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

8 4 Interpretation
citizens, bonds stronger than those forged either by fanatical passion or vague
fellow-feeling. The regime of democracy means the rule of equals; “because
equality must have some referent, some dimension on which all are equal,”
democracy typically looks to “our common membership in the human race,”
or, as Tocqueville puts it, “the constitution of man, which is everywhere
the same” (305). Christians have not invented this constitution; they have
discovered it and proselytized in its favor, freeing each person “to act as an
independent moral agent” (305).
But democracies do not embrace the whole of humanity. The
nations that find themselves in conditions of democracy, themselves “historical
legacies or constructs” and emphatically not natural groupings, thus find
themselves both part of and differentiated from the human race. In another
regime this distinction might not trouble souls so much. But Tocqueville “was
afflicted with permanent double vision” on its account (309). He tended
toward exaggeration of the dangers of racial differences, even and especially in
democratic America, where natural human sociality gets “denatured by artificial
taboos” that are nonetheless popular. He hoped to avoid the malign effects
of racial prejudice in the French Empire, particularly in Algeria. But his efforts
to find a way to prevent the problem—especially his recommendation of stateenforced
racial intermingling—obviously contradicted his intention to defend
political liberty. His own visit to Algeria forced him to “abandon the hope of
enforced fraternity between French and indigenes. But this left him with only
two choices: the abandonment of the imperial project or the “long-term domination”
of the Algerians by the French (322). For instruction on the latter he
looked to his usual model, Britain, and its rule of India. He hoped that firm
rule wisely managed might make Arabs see mutual interests with the French,
but this again contradicted his longstanding claim “that interest alone cannot
generate lasting association” (325).“A theorist who sees the growth of unrepresentative
state bureaucracies and the usurpations of military despots as among
the greatest threats to a culture of freedom, Tocqueville nevertheless proposes
to counter the criminal eruptions of democratic xenophobia, exclusionary
racism, and retaliatory nationalism with long periods of unaccountable imperial
tutelage,” a likely breeding ground for bureaucratization and demagoguery,
two principal evils of democracy that alike threaten republicanism (327).
On this, as a supplement to Welch’s sharp-eyed account it
might be worthwhile to consider Tocqueville’s geopolitical concerns. French
imperialism did not exist in a vacuum; British imperialism might not only provide
a source for tips in ruling an empire but also loom as a rival to France. So