This chapter examines how and why the idea of “liberal democracy” was invented by French liberals in the 1860s. I argue that liberal democracy was conceived as an essentially polemical concept, defined in reaction to what French liberals identified as a defective form of democracy – namely, Napoleon III’s “Caesarist democracy.” I also show that, initially, one of the key meanings of liberal democracy was the idea of rule by public opinion. The first theorists of liberal democracy criticized Caesarism as a dangerous combination of plebiscitary sovereignty and silencing of public opinion. Meanwhile, they argued that the exercise of popular sovereignty should be confined to legislative elections, and that a free and independent public opinion should influence both elections and representatives. This perspective was articulated by figures such as Eugène Pelletan, Auguste Nefftzer, Charles Dollfus, Édouard Laboulaye, Anatole Prévost-Paradol and Émile Ollivier. The chapter further explores how the invention of the term “liberal democracy” overlapped with efforts to create a liberal tradition, as well as with a defense of settler colonialism in Algeria.

This chapter interprets Tocqueville’s thought in the context of the political discussions that took place during the French July Monarchy (1830–1848). It begins by exploring how the ruling liberal elite, including figures like François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, responded to the radical republicans’ arguments about direct popular sovereignty and democracy. This confrontation sets the stage for understanding Tocqueville’s arguments about the people’s two powers in Democracy in America (1835–1840). In that text, Tocqueville criticized the idea of government by public opinion, which was advocated by his liberal contemporaries. Meanwhile, he rehabilitated direct popular sovereignty, as exercised at the local level in the New England township, interpreting it as the beating heart of political democracy and a source of “public spirit.” The concluding section considers how, faced with the impossibility of recreating the American township in France, Tocqueville began to look for alternative sources to foster “public spirit” in his home country, including the colonization of Algeria and the creation of great opposition parties.

This essay probes two questions about popular sovereignty’s status as a philosophical and governing creed in early America. How did an unprecedented collective ‘people’ – a people of citizens who actively participated in governing and who constituted an abstract legitimating power – get fashioned notwithstanding the remarkable national, cultural, religious, and racial heterogeneity of Britain’s North American colonies and the early United States? Why did this remarkable achievement not last, culminating in rivers of blood? I argue that the constellation of ideas and institutions that had fashioned America’s civic people out of raw materials provided by Hobbes, Locke, and Madison was brought to crisis by how President Andrew Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun elaborated extensions to the scope of popular sovereignty in the name of democracy – Jackson regarding the movement of free white people westward; Calhoun concerning slavery and its expansion.

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.

Tocqueville is shown to be an able student and adversary of Machiavelli.

If, as this book argues, jurors are made, not found, and it is the stages of the jury process that transform jurors into responsible jurors, what are the implications of this new understanding of the American jury system? One implication is that more citizens can serve as jurors. The traditional view is that only those who enter the courtroom as ready-to-serve jurors can be jurors, but this is a limited view of who can serve. If, instead, the jury process is what brings about the transformation of citizens into jurors, then most citizens can serve. In the United States, citizens who might have doubts about their ability to be a juror should be reassured that they can serve, and serve well. Citizens in other countries who might have doubts about their ability to be jurors, particularly in countries that do not have a tradition of juries, should also be reassured. If the stages of their jury process track those in the United States, and their judges play a similar role as judges in the United States, then their jury process will transform citizens into jurors too.

Chapter 10 situates the findings of the book in the main lines of literature on Iran state-building: state centralization and its contradictions; authoritarian persistence; social welfare compact between state and citizens; and the challenges of democratization. The chapter also assesses the implications of the Iran experience for conventional expectations of the democracy-decentralization nexus. The chapter explains why the main lines of literature on modern Iranian state-building fail to explain what motivated the IRI to adopt political decentralization or to explain the timing when it finally did so. Nor does this scholarship distinguish the two dimensions of centralization emphasized in this book. Moreover, scholarship on Iranian state-building has thus far not engaged with the theory of electoral authoritarianism; my findings give strong support to this theory, which explains how the regime effectively deploys local electoral politics to enhance its dominance. Electoral authoritarianism moreover explains how the two forms of state power – the despotic and infrastructural – can be combined in the management of subnational divisions of the nation’s territory. Finally, the findings of the book undermine the claim, associated with writers such as Mahmoud Taleghani or Alexis de Tocqueville, that there is an necessary and causal relationship between decentralization and democratization. The book shows how political and electoral decentralization can be compatible with authoritarian state-building.

