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 7<br />
Tocqueville therefore does not encumber himself with the prejudices of ‘valuefree’<br />
social science, instead “propos[ing] a very explicit ‘scale of values’ as a<br />
guide to human action” (116). That scale, characteristically, centers on the<br />
regime question. Insofar as they are democratic, human souls <strong>and</strong> societies orient<br />
themselves toward justice, justice understood as equal rights. Insofar as<br />
they are aristocratic, souls <strong>and</strong> societies orient themselves toward gr<strong>and</strong>eur.<br />
“For Tocqueville, as for Aristotle, the perspective of ‘magnanimity’”—<br />
gr<strong>and</strong>eur, greatness of soul—“does not coincide with that of ‘justice,’ <strong>and</strong><br />
sometimes comes into contradiction with it” (117). Human souls <strong>and</strong> societies<br />
alike by their very natures find themselves in conflict, a conflict between reason<br />
<strong>and</strong> spiritedness, ‘democracy’ <strong>and</strong> ‘aristocracy.’<br />
Modernity complicates this natural conflict by the invention<br />
of the modern state. Monarchy is a regime (in Aristotle, a pair of regimes) in<br />
which politics strictly speaking—the condition of ruling <strong>and</strong> being ruled—<br />
exists not among men but in the mind of the monarch, which then comm<strong>and</strong>s<br />
other men ‘in principle’ with no resistance. In practice monarchy invented the<br />
state as an instrument to de-politicize societies, to end the political interplay<br />
between aristocrats <strong>and</strong> democrats by replacing aristocrats with the administrative<br />
institutions wielded by the monarch <strong>and</strong> his bureaucrats. Manent puts<br />
it somewhat differently:<br />
Democratic society was indeed the “original fact,” the cause, of the<br />
democratic life that Tocqueville describes, but that cause was in turn<br />
caused by a political institution to which a representation was<br />
attached. The political institution was the sovereign, leveling state,<br />
the state that produced the “plan of equality”; the representation<br />
was the idea of equality as human resemblance, with the passion<br />
that accompanied it. (119)<br />
I propose only the slight modification that monarchy was the least ‘political’<br />
political regime, to begin with.<br />
Manent carefully distinguishes equality defined as the original<br />
fact of modern society from equality as the generative principle of that<br />
society. Social causality for Tocqueville is a fact <strong>and</strong> condition of modern life,<br />
whereas popular sovereignty, the political dimension of that life, consists of a<br />
principle. “This second causality is obviously richer <strong>and</strong> more significant in<br />
human terms since it serves to regulate most human actions from within <strong>and</strong> is<br />
inextricably associated with a ‘dogma’—in this instance, an opinion about the<br />
human world that possesses incontestable authority” (119). By acknowledging<br />
social equality insofar as it is a fact <strong>and</strong> interrogating it insofar as it is a princi-