Virtue's Aristocrat.

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, by Hugh Brogan (Yale, 736 pp., $35)

THIRTY years ago, in surveying the history of Tocqueville scholarship, the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that in seven years as an undergraduate and graduate student in social sciences at Berkeley in the 1930s he "did not once hear the name Tocqueville in class or seminar." But the calamitous history of the world in that decade was already leading academe to revise its low estimate of the French thinker: By 1940 important studies of Tocqueville, essay-length and book-length, had been published by G. W. Pierson, J. P. Mayer, and Albert Salomon. From the 1950s through the 1970s, such leading figures as Nisbet, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Raymond Aron, and John Lukacs persistently drew on and demonstrated Tocqueville's genius and relevance to our calamitous age. Lukacs's publication in 1959 of Tocqueville's "The European Revolution" and Correspondence with Gobineau was a particularly vital addition to the Tocqueville corpus in English, movingly revealing his hatred of "scientific" racism.

In 1984 Andre Jardin's great biography of Tocqueville appeared in French, and now we have, rightly built on it, Hugh Brogan's Life, an outstanding, exhaustive, nicely written account that has been many years in preparation. (We also finally have good translations of Democracy in America, by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, and of The Old Regime and the Revolution, by Alan Kahan; for both, we are indebted to the University of Chicago Press.)

In the tortured and treacherous political, intellectual, and moral history of France since 1750, Tocqueville stands out as a beacon of sanity, integrity, and profound prudence and wisdom. He was utterly unlike his cultural predecessors, the feckless aristocratic and "philosophical" libertines of the 18th century, of whom Burke wrote in 1790 that "they had countenanced too much that licentious philosophy" that "helped to bring on their ruin" in the French Revolution that began in 1789. But Tocqueville was also utterly unlike his successors, the French clercs of the 20th century: the voluble, mercurial, nihilistic intellectuals of whom Bernard-Henri Levy has given an amazingly embarrassing portrait in Adventures on the Freedom Road (1991), and about whom Renee Winegarten, Roger Kimball, and David Lehman have also written. Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991) is a crucial document of intellectual history, and a fit successor to Tocqueville's mordant chapter in The Old Regime and the Revolution bearing the ironic title "How Around the Middle of the 18th Century [France's] Intellectuals Became the Country's Leading Politicians, and the Effects Which Resulted from This."

Tocqueville's intellectual mentors were the austere Christian Pascal ("his favorite author," says Brogan), Montesquieu, Burke, and the French Protestant historian Francois Guizot (1787-1874), his older contemporary. In 1828 the young Tocqueville heard Guizot's lectures at the Sorbonne, later published as The History of Civilization in Europe, which Oxford professor Larry Siedentop has recently called "the most intelligent general history of Europe ever written." Tocqueville's own two subsequent great books are certainly among the greatest commentaries on modern civilization ever written, indispensable and profound.

But if Tocqueville was an intellectual, he was an aristocratic intellectual rooted in a landed class that he saw and felt to be disappearing. He was born in 1805; members of the two preceding generations of his family were put to death in the sanguinary revolution and others, including his parents, were temporarily imprisoned by it. He was raised among throne-and-altar aristocrats and monarchists, yet unlike most aristocratic reactionaries of his time--often as ostentatiously pious and Catholic as their 18th-century predecessors had been skeptical and libertine--Tocqueville saw the corruption of his class, its hypocritical religious-moral taint thinly hiding gross self-interest in a monarchist restoration. Tocqueville clearly saw and generally avoided, as historian, moralist, and politician, what Kant called "the radical evil"--the use of the language of ethics as a screen or tool for self-love and self-interest. "No one disputes that the French aristocracy of the [18th] century was very dissolute," Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America; he came to see the hypocritical, moralizing self-interest of the possessing classes in 19th-century France--whether their politics were Bourbon "legitimist," Orleanist, or Bonapartist--in much the same way.

