The Ark and the Deluge: The Unfurling of Equality in World History

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

Proof of the unparalleled robustness of the American labor market can be found in the remarkable fact that despite the double blow of an economic and military war, the economy was still growing as of the first half of 2026.¹ Much more uncertain is the US’s ability to project an image of liberal virtue to the rest of the world. Liberal ideas and values have been so openly and repeatedly trampled on by American political leaders that it is hard to conceive of how ordinary citizens and their elected representatives can build back the moral culture which gives life to liberal institutions.

While daunting, the challenge of reconstruction is by no means unsurmountable. The secret to liberalism’s enduring success over three centuries of war and revolution has been its uncanny ability to adapt to geopolitical challenges. Both world wars and their surrounding economic devastations forced politicians and other intellectual professionals to impose well-chosen limits on the power of corporations, while governments across the western world moved to protect civilians from the vagaries of the global market. The economic impracticalities of running an empire, and the embarrassment of holding racial minorities down during an ideological war, helped in the late twentieth century to propel multiracial societies toward a more effective form of democracy. Every major world event provided liberal thinkers with an opportunity to exploit the circumstances of the time and to realize their vision of a better world, something liberals have historically been very good at. “Liberals get nothing accomplished—except everything, eventually” was Adam Gopnik’s memorable assessment of liberalism’s legacy in the twenty-first century.²

It is precisely this remarkable history of adaptation that makes liberalism’s current stasis all the more worrying. As a number of scholars have already observed, the problem with liberalism today isn’t just that it is not evolving. The deeper concern seems to be that it is devolving.³ No longer a source of inspiration for industrial workers in rich democracies, critics allege that liberalism has mutated into a stale ideology that now seems to lack the resources to confront the threat of authoritarianism at home and abroad. What ails liberalism is a matter of controversy, but what remains clear is that liberals feel themselves besieged, and as a result, somewhat unsure of themselves. Liberals are increasingly uncertain of whether the so-called ‘moral arc of history’ does indeed bend toward justice. Behind this palpable sense of insecurity is an understandable loss of faith, both metaphysical and moral, in the progressive nature of history and the place of human actors in this unfolding scheme.

While that loss of faith is not the only factor that sets modern-day liberals apart from their pre-twenty-first-century intellectual ancestors, it is nonetheless one of the more conspicuous elements of modern politics, one which may perhaps help explain the perceived tepidness of the current liberal faction. The liberals of old were distinguished (and often criticized) for their buoyancy. The most zealous among them seemed to have an almost boundless faith in their political project and their ability to carry it forth. “If the French who conducted the Revolution were more sceptical than ourselves in matters of religion,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “they retained at least one admirable belief which we do not have: they had faith in themselves…. They had no doubt that they were called to transform society and to regenerate our human race.” While this “arrogant confidence” often led to error and pushed “audacity to the point of madness,” it also “impelled them towards heroic action and devotion.”⁴

Tocqueville’s account of the fall of the ancien régime has an interestingly metaphysical bent. He says that the French Revolution was driven by a “missionary spirit” which spread through “preaching and propaganda” and produced “inspired converts” and “flooded all the Earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs.” Its aim was to foster a “love for equality and freedom,” to “acknowledge and sanctify” universal human rights, and to bring about a condition in which all human beings can “serve the master of the world on an equal footing.”⁵ The “closer I drew near 1789,” he explained, “the more distinctly could I make out the spirit which had caused the shaping, the birth and the growth of the Revolution.”⁶ This was the spirit of “equality inside freedom,” a wish, as Tocqueville put it, “to live not only equal but free.”⁷ The more the Frenchman studied the revolution in detail, the more clearly he “perceived the features of this Revolution gradually unfurling before my gaze.”⁸

Its character at first seemed irreligious, but more careful study taught Tocqueville otherwise. “To believe that democratic societies are by their nature hostile to religion is to commit a great mistake,” he explained.⁹ Though godless and “without ritual or an afterlife,” this French cult of liberty had all the hallmarks of a religion: it was abstract, universal, and transformative of social relations. “It did not simply seek to determine the individual rights of the French citizen,” but the “general rights of man to God” and “the duties of man to man.”¹⁰ Some saw in this new “revolutionary religion” the ill-craft of the devil, while others (Tocqueville included) perceived “the benevolent workings of God,” whose “aim was to reinvigorate not only the face of France but of the whole world.”¹¹

