Alexis de Tocqueville on the Covenantal Tradition of American Federal Democracy

Abstract

Perhaps no analyst of democracy's potentials for despotism and self-government understood better than Alexis de Tocqueville the importance of the “favorable circumstances” of America's republican and religious origins. America's covenantal heritage inspired the public philosophy of federal liberty and the federal principle used to establish governments and political associations in colonial New England. The Puritans, Tocqueville explained, created the bonds and the liberties of citizenship by their assent to eternal, transcendent principles, as well as by their consent to government. The principles of covenant ultimately provided the institutional and conceptual foundation of constitutional government, making America's federal democracy less vulnerable to possessive individualism and democratic despotism. Federal principles fostered an important indirect role for religion in American politics. Tocqueville not only analyzed the tension between the requirements of faith and democratic norms, but also distinguished covenantal ways of negotiating these concerns from the approach taken by later advocates of religious freedom, fames Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He argued that federalism's moral foundations will be difficult to preserve if this tension is resolved in ways that promote individual autonomy by undermining covenantal thinking.