Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation
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6 8 <strong>Interpretation</strong><br />
own professed specialty: accurate prediction. Historians, political scientists,<br />
sociologists took notice, began to pay him the highest compliment they knew,<br />
namely, calling him one of them. And if the Cold War seemed unwinnable, at<br />
least it need not prove futile, so even political liberalism might have a chance<br />
on the road to some accommodation between it <strong>and</strong> state socialism—say,<br />
‘social democracy.’<br />
If he could return to life, the companionable, well-broughtup<br />
Tocqueville would likely have taken his newfound popularity very much in<br />
stride, welcoming even the most implausible claims to some distant relation,<br />
then drawing even his not-very-similar semblables closer to him in thought <strong>and</strong><br />
sentiment. Politicians <strong>and</strong> philosophers both appreciate friends, each in their<br />
own way; if Tocqueville is both, a political philosopher, then doubly so for him.<br />
Professor Welch has assembled a motley but stimulating<br />
group of Tocqueville friends <strong>and</strong> (intellectual) family relations as contributors<br />
to this volume—not only historians, political scientists, <strong>and</strong> sociologists but literary<br />
scholars <strong>and</strong> translators, <strong>and</strong> even a specimen of that rare bird, the<br />
independent scholar, which Tocqueville was, in a sense. She arranges the essays<br />
into, roughly, five groups of topics: Tocqueville the sociologist; Tocqueville the<br />
political philosopher; Tocqueville the literary <strong>and</strong> scholarly craftsman;<br />
Tocqueville the political scientist; <strong>and</strong>, finally, Tocqueville the literary politician,<br />
with his ups <strong>and</strong> downs in reputation in his native France <strong>and</strong> America,<br />
the future possible homel<strong>and</strong>, so to speak, of at least half the world. She assures<br />
readers that she is no Straussian, <strong>and</strong> I believe her, inasmuch as she puts the<br />
essays on Tocqueville the political philosopher second, not third in order.<br />
Because Tocqueville put his scholarly talents to the political work of persuading<br />
his contemporaries, the centrality of these articles in this volume points to<br />
Tocqueville the politician, the one who assured his friend Louis de Kergolay<br />
that he suffered from no “reckless enthusiasm for the intellectual life,” but “have<br />
always placed action above everything else” (quoted, 170).<br />
Sociologist Seymour Drescher <strong>and</strong> sociologist/political theorist/historian<br />
Jon Elster lead off with accounts of Tocqueville as a social<br />
scientist—specifically, a political sociologist. Drescher considers Tocqueville as<br />
seen first in the titles of his best-known books, Democracy in America <strong>and</strong> The<br />
Old Regime <strong>and</strong> the Revolution: a comparativist. He who knows only France<br />
cannot underst<strong>and</strong> the French Revolution, Tocqueville said; therefore, one<br />
must journey to America, <strong>and</strong> also study not only France’s regime-of-themoment<br />
but the regime that antedated all the others, in both instances