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

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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and Winthrop explicate Tocqueville’s assertion that a new political science is
needed for a world altogether new. Tocqueville does not follow this “striking
statement” with a direct account of political science old or new, leaving the new
science “implicit and scattered”—“for good reason” (81). They set out to
recover that science, the reason for it, and the reason for Tocqueville’s obliquity
in presenting it.
Tocqueville mixes the political science of Aristotle with that of
Publius,‘ancient’ with ‘modern.’ Like Aristotle, he writes as a teacher of democracy,
“judge and trainer”; “the political scientist must be occupied with the
character of human souls” (83). But he regards the regimes Aristotle called
democracies to have been aristocracies, reduces Aristotle’s six regimes to two,
and “values souls as a liberal would, in contrast to Aristotle” (83) Like Publius,
“he regards America as the most modern regime, the arena in which the happiness
and liberty of mankind are at stake in a new experiment” (82). But he
inclines to see Publius’ sharp distinction between democracy and republicanism
as overdrawn; “in America, the power of the people overcomes the
republican restraints of representative government owed to modern political
science” (82). Modern political science attempted to solve the problem of religious
warfare by abandoning political attempts to improve souls and instead
centering the attention of political men on issues of “legitimacy”—the origins
of society in a social contract, for example. Tocqueville replies that the moderns
have succeeded in neglecting the soul without finding a solid foundation for
political legitimacy, either. He therefore turns instead not to modern political
theory—even to American theory, as enunciated in the Declaration of
Independence—but to American political practice, which he discovers as
decidedly soulful. “He prefers liberalism in practice to liberalism in theory
because liberalism in practice is liberalism with soul” (84).
In theory, liberal egalitarianism denigrates human pride. It
tends toward pantheism, which dissolves all individual distinctions into cosmic
mush, or historicism, which dissolves the efforts of statesmen into sweeping
“general causes” (85). “In the practice of democracy, however, democratic citizens
show their pride” (85), especially their politicians, often heard to insist
vehemently on the greatness not so much of themselves as on that of the people
whose votes they want. “The image [of democracy] is there to be seen, but
in [Tocqueville’s] political science it is embedded in fact rather than abstracted
in a theory. Democracy for him is in America, and America is not merely an
example of democracy outside his political science” (85–86).