Abstract

This article analyzes Alexis de Tocqueville’s eloquent and noble 1848 “Speech on the Right to Work.” The speech provides Tocqueville’s most powerful and sustained critique of socialism. Socialism is taken to task for its “energetic, continuous, immoderate appeal to the material passions of men,” for its “continuous” attack on the “very principles of private property,” and for its scorn for individual reason and initiative. Tocqueville argues that democracy and socialism are at their heart “contradictory things.” But at the same time, Tocqueville affirms a Christian and democratic obligation for government to provide “public charity” for the poor. For all his concerns about tutelary despotism and the socialist subversion of democracy, he did not oppose the welfare state per se, at least in a modest form. The article shows that Tocqueville’s “Christian democratic” vision provides a principled, humane, and morally serious alternative to both libertarianism and collectivism.