason is not self-validating. To provide a genuine, noncircular refutation of miracles and revelation, Spinoza seeks to engineer a massive social transformation showing that human beings can be made to live—and live happily—without the experience of devotion and therefore without the need for God. Spinoza implies that this project, if successful, would show that biblical revelation, which teaches a morality of loving obedience and which understands our need for the divine as permanent and unalterable, has always been merely a product of the imagination. This project, however, does prompt some critical questions, which I here present as starting points for reflection on it. While I do not claim that these questions are definitive or unanswerable, I also believe it is unclear what Spinoza’s answers to them would be. Perhaps the most obvious objection to this project is that Spinoza himself would be unable to assess its results. If the only way to refute revelation is to engineer a cultural and political transformation that would take centuries to unfold, Spinoza obviously would not live to judge its success. Of course, it could be that Spinoza simply sees no other way, and he may be reasonably confident the experiment will succeed (although here again the very idea of being reasonably confident of anything is question begging). Additionally, although Spinoza will not live to see his experiment completed, in launching it he may eventually bring benefits to future philosophers and potential philosophers. Undertaking his own form of generosity, or at least conceiving of his own good in an expansive way, Spinoza may be seeking to benefit philosophers as a class and philosophy as a way of life. One should of course hesitate before calling this a form of devotion, but Spinoza’s own life, which was openly lived without religion, seems at least to illustrate a need to take certain calculated risks to benefit reason’s cause. Second, and more seriously, we might consider again the problem posed by the claimed experience of revelation. When the prophet Samuel anoints Saul, he tells him that the spirit of God will come upon him, that he will prophesy, and that he “will be changed into a different person” (1 Sam. 10:6). This is an experience that, as Spinoza effectively acknowledged at the opening of chapter 1, he cannot not refute. Rather, he began his treatment of prophecy on the assumption that such a thing is impossible (i.3) and therefore should be attributed to the delusions of a primitive, devotional mindset. But as Spinoza implies by treating the matter in such a dismissive way, any scientific

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explanation for the experience of revelation, any phenomenological account of what is really going on in the mind of an enthusiast, must remain merely hypothetical—and so Spinoza instead seeks to make such experiences disappear and to show that human beings can be happy in a world without them. But here the orthodox believer might respond: how can we know that the citizens of a Spinozistic republic, even if they are content to all external appearances and even in their own minds, are truly happy? After all, in a godless regime people may not be able to recognize their own misery. Idolaters in the Bible do not claim to be unhappy. So in a similar way, how can we be sure that citizens in a Spinozistic republic will not actually be hiding their own discontent from themselves? How could Spinoza show, in a way the believer would have to accept, that the life of philosophy is not in fact one of misery and sin? Third, Spinoza has pointed to the need for a lingering need for superstition among the vast majority, even at the conclusion of his political project. How much of a problem does this pose to his attempted refutation? To be sure, Spinoza could claim that philosophy could understand and look down upon this phenomenon from a higher vantage point. Philosophy can attribute the superstition that must remain even in the most enlightened society to the fact that apparently causeless suffering or misfortune still occurs and that it is impossible for all human beings to be fully reconciled to this. And it could also note today that as science and technology have made progress in addressing that problem, the churches have begun to empty, especially in those areas of the West that are the most urban and commercial. Still, here, as with the experience of prophecy, we can ask whether this attribution of the causes of superstition to fear and the desire for worldly fortune must not also remain hypothetical. If superstition persists in accompanying misfortune among those Spinoza calls the vulgar, can it be known with certainty that the one is truly the cause of the other? And if there are natural limits to society’s prospects for enlightenment, could a believer not continue to understand these as evidence of reason’s ultimate limitations? Put differently, although the Spinozistic philosopher may claim to have purged himself of all superstitious experiences, it seems still unsettled whether he could definitively claim that his psyche provides a clear window into certain truths that apply to all human beings and that the “vulgar” too would recognize if they could be freed from their struggle with emotion. Here Spinoza would have to be able to rebut the claim that these emotions actually are crucial for opening one up to certain necessary pious experiences that he himself lacks, or in other words—again—that a life of unassisted reason is one of pride and therefore not the peak but the nadir of human existence.

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Finally, there remains a big practical question: when would this experiment be complete? What kind of evidence would have to be gathered, which kinds of social facts would have to come about, to conclude that biblical revelation has been adequately refuted? Alternatively, could revelation be partially refuted? A secular society that flourishes for ten years may perhaps indicate something; one that flourishes for ten thousand years may indicate that much more. However, even in the middle of the life of a society that seems likely to remain healthy and prosperous for ten times as long as that, could one really be sure that God will not reappear tomorrow and interrupt everything? Spinoza’s nods to the contrary notwithstanding (xviii.1), no society lasts forever. But since that is so, might revelation not have the last laugh? When it comes to refuting the Bible, one must succeed entirely or not at all, and those who take their bearings from the end of the world will always have time on their side.16

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Such are some of the questions that could be asked about Spinoza’s theological project. To these, I would like to add a few more that concern the moral and political underpinnings of his liberal republic. As we have seen, both Spinoza’s hopes for human progress and his sober awareness of its limits are rooted in the belief that superstition is a product of fear, and although fear may be dampened considerably, it remains an inescapable part of the human condition. His limited hopes, however, are based on his more fundamental claim that human beings are utilitarian calculators. To Spinoza, even the most advanced society will need a belief that virtue brings rewards because we are all, at bottom, seeking to preserve ourselves (albeit in a rich and spiritually meaningful sense). Conversely, the experience of devotion, far from an important part of our psychology, is merely a symptom of intellectual backwardness and moral slavishness. But is this really the case? Here, as we prepare to turn to Tocqueville, I believe there are grounds to question the presumptions behind Spinoza’s analysis, and for this it is not necessary to look further than the testimony of Spinoza himself. Recall again Spinoza’s moving but, by that very fact, extraordinarily puzzling appeal to the beauty and nobility of his envisioned liberal martyrs. To repeat, he says those who use the scaffold to silence the independent-minded transform it “into a most beautiful theater for showing the highest example of tolerance and virtue” (xx.35). Subsequently, he says that when honorable men are punished only for being nonconformists, these

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punishments are seen not as punishments but rather “as martyrdoms . . . which provoke others and move them to pity, if not to vengeance, more than they terrify them” (xx.44). To be sure, as previously noted, a liberal society that considers tolerance the greatest virtue will avoid making such martyrs, but it will also rely on this admiration for self-sacrifice, together with certain sentiments of pity and indignation that are linked to it, for the maintenance of its way of life. Moreover, Spinoza had also previously linked the willingness of his citizens to devote themselves to the common good with some perceived sense of eternity (xvii.85). But here one can wonder precisely how this sense of the beauty of self-sacrifice—rather than its simple necessity or the belief that it will ultimately produce a reward—can be accounted for on the basis of Spinoza’s psychology. After all, he had suggested that religious longings arise because people become indignant when they see that the law is not enforced and that not everyone is treated as “equally holy” (xvii.103). But if there is something in human beings that attracts them to a kind of justice demanding self-transcendence or that causes them to admire such acts as beautiful or resplendent, Spinoza’s political project may be faced with a grave challenge. This is a contradiction that I do not believe can be made consistent, although it is one that I think reveals something crucial about our crisis of confidence in liberalism today. In the West today, religion does seem to be weakening, but it has not entirely gone away, and its most orthodox forms may even be strengthening, if only at society’s margins.17 And this has occurred against a backdrop in which secular liberalism’s champions have spoken of a need to reestablish a sense of community, and to rectify the perceived deficiencies of our individualistic and rights-based moral discourse, by recovering notions of duty and obligation. Spinoza’s thought has therefore proven attractive because, by promising to make obligation synonymous with liberty, and duty with rational self-interest, it assures us that we can square the moral circle. While Spinoza himself does recognize the impossibility of this—for even his teaching of natural right is but a very sophisticated superstition—in propagating such a teaching he may tap into or draw upon something he cannot explain. If we are indeed naturally attracted to devotion or self-sacrifice in a way Spinoza denies, this may show not only why a liberalism that does not account for duties will always seem unsatisfying, but also why such duties will always entail certain compromises with liberal freedoms. And if liberalism from its very origins has left us dissatisfied because it has overlooked this fundamental aspect of our psychology, that may in turn help explain why

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traditional revealed religion, with its promise of genuine self-transcendence, has reemerged as a viable challenger to it today.18 In this way, Spinoza’s political project may inadvertently reopen the door for orthodoxy’s return. But it is possible also to go even further, for there may also be grounds to suspect that certain aspects of Spinoza’s project have the unintended effect of making philosophy less recognizable and therefore less capable of opposing revealed religion. Consider here again Spinoza’s suggestion that liberal morality will need to consist in a pseudo-rational myth claiming to reconcile the good of the individual with that of the community. In Spinoza’s understanding, all societies rest on such superstitions, but what is distinctive and perhaps problematic about this one is that it masquerades as science. Spinoza implies that the future maintenance of the Enlightenment project will require philosophers to propagate such ideologies and thus to teach outwardly that philosophy is a spokesman for the existing liberal democratic moral order. Of course, the plan of Spinoza’s project has been to enable the best thinkers, at each level of its unfolding, to think through its contradictions and undergo an educational ascent. This is why he undercut his own civil religion in chapters 14 and 15, in the end finally refusing to bestow reason’s blessing upon it. But if philosophy ultimately does have to propagate ideologies (and if it cannot undercut them as it could theology)—if it must claim that liberal dogmas are not dogmas at all but rather the conclusions of reason—might it become difficult for Spinoza’s project to encourage a liberation from them? As we will see, Tocqueville describes pantheism as fostering in its adherents not liberation but conformity, precisely because it caters to the prideful but false sense of their individual rationality: “It nourishes the pride and flatters the laziness of their minds” (Tocqueville 2000, 426). Since the new class of intellectuals that Spinoza is seeking to cultivate will govern the intellectual tenor of his future society, how can he be confident that promising students attending the universities that they will no doubt control will come away with a genuine spirit of independent questioning? If such students are likely to be taught by the adherents of various pseudorational schools, if their teachers convince them that they are practicing philosophy even when they are not, and if these pupils are left with the belief that they are using their independent reason when they are actually contributing to various moral doctrines—to one or another ism as we would say today— might this not affect their ability to recognize genuine philosophy should they ever chance to come across it? And, more alarmingly, in claiming that reason can endorse socially salutary superstitions, might Spinoza actually wind up obscuring the fundamental distinction between the two? If so, Spinoza’s

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Enlightenment might eventually create a world in which the conflict between reason and revelation is no longer seen as a living thing, to say nothing of an urgent concern.19 And if that occurs, the fate of philosophy—which, as the Treatise itself testifies, can only really come into its own by vindicating itself against its old adversary—may become very uncertain, for a reason accepted dogmatically is no reason at all.20 On one hand, then, the brightest minds in a Spinozistic society may be unknowingly affected by a false confidence in reason’s monopoly on truth, especially vis-à-vis revealed religion. On the other, however, it also seems very possible that the omnipresence of these rationalist orthodoxies in the universities may foster an equal and opposite reaction (perhaps even in the same individuals): a disappointment in what reason, now understood as ideology, can offer. Those promising students who know at the bottom of their souls that only a genuine liberation can make them truly happy may for a time convince even themselves that such ideologies have granted this to them; but when they come to recognize, as they perhaps inevitably will, that this cannot be so, some of them may descend into misology or cynicism. Indeed, although much more would need to be said to sustain this claim, one might nonetheless wonder whether such a development could be at least partially at work in the development of the distrust in reason that characterizes our intellectual life today. Finally, as we now begin a transition to the political thought of Tocqueville, we might consider one more potential complication. Spinoza argues for a liberal democracy, or, more specifically, for a confederacy of small participatory republics in which there is a tight bond between the individual and the community. He anticipates in many respects the theories of thinkers like Rousseau and the anti-Federalists, and he has accordingly been saluted by their contemporary admirers. But although the democratic side of Spinoza’s thought is undeniable, its liberal side is clearly predominant, and he has earned much favor today by making tolerance the greatest virtue. He makes freedom of thought and expression—and not just of religion—the whole purpose of political life, as well as the basis for democratic participation and civic duty. In Spinoza’s political thought, citizens are devoted to their democratic communities because those communities allow them to live and think for themselves, and they are equal because they all have the desire to live as intellectually independent beings. Democracy exists in the service of liberalism. But at the same time, Spinoza, faced with the obvious need to place limits on freedom, finds those necessary restraints in the power of public opinion. In doing so, he prompts us to wonder what the limitations on this new power

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will be, especially in a democratic society where there are no intermediate bodies or institutions between the government and the people. In a small republic with a citizenry firmly in the grip of the mindset Spinoza propagates, perhaps this danger could be mitigated through a continuing process of civic education—and indeed, the focus Spinoza gives to such education is one thing that makes his thought compelling today. Even so, it is still possible to ask whether at the conclusion of his envisioned project democracy might not eventually turn the tables on liberalism. If Spinoza’s citizens believe, at the very core of their souls, that “everyone is equally holy” because everyone has the capacity to think, could the attachment to equality ultimately become stronger than and outstrip the commitment to independent-mindedness? Put differently, might democratic citizens eventually become proud of their capacity to think for themselves because it makes them equal?21 If that happens, the passion for equality may yet become a threat to freedom, and to intellectual freedom in particular. Spinoza does not consider this possibility because his view of human pride does not lead him to it. But if human beings also naturally seek to sacrifice themselves or to devote themselves to entities greater than themselves, that view may be in need of correction or supplementation. Indeed, if human nature is so constituted, Spinoza’s project may actually open up a set of new dangers that he and thinkers like him did not anticipate, for in the absence of orthodox piety, devotion will inevitably seek out a new object. With that problem in mind, we turn to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

CHAPTER 3

Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the Enlightenment Project

Alexis de Tocqueville is one of the first great thinkers to devote himself to the careful observation of the practice of modern politics. In the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers, the modern project had remained just that: a plan, albeit one believed to be on the cusp of reality. By the early nineteenth century, that plan had been successfully implemented in the United States and, in Tocqueville’s understanding, its triumph was decisive in Europe as well (even if this was not always apparent to his contemporaries). Tocqueville came to America on an official mission to study prison reform, but he opens his work by declaring that his visit attracted his attention to other “new objects,” especially to “the equality of conditions” reigning there. Upon reflection, Tocqueville concluded that this equality—the absence of ascriptive class hierarchy—is the “primary fact” influencing American society.1 Not only does it give “a certain direction to the public spirit,” the laws, and political habits in America, but, exercising “no less dominion over civil society than over government,” it constitutes “the generative fact” of the entire life of the nation: “It creates opinions, gives birth to sentiments, suggests usages, and modifies everything it does not produce.” And what is true of America is true also of the entire modern world, or soon will be: “The same democracy” reigning in America is “advancing rapidly toward power in Europe” (Tocqueville 2000, 3). From the outset, then, Tocqueville shows himself to be a very different kind of political scientist from his Enlightenment predecessors, as well as from those theoretically informed statesmen (like the American Founders) who were influenced by them. Whereas Spinoza had proceeded on the assumption that, after stripping away the distortions of theology, one can recognize and build upon man’s natural condition, Tocqueville has no teaching

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on the state of nature.2 He never suggests the political community is artificial, and his analysis begins from the recognition that politics has a decisive influence on the whole of human life. As the “generative fact” of modernity, democracy is responsible for every “particular fact” of American life (3). Its influence is decisive in shaping families, ambitions, tastes, cultural and intellectual pursuits, and—most important—moral and religious beliefs. A glance at Democracy in America’s table of contents suffices to indicate the difference between Tocqueville’s objects of study and the largely institutional preoccupations of most modern political science. In looking to democracy as the constitutive element of American life, Tocqueville promises to articulate a constitutionalism understood in the broadest and most literal sense—one that encompasses but is not limited to our written constitution and the other formal elements of our government. His analysis begins (but does not end) by situating itself within, and seeking to understand the deepest principles, aspirations, and effects of a particular regime. As he writes, “I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions; I wanted to become acquainted with it if only to know at least what we ought to hope or fear from it.” America thus serves a dual function for Tocqueville. Sometimes it appears as democracy incarnate, the exaggerated image of an egalitarian society left to its “natural consequences” (13). At other times, Tocqueville examines the way Americans have arrested or modified those consequences by implementing a certain political science whose successes (and failures) in this regard can teach lessons “from which we [Europeans] could profit” (12). Hence, Tocqueville gives great attention to the “political science” of the American Founders and The Federalist, which has “descended to the last ranks of society” in his time (156; cf. also 81 and 176). But this is just one example of the restraints on democracy he discovers in America and which his own political science will assess. So although Tocqueville’s political science begins from within democracy, in seeking to understand and evaluate that regime it must necessarily look to an external and higher standard. He begins by taking political life and political opinions seriously and by evaluating them on their own terms. For example, in seeking the reasons for the apparent strength of religion in the United States, Tocqueville engages in conversations with American clergy and laymen of all denominations, first asking their views and then probing deeper (282). But, as we will discuss below, while Tocqueville records their common answer to his question, it will not form his own final view of the matter. Concluding his introduction, Tocqueville writes that in crafting his

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book he “undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties; and while they are occupied with the next day, I wanted to ponder the future” (15). Unlike his Enlightenment predecessors, Tocqueville takes his bearings from the ordinary partisan disputes that are the everyday essence of politics. But he does so because only a serious attention to those disputes can allow the political scientist to transcend them and arrive at a more far-reaching truth—one that at the same time does not necessarily permit him to leave these ordinary moral and political questions behind.3 For this reason, Tocqueville’s political science has sometimes been compared to Aristotle’s.4 Unlike Aristotle, though, Tocqueville analyzes a society whose outlook has been shaped by modern Enlightenment rationalism. As he will make clear especially at the opening of the second volume, the Americans are a scientific people largely alienated from ordinary moral and religious concerns. Placing “moral authority in universal reason” (359), they think almost exclusively in terms of personal self-interest (501); they believe in progress and human perfectibility (426–28) and they have “little faith in the extraordinary and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural” (404).5 As Tocqueville famously writes, America is the country “where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed” (403). So although Tocqueville’s anthropology seeks to uncover and do justice to the ordinary opinions of American democracy, those opinions from a historical standpoint are not ordinary at all. Believing they have dispelled the superstitions of the past, the Americans inhabit a realm somewhere near the conclusion of Spinoza’s educational project. Or, in Platonic terms, they inhabit a paradoxical kind of cave—one whose shadows consist in their opinion of their own independent-mindedness (cf. Strauss 1952, 155; 1995, 136 n. 2). To be sure, this insight is complicated not only by Tocqueville’s descriptions of the seeming strength of American religion but also by his overall impression suggesting, as his work’s title implies, that the historical fact of social equality, not the spread of Enlightenment rationalism, is foundational for modern politics. As just noted, Tocqueville initially defines democracy not as popular sovereignty or self-government but as “complete equality of conditions” (12). As it first comes on stage, it is the monster that ate aristocracy (together with the latter’s competing centers of moral and political authority— the monarchy, the nobility, independent cities and corporations, the Church, etc.). In this sense—the absence of any legitimate social hierarchy or social bodies outside or above the people—democracy is the defining feature of all modern political regimes, including authoritarian ones. Hence, Tocqueville will famously warn of democratic despotism. And because he suggests that

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democracy, not liberalism, is the more important modern phenomenon, he initially downplays the Enlightenment’s role in bringing it into being. In Tocqueville, then, democracy first appears simply as a massive and indisputable “fait accompli” (13)—one that threatens liberty and one whose power Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza did not fully appreciate.6 But Tocqueville also suggests a commonality between democracy and the Enlightenment in their shared disposition toward religion. Political modernity is fundamentally egalitarian as well as secular, and the destruction of the French aristocracy accompanied an attack on the Church and on the intellectual authority of religion. In their stead, rationalism and scientific materialism have become authoritative: Tocqueville’s European contemporaries hold that “the freedom and happiness of the human species lack nothing except to believe with Spinoza in the eternity of the world and to assert with Cabanis that the brain secretes thought” (281). As we will see, although Tocqueville’s America seems devoid of overt skepticism, its religious outlook contains the seeds of a more “European” outlook. In this chapter and the next, I will argue that the core of Tocqueville’s thought consists in a meditation on the fate of the human soul within a society where traditional piety has been decisively weakened. This is an unprecedented phenomenon and problem, and it explains why a “new political science is needed for a world altogether new” (7). A new political science is needed for a new world because, Tocqueville’s respect for it notwithstanding, the old political science, which helped bring this new world into being, suffered from a crucial defect requiring correction or supplementation. Assuming that religion was rooted in the desire for worldly fortune, Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza and Hobbes predicted that religious desires would wane as poverty, ignorance, and oppression decreased or that the advent of a liberal and commercial republic would satisfy our deepest longings. But while Tocqueville observes that the Enlightenment project has been successful in certain respects, in the last analysis it has not produced the results they predicted. In both volumes of Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes the presence in human nature of “a taste for the infinite” and a “love of what is immortal” (510). Indeed, by observing a country in which religion is actually weakening, he discerns the psychological presence of a “natural” and ineradicable hope for immortality—a hope that is driven by a paradoxical desire to affirm and forget oneself simultaneously, or to seek a kind of happiness that is found, at least partially, in acts of self-sacrifice (283–84). Because the “philosophers of the eighteenth century” (282) who laid the basis for liberal democracy either failed to recognize this desire or thought it derivative of underlying material

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conditions, they also necessarily left it uncontrolled and undirected—which has produced certain unanticipated political dangers within the political order they constructed. I will argue that a meditation on this religious psychology forms the “mother thought” (14) of Tocqueville’s analysis and is at the root of his understanding not only of religion but also of freedom and human greatness. I will contend that the central task of Tocqueville’s “new political science” is to diagnose and remedy the pathologies that have resulted from the Enlightenment’s overlooking it. In this chapter, I will analyze Tocqueville’s thoughts on the relationship between democracy, the Enlightenment, and religion, showing how he understands the character of the religious desire and its troubled status in modern democracy. Then, in Chapter 4, I will discuss the possible dangers Tocqueville saw on the horizon as a result of democracy’s failure to provide healthy outlets for that desire, as well as the practical solutions for remedying this oversight that he pointed to as elements of his political science.7

Religion and the Great Democratic Revolution Near the end of his life, Tocqueville wrote that “man’s true grandeur lies only in the harmony of the liberal sentiment and religious sentiment,” and, reflecting on his political and intellectual career, he wrote that his “sole political passion for thirty years” has been to bring this harmony about (Tocqueville 1985, 295). This self-characterization of Tocqueville’s political project explains his oft-quoted declaration of his hope to be regarded as “a liberal of a new kind” (Tocqueville 1861, 402). In contrast to the liberalism of the Enlightenment, which had sought to weaken or even, in its most radical instantiation, stamp out religion in the name of liberty, Tocqueville’s liberalism presents itself as an attempt to aid both by effecting their reconciliation: “To persuade men that respect for law, both human and Divine, is the best way to be free, and that to grant freedom is the best way to ensure morality and religion—such is my object” (Tocqueville 1861, 403). These statements and others like them suggest that the centerpiece of Tocqueville’s political science is a project of religious statesmanship— although nowhere in his writings does he indicate the details of that project in a straightforward or systematic way. Rather, the reader is left to piece together its elements as they become evident from his analysis of democracy. To do this, the best place to begin is with the puzzle raised by the abovequoted statements, which suggest there is or should be a natural harmony

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between liberalism and religion. In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville takes his point of departure from the fact that almost none of his European contemporaries think as he does on this question. In postrevolutionary France, liberals and Christians agree only that democracy and religion are natural and implacable enemies (11). But Tocqueville’s surface impression is that this is an unfortunate misunderstanding resulting from a convoluted and artificial political situation: “It seems that in our day the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs has been broken” (10; Manent 1996, 89–90). Because the Church allied itself with the monarchy and the aristocracy, champions of freedom have thoughtlessly lumped religion with everything they are seeking to destroy, and partisans of religion have returned the favor, mistaking freedom for just another heterodoxy among the arguments of their adversaries (11). “Disbelief appears to them a new thing, and they envelop all that is new in the same hatred” (287). But Tocqueville claims there is nothing natural in this antipathy. With greater self-understanding, religion and freedom would be natural allies. Foreshadowing his famous argument for religion’s utility, Tocqueville says “the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of mores,” which depend in turn upon “beliefs.” Similarly, “Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God,” should not “not be loath to see all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning, and it is often brought to reject the equality it loves and to curse freedom as an adversary, whereas by taking it by the hand, it could sanctify its efforts” (11). This idea that religion and liberty find themselves ranged on opposite lines only by mistake, and that they could aid one another once they recognize their true interests, retains an appeal today to champions of religion and freedom alike. But here our perspective, informed partly by Tocqueville’s own rhetorical success, may obscure the fact that he expects this view to be controversial. Again, he presents himself as a voice crying in the wilderness, the only thinker alive who believes Christianity and liberalism are reconcilable.8 In Spinoza’s Treatise, liberal democracy is essentially anti-biblical, and freedom of speech and thought are established only through a liberation from the devotional life, which the Bible considers the core of righteousness. As we saw, Spinoza and his religious adversaries agree that placing moral and political authority in the people necessarily removes it from a law-giving God. Although Tocqueville’s introductory claim is that these antipathies are merely accidental, he later associates the Americans’ outlook with Spinoza’s own philosophic teacher Descartes, as we have already remarked, and he

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argues that equality naturally leads the Americans to adopt a rationalistic and independent-minded outlook strikingly similar to the one Spinoza proposes for his republican citizens. Possessing “a sort of instinctive incredulity about the supernatural” (408), “each American calls only on the individual effort of his own reason” (403) in all things. Consequently, he places moral authority solely in himself or those like himself—and hence, eventually, in “common opinion” (408–9). In this, Tocqueville says, the American adheres to an eighteenthcentury “philosophic method” that is in essence “democratic” (405). If this mindset is at its core anti-supernatural, Spinoza or Descartes might ask how Tocqueville can envision a religious liberal democracy. Are not freedom and popular sovereignty simply opposed to obedience to divine law (as Spinoza had argued), such that neither could fully accommodate religion without fundamentally compromising itself? Conversely, if biblical morality (as Spinoza also contended) is fundamentally illiberal, could Christianity actually accept modern liberalism while retaining its distinctive principles? And if it could not—if democracy transformed it into something other than itself— would it retain the virtues that Tocqueville would look for it to perform? To these questions, which we will consider below, we must add another complication. Thus far we have been somewhat loose in speaking about liberalism, or political freedom in the modern sense,9 and democracy. But one of Tocqueville’s major themes is that these two ideas are distinct and not always harmonious. For example, in the passage about the Cartesian “philosophic method” just discussed, Tocqueville notes how placing sole moral authority in the individual leads, in a mass society, to the intellectual tyranny of democratic opinion (cf. 410). But in speaking somewhat loosely about freedom and democracy we have been following Tocqueville’s own use of these terms in his introductory discussion of religion, which leads us to ask just which of these should be Christianity’s natural ally. When summarizing the views of his religious contemporaries, Tocqueville suggests that Christianity faces no inherent obstacle to embracing political equality, since a religion teaching equality before God can accept equality before the law. But while Tocqueville says Christianity could also “sanctify” freedom, he does not say how. For now, he leaves these as open questions and potential standing challenges to his project of reconciliation. Democracy, Liberalism, and Providence To begin answering these questions, we can consider Tocqueville’s presentation of democracy’s character and origins. Although Tocqueville may have

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eventually come to see himself as a “liberal of a new kind,” in Democracy in America, as the work’s title suggests, it is democracy, not liberalism, that forms his major theme. Tocqueville’s introduction presents democracy— understood strictly as the “generative fact” of social equality (3)—as the most important phenomenon of the modern world, a force that dates back seven centuries and that actually began with the establishment of the political power of the Catholic Church (3–5). By contrast, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville uncovers a major part of the origins of the events of 1789 in the public role of Enlightenment-inspired intellectuals (Tessitore 2013, 225–28; Tocqueville 2004, 195–202). And in an 1852 speech to the French Academy, Tocqueville goes even further: he gives sole credit for the Revolution to the “political science” of the Enlightenment philosophers, and he draws a general lesson about the role of political science in shaping society from the top down. In all times and places, he claims, the political sciences produce “a sort of intellectual atmosphere where the spirit of the governed and the governments breathe” (Tocqueville 1951, 16:233).10 In the introduction to Democracy in America, however, Tocqueville’s focus is not on the new teaching of the rights of man but on the “gradual development” (6) of equality among “Christian peoples” (7). His brief sketch of European history hardly mentions the anti-religious teachings of the liberal Enlightenment but instead traces democracy’s spread throughout the “Christian universe” (7). Moreover, although Tocqueville opens his work by calling equality a “new object” (3), his subsequent presentation suggests that it gradually developed over seven centuries. Unlike in his future speech to the academy, he presents himself as more of a sociologist than a political scientist, describing political developments as reflections of more fundamental demographic and economic causes (so much so that he even omits any mention of the French Revolution).11 And on the basis of the evidence he gathers, he famously concludes that the inevitable triumph of equality is a “providential fact.” It has all the “principle characteristics of one: it is universal, it is enduring, each day it escapes human power; all events, like all men, serve its development” (6). For the past seven centuries, “all”—even democracy’s opponents—“have worked in common” for its establishment, “as blind instruments in the hands of God” (6). In Tocqueville’s initial presentation, religion and the Christian God are not only friendly to democracy; it would seem they are its very cause. Later, he makes this explicit, asserting that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (413). But again, even if this is so, whether Christianity is friendly to liberalism remains an open question.12

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In Tocqueville’s analysis, then, the claim that democracy is inevitable, that it is providential, and that it is primarily a sociological development are one and the same: “If long observation and sincere meditation led men in our day to recognize that the gradual and progressive development of equality is at the same time the past and future of their history, this discovery alone would give that development the sacred character of the sovereign master’s will. To wish to stop democracy would then appear to be to struggle against God himself, and it would only remain for nations to accommodate themselves to the social state that Providence imposes on them” (7). But as Tocqueville’s conditional phrasing indicates, the interpretation of democracy’s origin and ultimate victory as providential depends upon a particular reading of history. Given this, scholars have been divided over how seriously Tocqueville intended his providential thesis, with some holding that it is largely rhetorically crafted.13 To address this point, it is necessary to look in more detail at his general reflections on history and at his account of democracy’s rise. Doing so, in turn, will provide some indication of Tocqueville’s manner of writing. Tocqueville’s attribution of the origins of the idea of human equality to Jesus occurs in a chapter on general ideas in volume 2. In that context, he characterizes the taste for general ideas, which has become a “frenetic passion” among his countrymen, as quintessentially democratic. He spotlights three features of democracy giving rise to it. First, in aristocracies, where “inequalities are permanent,” particularity is the rule; there appear to be “as many distinct humanities as there are classes,” and one is thus inclined to regard “only some men, not man.” This gives aristocrats “an habitual distrust of general ideas and an instinctive distaste for them” (412). In democracy, by contrast, where human beings are similar and perceive themselves as such, each regards those truths applicable to him as equally so to all others, which leads to a “blind passion” for discovering universal rules and single causes. Strikingly, Tocqueville says no example better illustrates this than the opinions in antiquity regarding slavery. Since the greatest Greek and Roman authors were part of the aristocracy of masters, the general principle of human equality never occurred to them, which is why Jesus Christ had to come to earth to make it understood (413). But in attributing the triumph of this moral outlook to a single event, Tocqueville here provides an explanation that would be very much in tune with the predispositions of his democratic audience. He thus caters to those predispositions, but he does so in a way that encourages his audience to consider the possibility of supernatural and individual influences on history—two things he also says democrats naturally disregard.

