SOURCE: "Of Moderation and Motion: Mother Nature and Father Industriousness," in The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 132-40.

In this excerpt, Mitchell examines Tocqueville's views on the relationship between activity and passivity and suggests that the vastness of the American wilderness encouraged both activity and "immoderation of desire."

Of Moderation and Motion: Mother Nature and Father Industriousness

What we [Europeans] call love of gain is praiseworthy to Americans, and they see something cowardly in what we consider moderation of desires."

We may wonder why Tocqueville, who well knew of the strenuous efforts throughout the history of Western political thought to instill virtue into a citizenry forever prone to the immoderation of desire, seems so little concerned with this problem in the American context. His claim that the human heart in the age of equality is ruled...