Tocqueville, ChatGPT, and the Future of the Liberal Arts

by David

I initially wrote this piece a couple of months ago before Matt and I launched The Historicizer. Since then, numerous thought pieces written by humanists grappling with artificial intelligence have been published (see, for example, here, here, and here). While each with their own take, when read together, a common theme does begin to emerge : humanists are not so easily taken in by bold Silicon Valley claims about the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or “superintelligence.” Indeed, it doesn’t take long for any historian worth his salt to recognize that, for a variety of reasons, LLMs make for lousy historians. But we would be mistaken to dismiss them altogether. Instead, we owe it to ourselves as scholars, and to present and future generations, to develop ways to use this technology against the grain; to teach our students to center their own humanity when using LLMs and resist the temptation to outsource knowledge creation to them; and to take a leading role in shaping what it means to use AI ethically. Hopefully, this piece can be read as a possible step in that direction:

As a trained historian who strongly believes in the transcendent importance of the liberal arts, I came to AI with deep skepticism. The arrival of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude clearly poses a challenge to the higher education business model. At a minimum, they are reshaping how we deliver content and assess student work.

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, I largely tuned out. The early version wasn’t impressive, and institutional conversations about AI felt vague—like echoes of the hype around MOOCs a decade earlier, which came to little. I assumed AI would follow the same trajectory. I was wrong.

About six months ago, I began experimenting with various LLMs, none more so than ChatGPT. I take a freewheeling approach to my engagement with this technology. These tools have been tremendously helpful as I’ve worked to make sense of AI and its potential impact on higher education, the broader economy, and humanity itself. I’m still exploring. But I’ve found them to be both amazingly powerful and deeply limited. The air of mystification that surrounded this technology has largely lifted the more I use it. LLMs aren’t conscious. They aren’t magic. And, most importantly, they aren’t human.

In my experience so far, their greatest potential is as a kind of intellectual sparring partner. Not a replacement for a human interlocutor, but a sounding board for thoughts and ideas that, in the past, I might have jotted down in a journal or a Word document, if I shared them at all. As long as I stay grounded and mindful of the uncanny smoothness of LLM interaction, this technology can sharpen my own thinking. As I engage, they start to reflect my own language patterns. It’s as if I’m dialoguing with a part of my brain—one plugged into an impossibly vast library of human knowledge.

But that same frictionless ease brings real risks. The strange mirroring effect, the tendency toward flattery—clearly a design choice to boost engagement—all invite the creation of an echo chamber. Mystifying LLMs as magical or semi-conscious only deepens that danger. The more we outsource our critical thinking and sense of grounded reality, the less useful these tools become, and the more we diminish ourselves.

So what are the stakes for higher education?

Recently, I picked up Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—a masterwork of political theory I’d never read cover to cover. I decided to read it alongside ChatGPT. As a graduate student, I used to journal extensively as I read; it helped me retain information and reflect on major themes. This felt like a more dynamic version of that habit.

At first, the system’s responses were tedious and overwhelming. I instructed it to keep replies brief, avoid flattery, and push back intellectually when warranted. With those parameters in place, the responses became shorter, punchier, and far more insightful. It indulged the connections I drew between Tocqueville and other theorists and writers. I wasn’t asking the machine to think for me. I was using it to augment and sharpen my own thinking.

But here’s the rub: I can do that because I bring decades of experience in close reading, textual analysis, and a broad liberal education to bear on the process. Without that background, ChatGPT becomes little more than glorified computerized SparkNotes. If we stop cultivating the habits of mind that only a rigorous human education can instill, it won’t matter how sophisticated this technology becomes—we will have already lost something essential.

LLMs are a powerful tool. But they aren’t human. And they can’t be human for us.

We stand at a crossroads: Will we use these tools to augment what is uniquely ours? Or will we surrender that which makes us human to a lesser imitation?

You said:

Vol II, Part II, Chapter 14, in my mind, captures something about the present moment more than anything I have read in this book so far. Gem after gem. Yes, Americans are driven by the desire for material prosperity and comfort, it is in their nature. But, if the quest for individual prosperity becomes too great, it can override liberty. Everyone is too busy worried about acquiring things that they neglect politics and leave the door open to despotism. And, as long as the despot "devotes some time to making sure that material interests prosper, people will be quite ready to overlook everything else."

