Abstract

For Alexis de Tocqueville, a faithful son of the Enlightenment, the priority given to the individual in the pursuit of truth represents the starting point of an inexorable march of equality towards individual autonomy. In other words, in agreement with the historicist movements of the 19th Century, Tocqueville interprets history as a dialectical progress: History understood as progress in the Hegelian sense, whose becoming unfolds in virtue of a steady and unalterable progress towards a better society-civilization as a creation of the illustrated man. However, while for Hegel progress obeys a reason understood as self-knowledge, Tocqueville understands it as a balance between antagonisms: liberty-individual-democracy. In other words, the Tocquevillian dualism, expressed in the permanent tension between antagonisms equality vs. freedom, the individual vs the citizen–, leads towards a new class of dialectics of liberty. In this sense, the aforementioned triad represents, precisely, the tension that reveals itself as problematic, given that, ultimately, the elements that compose it arise antithetically.