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

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7 8 Interpretation ple, Tocqueville “reopens the question that our dogmatic passion declared to have been settled in advance. How can we deny the name ‘philosopher’ to the liberal sociologist who leads us out of the social cave?” (120). The third set of essays show Tocqueville at work in his literary and scholarly craft. Historian James T. Schleifer uses Eduardo Nolla’s critical edition of the Democracy to show how Tocqueville made the book “take shape” (121). In this exercise Schleifer notices something often lost upon the new reader of Tocqueville, overwhelmed with the details. Tocqueville “thought deductively, even syllogistically”; the facts support real arguments, and never get thrown about (122). Such logical rigor underlies the success of Tocquevillian comparativism, and helps him to reject (as his notes show him doing) easy comparisons between modern and ancient conditions. At the same time, Tocqueville emerges clearly as a non-historicist in his rejection of historical relativism. The desire for the arts and sciences, the love of honor, the family, the rule of law, the love of liberty, religiosity: the entirely new world of democracy will not extinguish these perennial human characteristics and practices but will instead channel them “in new ways” (135). Prolific translator Arthur Goldhammer describes Tocqueville’s literary style as supporting the substance of his thought inasmuch as in both he opposes both the Enlightenment philosophes and their Romanticist rivals. Neither the transparent prose of the Encyclopedists nor the lush and overgrown rhetoric of his uncle Chateaubriand would do, for his purposes. He wants to influence his contemporaries, and, knowing that many of them will be impatient of any hint of pedantry, he does not wish to burden his prose with exegesis. Often he merely alludes. To the wise, a word is enough… A certain delicacy is required in dealing with such a text lest subtle references—hints contained in a lexical wisp of syntactic murmur—be obscured. (141) This leads Goldhammer to an extended and exceedingly subtle critique of what he describes as the Straussian mode of translation, which he regards as leadenly literalist.“Slavish imitation, being mechanical, saps the work’s soul” (151). This reader, for one, rather prefers a fair degree of slavishness in translators, inasmuch as fidelity to a text, being accurate, saves the work’s soul—from the translator. The real solution of course is to learn French, read Tocqueville, then consult the translations. French literature scholar Laurence Guellec discusses the Recollections, Tocqueville’s memoir of the revolution of 1848 and the short-
Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville 7 9 lived Second Republic, written to show why France had succumbed to yet another monarchy. She adroitly describes how Tocqueville’s language, “the antirhetoric of an autobiographical text” (168), reinforces Tocqueville’s critique of the failure of republican rhetoric, including his own, during the political crises of that time. The rhetorician attempts to marshal men by marshalling words, Tocqueville said, but that is easier said than done. If democrats love generalities, how can a politician address them when specific policies are what the country needs? “Tocqueville rejected ‘Parnassian’ liberalism,”“refus[ing] to fall back haughtily on pure philosophy,” but neither would he “accommodate to the liberalism of compromise represented by Guizot, Remusat, and Cousin” (173). In Tocqueville’s lifetime, literary, scientific, and political discourses had begun to separate from one another, making intelligible talk among practitioners of different ‘disciplines’ or kinds of thought more difficult even as the immense power of the modern project made such talk indispensable to the survival of free societies. “The history of 1848 became the history of a generalized impropriety of public speech—the very same speech that was supposed to have given form and meaning to the constitutional liberty of which Tocqueville saw himself as the harbinger” (182). Straining after the grand passions of 1789, the revolutionaries of 1848 sank into self-parody and cliché. “The constitutional monarchy”—the July Monarchy founded in 1830—“had proved incapable of educating citizens and teaching the French the practical art of political deliberation in accordance with the lessons laid down by Democracy in America” (184). This in turn made the attempt at a new republic farcical. In the wake of the failure of political language (really of prudence) literature went off into the passions of Romanticisms—Hugo, Michelet, Sand, “the novelistic apotheosis of Les Miserables, the book of the People” (184). No room for a Tocqueville in either that literature or that politics. In the final essay on ‘Tocqueville-at-work,’ independent scholar Robert T. Gannett, Jr. considers the historical research behind The Old Regime and the Revolution. Although he calls his book not a history of the 1789 revolution but a “study” of it, Tocqueville did undertake extensive archival digging before putting pen to paper. Such research documented the long period of gestation that social democratization underwent. Tocqueville emerges as a reverse Burke: beneath the grand tradition of the old, aristocratic regime the new democracy arose with all the slow, unfolding majesty that the Englishman associated with the days of grandeur. The violent denouement
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