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

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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“viewing from without what one wishes to understand within” (21). Nor did
Tocqueville confine himself to the study of two or three countries.“His interest
extended across most of the globe: in Europe, from Russia to Ireland; in the
Pacific, from Australia to New Zealand; in Asia, from China to the Ottoman
empire; in North Africa, from Egypt to Algeria; in the Western hemisphere,
from Canada to South America” (22). Throughout these places he located a
common thread. The regimes of aristocracy (seen in its most extreme form in
the villages of India) and despotism (from Napoleonic France to the “imbecile
and barbarous government” of China) stultified societies (24). Indian decentralization
made it vulnerable to British conquest while the caste system in its
villages prevented the reward of natural merit. Only a measure of equality can
elicit the best in a society as a whole.
Over his relatively short literary career of some twenty years
Tocqueville changed his mind about the home of democracy. He began to see
that the slave-based aristocracy of the American South might persist, and that
the aristocracy of England acted in and among a strong and pious middle class.
By the time he wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution in the 1850s, Great
Britain, with its dynamic commercial and industrial economy, its political stability
with substantial popular self-government, and its world-encompassing
empire—all products of a successful transition from an ancient aristocracy to
modern social equality—had become his model for sound politics in modernity.
And politics was the key: Britain’s “rulers [had] avoided the generic aristocratic
tendency to become a ‘caste’ because of the continuous political interaction
inherent in its parliamentary and municipal systems” (38). The French aristocrats,
by contrast, “had ossified into a caste” because they had taken the
poisoned bait of the monarchy, trading political engagement for exemptions
from national taxation and local responsibility (39). They became not an
aristo-cracy—a ruling body—but a mere nobility, a social body. But independence
from political life has nothing to do with liberty. As Tocqueville observes,
“There is nothing less independent than a free citizen” (39); in that sense he
was no ‘independent scholar’ at all. Only comparative study, getting the French
‘outside’ themselves might bring “the rebirth of liberty in France” (42).
The neo-Marxist scholar Jon Elster concerns himself not so
much with the lessons Tocqueville draws from his comparative studies as with
his account of historical causation. Elster particularly wants to determine the
points at which revolution becomes first possible, then probable, then
inevitable; revolution’s “preconditions,” “precipitants,” and “triggers,” respectively
correspond roughly to Aristotle’s material, formal, and efficient causes,