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Second, Tocqueville claims the democratic tendency to attribute complicated phenomena to “a few great causes” (413) is a product not only of equality but also of “enlightenment” (414). People like the Americans, who have adopted the Cartesian philosophic method and who trust only their own reason, will always seek explanations for things in “the very nature of man” and hence also in “very general notions” (413–14). Finally, in a commercial society like the United States everybody works, and in the resulting world of constant busyness, even those in “intellectual careers” desire “easy successes and present enjoyments.” This desire naturally inclines writers to posit simple explanations for complicated phenomena. Tocqueville says that tendency is often due to the laziness of the writers themselves, but it also reflects an accurate appraisal of their readers, who also think in terms of single variables and vast generalities (414). If Tocqueville is seeking to capture the attention of a commercial and scientific society, he too must find it advantageous to follow this tendency (albeit more self-consciously than the authors he describes)—and he does so by proclaiming Christianity the single cause of equality, and equality the “generative fact” of every aspect of modern life. Indeed, in his subsequent chapter on historians, Tocqueville gives an unflattering portrait of exactly the kind of historical presentation with which he opens the work. Expanding his earlier analysis of general ideas, he says it is characteristic of democratic historians to assign “great general causes to all the little particular facts” of human life. Aristocratic historians, by contrast, conceive “an exaggerated idea” of the influence of great men and great events (469–70). In both cases, historians overstate the importance of what most influences their own times. Broad social forces have some effect under aristocracy, although they are relatively weak and harder to discern, just as individual influences can “slow or hasten the natural course of the destiny of a [democratic] people,” although they “are infinitely more varied, more hidden, more complicated, less powerful, and consequently more difficult to unravel” (470). This causes “mediocre public men” in democracies to propose single-variable theories or to adopt simplistic “historical system[s],” but Tocqueville distinguishes himself from such authors. As for me, I think that there is no period in which it is not necessary to attribute one part of the events of this world to very general facts and another to very particular influences. These two causes are always met with; only their relationship differs. General facts explain more things in democratic centuries than in aristocratic centuries, and particular influences fewer. In aristocratic times, it is the contrary:

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particular influences are stronger and general causes are weaker, unless one considers as a general cause the very fact of inequality of conditions that permits some individuals to oppose the natural tendencies of all the others. (470–71) Both democrats and aristocrats thus mistake a particularity of their own society for something universal, and this has politically deleterious consequences in both cases. Taking “away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate” and subjecting them “either to an inflexible providence or to a sort of blind fatality” (471), democratic historians propagate a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy. As democratic publics accept a popularized determinism not unlike the one Spinoza sought to spread, they surrender their moral freedom in a way that also places their political freedom in jeopardy. Aristocratic historians, by contrast, “and particularly those of antiquity” taught that “to become master of his fate and to govern those like him, a man has only to know how to subdue himself. . . . Historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything other than how to obey” (472). To Tocqueville, the aristocratic outlook on history has the advantage of instilling something like the classical virtue of moderation, understood as a kind of willful self-mastery. On one hand, the pride thus cultivated fosters the development of human freedom along with the capacity to do great deeds. But on the other, it nurtures an inclination to unjust mastery over others. In democracy, these moral consequences are inverted. Equality heightens natural bonds between human beings and fosters sympathy with others perceived as like oneself (563, 535–39), but it also encourages a rootlessness and a sense of powerlessness that threatens to complete the prostration of souls (to “reduce Christians to Turks”; 472). Thus, at the very end of the work, Tocqueville warns against what he calls “false and cowardly” doctrines that subject human beings to “insurmountable and unintelligent” historical forces (676).14 With these considerations, we are now in a position to analyze Tocqueville’s claim in his introduction about democracy’s providential character— which, to repeat, is essential for understanding his thoughts on the relationship between democracy and Christianity and between Christianity and freedom. In asserting that democratic historians threaten to “reduce Christians to Turks,” he emphatically suggests that Christianity (in contrast to Islam; cf. 419–20), is friendly to liberty. This claim is puzzling, however, because it also associates Christianity with an aristocratic moral teaching that supports human willfulness and pride. But be that as it may for now, Tocqueville’s

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discussion of historians and general ideas should affect the way we read his initial presentation of the “great democratic revolution” (3). By presenting democracy’s triumph as the inevitable result of vast social forces beyond human control, he caters to and even endorses a mindset he knows to characterize his readers but that he also regards as dangerous for them. In doing so, however, he appeals to those readers in a way that can garner their sympathy and attention and that can render them receptive to his own attempts to modify or restrain their dangerous outlook, for Tocqueville speaks of a providence that is not inflexible and a fatality that is not blind. Christianity and the Demise of Aristocracy Tocqueville also calls attention to his own manner of writing when he opens his book by addressing an important division in his audience. He begins the introduction by noting that while his European contemporaries all agree that “a great democratic revolution is taking place among us,” in their attitudes toward it they fall into two sharply opposed groups. One group, whom we might call reactionaries, considers democracy an entirely “new thing” and an “accident,” a fluke monstrosity that can still simply be eradicated. The other group, whom we might term progressives, judges democracy “irresistible” because it seems to them “the most continuous, the oldest, and the most permanent fact known in history” (3). In this latter view, the march toward equality is a destiny to be embraced without reservation—something to be hastened and encouraged, rather than merely accepted, in full confidence that it will create a better and more just world. Tocqueville’s introduction agrees with the progressives about democracy’s inevitability, and even if his claim that it is providential might not satisfy the anti-religious among them, his argument has something in common with the natural theologies of the Enlightenment: “It is not necessary that God himself speak in order for us to discover sure signs of his will; it suffices to examine the usual course of nature and the continuous tendency of events; I know without the Creator’s raising his voice that the stars follow the arcs in space that his finger has traced” (6–7). But Tocqueville disagrees with the progressives when he asserts that democracy’s goodness, as distinct from its inevitability, is hardly assured. He claims (as no proponent of natural theology could) to have written his book with “a sort of religious terror” in his soul arising from a contemplation of the “ruins” providence has made (6). Tocqueville’s own initial attitude thus partially agrees and partially disagrees with his two main audiences. He claims democracy is inevitable but

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also potentially terrible. With the opponents of monarchy and revelation, he agrees that democracy’s ultimate cause is a God who works through “the usual course of nature” (including human nature as evident in history) and that it cannot be turned back. With the defenders of the old order, he speaks the language of fire and brimstone: “Christian peoples” must view the march of equality as a “frightening spectacle” that human agency must and can resist, if only to a limited extent (6–7). And in his own historical account of democracy’s rise, Tocqueville straddles the divide between his reactionary and progressive audiences: whereas the former thinks democracy entirely new and the other believes it eternal, Tocqueville claims it is seven hundred years old. Thus splitting the difference, Tocqueville presents democracy as something to be neither completely resisted nor blindly embraced. His brief history therefore begins in the twelfth century, when France is “divided among a few families who possess the land and govern the inhabitants.” At that time, land was the only form of wealth, political authority was transmitted only by inheritance, and men acted on one another solely “by force” (4). Looking back seven centuries from that time, someone seeking to establish a providential pattern in history on the basis of “the continuous tendency of events” (6–7) would likely have discerned the gradual development of inequality. The warrior-barons governing Europe in 1135 were the descendants of Germans who had subjugated the inhabitants of the Roman Empire (cf. 315). Aristocracy in its purest and most undiluted form is thus a savage and brutal warrior society, one founded on the naked exploitation of the weak by the strong and largely devoid of art, leisure, philosophy, and other forms of cultural and intellectual life. But according to Tocqueville, the seeds of this society’s undoing were planted when “the political power of the clergy” came “to be founded” and soon spread (4). Here again Tocqueville’s argument opposes the respective presuppositions of his two audiences. Against the progressives, he suggests that democracy is neither natural nor eternal. It had a human founding, and that founding was accomplished through the establishment of the earthly power of the religion that democracy’s champions now oppose. Against the reactionaries, however, Tocqueville suggests that that power, properly understood, is not only friendly to democracy, but that it has always been intimately connected with it. Initially, then, Tocqueville’s historical account holds that the political establishment of Christianity eventually resulted in the same democracy the Church is seeking to eradicate in Tocqueville’s time. But this is not the only paradox to which he draws our attention. He also indicates that Christianity’s democratic character allowed aristocracy to come to greatness. Because the

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clergy, in Tocqueville’s telling, opened “its ranks to all,” equality penetrated “through the church to the heart of government, and he who would have vegetated as a serf in eternal slavery” could assume a place “as a priest in the midst of nobles” and would “often take a seat above kings” (4). Now, as a historical claim this last assertion is a gross exaggeration—in the Middle Ages the sons of peasants did not frequently dominate kings—but it conveys Tocqueville’s view of the positive role played by the Church in propagating a notion of rule of law. In his presentation, priests were able to exercise power over kings because kings became believers. Accepting that they ruled only by divine right, monarchs understood themselves not just as rulers but as legitimate rulers, as exercising force sanctioned by justice. Hence, the rise of the Church as a political force also led to “civil laws” and the power of jurists. As society became “more civilized and stable,” and as hierarchical social relations became “more complicated and numerous,” those conquering feudal barons eventually clothed themselves in “ermine” as well as “mail” (4). In contrast to Spinoza, who saw the teaching of divine right, with its concomitant “two kingdoms” problem, as a recipe for violence and civil discord, Tocqueville downplays the political instability resulting from the clergy’s power, emphasizing instead its role as a force for moderation and civilization. In his presentation, the power of the popes to command kings through the threat of excommunication ennobled aristocratic politics by holding rulers to an otherworldly standard of virtue. From this perspective, Napoleon taking the Crown of Charlemagne from the pope and placing it on his own head completed the triumph of modern politics and the demise of the aristocratic order. And even if Christianity’s egalitarianism made that demise inevitable, aristocracy’s peak nonetheless occurred at the very moment this decline began. In his chapter on majority tyranny, Tocqueville denies the possibility of a mixed regime. A mixed government is “a chimera,” he says, “because in each society one discovers in the end one principle of action that dominates all the others” (240). But even though every society contains one authoritative principle setting the tone for human life, the role of other, lesser principles may still be considerable. In his chapter on political parties, for example, Tocqueville suggests that democracy and aristocracy should not simply be understood as successive historical phases. He says there are in fact two “great parties” whose opinions are “as old as the world” and which are present to some extent “in all free societies”: one that seeks to restrict popular power and another that seeks to extend it (167, 170). Thus, it is in despotisms at the extremes of aristocracy and democracy—such as France in the twelfth century or the “soft despotism” described at the end of volume 2—that one

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governing principle has eradicated all the others, together with freedom and the goods it produces. In healthy regimes, by contrast, principles alien and even opposed to the ruling one may exercise significant restraining influence. According to Tocqueville, the United States Constitution is “a lasting monument” to the patriotism and wisdom of a now defunct aristocratic party: the Federalists, who accepted democracy but sought to limit it (169). In a similar way, in the High Middle Ages the egalitarian force of Christianity tempered the martial qualities of the ruling class by articulating a standard of virtue by which to judge the use of force. In so doing, it acted as a civilizing influence and brought about the cultural flourishing of aristocratic society. By contrast, the danger now facing European democratic peoples is that the tide of democracy is so strong, and moving so rapidly, that it risks coming to full maturity “weakened by its own excess,” that is, without the benefit of instruction or moderation. “The most powerful, most intelligent, and most moral classes . . . have not sought to take hold of it so as to direct it.” Partisans of aristocracy have sought to crush democracy rather than educate it, while those of democracy, not recognizing their own interest in restraint, have “submitted with servility to its least desires.” What is most needed, then, is to “instruct democracy,” and the first element of that instruction must be to “purify its mores” and “if possible to reanimate its [religious] beliefs” (7). Here again, Tocqueville suggests that although political equality may have originated with Christianity, its natural tendency has been to deaden Christian piety and weaken the mores it supports. While reanimating religion and purifying mores are tasks likely to appeal to aristocrats who would curb democracy’s excesses in the name of virtue, Tocqueville also proposes others that will be attractive to the calculating and self-interested democratic mind: “to substitute little by little the science of affairs for [democracy’s] inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts.” In Tocqueville’s vision, those who can carry out this combination of moral education and enlightened self-interest—both former reactionaries and former progressives—will, guided by moderation and prudence, instruct and supervise the emerging democratic society, adapting “its government to time and place” and modifying “it according to circumstances and men.”15 Because these new leaders will need to preserve some place for a version of aristocratic virtue within an egalitarian and commercial society, a task of religious statesmanship will lie at the heart of the “new political science” that “is needed for a world altogether new” (7). Tocqueville indicates something of the character of that virtue, and its link to religion, when he next presents a eulogy of aristocracy. “When

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royal power, leaning on the aristocracy, peacefully governed the peoples of Europe,” he writes, “society, amid its miseries, enjoyed several kinds of happiness one can conceive and appreciate only with difficulty in our day” (8). It is appropriate to call this account of aristocracy a eulogy not only because aristocracy, in Tocqueville’s estimation, is dead, but also because he here follows the custom at funerals of praising the deceased beyond what is strictly merited—as this tendentious opening statement makes clear. Tocqueville already indicated that the feudal aristocracy was a warrior society at its core. Since it was “born of war and for war” (591), his description of its “peaceful” government is—at best—an account of a few rare and fleeting moments in its long life. But these moments nonetheless convey an ideal whose memory Tocqueville believes worth preserving, even at the cost of exaggeration. Feudal society was filled with “miseries” (or poverty, misères), which makes it difficult in our times to appreciate its “several kinds of happiness.” Because the “taste for well-being forms the salient and indelible feature of democratic ages” (422), it is hard for us to conceive of forms of happiness that involve the exaltation of the spirit rather than the comfort of the body. Such forms of happiness, Tocqueville now makes clear, are founded on a conception of virtue calling for self-sacrifice, or for the transcendence of one’s happiness in the most immediate or ordinary sense. At its best, aristocratic society encapsulated an ideal of inequality with dignity, one founded on a code of mutual generosity and reciprocal devotion that “could have been established” between the various classes in the social hierarchy (8; emphasis added). At the top, those claiming nobility of rank guided themselves by a code mandating noble or selfless action. Because kings were elevated so far above the people, they felt themselves “vested in the eyes of the crowd with an almost divine character,” but this led them to draw “from the very respect they generated the will not to abuse their power” (8). Sacrificing the immediate potential benefits to be gained through exploitation was the foundation of the aristocracy’s conception of its own honor and glory (Cf. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 1.73–78). Taking “the sort of benevolent and tranquil interest in the lot of the people that the shepherd accords to his flock” (8), those who were noble in rank believed themselves entitled to hold that rank because they were noble in soul. They held that their transcendence of self-interest in the material sense rendered them deserving of other, greater exaltations, and they viewed the framework for this conception of nobility as inextricably tied to a religious order. They regarded the welfare of their social inferiors “as a trust placed by Providence in their hands,” and the people, in turn, believed that same Providence to

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sanction their own version of these sentiments. Considering the nobility’s rule as justified by divine right (and not conceiving any alternative), they “loved their chiefs” when they “were lenient and just.” At other times, Tocqueville implies with some understatement, they may not have loved their superiors, but they “submitted to their rigors without trouble and without baseness, as they would to inevitable evils sent by the arm of God” (8). Their obedience to hierarchy thus elevated rather than debased them because they considered these sacrifices to be the just demands of religious authority (8). If only at rare moments, the aristocratic order of the Middle Ages served to refine and elevate rather than corrupt aristocratic morals because it accompanied an aspiration to divine greatness—and this filtered down to the peasantry itself. The “official doctrine” of aristocratic times in matters of morality held “that it is glorious to forget oneself and that it is fitting to do good without self-interest like God himself ” (500). In his aristocratic eulogy, Tocqueville does not say how often the nobility actually was “lenient and just” toward the people; such instances of conformity to an official doctrine may have been few and far between. At the same time, though, he indicates that this notion of self-affirmation through self-transcendence set the overall tone for aristocratic society and allowed all classes to pursue a kind of immaterial greatness that we can conceive of only with difficulty in our present materialistic age. It led the aristocracy to take up “pursuits of luxury, refinements of taste, pleasures of the mind, and cultivation of the arts,” and even among the people the instinct for self-forgetting produced “generous sentiments, profound beliefs, and savage virtues” (8). Constituted around such an ethic, Tocqueville concludes, “the social body could have stability, power, and above all, glory” (8). The surface message of Tocqueville’s eulogy, then, is that while aristocratic society was materially poor, it was spiritually rich, whereas democracy suffers from the opposite problem. In the Middle Ages, kings were fed, clad, and housed worse than the poor in America, but “souls were not degraded” (8; Locke 1982, sec. 41). In democracy, by contrast, immaterial goods are becoming rarer and the virtues giving rise to them increasingly unrecognized. The breakdown of class hierarchy has removed a barrier against tyranny and engendered suspicion among citizens rather than respect for rights. The aristocratic ideal of mutual obligation has collapsed before an extreme individualism and an unrefined selfishness that has much to do with religion’s decline: the “poor man has kept most of the prejudices of his fathers without their beliefs; their ignorance without their virtues; he has taken the doctrine of interest as the rule of his actions without knowing the science of

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it, and his selfishness is as lacking in enlightenment as was formerly his devotion” (10). To remedy this problem, to recover some semblance of aristocratic virtue by showing how “enlightenment and experience” can lead “citizens” to make “great sacrifices,” Tocqueville’s political science will propagate the notion of “self-interest well understood” (500): the idea that actions serving the common good ultimately benefit oneself. But as Tocqueville will make clear in volume 2 (504–5), religion will need to play a crucial role in articulating what he there calls a “doctrine” (500) rather than a “science.” Strikingly, in the first chapter of volume 1, Tocqueville revises his eulogistic presentation of aristocracy, and he contradicts his claim that those at the foot of the feudal hierarchy could have lived happy and dignified lives. He writes that hierarchy and inequality are always degrading to souls at the bottom of an aristocratic order: “The people are coarser in aristocratic countries than everywhere else,” especially in “opulent cities” where poor and rich live side by side. The contrast between their “misfortune and weakness” and the visible “happiness and power” of “those like them” instills both anger and fear in the poor: “The sense of their inferiority and dependence irritates and humiliates them,” which renders them “at once insolent and base” (24; emphasis added). Here, the “savage virtues” of the medieval lower classes have disappeared from Tocqueville’s account; the peasants were degraded, and they were so directly on account of aristocracy’s social structure. This is aristocracy’s most significant injustice. What degrades men is not obedience to authority but obedience to authority “they consider illegitimate” (8), and if the lower classes did not view the nobility as beings of a different nature—as shepherds rather than flocks, more outstanding in virtue and thus deserving of rule—their submission was not such as to ennoble them. It was either base servility or a necessary accommodation to strength—or rather, tyranny. And if the latter was the nature of the rule of those at the top, that too compromises their own virtues and calls into question aristocratic claims to greatness of soul. Indeed, Tocqueville’s brief history of aristocracy’s downfall in the introduction also shows that the ruling classes themselves were not unaware of this problem. We recall that in his presentation it was the introduction of the principle of equality itself, in the Christian ideal of equality under God, that led to aristocracy’s greatness even as it also introduced a fundamental and eventually fatal tension. That Christian teaching of equality would eventually be radicalized in Protestantism, which taught “that all men are equally in a state to find the path to Heaven” (6). In his discussion of the Americans’ “philosophic method,” Tocqueville argues that that religious principle laid the groundwork for the irreligious teachings of the Enlightenment. The

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rehabilitation of the individual’s intellectual authority, which Luther sought to confine to theology, was naturally extended by Bacon, Descartes, and Voltaire to scientific and political matters (404–5). Here is Tocqueville’s description of the political consequences of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment: Once works of the intellect had become sources of force and wealth, each development of science, each new piece of knowledge, each new idea had to be considered as a seed of power put within reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the graces of the mind, the fires of the imagination, depth of thought, all the gifts that Heaven distributed haphazardly, profited democracy, and even if they were found in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by putting into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests therefore spread with those of civilization and enlightenment, and literature was an arsenal open to all, from which the weak and the poor came each day to seek arms. (5; emphasis added) These achievements revealed the disjunction between conventional and natural greatness. By showing that Heaven had distributed intellectual and artistic gifts “haphazardly,” among the people as among the elite, they exposed aristocracy’s injustice. Conversely, one of Tocqueville’s most important arguments will be that such forms of greatness are much more likely to be fostered under aristocracy—if not always on the part of aristocrats themselves (Manent 1996, 68). By thus positing an ideal of human greatness unbound by convention, aristocracy effectively came to undermine itself, along with the religious basis for its conception of nobility, for the example of these geniuses also showed what human nature unassisted by divinity is capable of achieving. In so doing, it elucidated a moral and spiritual case for equality. Thus viewed, the Enlightenment was simultaneously a product of aristocracy and the principal moral source of its destruction.16 In a later chapter, Tocqueville writes that it is only in aristocratic times that the taste for material enjoyments can engender a passion for “vanquishing and outwitting nature” (509). From this perspective, the Baconian vision of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate appears to be the kind of grandiose project one should expect to find among the chief thinkers of an aristocratic age, even, or especially, if the intended result of that project is to undermine aristocracy by cultivating a rival conception of justice and human greatness. In a similar way, the “greatest men” who led the American Revolution and

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Founding—most of whom were Virginians—composed “a sort of aristocracy,” though one “little different from the mass of the people” (46). These men helped establish American democracy not only because social forces had already given a victory to it but also because they were convinced of its justice (cf. 54–55). Just as the U.S. Constitution reflected but also helped inform and restrain preexisting democratic sentiment (106–7), the Enlightenment not only hastened and legitimated but also gave political expression to historical forces conducive to equality. Bound together in a dynamic historical process, democracy and the Enlightenment may not be identical, but they “fit together hand in glove” (Hebert 2008, 529 n. 5). The task of Tocqueville’s new political science, then, is to reintroduce to democracy, or (so far as possible) to arrest the erosion of, those immaterial goods arising from the self-sacrificial virtues. A new political science must do this because, left to its own tendencies, democracy threatens even its own conception of human greatness.17 To accomplish this, Tocqueville’s political science will work within the world created by democracy and the Enlightenment, accepting the constraints of an irreversible historical situation while also recognizing that human beings remain free to shape their future within certain limits. The same providence that has made “ruins” of Europe can also be modified somewhat for our good. Borrowing a Machiavellian analogy, Tocqueville likens the historical force of democracy to a raging river whose naturally destructive power may yet be directed to human advantage—if we act with celerity and resolution (7).18 From the perspective of the old aristocracy, such a course of action would seem like simple surrender, the complacent acceptance of mediocrity. But Tocqueville suggests that there can be virtue—perhaps a form of moderation—in accepting given necessities, although this should not blind us to what we must give up in doing so. It is necessary to abandon “forever the social advantages that aristocracy can furnish” in order to take from democracy “all the goods it can offer” (9). But, as we saw, Tocqueville also does not regard aristocratic virtue as wholly uncompromised, and as he points to democracy’s potential dangers when unrestrained, he also indicates its compelling claims to justice. One of Tocqueville’s chief accomplishments in Democracy in America is to promote a sober reflection on the moral trade-offs between democracy and aristocracy, for it is only with this knowledge in hand that Tocqueville’s political science can perform its task of instructing, modifying, and restraining democracy’s instincts—a task that, as his account of America’s origins now shows, must begin from a serious mediation on the relationship between democracy and biblical religion.

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The Puritan Point of Departure The first chapter of volume 1 describes the natural features of North America and the character of its native peoples. This chapter, however, is mainly prefatory to its sequel—“On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans”—which is the first major peak of the book. Devoted to an account of the origins of America’s political principles, chapter 2 promises insights into both the character of democracy and those favorable methods the Americans have used to modify and restrain it. But those insights immediately appear highly paradoxical, as can be seen from the contrasting ways they are introduced. Chapter 1, with its quasi-poetic descriptions of American geography and its brief reflections on the Native Americans, clearly serves as the backdrop for the coming story. It describes the natural setting on top of which a society built “on new foundations” will be constructed (27). Tocqueville says that because the Indians did not practice agriculture, they merely “occupied” the soil but “did not possess it.” Since “man appropriates the soil” only by farming, they occupied it “only in the meantime.” “Providence” thus doomed these Native peoples to be swept aside on the day “civilized men” arrived to settle what was still “only a wilderness” (26–27).19 Although Tocqueville never mentions Locke’s influence on America, it is hard not to find echoes of the Second Treatise here. The conclusion of chapter 1 seems to present America as a historical example of the state of nature: it is the “still-empty cradle of a great nation” because it contains the raw materials “for commerce and industry” that lie waiting to be extracted by those with the foresight and the industriousness to give them value (27; cf. Locke 1982, chap. 5). And at the opening of chapter 2, as Tocqueville introduces his account of the first colonial settlements, he presents America as a great experiment in modern ideas (including, as his chapter headings indicate, the “social contract”; 27). It was on that empty continent “that civilized men were to try to build a society on new foundations, and applying for the first time theories until then unknown or reputed inapplicable, they were going to give the world a spectacle for which the history of the past had not prepared it” (27). Tocqueville thus implies that American politics and constitutionalism constituted the first ever attempt to put the rationalist insights of Enlightenment political thought into practice. His description clearly calls to mind the natural rights teaching of the Declaration of Independence and the distinctly modern “science of politics” discussed in The Federalist (cf. esp. no. 9; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, 67). But having now led the reader to anticipate

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an account of these new principles, Tocqueville does an about-face, for chapter 2’s title suggests America did not have a founding at all but a “point of departure,” which transplanted established European ideas to the New World (something also implied by Tocqueville’s repeated uses of the term “AngloAmerican” here and throughout the work). Indeed, Tocqueville’s account of that point of departure suggests that the basis of American civilization is not new at all. He locates the origins of American liberal democracy not in the Enlightenment-inspired Founders of the eighteenth century, but in the New England Puritans, who based their society on the Mosaic Law. In coming to America, these fierce sectarians and ardent theocrats sought to re-create the very Hebrew Republic from whose outlook Spinoza had sought to effect a general liberation. If the Puritans are truly the fountainhead of American ideas, the novelty of those ideas obviously cannot consist in their modern character. Rather, what is new about America must be the successful marriage of modern principles to a set of seemingly opposed ones stemming from orthodox piety. America’s singularity is in its reconciliation of old and new.20 Tocqueville says it was the religious aspect of America that first struck his eye (282), and he gives every surface impression that Christianity in the United States remains robust: that country is “still the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over souls” (278). Notwithstanding its Cartesian philosophic method, and despite (or rather because of) its separation of church and state—something the Puritans lacked—America in the 1830s, Tocqueville concludes, remains a fundamentally Puritan country: “I see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on its shores, like the whole human race in the first man” (267; cf. also 405). It is this paradox, this capacity of Americans to affirm apparent contradictories, that constitutes the “great social enigma that the United States presents to the world in our day” (37). This is the successful combination of “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom”—two tendencies Tocqueville says the Puritans showed to be “diverse but not contrary” (43). Recalling his providential thesis from the introduction, Tocqueville opens chapter 2 by claiming that a study of America’s point of departure can elucidate the nature and causes of democracy’s inevitable triumph. Although Europe may be marching toward an egalitarian future, the original causes of that march are lost to history. But America’s past reveals “in broad daylight what the ignorance or barbarism of the first ages hid from our regard” (28; cf. 38). It contains a record of a religious founding no longer “surrounded . . . with fables behind which the truth lies hidden” (28). Because it promises

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to illustrate the nature of the relationship between democracy and religion, this chapter will explain the destiny of those European peoples “whom an unknown force”—is it providence after all?—“seems to carry along toward a goal of which they themselves are ignorant” (28). And because the attempted reconciliation of liberty and religion is the core of Tocqueville’s “new political science,” his account of the Puritans’ apparent success in this regard contains “the seed of what is to follow and the key to almost the whole work” (29). Even as Tocqueville makes these claims, however, he also spotlights the problems they pose, for the idea that American liberal democracy could be rooted in Puritan theocracy is paradoxical indeed. Tocqueville suggests that this chapter is the key to the whole work not only because it can resolve this paradox but also because in doing so it will explain the distinctiveness of the American character: “There is not one opinion, one habit, one law, I could say one event, that the point of departure does not explain without difficulty” (29). Even as he says this, though, he implies that the relationship between Puritanism and American principles may not be as harmonious as he first suggested. Hypothesizing that nations, like individuals always feel the effects of their origins—they are “so to speak” already “whole” in their cradles—Tocqueville says a study of America’s infancy can allow us to discover “the first cause of [those] prejudices, habits, [and] dominant passions” that compose our national character. But he then adds that by undertaking such a study, “we would come to encounter the explanation of usages that today appear contrary to the reigning mores; of laws that seem in opposition to recognized principles; of incoherent opinions that are encountered here and there in society like those fragments of broken chains that one sometimes sees still dangling from the vaults of an old building, no longer supporting anything” (28). Will this chapter truly examine America’s enduring and fundamental principles? Or will it elucidate the way that, Tocqueville’s surface presentation notwithstanding, the Puritan influence on America is no longer primary— and hence that biblical piety and liberal freedom are actually opposed? America of course had old-time religion in its past, as obviously did Europe. Pre-Enlightenment Christianity was once as authoritative in the New World as it was in the Old, and so it must still have a presence somewhere in society, in mores and in souls. But what kind of presence is this, and what influence does it have? Is it more than the kind of historical residue that one still finds in laws and customs from time to time but that no longer have much real meaning, or does it have the capacity to provide a more fundamental and powerful restraint on the dominant characters of a democratic age? To

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begin answering these questions, we must look more closely at Tocqueville’s account of the point of departure. Liberty and Religion at America’s Origins Although the Europeans who settled North America were diverse in their goals and “principles,” Tocqueville says they all possessed an incipient version of the combination of religion and freedom that became fully manifest in New England. Primarily, this was due to the religious and political strife that was often the reason for their emigration. “Born in a country that the struggle of parties had agitated for centuries, and where factions had been obliged in their turn to place themselves under the protection of the laws,” the English settlers had learned through hard practice the lessons of the social contract theorists. Recognizing their mutual vulnerabilities in an atmosphere of insecurity, they adopted the principle—which Tocqueville later terms the “dogma of the sovereignty of the people” (29; cf. 381)—that each is bound to respect the rights of others in their areas of exclusive concern. But although living through conflict had instilled these settlers with “notions of rights” and “principles of true freedom,” the particularly religious character of that conflict gave them not just a “political education” but also a moral one (29). During the seventeenth century, the English threw themselves “with a sort of fury” into the religious wars tearing Europe apart, and Tocqueville suggests approvingly that they hardly considered them barbaric or irrational. Spinoza said these wars arose from “the pretext of religion”; he claimed that disingenuous men, interpreting Scripture with “blind and rash longing,” used religious claims as a vehicle for their worldly ambitions and as an opportunity to control minds (2004, vii.1–4). Similarly, Locke asserted that all claims made in favor of persecution on behalf of the so-called True Church “are much rather Marks of Men striving for Power and Empire over one another” (1983, 23)—though they have given Christianity a political legacy of “schisms, separations, contentions, animosities, quarrels, blood and butchery” (1823, 7:358). In contrast to these Enlightenment liberals, Tocqueville here actually speaks about Europe’s wars of religion rather glowingly. To his mind, what made these conflicts salutary was precisely that the combatants did not perceive themselves as fighting over merely trivial points of doctrine—what Locke termed “indifferent things” (1983, 39–40). They believed their souls at stake in the questions being disputed, and the serious attention they gave to their ultimate fate benefitted them spiritually, morally, and intellectually. In these “intellectual struggles,” Tocqueville writes, “education had been much

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increased”; “the mind had received a more profound cultivation,” and while the combatants were “absorbed in speaking of religion, mores had become purer” (29). The wars of religion could kill the body but could not kill the soul—they led to massive damage to life and property, but they did not produce the injuries resulting from popularized skepticism (cf. 418). In Tocqueville’s initial presentation, then, it was this combination of an attachment to individual rights, on the one hand, and a serious attention to the cultivation of the mind or the soul, on the other, that set the English colonies of America apart from the rest. These seemed “destined” from their beginning “to offer the development” of a new kind of freedom: “not the aristocratic freedom of the mother country, but the bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world still had not offered a complete model” (30). To be sure, every New World settlement contained “at least the seed of a complete democracy.” American soil proved inhospitable to aristocracy, and the most common characteristics of the early settlers were poverty and misfortune: “the best guarantees of equality known among men.” But while these colonies were thoroughly egalitarian—“the emigrants had no idea of any superiority whatsoever of some over others” (30)—all save the English ones eventually succumbed to tyranny and disorder (cf. 216). But, as Tocqueville now reveals, this was also true of half the English colonies, for the American South was settled by the basest and most uncivilized types, people whose only goal was to become rich. “No noble thought” or “immaterial scheme presided at the foundation” of Virginia and its neighbors. These new settlements attracted mainly “gold seekers,” “people without resources or . . . [good] conduct, whose restive and turbulent spirits troubled the infancy of the colony and rendered its progress uncertain” (30–31). There was, therefore, nothing in the English experience that automatically produced the successful reconciliation of democracy and liberty. And, conversely, although he notes the advantages given to the English settlers by their common history and language (29), Tocqueville disclaims any notion that the criteria for a successful democracy are somehow essentially AngloAmerican (12). But he does suggest that the failure of liberty to establish itself in the South reveals with particular clarity a danger all democratic societies face. Because the southern English colonies lacked any end higher than the pursuit of wealth, they also could place no restrictions on the means of attaining it. It is therefore unsurprising that the Jamestown settlers had hardly arrived “when they introduced slavery,” which came “to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South” (31). At Jamestown, it was the unrestricted freedom of the first settlers—their

