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 />
8 1<br />
Tocqueville trails no one in his disapproval of bureaucratic government, but it<br />
is precisely for bureaucracy’s injuries to political life that he detests it most. “If<br />
we want to grasp Tocqueville’s idea of civil society, we must conceive it not as a<br />
seemingly self-contained realm of mores, habits, <strong>and</strong> feelings, but rather as a<br />
sphere of politically invaluable mediating organizations, a sphere sustained by<br />
the ‘free moeurs’ these organizations help to create <strong>and</strong> maintain” (224).<br />
Tocqueville identifies three kinds of “associations” that mediate<br />
between the individual <strong>and</strong> the state: permanent, political, <strong>and</strong> civil. In<br />
Europe, permanent associations are the estates of the old regime: aristocratic,<br />
bourgeois, peasant. In America, permanent associations of this kind did not<br />
exist, at least among the European populations, so the term refers to such<br />
“legally established political entities” as townships, cities, <strong>and</strong> counties where<br />
men administer their own public affairs (224). Political associations are political<br />
parties <strong>and</strong> other, typically smaller organizations founded to advance some<br />
opinion or policy. Civil associations include commercial <strong>and</strong> manufacturing<br />
companies, churches, <strong>and</strong> the press—all of which have their own political<br />
opinions <strong>and</strong> interests, which they seldom hesitate to advance. This means<br />
that Tocqueville cares “first <strong>and</strong> foremost,” for “the political uses <strong>and</strong> effects<br />
of associational life,” the way they “decentralize administrative <strong>and</strong> political<br />
power” <strong>and</strong> “enable ordinary citizens to attain a degree of positive political<br />
freedom it would otherwise be hard to imagine,” keeping despotism hard<br />
<strong>and</strong> soft “at bay” (225).<br />
Villa’s description of the “permanent” associations of America<br />
gives a sense of how Tocqueville found there a way to address Constant’s argument<br />
on ‘ancient <strong>and</strong> modern liberty.’ In his famous 1819 lecture Constant<br />
argued that the attempt to introduce the political liberty of the ancient polis<br />
into the modern state could lead to nothing but the sort of disaster seen in the<br />
French Revolution. At best, moderns must settle for their own form of liberty,<br />
the liberty of free social life under a strictly limited modern state, bound by the<br />
rule of law. The New Engl<strong>and</strong> township, “the concrete instantiation of the<br />
American principle of popular sovereignty,” amounted to “a Puritan polis”<br />
(227)—that is, a piece of the ‘ancient,’ political, self-governing world thriving<br />
within the conditions of modernity, protecting modernity from its own statist<br />
tendencies by providing a school for citizenship <strong>and</strong> a stop against both majority<br />
tyranny <strong>and</strong> administrative despotism on any wide scale. To make a man<br />
really see the virtue of politics one needs to make him see how his private interests<br />
<strong>and</strong> the general interests of society can coincide, how “to obtain [the]<br />
support” of his own interests “he must often lend them his cooperation”