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

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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here for a mixed regime, but there does turn out to be an impressive list of aristocratic
features in American democracy, enough to save democracy from its
characteristic vices. Christian religion is a precious inheritance from aristocracy;
local self-government, juries, free press, the idea of individual rights “are
all said to have been brought from aristocratic England,” as were democratic
associations, the legal profession, and the Constitution itself (the latter the
work of the Federalist not the democratic party [100–101]). “Tocqueville does
not add up these hidden aristocratic elements in American democracy, perhaps
because the sum would seem considerable” (101).
The third innovation, the use of prediction, seizes the minds
of democrats while elevating them beyond themselves. I venture to guess that
no one who has taught Tocqueville in the past sixty years has failed to see, and
rather enjoy, the effect of Tocqueville’s prediction of a geopolitical confrontation
between the Americans and the Russians on those who read it for the first
time. (One often can get this effect by reading the passage aloud in the classroom,
because some students dependably neglect to read the day’s assignment
beforehand, in the throes no doubt of the persistent busyness of democratic
life.) Mansfield and Winthrop appreciate the rhetorical power of Tocqueville’s
innovation: “Tocqueville wanted the reactionaries of his day to consider
democracy irreversible” (102). By ascribing democracy’s advance to providence,
Tocqueville at the same time avoids the sinister effects of materialist
determinism, vindicating sufficient intellectual ‘room’ for the continuance of
the spirit of political liberty his political science defends and exemplifies. “His
notion of providence preserves human choice, which means that it preserves
politics” (102). Democracy in America comes, ultimately, from Christianity.“It
was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all
members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” Tocqueville
writes (quoted 103). It took an individual, albeit a divine individual, to take a
general truth that had been insufficiently appreciated and make it generally
known, and therefore politically relevant. “The upshot for political scientists is
to pay attention to particular facts, not only to general truths, and this lesson is
aristocratic in character rather than democratic,” a practice of “immersing oneself
in our democratic age and also…rising above it” (103)—in its own way,
then, an imitatio Christi as well as a philosophic ascent from the cave of public
opinion. One might of course wonder at Tocqueville’s understanding of
Christianity as aristocratic rather than monarchic. He may mean that the Church
is aristocratic, inasmuch as Jesus’ teaching of human equality under God anticipates
the European monarchs’ teaching of human equality under themselves—