Tuesday, July 9, 2013

"In the United States even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment...."

"Aux États-Unis, la religion du plus grand nombre elle-même est républicaine; elle soumet le vérités de l'autre monde à la raison individuelle...."

     Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I (1835).I.XVIII[.4] ("Of the republican institutions of the United States, and what their chances of duration are"), trans. Henry Reeve, with revisions by Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley ((New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), vol. 1, p. 418);  =I.ii.X[.4] in Œuvres, ed. André Jardin (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), II (De la démocratie en Amérique), ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 462.
     Cf., however, "I believe that the men who will live under the new forms of society will make frequent use of their private judgment, but I am very far from thinking that they will often abuse it" (vol. 2, p. 7, as followed up in chap. 2).

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