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

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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good of the polity”—the breeding of “industrious herds of sheep subservient
to their bureaucratic shepherds” (256). Once established, such despotism can
only collapse, eventually, a victim of its own imbecility. The imperial/military
despotism that likely follows it excites souls more, inasmuch as a military
tyrant seldom lacks “what we, in the wake of Max Weber, now call Bonaparte’s
charisma” (262). This gives the tyrant a sort of legitimacy, in the sense that
he does enjoy the enthusiastic consent of his people, at least initially. As
Tocqueville said of Napoleon Bonaparte, “The hero concealed the despot”
(quoted 263). He predicted that the Second Empire of his lifetime, like the
First,“would be destroyed by an unnecessary war of its own making” (267). All
of these permutations of despotism themselves reflect the underlying social
condition of egalitarianism, and so fall under the overarching category of
democratization.
Under such conditions, what happens to religion, that aristocratic
thing? Joshua Mitchell writes that Tocqueville anticipated that “religious
experience” in democracy would “become tame and self-referential,” but that it
would also “make new forms of religious experience possible” (281). The
democrat’s search for something stable amidst the energetic clamor of democratic
life and his ‘Cartesian’ taste for clarity and simplicity will produce a turn
toward what later writers named ‘Fundamentalism.’ The democrat will also
seek “unmediated and direct” religious experiences, without the mediating
forms seen in aristocratic regimes; Mitchell finds this in Tocqueville’s chapter
on poetry in the Democracy (286). Finally, the replacement of the idea of a hierarchic
nature, eventually throwing “the very idea of nature into question,”
favors the Protestant doctrine of original sin, which in its more extreme forms
“denied that an intact ‘nature’ survived Adam’s fall” (289–90). All of these tendencies
together eventually will redound to the injury of Protestantism,
however, “because man cannot long endure the isolation it engenders” (292).
The soul will return to Roman Catholicism as a needed anchor in such heavy
seas. (For an ampler discussion of these matters Mitchell’s readers should
consult Peter A. Lawler’s 1993 study, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on
the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty.)
In the last of the four essays on Tocqueville’s political science,
Cheryl B. Welch sets for herself the challenge of giving a Tocquevillian account
of fraternity, a term Tocqueville “deliberately avoided” as an excrescence of the
Jacobinism of the first French Revolution and of the communitarianism sentimental
Christians and socialists purveyed in his own time. Tocqueville
associated political life with regimes, and therefore with real bonds between