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

8 6 Interpretation
Nations”: “man comes from nothing, traverses time, and is going to disappear
forever into the bosom of God.…” (Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2000], 462). She sees that for Tocqueville as for the earlier moralists—and not
so much for the pre-Christian Aristotle, one might add—human happiness
seems profoundly elusive, anxiety and restlessness chronic. Human beings
oscillate between grandeur and misery for this “political Pascal” (348), and
Tocqueville hopes to find “the kind of grandeur and happiness that is appropriate”
to man in the very act of guiding his fellow men, and especially his fellow
citizens, through the wilderness of regime change (348, emphasis added).
Although she initially seems to deny that Tocqueville regards human nature as
fixed, Melonio soon affirms that the very sublimity (and thus disquietude) of
humanity constitutes “the fixed foundation of man’s nature” (Tocqueville,
quoted 348–49). Tocqueville “looks beyond all social regimes to their ‘fixed
foundation’ in human nature”; “democracy is the regime in which that nature
reveals itself in its purest form” (349).
The legislator navigates high seas. He can steer the vessel but
not construct it, nor control the ocean. Good steerage requires prudence,
which Tocqueville “recovered” from Aristotle (349). Indeed, “for Tocqueville
the quality common to all great writers is common sense,”“the art of engaging
in conversation with the commonplaces of one’s time” (350). He offers “nothing
to encourage romantic effusions of sensibility or imagination” but rather
sought “to tame democratic man” (354). His “literary eloquence, his classical
rhetoric, was intended to serve deliberative democracy, the only defense against
despotism” (354). The best answer to Enlightenment materialism and rationalism
consisted not in Romantic appeals to thumos but to the sanity, the balance,
the moderation, the sanity of the biblical and classical wellsprings of the
West—not because they were traditional but because they were true. In the first
half of the twentieth century, these wellsprings dried up.
Olivier Zunz reports the course of Tocqueville’s reception in
America in the final essay. Jacksonian Democrats dismissed Tocqueville’s critique
of majority tyranny, while New England Whigs found his praise of
township government notably insightful, although Whig economist and tariff
enthusiast Henry Carey “faulted Tocqueville for attributing [Americans’ wellbeing]
to the democratic principle rather than to Whig economics” (370). The
Democracy found more serious readers during the Civil War, which (as Zunz
puts it with nice understatement) “highlighted” Tocqueville’s warnings about
potential tensions between equality and liberty (374). The young Henry