In this chapter I continue the redescription of Tocqueville's sociology of religion from Chapter 6. To do so, however, I leave behind the historical method that has been the basis of this book in favor of Tocqueville's sociological method of ideal-types. Switching to this sociological method also helps to make Tocqueville useful to today, for these rational abstractions are designed for comparative purposes. In order to diagnose France, Tocqueville needed a kind of template or table of thought that was something different from the empirical evidence found in particular societies, and the ideal-type of the democratic social state is the tool he developed for this purpose. After this description of Tocqueville's ideal-type, I turn to how he used it to read the histories of America and France, as well as to what this perspective opens up for twenty-first century America. As I suggested in the introduction, the America of 1831 no longer exists, and in order to make Tocqueville useful today we need to perform the same act of translation through time that he performed through space. We need to understand how his ideal-type diagnosed France and then, in turn, use his method to look at the America today.

This chapter moves in four steps. First, I take a brief look at how Tocqueville uses a modified form of the Jansenist theory of orders to help him conceive of religion and liberty as antinomies, a relation he places at the center of his ideal-type. Second, I use a brief comparison with Jon Elster and Robert Bellah to look at how Tocqueville describes the political utility and social function of the antinomy of religion in democratic political life. In the third section, I look at how Tocqueville used the ideal-type as an analytic device to make sense of the French and American foundations. Lastly, I use this look at Tocqueville's ideal-type as a comparison with America today. I argue that in contrast to the argument that the American foundation was unitary and democratic, Tocqueville sees it as having a two-fold nature: democratic in the North, to be sure, but aristocratic and unequal in the South. I conclude the America of today may be seeing a similar set of consequences as Tocqueville's France, but that this should ultimately leave us with an optimistic view of the future of American democracy.