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fierce individualism and desire not to be ruled, which found a natural ally in commercialism—that engendered mores ultimately hostile to freedom.21 The unadulterated right of each to pursue wealth without interference from or obligations to others naturally led to an attempt to do so through exploitation and tyranny, with the result that the South became a despotic society with all the vices typical thereof: “Slavery . . . dishonors work; it introduces idleness into society, and with it, ignorance and haughtiness, poverty and luxury. It enervates the forces of the intellect and puts human activity to sleep” (31). There is some irony in Tocqueville’s comparison of an excessively materialistic South to a more spiritually minded North. In Tocqueville’s time, after all, it is the North that suffers from a near surfeit of materialism, while the South’s governing class displays the contempt for the body and for property typical of aristocracies (cf. 361). Here, however, Tocqueville reveals with a characteristic frankness the unjust, degrading, and ignoble origins of that aristocracy—and, by implication, of Europe’s as well. Moreover, he does so in a way that conveys a warning to partisans of democratic liberty, showing how unrestricted greed, combined with what he will term “individualism” (482ff.), can lead to despotism (cf. also 359–56; Lerner 1987, chap. 5). In the North, however, and especially in New England, where “altogether contrary nuances were woven into this same English background” (31), such a fate was avoided. “New England offered a new spectacle; everything there was singular and original” (32), and its civilization—“like those fires lit in the hills that . . . still tinge the furthest reaches of the horizon with their light” (32)—would eventually spread to the entire American Union. Throughout the remainder of the work, Tocqueville describes features of the nineteenth-century North as though they characterize the entire country, suggesting a confidence that the Southern slave-based aristocracy will not survive. (cf. 370).22 New England’s most obvious distinction is that it was the first group of colonies anywhere to be settled by those who were neither desperate nor greedy but instead braved the dangers of the wilderness as a freely chosen sacrifice. If the South’s settlers foreshadow the possibility of democracy at its worst—where citizens hardly know one another (cf. 50–51), where wealth and education are uniformly low (cf. 52), and where a preoccupation with material things threatens freedom—the North’s convey what it promises at its best. These emigrants “all belonged to the well-to-do classes of the mother country.” But at the same time, they brought with them no aristocrats, and so they put on display something that was hitherto thought impossible: a democracy, as it were, without a demos; “a society in which there were neither great lords nor a people, and, so to speak, neither poor nor rich.” The

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upper-middle-class character of these emigrants was also reflected in their educational and intellectual achievements: “Proportionately, there was a greater mass of enlightenment spread among those men than within any European nation of our day.” All had received an advanced education, and there were even a few geniuses well known “in Europe for their talents and their science.” Most important, whereas the South attracted only greedy adventurers—almost all men—New England’s settlers brought their wives and children. And it was the family’s binding ties—“admirable elements of order and morality”—that was the primary element helping to direct New England to a grander purpose. New England’s first immigrants undertook considerable personal sacrifices to achieve something immaterial. They “left a social position they might regret and a secure means of living,” and they “tore themselves away from the sweetness of their native country to obey a purely intellectual need; in exposing themselves to the inevitable miseries of exile, they wanted to make an idea triumph” (32). The family received almost no treatment in Spinoza’s Treatise. Chapter 16 of that work discovered the only truly natural locus of human existence in the autonomous individual, and Spinoza’s account of the best republic in chapter 20 sought to reproduce that understanding as far as possible within society. Spinoza considered the family, like religion and the state, purely artificial, its ties of obligation an obstacle to genuine philosophic liberation. Tocqueville, by contrast, presents that experience of obligation as an integral aspect of the intellectual flourishing of New England’s settlers: it was their intense religious devotion that kindled in them the admirable dedication to an idea. But while this description of the Puritans suggests a commonality between intellectual and religious life, it also presents their outlook somewhat differently from the way they themselves did. As Tocqueville now tells us, New England’s first immigrants “or, as they so well called themselves, the pilgrims,” were so austere—one could say fanatical—that they could no longer live among their countrymen, who refused to tolerate them and gave them the pejorative label “Puritans” (32). Believing all existing human societies irreparably corrupt, they came to America because they could only “live in their manner” in a place utterly “barbarous and . . . abandoned by the world” (32). As Tocqueville’s subsequent quotations from Nathaniel Morton make clear, they discerned God’s direct and particular providence in every event in their lives (33), and they called themselves “pilgrims” not because they believed America to be their promised land, but because as Christians they saw this life as but a passage to the next; “heaven” was their only “dearest country” (34; cf. also 35).

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Now, Tocqueville has claimed that New England’s settlement was historically unprecedented—but Massachusetts was not the world’s first religious colony, nor would it be the last, so its originality cannot consist in this alone. Rather, what was remarkable about Puritanism was that it “was not only a religious doctrine; it also blended at several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories” (32). Because the Puritans came to America so they could “live there in their manner and pray to God in freedom,” their piety was fundamentally intertwined with overlapping ideas of liberty and self-government. Tocqueville thus suggests that these “pious adventurers” (33) managed somehow to combine the steadfast independence of the American pioneer with an old-fashioned devotion to religious orthodoxy that rendered their spirits radically communitarian. However, as he quotes extensively from Morton’s New England’s Memorial—a work that gives off “an air of antiquity and a sort of biblical perfume” (33)—Tocqueville provokes some skepticism about the notion that the Puritans’ religious views were “republican.” After all, Spinoza’s tendentious reading notwithstanding, this term never occurs in the Bible. But Tocqueville suggests that there is something about Morton’s old-fashioned piety—his conviction that every event befalling his people is a literal manifestation of Providence—that “elevates his language” and ennobles their enterprise. The first words of Morton’s Tocqueville quotes are about duty—he never speaks of rights—and though he says that duty is owed to God, he also presents it as bound up with the human greatness of a particular people. “In your eyes, as in his,” Tocqueville says of reading Morton, “it is no longer a small troop of adventurers going to seek fortune beyond the seas; it is the seed of a great people that God comes to deposit from his hands onto a predestined land” (33). Although Tocqueville includes Morton’s sincere profession of the Puritans’ Christianity (34–35), the bulk of his selections make that Christianity appear more rooted in the Old Testament than the New. Portraying Puritanism as a highly political and law-based religion (cf. 419), Tocqueville describes a form of piety that supports civic achievements in this life and thus nurtures human pride. Tocqueville quotes Morton’s expressed confidence that some of God’s glory may also “reach the names of those blessed saints that were the main instruments” of the establishment of New England’s settlements (33). Tocqueville’s account of the importance the Puritans gave to politics may thus be a deliberate exaggeration, as he acknowledges by noting that “Puritanism . . . was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine” (35; emphasis added). Indeed, as Tocqueville recounts how these settlers “constituted themselves” into political communities, his history becomes

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anachronistic and inventive. After arriving in the wilderness, he says, New England’s settlers gave tacit acknowledgement to the authority of the mother country but nonetheless refused to “draw the source of their powers from its heart.” Rather, they named their own magistrates and gave themselves laws “as if they came under God alone” (37). But to the Puritans, of course, that qualification was no mere figure of speech. Tocqueville quotes at some length a rather loosely translated version of the Mayflower Compact, which he attempts (somewhat tendentiously) to present as America’s original social contract. In Tocqueville’s French version of that document, the Plymouth settlers combined themselves into a political society not only to ensure their security but also to work “for the glory of God, the development of the Christian faith and the honor of our country” (Tocqueville 2010, 59). He thus presents the Compact as a half-Lockean document—an amalgam of Enlightenment social contract theory and Old Testament Judaism, in which prepolitical individuals come together and voluntarily form a society that places restrictions on their natural liberties not just for the sake of their own preservation, but also for the pursuit of certain higher responsibilities in devotion to God and country. But to achieve this presentation, Tocqueville’s version removes the settlers’ acknowledgement of their fidelity to King James I, and it adds the word “contract” where the original uses only the biblical term “covenant” (Tocqueville 2010, 59; cf. with note r on the same page). As Tocqueville recalls, “This took place in 1620” (35)—twenty-two years before Hobbes’s De Cive and thirty-one before Leviathan, works for which the Puritans would have had little sympathy. Tyrannical Laws and a Beautiful Definition of Freedom What, then, does Tocqueville accomplish by reading this half-liberal, halfbiblical understanding of politics into what he suggests is America’s founding moment? The leading possibility, I suggest, is that, by doing so, he portrays an idealized but tension-ridden picture of what democracy in the United States stands for—one that can serve as a corrective to the Enlightenment rationalism, with its accompanying theological outlook, which is dominant in the 1830s. Just such a tension is present in the Puritan legislation that Tocqueville now discusses and that he claims reveals the password to America’s “great social enigma” (37). Tocqueville’s commentary on the Puritans’ laws focuses on Connecticut’s Code of 1650, “one of the most characteristic” of the era (37). In their commitment to liberty, the framers of the American Constitution of 1789 began

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with political laws about institutional arrangements, and they amended to this a Bill of Rights, most of which provides protections for the criminally accused. The legislators of Connecticut, by contrast, gave greater importance to religious and moral obligations, and they therefore “occupied themselves first with penal laws” (37). They enacted a series of measures Tocqueville calls “bizarre” and “tyrannical,” literally copied from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, mandating capital punishment for blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and insulting one’s parents, as well as for idolatry and other forms of religious dissent. Excessively “preoccupied with . . . maintaining moral order and good mores,” these laws “constantly penetrate into the domain of conscience,” forcing church attendance through fines and handing down punishments—“a fine, the whip, or marriage”—for moral offenses like drunkenness, lying, and “keeping company among unmarried people” (38–39). But even as Tocqueville faults the Puritan legislator for “forgetting completely the great principles of religious liberty he himself demanded in Europe” (39), he also claims their society was “enlightened” and its “mores mild,” which ensured that the severe punishments mandated by the law were seldom carried out: “One never saw the death penalty laid down more profusely in the laws, or applied to fewer of the guilty” (38). Despite their acknowledged concern with sorcery, Tocqueville’s Puritans were not those who would conduct witch trials at Salem. Instead, they presented the bizarre spectacle of an enlightened society in which that sort of religious zealotry has largely fallen by the wayside but that nonetheless modeled its laws on the illiberal theocratic code of the Pentateuch, with the result that this legislation was rarely enforced. This characterization of Puritan theocracy, however, is odd to say the least. History is replete with examples of laws that have fallen into disuse while remaining on the books (cf. 682), but it is something else altogether for a community to pass such laws with the intention of not enforcing them (or at least immediately declining to do so). In the footnotes to this chapter, Tocqueville does record a handful of instances in which people were executed for violating these laws (cf. 38 n. 19), which may encourage the reader to search his sources for others, or at least to question how mild and tolerant the Puritans’ mores actually were. But be that as it may, in his detailed endnotes Tocqueville acknowledges that within two generations the “rigor” of the Puritans was “much weakened” (680), not to say corrupted. He quotes a 1663 sermon castigating New Englanders for forgetting “that they are originally a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade,” and for devoting themselves to “increasing cent per cent” (688). It did not take long for Boston to become a commercial hub and for attention to worldly gain to rival Christian virtue.

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Now, if Tocqueville’s concern is to address the needs of a democratic society that is eroding religion, and thus undermining an essential tool for combating the effects of individualism and commercialism, his account of American politics in the seventeenth century may be meant as a model showing how some salutary restrictions might be placed on the excessively materialistic democracy of the 1830s.23 Notable in this regard is Tocqueville’s statement that Connecticut’s “bizarre” and “tyrannical” penal laws “were not imposed” but “were voted by the free concurrence of all the interested persons themselves.” This appears to be the very first American instance of majority tyranny, which has such a prominent place in Tocqueville’s analysis of the United States. In many instances it took the same kind of extralegal form that Tocqueville would find in the 1830s, as mores, “more austere and more puritanical than the laws,” regulated aspects of behavior that even these intrusive regulations did not touch (39). But while Tocqueville calls these measures shameful “lapses,” he leaves no doubt that he admires something of the spirit behind them—indeed, the vehicle by which this censoriousness was put into practice was that most famous of all Tocquevillian remedies for the ills of democracy, the “association” (39). In choosing ancient Israel as their model for political virtue, the Puritans crossed the line from the sublime to the ridiculous. Animated by a spirit of persecution “that still fermented in the depth of souls,” they copied “the legislation of a rude and half-civilized people” (38). But their error in this was, in its way, praiseworthy. Because their legislation sought to endow freedom with an active, political direction, it contained the germ of a solution for combating individualism by leading citizens to communal attachments. In an 1843 letter to Arthur de Gobineau, Tocqueville credits Christianity with inciting a social revolution that toppled the “rude and half-savage virtues” of the ancient republic. Even so, echoing the criticisms of Spinoza—as well as Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Gibbon—he laments that the “duties of men among themselves as well as in their capacity of citizens, the duties of citizens to their fatherland, in brief, the public virtues seem to me to have been inadequately defined and considerably neglected within the moral system of Christianity” (Tocqueville 1959, 192). By modeling their politics on the Old Testament rather than the New, the Puritans in Tocqueville’s presentation accomplished two major ends. First, they introduced into a democratic society a spirit of moral restriction—a salutary mechanism by which majorities helped preserve liberty by curtailing its exercise. Thus, Tocqueville writes that Connecticut’s draconian penal laws were “in a way connected to” another “body of political laws which . . . anticipate from very far the spirit of freedom

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in our age” (39; emphasis added). These latter provisions contained many of the liberal “principles on which modern constitutions rest” (39), including universal suffrage, “the intervention of the people in public affairs,” trial by jury, and that sine qua non of Lockean politics, “free voting of taxes” (39–40). At the same time—and this is the Puritans’ second major accomplishment— Connecticut’s political legislation also contained republican or communitarian aspects that, by organizing political life around duties rather than rights, helped remedy those defects in modern morality Tocqueville complained of to Gobineau. The Code of 1650 obliged citizens to bear arms and serve in the militia (40), and it established “a real, active, altogether democratic and republican political life” centered in the township, where citizens practiced direct democracy into Tocqueville’s time. “In the New England township the law of representation is not followed. Affairs that touch the interest of all are treated in the public square and within the general assembly of citizens, as in Athens” (40). The Puritan political laws as Tocqueville describes them thus establish a hybrid between the modern and classical republics. New England’s citizens enjoy the individual autonomy protected by the modern liberal tradition, but they have used that autonomy to establish a mini-polis in which they are obligated to deliberate in common and to be concerned with their neighbors’ affairs in areas affecting the community’s well-being. In this, they act similarly to Spinoza’s democratic citizens, except that they view those obligations as primary and choice-worthy in themselves—they are not, or not only, viewed as means to self-fulfillment. In New England, the “law enters into a thousand diverse details” (41) of ordinary life, and by giving ordinary citizens responsibility for solving community problems, it fosters their moral and intellectual improvement. The same Connecticut law that made religious dissent a capital crime also established America’s first systems of public welfare and education. As an aspect of the latter, it created a mechanism for punishing parents who neglected their children’s education (41–42).24 Because these laws were established democratically—as products of civic participation and deliberation rather than administrative fiat—they are signs of democracy’s potential vitality. Where “interests, passions, duties, and rights” are “grouped around the township’s individuality and strongly attached to it, . . . one sees a real, active, altogether democratic and republican political life reigning” (40). But since the Puritans’ (praiseworthy) political laws were “connected to” their (tyrannical) penal laws, Tocqueville’s account of their legislation raises a crucial question: is it possible to have one without the other? Can the active duties and positive obligations Tocqueville salutes here exist in the absence

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of the intrusive civil religion and sumptuary laws he condemns? Rejecting “any religious supremacy,” Puritanism was a fervent Protestantism that did not draw its strength from any kind of church authority outside and above the people. Like everything else democratic, it was a bottom-up affair, and because “politics and religion were in accord” (275) in this, any change in public opinion could conceivably sink the entire architecture. Such considerations become especially pressing when, at the climax of chapter 2, Tocqueville indicates his admiration for the spirit of the Puritans’ laws, if not for their letter. He does this via a lengthy quotation of what he calls John Winthrop’s “beautiful definition of freedom.” According to that definition, there are two kinds of liberty, the first of which is “a kind of corrupt liberty, the use of which is common to animals as it is to man” (Tocqueville 2010, 68). This understanding of liberty as the freedom “of doing whatever you please”— subject to respecting a similar right in others—is virtually identical to that of the theoretical founders of modern liberalism.25 Because it possesses a strictly negative orientation, it can lead to no good greater than the preservation of life and the increase of its comforts. In Winthrop’s estimation, that means it can produce nothing distinctly human, which is to say, nothing for which it is worthwhile to die. Entirely apolitical, it “is the enemy of all authority” and “it suffers all rules with impatience” (Tocqueville 2010, 68–69). It remains a core tenet of modern liberal thought that our only obligations are those we give ourselves (see esp. Rawls 2005, 221–22). As Spinoza made clear through his continual juxtapositions of freedom and obedience, such an understanding of politics deprives obligation of moral legitimacy: because truly autonomous individuals cannot bind themselves to a contract forever and remain such, utility is the sole criteria of any properly liberal politics (cf. 2004, xvi.20 and xiv.7). In Tocqueville’s estimation (as voiced by Winthrop) the understanding of liberty underlying this view ultimately saps law of all moral legitimacy, for it cannot accept—indeed, it must undermine—those sacrifices and those limitations on freedom that all truly political associations demand. Moreover, and more dangerously, this notion of freedom flatters and deceives us into becoming “inferior to ourselves” because it erodes that sense of self-overcoming—of elevation above oneself—that Tocqueville will soon claim in his own name to be the distinguishing feature of humanity (283–84). As an alternative, Winthrop proposes another conception of liberty, which he terms a “civil,” “moral,” and “holy liberty”—one he says “we must defend at all costs, and if necessary, at the risk of our life:” this is “the liberty to do without fear all that is just and good” (Tocqueville 2010, 69). Positive liberty, a liberty that exists only for the sake of self-perfection through

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the performance of moral duty, appears essential for instilling those noble and immaterial sentiments that sometimes lead human beings to renounce their existence, but in the absence of which that existence is felt to be without purpose. As Tocqueville’s whole account of the Puritans has suggested, the achievement of that end, in his estimation, requires not unrestricted freedom to make the right choice but moral restrictions, rooted in communal piety and serving an educative function. Summing up, this whole account of America’s point of departure suggests a powerful (if paradoxical) means by which that restriction could be provided. Tocqueville’s description of the spirit of the Puritans’ laws has been ahistorical and inventive. He claims they combined their ardor for religion and their zeal for divine law with direct democracy, mild mores, and a spirit of tolerance. He thus reads back into the outlook of a premodern and Christian people certain Enlightenment-inspired ideas that were alien to them. In so doing, however, he creates, and puts forward as the foundation of American political and religious life, an outlook that is partly modern, partly biblical, and (considering the stress Tocqueville places on Athenian-style democracy in the township), partly classical as well. This artful, fictional picture of the point of departure therefore shows how a healthy tension could be established between certain fundamentally opposed conceptions of political life. It provides an allegorical and illustrative example of how a religion rooted in public opinion could provide the moral restrictions democracy needs to preserve itself in liberty—a process that is in function similar to that described in Tocqueville’s infamous account of majority tyranny but serves a beneficent end. To rely on such a power is perhaps unsettling, though Tocqueville’s modernizing account of the Puritans, which smooths out their rough and tyrannical edges somewhat, may make that problem harder to recognize.26 But even if Tocqueville’s account deemphasizes those rough edges, it also reveals them. It makes plain that the Puritans were not liberals. They had no understanding that church and state should be separate or that the full force of the law should not be used to instill piety. Tocqueville faults them for this, though they might respond (and Spinoza would agree, his new presentation of Christianity notwithstanding) that he is faulting them for seeking to live a truly biblical life—for being Christians. In the same way that the Puritans were not truly liberal, so too, as we will see next, the Americans of the nineteenth century are not deeply pious—at least not in any way the Puritans would recognize. So while Tocqueville’s account of the point of departure elucidates why his political science sees a need for religion to serve a positive role in democracy, and while it indicates what that role should be, it

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also points to some of the problems and political obstacles it is sure to face. To repeat, Tocqueville’s solution as presented in this chapter is that a religion rooted in public opinion, by looking to a moral standard outside the political world, has the capacity to restrain public opinion and forestall some of its most dangerous excesses. But, as some of Tocqueville’s friendly critics have asked (e.g., Zuckert 1981, 272–73), is it really probable or even possible that democracy will voluntarily restrain itself in this way, especially when majority opinion has become considerably alienated from the kind of sincere religious faith the Puritans possessed?

Religion as a Political Institution Tocqueville’s thematic account of religion in volume 1 paints an undeniably positive portrait. He gives every surface impression that America’s foundational marriage of the spirits of religion and freedom has endured (282) and that the “democratic and republican” Christianity of its first settlers remains robust (275). America is “the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over souls” (278), and this, Tocqueville says, is precisely because of its separation of church and state: “In America, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been in certain times and among certain peoples, but its influence is more lasting. It is reduced to its own strength, which no one can take away from it; it acts in one sphere only, but it covers the whole of it and dominates it without effort” (286). Because religion never mixes directly in American politics, and because it remains untainted by party association, it is rooted only in the natural “desire for immortality that torments the hearts of all men equally” (284). As a result, its moral authority and capacity to restrain public opinion remain uncompromised. “It is when it does not speak of freedom that it best teaches Americans the art of being free” (278). Thus, Tocqueville famously concludes, religion is “the first of their political institutions” (280). The apparent strength of American piety and its presumed harmony with both liberalism and democracy are of great theoretical as well as political importance, because Tocqueville suggests that they reveal a critical and characteristic error of Enlightenment thought: “The philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual weakening of beliefs in an altogether simple fashion. Religious zeal, they said, will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase.” But America’s example shows that “the facts do not accord with this theory” (282), for piety there “exercises the greatest empire”

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in a country that “is at the same time the most enlightened and most free” (278). As Tocqueville indicates in The Old Regime and in his 1852 speech, it was the intellectual heirs of these eighteenth-century thinkers who endowed the French Revolution with its enduring hostility to Christianity. Following Spinoza, these philosophers considered religion an ally of monarchy because they placed its origins in poverty, ignorance, and despotism, and if they did not expect it to disappear completely under liberal democracy, they predicted that the diffusion of science, the increase of wealth, and the spread of political freedom would dampen zealotry (cf. Spinoza 2004, pref.5–6, 33 with xx.11; Herold 2013; Israel 2001, 709–20). While Tocqueville does not single out any particular eighteenth-century thinkers as influential in popularizing these ideas, his characterization of their project recalls Montesquieu’s famous declaration that the surest way to attack religion is by favor, or by the hope of wealth that characterizes life in a commercial republic (Montesquieu 1989, xxv.12; cf. Bartlett 2001, 30–32). As Pangle has shown (2010, 99–130), Montesquieu’s project can be seen as an attempt to implement this essentially Spinozistic vision in which commerce and material comfort provide mundane satisfactions for the longing for immortality. Although elements of this project were espoused by the most radical of the American Founders,27 Tocqueville’s surface impression is that it should be regarded as an exclusively European phenomenon—although there it has become dominant, so much so that the continent’s elite holds that human happiness lacks nothing “except to believe with Spinoza in the eternity of the world and to assert with Cabanis that the brain secretes thought” (281). In this sole explicit mention of Spinoza, Tocqueville draws a clear contrast between the alleged Puritanism of the Americans and the Radical Enlightenment of his fellow countrymen. Subsequently, in his chapter on pantheism, he suggests Spinozism has had the greatest influence in shaping the intellectual outlook of nineteenth-century Europe (425–26). America’s Reasonable Christianity Tocqueville’s surface impression, then, is that in America a sincere but democratic and republican piety has bucked the predictions of the Enlightenment philosophers, whereas in Europe their project has resulted (at best) in bitter social conflict and a political atmosphere unfavorable to freedom. But it is necessary to look in more detail at Tocqueville’s presentation of American piety. After all, his declaration that the United States is “still the place in the world where the Christian religion has most preserved genuine powers over

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souls” (278; emphasis added) is carefully phrased. “In America one sees one of the freest and most enlightened peoples in the world eagerly fulfill all the external duties of religion” (282; emphasis added). But might that religion be limited in its capacity to penetrate to the depths of souls, as Owen argues (2015, chap. 4)? At the conclusion of his account of the Puritans, Tocqueville sums up the terms of the American marriage of the spirits of religion and freedom: although the two have been “incorporated somehow into one another,” they also (paradoxically) remain “perfectly distinct” (43). Neither religion nor freedom has had to sacrifice its fundamental character, but the relationship between them is no mere alliance. Instead, the Puritans have bequeathed to the Americans the notion of a bifurcated world. Religion and freedom are seen as separate: the one is the domain of morality, the other of politics. In the latter, unlimited innovation is permitted, but when the human spirit approaches the former, “it halts; trembling, it leaves off the use of its most formidable faculties” and “bows with respect before truths it accepts without discussion” (43). But when it comes to issues of morality and politics, can the human mind truly remain divided in this way? In his volume 1 account of religion, Tocqueville says our minds will always regulate politics and religion in the same manner. They will “harmonize the earth with Heaven,” as the Puritans did in adopting a “democratic and republican” Christianity (275). The bifurcation of the world Tocqueville observes in America, then, actually appears not to be an amalgam or a tension between two competing worldviews but rather a particular and comprehensive worldview in itself. As Spinoza had suggested through the Treatise’s title, religion and politics (and still less politics and morality) ultimately cannot be separate. Since politics is the domain of moral action, it must be governed by the same standard determining the rules of moral behavior. American religion “sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man” and “a field left by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence.” It is the product of a specific theology holding that the use of reason and free will is permitted or required by God and that the separation of church and state—or the division between the religious and political worlds—reflects a single truth beneficial to religion. Religion “knows that its empire is all the better established when it reigns by its own strength alone and dominates over hearts without support.” At the same time, freedom “sees in religion” not only a protector of mores and a guardian of its longterm survival but also “the cradle of its infancy” and “the divine source of its rights” (43–44). For the spirits of religion and freedom to be “incorporated somehow into one another” partisans of liberal freedom must believe that

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religion gave birth to politics—as Tocqueville suggests of America—or that modern notions of rights are divinely sanctioned. Politics, in other words, must rewrite religion. As my account of Spinoza has shown, and as others have demonstrated of other modern authors, the liberal Enlightenment was characterized by a project seeking to do precisely this (Herold 2013, 2014; Owen 2015; Pangle 1988, 2010; Stauffer 2018; Yaffe 2004). And as some of these scholars have also noted, although Tocqueville does not draw this connection, the outlook of America’s Christians as he describes it bears a striking resemblance to the theology of John Locke (cf. also Rabieh 1991, 933–34).28 In this, Christianity is as reasonable, and as liberal (or “republican”), as everything else American (cf. Curti 1937): “It submits the truths of the other world to individual reason, as politics abandons to the good sense of all the care of their interests, and it grants that each man freely take the way that will lead him to heaven, in the same manner that the law recognizes in each citizen the right to choose his government” (381; cf. Locke 1983, 28–29). More particularly, the American clergy not only endorses separation of church and state on theological grounds (283) but also gives its blessing to a general toleration of religious opinions. In doing so, it de-emphasizes the importance of dogma, and hence of denominational differences,29 reducing Christianity to a universal moral teaching supportive of liberal democracy and commercial prosperity (278, 423; cf. Locke 1965, 154, para. 222).30 Tocqueville even heard from American clergymen that sincerely held errors “cannot be condemnable in the eyes of God . . . and that there is no more sin in erring in matters of government than in being mistaken about the manner in which one must build a dwelling or plow a furrow” (283; cf. Locke 1983, 26–27). But if the Americans follow Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity and Letter Concerning Toleration in de-emphasizing the role of doctrine in Christian faith, they do so even more in stressing Christianity’s civic necessity (cf. Locke 1965, 128, para. 172). Like Locke, Tocqueville’s Americans effectively refuse to tolerate atheists, although on the secular ground that the promises underlying the social contract, especially sworn testimony in courts of law, depends on belief in “a God” (Locke 1983, 51; cf. 280 n. 3)—and from society’s point of view, any God supportive of liberal morality will do (278). With some professing Christian dogmas because they believe them and others doing so “because they are afraid of not looking like they believe them,” Christianity reigns in America “on the admission of all” (279), and Tocqueville describes how this democratically established religion imposes a set of salutary moral restrictions that are essential for freedom’s survival. Christianity’s “empire

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over intelligence” (279) codifies unwritten rules and establishes boundaries confining political innovation. Because America’s women are pious, the home life they create establishes a healthy limit to the commercialism of their husbands, which reduces the agitations befalling the political sphere (279). America has no revolutionaries and if it ever got them they would lack followers: “Up to now, no one has . . . dared to advance” the “impious maxim” that “everything is permitted in the interest of society.” “So, therefore, at the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything” (280). But Tocqueville says that it “is also from this [civic] point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves consider religious beliefs. I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion—for who can read to the bottom of hearts?—but I am sure that they believe it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion does not belong only to one class of citizens or to one party, but to the entire nation; one finds it in all ranks” (280). So although the religious landscape of Tocqueville’s America is superficially diverse—with “an innumerable multitude of sects” (278)—that diversity hides an underlying uniformity: “There reigns so to speak only a single current in the human mind” (277). No American religious doctrine “shows itself hostile to democratic and republican institutions” (277). More so, every American believes that Christian and liberal morality are identical or nearly so and therefore that Christian faith is essential for the survival of republican institutions for all the reasons Tocqueville himself articulates: “Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other.” Tocqueville stresses that “among them, this”—not Christianity itself, but its union with patriotism—“is not one of those sterile beliefs” that has been merely inherited from the past (281; emphasis added). In the 1830s, this Christian-republican fusion is vibrant and brimming with what Tocqueville positively describes as a restive and spirited energy (cf. D. J. Stauffer 2018). He notes how Americans associate to send clergy to the frontier—undoubtedly a perilous enterprise—because they are convinced that if the new states formed there are not religious they will not be free, and if they are not free, they will threaten the liberty and prosperity of the present Union (281). Viewing religion through the prism of enlightened selfishness, and taking into account their interests in this world as well as the next, Tocqueville’s Americans are united not only by common religious views but also by common views about religion. They “all have the same manner of viewing

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religion” (358) and perceive it “in the same light” (423). But again, that manner of viewing religion assimilates piety almost entirely to patriotism or moral commitment to liberal democracy. Tocqueville reports attending a “political gathering” in support of Polish independence that featured “a priest clothed in ecclesiastical habit” who offered a prayer that Tocqueville dutifully recorded. This is the only direct transcription of the content of nineteenthcentury religion in Democracy in America, and, when compared to the outlook of Puritans like Morton (cf. again 33–34), it makes clear just how far Christianity had strayed from its biblical foundations in the preceding two centuries. Tocqueville’s priest recalls the American Revolution: he proclaims the sacred character of a right to national independence, and he asks God to eradicate despotism and inequality and to rouse the French to fight for liberty once again, but were it not for a closing mention of the Crucifixion and an invocation of Jesus’s name, there would be little to identify this prayer as particularly Christian (277). Indeed, one could imagine civic-minded prayers that omit such closing statements in order to accommodate more religious diversity and that do so without sacrificing the notion that divinity is on the side of liberal democracy.31 In “the United States,” Tocqueville says, “religious zeal constantly warms itself at the hearth of patriotism” (281). Contrary to his initial impression, it is not religion that keeps liberal democracy strong and healthy; it is liberal democracy that invigorates religion. But if that is so, both democracy and religion in America may be faced with a grave challenge, albeit one Tocqueville’s largely positive presentation in volume 1 may lead us to overlook. In the Americans’ opinion, a belief in Christianity is needed to preserve liberal democracy, but it now appears that the belief in liberal democracy is actually the crucial element sustaining Christianity. With democracy and religion each seeking a foundation in the other, the logic of American civil religion is circular, and so could eventually unravel. The Americans follow Locke in believing that Christianity teaches a basic morality of toleration and prosperity, but they are also attached to it because they agree with him that supernatural sanctions are necessary to support that morality. However, as several scholars have noted (e.g., Manent 1996, 91), if their belief in Christianity’s utility is actually stronger than their belief in its truth, their piety may have a hollow core. Concluding his discussion of religion in volume 1, Tocqueville briefly articulates how deep doubt and apparently zealous belief can advance together—or how religion can become politically authoritative in an age characterized by “negative doctrines” that attack the truth of all religions. At such times, men “let the object of their dearest hopes escape them almost by forgetting. . . . In ceasing to

