[F]rom the very beginning of his acquaintance with Gobineau, Tocqueville made clear his firm disapproval of the younger man’s opinions. That especially concerned the racial determinism that steadily pervaded Gobineau’s writings. In a letter penned before Gobineau’s Essay appeared, Tocqueville wrote:
I have never concealed from you that I have a strong prejudice against what seems to be your leading idea which strikes me as belonging, I confess, to that family of materialist doctrines and to be one of its most dangerous members, since it involves the fatality of constitution applied not only to the individual but to those collections of individuals that are called races.
Tocqueville didn’t deny that there were often profound cultural differences between, say, Italians, Germans, Russians, Persians, Algerians, and Mexicans. But the notion that peoples have unchanging aptitudes and even fixed destinies by virtue of their ethnicity was described by Tocqueville as “unprovable.” For one thing, he noted, such claims ignored the hard-to-deny fact that historical changes have many causes, and that sorting out which ones are more important than others is always challenging. Monocausal explanations for political and social trends, Tocqueville thought, were invariably wrong.
This empirical criticism, however, was accompanied by Tocqueville querying Gobineau’s motivations for advancing his thesis of racial determinism. Point-blank, he asked Gobineau:
What possible interest can there be in persuading miserable people living in barbarism, idleness, or slavery that, by virtue of their race, there is nothing that can be done to improve their condition, change their mœurs, or modify their government? Don’t you see that from your doctrine derives naturally all the evils which permanent inequality gives birth to: pride, violence, scorn for one’s fellows, tyranny, and abjection in all its forms?
The unspoken answer to Tocqueville’s question was that Gobineau’s propositions had little to do with science or the pursuit of truth. Instead, they had everything to do with a desire to rationalize serious injustices and deny freedom to millions of people. For as Tocqueville wrote elsewhere, Gobineau’s racial determinism led to “a very great restriction, if not to a complete abolition of human liberty.”
Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”
