Tocqueville on the Alliance of Liberty and Religion

  

Aug 28, 2013 Religion and Realism in Political Thought

Tocqueville advocated an alliance between religion and liberty rather than a war between them as in France and in previous liberal theories. He made religion into a promotion of pride, not humility, thus a remedy against democratic submissiveness to the "immense being" of Big Government. About the lecturer: Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University, studies and teaches political philosophy. He has written on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, in defense of a defen-sible liberalism and in favor of a Constitutional American political science.