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believe religion true, the unbeliever continues to judge it useful. Considering religious beliefs under a human aspect, he recognizes their empire over mores, their influence on laws. He understands how they can make men live in peace and prepare them gently for death. He therefore regrets his faith after he has lost it, and deprived of a good of which he knows the entire value, he fears to take it away from those who still possess it” (286). Tocqueville has attributed exactly these sentiments to the Americans.32 Though he has given every impression that their liberal and patriotic Christianity remains robust, he has also suggested that the authority of that religion, like many officially established faiths, may suffer from more doubt than is apparent from the outside. In so doing, he has also shown how the external religious consensus of the 1830s could give way to the secularization of thought and life that occurred in the United States in the twentieth century (and was present already in Tocqueville’s Europe). “With those who do not believe hiding their disbelief and those who believe showing their faith, a public opinion in favor of religion is produced; people love it, sustain it, and honor it, and one must penetrate to the bottom of their souls to discover the wounds it has received” (287). The gulf between Europe and America, then, is not, as Tocqueville originally suggested, between the Radical Enlightenment and Christianity. It is between the Enlightenment’s radical and moderate strains. Following Locke rather than Spinoza, Americans believe religion necessary to support a morality of individual freedom, economic acquisition, and popular sovereignty.33 But Tocqueville implicitly suggests that this Lockean compromise is untenable;34 in the long-run, political life in America will tend in a European, Spinozistic direction, with its accompanying dangers. Religion in Human Nature and in America One common criticism of Tocqueville concerns his apparent support for the Americans’ “religious functionalism” (Kessler 1977; 1994, 52–54; Lively 1965, 196–99; Zetterbaum 1967, 119–22)—his seeming belief that religion can remain strong when it is valued for its utility rather than its truth. Another version of this criticism faults Tocqueville for believing that a religion founded in the opinion of the majority could serve as a counterweight to that majority’s impulses, especially when those impulses have been shaped by the very desire for commercial prosperity that Tocqueville would have Christianity restrain (cf. Zuckert 1981, 272–73).35 As we have seen, however, there is evidence Tocqueville was well aware of the weaknesses in American piety, and it is possible to view his descriptions of its compromises with

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materialism and democracy in the nineteenth century as the initial stages of a more complete secularization. His positive surface impression of Christianity in the United States may therefore be intended primarily to do what he says doubters in skeptical ages should: to hide religion’s wounds, to preserve its life as long as possible, and to do everything possible to avoid shaking the faith of those who have not yet lost theirs. One of the chief issues besetting American religion is that, in reducing Christianity to a tolerant moral teaching, it has threatened the core beliefs that give it life and substance and that underlie that moral teaching itself. “There is almost no human action, however particular one supposes it, that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them” (417). Religious dogma therefore imposes “a salutary yoke on the intellect” that, even “if it does not save men in the other world, . . . is at least very useful to their happiness and greatness in this one” (418). (Here again we may be reminded of the Puritans’ paradoxical pursuit of what Tocqueville called an intellectual good). By contrast, “when religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each becomes accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about matters that most interest those like him and himself; one defends one’s opinions badly or abandons them, and as one despairs of being able to resolve by oneself the greatest problems that human destiny presents, one is reduced, like a coward, to not thinking about them at all” (418). While Tocqueville is careful to convey a positive impression of American Christianity in Democracy in America, some of his letters suggest much more bluntly that religion there is approaching this dangerous point of doubt and indifference. Writing from New York in 1831 to his cousin Kergorlay,36 Tocqueville says (as in his published work) that the foreign visitor, on first arriving in the United States, is inevitably impressed by the great “practical exactitude that accompanies the practice of religion.” The sabbath is strictly observed, and both law and the more powerful force of public opinion effectively command Americans to attend church and “abstain from all amusements” on Sundays. But Tocqueville makes a distinction between this external piety and its internal hold over souls: “Nevertheless, either I am badly mistaken or there is a great store of doubt and indifference hidden underneath these external forms. Political passion is not mixed, as it is in our country, with irreligion, but even so religion does not have any more power. It is a very strong impulse that was given in days gone by and which is now expiring day by day” (Tocqueville 1985, 48).

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This weakening of sincere religious faith has to do not only with the reduction of Christianity to “the platitudes of morality” (Tocqueville 1985, 49) but also with the theological prerequisites for toleration. Tocqueville continues his observations to Kergorlay by noting that faith in Protestant churches is “evidently inert.” There, “you hear them speak of morality; of dogma not a word, nothing that could in any way shock a neighbor, nothing that could reveal the hint of dissidence. The human spirit loves to plunge itself into abstractions of dogma, discussions which are especially appropriate to a religious doctrine, whenever a belief has seized it strongly; the Americans themselves were formerly like that. This so-called tolerance . . . in my opinion, is nothing but a huge indifference” (Tocqueville 1985, 49). The very requirements of a religiously diverse society inevitably promote a superficiality toward those essential elements of each religion that are most meaningful for believers37 and that Tocqueville believes essential for human happiness and greatness. That superficiality does create doctrinal homogeneity across denominations—Tocqueville reports hearing the same things preached in all Protestant churches—but the resulting theology is too shallow to be sustainable. America’s Protestants live in “a milieu which is hardly satisfying, but which is tranquil. . . . They live and die in compromises, without ever concerning themselves with reaching the depths of things.” As a consequence, “they no longer recruit anyone” (Tocqueville 1985, 50). In contrast, Tocqueville tells Kergorlay, the American Catholic Church is dynamic and growing, and it is so precisely because, being less neighborly and more illiberal, it can offer the kind of spiritual satisfactions Protestant churches cannot. In volume 1 of Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes American Catholics as “the most democratic and republican class there is in the United States” (275). He explains that Catholic support for democracy has a firm theological root in the equality of all congregants before the priest and of all human beings before God. But Catholicism has much less theological resonance with liberal republicanism: “Catholicism is like an absolute monarchy. Remove the prince and conditions are more equal in it than in republics” (276). American Catholics have embraced equality on religious grounds, but they have accepted individual rights on prudential or utilitarian ones. “Most Catholics are poor, and they need all citizens to govern in order to come to government themselves. Catholics are in the minority, and they need all rights to be respected to be assured of the free exercise of theirs. These two causes drive them even without their knowing it toward political doctrines that they would perhaps adopt with less eagerness if they were wealthy and predominant” (276). Writing to Kergorlay, Tocqueville is blunter. America’s “fistful of Catholics . . . are making

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use of the tolerance of their ancient adversaries,” but they “are staying basically as intolerant as they have always been, as intolerant in a word as people who believe. . . . It even seems to me that their dogma on liberty of conscience is pretty much the same as in Europe, and I am not sure that they would not be persecuting if they found themselves to be the strongest” (Tocqueville 1985, 50).38 But as lamentable as this may be, Tocqueville says American Catholicism is drawing converts “in a prodigious manner”; its believers are “full of zeal” because, in spite or because of the Church’s dogmatism, its leaders are not “businessmen of religion” like the Protestant clergy. They continue to preach a “religion of sacrifice” (Tocqueville 1985, 50). In Tocqueville’s understanding, then, liberal democracy faces an unsettling trade-off, which a future political science will need to manage attentively. Liberalism by its very nature promotes religious indifference in the name of tolerance, and Tocqueville clearly believes that tolerance to be a moral good. But indifference also renders liberal morality unsustainable in the absence of assistance from substantive religious doctrines that, by virtue of their inherent exclusivity, are no friends to liberalism.39 Presenting American Protestantism and Catholicism as embodiments of these trajectories, Tocqueville wonders aloud to Kergorlay “at the misery of our nature” (Tocqueville 1985, 53). One religion works powerfully on the will, it dominates the imagination, it gives rise to real and profound beliefs; but it divides the human race into the fortunate and the damned, creates divisions on earth that should exist only in the other life, the child of intolerance and fanaticism. The other preaches tolerance, attaches itself to reason, in effect its symbol; it obtains no power, it is an inert work, without strength and almost without life. That is enough on that subject, to which my imagination is constantly dragging me back and which in the end would drive me mad if I often examined it deeply. (Tocqueville 1985, 53) Tocqueville concludes this letter by asking Kergorlay to keep it for him so he can study it later (Tocqueville 1985, 59). Far from driving him mad, its raw reflections on the tension between liberalism and religion clearly form the basis for the mature and deliberative assessment of that problem in Democracy in America.40 In volume 2 especially, Tocqueville provides a blueprint for balancing these two opposing tendencies. As we will see in Chapter 4, he does this primarily

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by taking the reader through a comparison of democratic and aristocratic morality and religion. His ultimate conclusion is that the indifferent side of American religion is destined to prevail, for while Catholicism may be gaining converts, those converts still have had their outlooks shaped by democracy. Perhaps anticipating the changes the Catholic Church would undergo starting in the 1950s, Tocqueville describes how American priests have altered their religion considerably to satisfy the predispositions of their parishioners. Again, all Americans “perceive their religion in the same light,” and this rule applies to Catholics no less than to Protestants (423). After publishing volume 2, Tocqueville became convinced that indifference was so dominant in liberal society that it was well worth offsetting even at the cost of “a certain amount of intolerance.” Writing in 1843 to Gobineau, he argued that “the eventual damage to human morality” dogmatic and exclusivist religions cause “is far less than what would result from moral systems that have emancipated themselves from religion altogether. The longer I live the less I think that the peoples of the world can ever separate themselves from a positive religion; and this growing conviction makes me less concerned with these inconveniences that are eventually inherent in every religion, including the best” (Tocqueville 1959, 205–6). For Tocqueville, the “whole art of the legislator consists in discerning well and in advance” the “natural inclinations of human societies in order to know when one must aid the efforts of citizens and when it would rather be necessary to slow them down. For these obligations differ according to the times” (518). In an age when the Puritans’ old-time religion has become just that, and when the dangers of skepticism and enervation far outstrip those of theocracy and fanaticism, Tocqueville believes even convinced liberals should recognize that a small amount of dogmatism and exclusivity is a reasonable price to pay for the preservation of happiness and greatness. But why is religion so necessary for these ends? Tocqueville’s fullest treatment of this as yet unanswered question occurs in a subsection entitled “On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America,” which begins with the critique, mentioned earlier, of the “philosophers of the eighteenth century” (282). But that critique now appears not as straightforward as it first seemed, for it turns out that religion is actually not as powerful in the United States as Tocqueville’s surface impression indicates. The Enlightenment project of weakening religious zeal through the spread of freedom, enlightenment, and commercial well-being has been generally successful. But that success, Tocqueville now makes clear, is indicative of an even greater failure. To see why, it is helpful to begin by recognizing that this section also contains an explicit description of Tocqueville’s activity as a political scientist.

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He reports that on arriving in the United States, “it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye” (282). After noticing that, in contrast to the predictions of the eighteenth-century philosophers, religion and freedom apparently march hand in hand in America, Tocqueville says he felt his “desire to know the cause of this phenomenon growing daily” (282). “To learn it,” he “interrogated the faithful of all communions.” To priests and laymen alike, he says, “I expressed my astonishment and exposed my doubts;” and what he found through these conversations was that Americans universally attributed the power of religion in their country to separation of church and state (282–83). But Tocqueville refuses to stop there—this is the agreed-upon opinion of the parties, and, as he stated in the introduction to his work, his task in writing it was “to see, not differently, but further than the parties” (15). And so he continues: “I wanted to bring the facts back to causes: I wondered how it could happen that in diminishing the apparent force of a religion one came to increase its real power, and I believed it was not impossible to discover this.” The answer Tocqueville came to provides his fullest articulation of his understanding of human religious psychology: The short space of sixty years will never confine the whole imagination of man; the incomplete joys of this world will never suffice for his heart. Alone among all the beings, man shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense desire to exist; he scorns life and fears nothingness. These different instincts constantly drive his soul toward contemplation of another world, and it is religion that guides it there. Religion is therefore only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself. Only by a kind of aberration of the intellect and with the aid of a sort of moral violence exercised on their own nature do men stray from religious beliefs; an invincible inclination leads them back to them. Disbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state of humanity. (283–84) Now, scholars have pointed to statements like this one, in which Tocqueville describes an innate human need for the infinite, as evidence of his own religious faith.41 But Tocqueville repeatedly notes that his examination of religion is conducted “from a purely human point of view” (284, 419), and in this passage, by describing religion as “only a particular form of hope,” he provides an undoubtedly naturalistic explanation of its character and origins. But that naturalistic explanation nonetheless makes clear the difference between his humanistic portrait of our religious psychology and that of his

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Enlightenment predecessors. For, as we saw in our examination of Spinoza’s preface—in this sense highly representative—those predecessors stressed the primary role played by fear, ignorance, and the desire for well-being in giving rise to “superstition” (cf. also Hobbes 1994, chap. 12). Tocqueville, by contrast, not only gives priority to hope over fear, but he indicates that that hope is characterized by a scorn for life or a desire to overcome oneself. In contrast to Spinoza, for whom conatus—the desire of each thing to preserve itself in its particular state—is the core of all natural beings, Tocqueville’s religious psychology describes an instinct for self-overcoming that makes human beings exceptional. Tocqueville suggests that what characterizes a truly human soul is a paradoxical and perhaps tension-ridden desire to affirm oneself—to lay claim to an unending, immortal existence—by engaging in acts of willful self-sacrifice.42 Human beings are the only animals that can never simply be happy with life in this world, no matter how comfortable and long lasting it may be. Rather, the anxieties and frustrations they feel can be traced to a desire to transcend this life, both because they hope for something better and because they think a life devoted to the goods of this world alone is simply not worth living. Our conception of virtue is such that, whatever efforts one makes to prove its utility, “it will always be hard to make a man who does not wish to die live well” (504). But while we believe that to live only to stay alive is hardly human, we are also deeply conscious of the brevity of life and terrified by the prospect of nonexistence after death. In a human soul, these “different” and perhaps contradictory instincts always accompany one another, and when fused together they drive us to contemplate the idea of an eternal and perfect existence—one free not only of the pains and defects of this life but also of the spiritual dissatisfactions and anxieties that always accompany an existence devoted exclusively to temporal needs and pleasures. In Tocqueville’s understanding, it is religion—one particular form of hope—that in most cases serves as an intellectual guide that directs and shapes this desire for immortality. It fixes this longing on certain objects; it indicates the value, the necessity, and the character of self-sacrifice; and it articulates a vision of another world in which that sacrifice is rewarded. When religion is not present, however—as, for example, when it has been attacked by “negative” doctrines—this dual longing for self-affirmation and self-sacrifice remains, though without an influence to guide and shape it. And here, in Tocqueville’s comments about the “moral violence” such negative doctrines do to human nature, we can see Tocqueville’s implied critique of his Enlightenment predecessors. Because the early modern thinkers located religion’s natural origins in strictly self-interested and temporal concerns, they

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failed to recognize that human beings have an innate desire that will always cause them to scorn life for the sake of eternity. Moreover, because they overlooked this longing, their political science, which was integral in the creation of the American regime and way of life,43 necessarily left it uncontrolled and undirected. In other words, Tocqueville’s discussion of religion in volume 1, which is ostensibly meant to show the strength of American religion, actually reveals the ways in which “what ought to be, in our day, the natural state of men in the matter of religion” (286) is actually not present. In America, the link between religious hopes and religion itself has been broken. These hopes remain in a society where the churches are on their way to becoming empty, but this means that, because they lack a healthy outlet, they are beginning to manifest themselves in other, perhaps potentially dangerous forms.

CHAPTER 4

Tocqueville’s Political Science and the Democratic Soul

Tocqueville’s analysis of American religious sentiment provides an illustrative example of the methods of his political science more generally. By undertaking a series of conversations with Americans of all political and religious persuasions, he assesses the political results of the Enlightenment in a way alien to its spirit. In contrast to the early modern thinkers, who began from the state of nature—a thought experiment whose presupposition was that all politics is a convention that must be stripped away to understand human existence correctly—Tocqueville engages political life directly and on its own terms. Attempting “to see, not differently, but further than the parties” (15), he gives ordinary moral and political opinions a dignity the Enlightenment refused to bestow on them, and he forms an assessment of the thoughts and sentiments of a society shaped by modern natural and political science. While doing so, he uncovers dissatisfactions and anxieties that are evidence of the Enlightenment’s failure to carve out a place for certain innate religious hopes whose existence it largely denied. In the first part of this chapter, I will discuss these maladies affecting the democratic soul, noting the various forms in which Tocqueville discerned them and the dangers they might pose for the future. After this, I will examine the proposed solutions of Tocqueville’s political science for remedying these maladies and staving off these dangers, gauging their potential for success and the costs they may entail. Taken together, as we will see, Tocqueville’s reflections on democracy’s pathologies and on what can be done to combat them elucidate his thoughts on democracy’s moral worth, on the sacrifices it requires, and his hopes for the future of what he calls human greatness.

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The Maladies of the Democratic Soul America’s Anxiety and Discontent Foremost among the maladies afflicting the democratic character, and the one most obvious to the aristocratic visitor, is a peculiar and unexpected restiveness (inquiétude) that the Americans display in the midst of their historically unprecedented prosperity (“the happiest condition that exists in the world,” 511) . In the United States, where laws designed to consolidate wealth have been abolished (47), and where the opportunity of each to rise in the world thus appears unlimited, the love “of well-being has become the national and dominant taste; the great current of human passions bears from this direction; it carries everything along in its course” (507–8; cf. 47–52). That the “mother passion” (422) of democratic times should be not political or religious but commercial would have pleased Spinoza and those other Enlightenment thinkers who sought to turn our hopes toward “commodious living” in this world (Hobbes 1994, xiii.14; Locke 1982, chap. 5; Montesquieu 1989, xxv.12). It should be stressed that to Tocqueville as well, this development is neither surprising nor a source of unqualified opposition. He writes that the desire for prosperity is “natural to men who are excited and limited by the obscurity of their origin and the mediocrity of their fortune,” and it can be expected to color the sentiments of any society in which the middle class predominates (507). Indeed, it has a potentially noble side, for there “is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that incites men to want all to be strong and esteemed” (52). If it does not transform into resentment of those with more, the American dream of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps expresses an admirable element of democratic life. Nonetheless, Tocqueville’s account of religion in volume 1 has indicated that the Americans’ commercialism also causes them to hide from themselves the most characteristic, and indeed, the most egalitarian feature of the human condition. In his discussion of restiveness in volume 2, he describes how the “moral violence” democracy has done to human nature is evident first and foremost in the way the Americans do everything they can to distract themselves from confronting their mortality. In their quest for wealth, they are “constantly tormented” by a fear not only of poverty but also of not having chosen the quickest road to prosperity. “The inhabitant of the United States attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were assured of not dying, and he rushes so precipitately to grasp those that pass within his reach that one would say he fears at each instant he will cease to live before he

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has enjoyed them” (512). In this, the American reveals not a thoughtlessness about death but quite the opposite: he seeks an impossibly material satisfaction for his longing to overcome his mortal condition. He who has confined his heart solely to the search for the goods of this world is always in a hurry, for he has only a limited time to find them, take hold of them, and enjoy them. His remembrance of the brevity of life constantly spurs him. In addition to the goods that he possesses, at each instant he imagines a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying if he does not hasten. This thought fills him with troubles, fears, and regrets, and keeps his soul in a sort of unceasing trepidation that brings him to change his designs and his place at every moment. (512) Tormented by the dim recognition that economic prosperity alone cannot produce happiness but unable to conceive of any alternative, the Americans repeat the same behavior over and over again expecting a different result. They change cities, they switch jobs, they take up and drop political careers, they flit back and forth between every conceivable activity, and all in a vain and fruitless effort to obtain the “complete felicity that always flees from [them]” (512). Their restiveness, in other words, stems from their desire to avoid thinking about the fact that if their current path to material prosperity has not made them happy, then neither will the next one. But if America’s commercial society does everything it can to distract its inhabitants from death’s inevitability, perhaps its greatest failure can actually be seen in those Americans who go out of their way to seek it out. At the end of volume 1, Tocqueville describes the way Americans sometimes discover an outlet in their commercial ventures for what appears to be a passion for self-overcoming or self-sacrifice. Notably, he attributes the economic success—indeed, the commercial “greatness” (384)—of the American nation to the “sort of heroism” they put “into their manner of doing commerce” (387). Perhaps with some irony, he says American democracy has introduced the same innovation into business that the French revolutionary government introduced into warfare. The French effectively rewrote the rules of military engagement and “nearly destroyed the oldest monarchies of Europe” by showing themselves willing to endure hitherto unthinkable sacrifices of blood and treasure in the service of a great goal, and the “Americans have introduced something analogous into commerce. What the French did for victory, they do for low cost” (386). No European trader can compete with

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his American counterpart because none can match the asceticism and extraordinary fortitude he brings to his quest for fortune. The American navigator leaves Boston to go buy tea in China. He arrives at Canton, remains there a few days and comes back. In less than two years he has run over the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land only a single time. During a crossing of eight to ten months, he has drunk brackish water and lived on salted meat; he has struggled constantly against the sea, against illness, against boredom; but on his return he can sell the pound of tea for one penny less than the English merchant: the goal is attained. (387) Tocqueville’s description of this sailor is meant, I think, to be simultaneously impressive and humorous. It is impressive because it conveys a portrait of a kind of striving and an austerity—indeed, a nobility—of which only a few human beings are capable; but it also contains some of element of the absurd. “For an American,” Tocqueville says, “one’s entire life is spent as a time of revolution, a day of battle” (388). But the goals of that revolution, the objects fought for in that battle, are troublingly petty and unworthy of the fight. There is an obvious disconnect between the end sought by the American trader and the means he employs to attain it. As the old saying goes, he cannot take it with him if his ship goes down, and Tocqueville’s portrait of him suggests that he has little interest in ever pausing to enjoy the life that could be lived with the money he has earned. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether what really motivates him is an attraction to risk taking or self-sacrifice. In courting danger, he may be seeking not money per se, but instead some vague and undefined end that he has not thought much about or has recognized only very dimly. These same questions can also be posed about the American pioneers Tocqueville observes facing similar dangers to conquer nature and settle the West. He says these men and women are driven by “a passion stronger than a love of life”; their activity may have well-being as its ostensible end, but that end is hardly satisfying, with the result that for them “the desire for well-being has become a restive and ardent passion that increases while it is being satisfied.” Consequently, they have attained “fortune, but not happiness” (270). Indeed, since “the wildernesses are filling up” (298), Tocqueville foresees that the frontier will be unable to provide an outlet for self-sacrificial passions much longer. He thus provokes the question of what outlet such passions will have in an established and settled commercial society—such

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as our own—that directs human hopes almost exclusively toward material enrichment. And he provides some indication that such societies are in fact ill-equipped to address this problem in his thematic discussion of American restiveness. That discussion is most famous for its account, just mentioned, of the constant motion and anxiety filling American lives. On the surface, Tocqueville’s Americans seem living evidence of the Lockean proposition that the core of human psychology is “uneasiness.”1 Their continually agitated souls indicate a perpetual discontent with their circumstances, and their inability to cure that disquiet by changing those circumstances might seem proof of its ineradicable character: “One is at first astonished to contemplate the singular agitation displayed by so many happy men in the very midst of their abundance. The spectacle is, however, as old as the world; what is new is to see a whole people show it” (512). But although this malady has its roots in human nature, it is exacerbated by equality and is thus particularly pronounced in democracy. To Tocqueville, moreover, it originates not in the Lockean desire for economic power, but in something more spiritual from which the quest for such power distracts us. After describing the central place of material well-being in America, Tocqueville comments on religious “follies,” sudden outbreaks of “exalted spiritualism” (510) that seem to exist in tension with the typically mundane pursuits of almost all Americans: “From time to time bizarre sects arise [in the United States] that strive to open extraordinary roads to eternal happiness” (510). Tocqueville notes how everywhere in America, but especially on the frontier, one observes entire families eager to abandon their eastern prosperity and—at least “for several days and nights”—to forget “the care of their affairs and even the most pressing needs of the body” (510). America has always been home to the most straight-laced commercialism as well as to strange cults and untraditional spiritualism. While mainstream Christianity, having made its peace with the pursuit of well-being, is weakening in Tocqueville’s America, its void is being filled by raw outbreaks of otherworldly spiritualism that burst forth in spite or because of their incongruity with democracy’s “mother passion” (422). “This,” says Tocqueville, “should not surprise us.” Man did not give himself the taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal. These sublime instincts are not born of a caprice of his will: they have their immovable foundation in his nature; they exist despite his efforts. He can hinder and deform them, but not destroy them.

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The soul has needs that must be satisfied; and whatever care one takes to distract it from itself, it soon becomes bored, restive, and agitated amid enjoyments of the senses. (510) When the human desire for the eternal is artificially confined within materialist bonds, it can be counted on to burst forth, immoderately and even violently, in an equal and opposite reaction. Tocqueville likens the spiritual situation on the American frontier to that of the early Christian hermits who flocked to Egyptian deserts. In both cases, he suggests, religious zealotry must be understood as a reaction not to persecution but to hedonism. The martyrs and saints of early Christianity were spurred on by “the delights of Rome and the Epicurean philosophy of Greece” (511), and in America too, “I would be surprised if mysticism did not soon make progress in a people uniquely preoccupied with its own well-being” (511). Although Tocqueville does not explicitly draw this connection here, his analysis could be extended to explain the very origins, as well as the compelling attraction and rapid spread, of Christianity itself. But Tocqueville is not predicting that such religious outbreaks will be the norm rather than the exception in America. In his presentation, it is not average Americans who seek out such religious revivals, and even those who do tend to make material sacrifices only for a brief time. Because their “social state, circumstances, and laws” restrain the Americans “closely in the search for well-being,” these spiritual outbreaks should be seen as inevitable and necessary episodes of spiritual compensation. Those who feel the need let off a little steam for a week at a camp meeting before returning to their careers and worldly affairs. Nonetheless, Tocqueville’s brief account of these religious revivals suggests that if American materialism were to become more all-consuming than it already is—something Tocqueville’s account of the weakening of mainstream Christianity clearly predicts—the presence of these unaddressed spiritual needs could eventually pose a more serious danger, for by imprisoning the desire for the eternal “within limits from which it is seemingly not allowed to leave,” American commercialism risks ensuring that it will eventually seek to escape these fetters, bursting forth with pent-up energy in ways that transgress “the bounds of reason and common sense” (511). In a rather chilling declaration, Tocqueville predicts that if “the minds of the great majority of the human race were ever concentrated on the search for material goods alone,” one could expect “an enormous reaction” to occur (510). While religion may be weakening in the United States, religious desires clearly are not, and Tocqueville’s account of them therefore suggests that such

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desires may take on new and dangerous forms in an age when a return to traditional religion is unlikely.2 More commonly, however, the Americans’ spiritual dissatisfaction manifests itself in a general malaise—a lack of pride and general lowering of ambition—that Tocqueville found to be of greater concern. As we have just seen, the restiveness animating the Americans’ commercialism arises as a psychological response that enables them to avoid thinking about the purpose of their economic activity. Even in those moments when they do stop to enjoy their wealth, they appear “grave and almost sad . . . in their pleasures” (511). Tocqueville’s chapter on restiveness thus ends by noting the “singular melancholy” and the “disgust with life” that is endemic to democratic life: he notes that the number of suicides is increasing in France, while in America, where religious morality thus far remains intact, “madness is more common than everywhere else.” Forbidden by the prevailing mores from taking their own lives, Americans allow their reason to give way (514). To explain this calamity, Tocqueville draws a connection between the Americans’ restiveness and their passion for equality. Having destroyed all the aristocratic “prerogatives of birth and fortune” that formerly stood as barriers to equality of opportunity, they are surprised to discover that democracy itself poses a comparable and perhaps even more formidable obstacle: “The same equality that permits each citizen to conceive vast hopes renders all citizens individually weak. It limits their strength in all regards at the same time that it permits their desires to expand.” Democracy promises each the opportunity to rise as far as his talents and hard work will take him, but what makes this achievement possible in theory also renders it virtually impossible in practice. “When men are nearly alike and follow the same route, it is difficult indeed for any one of them to advance quickly and to penetrate the uniform crowd that surrounds him” (513). This is “tormenting and fatiguing to souls,” and democrats generally seek to overcome that fatigue by ratcheting up their demands for equality, the passion for which now grows in them with greater and greater intensity. In a way analogous to the pathologies of his commercial life, the American seeks to cope with the troubling recognition of the disconnect between democracy’s promise and its reality by doubling down on his hopes for it: he seeks to overcome the limitations caused by equality by demanding more and more of it. Tocqueville says democrats can enjoy freedom “without restiveness and without ardor,” but they will never achieve an “equality that is enough for them.” Even if they were to level social and political conditions completely, “the inequality of intellects would still remain,” which, coming “directly from

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God, will always escape the laws” (513). Thus, the democratic longing for equality, like the American sailor’s desire for that penny he will never spend, reveals itself as a rebellion against the natural or divinely ordered constraints of the human condition. In comparison to the American sailor, however, the ordinary democrat gripped by the longing for equality is more reflective about the futility of his desire: he succumbs to melancholy precisely because he recognizes the impossibility of attaining what he seeks. In a similar way, Tocqueville’s Americans prove to have a complicated relationship with their own commercialism, as can be seen from the pride they take—or seem to take—in their way of life. The third part of volume 2 contains a sequence of chapters on pride, honor, and ambition. Tocqueville begins these with some humorous reflections on America’s national vanity, which is more “restive and quarrelsome” than that of their English cousins. In “their relations with foreigners,” Americans “appear impatient at the least censure and insatiable for praise. The slimmest eulogy is agreeable to them and the greatest is rarely enough to satisfy them; they pester you at every moment to get you to praise them; and if you resist their entreaties, they praise themselves” (585). From these droll observations, however, Tocqueville concludes there is something “restive and envious” in the Americans’ pride: “One would say that, doubting their own merit, they want to have a picture of it before their eyes at each instant” (585). In contrast to the aristocratic Englishman, whose pride “has no need of nutriment” but “lives on itself,” the American is constantly singing his own praises in an effort to convince himself and others of the truth of his words. As Tocqueville’s examples show, he seems incapable of praising himself without also insulting his neighbors (see 585). So while the Americans’ pride at first appears robust, it requires only a little examination to see that it is hardly so. As Tocqueville concludes at the end of this sequence of chapters, what the Americans in fact “lack most . . . is pride” (604). They possess vanity, and even a kind of snobbery, but these “demanding and jealous” (586) sentiments arise from a consciousness of their own perceived inferiority, and thus from their lack of a pride they can consider truly deserved. And this, Tocqueville says, is precisely what democrats most require. As he puts it (in a statement to which we will soon return), “I would willingly trade several of our small virtues for this vice” (604). To see why he thinks this, what can be done about it, and how this consideration informs his estimation of democracy, we can turn now to Tocqueville’s chapters on honor and ambition.

