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trickery, of baseness, and of bribery, which has enervated and
degraded the middle classes, destroyed the public spirit, and filled them
with a selfishness so blind. 25
Tocqueville characterizes the bourgeoisie, as a social class, not by its
economic or social conditions but by its ruling passions. Aristotle and
The new science of politics 59
republican theorists argue that the best regime (that is, the regime
where justice reigns) is the one in which the middle classes rule. For
them, the middle classes provide the civic zeal that makes free institu-
tions work; they possess the ability to govern for the common good.
Because they are a mean, they are able to preserve friendship and mod-
eration among the upper and lower classes. Republican theorists
assume that any free citizen would naturally participate in the political
arena and accordingly they define differences between citizens in terms
of wealth (and not virtue or influence). For Aristotle and the republican
theorists, the conflict between the passion for wealth and devotion to
the common good does not exist, because the human being, being a
political animal, naturally desires to be an active citizen.
When Tocqueville speaks about the bourgeoisie, he means some-
thing very different from Aristotle s middle classes. What Tocqueville
means by the bourgeoisie is an apolitical class that prefers the private
good to the public good. Hobbes s science of politics legitimizes the
passive citizenship of the bourgeoisie. Whereas Aristotle s middle-class
citizen seeks to improve the human condition, even at the cost of per-
sonal pain, Hobbes s apolitical bourgeois seek to minimize their pain
without doing anything wrong as such. The active citizens define their
liberty in terms of political participation, namely, as the ability to make
a decision for their own destiny. The bourgeois regard the private right
to withdraw from the public domain sphere as the essence of their
liberty. The bourgeois define liberty as freedom from care, or freedom
from obstacle , as Hobbes defines it. For the bourgeois, indifference
does not have the negative connotation that it has for Tocqueville.
While Hobbes legitimizes the retreat to the private sphere, Tocqueville
equates indifference with irreligion.26 Indifference is irreligious, for
Tocqueville, because it is equivalent to the lack of devotion to the good
life, that is, indifference to the rights of humanity.27 Without active cit-
izenship, Tocqueville believes that society degenerates into no more
than a group of individuals or strangers, who behave decently but who
surrender the right to actively govern themselves to satisfy their private
passions: The craving for material well-being leads the way to servi-
tude . . . While promoting moral rectitude, it rules out heroism and
excels in making people well behaved but mean spirited as citizens. 28
Tocqueville stresses that, in a bourgeois society citizenship tends to
be confused with consumerism. The craving for material well-being is a
passion that is very tenacious and very exclusive, but also a very agree-
able feeling, that easily accommodates itself to any form of govern-
ment, provided it be allowed to satisfy itself .29 He sees the desire for
material well-being as the desire of a servile class that is enslaved to
comfort and only likes the fruits and not the burdens of liberty.30
60 The new science of politics
It does not demand a free government to be satisfied. Tocqueville
argues that free governments are called on to resist the civil call for
material well-being and to strengthen the civic spirit. He had a great
distaste for the consumerism that prevailed during the reign of Louis
Philippe and the government of Thiers and Guizot. He saw materialism
as the primary cause of the rise of Louis Napoleon, the bourgeois
king who promised welfare rather than freedom. The liberation of
France, he believed, had to come from within the soul of the nation.
The challenge of transforming the bourgeois into a citizen had taken
his whole intellectual and practical life. Less than a year prior to his
death, Tocqueville was still hopeful that France would change its moral
direction: I doubt it whether one has ever seen during centuries a great
mass being engaged in the only passion for material well being . . . Epi-
cureanism is as curious as it is sad. 31
Tocqueville does not identify the bourgeoisie as a governing class
because it does not have the passion to govern. For him, the bour-
geoisie is a governed class, a class that must be guided to become a
civic middle class. While Guizot and Adolphe Thiers (the personifica-
tions of the French bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century) attempt to
get the bourgeoisie into the government so as to make the bourgeois
accustomed to governing (and hence to raise them), Tocqueville tries to
keep them out because he fears a bourgeois monopoly on governance.
Guizot, like Marx and Weber, perceives the dignity of the bourgeois in
their struggle against the nobility; and he hopes to reconcile govern-
ment and society through the mediation of the bourgeoisie whose
aspirations he seeks to satisfy:
I want, I seek, I serve with all my strength the dominating
politics of the middle classes in France, the definite and regular
organisation of this great victory that the middle classes have won
over the privileged and over the absolute power from 1789 to
1830.32
While Guizot seeks to establish the nouvelle intelligence bourgeoise
and tries to turn the bourgeois into citizens by providing them with a
political culture and a political education, Tocqueville does not accept
the bourgeoisie as the governing class because it prefers material well-
being to liberty and virtue. Tocqueville argues that those who possess a
theoretical and practical understanding of virtue, are called to govern,
whereas those who lack virtue, are meant to be governed: The most
rational government is not the one in which all the interested parties
participate, but the one that is directed by the most enlightened and
moral classes of society. 33
The new science of politics 61
The statesman and the philosopher
Whereas Hobbes s science of politics emancipates political philosophy
from the public scene (his science of politics has become the rule
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