Des cartesiens qui s’ignorent : la method philosophique des Americains selon Tocqueville

Abstract

Thinking by oneself: in the preliminary chapter of the second Democracy in America, Tocqueville questions such a motto from the Moderns which is also their philosophical method. Through the American example, i.e. the very type of democratic anthropology, he stresses ambivalence and questions the promises of Cartesian philosophy: if individual reason is freed from tradition and prejudices, will everyone find in his own self the means of a reasoned exercise of judgment ? Reversely the void of minds may find itself revealed, dangerously filled as it might by the answers from the public opinion, i.e. sovereign within democracy. Showing how intellectual individualism is at the origin of a new kind of alienation, Tocqueville inscribes doubt in the heart of liberal optimism right at a time when official liberalism (Cousin, Guizot) acknowledges Cartesianism and worships in it the true French spirit.