Losing Sight of Man: Percy and Tocqueville on the Fate of the Human Sciences

Abstract

Social scientists rarely seem troubled by the ways their work evades the questions that animate people in everyday life. The terms of most social science inquiries into the causes of large-scale human behavior force scholars into a set of explanations that represent our motivations as essentially materialistic. At best, social science work provides its readers with a limited guidance for their actions; at worst, the nature of the inquiry itself leaves a vacuum where traditional belief once thrived. In this continual process of theorizing about society, something about humanity often disappears. In fairness, any theorizing about individuals—let alone the study of society—must greatly simplify lived experience. But the path social science took over the last century ruled out the idea of leaving man a workable theory that aided his self-understanding without reducing his life to a mere assortment of uncontrollable external causes. This essay argues that through a reading of Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy's various writings, we can come to a fuller understanding of both the limitations of social science as well as those of any purely humanistic inquiry into social life. Using both, we might more fully regain sight of man.