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

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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
Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville 8 7 Adams “learned to think de Tocqueville my model” during the war (378). But Americans began to forget him around the same time the French did, and “the Progressives had little use for his work” (379). Tocqueville speaks to Americans and Europeans today because the two great political alternatives, democratic republicanism and democratic despotism, ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ remain before us. This Companion to the writings of our longtime companion serves him well, and with him, us.
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