1. Hegel, G. W. F., Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts in Hegel, Werke 2: Jenaer Schriften, 1801–1807 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970)Google Scholar; English translation in Hegel: Political Writings, ed. Dickey, Laurance and Nistbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 102–80Google Scholar.

2. See Lukes, Stephen, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973)Google Scholar for a concise analytical and historical survey of the various (moral, methodological, epistemological, and political) strands of “individualism.”

3. Hegel, G. W. F., Grundlinien der Philosophic des Rechts, ed. Hoffmeister, Johannes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995)Google Scholar, addition to sec. 273; Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Wood, Allen W. and translated by Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 312Google Scholar. [Hereafter cited as PR.]

4. It would, however, be hard to think of a 18^th or nineteenth-century philosopher more methodologically self-aware than Hegel.

5. See Shklar, Judith, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's ‘Phenomenology of Mind’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

6. See Fine, Robert, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, Arendt (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 34Google Scholar.

7. Cf. Benjamin, Constant, “On the liberty of the moderns compared to that of the ancients” in Constant, Political Writings, ed. Fontana, Biancamaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 309–28Google Scholar.

8. For the “civic humanist” reading of Hegel, see Dickey's, introduction to Hegel: Political Writings and Patten, Alan, Hegel's Idea of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. While an important corrective to other, more metaphysical, readings of Hegel, the civic humanist interpretation has its limits, as Hegel's diverse criticisms of Rousseau and civic republicanism in PR make clear. See Lukács, Georg, The Young Hegel, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 31–56Google Scholar.

9. At the end of the day, neither did Constant. See Constant, , Political Writings, pp. 326–29Google Scholar.

10. Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. Kahan, Alan S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 87Google Scholar. [Hereafter cited as QRR].

11. Boesche, Roger, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 53Google Scholar.

12. Tocqueville, Alexis de, De la Démocratic en Amérique in Oeuvres II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992)Google Scholar [one volume edition, hereafter cited as DA, Pléiade edition]; Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar [two volume edition, hereafter cited as DA]. See especially vol. 2, bk. 4, chap. 3 (p. 293, Reeve translation).

13. As Siedentop notes, Tocqueville's use of the American example to overcome the sovereign model of power that dominated the European political mind from the time of Hobbes and Bodin can be seen as his greatest theoretical innovation. See Siedentop, Larry, Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 41Google Scholar.

14. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 3Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 513Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., p. 99; Pléiade edition, p. 613Google Scholar.

16. Ibid., pp.129, 122; Pléiade edition, pp. 643, 635Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., p. 99; Pléiade edition.

18. Of course, Tocqueville admired the habit of self-reliance he found in the Americans, but largely because it inured them to the siren song of a tutelary state, one that ministered to all their needs, whether public or private.

19. DA2 p. 98, my emphasis; Pléiade edition, p. 612Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., p. 103; Pléiade edition, p. 617Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., p. 104; Pléiade edition, p. 618Google Scholar.

22. See DA2, bk. 2, chap. 5 (“Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life”). See Villa, Dana, “Tocqueville and Civil Society” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Welch, Cheryl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

23. See Tocqueville, , DA1, pp. 241–44, 250Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, pp. 269–72, 279Google Scholar.

24. Tocqueville, , DA2p. 122Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, 635Google Scholar.

25. Ibid; Pléiade edition, p. 636Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., p. 123; Pléiade edition, p. 637Google Scholar.

27. Ibid., p. 122; Pléiade edition, p. 636Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., p. 102. Tocqueville provides an explanation for this reductionism by noting the affection Americans have for simple, all-explaining general ideas.

29. Ibid., p. 142; Pléiade edition, p. 655Google Scholar.

30. Ibid.

31. Tocqueville, , DA1, p. 250Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 279Google Scholar.

32. Tocqueville, , DA1, p. 68Google Scholar; DA2, pp. 108–09.

33. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 3Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 513Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., p. 4;.Pléiade edition, p. 514Google Scholar.

35. Ibid., pp. 10–11; Pléiade edition, pp. 520–21Google Scholar.

36. Ibid.

37. Tocqueville, , DA1, p. 263Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, pp. 292–93Google Scholar.

38. Tocqueville's chapter on the necessity of “dogmatic” beliefs (DA2, bk. 1, chap. 2) ends, however, by reiterating his concerns about the potentially “despotic” rule of “authoritative” public opinion.

39. Tocqueville, , DA2, pp. 5–6Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, pp. 515–16Google Scholar.

40. See ORR, pp. 196–208.Google Scholar

41. DA2, p. 11;Google ScholarPléiade edition, p. 522Google Scholar. Tocqueville writes: “Thus, intellectual authority will be different, but it will not be diminished; and far from thinking it will disappear, I augur that it may readily acquire too much preponderance and confine the action of private judgment within narrow limits than are suited to either the greatness or the happiness of the human race.”