Chapter 4 turns to the historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay to investigate tensions between classical eloquence and the emergence of mass politics. Macaulay’s influential History of England revived the classical notion of history as a branch of rhetoric, as well as the classical practice of narrating political change through simulated speech. For Macaulay, writing history as rhetoric had a clear normative value: it was an effort to glamorize practices of political judgment that he saw as increasingly endangered by mass politics. While Macaulay contributed to the growth of political participation through his advocacy of the Reform Act, he also feared the ways in which mass politics might render political life less susceptible to classical norms of eloquence. His History is a response to this fear: an attempt to educate a judging public. The chapter concludes by contrasting his attempt with Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. In comparison to his contemporary Macaulay, Tocqueville fixed his attention on secrecy rather than publicity, long-term processes rather than charged moments of persuasion, and tragic necessity rather than deliberative contingency. Nevertheless, Macaulay’s historiography offers something that Tocqueville’s lacks: a temporally sophisticated account of rhetoric, in which the orator’s responsibilities include cultivating practices of judgment over time.

Chapter 6 examines the evolution of associational freedoms from the time of de Tocqueville through the modern era. It begins by discussing the myriad ways in which even nonpolitical associations, organized around a vast variety of topics and causes, helped shape our democracy from the nineteenth through much of the twentieth centuries. Such groups helped politically marginalized individuals such as women and minorities to develop the organizational and leadership skills needed to participate in political life. They also were vehicles that, given a push, could evolve to pursue political objectives. And importantly, such associations permitted citizens possessing a diversity of social and political views to mingle and exchange thoughts. Recently, however, as Robert Putnam has extensively shown, civil society in the United States has collapsed. Instead of participating in broad associations, people are increasingly siloed into narrow groups with shared political and social values, a process that the Internet and social media have vastly exacerbated. The chapter concludes by exploring how certain surviving associations – notably book clubs and beer groups – might present a pattern for how we might bring about an associational revival, and how the Internet might become a tool rather than a barrier in that quest.

This chapter focuses on Aron’s interpretation of Montesquieu and Tocqueville and his influential self-description as their ‘belated descendant’ in his book Main Currents of Sociological Thought. It argues, firstly, that in this book Aron’s invention of a ‘French school of political sociology’ represented by these liberal forbears was part of wider efforts among sociologists to rewrite their discipline’s history at a time when it was becoming unprecedentedly popularised and institutionalised. It shows that the decline of Durkheimian hegemony at this juncture had opened up a consensus gap between French sociologists, some of whom - including Aron - responded by rewriting the discipline’s past to legitimate their competing visions of its future. The chapter also shows how Aron read Montesquieu and Tocqueville through the lens of his earlier philosophical writings in an attempt to revise the epistemological basis of his political thought. Ironically, this project was substantially indebted to previous readings of Montesquieu and Tocqueville by some of the same Durkheimian colleagues against whom Aron defined himself and the ‘French school of political sociology’ in Main Currents.

This chapter considers Raymond Aron’s role in the ‘liberal moment’ of the 1970s and 1980s, when a significant broadening of interest in liberalism occurred among French intellectuals. It begins by considering the significance of intellectual anti-totalitarianism in these years. Rather than reducing late twentieth-century French intellectual anti-totalitarianism to anti-communist politics, the chapter shows how French intellectuals’ preoccupations with the problem of totalitarianism informed significant innovations in historiography and political theory. It also shows how the notion of ‘the political’ entered into widespread use among intellectuals in these years and considers Aron’s influence on this development. On the broadening of interest in liberalism the chapter argues for the existence of two main strands to the French liberal moment: one associated with Aron that emerged in hostile opposition to the events of May ’68 and another associated with Claude Lefort that viewed the events and legacy of 1968 in an altogether more positive light.

Chapter One presents what I propose is a perennial conflict of divine and human law, a conflict that is built into the very nature of religious freedom itself. It examines the reasons why the conflict is especially acute in late modernity, arguing that liberal approaches to religious freedom have both addressed and exacerbated the problem. Finally, the chapter proposes a theoretical framework in which natural law serves as a mediator between human law and divine law and thereby as a means forward from the perennial conflict of the two forms of law.

The Conclusion explores the wider implications for human rights more generally of the theory of law proposed in the book, including responses to possible objections. It also brings in other disciplines’ use of the study of nature and its role in ethics and normative political theory, revealing how and why a return to traditions of natural law is a viable project in contemporary scholarship. Finally, it explores the more concrete formulations of policy, legislation, and jurisprudence that would flow from the proposed theory of law.