Beyond Struggle and Power: Heidegger's Secret ... - Interpretation

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