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

Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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might other European empires. It might not be an “inability” to “envision voluntary
divestment” of imperial rule that holds Tocqueville back but real
concerns about the results of doing so (324). Americans with their slaves were
not the only ones with a wolf by the ears, and the wolves were not only (or, in
the case of the Europeans) the principal wolves to be feared. All modern states
of the nineteenth century (including Americans, as they marched from one
coast to the other, over, around, and through the Amerindians) had to operate
in a world of modern empires, and as it happened that turned out to be a dangerous
world, if not yet in that century, for the Europeans.
The Companion’s final pair of essays, by French literature professor
Françoise Melonio and historian Olivier Zunz, trace the reception of
Tocqueville’s books in Europe and in the United States, respectively. Melonio
links Tocqueville to line of French moralists beginning with Pascal; Tocqueville
deliberately adapts classical and Christian imagery and insights to the new
regime of democracy in order “to clear a path for the future legislator—the
future French legislator—whose mission is to bring the Revolution to an end
and establish a well-regulated democracy” (339). The “entirety of [his] work”
reflects “on the management of the democratic transition” (345). Once the
Third Republic had established itself the French turned away from Tocqueville.
Only the debacle of the 1940s brought them back, led by Raymond Aron. (One
might, incidentally, wonder why de Gaulle, who saved French republicanism
twice, avoided any serious reference to Tocqueville. Melonio, who does not ask
this, nonetheless may provide a clue: Tocqueville thought that “The kings of
France had sought only to divide their subjects in order to reign more
absolutely,” thereby planting “the seed of the enduring French taste for servitude”
[344]. De Gaulle wanted a republic that could defend itself, and therefore
a republic with a strong executive, not a dominant parliament. Tocqueville’s
critique of monarchy, however accurate, would not have proved a useful text in
the Gaullist founding.)
Tocqueville took up the French moralists’ theme of homo viator,
man the voyager, the being that lives in perpetual exodus toward or away
from the Promised Land. Melonio rightly observes that Tocqueville writes
most extensively about the contemporary voyage or crossing to the new world
of democracy. But in saying that he “offered a secularized, historicized version”
of this story, “because for him the theme of homo viator characterized not so
much human experience in general as the historical situation of democratic
man” (347), she overlooks the striking passage from chapter 17 of the
Democracy’s second volume, “On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic