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

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