The French Revolution did not just codify the idea of a universal natural equality, it also gave birth to a new kind of political creature. “We saw an unknown type of revolutionary,” step on to the political scene. Fearless, “never hesitating before the execution of any plan,” and confident in the righteousness of his cause, despite the obvious risks attached to his political experimentations. These “new creatures” had now “formed a race” whose ideas, zeal, and character was now spreading “to every civilized area of the earth.”¹² Tocqueville’s new race of men would eventually come to be known as ‘liberals.’ Their movement would become the wellspring of a new form of politics centered on equal rights and the pursuit of freedom, and sustained by a faith in historical progress. Every time we moderns entertain this conception of humanity and its history as ‘progressive,’ i.e., capable of change, sometimes for the better, we partake in the hopes and dreams of those who first interpreted the wonderful events of their time as the levelling work of a supreme intelligence.

“I have seen the world’s salvation!” was Immanuel Kant’s ecstatic response to the amazing events of the French Revolution.¹³ The collapse of the ancien régime was so radicalizing an event in world history that it turned subdued intellectuals into vocal liberators. Otherwise timid and prudent thinkers discovered a new-found boldness. Many spent most of their waking days thinking, discussing, and writing about the drama in France. Marcus Willaschek, author of a recent biography of Kant, tells us that no other political event had such a deep impression on the notoriously reserved stickler for rules. It became almost his sole topic of conversation, an astonishing fact for a man best known for small talk.¹⁴ It seemed to Kant and other like-minded contemporaries that a new horizon had just appeared. All of a sudden, says Willaschek, a “more just world seemed achievable,” and the burdensome power of clerical authority no longer absolute.¹⁵

“Everything tells us that we are now close upon one of the great revolutions of the human race,” said the Marquis de Condorcet.¹⁶ The obscurantism and despotism that had plagued humanity since time immemorial would slowly fade away, and be replaced with humane feelings, rational speculation, democratic institutions, and a world populated by ‘free and equal’ citizens. At times, Condorcet and his revolutionary friends spoke with the confidence of men who had been charged, perhaps by some divine oracle, with the solemn duty to rid the world of human imperfection. What else but hubris and religious sentiment could explain this longing for a world where “there are no longer at home any crass prejudices to combat,” nor “any shameful errors to dissipate.”¹⁷ Those words seem to anticipate the emergence of a “new type of humanity,” said Tocqueville, liberated from the worst humiliations of kingly rule and free of prejudice and error.¹⁸

It is not surprising that men on a quest for ever new dragons to slay should fall into excess and fanaticism. What is remarkable, even to this day, is that the victims of this “excessive zeal for freedom” should submit to the idea that history was ripe for a welcome and inalterable change in the situation of mankind.¹⁹ Tocqueville, the aristocrat whose family had suffered terribly at the hands of men with grand ideas of a new world to come, never lost this nerve-wracking sense that something momentous was happening in European society, something that would have important consequences for the world over. In his Democracy in America, published almost half a century after the Terror, he described the revolution of ideas and mores which the French Revolution had produced as a ‘democratic revolution’ ushering in a ‘democratic age.’

Democracy for Tocqueville meant many things, but first and foremost it meant the equalization of social conditions. To say that the world was undergoing a ‘democratic revolution’ was to say that the old hierarchies of power based on birth and ancestral status were dissolving and more undutiful relations were taking their place. He described this visible process of change as the “gradual unfurling of equality,” a slow unraveling of the layers of dogmatic control in human societies, that had progressed over many centuries, “surmounting all obstacles, and which is still advancing today amid the ruins it has caused” in Europe.²⁰ If anyone was familiar with the ruinous effects of this unfolding revolution it was Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s own father, Hervé de Tocqueville, was imprisoned during this tense period. Crushed by his fears and anxieties, the twenty-one-year-old Hervé woke up from a prison nap to find that his hair had turned white. Tocqueville’s parents would survive the traumatic experience, but his mother would remain a nervous wreck for the rest of her life.

