Pantheism Tocqueville Summary

Chapter seven of the first part of Volume Two of Democracy in America is a small, one-page chapter whose importance may not initially be perceived by even an attentive reader, but contains Alexis de Tocqueville’s view on democratic pantheism. It is by no coincidence that his essay on pantheism follows two significant chapters on the principal source of beliefs among the democratic peoples and America’s preference for general ideas. Tocqueville argued that, in order for a society to be successful and prosperous, the minds of its citizens must be held as one by certain ideas and dogmatic beliefs. He also stressed the importance of public opinion during democratic times, noting that faith in the latter will likely become a new form of religion for the citizens. In
While emphasizing equality for all and individual independence, this social condition has a tendency to make citizens isolated and somewhat powerless, and leads them to superficiality and pragmatism. On this matter Tocqueville writes that in societies of equality, “all men are independent of each other, isolated and weak; [one] sees none whose will directs the movements of the crowd in a permanent fashion; in these times, humanity always seems to march by itself. So in order to explain what is happening in the world, [one] is reduced to searching for some general cause that, acting in the same way on each of [his] fellows, therefore lead them all voluntarily to follow the same route. That also naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and causes it to contract the taste for them” (Tocqueville, 733-734). He continues to state that in democracies, the need to discover common rules for every matter and every individual and to seek a sole cause often becomes a fervent desire of the society’s