FRENCH POLITICAL THOUGHT
great idea ; it is both economic and political; it meets a need felt
in the country, which is more concerned nowadays with matters
of a social character than with those which are purely political."
The writer of the above letter can surely be described both as a
thinker of real insight and as a truly noble-minded Liberal.
Are we then to discern no defects in Tocqueville's thought ?
By no means. He has faults which he shares with his fellow-
Liberals : Anglomania for one, an excessive belief in the
intrinsic value of institutions and constitutional devices, an
inadequate grasp of first principles, a fear of metaphysics,
with subsequent hesitation before particular issues and a great
difficulty in drawing clear conclusions or in reaching a definite
synthesis. Although more of a historian than many others,
and perhaps possessed of a keener historical sense even than
Guizot, he lacks the faculty of the passionless criticism and
, study of historical origins ; he uses history more like Bossuet
than like Montesquieu, to prove his point rather than to test
his conclusions. An aristocrat by birth and instinct, he failed to
see that the distinction he drew so carefully between political
and social equality could not be indefinitely maintained, and
that no people, given equal political responsibilities, could for
ever accept an economic order based on privilege. He remains
a nineteenth-century Liberal, distrustful of State action, par-
ticularly in the economic sphere, a believer in the need for
private property, particularly in land, suspicious of what was
beginning to be called Socialism. But few among Liberals
have had such insight into the nature of the oncoming forces
of democracy; few have grasped so fully the impossibility of
restricting political freedom to one class of the people; few
have seen so clearly the limitations of purely political action.
There is scarcely one of Guizot's blunders from which a study
of Tocqueville would not have saved him. That is perhaps
enough to establish his claim to represent Liberalism at its
best, in thought at least if not in power.
5. THE FAILURE OF RESTORATION LIBERALISM
A study of the last few pages will have made it clear that
little true liberty was to be expected from the Liberals when
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