Fear of the Terror and of majoritarian tyranny more broadly would never exit the family psyche. Alexis de Tocqueville would spend his literary career condemning the bloody excesses of the revolution, while marveling at the almost supernatural changes taking place in both Europe and the United States. By the time he set out to write his magnum opus, he had not shaken off the belief that humanity was being “driven willy-nilly along the same road…some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind instruments in the hands of God” to an entirely new world order.²¹ This process of democratization, which Tocqueville called “the gradual and progressive development of equality,” was an unstoppable force which was being “imposed upon them by providence.”²² At the core of this divine program was the doctrine of the natural equality of man, the notion that all human beings as human beings are by nature and birth equal in moral worth and dignity, and consequently deserving of equal treatment in all significant aspects of law, politics, and society.

The roots of this idea are metaphysical, but its import is remarkably political. If all human beings are equal from birth, then each one of us has the same basic rights and entitlements well before we become registered members of society. In fact, the natural law theories of the early modern period stipulated that certain human rights were not a bestowal of the state, but were instead an expression of the character of the human race. Condorcet wrote that the rights of men stem not from the fact that laws are written to protect individuals from humiliation, but “exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them.”²³ Rights, therefore, do not emerge from the state; they precede the founding of political communities and are an entitlement that have their grounding in the human form.

This was a relatively new idea. Before the Christianization of Europe, the idea of a ‘basic equality’ between human beings had very negligible currency in ancient Rome and Athens. Tocqueville believed that it was Christianity “which made all men equal before God” in thought and created ‘equality before the law’ in practice.²⁴ The political consequences of this revolution in morals and ontology was “the abolition of all racial, class and professional privileges, the sovereignty of the people, the predominance of social power, the uniformity of rules,” and a whole host of other ideas and policies which form the “fundamental, lasting and authentic” foundation of the French Revolution.²⁵ The revolution in France, like the revolution in America a few decades prior, set out not to establish the rights of a particular locality, but to express “the general duties and rights of men in the political sphere.”²⁶ The universality of its aims—to affirm the sameness of all human beings—was in Tocqueville’s opinion one of the main reasons why the revolution of 1789 was able “to appear comprehensible to all and to be worth imitating in a hundred places at once.”²⁷

The French Revolution then was no ordinary event. It was part of the unfurling of God’s plan for humanity, a plan which mortals such as him had no other choice but to accept. The “obvious truth” which all reasonable political observers, whether progressive or reactionary, had to come to terms with was that “all our contemporaries are driven on by an unknown force which we can hope to govern and moderate but are unable to overcome.”²⁸ Tocqueville had mixed feelings about democracy. He feared “its lawless passions” and the “confusion and agitations” which it was known to conceive, but was helpless to stop it.²⁹ Hence why despite the “frightening spectacle” of violence which marked the revolution, and the vulgar uniformity of thought and manners that so often characterizes democratic societies, the spread of such liberal values as freedom and equality had to be embraced as a fait accompli.³⁰ It is only when Tocqueville is seen as writing under “the pressure of a kind of religious terror” that his at times passionate endorsement of the principles that so deeply wounded his family can start to make psychological sense. Tocqueville had no choice but to reckon with the realities of a world dominated by the passion for equality.³¹ “Equality is the great fact of our time,” he wrote, and no enlightened person could fail to understand its implications for modern politics.³²

Tocqueville compared this globalized democratic wave to a great deluge: “Démocratie! Don’t you notice that these are the waters of the Deluge? Don’t you see them advance unceasingly by a slow and irresistible effort…”³³ All attempts to stop this divine drive were in vain. To desire to halt democracy, Tocqueville noted, would “appear a struggle against God himself.”³⁴ All the “efforts that people will make to stop the movement will achieve only temporary halts.” A government can at best “claim to regulate, but not stop it.”³⁵ Instead of “wishing to raise impotent dikes,” it would be wiser to “seek to build the holy guardian ark which must carry the human species on this boundless ocean.”³⁶ In the end, the hope and fury of humanity would not be able to restrain the designs of the divine power. Come what may, equality of conditions must be accepted as “the invincible necessity of our times.”³⁷

