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    Tocqueville on Liberty and Democracy

    by

    Michael Hereth: Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats to Freedom in America.  George Bogardus translation. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 24, 1986.

     

    Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has educated Americans about themselves for 150 years. Other observers have held our attention temporarily. Charles Dickens, Lord Bryce, G. K. Chesterton among foreigners; Horace Greeley, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann among Americans: Who today reads their opinions on America? Writing about Andrew Jackson’s country for an audience of politically superannuated French aristocrats, Tocqueville nonetheless speaks to us, and more profoundly than any of our contemporary ‘pundits.’

    Michael Hereth teaches political science at the Military College of Hamburg; Tocqueville speaks to him, too. Among the “ever-recurring problems in human social life,” the “search for the bases of a reasonable order in a society of equals and the questions regarding the criteria of reasonable community life of free citizens” remain serious today, in Hereth’s Germany and elsewhere, and no less so than in America and France in the 1830s. Today as then, Tocqueville fits no ideological or academic box. His kind of liberalism means the defense of political liberty, and requires intellectual independence above all.

    Reasonable order and social equality, community with liberty: Tocqueville sought a balance among principles that cancel one another when they are pushed to extremes by political men—or rather, by impolitic men engaged in politics. Exhausted by revolutions and counterrevolutions, France in Tocqueville’s generation had lapsed into a merely economic life. The ‘bourgeois king’ who cheerfully advised his subjects to enrich themselves deliberately undermined political liberty by a strategy of distracting his subjects from politics. Exclusively economic activity narrows souls, makes them petty and grasping, vulnerable to a soft sort of despotism. For practical men, only political life enlarges the soul, engendering the love of self-rule—moderation, prudence, and responsibility for oneself and one’s country. “Behind this concept of the free way of life stands the image of the free aristocrat,” an image as old as classical Greece. Tocqueville wanted to bring the traditional “manly virtues” of the aristocracy, including constancy, civic courage, and honor, to an otherwise too-egalitarian regime. True freedom is not freedom from politics; on the contrary, it is “freedom for political citizens to act and perform.” More, in Hereth’s account Tocqueville thinks “speaking and acting have meaning only among fellow citizens”; public life enables human beings to achieve full development of their distinctively human faculties of speech and reason.

    Tocqueville never supposes that love of political liberty will animate the majority of democratic citizens most of the time. For them, enlightened self-interest—restraining oneself now in the hope of gaining material benefits later—may be the best that one reasonably expects, from day to day. But can the few aristocratic souls survive and even share in the rule of a democracy? Tocqueville thinks they can, if the democracy is well-constituted as a republic, “so designed that existing morals, customs, and habits, as well as political institutions, teach the usage of freedom,” making the average citizen prefer it to comfortable, “administrative despotism” and admire those who energetically defend it. Few can be Churchill, but many can be English.

    Freedom, then, is not ‘freedom from’ this or that governmental action, but “a special way of life,” “the actual practice of political activity in the republic, a matter of self-government under “God and the Law.” To love self-government is to love something innate in the human soul more than wealth or any other “external goals.” To this end, as Hereth emphasizes, Tocqueville promoted decentralization of political power. In small communities and in small voluntary organizations including political parties, democratic citizens would practice the political virtues, rule themselves, and help to delimit the powers of the central government. Such “cooperation of equals” can replace the hierarchical, aristocratic social structures that once served as bulwarks against centralizing despotism but now lack the strength to resist it. Tocqueville’s paradigm for France was the United States. Hereth ingeniously suggests that Tocqueville pretends the American founders planned decentralized power here—of course it already existed long before 1787, and the American Constitution in fact centralized power somewhat—because he wants the French to do just that, for their own very different country.

    “Tocqueville is always a political citizen, even when he writes.” Unlike John Stuart Mill, who called Democracy in America “the most philosophical book ever written on Democracy, as it manifests itself in modern society,” Hereth regards Tocqueville as a rhetorician not a philosopher—by which he means a man seeking political power more than truth. In this he is mistaken, but his emphasis on Tocqueville’s rhetoric nonetheless brings him to propose an excellent solution to one of the most troubling problems readers find in the book: Why does this devotee of political liberty insist vehemently that democracy is inevitable, that is, not open to free choice?

    By the 1830s, Tocqueville considered a regime based on social equality to be inevitable in France. But equality could go in either of two ways, politically: liberty or despotism. (Almost two centuries earlier, the British philosopher and monarchist Thomas Hobbes had noted that absolute monarchy guarantees equality to all but one member of the commonwealth, and that is the most equality one should hope for.) By refusing to debate the question, ‘Is Democracy desirable?’ Tocqueville could concentrate French minds on the practical question of “establish[ing] the political constitution of democracy”—very much a matter of free choice deserving careful deliberation. Tocqueville would educate the potential founders of a French regime of liberty. To this day, he educates all those who want to know how to defend and strengthen regimes of liberty.