42. See DA1, p. 300; also DA2, p. 21.Google Scholar

43. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 22Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, pp. 532–33Google Scholar.

44. See Welch, Cheryl, De Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 243Google Scholar. Cf. Sidentop, , Tocqueville, p. 64Google Scholar.

45. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 22Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 532Google Scholar.

46. DA1, chap. 1, pp. 34–44:Google Scholar “Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and its triumphs, as the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.” [Pléiade edition, p. 48]Google Scholar. Cf. ORR, p. 206.

47. Ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 299–305.I should note that Tocqueville saw the potential tyranny of majority opinion as being contained, chiefly, by the spirit of American Christianity. See DA, p. 305; Pléiade edition, p.337Google Scholar.

48. DA2, p. 99; Pléiade edition, p. 613Google Scholar.

49. DA2, bk. 2, chaps. 5–7.

50. DA2, pp. 138, 263; Pléiade edition, pp. 650, 780–81Google Scholar. The (perhaps counter intuitive) case that Tocqueville presents a democratic form of Sittlichkeit is made by Wellmer, Albrecht in his essay “Models of Freedom in the Modern World” in Wellmer, Endgames, trans. Midgley, David (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

51. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Hoffmeister, Johannes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955), p 209Google Scholar; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, translated by Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p.170Google Scholar. Tocqueville's initial impressions of America oddly coalesce with Hegel's. See his letter of June 9, 1831 to Chabrol, Ernest de in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

52. These functions comprise, in part, the activity of the polizei in Hegel's conception of civil society.

53. Hegel, PR, sec. 260. It is important to note at the outset Hegel's distinction between the political state (der politische Staat mentioned in sec. 267) and the state as ethical totality. The former comprised the legal apparatus, governmental powers, and coercive authority we normally identify with “the state,” while the latter pointed to the collective ethical life of a specific, differentiated form of political community. See Pelczynski's, essay “The Hegelian Conception of the State” in Pelczynski, Z. A., editor, Hegel's Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 1–29Google Scholar.

54. Hegel, , PR, sec. 260Google Scholar.

55. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 319Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 837Google Scholar.

56. This assessment has been made from the most diverse ideological standpoints. See, for example, Eberly, Don, editor, The Essential Civil Society Reader (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000)Google Scholar and Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

57. In his Introduction to Hegel's Political Writings, Lawrence Dickey presents Hegel as intensely committed to the principle of popular participation, if not self-government. This is a useful corrective to the usual “statist” interpretations, but I think Allen Wood is more on target when he observes (in his Editor's Introduction to PR) that “Hegel plainly intends real political power to be in the hands neither of the prince nor of the people, but of an educated class of professional civil servants” (p. xxiv).

58. Hegel, G. W. F., Political Writings, ed. Pelczynski, Zbignew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 163–64Google Scholar.

59. Ibid. See p. 161, where Hegel writes of the ideal state in “recent theories”: “a state is a machine with a single spring which imparts movement to all the rest of the infinite wheelwork.” Cf. PR, sec. 303.

60. For the Tocqueville/Weber connection, see Mayer, J. P., Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960)Google Scholar. For the Hegel/Weber connection, see Dallmayr's, Fred essay “Max Weber and the Modern State” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Horowitz, Asher and Maley, Terry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 49–67Google Scholar.

61. Hegel, , PR, addition to sec. 290Google Scholar.

62. This characteristically “liberal” critique of Hegel is echoed by—of all people—Adorno, Theodor in his Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 349–50Google Scholar.

63. See Hegel, , PR, section 260Google Scholar. Here Hegel notes that the “concrete freedom” of the modern state requires that “personal individuality and its particular interests should reach their full development and gain recognition of their right.” See also the additions to sections 184,185, 206, 261, 262, and 273 (“the principle of the modern world at large is freedom of subjectivity…”).

64. See Hegel's, letter from 11, 1807Google Scholar, where he complains to his friend Niethammer that “so far we have seen that in all the imitations of the French only half the example is ever taken up. The other half, the noblest part, is left aside: liberty of the people; popular participation in elections; governmental decisions taken in full view of the people; or at least public exposition, for the insight of the people, of all the reasons behind such measures.” In Hegel: The Letters, trans. Butler, Clark and Seiler, Christine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 151Google Scholar.

65. Hegel, , PR, addition to sec. 302Google Scholar.

66. Ibid, sec. 303.

67. Ibid., sec. 302. Cf. addition to sec. 290.

68. By “corporation” Hegel primarily meant trade or professional groups. However, he also included churches and municipal governments in this classification. See PR, sections 250–56; 270 and 288.

69. Tocqueville, , DA1, pp. 64–71Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, pp. 70–75Google Scholar; see also DA2, pp. 103–104; Pléiade edition, pp. 617–18Google Scholar.

