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

8 0 Interpretation
Burke rightly deplored Tocqueville considered accidental, a product of bad
choices by the last monarch.
Because statesmanship requires seeing both in the long and
the short distances, Tocqueville “went beyond the simple contours of finding
and stating historical truth” (197) to identifying tendencies in the course of
events that, if shown dramatically to citizen-readers, will alert them to present
and future political dangers.“The pervasive hyperactivity of a well-intentioned
royal government seeking energetically to preempt all forms of individual initiative
by its citizens resonated with Tocqueville’s lifelong theoretical
understanding of democracy’s principal threat: soft despotism” (198). Such a
warning might serve as a spur to guide citizens not only to a defense of ‘negative
freedom’—freedom against state encroachment upon their private
affairs—but ‘active liberty’—the freedom to engage in politics. Far from misunderstanding
the longue duree as a necessary march to servitude or to
freedom, Tocqueville “pursued his archival work with the explicit understanding
that free men possessed the ability to shape their destinies” (211).
In The Old Regime, he eschewed both aristocratic history, which
privileged the individual actions of a few principal actors, and democratic
history, which made great general causes responsible for
particular events. Rather he sought to be a historian of a new order,
appropriate for the new age of equality, who could comprehend and
explain the causes that made possible the “force and independence
[of] men united in a social body”…[A] historian must not just
define and interpret the complicated variables affecting the actions
of free men. He must also teach them how to be free. (211)
Tocqueville sought a new historiography of statesmanship for a world altogether
new.
In the fourth group of essays, political scientists Dana Villa,
Melvin Richter, Joshua Mitchell, and Cheryl B. Welch address Tocqueville’s
political science as it addresses liberty and fraternity (the other elements of the
French revolutionary trio), civil society, and religion. Villa emphasizes the
political character of civil society for Tocqueville. Unlike previous French liberals,
Tocqueville did not regard civil society as an enclave removed from politics
but as the primary place where politics takes place, where citizens learn to govern
themselves. Too often, the national state stifles political activity; many
liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for this by
identifying civil society with economic activity or with ‘cultural’ activity (‘the
republic of letters’), a ‘sphere’ to be protected from statist intrusions.