De kunst van het vrij zijn: Alexis de Tocqueville en het democratisch ideaal

Abstract

Over the past decade, the sense that freedom and democracy in the West are under threat has grown markedly. Yet opinions differ sharply about where this threat originates. One camp speaks of a “revolt of the people”: populist parties that increasingly undermine the institutions, norms, and representatives of the constitutional state. The opposing camp, by contrast, warns of a “revolt of the elite”: state bureaucracies and organizations that impose their own agendas while disregarding the interests and rights of the people.

Drawing on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, this dissertation shows that both camps identify a genuine danger. Complemented by other major thinkers and contemporary scholarship, the first two parts argue that liberal democracy depends on a balance of power—between state and people, leadership and citizenship, elitism and populism.

The third and longest part contends that beneath this political struggle lies a deeper crisis: a spiritual or religious one. Engaging Tocqueville alongside figures such as Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King Jr., it argues that freedom and democracy appear to require an element of transcendence—a religious or spiritual tradition—if the “hyper-nervous” modern society is not to succumb to its own materialist and individualist tendencies, but instead remain animated by meaning, ethics, and discipline.

Only a nation that maintains balance in both the political and moral realms masters “the art of freedom.”