Pride and Liberalism: Thomas Hobbes and Alexis de Tocqueville.

摘要

This dissertation concerns the relationship between pride and liberty in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Alexis de Tocqueville. While these thinkers are often thought to present alternative kinds of liberalism, I contend that their visions are in fact complementary. Hobbes domesticates pride without destroying it, hoping thereby to secure a life of material comfort and scientific progress. Tocqueville resuscitates pride as the psychological backbone of liberalism in order to build on Hobbes' political thought, not to repudiate it. He thus secures better those ends that Hobbes emphasized by taking the soul and the soul's pride into consideration where Hobbes did not.;The dissertation is composed of two parts. Taking my cue from Hobbes' Leviathan, the first part is an analysis of what Hobbes means by pride. It can be the hubristic straining of an ambitious, popular subject, or the mad delusions of one pretending to divine inspiration. At the same time, subjects who are made aware of their own equality can resist the charming eloquence of such men and thereby avoid civil war. The core of this resistance is a residue of pride that Hobbes cannot, and does not wish to, annihilate.;In the second part I turn to the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America and his writings on Algeria. Tocqueville teaches that pride is less dangerous than Hobbes had claimed. He argues further that resuscitating pride secures precisely the way of life that Hobbes hoped to secure in domesticating pride—a life of ease and comfort continually advanced by scientific progress. Pride is rooted in the soul, however, and without an appreciation of the soul democrats reduce beauty to use and theory to practice. Their literature, arts, sciences, and innovations stagnate. The soul, highlighted by religion for most and the by life of the mind for some, is indispensable for the very activities that Hobbes set forth as the proper ends of political life.