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697 s4s4s4s4s4 c h a p t e r 1a In the beginning, the organization of the first chapters probably must have appeared as follows: (1) A long chapter on philosophical method, including a certain number of ideas that were later moved or that formed independent chapters, like the one on pantheism , which now bears number 7. (2) The origin of beliefs among democraticpeoples. (3) A chapter on religion. (4) The influence of philosophical method on the relations of the father with his children, of the master with his servants, on woman and on habits. (5) The taste for general ideas. (6) Science and the arts. a. “While rereading and recasting my manuscript, do, after each chapter, a small outline of what it contains; a kind of assets and liabilities of democracy; that will marvelously facilitate for me the final tableau, which it is immensely important to do well” (YTC, CVk, 1, pp. 11–12). Notebook F of the manuscript collection of Yale reproduces short summariesof each chapter. The first page bears the date April 1840. Here is the summary of this chapter: 1. That the Americans show by their actions that they have a philosophical method, even though they have neither philosophical school nor philosophical doctrine strictly speaking. 2. That this method consists principally of drawing your opinions only from within yourself, as Descartes indicates. 3. That it is principally from their social state that they have drawn this method and that it is the same cause that has made it adopted in Europe. 4. That the Americans have not made so great a use of this method as the French: 1. Because they got from their origin a more fixed religion. 2. Because they are not and have never been in revolution. 3. As a result of a still more general and powerful cause that I am going to develop in the following chapter and that in the long run must limit, among all democratic peoples, the intellectual independence given birth by equality (YTC, CVf, pp. 1–2). The first draft of this chapter (YTC, CVj, 1, pp. 42–82) contains some ideas that afterward willacquiresufficientimportancetoconstituteindependentchapters(chapters 2 to 8). Tocqueville clearly hesitated a great deal about the content of the first chapter, finding himself inclined to speak about individualism before everything else. “Perhaps,” Tocqueville noted again in a rough draft, “begin the whole book with the chapters on individualism and the taste for material enjoyments.Nearlyeverythingflows from there in ideas as well as in sentiments” (YTC, CVk, 1, p. 12). It is probably on the advice of Kergorlay, who spent the autumn of 1838attheTocqueville château at the very time when the author worked on the revision of the first version 698 philosophical method Of the Philosophical Method of the Americansb I think that in no country in the civilized world is there less interest in philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they worry very little about all those that divide Europe; they hardly know their names. of his manuscript, and who found the first two chapters remarkably well written, that Tocqueville changed his mind. In another place: Of all the chapters that precede the IXth where I am now (December 1838), there is not a single one in which I have not felt the need to assume that the reader knew either what leads democratic peoples to individualism, or what leads them to thetaste for material enjoyments. The experience of these eight chapters tends to prove that the two chapters on individualism and material enjoyments should precede the others. L[ouis (ed.)]. thinks that whatever logical interest there mightbeinbeginningwith the two chapters above, I must persevere in placing the chapter on method at the beginning. That, he says, opens the subject very grandly and makes it immediately seen from a very elevated perspective (YTC, CVk, 1, p. 11). Chapter 9 in the manuscript is now number 11, entitled: in what spirit the americans cultivate the arts. Another note, probably prior, suggested: “Perhaps do a chapter on the influence of democracy on the moral sciences. I do not believe that the first chapter of the book corresponds to that” (YTC, CVa, p. 45). b. Chap. 1. This first chapter treats a very abstract matter. Extreme efforts must be made to make it clear and perceptible, otherwise the reader would be discouraged. In this chapter there are two ideas that I take up and leave alternately in a...

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