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 />
7 5<br />
here for a mixed regime, but there does turn out to be an impressive list of aristocratic<br />
features in American democracy, enough to save democracy from its<br />
characteristic vices. Christian religion is a precious inheritance from aristocracy;<br />
local self-government, juries, free press, the idea of individual rights “are<br />
all said to have been brought from aristocratic Engl<strong>and</strong>,” as were democratic<br />
associations, the legal profession, <strong>and</strong> the Constitution itself (the latter the<br />
work of the Federalist not the democratic party [100–101]). “Tocqueville does<br />
not add up these hidden aristocratic elements in American democracy, perhaps<br />
because the sum would seem considerable” (101).<br />
The third innovation, the use of prediction, seizes the minds<br />
of democrats while elevating them beyond themselves. I venture to guess that<br />
no one who has taught Tocqueville in the past sixty years has failed to see, <strong>and</strong><br />
rather enjoy, the effect of Tocqueville’s prediction of a geopolitical confrontation<br />
between the Americans <strong>and</strong> the Russians on those who read it for the first<br />
time. (One often can get this effect by reading the passage aloud in the classroom,<br />
because some students dependably neglect to read the day’s assignment<br />
beforeh<strong>and</strong>, in the throes no doubt of the persistent busyness of democratic<br />
life.) Mansfield <strong>and</strong> Winthrop appreciate the rhetorical power of Tocqueville’s<br />
innovation: “Tocqueville wanted the reactionaries of his day to consider<br />
democracy irreversible” (102). By ascribing democracy’s advance to providence,<br />
Tocqueville at the same time avoids the sinister effects of materialist<br />
determinism, vindicating sufficient intellectual ‘room’ for the continuance of<br />
the spirit of political liberty his political science defends <strong>and</strong> exemplifies. “His<br />
notion of providence preserves human choice, which means that it preserves<br />
politics” (102). Democracy in America comes, ultimately, from Christianity.“It<br />
was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all<br />
members of the human species are naturally alike <strong>and</strong> equal,” Tocqueville<br />
writes (quoted 103). It took an individual, albeit a divine individual, to take a<br />
general truth that had been insufficiently appreciated <strong>and</strong> make it generally<br />
known, <strong>and</strong> therefore politically relevant. “The upshot for political scientists is<br />
to pay attention to particular facts, not only to general truths, <strong>and</strong> this lesson is<br />
aristocratic in character rather than democratic,” a practice of “immersing oneself<br />
in our democratic age <strong>and</strong> also…rising above it” (103)—in its own way,<br />
then, an imitatio Christi as well as a philosophic ascent from the cave of public<br />
opinion. One might of course wonder at Tocqueville’s underst<strong>and</strong>ing of<br />
Christianity as aristocratic rather than monarchic. He may mean that the Church<br />
is aristocratic, inasmuch as Jesus’ teaching of human equality under God anticipates<br />
the European monarchs’ teaching of human equality under themselves—