One of the many merits of Hugh Brogan's biography is to show, more judiciously than any Marxist cartoonist ever has, the pervasiveness of this evil in the French landed and moneyed classes, a pervasiveness evident in the novels of Balzac, Stendhal, and Flaubert, and one that Jacques Maritain was to mention as characteristic of the haughty and cynical French Right up into the 1930s and 1940s. Nor does Brogan varnish Tocqueville's own record in this regard: He was a man of his class, capable of gross insensitivity to the lower depths, especially the urban poor and industrial workers.

But it was precisely one of Tocqueville's greatest insights that although human beings are not determined creatures, we are conditioned ones. The astonishing intellectual-moral achievement of Tocqueville, as Jacques Barzun has pointed out, was to understand the human person as having not only a conditioned free will but a conditional one. (Dostoevsky's depiction of this moral-epistemological fact in fiction puts him in a class of genius far beyond any 19-thcentury French novelist.) Tocqueville's love of liberty, like that of Burke, the Federalists, and Lincoln, asserts the existence of human liberty in a moral universe, within a providential, theistic framework. Tocqueville avoids the extremes of both determinism/fatalism (Islam, Spinoza, Cabanis, Gobineau, and their many modern successors, especially Marxist and Darwinian) and a radical, post-moral libertinism or self-will that was growing in his age and was promoted intellectually by such post-Christian thinkers as Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman, and Nietzsche, as well as by the gross, unregenerate class and individual selfishness for which the French use the phrase "l'homme moyen sensuel." His profound insight on these issues makes him a permanent treasure of civic wisdom and self-knowledge, one of the great orthodox writers of the modern era.

As Andre Jardin correctly and luminously says in his biography, Tocqueville's conception of liberty "was something more sacred than Benjamin Constant's individualism and much closer to the Pauline freedom of the children of God." As Tocqueville's mentor Burke put it in Reflections on the Revolution in France, "What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils." In Tocqueville's own words, "Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better deserves the name: That is virtue. But what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?" (Emphases in the original.)

If this long-time reader of Tocqueville has any quarrel with Brogan's painstakingly detailed depiction of Tocqueville's life and thought, it is with his condescending dismissal of Tocqueville's discussion of the tendency for democracy to breed pantheism in Part II of Democracy in America: "What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean Toward Pantheism." Scholars of Romanticism and popular culture from Irving Babbitt to Jacques Barzun, Quentin Anderson, E. D. Hirsch, Daniel Bell, and Allan Bloom have remarked upon the promiscuous, pantheistic spirituality whose forefathers were Rousseau and Whitman and whose progeny is our ubiquitous "rock culture." Very much in Tocqueville's manner, Anderson saw Whitman's demotic cultural campaign as "a rejection of Christianity on behalf of an emotional egalitarianism" that was rooted in Whitman's "rejection of the idea that the self is internally structured by conscience." In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom discerned the key pantheistic-spiritual role that rock music pervasively plays in the sensibility of our young. Bell sees an anarchic aesthetic paganism undermining the otherwise successful operation of the American polity and economy. Barzun has noted the increasing vulgarity of our culture, and quoted Tocqueville's comments on the dark side of egalitarianism: "Low emotions and ignoble instincts . . . are the products of equality." Writing in 1986, Barzun argued that "leveling down" may take us far below "comfortable mediocrity" and reduce our "social surface to the plane of the deliberately sordid."

That Burke and Tocqueville were profoundly concerned with manners and mores is a sign of their wisdom, and Tocqueville's worries about egalitarianism, democratic culture, and pantheism are far from misplaced or irrelevant to our condition and that of our current cultural effluvia. The pantheistic, democratic sensibility from Rousseau and Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Madonna is a lethal toxin, a form of cultural bacteria that may rot from within a prosperous civilization that has defeated its most dangerous external foes.

Plato expressed such suspicions long ago. Tocqueville had over 2,000 more years of historical experience on which to draw to make his case against the pantheistic perversions of democracy and equality, and in favor of their noble and positive features. As Hugh Brogan's fine biography shows, Tocqueville was a rare thing: an aristocrat who was really noble, in thought, word, and deed, and whose liberality was never libertine.

Mr. Aeschliman is professor of education at Boston University, adjunct professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.