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