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Pride, Honor, and Ambition in Democracy We have seen that the centerpiece of Spinoza’s project is the cultivation of a liberal and democratic pride—a pride in living, legislating, and thinking for oneself. Tocqueville’s observation that America’s liberal democracy lacks a healthy outlet for pride—and suffers because of it—thus markedly challenges Spinoza’s predictions for the kind of society that would most satisfy our human nature. The reasons for this are articulated in Tocqueville’s chapter “On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies” (II.3.18; 589), which contains his thematic reflections on our moral psychology—and an implicit criticism of Spinoza’s presuppositions. That chapter, however, is introduced and preceded by a brief one entitled “How the Appearance of Society in the United States Is at Once Agitated and Monotonous” (II.3.17; 587). Here, Tocqueville conveys the impressions, at first largely positive, of a thoughtful visitor from the old aristocracies of Europe on witnessing the spectacle of America’s industrial and commercial life. Observing the constant motion of a whole society devoted to economic growth and the conquest of nature, Tocqueville reports feeling impressed and spurred to reflection. “It seems that nothing is more apt to excite and nourish curiosity than the appearance of the United States. Fortunes, ideas, and laws there vary constantly. One would say that unmoving nature itself is moving, so much is it transformed daily by the hand of man” (587). The traveler’s excitement on witnessing this tumult is an echo of the great hopes, and the expectation of a better future, that animated this society’s founders. To those authors and statesmen who were its principal architects, the Enlightenment project to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate was a grand and noble experiment. It understood itself as devoted to an unprecedentedly ambitious goal, and, like Nathaniel Morton and his followers, those instrumental in its success could perhaps claim a few rays of deserved glory for themselves. But while this experiment may have been exciting and glorious to those who fought for it on the front lines, now that its triumph is complete the results leave something wanting. “In the long term,” Tocqueville says, “the sight of such an agitated society appears monotonous, and after having contemplated this picture of such movement for some time, the spectator gets bored” (587). Spinoza’s Enlightenment sought to liberate the human spirit by destroying the entrenched feudal hierarchy of the old aristocracies. While that goal was in its way noble—indeed, in the next chapter Tocqueville will call it the very essence of justice—the same aristocratic hierarchy that forced each man to

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remain “nearly fixed in his sphere” also produced a rich diversity of “passions, ideas, habits, and tastes”—for the great distance between classes under the ancien régime made men “prodigiously unalike” (587). Now that democracy has erased these ancient barriers, diversity has given way to uniformity: “All men are alike and do things that are nearly alike.” Individually, they “are subject . . . to great and continual vicissitudes,” but, considered from a distance, “the name of the actors alone is different, the play is the same” (587). Under aristocracy society was stagnant, which is to say that, by modern standards, it was miserably poor. The medieval elite lacked what today would be considered basic necessities. Democracy, by contrast, is agitated because it is filled with competition, but it is monotonous because that competition is exclusively economic. In aristocracies, the poor had no experience of material well-being and so were “not familiar enough with it to desire it” (507), while the rich, accustomed to wealth from birth, regarded well-being not as “the goal of life” but as “a manner of living” (507). They therefore would turn “their souls” to “some more difficult and greater undertaking” (506). Placed “in a permanent and hereditary manner above the crowd,” aristocracy’s governing class “naturally” conceived “a high-minded idea of itself and of man.” Without the need to consider their well-being, its members imagined a diverse set of “glorious enjoyments” and “magnificent goals” (436)—which often required the sacrifice of material comforts. Indeed, even “in the midst of material enjoyments,” aristocrats “often display a haughty scorn of these same enjoyments and find singular strength when they must be deprived of them.” The asceticism of some British imperialists in Tocqueville’s time comes to mind here, as does the stoicism of French émigrés. “All revolutions that have troubled or destroyed aristocracies have shown with what facility people accustomed to the superfluous can do without the necessary” (506). As Tocqueville suggested in the introduction, these sacrifices were the principal element in the set of reciprocal devotions among rulers and ruled that held aristocratic society together. In democracy, as Spinoza predicted, these have been replaced by commercial contracts among mutually selfinterested individuals (see Stauffer 2014). “When fellow citizens are all independent and indifferent, it is only by paying them that one can obtain the cooperation of each; this infinitely multiplies the use of wealth and increases the value of it” (587). Americans thus pour all their efforts into economic acquisition and into displaying their wealth to their neighbors. But Tocqueville notes that this behavior “comes from the fact not that their souls are smaller,” but because “the importance of money is really greater” in a democracy than it has ever been anywhere else. In other words, the Americans have

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the same depth of soul—the same intensity of passion and desire, the same complicated hopes—as their aristocratic forbearers, but they live in a society where, the privileges of “birth, condition, and profession” having vanished, “there remains scarcely anything but money” that can distinguish them “from their peers” (587). The long-term result is that, although our hopes and desires under democracy remain as powerful as they were before, they take on a homogenous character. “Men who live in democratic times have many passions; but most of their passions end in love of wealth or issue from it” (587). This gives them all “a family resemblance, and it is not slow to create a tiresome picture” (588). So even if the souls of Americans are not smaller than those of aristocrats, the fact that all their passions are directed to well-being creates a troubling paradox: they employ all the means at their souls’ disposal to aid and comfort their bodies. At the close of this short chapter, Tocqueville, recalling his inevitability thesis, claims that this American condition will soon characterize “almost all men of our day” (588). “Variety is disappearing from within the human species; the same manner of acting, thinking, and feeling is found in all the corners of the world. That comes not only from the fact that all peoples deal with each other more and copy each other more faithfully, but from the fact that in each country, men diverge further and further from the particular ideas and sentiments of a caste, a profession, or a family and simultaneously arrive at what depends more nearly on the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same” (588). While aristocracies featured a diversity of human types, democracy does not, and this is because, by directing the soul to the most basic needs all share in common, it seeks to bring the soul into conformity with the body. But how successful can such an attempt be? Tocqueville here strongly implies that this development portends the practical triumph of human nature over convention. It appears that, like travelers dispersed in a forest “in which all paths end at the same point,” we will all soon “arrive at what depends more nearly on the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same” (588). But since the “constitution of man” contains both body and soul, how likely is it that this democratic future will be a harmonious one? Tocqueville’s next two chapters are devoted to answering this question. II.3.18 is a comparison of honor in democracy and aristocracy, but it extends to an examination of the whole of our moral psychology. Tocqueville begins by remarking that men employ two methods of “public judgment” in assessing the actions of others: “Sometimes they judge them according to the simple notions of the just and the unjust that are widespread over all the earth;

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sometimes they appraise them with the aid of very particular notions that belong only to one country and one period” (589). The first of these— encapsulated in the “moral laws” of justice and notions of good and evil— is born in response to the “permanent and general needs” of the entire human race—needs that exist “in all places and all times.” The second, which Tocqueville terms “honor,” reflects the specific needs of “more restricted associations”—nations, classes, castes, and so on. But while justice may therefore represent the demands of nature and honor those of convention, an awareness of this dichotomy is only the beginning of an understanding of our moral psychology. Since everyone belongs both to humanity and to one (or more) of these smaller associations, our moral sensibilities are always composed of these two rival and often conflicting understandings of right and wrong. “Often it happens that these two rules differ; sometimes they combat each other; but they are never entirely confused with one another, nor do they ever destroy each other” (589). Put differently, since our nature requires us to live within particular societies governed by particular conventions, honor is in its way natural, even if its particular requirements may be arbitrary. But even when “men submit without hesitation and without murmur” to honor’s requirements, those of justice, of the general interests of humanity, continue to tug at them in the background—“They still feel, by a sort of obscure but powerful instinct, that there exists a more general, older, and more holy law which they sometimes disobey without ceasing to recognize” (589). Unlike Spinoza and the other social contract theorists, Tocqueville accepts natural right while also denying that human beings can be entirely liberated from the moral power of artificial associations. Whereas Spinoza is confident that, given the right education, we can become psychologically self-sufficient wholes, Tocqueville suggests we are perpetually conflicted. The human soul is characterized by a permanent tension between nature and convention. Now, although justice, or “simple virtue” (598), arises in response to humanity’s general needs, its ideas of “blame and shame” (589) are not strictly speaking necessary for its rules to be followed. Tocqueville says justice “lives on itself and is satisfied with its own witness” (598); it does not need extrinsic support from public opinion, and this is because its demands are few and easily seen by all as being in accord with “reason” (594, 598). The only example of the “holy law” of justice Tocqueville gives in this chapter is the prohibition against homicide (590). Justice, in other words, requires only passive obedience; if all human beings refrain from attacking each other, they will attain a common good while doing absolutely nothing for their neighbors. What Tocqueville calls “simple virtue” is therefore perfectly Hobbesian (cf. Carrese

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2016, 103). It does not demand—it may even forbid—acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, but it allows human beings (it would be wrong here to speak of “citizens”) to achieve a collective self-interest—understood in exclusively material terms—in security and prosperity. By contrast, since codes of honor exist to further the needs of particular groups that are set off from, or elevated above, the rest of humanity, they usually require exactly the kinds of active devotions that the laws of justice do not. They thus often stress the martial virtues, and they do so in ways that may be unjust, particularly when (as is often the case) these particular associations can flourish only by exploiting or dominating a larger group or the rest of humanity. Hence, the Romans, whose polity “was formed for the conquest of the world,” made the Latin words for “virtue” and “valor” synonymous (593). Similarly, the code of honor of the medieval aristocracy was written to facilitate the needs of a warrior nobility that “formed a separate body amidst the people.” Tocqueville calls this “the most extraordinary species of honor that has ever appeared in the world,” and he examines it as the example encompassing all others (590). Born “of war and for war” (591), the feudal aristocracy could preserve its rule only by esteeming military courage and absolute loyalty to one’s superior. Thus, “it imperiously commanded men to overcome themselves.” “It ordered the forgetting of oneself ” (591) in battle and the sacrifice of one’s life in service to one’s lord (592). Because nothing “was more necessary” to the aristocracy than these virtues, its code of honor glorified them “even at the expense of reason and humanity” (591). But in that case, is it really fair to call these actions virtues? Drawing a general lesson from feudal honor, Tocqueville reaches the following, somewhat puzzling conclusion. A class that has come to put itself at the head and above all the others, and that makes constant efforts to maintain itself in this superior rank, must particularly honor the virtues that have greatness and luster and that can be readily combined with pride and love of power. It is not afraid to disturb the natural order of conscience so as to place those virtues before all others. One even conceives that it willingly elevates certain audacious and brilliant vices above peaceful and modest virtues. It is in a way constrained by its condition to do so. (591) In thus speaking of the “greatness” (grandeur) of such “virtues,” Tocqueville might seem to be flirting with something akin to Nietzscheanism. His description seems to suggest that he is impressed by these actions, in

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spite—or perhaps even because?—of their cruelty and inhumanity. At one point he refers to them as “the turbulent virtues that often dazzle, but still more often bring trouble in society” (594). Yet unlike Nietzsche, Tocqueville consistently affirms that these “virtues” are unjust. To repeat, they disturb the “natural order of conscience” (591), and in his analysis the feudal aristocrats whose lives they governed therefore had a profound tension at the bottom of their souls. In exploiting others, they knew themselves deep down to be violating a more ancient “and more holy law” (589). Hence, in the above quotation, Tocqueville also calls these actions vices. For Tocqueville, “reason and humanity” remain fixed and unchangeable moral standards. At the same time—and this is perhaps a second difference from Nietzsche—the feudal aristocracy invented these notions of honor because it was “necessary” for it to do so. It acted not out of creativity but from compulsions of material self-interest. It honored courageous and self-sacrificial actions because it was “constrained by its condition to do so”; the specific laws of honor it invented were thus “always confined within certain necessary limits” (591; emphasis added). The particular details of the code governing the aristocrat’s life were arbitrary, but that there should be such a code, and that it would prize the kinds of actions it did, was a natural and necessary product of class interest (591). At least in one sense, then, Tocqueville’s account of honor is a debunking one. By exposing the conventional origins and utilitarian purpose of honor’s role in preserving the “special interests” of particular associations (593), he provokes the question of whether a clear-sighted individual would engage in this kind of self-forgetting. But he also indicates how such actions aiming at self-transcendence were linked to a kind of greatness founded on these kinds of confused judgments. Unlike Hobbes, for example, Tocqueville attempts to do justice to the attraction to self-sacrifice that forms honor’s heart (cf. Hobbes 1994, chap. 10). Recalling his earlier discussion of the Americans’ “commercial greatness,” Tocqueville says they too have a code of honor serving the goals and interests of their particular association. American honor esteems those who “brave the furies of the ocean to arrive sooner at port” or “tolerate without complaint the miseries of the wilderness” (595). In other words, all codes of honor praise—and thus call good—actions that are in reality bad for an individual but good for the group. These maxims may seem “incoherent and . . . bizarre” (591) because they depend on an identification of self-interest and self-sacrifice, on thinking that one can “win honor” as a good for oneself by following certain rules mandating self-denial (589 n. 1). In aristocracies, “nobles” are separated from commoners by their capacity

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to make such sacrifices as well as by the greatness they—and only they— can earn in so doing. They perceive their code of conduct as “the distinctive feature of their physiognomy” and “they apply its different rules with all the ardor of personal interest” (597). But according to Tocqueville, it was precisely this paradoxical sentiment that made possible those magnificent and difficult undertakings—“the virtues that have greatness and luster” (591)—to which the aristocratic elite devoted itself. Based on his observations of America, however, Tocqueville predicts the lifespan of such virtues will soon reach its end, for as society grows progressively more egalitarian, it will naturally become less warlike and more prosperous, which will come at the expense of the “virtues that . . . dazzle” (594). As the class distinctions that gave birth to rules of honor break down, society will become more rational, orderly, and pacific. Virtue will come to be seen as passive rather than active and as more obviously conducive to one’s own security and prosperity: rules of honor “will be less and less distant from the moral laws adopted by common humanity” (596). The honor of nineteenthcentury Americans—who have no hostile neighbors—praises the material acquisition that the medieval aristocracy “named servile cupidity,” and it scorns their martial virtues as “blind and barbaric fury” (594). It is thus closer to justice than aristocratic honor, and in that sense it is gradually working toward its own destruction. American honor praises the courage necessary to conquer nature and settle the wilderness, but once the wildernesses are filled up (298), that honor will have rendered itself unnecessary. As the frontier closes and modernity settles in, honor will approach those “simple and general notions of good and evil” (599) that reflect the most basic, natural needs of mankind. In Tocqueville’s predicted future, society will be peaceful—and that peace, it bears repeating, is demanded by justice—but this achievement will come at a great cost as avenues for distinction or self-affirmation through self-sacrifice disappear. Just as Tocqueville in volume 1 had indicated that the Americans’ religious outlook does “a sort of moral violence” to human nature, here in volume 2 he shows that our commercial and self-interested moral ethos has led to great unhappiness—and to potential new dangers arising from the lack of available outlets for the pursuit of immaterial greatness. Tocqueville describes this problem, and begins to suggest some potential solutions to it, in the next chapter, which is on the paradoxical character of ambition in the United States. As that chapter’s title states, the United States contains scores of ambitious men but few grand ambitions. Americans are universally “devoured by the desire to rise, but one sees almost none of them who appear to nourish

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vast hopes or to aim very high. All want constantly to acquire goods, reputation, power; few envision all these things on a grand scale” (599). And this at first glance is surprising, partly because, as we have already noted, Americans individually appear proud to the point of being bombastic (227, 585). Tocqueville himself initially claims to have been puzzled by this phenomenon, for one finds nothing in the United States preventing ambitions “from soaring in all directions” as they did in France after the Revolution (599– 600). In the latter case, however, the desires of ordinary people reached spectacular heights largely because, having previously absorbed the aristocracy’s sentiments, they now found themselves with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seek out a long-envied greatness. When an aristocracy is overturned, Tocqueville writes, “nothing seems impossible to anyone,” but once the dust settles and the memory of the old order fades people’s desires become proportionate to their means (600). A democratic revolution, in other words, is akin to a war to end all wars: something that, for a lover of battles and a seeker after glory, presents the greatest opportunity and the greatest disappointment. For once a democracy reaches its “permanent and normal state” (601), according to Tocqueville, hopes are both stimulated and lowered at the same time. As Tocqueville has already mentioned, the same equality that allows all to rise in the world makes it practically very difficult for any one person to do so. By giving “some resources to all” but extensive resources to none, it “confines desires within fairly narrow limits.” This directs ambition toward the “petty” and usually material “objects that one sees within one’s reach” (601), but it also does something more. For as democrats begin to recognize that they are focusing their spiritual longings on unworthy ends, those longings threaten to dry up. “What above all turns men of democracies away from great ambition is not the smallness of their fortune, but the violent effort they make every day to better it. They compel the soul to employ all its strength in doing mediocre things—which cannot fail soon to limit its view and circumscribe its power” (601). Because ordinary citizens in the United States are more clear-sighted than the sailors and frontiersmen striving to conquer nature on its fringes, there is a real danger their ambitions will eventually turn in on themselves and destroy themselves, and thus that their paradoxical desires for self-affirmation and self-overcoming will weaken dramatically. The “permanent and normal” state of democracy is thus not heroic, and it is not even commercial. Rather, it is bureaucratic, as in China, “where equality of conditions is very great and very old,” and where the rule of equality permits one to rise through the ranks only slowly, after passing a series of tests during which time “youth is

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lost and . . . imagination is extinguished.” In such a society, by the time one has finally achieved the means “to do extraordinary things,” one has “lost the taste for them” (602). The result, Tocqueville fears, may be the ascendancy of a kind of person as dispassionate as the unchivalrous hero of a Chinese novel who “touches the heart of his mistress by passing an examination well.” Great ambitions necessarily “breathe uneasily in such an atmosphere” (602) because our pride can never be founded merely on the calculating pursuit of interest. Indeed, as he closes this chapter, Tocqueville makes explicit that the Americans’ pride, which on the surface seems so robust, actually covers over a sense of inferiority and even self-contempt: the same democratic man who refuses to admit the superiority of his neighbor “nonetheless despises himself to the point that he believes himself made only to taste vulgar pleasures” (604). Human nature is such that it cannot be confined to purely selfish concerns; it will continue to seek avenues for self-overcoming, and if it finds itself boxed in such that it cannot do so outwardly, it will seek them inwardly, by turning against itself.

The Task of Tocqueville’s New Political Science Probable Dangers and Potential Solutions Of course, one could say that this too is a kind of pride, if a perverse one. The American who despises himself remains, in a crucial respect, above himself, but the particular pride he retains in his despair threatens to lay the groundwork for its own eventual diminution. In this, his psychology provides the framework for those other democratic intellectual trends that Tocqueville fears will diminish the individual’s sense of his own importance and his own freedom, thereby encouraging his subjection to the state. One of Tocqueville’s great themes in volume 2 is the way the new pride democrats take in their equality and independence can accompany a sense of smallness and powerlessness vis-à-vis the rest of society. “When the man who lives in democratic countries compares himself individually to all those who surround him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of each of them; but when he comes to view the sum of those like him and places himself at the side of this great body, he is immediately overwhelmed by his own insignificance and weakness” (409). The Americans’ Cartesian “philosophic method”—and the prideful outlook Spinoza sought to inculcate—celebrates the judgment of the individual; it grants him the right “to be self-sufficient” and find “his glory in making

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for himself beliefs that are his own about all things” (406). But the concomitant recognition that each person has as much right to such ideas as any other naturally disposes democrats to believe that truth must be found on the side of the greatest number. In this way, Tocqueville suggests, Enlightenment rationalism risks bringing about the enslavement rather than the liberation of minds: “The public therefore has a singular power among democratic peoples, the very idea of which aristocratic nations could not conceive. It does not persuade [one] of its beliefs, it imposes them and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each” (409). This not only leads to an obsequious deference to the judgment of majorities of the kind Tocqueville describes in volume 1 (235–49)—for “nothing is more familiar to man than to recognize superior wisdom in whoever oppresses him” (409)—but, more radically and alarmingly, it threatens to persuade democratic man that he is nothing, that there is nothing in him distinct from others and capable of greatness. In Spinozistic terms, when the democratic soul considers its place as just one member of a mass society, it risks seeing itself as no more than “a particle” of the body politic—which is to say, as not a soul at all (cf. again Spinoza 2004, xvi.10). Tocqueville thus reserves his harshest criticism for pantheism, the theological outlook Spinoza popularized. Pantheism holds “secret charms” for democrats because the same consciousness of weakness and insignificance that leads them to accept a vast social power also causes them to posit something analogous about God and the universe. By enclosing everything—“both material and immaterial”—into a single whole, pantheism “nourishes the pride and flatters the laziness of their minds.” More so, its paradoxical appeal to pride gives it the dangerous capacity to “seduce” the human mind “although it destroys individuality, or rather because it destroys it.” Tocqueville thus ends this chapter with one of his most emphatic statements, declaring of pantheism that “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it” (426). Pantheism, however, is but the most dangerous of a number of intellectual developments that, by appealing simultaneously to individual sovereignty and helplessness, are likely not only to foster but also to eradicate the pride of democratic souls. As noted in Chapter 3, Tocqueville cautions against the work of democratic historians who exaggerate the power of vast impersonal forces and “take pleasure” in demonstrating the presumed inevitability of historical outcomes (472)—a criticism that also clearly applies to Spinoza’s dissemination of determinism. Similarly, while foreseeing their coming popularity, Tocqueville criticizes scientific materialists who gleefully

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deny the existence of free will and who take a perverse pride in diminishing, and even brutalizing, humanity: “When they believe they have sufficiently established that they are only brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated they were gods” (519). In this, their contradictory disposition reveals a depth of soul—a concern for honor and eternity, even a kind of self-sacrifice—that their strictly materialist outlook cannot account for. One could say they adequately explain everything in the universe except themselves. And the same is also true of their democratic audience. For reasons already discussed, that audience is naturally disposed toward a taste for material enjoyments. “This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing but matter; and [scientific] materialism in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are propelled” (519). Whereas a consistent (and dehumanizing) materialism would be limited to the simple pursuit of those physical needs and comforts most satisfying to our bodies, the “insane ardor” displayed by the democratic mind in pursuit of these goods suggests something spiritual—something the amassing of material goods or a life of ongoing pleasures actually cannot satisfy—and hence a latent discontent with the same materialistic universe that is otherwise so attractive to it. In thus poring all his spiritual energies into material pursuits, the democrat only exacerbates the unhappiness and the self-contempt that drove him to these pursuits in the first place. Finally, the most alarming, because most pervasive, intellectual trend on display in democracy is the love of equality itself, which Tocqueville labels the “principal passion” of democratic times (480). This passion has the salutary potential to confer a newfound dignity on the vast majority, but, taken to an extreme, it risks eradicating human distinctiveness; it “attacks the pride of man in its last asylum” by teaching the equality of intellects (236). According to Tocqueville, while democrats have an “instinctive taste” for freedom, they “love equality with an eternal love,” and they “would sooner consent to perish than to lose it” (52). “Men, therefore, do not hold to equality only because it is dear to them; they are also attached to it because they believe that it will last forever” (480). At certain moments they even press this passion to the point of “delirium”; they are “blind” to harm they do in thus attacking freedom in equality’s name, “or rather they perceive only one good in the whole universe worth longing for” (481). Indeed, as we saw earlier, in the nineteenth century there is a widespread “disgust for life” arising from the recognition that, since human beings have naturally different talents and abilities, this good can never be fully attained (514).

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Politically, the tendency of democrats to despise themselves, or to channel their natural instinct for self-overcoming in a way that convinces them of their own insignificance, is linked to the threat of soft despotism—a regime and way of life in which humans have been apparently stripped of those prideful but also self-sacrificial desires separating them from the other beings. Tocqueville suggests that, were human pride or ambition ever to destroy itself completely, we could find ourselves under an “administrative despotism” (664) in which the state could satisfy all our now-tepid desires (see Rahe 2009). For when the wants of human beings have become simple and predictable, bureaucracy will be able to replace the free market in providing them. In doing so, it will deprive human beings of their last remaining liberties in a way they will actually regard as “a benefit” (663). Tocqueville’s famous and sobering description of this new kind of despotism is worth quoting in full. I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country. Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? (663) By rendering obsolete even that odd and disproportionate commercial heroism that Tocqueville discerned among American sailors and pioneers,

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such a regime would transform human beings into purely desiring or selfish brutes—“a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd” (663). But although Tocqueville warns that we could eventually fall “below the level of humanity” (665), there is reason to suspect this cannot be his final word. For in describing the longing for immortality in both volumes of Democracy in America, Tocqueville consistently presents it as a “permanent” aspect of the human condition (284). The particular passions that give man his humanity “have their immovable foundation in his nature. . . . He can hinder and deform them, but not destroy them” (510). Thus, far from exhibiting the subhumanity of Nietzsche’s “Last Men,” those living under soft despotism would continue to display that perverse version of the distinctly human mixture of self-assertion and self-sacrifice that Tocqueville saw among those Americans from whom he discerned the possibility of such a regime. But this also means that more outwardly directed versions of this desire could always reawaken, and not necessarily in a healthy way. At the close of his chapter on ambition, Tocqueville warns of what he sees as the less likely but more dangerous possibility that “badly regulated great desires” could “burst out from time to time” even in a firmly established democracy. When truly grand ambitions do emerge in democracy—where there are no political barriers to stop them, where “precedents have little empire and laws little duration,” and where aristocratic sentiments can no longer lead them in a sublime or noble direction— they take on “a violent and revolutionary character” that leads those holding them to believe “they can dare all” (603).3 Putting this claim together with Tocqueville’s earlier statement that confining the human mind to material goods could eventually produce an “enormous reaction” (510), it seems Tocqueville’s warnings about soft despotism should not be read to exclude harsher alternatives.4 After all, his chapter on America’s “religious follies” has shown how savage outbreaks of fundamentalism, or other versions of religious or quasi-religious hope, could grow out of the prosperity and tolerance of liberal democracy.5 His analysis thus suggests that our societies remain vulnerable to these twin dangers of soft despotism and hard despotism because the political science which founded them did not properly comprehend the causes that drive human beings to scorn life for the sake of eternity. To correct this oversight is the central practical task of Tocqueville’s “new political science.” While he is attentive to the need to guard against a potentially tyrannical super-ambition, he considers the petty day-to-day desires of the average democrat to be of greater concern: “I avow that for democratic societies I dread the audacity much less than the mediocrity of desires; what seems to

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me most to be feared is that in the midst of the small incessant occupations of private life, ambition will lose its spark and its greatness; that human passions will be appeased and debased at the same time, so that each day the aspect of the social body becomes more tranquil and less lofty” (604). Thus, Tocqueville concludes that while it remains necessary “to purify, to regulate, and to keep in proportion the sentiment of ambition,” it would nonetheless “be very dangerous” to “impoverish” it and “constrict it beyond measure” (603).6 Having discerned the presence of anomalous but enduring desires for self-transcendence in democratic life, Tocqueville proposes some remedies for recovering a sense of greatness in devotion to something greater than oneself. At the end of his chapter on ambition, he recommends combating the sense of isolation and self-despair among democratic citizens by giving them grand projects requiring risk taking and self-sacrifice: “It is good to give them difficult and perilous affairs sometimes to elevate ambition and to open a theater for it” (604). Tocqueville does not specify what he has in mind, but it is hard not to read this statement as a reference to war (and perhaps also to imperialism, his support for which in his subsequent political career remains controversial: Atanassow 2017). It could of course encompass other kinds of large national projects—Tocqueville was, for example, impressed with the spirit of the temperance movement, even if, as a good Frenchman, he found teetotaling somewhat silly (492). But his praise of war does stand out—perhaps uncomfortably so to our ears—as when he actually goes out of his way to apologize for seeming to condemn it: “I do not wish to speak ill of war; war almost always enlarges the thought of a people and elevates its heart. There are cases where only it can arrest the excessive development of certain penchants that equality naturally gives rise to, and where, for certain deep-seated maladies to which democratic societies are subject, it must be considered almost necessary” (621–23). In volume 1, Tocqueville writes that in an age when religion is weakening, only patriotism remains “to interest men in the destiny of their country” (89). In referring to that remark earlier,7 I suggested Tocqueville was aware of a serious danger to freedom that nationalism might pose—and his subsequent discussions of America’s “religious follies,” together with his acknowledgment of the possibility of tyrannical super-ambition in democracy, confirms this. At best then, we must conclude that Tocqueville finds it necessary to play with fire somewhat and to do so in the confidence that democratic mediocrity presents the far greater danger (or that those cultivating ambition will have the capacity to keep it in bounds). Given the experience of the twentieth century, this may be an area in which we could reasonably criticize

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Tocqueville, although it might be argued alternatively that the lack of opportunities for a “moderate yet vast” ambition (603), or a reaction against mediocrity, can play a large role in the attraction of tyrannical movements. Be that as it may, after the passage quoted above, Tocqueville himself acknowledges the potential dangers, and the probable insufficiency, of war as a solution to this problem. Although war “has great advantages, . . . one must not flatter oneself that it diminishes the peril” posed by a restive military; it “only suspends it, and it comes back more terrible after the war.” Indeed, the longer a war lasts abroad, the greater the threat of despotism it poses at home. “War does not always give democratic peoples over to military government; but it cannot fail to increase immensely the prerogatives of civil government in these peoples; it almost inevitably centralizes the direction of all men and the employment of all things in its hands. If it does not lead one to despotism suddenly by violence, it leads to it mildly through habits” (621). More fundamentally, though, war can serve only as a limited cure for democratic pathologies because democratic peoples are naturally pacific (617ff.). “War would only be a remedy for a people that always wanted glory,” and we have seen that Tocqueville’s Americans are not that. His chapter on honor indicated that democrats will soon look down on the martial virtues and that they will do so with some justice (594). Tocqueville is thus under no illusions about the possibility—and even (in part) the desirability—of preserving the kind of self-sacrificial devotions that characterized aristocracy. Instead, in an age when atomistic “individualism” characterizes social life (482–84), grand national projects may have to give way, at least on a day-today basis, to more mundane means of persuading citizens to become involved in their communities—such as civil associations, local self-government, and, above all, religion. To those dissatisfied with democracy’s lowering of horizons, Tocqueville’s blunt message stresses the need to accept different virtues, even if they believe them inferior: the goods of aristocracy must be abandoned “forever” (9), but we can still derive from democracy “all the good that it can do” (235). Tocqueville’s thematic exposition of these new virtues is contained in his famous discussion of “the doctrine of self-interest well understood,” and so it is to this that we must now turn. Tocqueville’s Moral and Religious Statesmanship In the introduction, Tocqueville had spoken of a “science” of self-interest, and he had juxtaposed that science—which he bemoaned as lacking among his European contemporaries—to the unenlightened “devotion” of aristocratic

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times (10). In his discussion of self-interest well understood in volume 2, however, he always refers to this idea as a “doctrine” (500), never as a science, and he praises the aid that religion, understood as a set of purely “dogmatic beliefs” (417), can give it (504–6). But his treatment of it opens with a contrast between the essential characteristics of aristocratic and democratic moral thinking. “When the world was led by a few powerful and wealthy individuals,” he writes, “these liked to form for themselves a sublime idea of the duties of man; they were pleased to profess that it is glorious to forget oneself and that it is fitting to do good without self-interest like God himself. This was the official doctrine of the time in the matter of morality” (500). Under aristocracy, those who were most seriously moral believed they carried out their actions for the sake of virtue alone, without any consideration of benefit. They thought the pursuit of virtue thus understood rendered their souls noble and deserving of glory, and they found that same nobility reflected in the idea of a God who was free of any of the self-interested defects of human nature and whose omnipotence was therefore equal to His justice. Yet insofar as they believed this idea of selflessness to underlie a notion of human excellence—of a glorious and sublime existence whose virtues it “pleased” them to profess—one can doubt whether this notion of aristocratic virtue was truly as disinterested as its practitioners claimed. Moreover, since this was “the official doctrine” of the times, one may suspect hypocrisy was fairly common, and Tocqueville claims to “doubt that men were more virtuous in aristocratic centuries than in others,” although he is certain “the beauties of virtue were constantly spoken of then” (500–501). At the same time, he says, the benefits of virtue were studied “in secret” (501). In democracy, however, this moral thinking is inverted. [As] each man concentrates on himself, moralists become frightened at this idea of sacrifice and they no longer dare to offer it to the human mind; therefore they are reduced to inquiring whether the individual advantage of citizens would not be to work for the happiness of all, and when they have discovered one of the points where particular interest happens to meet the general interest and to be confounded with it, they hasten to bring it to light; little by little such observations are multiplied. What was only an isolated remark becomes a general doctrine, and one finally believes one perceives that man, in serving those like him, serves himself, and that his particular interest is to do good. (501)

