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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Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville<br />
6 9<br />
“viewing from without what one wishes to underst<strong>and</strong> within” (21). Nor did<br />
Tocqueville confine himself to the study of two or three countries.“His interest<br />
extended across most of the globe: in Europe, from Russia to Irel<strong>and</strong>; in the<br />
Pacific, from Australia to New Zeal<strong>and</strong>; in Asia, from China to the Ottoman<br />
empire; in North Africa, from Egypt to Algeria; in the Western hemisphere,<br />
from Canada to South America” (22). Throughout these places he located a<br />
common thread. The regimes of aristocracy (seen in its most extreme form in<br />
the villages of India) <strong>and</strong> despotism (from Napoleonic France to the “imbecile<br />
<strong>and</strong> barbarous government” of China) stultified societies (24). Indian decentralization<br />
made it vulnerable to British conquest while the caste system in its<br />
villages prevented the reward of natural merit. Only a measure of equality can<br />
elicit the best in a society as a whole.<br />
Over his relatively short literary career of some twenty years<br />
Tocqueville changed his mind about the home of democracy. He began to see<br />
that the slave-based aristocracy of the American South might persist, <strong>and</strong> that<br />
the aristocracy of Engl<strong>and</strong> acted in <strong>and</strong> among a strong <strong>and</strong> pious middle class.<br />
By the time he wrote The Old Regime <strong>and</strong> the Revolution in the 1850s, Great<br />
Britain, with its dynamic commercial <strong>and</strong> industrial economy, its political stability<br />
with substantial popular self-government, <strong>and</strong> its world-encompassing<br />
empire—all products of a successful transition from an ancient aristocracy to<br />
modern social equality—had become his model for sound politics in modernity.<br />
And politics was the key: Britain’s “rulers [had] avoided the generic aristocratic<br />
tendency to become a ‘caste’ because of the continuous political interaction<br />
inherent in its parliamentary <strong>and</strong> municipal systems” (38). The French aristocrats,<br />
by contrast, “had ossified into a caste” because they had taken the<br />
poisoned bait of the monarchy, trading political engagement for exemptions<br />
from national taxation <strong>and</strong> local responsibility (39). They became not an<br />
aristo-cracy—a ruling body—but a mere nobility, a social body. But independence<br />
from political life has nothing to do with liberty. As Tocqueville observes,<br />
“There is nothing less independent than a free citizen” (39); in that sense he<br />
was no ‘independent scholar’ at all. Only comparative study, getting the French<br />
‘outside’ themselves might bring “the rebirth of liberty in France” (42).<br />
The neo-Marxist scholar Jon Elster concerns himself not so<br />
much with the lessons Tocqueville draws from his comparative studies as with<br />
his account of historical causation. Elster particularly wants to determine the<br />
points at which revolution becomes first possible, then probable, then<br />
inevitable; revolution’s “preconditions,” “precipitants,” <strong>and</strong> “triggers,” respectively<br />
correspond roughly to Aristotle’s material, formal, <strong>and</strong> efficient causes,