Lecture Summary, Alexis de Tocqueville and America: Two Days on Tocqueville, Conservatism, and Civic Friendship
In September 2025, the Tocqueville Center at Furman University launched its new academic year with a two-day program featuring Mark Lilla, Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and one of America’s leading public intellectuals.
Over the course of two evenings, Lilla delivered the Walters Memorial Lecture on Tocqueville, equality of conditions, and civic friendship, and then led the year’s first On Discourse seminar, exploring the contested meanings of “liberal,” “conservative,” “progressive,” and “reactionary.” Together, the events offered a chance for the Furman community and Greenville public to engage in searching conversation about the challenges of democracy in our time.
Day One: Tocqueville and America
The program opened with the Walters Memorial Lecture. Brent Nelsen, Director of the Tocqueville Center, welcomed the audience and introduced Mark Lilla, highlighting his influential books The Once and Future Liberal, The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, and Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.
Lilla’s Lecture: Equality of Conditions as a “Brute Fact”
Lilla began with the explosive first sentence of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of conditions.”
For Tocqueville, this “equality of conditions” was not an idea or a principle, but a “brute, generating fact”—a material reality that created principles, opinions, and even sentiments. Lilla stressed how radical this was:
“He casually asserts as if it were the most obvious thing in the world that material facts can create non-material facts.”
From this foundation, Tocqueville saw democracy’s distinctive “emotional weather.” Even when institutions and principles faltered, the lived experience of equality shaped how Americans thought, felt, and related to one another.
Lilla described how shared experience—hardship, cultural homogeneity, and even diet—once helped bind Americans across class lines. In the mid-20th century, he noted, a worker’s dinner plate looked little different from Dwight Eisenhower’s. Today, by contrast, education-based class divisions increasingly sort Americans into divergent worlds:
“Even the typical bodies of our two large educational classes are notably different today… Our universities are machines of conformity into this particular class. And if you haven’t been through that training, you’re just very different.”
The crisis of democracy, Lilla suggested, is not only institutional but cultural:
“We are in a very, very bad place… a new brute generating fact is producing feelings of distrust, contempt, shame, defensiveness, resentment, antipathy, and withdrawal.”
Panel Responses
The lecture was followed by a panel moderated by Brent Nelsen, with Elizabeth L’Arrivée (Rosary College), John Barrington (Furman, History), and Rob L’Arrivée (Furman, Politics & International Affairs).
Elizabeth L’Arrivée pressed Lilla on republican scale and whether education access strengthens or weakens civic friendship:
“Higher education in Tocqueville’s time would have been much lower than 30 percent. Today we have unprecedented access—how important is that for inclusion?”
Lilla responded that universities now function less as gateways to inclusion and more as engines of class-formation.
John Barrington emphasized Tocqueville’s use of a mythic New England origin story:
“If he fell short as a historian, he succeeded in recording a myth of origins that offered Americans a sense of belonging amid industrial upheaval.”
Lilla noted that Tocqueville’s real purpose was to illuminate French debates through America as a case study.
Rob L’Arrivée listed Tocqueville’s five mechanisms of fellow feeling—associations, local politics, newspapers, religion, and rough equality—and asked whether they can still hold:
“What happens when these break down? Doesn’t it push us toward a friend/enemy politics?”
Lilla agreed, underscoring Tocqueville’s conviction that civic friendship was indispensable for justice.
A student asked how Tocqueville could claim equality of conditions amid slavery and women’s disenfranchisement. Lilla answered:
“That initial challenge of settling—families facing the wilderness—represented an equality of condition that produced an ideology of equality… But it blinded us to actual inequalities of the sort you just mentioned.”
Day Two: Conservatives Versus Reactionaries
The following evening featured an On Discourse seminar. Nelsen opened with the Center’s community agreements—listening attentively, extending grace, and arguing well—before introducing Lilla once again.
Lilla’s Framework: Four Political Boxes
Lilla began with a parable about moving apartments and the arbitrariness of “boxes” and labels:
“Imagine I take a watch that doesn’t work, two dried apricots, a belt, a stapler, and a Sony Walkman and hand it to my wife. To me it’s obvious—it’s my dorm room desk in 1978. To her it’s nonsense. Any grouping is pure convention. The same is true of political terms.”
He then proposed distinguishing four familiar labels into two pairs:
- Liberals and conservatives → debate human nature and the relation of individual and society.
- Progressives and reactionaries → debate history—whether it is moving forward, backward, or broken.
On conservatives:
“Society is organic; we are born into a pre-existing whole. It changes slowly. It is hard to rationalize or remake without danger.”
On liberals:
“The individual is morally prior. Society exists for the sake of individuals. Freedom and rational reform are possible without collapsing the whole.”
On progressives:
“History is the story of emancipation, of human beings freed from domination. If stuck, revolution may be necessary.”
On reactionaries:
“History is the story of decline since modernity. To heal requires counterrevolution, even a muscular rebirth of tradition.”
Lilla warned that these labels no longer cohere neatly:
“Today we have liberals who sacrifice liberal principles like free speech in the name of progress, and conservatives who conserve nothing—seeing modernity itself as the disaster. Both are confused. Maybe we all are.”
Audience Exchanges
The discussion quickly opened to the room:
- A student speaking as a Marxist argued the progressive/reactionary divide was a “false dichotomy”:
“Any age of history is unprecedented. Even fascism represents not a return but a new epoch. We cannot predict whether proletarian class consciousness would liberate humanity or produce new aristocracy.”
Lilla called it a “brilliant” articulation of Marxism’s difficulty, then pressed:
“Why should we think the next stage will be better? Marx and Engels promised fishing in the morning and criticism in the afternoon. But why assume history delivers improvement?”
- Another student asked about libertarianism. Lilla replied:
“To my mind, libertarianism is just the most radical form of liberalism. It recognizes only individuals, not society. But again, the real question is what picture of human nature undergirds that.”
- A faculty member raised economics, noting that American conservatism often champions individualism more than liberalism. Lilla agreed the old “fusionism” of free markets plus family values has broken down.
- One participant pressed him on extremism:
“When conservatives and liberals debate, it’s about reforms. But when progressives and reactionaries debate, history itself is at stake. That raises the threat level.”
Lilla recalled:
“When I grew up, radicalism was on the left. Now it’s on the right. Young people lecture me about the 1950s as if they’d lived there. The mythology of a lost world drives them. Every event becomes apocalyptic. That spirit of apocalypse once belonged to the left. Now it drives the populist right.”
The evening ended with Lilla’s caution:
“We don’t need nostalgia to critique the present. We can simply say: this is no way to live. We can do better.”
Takeaways Across Two Days
- Equality of conditions: Tocqueville saw material equality as the foundation of democratic sentiment. Today, widening education-based divisions threaten that foundation.
- Civic friendship: Justice depends on the ordinary recognition of fellow citizens. Fragmented habits and styles of life corrode this.
- Political labels are provisional: Liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary—these are “sticky labels on boxes,” not eternal essences.
- Extremism has shifted: The spirit of apocalyptic radicalism has moved from the left to the populist right, reshaping American politics.
Looking Ahead
The Tocqueville Center thanks Mark Lilla for inaugurating the 2025–26 year with two evenings of vigorous conversation. His reflections on Tocqueville, civic friendship, and the confusions of political language left students and community members with new frameworks for thinking about democracy.
Our next event, “Religion and the American Founding,” will feature Mark Noll (Notre Dame) and Caitlin Chess (Duke) on October 7–8, 2025. We invite all members of the Furman and Greenville communities to join us as we continue the conversation.