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Gathering together evidence that does not on the whole support their conclusion, these unnamed American moralists teach that it is always beneficial to be virtuous or that by working for the common good each will ultimately further his own advantage. These moralists should therefore be distinguished from free-market theorists who claim that “the useful is never dishonest” (503) or that private selfishness produces public benefits—that is, that “greed is good.” Rather, these are moralists in the strict sense. Turning Mandeville’s maxim that private vice produces public virtue on its head (cf. Zetterbaum 1967, 103), they are the democratic counterpart of those aristocratic thinkers who were secretly concerned with discovering virtue’s utility. Whereas those thinkers sought to uncover the rewards for virtue in a world where the “official” moral teaching spoke only of self-sacrifice, these multiply scattered observations of instances where virtue pays to convince a commercial and calculating people to act in accordance with duty. As a result, they have turned “personal interest against itself ” and provided their countrymen with a not-wholly-rational justification to act disinterestedly (502; cf. Behnegar 2013, 208–9).8 Tocqueville thus suggests that although this “doctrine” claims to be one of “enlightened” selfishness (502), it is really anything but. By contrast, he writes that the highly rationalistic, Mandevillian position is practically the “only” teaching he hears “every day” from his European contemporaries, and he contrasts this dangerous maxim to the one he purports to find constantly spoken of in America. With a mixture of bemusement and guarded confidence for the future, he records how Americans engage in the most complicated intellectual gymnastics to convince themselves that in making sacrifices for the common good they are really acting from mercenary motives. Americans . . . are pleased to explain almost all the actions of their life with the aid of self-interest well understood; they complacently show how the enlightened love of themselves constantly brings them to aid each other and disposes them willingly to sacrifice a part of their time and their wealth to the good of the state. I think that in this it often happens that they do not do themselves justice; for one sometimes sees citizens in the United States as elsewhere abandoning themselves to the disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man; but the Americans scarcely avow that they yield to movements of this kind; they would rather do honor to their philosophy than to themselves. (502)

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Self-interest well understood is therefore a kind of noble lie—or, as Tocqueville states more reservedly, it is a doctrine that is “not evident in all its parts” but that it is “necessary” for moralists to adopt, even “should they judge it imperfect” (503). For by teaching a commercial people that devotion to the common good brings benefits, it encourages Americans, almost despite themselves, to overcome themselves and acquire habits of virtue: “One is occupied with the general interest at first by necessity and then by choice; what was calculation becomes instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one’s fellow citizens, one finally picks up the habit and taste of serving them” (488). At the same time, though, since this doctrine claims to be rational, to be accepted the connection it posits between sacrifice and reward must be discernable, at least most of the time. Tocqueville thus says that self-interest well understood “contains a great number of truths” (503), for in a society where citizens only “sometimes” act on their disinterested sparks, and where they are called upon to sacrifice only “a part of their time and their wealth” for the common good, selflessness will be less demanding and the resulting payoff clearer. This doctrine therefore cannot recover the heroic virtues of aristocracy, but it can inculcate a set of unextraordinary but solid and dignified middle-class virtues. It “does not produce great devotions; but it suggests little sacrifices each day; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous; but it forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted,” and “masters of themselves” (502). But these sacrifices, small though they are, are sacrifices nonetheless. By turning personal interest against itself, this doctrine accordingly preserves and, to an extent, refines the twin elements of that paradoxical moral thinking that Tocqueville believes separates us from the other beings (cf. also 521–22). Thus, he concludes, while self-interest well understood “perhaps prevents some men from mounting far above the ordinary level of humanity,” it does an admirable job of keeping many others there who would otherwise fall below it. “Consider some individuals, they are lowered. View the species, it is elevated” (502). In the sequel to this chapter, however, Tocqueville again indicates that that elevation will require religion. Because “there are a great number of sacrifices that can find their recompense only in the other world,” no purportedly rational doctrine can fully close the gap between society’s good and one’s own. This is partly because experience shows not all small sacrifices will be rewarded in the fullness of time, but it is also because large sacrifices will always remain necessary. No civilization, no matter how advanced, can dispense with the need to ask some people to risk their lives for the sake of the common good, and, as Tocqueville articulates it, this awareness colors

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our understanding of morality itself: whatever effort “one makes to prove the utility of virtue, it will always be hard to make a man who does not wish to die live well” (504). In his account of religious psychology in volume 1, Tocqueville had suggested that someone who from love of life refused to die for anything would come to find that life to be no great good, and indeed, not worth living. Tocqueville therefore inquires whether “the doctrine of self-interest well understood can be easily reconciled with religious beliefs,” and he concludes that, fortunately, it can. The “philosophers” who teach this doctrine hold that one must triumph over one’s passions today for the sake of a “lasting happiness” later, and the “founders of almost all religions” have taught something similar, but they have “moved the goal” farther back, placing the reward for sacrifices in the next life (504). Now, this is a rather crude understanding of the origins of religion, though it is one that roughly accords with the understanding of Spinoza and the other Enlightenment philosophers (cf. Locke 1965, para. 245). But Tocqueville also suggests that, although religions do appeal to self-interest to “take hold of the crowd and become popular,” such considerations are only one “motive of religious men” (505). Having encountered Christians who claim to “forget themselves” only so they can merit heaven, Tocqueville suspects that “they deceive themselves. I respect them too much to believe them” (504). “I refuse to believe that all those who practice virtue out of a spirit of religion act only in view of recompense” (504). Thus, Tocqueville again suggests that the Enlightenment view of piety as strictly self-interested fails to account for the psychological appeal of selfforgetting. “It is true that Christianity tells us that one must prefer others to oneself to gain Heaven; but Christianity tells us as well that one ought to do good to those like oneself out of love of God. That is a magnificent expression; man penetrates Divine thought by his intelligence; he sees that the goal of God is order; he freely associates himself with that great design; and all the while sacrificing his particular interests to the admirable order of all things, he expects no other recompense than the pleasure of contemplating it” (504–5). In Tocqueville’s description, the attraction of piety in general, and of Christianity in particular, is rooted in two potentially opposed motives: it promises us a reward for virtue beyond this life, but it also teaches that that reward is not available to us if we act self-interestedly. Virtue is not virtue if it is undertaken for the sake of advantage, but thoroughly selfless action that goes unrewarded also fails to satisfy our moral hopes: the thought of a good man in hell is as unpalatable to us as that of a bad man buying his way

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into heaven. But note that even as Tocqueville describes what he suggests is the core of Christian piety, he may alter it. In the statement above, he writes that Christianity teaches that we must do good to others “out of love of God,” but he then immediately presents that love as a primarily intellectual activity, something of the head rather than the heart. Like Spinoza, he interprets loving God as thinking about God—or, more radically, he substitutes the latter for the former. Since this contemplation of “the admirable order of all things” does provide a “pleasure” to the pious person—here again we may recall Tocqueville’s description of the Puritans’ “purely intellectual need” (32)—piety thus understood preserves elements of both self-interest and selfsacrifice. Moreover, as we will see at greater length at the end of this chapter, Tocqueville also suggests a close connection between the philosophic life and the religious life—one that appears to be particularly clear in Christianity. Since religions have always had to appeal to interest to become popular, it is hardly surprising that Christianity in democratic America stresses the possibility of happiness for the believer rather than devotion and sacrifice. Tocqueville says the Americans’ religion is “so tranquil, so methodical, so calculated, that it seems to be reason much more than heart that leads them to the foot of the altar” (505). With such thinking predominant, Tocqueville’s hopes for the future strength of democratic piety would seem sober indeed, for while he began this chapter speaking of the need for religion to support sacrifice via the promise of another life, he ends it noting that American clergymen often place piety’s rewards “in this world” (505). Although applying the logic of self-interest well understood to religion will risk undercutting its strength, this risk may be necessary, and Tocqueville also suggests it could, paradoxically, have the reverse effect. By persuading democrats to give serious attention to their long-term fate, the concern for ultimate happiness, properly cultivated, could place them back in touch with their natural disinterested sparks. In one of the most remarkable statements in the work, Tocqueville writes that habituating citizens to think of their long-term interest in this world is “the only” path “remaining to us to lead the human race by a long detour back toward faith” (524). Because we are finite beings with a concern for the future, habits of delayed gratification may cause us to look beyond this life, and therewith to self-sacrifice. So while Tocqueville does close this chapter by seeming to undercut the claim with which he began it, his account actually proves to be a bit more complicated. He says the American clergy blurs its discussions of heaven and earth—“It is often difficult to know when listening to them if the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world or well-being

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in this one” (506; emphasis added)—and they do this self-consciously to “touch their listeners better” (505). Tocqueville thus credits the American clergy with a project of religious statesmanship, one that seeks to shift the opinions of their congregants gradually and cautiously, ever attentive to need to appeal to their dominant sentiments as well as to the dangers that will ensue should they alienate them by attacking these sentiments too harshly. “Thus it is in respecting all the democratic instincts that are not contrary to it and in taking aid from several of them that religion succeeds in struggling to its advantage against the spirit of individual independence that is the most dangerous of all to it” (524). But considering what Tocqueville says to Kergorlay about what he found in American churches, we might reasonably suspect this project of religious statesmanship to be Tocqueville’s own. In his final thematic treatment of religion, while describing the dangers posed by both commercial and scientific materialism, Tocqueville employs some of his strongest rhetoric to declare what the goals of this religious project must be: “It is necessary for all those who are interested in the future of democratic societies to unite, and for all in concert to make continuous efforts to spread within these societies a taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures” (519). In the same context, he writes that the “whole art of the legislator consists in discerning well and in advance” the “natural inclinations of human societies in order to know when one must aid the efforts of citizens and when it would rather be necessary to slow them down. For these obligations differ according to the times” (518). As we have seen throughout our discussion of Democracy in America, this approach underlies Tocqueville’s political science as a whole. He believes that “there is almost never any absolute good in the laws” (13), so the task of the political scientist will always be to augment those potentially beneficial qualities that are most in danger in any given age (cf., e.g., 452). Thus, “philosophers and those who govern” (523) ought to encourage citizens to reflect on their future condition, and should seek to cultivate a sense of individual and immaterial greatness, because democratic society naturally promotes a sense of human smallness and irrelevance. For this, it is essential to preserve religion “carefully as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries” (519). The stated goals of Tocqueville’s religious project therefore accord with the needs he reflects on at the end of his chapter on ambition. There, he indicated that the moral qualities it is necessary to preserve within democracy are actually quite opposed to those taught by the New Testament: “Far from believing that one must recommend humility to our contemporaries, I should want one to strive to give them a vaster idea of themselves and of their

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species; humility is not healthy for them; what they lack most, in my opinion, is pride. I would willingly trade several of our small virtues for this vice” (604). While politely deferring to Christian opinion in calling pride a vice, Tocqueville leaves little doubt that it will actually form the central virtue of the qualities of soul his new political science will seek to cultivate or preserve. To see this more clearly, we can briefly examine the practical advice he gives democratic religious leaders. This advice is famously flexible and low aiming. In the same chapter where he announces the need to combat materialism and the notion that the soul dies with the body, he seems willing to accept any kind of belief that life continues after death: should the choice be required, he says, even metempsychosis is preferable to outright materialism (519–20). Similarly, in his discussion of the way religion in the United States makes use of democratic instincts, he praises the American clergy for its strategic retreats. For instance, because democracy has instilled a taste for uniformity over particularity, American priests de-emphasize forms, ceremonies, and representational figures (421)—of the world’s Catholics, those in America best avoid giving to saints the worship due to God (423). American Christianity does not oppose the popular “taste for well-being” that forms “the salient and indelible feature of democratic ages,” for it understands “that a religion that undertook to destroy this mother passion would in the end be destroyed by it” (422). Instead, it concentrates on “finding the spot” where the concerns of this world and the next intersect, and it does so because it knows that to correct and influence the behavior of democrats, it cannot completely sever itself from their spirit. “American priests” therefore do not try to “fix all the attentions of man on the future life”; rather, they “willingly abandon a part of his heart to present cares,” considering these “important although secondary objects” (423; emphasis added). Congregants who are told money is the root of all evil will find something else to do on Sunday, but those who hear the progress of industry applauded may be receptive to priests who seek to wage occasional “necessary struggles” against materialism and other democratic tendencies (423). Preserving some amount of human pride, then, requires first surrendering a great deal to the very things that threaten it; one must perhaps give a mile to save an inch. But when this is understood, Tocqueville’s complicated assessment of Christianity’s relationship to democracy becomes clearer. As noted in Chapter 3, in his discussion of general ideas Tocqueville appears to credit the origin of human equality to the divine incarnation of Jesus. But while he there names Jesus as the first to teach “that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” he does not quite attribute to him the notion that

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there is an “equal right to freedom that each bears from birth” (413). Shortly after this, Tocqueville provides an additional account of the circumstances surrounding Christianity’s origins—one that, while remaining outwardly pious and respectful, nonetheless describes how that religion from its beginnings has been affected “by the social and political state” (420). Tocqueville first asserts that by uniting human beings under a single emperor at the time of Jesus, “Providence” had “undoubtedly” been preparing the world to receive Christianity’s universal teaching. But then, as in the introduction, he describes that Providence as working through humanly comprehensible sociological forces. At the time of the early Roman Empire, “a great part of the human species” found itself, “like an immense flock, under the scepter of the Caesars. The men who composed that multitude differed much from one another, but they nevertheless had this common point: they all obeyed the same laws; and each of them was so weak and small in relation to the greatness of the prince that they all appeared equal when one came to compare them to him” (420). In Tocqueville’s presentation, the Roman world that accommodated the birth and rapid spread of Christianity was a kind of democratic despotism, an absolute monarchy in which everyone not called Caesar was “alike and equal.” This social and political state, in which human begins felt themselves weak and small, and perhaps on that account inclined to look to the possibility of exaltation only in another life, “ought to have disposed men to receive the general truths taught by Christianity, and serves to explain the easy and rapid manner with which it then penetrated the human mind” (420). Original Christianity, in other words, was so appealing in the Roman world because it is a religion hostile to human pride and at best indifferent to human freedom; it suffers from, and may even be a product of, what Tocqueville considers the most alarming dangers of the democratic social state (cf. again 276). And this is also apparent from the “corresponding proof ” of the influence the social state has had on religion, which came after the Empire’s destruction (420). As the Roman world was then shattering, so to speak, into a thousand shards, each nation returned to its former individuality. Inside those nations, ranks were soon graduated to infinity; races were marked out, castes partitioned each nation into several peoples. In the midst of this common effort that seemed to bring human societies to subdivide themselves into as many fragments as it was possible to conceive, Christianity did not lose sight of the principal general ideas it had brought to light. But it nonetheless appeared to lend itself, as much

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as it could, to the new tendencies arising from the fragmentation of the human species. Men continued to adore one God alone as creator and preserver of all things; but each people, each city, and so to speak each man, believed himself able to obtain some separate privilege and to create for himself particular protectors before the sovereign master. Unable to divide the Divinity, they at least multiplied it and magnified its agents beyond measure; the homage due to angels and saints became an almost idolatrous worship for most Christians, and one could fear a moment might come when the Christian religion would regress to the religions it had defeated. (420–21) Under aristocracy, where individuals rather than social forces are thought to move history, and where particular influences take precedence over general ideas, Christian practice approached crypto-paganism. As Tocqueville indicated in the introduction, in the Middle Ages the authentic Christian teaching of equality before God served as a benign foreign influence, arresting and humanizing the natural hierarchical tendencies of aristocratic society. In this, it acted in a way analogous to the pride-supporting religion that Tocqueville would like to see exercise such an influence in democratic times. Indeed, when his comments quoted above are taken into account, it appears that when Tocqueville calls for religion to be preserved “as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries” (519), he is referring not to the Christianity of the time of Jesus but to this prideful religion that modern mass democracy is now beginning to undermine. So while Tocqueville indicates that Christianity’s moral teaching—that is, the Sermon on the Mount—is in one sense profoundly unhealthy for already humble democratic souls, it can also provide a vehicle in which Tocqueville’s political science can travel and a medium that can allow it to have some crucial influence in shaping those souls. Christianity’s message of equality makes it a religion suited for democratic audiences, and Tocqueville’s advice to future religious statesmen is to make compromises with the presuppositions of an egalitarian, individualistic, and materialistic age but to do so in order to wage occasional “necessary struggles” against it (423). Indeed, he warns that any religion that fails to do this “would soon see itself reduced to a flock of impassioned zealots in the midst of an incredulous multitude” (422). A sect that continued to insist on doctrinal purity, even or especially in response to democracy’s individualistic and secularizing tendencies, could perhaps remain internally orthodox, and might continue existing on the margins, but could have no influence on the larger society.

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Of course, the kind of piety Tocqueville calls for would appear unacceptably compromised to his religious and aristocratic contemporaries. But Tocqueville’s message to those contemporaries is that democracy is a “fait accompli” (13) and, moreover, that once they accept this they can help ennoble it by bringing their devotional sentiments onto its side (11). This task is indeed a delicate one because, in an age of indifference, once religions are destroyed they cannot be revived or replaced (286–88). Faith must therefore be preserved “carefully” (519) as a precious capital we have received only through inheritance and that can be neither replenished nor increased. But if religion can become an ally of democracy, it can preserve notions of rights as the source and focus of claims to honor and dignity (cf. 227–29; Winthrop 1993), and it can perhaps even help to conceive of democracy itself—as Tocqueville did in his chapter on honor—as embodying a fundamental and even a “holy” claim to justice (589), one that is worthy of devotion and selfsacrifice on the part of individual citizens (cf. 11, 43–44, 326, 345, 675). Intellectual Life and the Democratic Future Tocqueville’s limited hopes for the possibilities of democratic religious life presuppose not only that the Enlightenment’s influence over our thoughts and sentiments cannot be uprooted, but also that it can and must be supplemented in a way that will allow the natural longing for immortality to be cultivated, refined, and directed—to the extent that remains possible. To summarize, in a commercial republic where people “are naturally little disposed to believe” (424), religion must come down to earth and make its peace with the democratic taste for the pursuit of happiness. If instead it demands complete self-abnegation, the churches will empty—and this may result, as Tocqueville’s discussion of America’s “religious follies” has suggested, in outbreaks of fanaticism. By contrast, where religion compromises by asking only for small sacrifices, where it has accepted and in so doing has sought to augment the petty character of democratic ambition, it can reignite a psychological engine that will lead, ultimately, to the recovery of a naturally latent hope for immortality. At its best then, according to Tocqueville, religion in democracy can be no more than an aristocratic inheritance (519). Religion is in tension with democracy’s natural instincts but can nonetheless retain a limited influence over it as the most widely available outlet for our naturally occurring self-transcending and devotional passions. But religion is also not the only such outlet. Tocqueville also characterizes “the freedom of the intellect” as

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“something holy” that democracy is increasingly threatening (243–45), and he previously indicated that it is the human intellect that usually transforms our self-sacrificial passions into hopes (32, 284, 504–5). Accordingly, he discovers the peak of the intellectual life not in an Enlightenment rationalist like Spinoza but in Pascal, who he says displayed an “ardent, proud, and disinterested” passion for knowledge (435). Pascal’s “pure desire to know” (435), according to Tocqueville, was born of a “sublime and almost divine love of truth” (436) resembling the “sublime idea of the duties of man” that was the official, self-sacrificial moral teaching under aristocracy. In the same way that the consideration of that idea “pleased” those who professed it (500), this “inexhaustible love of truth that nourishes itself and enjoys itself incessantly without being able to satisfy itself ” (435) is, as Tocqueville describes it, both intrinsically rewarding and demandingly self-sacrificial. It led Pascal to pursue neither “great profit” (as do most democratic scientists) nor “glory alone” (as do aristocratic ones) but only to seek “to discover the most hidden secrets of the Creator”—an activity that, however, caused him to “tear his soul” from his body and “to die of old age before forty” (436). Contemplating such a possibility, Tocqueville says “I halt in bewilderment and understand that it is no ordinary cause that can produce such extraordinary efforts” (436). If we take this mention of “no ordinary cause” to refer to the social state—“the first cause of most of the laws, customs, and ideas that regulate the conduct of nations” (45)—it would seem Tocqueville considers Pascal a rare and exceptional human type, someone who transcends the dichotomy between democracy and aristocracy. Such a “speculative genius” can arise anywhere, “whatever the spirit of his country and his times should be. There is no need to aid his ascent; it is enough not to stop it” (437). But Tocqueville also predicts that people like Pascal will be much rarer under democracy. For to permit the flourishing of genius is one thing; to encourage it is quite another. In aristocracies “a high minded idea . . . of man” (436) was inextricably linked to the conception of self-affirmation through self-sacrifice that is present to its greatest extent in the Pascalian type, and this set a tone for society, and thus directed human activity, in a way that made the flourishing of that type much more likely. Aristocracy’s “official” moral teaching led ordinary people to satisfy their longings for immortality by accepting the dogmas of the Church, but it encouraged a rare few to seek out the most hidden secrets of the Creator for themselves (cf. 417). In choosing Pascal as his model of intellectual greatness, Tocqueville suggests a close connection between intellectual and religious life. In the individual soul, the search for truth is the purest and most intense form our

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religious psychology can take, and the extent to which that psychology is or is not cultivated by the political science guiding modern democracy will impact whether those born with Pascal’s “native spark” (436) will ultimately see it kindled. This is why Tocqueville’s political science seeks to “reanimate” democracy’s religious beliefs “if possible” (7). Throughout Democracy in America Tocqueville expresses his confidence that it is possible, for, as he asserts, our natural longing for immortality will erupt one way or another. But he nowhere claims with certainty that the solutions he outlines for refining and directing that desire will work. His book provides a blueprint for his solutions, but it necessarily leaves the practical management of his political science to “philosophers and those who govern” (523), to those future Tocquevillians with a limited power to shape democratic society in response to its specific needs, for “these obligations differ according to the times” (518). But, in a statement that reveals much about Tocqueville’s confidence for the future, as well as about the overall purpose of his project, he says if he had believed the problems facing democracy to be insurmountable, “I would have limited myself to groaning in secret about the destiny of those like me” (672).

Conclusion

I have argued that Tocqueville’s most salient criticism of Spinoza, and the one most relevant to our situation today, concerns religious psychology. In Spinoza, human beings are potentially self-contented wholes; they approach that condition to a greater or lesser extent depending on their level of understanding. Tocqueville, by contrast, describes human beings as always internally tension ridden. For Tocqueville, the complexities of the human condition— our unique potential for greatness but also for its opposite—are traceable to our being at odds with ourselves, and the naturalness of this conflict explains the permanence of religious desire. To be sure, his observations of America confirm that the efforts of Spinoza and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers to weaken religion were partially successful, which indicates that there is some truth in their assumptions about religion’s psychological origins. That freedom and prosperity have caused the churches to empty suggests that religion does have roots in their opposites. But Tocqueville observed religious longings enduring in America in unexpected places and directed toward paradoxically secular ends, which led him to conclude that Spinoza and his allies overlooked something critical and that this oversight imperiled their political project in serious ways. The Enlightenment was overconfident, and its political science therefore needs supplementation with one informed by a more nuanced understanding of religious psychology. Religion is partly rooted in fear, but that fear, in Tocqueville’s understanding, is also accompanied by a hope that, feeding off this fear and being fed by it in turn, will always lead human beings to hope for immortality. If there is a point of commonality between Spinoza and Tocqueville, it surely consists in their mutual concern to defend intellectual life from its greatest threats. But whereas Spinoza finds those threats chiefly in the antirational inclinations of revealed religion, Tocqueville discovers them in the homogenizing and intellectually isolating forces of egalitarian mass society— forces that can be traced in part to the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza himself. At the same time, however, in his description of Pascal,

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Tocqueville, like Spinoza, points to the possibility of a kind of human flourishing that can exist only outside politics. In this way, the two thinkers are united by an attachment to liberalism in its most authentic sense. In choosing Pascal as his model of intellectual greatness, Tocqueville might seem not to share Spinoza’s confidence in the liberating power of reason nor to agree with him that philosophy is a thoroughgoingly rational enterprise. But while it is true that Tocqueville claims that reason has inherent limits, he does so in order to indicate the power of the human mind to grasp certain essential truths (cf. 408, 417). In this, Tocqueville suggests his own ultimate difference from Pascal as concerns the status of reason (cf. 179), and that difference goes together with a contrasting political teaching. As the entirety of Democracy in America testifies, Tocqueville does not share Pascal’s indifference to politics, and in this he is far less Christian than his Jansenist predecessor.1 Like Spinoza, he seeks to recover a kind of human greatness that is achievable for human beings in this world. Unlike Spinoza, however, for whom a robust republican politics is ultimately dependent on superstition (if one that is more rational than its predecessors), Tocqueville finds real dignity in a life characterized by ambition, political participation, and communal attachment. Such a life, as Spinoza would no doubt point out, may indeed be characterized by certain tensions or contradictions, and Tocqueville himself, as a philosophic statesman who sought to live a life of both theory and practice, may have been torn, not to say tormented, on this score. In his letters and his Souvenirs, he claims to have felt a deep-seated restiveness and not to have been happy except when caught up in the rough and tumble of political engagement (Craiutu 2005, 614, 628; Lawler 1993, 109–24). Tocqueville’s work clearly lacks the consistency of Spinoza’s philosophic vision, and readers searching Democracy in America for the kind of systematic theorizing that characterizes Spinoza’s thought may well come away disappointed.2 Tocqueville, however, admits that such inconsistencies do pervade his work (14–15), and they are inevitable in any book whose purpose is to provide a framework for future legislators who must tailor his insights to inevitably shifting political contexts (7). That framework is derived from a consistent teaching about human nature that can inform and guide those decision-makers. At the same time, however, there may be some larger tensions in this picture of human nature that Tocqueville does not explore. He does not, for example, take up the question of how the desire for self-sacrifice can also entail a desire for self-affirmation, and this may be related to the fact that Tocqueville ultimately does not seem to decide between the competing

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claims of the philosophic and the political life. Is it the private pursuits of a Pascal or the political ambition and public service of Tocqueville’s later career that is ultimately most satisfying for a human being? To these potential criticisms of Tocqueville we might add still one more in Spinoza’s favor. While Tocqueville was highly attentive to the political benefits of religion and to the need most human beings feel for belief, he displays little explicit concern for the serious challenge posed by revelation that preoccupied Spinoza. Tocqueville, I believe, presents a richer and more compelling psychology of religion than Spinoza does, but there is little sense in Democracy in America of the importance that psychology may pose for the most important question of religion’s truth. Composed more than a century and a half after the publication of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Tocqueville’s work can help us assess the merits of Spinoza’s theoretical experiment. It can help us see that the Enlightenment’s transformation of society could not put the experience of devotion to bed in the way Spinoza anticipated, and it may therefore lead us to conclude that revelation cannot be refuted in this way. But Tocqueville himself does not draw theological conclusions from his observations. Whether from strategic choice or from inclination, the question of religion’s ultimate truth does not seem to be among his major concerns. However, as his praise of Pascal indicates, Tocqueville is aware that no serious thinker can be wholly indifferent to this question. At points in his writings he gives the impression of being a doubter or an unbeliever, though one who (unlike Spinoza) feels that doubt or unbelief not as a liberation but as a great loss, perhaps even as a profound spiritual wound (cf. again 286– 87). In one of his letters, he states bluntly “I am not a believer,” although he does not say exactly what he does not believe in. In another, he claims to have lost his faith as a teenager after reading some books in his father’s library, although he does not say what he read there that had this effect (Tocqueville 1951, 9:57; 2002, 334–37). His writings may thus lead us to wonder what the grounds of his skepticism are and whether they are adequate. At the close of Chapter 2, I raised the possibility that Spinoza may have inadvertently laid the groundwork for a loss of confidence in reason. But even if that is so, he may still exhibit a greater awareness of reason’s claims to dignity than Tocqueville does, and that is because he has a greater awareness of the permanent challenge posed to it by revealed religion—even if, ironically, he seeks to dispose of that challenge by rendering it ephemeral. Tocqueville’s Americans, like those described by Henry Adams in this book’s epigraph, seem to have little conception of a humanly meaningful quarrel between reason and revelation (cf. 404). And although Spinoza may have helped bring about this

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result, that he did so in full consciousness of the nature of that quarrel is a credit to him. As the foundational document of both liberal democratic politics and modern liberal religion, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise helps us achieve a greater understanding not only of liberalism itself but also, through its quarrel with the Bible, of the perennial opposition to it from illiberal alternatives. Moreover, the weaknesses in Spinoza’s arguments, most notably his apparent inability to account for the phycological attraction of devotion or self-sacrifice, can help us understand better the weaknesses of liberalism today and the reasons why revealed religion, far from disappearing as Spinoza predicted, has again reemerged as a robust challenger to it. It is my hope, however, that by pointing out these weaknesses the analysis contained in this book will allow us to defend liberalism more adequately, for only by first becoming attentive to our vulnerabilities can we then address them. This indeed is the main task of Tocqueville’s political science, which is rooted in the recognition that liberal democracy has brought great goods into the world, that it has a great deal of justice on its side, and (as the experience of the twentieth century abundantly testifies) that attempts to replace it with more idealistic alternatives are likely to result in disaster. Liberalism is worth defending, but that requires that it receive healthy and honest criticism from its friends (400). Returning, then, to liberalism’s current crisis, it is difficult to say what estimation Tocqueville would have of the pressing issues facing America and other liberal democracies today, and to attempt to mine his work for recommended solutions to our problems—which are of course much changed from those of the America he observed—would be to invite obvious difficulties. Indeed, one of the things most valuable about Tocqueville, especially for us today, is his lack of doctrinaire or ideological thinking. By providing only a framework for the actions of future legislators, who he knew would be called upon to address in flexible ways particular circumstances that he could not anticipate, he paves the way for the recovery of prudence as a political virtue. Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s work may provide us with some broad recommendations for addressing our situation, especially for discerning aspects of our political and intellectual life that merit being encouraged or resisted. Above all, as we have seen, his advice to future political scientists—a term that he uses very broadly—is to provide avenues for acting on what he regards as our natural and inevitable longing for a kind of greatness that demands self-transcendence or self-sacrifice. Only in so doing, he suggests, can democratic society avoid the twin dangers of excessive humility (with its potential path toward soft despotism) and the excessive pride (culminating

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in outbreaks of nationalistic fervor and the potential for hard despotism) that is likely to arise as a violent backlash to a society that fails to provide healthy outlets for the pursuit of greatness. To this end, as previously noted, Tocqueville recommends that statesmen find ways to develop national projects that can unite a democratic people and provide a theater for its ambitions. Tocqueville might therefore welcome calls from our leaders for community involvement and even perhaps for some forms of national service, but he also indicates that he understands such ideas to be largely contrary to the natural, day-to-day mindset of a democratic and commercial people. As such, it is likely he would place the greatest stock in doing what is possible, given the constraints of our historical situation, to affect that mindset in positive ways—for example, by encouraging the small sacrifices (and the opportunities for limited yet real prestige) that come from participation in local government, by working to resist trends in American religion encouraging excessive individualism and commercialism, and by counteracting developments in our intellectual life denigrating the importance of the individual. But Tocqueville’s most valuable contribution to us today may well consist not in any particular recommendation, but in the spirit of social scientific inquiry that underlies his writing. Guided by that spirit, Tocqueville undertook to grapple with the problematic legacy of the Enlightenment, and to uncover how it has shaped our politics in inescapable ways, by beginning from a series of simple observations of American political life—observations that were conducted without preconceptions and that gave a renewed seriousness to ordinary moral and political opinions. This process, in turn, permitted him to arrive at a complex understanding of human psychology and to alight on a problem arising from it that called into question the fundamental presuppositions of his Enlightenment predecessors. Tocqueville, as just noted, does not inquire more deeply into the character of the psychology he articulates—he does not explicitly raise the question of whether there is a tension between our “natural disgust for existence” and our “immense desire to exist” (284). But he does show that, because the theoretical founders of our regime did not recognize its existence, they inadvertently laid the groundwork for a number of unanticipated political dangers. And in calling attention to this problem, Tocqueville’s political science shows us how to begin to resolve it responsibly, in a way that not only acknowledges democracy’s unmovable practical strength but that is also aware of its claim to justice. To be sure, Tocqueville is altogether sober about the threats democracy poses to the future of the human spirit, and his analysis further suggests

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that these dangers pose a real moral challenge to it. For if the tyranny of the majority and democracy’s mediocritizing influences prevent individuals like Pascal from reaching their natural potential, is not democracy, from one perspective at least, unjust? But although aristocracy had proven more conducive to the flourishing of human greatness, it also came at a tremendous moral cost, one that, in turn, calls this very greatness into question, for it rested on the misery and subjugation of the vast majority of ordinary people—and it “is impossible to imagine anything more contrary to nature and the secret instincts of the human heart than a subjection of this kind” (383). Conversely, although democracy is “perhaps less elevated” than aristocracy, “it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty” (675). As we have seen, Tocqueville’s “art of the legislator” entails a delicate balancing act, one that seeks to discern and, where necessary, to counteract the natural tendencies of particular human societies. Thus, he says if he had been born in an aristocratic century, he would have joined the Enlightenment in encouraging the study of the physical sciences to improve the material condition of ordinary people (518). But as the preceding considerations have suggested, his understanding of this balancing act is not just political but also moral, for his analysis shows that both democracy and aristocracy present competing and compelling claims to justice, and it may even be that these conflicting attachments are in some way present in every human soul. Each of us, Tocqueville suggests, cannot help but acknowledge the moral case for human equality, just as we also cannot resist being troubled by the threat it seems to pose to the future existence of people like Pascal and Tocqueville himself. By thus elucidating the tension-ridden character of our moral hopes, Tocqueville’s reflection on democratic politics also reveals the inherent limitations on what we can hope for from it. He shows us that democracy’s claim to justice is compelling but also by no means unblemished, and also, for this reason, that a perfectly just society can never be realized. In so doing, Tocqueville transcends the partisan divide of his time and our own and lays the basis for a moderate democratic politics.