70. Tocqueville, , DA2, p. 104Google Scholar; Pléiade edition, p. 618Google Scholar.

71. See Siedentop's, discussion in Tocqueville, pp. 66–67Google Scholar.

72. Hegel, , PR, sec. 261Google Scholar. For the speculative principle underlying this formulation, see PR, addition to sec. 270: “The state is actual, and actuality consists in the fact that the interest of the whole realizes itself through the particular ends. Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity, the resolution of universality into particularity.”

73. As Hegel, writes in PR, sec. 187Google Scholar, the essence of “education” (Bildung) consists in the “elimination” of the “immediacy and individuality in which spirit is immersed, so that this externality may take on the rationality of which it is capable”.

74. In the addition to sec. 255, Hegel says: “In our modern states, the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business of the state; but it is necessary to provide ethical man with a universal activity in addition to his private end. This universal [activity], which the modern state does not always offer him, can be found in the corporation.” Cf. PR, addition to sec. 301, where Hegel expresses his dubiousness about the idea that the “people themselves” necessarily “know best what is in their own interest”; also sec. 309.

75. Hegel, , PR, sec. 309, 315, and 319Google Scholar.

76. Ibid., addition to sec. 279.

77. Hence the claims in the famous Preface to PR about comprehension as the proper task of a philosophical approach to the state. Cf. additions to sections 258, 268 and 270.

78. Avineri, , Hegel's Theory of the Modern State, p. 102Google Scholar.

79. Hegel, , PR, sec. 279Google Scholar; see also sections 308, 318.

80. Hegel, , PR, sec. 269Google Scholar.

81. Ibid., sections 317 and 318.

82. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophic I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), pp. 442–43Google Scholar; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol 1, trans. Haldane, E. S. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 386Google Scholar.

83. Hegel, , Early Theological Writings, pp. 157; 162–65Google Scholar Cf. Hegel, , Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree, , p. 317Google Scholar.

84. Ibid., p. 157.

85. See Lukács, , The Young Hegel, pp. 9, 21–23Google Scholar.

86. See Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, p. 90Google Scholar.

87. In sec. 273 of PR, Hegel makes both these points with respect to the constitution of the state. First, it is wrong to view a state's constitution as a product of a mere “aggregate” of individuals (the atomistic/social contract fallacy); second, that “the principle of the modern world” is “freedom of subjectivity,” and that (therefore) any constitution that does not “sustain within itself” the principle of “free subjectivity” is “one-sided,” defective.

88. For the first item on this list, see Hegel, , PR, addition to sec. 182Google Scholar; for the second, see PR, addition to sec. 270; for the third, see PR, Preface.

89. See Shklar, , Freedom and Independence, chap. 1Google Scholar.

90. See Lamberti's, Jean-Claude discussion in his Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Goldhammer, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 57–58Google Scholar. That Hegel was not unaware of this “German” contribution—he loathed it—is made clear by his remarks about the German character and its “stubborn insistence on independence.” See Hegel, , “The German Constitution” in Political Writings, ed. Dickey, and Nisbet, , p. 57Google Scholar. Cf. Hegel, , The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree, , pp. 350–51Google Scholar (on German “subjective freedom” as “self-will” or willfullness [Eigensinn].

91. Arendt, Hannah, “Civil Disobedience” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1972), p. 92Google Scholar.

92. Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, pp. 111, 125Google Scholar.

93. I borrow from Isaiah Berlin here. See his essay “The Originality of Machiavelli” in Berlin, , Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Hardy, Henry (New York: Penguin 1979)Google Scholar.

94. See Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, pp. 112,115,118Google Scholar.

95. See Hegel, , Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 75Google Scholar; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 65Google Scholar.

96. The more exotic strands—Black Africans and native Americans—were ruthlessly enslaved or exterminated, as Tocqueville knew all too well. See DA1, chap. 18.

97. See Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, p. 90Google Scholar.

98. Hegel, , Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p.67Google Scholar; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 58Google Scholar. The whole idea of a Volksgeist that underlies and animates the “religion, ritual, ethics, customs, art, constitution and political laws—indeed the whole range of its [a nation's] institutions, events, and deeds” is there to convey a sense of the aesthetic/moral coherence of a “people's” spiritual creations.

99. See Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth, H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 149Google Scholar.

100. This (highly Tocquevillian) account received its classic formulation in Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1951), pp. 305–326Google Scholar.

101. See Taylor, , Hegel and Modern Society, pp. 116–17Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (1984): 81–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102. See Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 97Google Scholar.

103. See Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

104. Horkheimer, and Adorno, , Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 94Google Scholar.

105. See Kant, Immanuel, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Reiss, Hans (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 54–60Google Scholar.

106. See Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 2001), sec. 38Google Scholar, “Das Verfallen und die Geworfenheit.” Cf. sec. 44.