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

7 4 Interpretation
In this regime, democracy’s small-souled ‘mass man’ becomes a capable, selfgoverning
citizen. Tocqueville’s political science discovers and encourages this
human type. “Tocqueville can be said to have desired to restore politics, and
therewith greatness, to the political science of liberalism” (96).
Self-government enables citizens to secure their rights by
“obey[ing] without being submissive and command without being arrogant”
(97). That is, self-government makes the theoretical rights of the Declaration of
Independence real in practice as well as in speech, and exemplifies Aristotle’s
understanding of politics as ruling and being ruled in turn. The three innovations
of Tocqueville’s new political science for a world altogether new each shows
how this can be possible. His concept of “the social state,” seems to combine the
modern desire to reduce society to pre-political elements with Aristotle’s insistence
on the importance of regimes, inasmuch as the two kinds of social state are
characterized by the political terms, ‘democratic’ and ‘aristocratic.’
America has a “point of departure”—the Puritans—rather than a
deliberate founding. A founding is imposed, but a social state causes
the society without ruling over it. That is why an aristocracy, which
is the rule of a part imposing itself on the whole is less of a social
state than is a democracy. (98)
(To this, Aristotle might reply: democratic public opinion does in fact reflect
the imposition of a part, albeit the majority, over the whole, and as for the
Puritans, their founding had already occurred, in England, and their presence
in America meant that they had lost a regime struggle there. Tocqueville might
not altogether disagree with that.)
The second innovation of Tocqueville’s political science consists
in seeing that individuals in democracies are sembables—equal not only in
the sense of having rights but in the sense of being alike in seeing themselves as
equals. Democracies frustrate Hegelians because ‘the other’ does not exist in
them, insofar as they truly are democratic. Those who try to agitate such societies
with stories of racial and class conflict will finally lose; not enough of the
citizens will quite believe them because, although such conflicts will exist, they
will not often predominate. If at some point they do predominate, the majority
will win them decisively. Although this seems to mean that “aristocracy and
democracy are successive eras in history, not constant possibilities for human
beings to choose between or to mix, as Aristotle had argued” (100), Mansfield
and Winthrop immediately mention that the few still exist in democracies—
the intelligent and the rich, for example. They can make little headway by
appealing directly to their own virtues as such. There is not enough ‘fewness’