NOTES

Introduction 1. For one reflection, see https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx. 2. At press time, the COVID-19 pandemic (whose long-term contribution to our crisis can only be guessed) may call this into question. Yet, that the pandemic’s economic and social ramifications have been so disruptive and shocking may show it to be the exception proving the rule—and the majority of Americans confidently expect a vaccine or cure within a year (https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americans-expect-a-covid-19-vaccine-within -a-year-72-say-they-would-get-vaccinated/)! 3. Recently, both progressive and conservative authors have provocatively traced liberal democracy’s current crisis to a surfeit of individualism and a politics overly focused on autonomy (Levin 2016; Lilla 2017; Murray 2012). 4. Many conservative intellectuals supporting Donald Trump have done so from a desire to restore the kind of moral community they claim secular liberalism has destroyed. An extreme but illustrative example occurs in a recent anti-liberal essay by the Catholic author Sohrab Ahmari (2019). Ahmari credits Trump for recognizing, with “a kind of animal instinct,” the need “to shift the cultural and political mix, ever so slightly, away from autonomy-above-all toward order, continuity, and social cohesion.” Breaking with mainstream American conservatives, he calls for reorienting the public square “to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” for recognizing the impossibility of state neutrality toward religion, and for enforcing “our order and our orthodoxy.” 5. Smith (2016) argues that our dissatisfactions with modernity are paradoxically integral to modernity itself. 6. Subsequent references to Leviathan will be to the paragraph number provided in this edition. 7. Thus, Sandel maintains that a communitarian democratic politics will produce a richer form of tolerance, replacing mere sufferance with “the higher pluralism of persons and communities who appreciate and affirm the distinctive goods their different lives express” (1996, 116). Viroli writes that republicanism must find “a way to give individual life a meaning that does not end with death,” but he (fearing the consequences for religious toleration) hedges and says this belief in posthumous existence should be accompanied by “a healthy dose of irony and doubt” that teaches citizens to experience their “political and moral values . . . not as absolute truths but as possible choices alongside other possible choices” (2002, 92–93). 8. See Machiavelli (1996, 35). Cf. also Aristotle Politics 1253a18ff and Nicomachean Ethics 1179b–80a, which argue that the law must govern “the whole of life.”

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9. This is not to deny that sincere religious thinking and biblical arguments played a role in liberalism’s historical development. See Nelson (2010) for an interpretation stressing such factors that is somewhat at odds with the present one. 10. For representative examples, consider George (1993), Lawler (1994, 1999, 2005), J. Murray (2005), and Neuhaus (1984), all of whom assert a biblical basis for liberal freedoms while critiquing Enlightenment individualism. That the progress of liberal Christianity has gone together with the overall weakening of religion in the West may help explain why the fusion of liberalism and Christianity on the American right has recently become more frayed and why some in that camp have begun to flirt with more traditional, illiberal arguments (see n. 4 above)—even as others, recognizing their new minority status, have adopted a discourse stressing moral autonomy and religious liberty (Dreher 2017). 11. I cite the Treatise by chapter and Bruder number, using Yaffe’s translation. On a few occasions I have modified the translation using the Latin text in Spinoza (1925, vol. 3). 12. My interpretation of Spinoza follows and is highly indebted to the pioneering work of Leo Strauss, both in giving primary attention to the Treatise (rather than the Ethics) for understanding the foundations of Spinoza’s thought and in regarding that work’s myriad contradictions as intentional (Strauss 1952). I acknowledge that this way of reading Spinoza is controversial, and the debate over Strauss’s work is charged. In particular, to some, the idea that Spinoza’s contradictions are parts of a larger rhetorical and political plan—that he spoke differently to different audiences—seems to call into question not just his religious beliefs but also his personal morality: it implies he may have been a liar (Garrett 1990). I cannot provide a full defense (hermeneutical or moral) of Strauss’s way of reading Spinoza—for this, readers should consult his essay, and for a defense of the idea of esotericism in general, which also discusses the morality of using rhetoric for educational purposes, Melzer (2014). I can say only that I am generally convinced by Strauss’s arguments and that (as I see it) the only alternative to viewing Spinoza’s contradictions as deliberate is to regard his thought in the Treatise as confused, ideological, or just plain sloppy. That said, I have sought to acknowledge alternative readings in the notes and especially to point to areas where a full understanding of Spinoza’s thought requires a deeper engagement with the Ethics (something beyond the scope of this book). Most important, though, I believe the best proof of any hermeneutical approach is in the pudding: readers who find my account of the unfolding of the Treatise’s argument persuasive will likely be convinced of my way of reading it. 13. For a succinct articulation, see Melzer (2014, 58–67). 14. For further elaboration, see Pangle (2010, 4, 14–23). 15. See, e.g., Antoine (2007, 139), Goldstein (1975, 6, 23), Hinckley (1990, 40), Kessler (1977, 125), and Zuckert (1981, 259–61), but cf. Maletz (2005, 8–10), Manent (1996, 87–88), and Mansfield (2016, 252). Recent exceptions are Berry (2019), Herold (2015), and Kitch (2016). Lawler (1993, 145–46) goes furthest in this regard by placing a Pascalian psychology of restiveness at the core of Tocqueville’s thought, but he does not stress the desire for self-sacrifice as an essential aspect. 16. All references to Democracy in America are to Tocqueville (2000). Chapter 1 1. Cf. Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947); Epperson v. Arkansas 393 U.S. 97 (1968); Rawls 2005, xxiv–xxv. 2. It is true that the structure of the Treatise appears divided into two sections of unequal length—one on theology (chaps. 1–15) and another on politics (chaps. 16–20). In this, Spinoza

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seems to follow the same strategy as Locke’s Two Treatises of Government: first clear away potential theological objections to liberalism, then draw the blueprints for a new kind of society (Pangle 1988, 135). As we will see, however, this appearance is deceptive. The theological chapters in fact contain extensive discussions of politics, while the political chapters continue to develop Spinoza’s new theology and provide further biblical interpretation. 3. As noted earlier, much of the recent surge of interest in Spinoza may derive from the fact that his vision of toleration is more radically pluralist than Locke’s (see esp. Israel 2001; but cf. Cooper 2006). But it may also have much to do with the recognition that the purpose of toleration in Spinoza is more high-aiming, more oriented toward freedom of mind rather than property rights or “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962), than it is in the work of his English contemporary. See also Mara (1982), who notes the challenge to contemporary liberal theorists like Rawls and Nozick posed by Spinoza’s claim of a rationally demonstrable best life. 4. In thus presenting Spinoza’s Treatise as attempting to effect a world-historical revolution, my analysis departs from a number of scholars who view the work as primarily concerned with the political and religious problems of the seventeenth-century Netherlands (e.g., James 2012; Verbeek 2003; cf. Smith 1997, 10, 19–20). 5. The Treatise thus undertakes to establish the theological claims with which the Ethics begins—that the universe operates and is understandable in terms of categories like cause, finitude, substance, necessity, etc.—i.e., that there are no miracles and that our knowledge of being does not depend on revelations from a fundamentally mysterious divinity. For this reason, far from being ancillary to the “mature” philosophy of the Ethics (cf. Curley 1990), the Treatise constitutes its very foundation. 6. This appendix also repeatedly describes “wonder” and “amazement” (stupesco) as characteristic of fools and simpletons (Spinoza 1996, I Appendix, 25–31). 7. In this respect, Alexander’s having been educated by Aristotle should hardly lead to surprise at his embrace of superstition. Spinoza characterizes the theologians of his time as going “insane with the Greeks” by reading “the theories of the Aristotelians and Platonists” into the Bible (pref.18–19)—the clear implication being that Plato and Aristotle are fountainheads of superstitious anti-rationalism. See also Letter 56: the “authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates carries little weight with me” because these thinkers “thought up occult qualities, intentional species, substantial forms and a thousand more bits of nonsense” and “old wives’ tales” (Spinoza 2002, 905–6). Spinoza’s assessment of classical philosophy lacks even Hobbes’s reservation that Aristotle “may” have known his teaching on essences “to be false philosophy, but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corroborative of [Greek] religion—and fearing the fate of Socrates” (Hobbes 1994, xvi.18). 8. It is also what separates Spinoza from Socratic rationalism, which understands humans as unfulfilled erotic beings longing for a complete and everlasting happiness (Pangle 2010, 133– 34, 144–45). 9. Cf. Spinoza 1996, IV P67, 151, one of his most anti-Socratic characterizations of the philosophic life: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (cf. Plato, Phaedo 64a). 10. Spinoza also acknowledges this practice of censorship at the end of the preface and of the work as a whole (pref.35; xx.47). See also Israel (2001, 275–85). 11. Spinoza actually identifies two “chief things” that he has sought to demonstrate in the Treatise: the possibility of a free republic (pref.12) and the separation of philosophy from theology (xiv.40).

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12. These terms are from Melzer (2014). The former seeks to aid a student’s educational ascent, the latter to change society so thinkers no longer need dissemble from fear of persecution. That Spinoza wrote esoterically has been most famously argued by Strauss (1952; 1965, 1–31), although, as Bagley catalogues in detail, a long tradition dating to Spinoza’s time held that he deliberately obscured his meaning to conceal his heterodox opinions (see Bagley 1996; 1999; 2008, 48 n. 54). Other scholars who regard Spinoza as engaging in esotericism of some form include Cook (1999), Smith (1997), Verbeek (2003), and Yovel (1989). This view has been criticized by Donagan (1988, 14–34; 1996), Garrett (1990), Harris (1971), and Rice (1999). 13. My account of Spinoza’s early chapters frequently parallels Beiner’s (2010, 87–112), who notes the similarities to Hobbes’s theology—and therefore also the reasonableness (so to speak) of the negative reactions of Spinoza’s contemporaries to his arguments (Beiner 2010, 93). For those reactions, see Nadler (1999, 288–319; 2011, 1–4, 215–40). 14. Cf., e.g., Jonathan Edwards’s 1734 sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God (Edwards 1734) and Thomas Hooker’s The Saints Dignitie (quoted in Miller and Johnson 1963, 1:55). 15. Subsequently, Spinoza will collapse the distinction between “a work contrary to nature and a work above nature.” Since nature is all-encompassing, both are impossible (vi.27). 16. Cf., e.g., Isaiah 29:13–14, and Paul, whom Spinoza later enlists as an apostle of the religion of reason: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain” (1 Cor. 3:19–20; cf. also Col. 2:8). 17. To take an admittedly extreme but illustrative example: A twenty-first-century scientist might laugh at a fundamentalist Christian who claimed that evidence for evolution and the age of the earth from the fossil record and carbon dating was put there by the devil to tempt us into unbelief. But the scientist could not actually refute such arguments, and this is precisely because, in denying the authority of reason and evidence, they are based on a rejection of the assumed foundations of the scientist’s claims to knowledge. They are not “falsifiable,” but that does not in itself necessarily mean they are false. 18. “Spinoza seeks to confront his reader with a dilemma by making him choose between an understanding of God which is Biblical but unacceptable and understandings which, while they are not unacceptable in the same way, are unsupported by the authority of the Bible” (Gildin 1980, 163). 19. Spinoza’s description of Jesus’s prophecy seems ambiguous. It may mean Jesus was “the greatest philosopher who ever lived,” as Strauss (1952, 172) suggests, but it also could imply what Spinoza earlier mocked as impossible: that Jesus had access to truths transcending reason. In presenting the New Testament’s teaching this way, Spinoza begins to effect a marriage between science and superstition, and he appeals to certain readers who would (incoherently) look to reason as a path to ultimately mysterious truths. Cf. Donagan (1988, 28ff.), who emphasizes this passage in disagreeing with Strauss. 20. For Spinoza’s strategy of indirectly criticizing Christianity by way of Judaism, see Strauss (1952). 21. Cf. Annotation 3: “Yet if there were someone who had another means of perceiving and other foundations of knowledge, surely he would transcend the limits of human nature.” 22. Spinoza says that “those who were there with Christ saw the Holy Spirit as a dove descending” (i.46). In the biblical context, it is plainly stated that Christ himself saw this (see Matt. 3:16 and Mark 1:10; cf. also Luke 3:22).

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23. Spinoza’s presentation of Solomon might thus be compared to Machiavelli’s presentation of David in chapter 13 of The Prince. While indicating on one level that the Bible teaches self-reliance, its deeper message is that it does the opposite—and is defective for that reason. Quoting Elihu’s declaration that “there is a spirit in man,” Spinoza omits the next words: “and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding” (see Job 32:8 and context). 24. For Spinoza’s debt to chapter 15 of The Prince, see especially the opening of chapter 1 of the Political Treatise (Spinoza 2002, 680–81). 25. Spinoza often describes Solomon—the epitome of human wisdom according to the Hebrew Bible—in apparently conflicting ways. In chapter 6 Spinoza will label Solomon “the Philosopher” (vi.67). In chapter 2, however, Solomon is presented only as the wisest man “of his age” (ii.48)—clearly a backhanded compliment. Solomon was less skilled than others in the prophetic gift (ii.1; cf. also iv.40), but he was a prophet (ii.30), which means he too lacked the strength of understanding needed to rein in his imagination. As Spinoza goes on to present Solomon’s scientific knowledge as the centerpiece of a new reading of the Bible, these statements should be kept in mind. 26. Cf. the opening of the Political Treatise, which bluntly declares that politics will always be governed by passion, not reason: “Those who believe that ordinary people or those who are busily engaged in public business can be persuaded to live solely at reason’s behest are dreaming of the poets’ golden age or of a fairy tale” (Spinoza 2002, 682). 27. Cf. Spinoza’s comments on Jesus’s accommodations at Matthew 12:26 and 18:10 with their biblical contexts (ii.56). 28. It is partly for this reason that Spinoza has been famously characterized as “the last of the mediaevals” and “the first of the moderns” (Wolfson 1934, vii). 29. One might compare this to the prototypical Socratic question: “What is it?” 30. Cf. the opening of Spinoza’s Treatise on Emendation of the Intellect (Spinoza 2002, 3–5). 31. The sarcastic proviso Spinoza appends to this statement—“unless we wanted to dream that nature long ago procreated different kinds of human beings” (iii.12)—may be another indirect indication that he has not refuted the anti-rational alternative. 32. Cf. in this regard Spinoza’s criticism of Maimonides at v.47ff. Spinoza’s relationship to Maimonides and Jewish tradition more generally is a much discussed topic, and the Treatise’s early chapters present an implicit response to The Guide of the Perplexed (Strauss 1965, 147–92). I have focused my attention elsewhere, both because this topic is extensive and well treated (see, e.g., Harvey 1981; Parens 2012; Smith 1997) and because Spinoza presents himself rhetorically as a Christian in an effort to challenge all revelation. For both Jews and Christians the endpoint of Spinoza’s political project is the same: assimilation into the liberal state and the adoption of a universal religion of reason. At the end of chapter 3, Spinoza predicts the Jews could one day “erect their imperium once more,” but in doing so he anticipates a paradox of modern Zionism: he says the establishment of a modern state for the Jews must come at the expense of “the foundations of their religion” (iii.55; cf. also xvii.54). 33. Hence, the Ethics begins with definitions and axioms presuming the existence of Spinoza’s God (Spinoza 1996, I, D1–D8, A1–A7). 34. As he introduces this theology, Spinoza acknowledges his practice of esoteric writing and admits (as far as he can) that he will be using the Bible for his own purposes: “Although a faith in histories is unable to give us knowledge and love of God, yet we do not deny that, for the reason of civil life, a reading of them is very useful. For the more we observe—and the better we recognize—the mores and conditions of human beings, which cannot be recognized by

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anything better than by their actions, the more we will be able to live more cautiously among them and better accommodate our actions and life to their mental cast, as much as reason lets us” (iv.19). Cf. also v.37, which spotlights the stylistic difference between the Treatise and the Ethics. 35. On the basis of this specious argument Spinoza reaches the absurd conclusion that a belief in miracles would “lead us to Atheism” (vi.28)! 36. The Ethics thus ends with an apparent teaching on immortality, or (more precisely) that “something of ” the mind “is eternal” and endures after death. The arguments Spinoza employs to support this extraordinary (but carefully worded) claim are complex, but they do not purport to demonstrate—though they may leave the impression—that consciousness continues after the body’s demise (Spinoza 1996, P23 and Dem.; cf. P34 S). 37. For pride’s irrationality, see Spinoza 1996, III, P55, Def. Aff. XXV and XXVIII . 38. I am grateful to Thomas Pangle for this insight. Chapter 2 1. Although Spinoza’s deconstruction of the Bible in chapters 8–10 concerns the Old Testament only, his subsequent summary of it applies its results simply to “Scripture.” He thus implies that a comparable investigation of the New Testament would yield similar results, and he invites biblical scholars living in a time with more intellectual freedom to carry it out (cf. xii.28–30, A.21). As has been noted (Strauss 1952, 191 n. 100), the section of the Treatise devoted to higher criticism is missing a chapter—Spinoza moves from the later Prophets to the Acts of the Apostles, skipping the Gospels. Had it been written, that deconstruction of the Gospels would have been the work’s central numbered chapter. 2. Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, for example, takes for granted the single, divine authorship of the Bible, and its surface message emphatically affirms Jesus’s miracles (Herold 2014). 3. When discussing the Bible’s linguistic difficulties, Spinoza, quoting the words of Pythagoras from Ovid, declares that “gluttonous time” (Metamorphoses xv.234) has abolished “almost all the modes of speaking peculiar to the Hebrew nation” (vii.46). Pythagoras uses the phrase “gluttonous time” in a speech proclaiming the impermanence of all things. 4. Hobbes is reported by Aubrey to have said of the Treatise that he “durst not write so boldly” and that Spinoza “had outthrowne him a bar’s length” (quoted in Curley 1992, 497; Gildin 1980, 155). 5. Cf. also xv.26, 27, and 44: “We cannot demonstrate by reason whether the foundation of Theology—that human beings are saved by obedience alone—is true or false”; “I am stating absolutely that this fundamental dogma of Theology cannot be investigated by the natural light, or at least that there has been no one who has demonstrated it; and therefore revelation has been necessary in the greatest degree”; “For inasmuch as we cannot perceive by the natural light that simple obedience is the way of salvation, but revelation alone would teach that it comes about on the basis of the special grace of God, which we cannot arrive at by reason, hence it follows that Scripture has brought very great solace to mortals.” 6. Cf. also Beiner’s discussion of “the civil-religion paradox” (2010, 116–20). 7. In the Essay, most notably, “Locke confines himself mainly to endless repetitions of pious affirmations” (Pangle 1988, 215). 8. See esp. Locke 1975, I.21.55 and, in general, the entire chapter, which is entitled “Of Power.”

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9. “As far as Politics is concerned, the difference . . . between Hobbes and me, is this: I always preserve natural right unimpaired, and I maintain that in each State the Supreme Magistrate has no more right over its subjects than it has greater power over them. This is always the case in the state of nature” (Spinoza 2016, 406, Letter 50). 10. It is true that in De Cive (chap. 1, sec. 7), Hobbes characterizes the impulse toward self-preservation as a “necessity of nature as powerful as that by which a stone falls downward.” But the derivation of moral right from natural necessity is questionable, in part because the former supposes human willingness and the latter entails a denial of it. At the very least, few would speak of the right of a stone to fall, so it would seem problematic to claim that everyone should grant a similar moral right to self-preservation on that basis. Perhaps for this reason Hobbes dropped this formulation when he published Leviathan four years later. Cf. McShea (1968, 137ff.) with Strauss (1965, 229–30). For the relationship between Hobbes and Spinoza, see Curley (1992, 1996); Gildin (1980); McShea (1968, 137–55); and Strauss (1965, 225–50). 11. Berlin (1969, 142, 146–47) famously criticizes Spinoza for his teaching of “positive liberty.” See Smith (1997, 133–34, 242 n.81) and West (1993) for a defense against Berlin’s charge of illiberalism, together with Beiner (2010, 102–3, 131); Israel (2001, 259); Mara (1982); and Williams (2010). 12. Although Spinoza speaks of longing or passionate desire (cupiditate) twice in this chapter (xvi.7, 21), this does not connote any kind of desire for self-transcendence, and it is used more or less interchangeably with appetito. Cf. also Spinoza 1996, III, P9, S: “Between appetite and desire there is no difference, except that desire is generally related to men insofar as they are conscious of their appetite. So desire can be defined as Appetite together with consciousness of the appetite.” Later in Part III of the Ethics Spinoza derives from this scholium the insight that a man “neither strives to do, nor desires, anything unless it can follow from his given nature” (Spinoza 1996, III, P55, Cor., Dem.). 13. But cf. Annotation 36, where Moses is presented as extraordinarily lacking in political prudence and wishing every Israelite could be a prophet (Num. 11:29). Here again Spinoza provides drastically contradictory portraits of Moses, employing them as they suit his purposes. 14. Here the American Founders may serve as an instructive example, as Tocqueville will observe. 15. Spinoza thus criticizes the dictates of the Sermon on the Mount as impious and goes so far as to cite the pagan example of Manlius Torquatus as though it were part of the Bible (xix.23; cf. Machiavelli 1998, 103)! 16. To these four potential objections we might add another, which concerns what role the Ethics plays in adding to or complicating Spinoza’s refutational project. Since this is beyond our scope here, other than noting that the Ethics begins by assuming the impossibility of miracles and revelation, we must leave this an open question. 17. Consider, e.g., Pew Research (2013). 18. We might also add here that this admiration for self-sacrifice points in an antidemocratic direction. Nobility after all, is impressive precisely because it is rare, and so witnessing it can be taken as powerful testimony that some human beings are morally superior to others. 19. Consider here again the epigraph from Henry Adams at the opening of this book. 20. One additional manifestation of this problem may be found in the decline of the art of esoteric reading. If the Treatise seeks to engender a world in which the need for esoteric books becomes unknown, but where certain truths must nonetheless remain obscure, another obstacle

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to philosophy may yet be erected. For it may prove difficult for the most promising readers in an open society, unfamiliar with the strictures of traditional or pre-Enlightenment morality, to know how to approach a book written in the Treatise’s manner (cf. Strauss 1952, 155–56). 21. Cf. Manent: “In the formulation ‘liberty is equal for all,’ which essentially distills the definition of democratic liberty, the predicate is stronger than the noun. The extension of liberty to all members of the social body changes its meaning. The center of gravity of the social mechanism tips to the side of equality. To affirm the equal liberty of all citizens amounts to affirming equality first” (1996, 23). Chapter 3 1. Tocqueville, however, dedicates his longest chapter to race, the massive exception to this rule. 2. Mansfield and Winthrop 2000, xvi–xviii. The only mention of “the state of nature” in Democracy in America occurs in a quotation from Federalist 51, at the conclusion of the chapter on majority tyranny (249). Tocqueville refers several times to one or another “natural state”— such as “the natural state of democratic peoples” (612) and “the natural state of men in the matter of religion in our day” (287)—but these uses of the term are always particularistic and situational. 3. For a sustained treatment of Tocqueville’s methodology in light of this statement, see Garsten (2008). 4. See, e.g., Ceaser (1985, 1990); Eden (1990); Kraynak (1987); Manent (2006); Pangle (2006, 96–97); Salkever (1987); Tessitore (2009, 654–56). 5. For Tocqueville’s most forthright and succinct description of the Americans’ outlook, see p. 359. 6. Perhaps the same could not be said of the physiocrats and other champions of enlightened despotism, whose thought Tocqueville singles out for criticism in The Old Regime and the Revolution. See Tocqueville (2004, 209–17). 7. I have treated this problem more succinctly in (Herold 2015), which the forthcoming analysis will occasionally draw and expand upon. For alternative recent treatments, see (Berry 2019; Kitch 2016; Yarbrough 2018). 8. In the introduction, Tocqueville divides his audience into six intellectual groups (Mansfield and Winthrop 2006, 82–83, 103 n. 6), not one of which is a proponent of both freedom and religion. Of these six groups, the only one about whom Tocqueville has nothing positive to say is the vanguard of the Radical Enlightenment, those “who, in the name of progress, striving to make man into matter, want to find the useful without occupying themselves with the just, to find science far from [religious] beliefs, and well-being separated from virtue” (11). 9. Tocqueville does not employ “liberalism” as an analytical category in Democracy in America. But because he discusses the role of liberal concepts like individual rights, limited government, and religious toleration, I will use it. Even so, Tocqueville’s teaching is that these liberal principles are weaker than democratic ones; they are useful mainly for counterbalancing democracy, and that utility can be appreciated only once this weakness is recognized (cf. 482). Tocqueville contrasts the modern egalitarian view of liberty as autonomy with the older view of liberty as aristocratic privilege in “The Social and Political State of France Before and After 1789” (Tocqueville 1951, 3:36). See Manent (1996, 18–19) and Henary (2014, 473, 492–93) for helpful discussions. 10. See Tocqueville (2011) for a full translation of the speech.

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11. This seeming neglect of the liberal Enlightenment’s influence has earned Tocqueville occasional criticism from political scientists (cf. West 1991, who also faults him for never mentioning the Declaration of Independence), just as his analysis of democracy’s “social state” has garnered him favor among sociologists (Aron 1965). For a response to both views, see Mansfield (2014, esp. 204–8, 215–17; 2016, 251–54). 12. Kessler thus goes too far in claiming Tocqueville believed Jesus the first to proclaim an “equal right to freedom that each bears from birth,” (413, emphasis added; Kessler 1994, 83, 102, 108, 137). Tocqueville says the greatest classical authors denied this notion and that Jesus was the first to teach that human beings are “naturally alike and equal” (413). He is silent on whether Jesus taught that we are also born free (but see also 326). 13. Kessler 1994, 52–54; Lively 1965, 40–41; Zetterbaum 1967, 1–16, 19–21. On the other side, see Mitchell (1995). 14. For a more complete treatment of Tocqueville’s thoughts on history, and for a defense against the accusation of historicism, see Henary (2014). 15. For Tocqueville’s “indirect strategy,” see (Ceaser 1985, 663ff., 1990, 26–40). 16. I believe Hancock (1991, 375–76) is therefore correct to read Tocqueville’s mention of “civilization and enlightenment” here as an allusion to the Enlightenment. 17. The only time Tocqueville mentions a “natural aristocracy”—a meritocracy of “enlightenment and virtue”—it is to describe how the extreme individualism fostered by democracy naturally endangers it (50; cf. Manent 1996, 12, 142). 18. Cf. Machiavelli 1998, chap. 25. For other Machiavellian intimations in Tocqueville, see Mansfield and Winthrop (2014). 19. Tocqueville, however, is hardly insensitive to the Indians’ coming plight. His description of their forced migrations at the end of volume 1 contains one of the most moving and humane descriptions in the book (cf. esp. 310–11) and expresses unequivocal moral condemnation (cf. 320–25). Tocqueville’s mentions of providence in I.1.1 and I.2.10 thus provide another reminder that he may not regard the inevitable triumph of democracy (or God’s will) as necessarily just. 20. Cf. especially Allen (2005), who gives central importance to Tocqueville’s account of Puritan theology in developing a political theory in which duties accompany rights. 21. George Chalmers, the eighteenth-century historian Tocqueville cites, attributes Virginia’s introduction of slavery in 1619 to “commercial freedom” combined with “indolence, pride, and refractoriness” (Chalmers 1845, 1:13). 22. “The civilization of the North seems destined . . . to become the common measure by which all the rest will be regulated one day” (370). Although Tocqueville is convinced slavery’s days are numbered, his predictions concerning the Union’s survival and the capacity of American democracy to overcome the race problem are less sanguine (cf. 326, 341–43, 361ff.). 23. Cf. Ceaser (2011), who interprets Tocqueville’s account of the Puritans as deliberately ahistorical, inventive, and motivated by an attempt to read back into early America lessons from which his contemporaries could benefit. 24. Tocqueville advertises the “intelligence about government” and the “advanced theories of the legislator” in this, although here again his discussion of the details of Puritan legislation contains considerable authorial revision. Quoting the preamble to the educational provision of the Code of 1650, he changes its reasoning about the nature and purpose of education. Whereas the original code speaks only of “the knowledge of the scriptures,” Tocqueville’s French translation simply mentions “enlightenment” (cf. 41 with n. 39).

