Tocqueville and Gobineau

 

Il y a un monde intellectuel entre votre doctrine et la mienne - Tocqueville to Gobineau

When I was a child in the suburb of Atlanta, I was effected in particular by two books. One was the Bible, and one was the Encyclopedia Britannica – the latter, in the 1911 edition, arriving at our house as a gift from the retired woman across the street, whose husband, a doctor, had bought it. From those two books I evolved a question. I remember it popping into my mind as I was bouncing a basketball on the driveway: why didn’t Jesus discover gravity?

A silly question, but as good a place as any to start understanding universal history.

Which brings me by a commodious vicus of recirculation, as the man says, to the correspondence between Arthur Gobineau and Alexis Tocqueville concerning the Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, sent by the former to the latter. Tocqueville and Gobineau were friends long before Gobineau’s book was written; although the elder, Gobineau had been Tocqueville’s research assistant for the latter’s history of the ancien regime. Most of their correspondence was published 1907, although the editors deleted certain parts – for instance, Tocqueville’s confession that he was an agnostic. It is by the prudery of editors that posterity is shaped.

As to the question of Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton, translated into another register: Tocqueville quickly seized on the main thesis of Gobineau’s system, and presents it with admirable clarity:

“Thus, you speak endlessly of races regenerating or deteriorating, which take on or quit social capacities that they did not have by an infusion of different blood ; I believe that these are your own words. I must declare that this predestination appears to me a cousin of pure materialism. Believe me that if the crowd,  which follows the great paths blazed by reasoning, admitted your doctrine, they would go immediately from the race to the individual and from social faculties to all faculties whatsoever.  It makes little difference, from my point of view, which is that of the practical consequence of different philosophical doctrines, if, the fatality is directly implanted into certain organisations of matter or it is the will of God who wanted to make many species of humans in the human genus and then impose on certain humans the obligation, in virtue of the race to which they belong, not to have certain sentiments, certain thoughts, certain behaviors, certain qualities that they will know about without being able to acquire them. The two theories result in a great restriction, if not to say complete abolition of human liberty. Thus, I confess to you that after having read you this time, as well as before, I remain situation at the extreme opposite of these doctrines. I believe they are probably false and certainly very pernicious.”

I think Tocqueville is very smart to grasp the essence of the theory of racism, or the inequality of races: that it naturally poisons the relationship between different kinds of humans who are nevertheless grouped together as humans. Either it is true, and thus the superior individual owes everything to the race, and denies every part of the superiority to the inferior, while the inferior is aware, at every moment, of thoughts, sentiment and behaviors that she is materially denied – or it is untrue, and it introduces the most pernicious conflict and apology for conflict between “races”. Morally, both parts of this are bad. But, as Tocqueville says, as natural history this idea is founded on a myth of ancient purity that nothing shows us ever existed.

“When it is a question of human families which differ among each other in a deep and permanent manner by their exterior aspect, we could perhaps recognize different distinctive traits during the course of time and go back to a sort of different creation. The doctrine, in my opinion, would without being certain becomes at least less improbable and easier to establish. But when we put ourselves in the middle of one of those great families, say, that of the white race for instance, the thread of our reasoning disappears and escapes us a each step. What is more uncertain in the world whatever we do than the question of knowing by history or tradition when, how and in what proportions humans are mixed, who retain no visible trace of their origin?”

Indeed, Tocqueville’s curious conservative liberalism seems to prefigure the arguments made in a book that came out about four years before this correspondence was published by the Revue des Deux Mondes: The Souls of Black Folks.  

Tocqueville’s liberalism was founded not on some ideal picture of the human, some existential model, but on the fact that humans are always within some circumstance. He always brought philosophical doctrine down to the circumstances in which it was produced, and that it effected. In this way, Tocqueville’s thinking had a very pragmatic strain. Given the attention to circumstances, Tocqueville was anything but color-blind – rather, he was color-aware, he saw the circumstances that had made for the “white race” and its relation to all others. Du Bois observed that the white race was a discovery of the 18^th and 19^th century: I think Tocqueville would have agreed. That doesn’t make race any less a social fact. But it makes the social fact of race an object for historical observation.