ABSTRACT
Tocqueville says: ‘The actual question is evidently not to make progress, but to stop backward steps and to regain lost ground; to preserve our liberties more than to augment them.’1 Tocqueville’s standpoint follows naturally from his observation that the development of democratic civilization, in the nineteenth century, has gone hand in hand with degeneration: ‘It is painful to perceive how much lower we are sunk than our forefathers, since we allow things to pass, under the colour of justice and the sanction of law, which violence alone imposed upon them.’2 Differently from the enlightenment philosophers and positivist sociologists like St Simon and Comte, Tocqueville argues that the nineteenth century is not one of progress but one of degeneration. ‘It is a fallacy to flatter ourselves with the reflection that the barbarians are far from us; for if there are some nations that allow civilization to be torn from their grasp, there are others who themselves trample it underfoot.’3 ‘The barbarians are already at our gates . . . They are around us, in the bosoms of our cities.’4 According to Tocqueville, progress had a universal character in the eighteenth century, in the sense that nations, everywhere in the Christian world, became more open societies and less persecution took place. However, degeneration had also been universal in the nineteenth century.
