Most interpreters who have taken an interest in Rousseau’s nationalism have looked beyond his Social Contract. This seems fitting, for Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsica, and Discourse on Political Economy explicitly discuss the role of nationality and the distinctiveness of national identity. By way of contrast, the Social Contract is often cited as a work of ideal theory, less concerned with the empirical, sociological contingencies of actual nations and more focused on normative questions about the best political community. This chapter suggests that this standard interpretation of the Social Contract discounts the significant role played by extant, prepolitical peoples. Rather than a purely abstract contract among previously unaffiliated individuals, as per Thomas Hobbes, a closer reading reveals the ontological and historical primacy of peoples in Rousseau’s political theory.

Thomas Hobbes’ affinity for certain core conceptions of liberalism has been noted by critics and admirers alike. Nonetheless, these proto-liberal aspects have tended to be overshadowed by his more obvious institutional support for absolute monarchy. This tension has sparked generations of disagreement. While building on familiar scholarly debates, the chapter sheds light on three less explored Hobbesian conceptual revolutions. The first is Hobbes’ distinction between persons and individuals. The ascendancy of the individual at the expense of the personage gives rise to a second building block of modern conceptions of popular sovereignty: namely, the reign of quantity and the depreciation of quality. Assuming an underlying identity among such individuals, popular sovereignty is predicated on an ability to measure their respective wills quantitatively. Finally, the Hobbesian theory model of solidarity is distinguished by its aspiration to uniformity. What Hobbes castigates as asperity on the part of individual subjects must be resisted not only because the existence of discrepant wills challenges uniformity, but also because such persons are representative of differences.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s political orientation has proven surprisingly difficult to characterize. During his own lifetime and political career, Tocqueville was a self-identified liberal and a figure on the French centrist-left. However, his political thought in the twentieth century has increasingly become associated with the conservative Right, especially in the United States. In this chapter, Richard Boyd identifies five major elements of Democracy in America that have strong affinities for central tenets of political conservatism. He further demonstrates how different figures on the conservative Right in the United States have drawn on these dimensions of Tocqueville’s political thought to bolster various strands of conservative thinking and policy. Whether a matter of foreign affairs, welfare reform, criticisms of the administrative state, affirmations of the centrality of religion to political life, or complaints about modernity and cultural decline, thinkers on the Right have found abundant intellectual resources in Democracy in America. As Boyd demonstrates, however, the Right has often deployed these arguments selectively and sometimes even at cross purposes in light of changing domestic and geopolitical circumstances.

In the editor’s introduction, Richard Boyd surveys the main intellectual sources for Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work Democracy in America. After sketching out how Democracy in America has been read in light of the influences of Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Blaise Pascal, and François Guizot, Boyd surveys the book’s contemporaneous receptions in France, England, and America. Consulting reviews from leading journals of the 1830s and 1840s, Boyd demonstrates that, while Democracy in America was universally acclaimed as a work of genius, its teachings about democracy were interpreted differently as a function of the ideological predilections of its readers. Tocqueville’s appeal to divergent political sensibilities – conservative and liberal democratic alike – anticipates a consistent pattern of subsequent thinkers adapting the book’s complex teachings to their own political circumstances. This rich tradition of appropriation is hardly confined to the United States or Europe but extends globally into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.