Tocqueville on human misery and human liberty

Abstract

Tocqueville understands Rousseau's history as presupposing the authenticity of Pascal's experience of being a self-conscious mortal. As human beings become more human or historical, they come to know and experience more of what was always true about the contingency of the human being's particular existence. Pascal had already know everything fundamental than Rousseau knew. I use both Tocqueville's “Memoir on Pauperism” and part of the second volume of Democracy in America to show how he accounts for and uses the historical observation that human progress increases self-consciousness and discontent and hence leads to revolution or some other form of misanthropic self destructiveness.