《旧制度与大革命·序言·致读者》第8节
Amidst the darkness of the future three truths may be clearly discovered. The first is, that all the men of our time are impelled by an unknown force which they may hope to regulate and to check, but not to conquer--a force which sometimes gently moves them, sometimes hurries them along, to the destruction of aristocracy. The second is, that of all the communities in the world those which will always be least able permanently to escape from absolute government are precisely the communities in which aristocracy has ceased to exist, and can never exist again. Lastly, the third is, that despotism nowhere produces more pernicious effects than in these same communities, for more than any other form of government despotism favours the growth of all the vices to which such societies are specially liable, and thus throws an additional weight on that side to which, by their natural inclination, they were already prone. Men in such countries, being no longer connected together by any ties of caste, of class, of corporation, of family, are but too easily inclined to think of nothing but their private interests, ever too ready to consider themselves only, and to sink into the narrow precincts of self, in which all public virtue is extinguished. Despotism, instead of combating this tendency, renders it irresistible, for it deprives its subjects of every common passion, of every mutual want, of all necessity of combining together, of all occasions of acting together. It immures them in private life: they already tended to separation; despotism isolates them: they were already chilled in their mutual regard; despotism reduces them to ice.
注释摘要
托克维尔在这段文字中提出了他政治思想中最为根本的一个判断框架：现代社会的民主化进程不可逆转，但这一进程未必通往自由，反而可能导向一种新型的专制。他以近乎预言的口吻标出三个递进的真理，构成一个严密的因果链条，其核心关切并非民主本身的好坏，而是民主社会在失去贵族制缓冲之后所暴露的结构性脆弱。 第一个真理确认了一种不可征服的历史力量。托克维尔称之为"未知的力量"…