Tocqueville says that the superiority of American women is the chief cause of the power and prosperity of American democracy. That superiority is the result of an education that treats women as capable of freedom, but the use of that freedom is to maintain the bonds that restrict women to the household. The present article examines the role of the family and women in the new political science Tocqueville thought necessary for the defence of democratic liberty. It is argued that as the primary influence of democracy upon the family for Tocqueville has been to eliminate the authority of fathers who were the “arbiters of mores” and thereby the defenders of liberty in aristocracy, so democratic liberty depends for him above all upon the new role of women as the makers of mores. Through the agency of women, otherwise fragile religion constitutes an effective limit to the authority of the majority, but what makes it possible for religion to operate through women is their exclusion from the world of commerce, and what maintains this exclusion is the strict conjugal morality that women themselves defend in America. How far the role of women as guardians of democratic liberty might be justified is shown to depend for Tocqueville upon arguments for it that are other than those commonly accepted by American men.

An unfortunate consequence of viewing Arendt's thought in terms of a Hellenic-Nietzschean continuum is to raise serious questions about the enduring significance of Arendt's work on totalitarianism and its opposite: political and personal freedom. What is missing from the dominant scholarship is an appreciation of Arendt's acknowledged debt to Tocqueville; there is considerable suspicion that their differences are more important than their similarities. But Arendt and Tocqueville agree that the central political problem of modernity is despotism. Parts one and two challenge the view that Tocqueville is only concerned with soft despotism, whereas Arendt addresses the issue of harsh despotism which she subsequently abandoned. This article also restores Arendt's appreciation for Tocqueville's call for a new science of politics to overcome the problem of modernity. Part three shows their reliance on the “art of associating together” to preserve freedom in an age dominated by isolated and lonely individuals.

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

This article examines three important texts in which Eric Voegelin discusses the Christian Faith. While it is true that one finds no personal confession of faith in Voegelin's works, one nevertheless finds there an extraordinary openess to the experiential truth expressed in Christian Symbols.