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

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