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25. As we saw, Spinoza derives this definition by collapsing the distinction between humans and other beings (2004, xvi.2–6; cf. also Hobbes 1994, xiv.2, Locke 1982, sec. 4, 6). 26. One example of majority tyranny Tocqueville gives concerns the way American religious sentiments effectively outlaw “licentious books.” Tocqueville says this use of the majority’s power is “doubtless good,” but he fears it could one day be directed to less salutary ends (245). Subsequently, Tocqueville extends the good use of that power to the effects of religion more generally, but he does suggest something unsettling about it: “Among the Anglo-Americans, some profess Christian dogmas because they believe them, others because they are afraid of not looking like they believe them. Christianity therefore reigns without obstacles, on the admission of all” (279; emphasis added). Tocqueville seems aware that the solution he proposes is not without risk, but there are also risks in leaving democracy’s natural secularizing tendencies to their own trajectory (cf. also Kessler 1994, 115; and Zuckert 1993, 232). 27. E.g., by Thomas Paine and by Jefferson, who (despite his hostility to urban commercialism) predicted that toleration would weaken religious passions and that all Americans would eventually become Unitarians (Jefferson 1984, 1459; Berns 1986, 222–23). 28. Kessler is thus incorrect to attribute the innovations in American religion to Tocqueville himself (1977, 124; 1994, 59). 29. “In the United States, when a political man attacks a sect, it is not a reason for the partisans even of that sect not to support him; but if he attacks all sects together, each flees him and he remains alone” (280). This de-emphasis of doctrine has naturally fostered the toleration of American Catholics, who, Tocqueville notes, have to a great extent adopted it themselves (423). 30. In volume 1 Tocqueville stresses the moral uniformity that accompanies liturgical diversity: “All differ in the worship one must render to the Creator, but all agree on the duties of men toward one another” (278). In volume 2 he goes further, noting a near absence of anything besides the utilitarian aspects of religion: “American preachers constantly come back to earth and only with great trouble can they take their eyes off it. To touch their listeners better, they make them see daily how religious beliefs favor freedom and public order, and it is often difficult to know when listening to them if the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world or well-being in this one” (504–5). 31. Cf. the prayers at issue in Engel v. Vitale 70 U.S. 421 (1962) and Lee v. Weisman 505 U.S. 577 (1992). 32. He has also voiced them in his own name (cf. 284), so it is tempting to take this statement as autobiographical. In a well-known letter from the end of his life, Tocqueville describes an unwilling loss of faith he experienced at sixteen after reading some books in his father’s library. The passage is quoted in full by Jardin, who insists “it was obviously his reading of Voltaire and Rousseau that caused doubt to enter his mind” (1988, 61–62). The same letter puzzlingly includes Tocqueville’s profession of belief in the soul’s immortality and posthumous rewards and punishments, and some scholars have thus taken it as evidence of faith (Yarbrough 2018, 18 n. 52). See Tocqueville (2002, 334–37) for a translation of the entire letter. Writing to Gobineau in 1843, Tocqueville said “I am not a believer,” although the precise object of this unbelief has been disputed. See Tocqueville (1951, 9:57) together with Kessler (1994, 193 nn. 1 and 3), who notes the omission of this statement in Lukacs’s translation (Tocqueville 1959, 205–6). 33. Most representative of American sentiment in this regard may be Washington’s declaration in his Farewell Address of the polity’s need of religion to inculcate moral habits leading to “political prosperity” and “the security of property.” Washington notes that religion should gain the support of the “mere politician, equally with the pious man,” and he responds to potential

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objections from those influenced by Enlightenment science: “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle” (Washington 1997, 971). 34. I have argued elsewhere that Locke’s religious project works at cross-purposes: while undermining the self-sacrificial elements of Christian piety for the sake of fostering toleration, it also seeks to preserve and strengthen them to inculcate civic spiritedness and devotion to natural rights (Herold 2014). 35. Kessler (1994) and Zuckert (1993) conclude that Tocqueville ultimately abandoned hope in religion’s ability to restrain democracy and looked instead to secular solutions (see also Zetterbaum 1967, 123), with Zuckert going so far as to suggest Tocqueville changed his mind about religion’s vitality between the publication of the work’s two volumes. 36. See also Galston (1992); Kessler (1993); Owen (2015, 141–42). 37. For an enduring contemporary analysis of this problem, see Fish (1997). 38. More concretely, “the only truth” for American Catholics is still “eternal damnation” (Tocqueville 1985, 50), and it is difficult to remain fellow citizens with someone whom one is convinced is destined for hell. 39. See also Baron (1982, 404–5). 40. See also Beiner (2010, 249–58), who places this tension in a Rousseauean context. 41. See, e.g., Goldstein (1975, 6); Yarbrough (2018). Carrese (2016, 100) finds elements of Thomistic natural theology here. 42. Mansfield (2016, 256) goes farther than I am willing to here by associating these aspects of human nature with Platonic eros and thumos. 43. Consider, e.g., the way the vision of a commercial republic articulated by Publius continues or presupposes the Enlightenment’s achievement in quelling religious fanaticism through toleration and the redirection of human efforts towards economic activity (see Berns 1986, 224ff. together with Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, 73–4, 79, 321). Chapter 4 1. Locke 1975, 2.21.31ff. For a more complete treatment of this phenomenon, see D. J. Stauffer (2018). 2. Tocqueville posits only two things that can inspire great strivings and sacrifices on the part of citizens: “There is nothing the in the world but patriotism or religion that can make the universality of citizens advance for long toward the same goal” (89). Tocqueville never explicitly claims that patriotism could provide an outlet for the desire for immortality, but his account of the sacrifices of the French Revolutionary soldiers (386), together with some of his other reflections on war and patriotism, may indicate that his account of religious psychology could be extended to help explain the outbreaks of nationalistic fervor in the century after he wrote. 3. Whereas in volume 1 Tocqueville had claimed the popularity of Christianity constrains such potential tyrants and demagogues in America (280), here he omits any mention of that safeguard. 4. See also Berry (2019), for whom these passages explain the growth of the contemporary “Alt Right.” 5. Additionally, because the inhabitants of a soft despotism are unlikely to resist the encroachments of a neighboring hard despotism, these two threats are necessarily intertwined (cf. 634).

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6. Among scholars critical of Tocqueville—especially of his later advocacy of imperialism as a potential solution to this problem—these considerations loom large (Banfield 1991, chap. 3; Boesche 2009; Pitts 2013; see also Henary 2014, 482 n. 36). 7. See n. 2 above. 8. For a contrasting interpretation, see Anastaplo (1991); Zetterbaum (1967, 102ff.). Conclusion 1. Cf. Kessler (1994, 24–26); Rahe (2009, 158, 317 n. 19, discussing Lawler 1993, 101–24). 2. For the most ambitious attempt to discern such theorizing in Tocqueville, see Mansfield (2014).

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INDEX

Abraham, 42 Adams, Henry, vi, 208 Ahmari, Sohrab, 213n4 Alexander the Great, 19–20, 22, 215n7 ambition, 185–87, 191–92, 224n6 anthropocentrism, 19, 24, 61, 82, 88 Apostles, 36, 75–76, 105 aristocracy: Christianity and demise of, 134–42; codes of honor, 183–84; degradation of peasants and, 140; democracy and, 125, 131–32; diversity under, 179–81; Enlightenment and, 141; historical outlook and, 132–33; human greatness and, 141, 211; Providence and, 138–39; religious inheritance of, 199, 203; self-transcendence and, 138–39, 180, 204; virtue and, 139–40, 142, 194 Aristotle, 4, 9, 125, 215n7 atheism, 82, 94, 160 Bagley, Paul J., 216n12 Bible: anti-republicanism and, 97; authenticity of, 77–78; authority of, 25; devotional audience and, 32; forgetting of, 72–73; God and the Hebrews in, 47; holiness of, 72–73; human reason and, 30, 216n16; irrationality of, 47; liberalism and, 5, 72, 214n9; moral authority and, 42; moral psychology and, 10; obedience and, 82; politics of, 64–66; popular opinions on, 60; prophecy and, 32–33; reason in, 20, 28, 34; revelations and, 33; self-reliance and, 38, 217n23; Spinoza on, 6–7, 28, 34, 37, 115; universal faith and, 77–78; the vulgar and, 83. See also Hebrew Bible; New Testament; Old Testament Catholic Church, 130, 165–67 Christianity: as ally of monarchies, 23; America and, 144, 157–67, 176, 198, 200;

de-emphasis of doctrine in, 160; demise of aristocracy and, 134–42; democracy and, 130, 133, 135–36, 200–203; devotion and, 68–69; equality and, 130, 140, 202; happiness and, 198; individual rights and, 5, 214n10; liberty and, 133; moral teaching and, 68; obedience and, 67; political equality and, 129, 137; political establishment of, 135; rational piety of, 35; reason and, 75; religious authority and, 23, 105–6; social equality and, 129–32; social revolution and, 153 civic education, 122 civic republicanism, 3–5 civil religion: believers in, 84–85; dogmas of, 84, 93–94; limits of Enlightenment and, 74; obedience and, 74, 79, 83; politics and, 84; rationalism and, 74–75; social cohesion and, 78, 80; social contract and, 111; superstitions and, 80–82; in the Treatise, 8, 17, 25, 74–75, 77–78; universal faith and, 8, 74, 77–83 commercialism: Americans and, 147–48, 161, 163, 172–74, 176, 178–79, 181; pride in, 178; restiveness and, 173–75, 177; self-sacrifice and, 173–74 communitarianism, 3, 154, 213n7 Connecticut Code of 1650, 151–54 constitutionalism, 124, 143 Declaration of Independence, 143 de Gobineau, Arthur, 153 democracy: Catholic support for, 165; Christianity and, 130, 133, 135–36, 200–203; communitarian, 3, 213n7; constitutionalism and, 124, 143; economic competition and, 180–81; Enlightenment thought and, 141–43; general ideas and, 131; humility and, 199–200, 209; inevitability of, 131, 134; intellectual freedom and, 122, 220n21;

236

Index

democracy (continued) justice and, 14, 142, 193, 203, 209–11; liberalism and, 121–22; liberty and, 127–28, 147–48, 150–53, 155–56, 220n21; modernity and, 124, 126; moral thinking in, 194–99; nationalism and, 192, 210; pantheism and, 188; religion in, 4–5, 13–14, 126, 135, 142, 144–47, 156–70, 203; self-sacrifice and, 192; simple explanations and, 132; social equality and, 123, 125, 130, 177–78, 220n21; Tocqueville on, 129–33; United States and, 123–24. See also liberal democracy Democracy in America (Tocqueville). See Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America Descartes, René, 125, 128–29 dignity: elite and, 104; freedom of the will and, 53, 106; Hebrew republic and, 102–4; human goods and, 68; moneymaking and, 114; reason and, 85; self-affirmation and, 95 divine law: biblical versus natural, 58; Hebrews and, 44–45; knowledge and love of God in, 57–59; obedience to God and, 78–79; Puritans and, 156; social contract and, 98; Spinoza on, 53, 56–59; universal, 77–78; virtue and, 59 Donagan, Alan, 216n19 Dutch Republic, 23–24, 100 duties: Bible and, 51; civic, 105, 121, 153; human greatness and, 150; for individual and common good, 69, 119; liberalism and, 119; liberty and, 96, 119, 155–56; political life and, 154; religion of reason and, 59; rights and, 3–4, 96, 221n20; virtue and, 195 Enlightenment: aristocracy and, 141; civil religion and, 74; democracy and, 141–43; innate religious hopes and, 171; liberal democracy and, 1, 5; majority truth and, 188; objection to individualism in, 2, 5, 214n10; rationalism and, 2, 6, 26, 39, 188; religion and, 13, 126, 157; religious equality and, 140–41; theologico-political problems and, 21; Tocqueville on, 11–12; weakening of faith and, 157, 165, 167 equality: America and, 123, 129; American restiveness and, 177; Christianity and, 129–30, 202; intellectual freedom and, 122; liberty and, 220n21; modern life and, 132; modern politics and, 125; moral case for, 211; religion and, 128. See also social equality

esotericism, 27, 111–12, 216n12, 217n34, 219n20 Ethics (Spinoza), 48, 56, 61, 82, 215n5, 218n36 Federalist, The, 124, 143 Federalists, 137 freedom. See liberty/freedom George, Robert P., 214n10 God: Abraham and, 42; absolute rule of, 97; being chosen by, 47–48; choosing of the Hebrews, 45, 47–50; corporeality of, 34–36, 216n22; human qualities and, 77; Jesus Christ and, 35–36, 216n22; justice and, 80; knowledge and love of, 57–59; laws of nature and, 25, 30–31, 37–38, 47, 49, 52, 54–57, 60–64, 135; moral qualities and, 44; Moses and, 33–34; natural law and, 30, 54–55, 60; obedience and, 78–79; prophets and, 29–30; Solomon and, 50–51; superstition and, 73; universal moral teaching of, 28; virtue and, 49 Hebrew Bible, 36–37, 71–72, 218n1. See also Bible; Old Testament Hebrews/Jews: chosen by God, 45, 47–50; communication with God, 32; corporeality of God and, 34, 36; miracles and, 37, 44–45; obedience to written law and, 80; persecution of, 50; polity of, 96–106; social contract and, 97–98; superstitions and, 37 higher criticism, 71 Histories (Tacitus), 17 Hobbes, Thomas: absolutism and, 94; on morality, 4; on nature and natural rights, 8, 86–87; on revelation, 29; self-preservation and, 219n10; on social contracts, 91; on summum bonum, 9, 46 honor codes, 182–85 human nature: convention and, 181; democracy and, 95, 172, 175; human greatness and, 141; intellectual freedom and, 108; irrationality of, 64; morality and, 8; religion and, 169, 185; self-interest and, 91, 194; self-sacrifice and, 187, 207; Tocqueville on, 11–12, 126; virtue and, 45, 48 humility, 199–200, 209 immortality: human hope for, 12–13, 16, 21, 59, 68, 126, 191, 205; justice and, 67; patriotism and, 223n2; religion and, 169; self-sacrifice and, 12, 51, 68, 126

Index individual rights: American colonies and, 147–48; Christian right on, 3; duties and, 3–4; liberal democracy and, 1, 3, 213n3; pre-political tradition of, 3; theoretical concerns on, 3 intellectual freedom, 15, 86, 122, 218n1 Isaiah, 59 Islam, 1–2, 23, 133 Israel, Jonathan, 6 Jardin, André, 222n32 Jeremiah, 80 Jesus Christ: as anthropomorphic deity, 35–36; communication with God, 35–36, 216n22; human equality and, 130–31, 221n12; justice and, 67–68; as philosopher, 37; prophecy and, 35, 216n19 Jews/Hebrews. See Hebrews/Jews John, 80, 82 Joshua, 99–100 justice: aristocracy and, 140–41; democracy and, 14, 142, 193, 203, 209–11; divine, 44, 58–59, 67–68, 77–78, 80–81, 87, 106; human qualities and, 87; moral laws of, 182–83; philosophers and, 85; piety and, 106; self-interest and, 90; selftranscendence and, 119; Solomon and, 51 Kennedy, John F., 3 Kessler, Sanford, 222n32, 223n5 Lawler, Peter Augustine, 214n10 Letter Concerning Toleration (Locke), 160 liberal democracy: anti-biblical, 128; crisis in, 1, 10–11, 209; duties and, 119; individual rights and, 1, 3, 213n3; intellectual freedom and, 108–12; morality and, 2–3, 108, 112, 114–15, 120, 127; moral objections to, 2–3, 213n4; Old Testament and, 96; origins of American, 144; rational theology and, 113–14; religion and, 129, 162; religious indifference and, 166; scientific moral teaching and, 74; self-sacrifice and, 109, 114–15, 119–20, 219n18; social contract and, 110, 113; superstitions and, 9–10, 17, 117; theological foundations of, 15 liberalism: American piety and, 157; Bible and, 5, 72, 214n9, 214n10; crisis in, 6, 119, 209; democracy and, 121–22; duty and, 119; esoteric writing and, 112; freedom and, 155; religion and, 10, 127–30, 166; Spinoza’s

237

anti-theocratic, 24–25; spiritual liberation of few through, 85; tastes and, 109–10; theology and, 5, 15 liberty/freedom: corrupt, 155; democratic, 126, 220n21; duties and, 96, 119, 155–56; intellectual, 17, 62, 97; political, 110; positive, 155–56; religion and, 127–28, 133, 145–51, 157–63 Locke, John: on Christian piety, 163, 223n34; on Christian revelation, 84–85; Enlightenment thought and, 6; on European religious wars, 146; Letter Concerning Toleration, 160; on nature and natural rights, 86; Reasonableness of Christianity, 84, 160; Second Treatise, 143; Two Treatises of Civil Government, 215n2 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 37, 98 Madison, James, 94 Maimonides, 55–56, 217n32 Mayflower Compact, 151 Melzer, Arthur M., 214n12, 216n12 miracles: anthropocentrism and, 82; Jews and, 37, 44–45; prophets and, 40; refutation of, 8, 11, 25, 29, 54–56, 61, 215n5; uncertainty and, 32 modernity, 5–6, 124, 126, 185, 213n5 monarchies: civil/religious violence and, 22, 97; divine right and, 136; Enlightenment thought and, 6; Hebrew polity and, 104–5; liberal democracy and, 21; religious control and, 22–23, 90, 128, 136, 158, 201; republicanism and, 17, 21, 24; spiritual discontent and, 104 monotheism, 22, 65 Montesquieu, 11, 158 morality: equality and, 211; freedom and, 160–61; human nature and, 8; justice and, 90; liberal democracy and, 2–3, 108, 112, 114–15, 120, 127; natural rights and, 4, 8, 88; nature and, 8–9; piety and, 104–5; politics and, 44, 66, 72, 159; power and, 8; public, 82; reason and, 84; religious, 161–63, 165–67, 177, 194; rights talk and, 3; Scriptures and, 40, 42, 44, 50, 129; self-sacrifice and, 139; separation of philosophy from theology, 72; Spinoza on, 214n12 Morton, Nathaniel, 149–50, 162 Mosaic Law: as cult of obedience, 42, 66–69, 79; irrationality of, 42–43; morality and, 41; natural rights teaching and, 97; Puritans

238

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Mosaic Law (continued) and, 144; revelation of, 15, 33; rewards and punishments in, 42 Moses: authority of, 33, 35, 68, 98, 102–4; failure as statesman, 15; Hebrew polity and, 96–98; lack of sophistication of, 39, 41–42; liberal democracy and, 66; Pentateuch and, 28–29; prophecy and, 33–34; written law and, 79–80 Murray, John Courtney, 214n10 nationalism, 192, 210 natural knowledge, 30, 60, 75, 79 natural rights teaching: Declaration of Independence and, 143; free thinking and, 95–96; Hobbes and, 86–87; Locke and, 86; morality and, 96; Mosaic Law and, 97; reality and, 87; republicanism and, 89–90; Spinoza and, 8–9, 86–89, 119, 219n9 nature: America and state of, 143–44; conquest of, 13, 16, 174, 179, 185–86; convention and, 182; devotion to, 62–64; divine meaning in, 82; freedom and, 95; God and laws of, 25, 30–31, 37–38, 47, 49, 52, 54–57, 60–64, 135; Jews and state of, 97–98; morality and, 8–9; natural rights and, 74, 85–88, 93. See also human nature Nelson, Eric, 214n9 Neuhaus, Richard John, 214n10 New England’s Memorial (Morton), 150 New Testament: Christian ceremonies and, 67; Christianity as rational piety, 35; devotion and, 66; obedience and, 59, 79; revelation at Sinai, 34; self-sacrifice and immortality in, 51. See also Bible obedience: Bible and, 82; civil religion and, 74, 79, 83; divine law and, 78–79; Mosaic Law and, 42, 66–69, 79–80; natural law and, 59; New Testament and, 59, 79; Old Testament and, 79; philosophy versus, 83; political stability and, 42; reason versus, 79, 85; truth and, 78; as virtue, 61 Old Regime and the Revolution, The (Tocqueville), 130, 158 Old Testament: corporeality of God and, 36; critique of, 108; forgetting of God in, 73; irrationality of, 47; liberal democracy and, 96; obedience and, 79; prophecy and, 51; Puritans and, 150–51, 153; revelation at Sinai, 34. See also Bible; Hebrew Bible

Pangle, Thomas L., 158 pantheism: conformity and, 120; democracy and, 188; John and, 82; Spinoza and, 16, 48, 60, 62, 88; Tocqueville on, 13, 48, 61, 120, 188 Pascal, Blaise, 14, 204–8, 211 patriotism, 24, 162, 192, 223n2 Paul, 44, 55, 76, 80 philosophy: democratization of, 112–13; esoteric reading and, 219n20; as human blessedness, 52; human goods and, 43–44; intellectual freedom and, 15, 86; liberal democracy and, 9–10, 120; as liberation from anthropocentrism, 61; obedience versus, 83; piety and, 47, 63; political reform and, 16; as quest for truth, 53, 56; religion of reason and, 59; separation from theology, 8, 72–73, 83–86, 111, 115; threat of religion to, 7–8; truth and, 53, 72, 83, 115 piety: Christianity and, 23, 35, 38; civic, 102; democratic, 198; intellectual freedom and, 25; justice and, 106; morality and, 104–5; patriotism and, 162; philosophy as, 47; post-biblical, 60, 100; public good and, 105; rational, 63; reward for virtue and, 197; theology and, 83. See also religion Plato, 9, 215n7 politics: biblical, 96–97, 108; civil religion and, 84; constitutionalism and, 143; liberalism and, 207; loss of confidence in, 1–2; moderation in, 1, 14, 211; morality and, 44, 66, 72, 74, 159; Puritans and, 150, 153–55, 159; rational, 6–7, 16, 86; religion in, 4, 6, 159–60; social equality and, 125; Spinoza on, 64–70; theological basis for, 2. See also communitarianism; democracy; liberal democracy; republicanism Politics (Aristotle), 4 populism, 1, 11 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 98 prophecy/prophets: anthropological account of, 39; authority of, 29–30; Bible and, 32–33; critique of, 28–37; Jesus as, 35, 216n19; lack of sophistication of, 39–42; mind of God and, 37; miracles and, 40; moral teaching and, 40–41, 44; Moses as, 33–34; natural knowledge and, 30; as natural phenomenon, 38; orthodox definition of, 29–30, 33; as primitive expression, 36; refutation of, 36; revelation and, 29, 32–33, 40; veracity of, 15, 33

Index Protestantism, 140, 155, 165–67 Providence, 131, 134, 138, 150, 201 public good, 105 Puritans: liberal democracy and, 145; liberty and, 150; Mosaic Law and, 144; Old Testament and, 150–51, 153; as pilgrims, 149; point of departure and, 143–44; political law and, 150, 153–55, 159; religious law and, 150–56; republican/communitarian aspects, 154; separation of religion and freedom, 159 Quintus Curtius, 22–23 rational life: freedom of philosophizing and, 15; goods of fortune and, 46; law and, 42; morality and, 27, 59; reason and, 8, 20; refutation of miracles and, 8; republicanism and, 93–94; summum bonum and, 59 reason: dissatisfaction with, 10; Enlightenment and, 2, 39; as handmaiden to theology, 30, 32, 75–76, 115; holiness and, 50; morality and, 27–28, 44; obedience versus, 79, 85; rational life and, 8, 20; religion of, 45, 57–64, 76; religious critique of, 7, 23–25; in Scripture, 20, 37; truth and, 121; validity of, 54–55 Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke), 84, 160 religion: as aristocratic inheritance, 199, 203; democracy and, 4–5, 13–14, 203; fear and, 206; freedom and, 127–28, 133, 145–51, 157–63; governmental powers and, 104–7; liberal democracy and, 129, 162; liberalism and, 10, 127–30, 166; monarchies and, 22–23, 136, 158; patriotism and, 162, 223n2; politics and, 4, 6, 159–60; of reason, 45, 57–64, 76; self-reliance and, 19; self-sacrifice and, 196–97, 223n2. See also Christianity; civil religion republicanism: anti-theocracy and, 69–70; civic, 3–5; established religion and, 17; free thinking and, 95–96; Hebrew, 97–106; intellectual independence and, 23–26; natural rights and, 89–90; patriotism and, 24; public religious teaching and, 4–5; rationality and, 93–94; social contract and, 89–92; as summum bonum, 92, 95–96; superstitions and, 90 restiveness: Americans and, 172–77; commercialism and, 173–75, 177; equality and, 177;

239

religious revivals and, 175–76; Tocqueville on, 52 revelation: anthropocentrism and, 82; categories of, 33; claimed experience of, 116–17; moral critique of, 32–36; prophets and, 29, 32–33, 40; refutation of, 116–18; social utility and, 78 Rorty, Richard, 2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 89, 121 Scriptures. See Bible Second Treatise (Locke), 143 self-interest, 195–97 self-preservation, 91, 219n10 self-reliance, 19, 38, 217n23 self-sacrifice: aristocracy and, 204; commercialism and, 173–74; communal bonds and, 5; democracy and, 192; honor and, 184–85; human nature and, 187, 207; immortality and, 12, 51, 68, 126; liberal society and, 119; morality and, 139; Mosaic Law and, 50; patriotism and, 223n2; religion and, 196–97, 223n2; Tocqueville on, 10, 12; virtue and, 138, 169, 195 Seneca, 69 social contract: Hebrews and, 97–98; Hobbes on, 91; irrationality of, 111; liberal democracy and, 110, 113; republicanism and, 89–92; utility and, 92 Social Contract (Rousseau), 89 social equality: Christianity and, 131–32; democracy and, 123, 125, 130, 177–78, 220n21; modern politics and, 125; rootlessness and, 133. See also equality Solomon: justice and, 51; on just rulers, 106; lack of sophistication of, 39; as philosopher, 37; on virtue, 58; wisdom of, 43, 47, 50–51, 58, 217n25 Souvenirs (Tocqueville), 207 Spinoza, Benedict: on Aristotle, 9, 215n7; best Republic and, 89; on the Bible, 6–7, 28, 34, 37, 115; civic education and, 122; civil religion teaching and, 8; on desire, 92, 219n12; on devotion, 67–69; on divine law, 53, 56–59; on the Dutch Republic, 23–24, 100; Enlightenment thought and, 6, 11, 15–16, 21, 26, 42, 44–46, 72–74, 77, 120–21; European influence of, 158; on European religious wars, 146; existence of God and, 54; on Hebrew Bible, 71–72, 218n1; human greatness and, 207; on human nature, 207–8;

240

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Spinoza, Benedict (continued) on intellectual liberation, 53, 121; liberalism and, 207; on Maimonides, 55–56, 217n32; on martyrdom, 118–19; natural law and, 54–55; natural rights teaching, 8–9, 86–89, 119, 219n9; pantheism and, 16, 48, 60–62, 88, 215n5; on Plato, 9, 215n7; political vision of, 9–10, 114–22; popular enlightenment and, 42–44; rational piety and, 35, 60, 63; refutation of miracles, 8, 11, 25, 29, 54–56, 61; refutation of revelation, 116–18; refutation of Scripture and, 38, 51, 115–16; on religion and politics, 159; religious psychology and, 206, 208; on selfpreservation, 91; self-sacrifice and, 119; on summum bonum, 9, 45–47, 52–54, 57, 59, 89, 114; on threats to intellectual life, 206; on the vulgar, 19, 43, 59–61, 83 Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics, 48, 56, 61, 82, 215n5, 218n36 Spinoza, Benedict. Theologico-Political Treatise: on anthropomorphic divinity, 34–36; anti-theocracy and, 24–25; apostolic dilemma in, 74–77; audience mindset and, 31–32, 59–60; Bible critique in, 7–8; biblical understanding of God, 34–35, 216n18; civil theology and, 8, 17, 25, 74–86, 93–94; contradictions in, 74; critique of prophecy in, 28–37; deconstruction of the Hebrew Bible and, 71–72; divine law and, 52–59; elite and, 15, 27, 44–45, 53, 58–61, 63; esotericism and, 27, 111–12, 216n12, 217n34, 219n20; family in, 149; freedom of philosophizing and, 15–17, 28, 215n11; governmental powers and, 94–96, 105–7; Hebrew polity and, 97–106; human blessedness and, 57–60; human goods and, 48–49; intellectual freedom and, 108–12; law and the summum bonum, 45–51; liberal democracy and, 6, 8–10, 15, 96–97, 108–14, 209; liberal religion and, 6; nature and natural rights in, 85–88; obedience and, 78–80, 155; political vision of, 64–70, 85–86; problem of superstition in, 17–24, 28, 215n7; prophets and, 29; pursuit of truth and, 38; readership of, 26–28; refutation of miracles and, 55; refutation of religion and, 20, 30–31; religion of reason and, 45, 57–64, 76; religious anthropology, 38–44; republicanism and, 23–26, 69–70, 215n11; revelation and, 56; Scripture as reasonable

in, 37; separation of philosophy from theology in, 83–86, 111, 115; social contract and republicanism, 89–96; Solomon and, 37; theology and, 214n2; toleration and, 16, 215n3; transformation of society and, 16, 21, 23, 215n4; on true life, 49, 58; universal faith and, 49, 80–82; virtue in, 37–38 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 11 Strauss, Leo, 214n12, 216n12, 216n19 summum bonum: goods of fortune and, 46; Hobbes on, 9, 46; human perfection and, 53–54; knowledge and love of God as, 57–58; rationalism and, 59; republic as, 92, 95–96; science and, 54; Spinoza on, 9, 45–47, 52–54, 57, 59, 89, 114 superstitions: anthropocentrism and, 19, 88; civil religion and, 80–82; Hebrew Bible and, 36–37; in liberal democracy, 9–10, 17, 117; political use of, 22; rationalistic, 93, 115; refutation of religion and, 20; religious control and, 22–24; republicanism and, 90; as response to fear, 7, 18, 20–21, 28, 117–18; sacrifices and, 19; social cohesion and, 80; universal faith and, 81–82; as vain religion, 20–21; the vulgar and, 117 Tacitus, 17 Theologico-Political Treatise (Spinoza). See Spinoza, Benedict. Theologico-Political Treatise theology: control of thought and, 22; foundation of, 84, 218n5; liberalism and, 5; moral universe and, 58; pantheism and, 62; politics and, 15; reason as handmaid to, 26–28, 30, 32, 75–76; religion of reason and, 59, 61; separation from philosophy, 8, 72–73, 83–86, 111, 115; universalistic, 49. See also religion Tocqueville, Alexis de: on American society, 124–25; on democracy, 125–28; Enlightenment critique of, 12–13; on European religious wars, 146–47; human greatness and, 207, 211; on human nature, 207–8; liberalism and, 127, 207; on loss of faith, 163, 208, 222n32; on modern politics, 123–27; on pantheism, 13, 48, 61, 120, 188; on Pascal, 14, 204–8, 211; political science of, 11–14, 167–68, 171, 187–205, 209; on religion, 93, 127–28; on religious functionalism, 163, 223n5; religious psychology and, 168–70, 206, 208; religious statesmanship

Index and, 127–28; social scientific enquiry and, 210; on threats to intellectual life, 206 Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America: ambition and, 185–87, 191–92, 224n6; on American anxiety and discontent, 172–78; on American Catholics, 165–67; on American commercialism, 147–48, 161, 163, 172–74, 176, 178–79, 181; on American restiveness, 52, 172–75; on aristocratic historians, 132–33; on aristocratic virtue, 139–40, 142; Christianity and demise of aristocracy, 134–42; defining freedom, 155–56; democratic future and, 203–5; on despotism, 190–91, 209, 223n5; on development of equality, 130–33; Enlightenment political thought and, 143; family in, 149; immortality and, 126; individualism and, 139, 221n17; individual rights and, 147–48, 187; inevitability of democracy and, 131, 134; intellectual life and, 203–5; intellectual trends and, 188–91; justice and, 182–83; liberalism and, 129, 220n9; on longing for immortality, 191; on love of equality, 189; majority tyranny and, 156, 211, 222n26; on monotony of democracy, 180–81; moral and religious statesmanship, 193–203; on national projects, 192–93, 210; on Native Americans, 143, 221n19; New England pilgrims in, 148–50; on origins of democracy, 129–35; point of departure in, 143–46, 156–57; political law and, 154–55, 221n24; on pride and honor, 179–87, 200; on Providence, 131, 134; Puritan law and, 150–56; Puritan theology and, 144–45, 149–51, 159, 221n20; reasonable Christianity and, 158–63; religion and freedom in, 128–29, 146–51, 157–63; religion as political institution, 157–60; religion in human nature, 163–67; religious psychology and, 126–27; state of nature in, 220n2; on war, 192–93; on weakening of faith, 164–67, 175–77 Tocqueville, Alexis de. Old Regime and the Revolution, The, 130, 158 Tocqueville, Alexis de. Souvenirs, 207 tolerance, 114, 118–19, 121, 166 Treatise. See Theologico-Political Treatise (Spinoza) Troades (Seneca), 69 Trump, Donald, 213n4

241

truth: civil religion and, 83; democracy and, 144, 159, 188; effectual, 21, 38, 106; existence of God and, 54; God’s eternal, 54, 82, 88, 91; obedience and, 78; philosophy and, 53, 72, 83, 115; reason and, 32, 121, 125, 160; religion and, 163, 201, 206, 208; religious psychology and, 21; search for, 204; virtue and, 38 Two Treatises of Civil Government (Locke), 215n2 United States: Cartesian philosophic method and, 132, 144, 187; Catholicism and, 165–67; Christianity and, 144, 157–67, 176, 198, 200; commercialism in, 147–48, 161, 163, 172–74, 176, 178–79, 181; democracy in, 123–24, 129; individual rights and, 147–48; liberal democracy and, 145; moral authority and, 129; personal self-interest in, 125; Puritan theology and, 144–45; religion and freedom in, 146, 157–63, 168, 222n30, 222n33; religion in, 124, 126, 144; religious functionalism and, 163; religious revivals in, 175–76; religious tolerance in, 160–61, 164–66, 222n29; restiveness and, 52, 172–77; self-interest and, 195–97; separation of church and state in, 144, 156–57, 159–60, 168; simple explanations and, 132; social equality and, 125, 129; weakening of faith in, 164–67, 175–77 universal faith: dogmas of, 8, 74, 80–83; reason and, 78, 80; superstitions and, 81–82. See also civil religion virtue: aristocracy and, 139–40, 142, 194; civic, 85; codes of honor and, 183–85; divine law and, 59; duty and, 195; egalitarianism and, 185; God’s choosing and, 49; human nature and, 45, 48; human spirit and, 37–38; justice and, 182–83; moral freedom and, 52–53; moral/intellectual, 59; philosophic, 85; pride and, 200; self-interest and, 197; self-sacrifice and, 138, 169, 195; Solomon on, 58; tolerance as, 114, 118–19, 121; wisdom and, 43 Winthrop, John, 155 Zuckert, Catherine, 223n5