One of the more interesting
things we discover about Alexis-Charles-Henri
Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his greatest work, Democracy in
America (1835, 1840), is that the author — like Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) a
generation latter in The American Republic (1866) — considered himself a
Catholic writing as a Catholic. What
surprises many people is to find out that both de Tocqueville and Brownson
considered the American system (slavery excepted) to be the closest to “Catholic”
political theory.
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| Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
Of course, to
label any science, hard or soft (with the exception of theology, “the Queen of
Sciences”), as “Catholic” is not, strictly speaking, accurate. It is even misleading after a fashion, as Dr.
Franz H. Mueller, a student of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., noted. What both de Tocqueville and Brownson meant, of
course — and said so, if not in so many words — was that the American system
was not the most Catholic per se, but the most consistent with Catholic
teachings.
Even more
remarkable is that de Tocqueville wrote during the pontificate of Gregory XVI (Bartolomeo
Alberto Cappellari, 1765-1846, elected 1831), who issued the first
social encyclicals condemning liberalism and religious indifferentism, and who
coined the phrase rerum novarum (“new things”) in his second social
encyclical in 1834, Singulari Nos, condemning the “Democratic Religion”
advocated by a renegade priest, Hugues-Félicité
Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854) . . . with whom de Tocqueville was personally
acquainted.
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| Pope Gregory XVI |
Not that de Tocqueville was
particularly impressed with de Lamennais.
As the former said of the latter after personally experiencing some of
de Lamennais’s tantrums that resulted from de Tocqueville trying to persuade de
Lamennais to support him on an issue on which they both agreed(!), de Lamennais
had “a pride great enough to walk over the heads of kings and bid
defiance to God.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, The
Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Cleveland, Ohio: The World Publishing Company, 1959, 191.) The fact was de Lamennais wanted the same
thing as de Tocqueville, but it had to be done precisely as de Lamennais wanted
it and at the time he wanted it.
Brownson was less
complimentary, and he allowed de Lamennais no excuse at all or any grounds for
agreement. In the July 1859 issue of Brownson’s
Quarterly Review, he declared,
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| Félicité de Lamennais |
The fall of the unhappy La
Mennais may well be held up as a warning to all over-zealous and headstrong
individuals who have theories or crotchets of their own for advancing Catholic
interests; but, though wholly inexcusable on his part, it may, perhaps, be
urged with no less propriety as a warning to those who are more ready to pounce
upon a writer for his errors than to help him to discover the truth that would
correct them. We cannot help thinking, that, if they who with so much zeal
denounced the unhappy abbé, had taken, in a spirit of charity and candor, half
as much pains to help him understand the truth he had in view, but which he saw
only dimly or fitfully, as they did to prove him in the wrong and the advocate
of monstrous errors, he might have been saved. Certainly, his philosophical
system was unsound, but his opponents in France combated it with a system about
equally unsound.
What interested
de Tocqueville as a foreign observer and Brownson as an American, however, was
the fact that the American system (at least in the mid-nineteenth century)
appeared to have achieved a balance between the individual and the
collective. As Brownson put it in the
Introduction to The American Republic,
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| Orestes A. Brownson |
The United States, or the
American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a
great idea. . . . [I]ts mission is not so much the realization of liberty as
the realization of the true idea of the State, which secures at once the
authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of
the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. (Orestes
A. Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003, 3)
This is the idea
of subsidiarity in a nutshell. It isn’t
that the State does automatically whatever individuals and groups cannot do for
themselves. That may be necessary as a
temporary expedient, but the goal of true subsidiarity is to ensure that power
resides or subsides in actual people, not in any form of the State or
community. The moment the State takes
over a function that belongs to individuals or intermediate groups as a
permanent solution instead of as a temporary expedient, the principle of
subsidiarity has been violated.
Sovereignty of
the people is not to be construed collectively or in an elitist manner, and
that is what both Brownson and — as we shall see in the next posting on this
subject — de Tocqueville saw as unique in the American system.
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