Even to this herald of democracy, the steady advance of such a powerful liberal current was a source of worry. When Tocqueville looked at the United States in particular he saw a country where the “great social revolution” of human equality had “gradually reached its natural limits.”³⁸ The social power of the majority had grown to such a monstrous scale that it now threatened to destroy the republic. “If ever freedom is lost in America,” wrote Tocqueville, “blame will have to be laid at the door of the omnipotence of the majority, which will have driven the minority to despair and…forced them to appeal to physical force.”³⁹

Most worrying was the fact that this tendency of powerful groups to tyrannize dissenters was asserting itself with growing violence with respect to the issue of slavery. Sympathetic Northerners were not able to get their views across without getting censored, and riots and other acts of violence were erupting in response to anti-slavery activism. America’s inconsistent and glaringly hypocritical approach to the question of human equality was now coming to a head. Did Americans truly believe in the basic equality of all human beings, or were all such pronouncements just a piece of poetic propaganda? So far as Tocqueville could tell, the state of affairs on the eve of the Civil War was one in which even nominally free blacks in the most northern parts of the union were not able to “enjoy all the rights of citizens” and not “able to become the equal of whites.”⁴⁰ In enlightened Massachusetts, “prejudice was so strong,” he observed, that the children of blacks “cannot be received in schools,” while in Baltimore blacks are scared to vote.⁴¹

The problems with the racist status quo were evident to see, and far beyond what the good-willed abolitionists could offer: once blacks “join the ranks of the free men” Tocqueville observed, “they will soon be indignant” at the injustice of whites and “will soon declare themselves their enemies.”⁴² If anything, “race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”⁴³ For this reason, Tocqueville noted, “I must confess that I do not consider the abolition of slavery as a way to delay the conflict of the two races in the southern states.” The oppressive white majority and its oppressed black minority were on a collision course, with no easy way out. There were only two options, both of which were untenable for Southern society. Either “integrating with them or remaining apart from them and keeping them in a state of slavery for as long as possible.” Interim measures, he explained, “seem to me likely to end shortly in the most horrific of all civil wars and possibly in the ruin of one or other of the two races.”⁴⁴ Tocqueville was not only fearful of what the future had in store for the United States, but also greatly resentful at “those who introduced slavery once again into the world after more than a thousand years of equality.”⁴⁵

Though a violent clash now seemed inevitable, Tocqueville held out hope that the “same revolution in motion throughout the Christian world” would bring about an end to slavery. Slavery being an institution “which is attacked by Christianity as unjust” could not last forever.⁴⁶ The visible signs of oppression and unequal treatment all around the United States would not fail to torment the conscience of a Christian nation, and prove a growing source of embarrassment for the United States. “I can not but hate,” declared Abraham Lincoln, “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world,” forcing so many good men to make “open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty,” including “the Declaration of Independence.”⁴⁷ Such philosophical contradictions could not hope to survive the movement of history toward greater equality for all. “If ever America undergoes great revolutions,” Tocqueville concluded, “they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of conditions.”⁴⁸

Tocqueville is usually praised for correctly anticipating the outbreak of the American Civil War, but seldom lauded for pointing out that the deeply Christian values embedded in the revolutionary doctrine of the rights of man would force the end of slavery, along with many other vestiges of the unequal past. Tocqueville is less of a prophet than a good observer of the social, political, and intellectual trends of his time. “God does not need to speak for himself” in order for human beings to discern the “definitive signs of his will.” All that is needed is a proper examination of “the normal course of nature and the consistent tendency of events.”⁴⁹ The tendency of events, as Tocqueville perceived them in the three decades leading to the outbreak of war, was toward an equalization of social conditions, irrespective of class or color.

The idea of a basic equality among human beings was already taken for granted by the most radical members of the American clergy at the time of Tocqueville’s visit to America. To read Manisha Sinha’s The Slave Cause is to be reminded that the mighty struggle to eliminate slavery from the world was spurred on by religious belief. Quakers, Unitarians, and a number of evangelical groups awakened by the religious revivals of the past decades welcomed censorship, violence, humiliation, and much more for the sake of defending the human rights of black people. They denounced slavery as “the greatest possible violation of human rights,” and an offence against both natural law and the created order.⁵⁰ They were also anxious to eliminate the artificial barriers of race and class in society. Like Tocqueville, they understood that the issue was not just the shackling of human beings, but their relegation to the bottom of society as lesser than.

