A TOTALLY NEW WORLD

We see Alexis de Tocqueville first of all as a citizen, a politician, and statesman confronting a temporal discontinuity. The old order has been swept away; the new order is not firmly established. If instability and disorder are prevalent in institutions, it is because they already affect men’s souls: “The laws of moral analogy have . . . been abolished.” If one is to become capable of acting in and on the new society, one must first know it. But what does it mean “to know the new society?” A “new political science” of unparalleled prestige already existed, that of Montesquieu. Benjamin Constant held fast to Montesquieu’s conclusion that the “modern difference” was the difference introduced by the development of commerce and the institution of regular political representation. In a style all his own, François Guizot ratified and extended the science of “representative government.”