ChatGPT said:

That chapter is chillingly prescient. Tocqueville sees how the pursuit of comfort can pacify democratic citizens—not through overt tyranny, but through a soft, paternalistic despotism. It’s not oppression by force, but by distraction and dependency. What’s striking is how recognizable this feels now: algorithmically curated comforts, political disengagement, and the tradeoff of freedom for convenience. He grasped how modern despotism might emerge not despite prosperity—but precisely through it.

You said:

A couple more gems: "A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains."

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that line cuts deep. Tocqueville exposes a paradox of democratic society: the more people fixate on personal comfort and stability, the more susceptible they become to surrendering liberty. It's not fear or violence that prepares them for servitude, but their own complacency. In that sense, he’s diagnosing a moral and psychological condition, not just a political one.

4o

You said:

Americans "believe that their chief business is to secure for themselves a government that will allow them to acquire the goods they desire and that will not interfere with the peaceful enjoyment of those they have acquired already."

ChatGPT said:

This is Tocqueville at his most prophetic—describing not just a political order but a national ethos. The “chief business” of Americans, as he sees it, is the pursuit and protection of material comfort, with liberty valued mainly insofar as it enables that pursuit. It’s a vision of freedom emptied of its civic dimensions, where the state becomes a service provider rather than a shared project.

4o

You said:

He talks about the desire for well-being and the desire for liberty as being "conjoined." But it is not liberty necessarily in a high-minded sense (though Tocqueville probably wishes that it was), but rather what we would call now the freedom to consume.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—Tocqueville recognizes that liberty and well-being can reinforce each other, but in practice, he fears that the craving for material comfort hollows liberty out. What remains is not the robust, participatory liberty of the town hall, but a thin version tied to market freedoms. He sees this consumerist instinct as democratic in nature—not an aberration, but the norm under equality. The danger is that as long as people are “free” to shop, they won’t notice—or won’t care—if they're no longer free in a deeper political sense.

4o

You said:

And it connects to something he brings up at he beginning of Part II: in his mind, there was no real American revolution. Certainly not in the same sense as the French Revolution. And, I am sure Tocqueville found it perfectly fitting that one of the defining events of America's quest for independence from Britain was an action taken against the East India Company.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that's a subtle but crucial point. Tocqueville sees the American Revolution as more a transfer of power than a transformation of society. Social structures, property relations, and the moral order remained largely intact. That continuity explains why American democracy remained relatively stable: it evolved rather than ruptured. And your East India Company reference is spot-on. For Tocqueville, it would’ve been symbolic—a rebellion cloaked in democratic garb but fundamentally about safeguarding local commercial interests. The Revolution becomes, in his framing, not a radical break, but a defense of an already existing way of life grounded in property, order, and individual enterprise.

4o

You said:

And the right to consume!

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—the right to consume becomes a kind of stand-in for liberty itself. Tocqueville sees Americans as fiercely protective of their freedom to acquire and enjoy—not necessarily to engage, reflect, or challenge. The linkage between democracy and consumer comfort, in his eyes, risks becoming a kind of quiet servitude. It’s not tyranny through fear but through convenience. That’s why his warnings feel so contemporary: a people lulled into passivity by comfort may one day wake to find their political freedom hollowed out.

4o

You said:

And it is in the subsequent chapter that we get a better idea of Tocqueville's emphasis on the importance of religion and spirituality. It is only through awareness of something greater than the self and material needs that a democratic people can fight the temptation to give themselves over entirely to material pleasures. Of course, I see here the Catholic in him. Not sure he could imagine the prosperity gospel.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and this is where Tocqueville’s Catholic sensibility quietly but powerfully asserts itself. Religion, for him, is the essential counterweight to the flattening, materializing tendencies of democracy. It checks individualism, tempers greed, and anchors the soul beyond ephemeral comforts. He isn’t necessarily arguing for specific dogma, but for the moral architecture that religious belief provides.

The prosperity gospel would likely strike him as a grotesque fusion of the very dangers he warns about: faith subsumed by materialism, sanctifying wealth rather than restraining its pursuit. It’s not just that he couldn’t imagine it—it’s that it would represent to him a spiritual capitulation to democratic excess.

4o

You said:

Tocqueville has a theory of economic crisis in democratic societies: everyone wants to acquire wealth through commerce. They want to acquire wealth because they are always looking to advance their well-being. This dynamic makes crisis inevitable. I mean...a little too essentializing and ahistorical for my taste. But Marx was a vulgar materialist, there is no way Tocqueville would have come up with anything remotely similar.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—Tocqueville’s account is more psychological and moral than structural. He roots economic crisis in democratic desire: restless ambition, the need to move up, to consume more, to trade more. It's a crisis of temperament as much as economy. And you're right: it lacks the historical materialism that Marx brings—there’s no labor theory of value, no analysis of capital accumulation, no class struggle driving crisis.