The Civil War and its legal amendments could not ‘solve’ this issue, or get people to buy into this vision of humanity, but it could begin to make ‘amends’ for previous wrongs and set the US on a more righteous path. What was needed, wrote Thaddeus Stevens, were policies which aimed at erasing the legacy of slavery and reinstating principles of equality. The Republican program should seek to convey to the public that “every man, no matter what his race or color, every earthly being has an immortal soul, has an equal right to justice, honesty, and fair play with every other man; and the law should secure him those rights.”⁵¹ By the 1870s, the language of rights, and the promotion of formal equality, had so penetrated the political lexicon that in the minds of some leading congressmen, a just society could not operate without proper observance of the rights of men. Robert Brown Elliot, a South Carolina representative, declared that “the constitution of a free government ought always to be construed in favor of human rights.”⁵²

The language of rights is second nature to us. We are fluent in its meaning and ever so prepared to deploy its rhetorical power to combat all manner of grave wrongs. What we lack is the courage to believe that the principles of liberty that we defend will ultimately prevail in the face of fierce opposition. Unlike our intellectual forefathers, we no longer believe ourselves to be co-participants in a divine plan for freedom. The horrors of the twentieth-century dealt a final blow to mass belief in God and divine action in the world, as well as the secular temptation to endow historical events with law-like patterns. What we are left with today is frequent doubts about the durability of our liberal ideals in a fast-changing world. We may have lost the religious faith of an Immanuel Kant or a Martin Luther King Jr., but we still retain a keen awareness of the specialness of human life and the reality of moral wrong. These two lasting beliefs must become the anchor points of future political agitation. They must provoke, outrage, inspire, and sustain liberal activism, even in the absence of a purported divine plan to rally around and spur us on.

At the most basic level, liberalism exists to uphold the collection of rights which apply to human beings as creatures with very specific capabilities. Any path to political recovery must affirm the preciousness of human life and acknowledge when this dignity has been attacked. To fail to do so is to succumb to a much graver form of disenchantment than the one which befell the survivors of the two world wars.

1. “How much is Donald Trump costing America’s economy?” The Economist, May 18th 2026.
2. Adam Gopnik. A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books, 2019. p. 24.
3. Samuel Moyn. Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War and the Making of Our Times. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2023.
4. Alexis de Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution. Translated by Gerald Bevan. New York: Penguin, 2008. pp. 156–157.
5. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 10.↩︎
6. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 9.↩︎
7. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. pp. 204–205.↩︎
8. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 9.↩︎
9. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 23.↩︎
10. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. pp. 26–27.↩︎
11. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 20.↩︎
12. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 157.↩︎
13. Marcus Willaschek. Immanuel Kant: A Revolution of the Mind. Translated by Peter Lewis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2025. p.114.
14. Marcus Willaschek. Immanuel Kant. p. 7.
15. Marcus Willaschek. Immanuel Kant. p. 7.
16. Condorcet, Political Writings. edited by Steven Luke and Nadia Urbinati. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 68.
17. Condorcet, Political Writings. p. 66.
18. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 20.
19. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 12.
20. Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America and Two Essays on America. Translated by Gerald E. Bevan. New York: Penguin. p. 15.
21. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 14.
22. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 15.
23. Condorcet, Political Writings. p. 53.
24. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 21.
25. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 22.
26. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 27.
27. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 27.
28. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 12.
29. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 20.
30. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 203.
31. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 15.
32. James T. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, p. 215.
33. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 326.
34. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 15.
35. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 326.
36. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 326.
37. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 233.
38. Tocqueville. The Ancien Régime. p. 23.
39. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 304.
40. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 423.
41. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. p. 272.
42. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 422.
43. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. p. 272.
44. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. pp. 422–423.
45. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 426.
46. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 14, 426.
47. Achilles Reed Amar. Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920. New York: Basic Books, p. 299.
48. Schleifer. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, p. 275.
49. Tocqueville. Democracy in America. p. 15.
50. Manisha Sinha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 249.
51. Manisha Sinha. The Rise and Fall of The Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 77.
52. Manisha Sinha. The Rise and Fall of The Second American Republic. p. 281.