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

7 0 Interpretation
with the final cause having disappeared. Unlike Drescher, Elster cares little for
the ‘teleological’ dimension of Tocqueville’s enterprise.
Elster astutely describes the “social psychology” of the French
Revolution, as Tocqueville understood it. The aristocracy succumbed to interclass
hostility from two directions. The tax exemptions aroused envy and
resentment in the bourgeoisie, who seldom dealt with the aristocrats but
‘looked up’ at them from afar. At the same time, the aristocrats’ “withdrawal”
from local administration without a simultaneous withdrawal from the countryside
they had administered—their political irresponsibility coupled with
daily contact with ‘their’ peasants—infuriated those peasants, made them want
to physically destroy a class that had descended to parasitism (56).
Elster finds this account of the revolution impressive. He
finds Tocqueville’s explanation of the aristocrats’ withdrawal from politics less
persuasive; rather than a deliberate attempt by French monarchs to divide and
thereby rule the social classes (a claim he judges “far-fetched and undocumented”),
he takes the aristocratic exemptions as entirely a capitulation by the
king to aristocratic demands—a power play that redounded unintentionally to
the loss of aristocratic power and the final ruin of that class, an example of the
cunning of history. Elster’s Marxist-historicist tendency also comes out in his
discussion of the ‘Tocqueville paradox’: that improved ‘objective’ economic
conditions may result in more intense discontent, and hence make revolution
more likely. He objects that Tocqueville inconsistently appeals to two kinds of
explanations of the paradox. The “synchronic” evidence of the paradox comes
from Germany and from France itself; regions where aristocrats continued to
perform their administrative responsibilities while peasants enjoyed low levels
of personal freedom and suffered high taxes remained more stable than regions
in which peasant freedoms were more considerable and taxes were low, but the
aristocrats did not really rule (58). The “diachronic” claim holds that “revolutions
often occur as one goes from the worse to the better rather than the
other way around” (58). But of course it may be that Tocqueville is not a historicist,
and therefore does not much care if an explanation is synchronic or
diachronic, words that do not appear in his writings.
The next pair of essays, written by political philosophy scholars
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Delba Winthrop, and Pierre Manent, point to
Tocqueville not as a sociologist but as a philosophic political scientist—that is,
as one who thinks about knowledge in its relation to political life. Mansfield