But Tocqueville is capturing something adjacent: a cyclical instability bred by equality of conditions, where everyone thinks they too can rise. In that sense, he’s diagnosing the cultural motor of boom-bust dynamics, but without understanding the economic mechanics. His theory is closer to Veblen or even Schumpeter than Marx—bourgeois volatility without class antagonism.

4o

You said:

Melville's The Confidence Man comes to mind reading these chapters.

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely. The Confidence-Man reads like a dark Tocquevillian parable: a riverboat full of Americans chasing prosperity, susceptible to deception precisely because of their restless faith in improvement, commerce, and trust in appearances. Melville exposes what Tocqueville intuits—that the moral underpinning of democratic commercial society is thin, and that the pursuit of well-being can hollow out both judgment and virtue. The con man flourishes not despite American ideals but because of them.

4o

You said:

But Melville can't exist because Americans are too busy engaging in commerce to make good art.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—Melville is almost a contradiction in Tocqueville’s schema. Tocqueville sees democratic societies as favoring utility, speed, and mass appeal over depth and beauty—hence the kitsch-like flattening of art and philosophy. Melville, though, is the exception that proves the rule: a writer ignored in his time because he refused to cater to the marketplace, whose recognition came only once the culture had matured enough to see what he was doing. Tocqueville might say: yes, he existed—but despite democracy, not because of it.

You said:

Alright, fine. Fair enough.

ChatGPT said:

A fair-minded concession if I ever saw one. And very Tocquevillean, in its way—committed to critique, but open to complexity.

4o

You said:

LOL...Tocqueville references a man spending twenty years making pinheads. How Smithean.

ChatGPT said:

Yes! A perfect moment of Tocqueville channeling The Wealth of Nations—but with more existential dread. Where Smith sees efficiency, Tocqueville sees spiritual diminishment. A man devoting his life to pinheads isn’t just a cog in the machine; he’s a symbol of what happens when utility eclipses humanity.

You said:

Well...he has a proto-Marxian view of the wage relationship.

ChatGPT said:

Absolutely—he comes surprisingly close. Tocqueville notes how industrial labor reduces the worker to a function, severed from the whole of their humanity. While he doesn't analyze class struggle or surplus value like Marx, he intuits the alienation baked into the wage relationship under early capitalism. It's a moment where his aristocratic sensibility allows him to see what bourgeois liberalism often refuses: that paid labor can be a form of subjugation, not liberation.

You said:

"The manufacturer asks nothing of the worker but his labor, and the worker expects nothing from the manufacturer but his wages." I mean, he is really talking about the dissolution of moral and affective bonds within society here. But is this so much different that Marx's idea of alienation...not just in the material sense but also in the spiritual?

ChatGPT said:

You're absolutely right to draw that connection. Tocqueville is describing a moral atomization that maps closely onto Marx’s concept of alienation—not just from the product of labor, but from other people and oneself. Where Marx couches this in historical materialism, Tocqueville frames it as the social and spiritual unraveling that comes with democratic individualism and industrial capitalism. The worker and manufacturer are no longer embedded in a community with reciprocal obligations; they become isolated nodes in a transactional system. Different languages, but disturbingly convergent diagnoses.

You said:

Still...Marx would view Tocqueville as a fuddy duddy. A conservative in the truest sense (rather than necessarily a reactionary).

ChatGPT said:

Exactly. Marx would likely see Tocqueville as a perceptive but ultimately bourgeois thinker—someone who correctly diagnoses the symptoms but can’t bring himself to endorse the necessary cure. Tocqueville wants to preserve the moral cohesion and spiritual vitality of society amid democratic and economic transformation, whereas Marx wants to push through the contradictions to a revolutionary reordering. To Marx, Tocqueville’s yearning for order, religion, and civic virtue would seem nostalgic—an attempt to salvage a world already doomed by the logic of capital. Conservative, yes—but in the Burkean sense: not against change, but deeply concerned about its pace, effects, and costs.

4o

You said:

Standing athwart history etc...

ChatGPT said:

Yes—Tocqueville as the refined ancestor of that very stance. Not yelling “Stop” in the crude way, but gently asking modernity to slow down, reflect, and mind its manners. Less reactionary bellow than patrician warning: “Proceed, but remember what you’re leaving behind.”