    Hereth addresses another paradox of Tocqueville’s thought, but does not resolve it. Despite “his knowledge of the evil consequences of foreign rule,” displayed in his writings against British rule in Ireland, Tocqueville supported the French conquest and colonization of Algeria, and even regarded military terrorism against Arabs as a necessary evil. Hereth denounces this, calling it proof of Tocqueville’s rhetorical, subphilosophic approach to politics. Tocqueville could not universalize his principles, rationally transcend his own political community in order to strengthen it with truth, he charges. Hereth soberly concedes that even a philosopher can do little to enlighten citizens: “The problem of an inquiring philosophical life is that it, too, does not pierce through the domination of opinions over society by withdrawing from politics, but thereby leaves the field open to those who are not even aware of the problem of a political way of life and who therefore are much more likely to be wrong. The problem is insoluble.” But he does claim that Tocqueville could not even conceive of solving it, being no philosopher. “Tocqueville fell victim to the reduction of reason to pragmatic rationalism, which characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinking,” the reductive rationalism of Descartes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. “He was unable to define the criterion for specific actions through an understanding of reason, which inquires beyond intermediate goals” and established ultimate ends, as did Plato and Aristotle. As a rhetorician and a ‘modern,’ he could only appeal to opinions and passions. Appeals to the specifically political passion, the passion to rule, yield imperialism. In the end, he charges, for Tocqueville freedom “became a surrender to the passions,” leavened by merely occasional appeals to justice.

    Hereth is right about politics as practiced almost everywhere, almost all the time. He sees something important about the Machiavellian core of modern philosophy. It is harder to say if he is right about Tocqueville. Although much of his work reads like a dialogue between Montesquieu and Rousseau, Tocqueville explicitly criticizes Descartes. With a true scholar’s integrity, Hereth concedes that Tocqueville at least once appeals not only to passions but to justice. One should add that Tocqueville also distinguishes among passions—as when he praises the “manly and lawful” passion for equality—what we now call ‘equality of opportunity,’ which aspires to greatness and comports with liberty—and condemns the “depraved” passion for equality—the passion compacted of envy and resentment, which tears down greatness and establishes despotism. He also criticizes passion itself in this haunting sentence from “The European Revolution”: “When passion begins to rule, the opinions of men of experience are often less important than are schemes in the minds of dreamers.” Rhetorician or political philosopher? Or something in-between—a statesman? Only a careful textual commentary on Tocqueville’s writing would tell us.

    Meanwhile, we have this lucid, measured book—along with the writings of the American scholar Marvin Zetterbaum, a fine introduction to Tocqueville.

    Rousseau’s “Confessions”

    by

    Ann Hartle: The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to St. Augustine. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.

    Earlier version published in the New York City Tribune, November 12, 1986.

     

    Contemporary readers view Rousseau through spectacles manufactured after his time, Romanticism and psychoanalysis being the most popular. But although the Confessions, as the first truly modern autobiography, inspired Romantics and set in motion the intellectual trends culminating in psychoanalysis, Rousseau presents himself in different terms. Ann Hartle removes our anachronistic lenses to show us Rousseau from a perspective nearer his own—one free of Chateaubriand and Freud, closer to Plutarch, Socrates, and Augustine.

    Rousseau admired Plutarch’s heroes, but he saw they were thoroughly public men. Rousseau sees that this raises the philosophic question of ‘Being’—specifically, of ‘human being.’ As Hartle writes, the Romans “are what those other than themselves say they are.” Augustine replaces this aristocratic regard for public opinion with a regard for the perfect ‘opinion’ of God; he “is what he is for God.” Rousseau invokes a new standard. He “claims to see himself as he is, and what he is within, invisible to others.” Rousseau’s “self” claims independence from judgments of all others. Since Rousseau, ‘we moderns’ adhere to “the notion of an inner self, an inner core, other than and separable from everything which is not itself”; if external influences separate “the individual from his ‘true self,'” we call this “alienation.”

    Rousseau “claims to see himself as he is, and what he is within, invisible to others.” With no false modesty, and in marked contrast to Augustinian humility, he writes his famous first sentence: “I am commencing an enterprise, hitherto without example, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows a man in all the truth of nature, and that man is myself.” Ecce Homo, indeed!  The self-presentation of this replacement-for-Jesus commences what Hartle calls Rousseau’s “‘return’ to the state of nature,” “a turning within to the isolated self-sufficiency of the essentially private self”—not so much in thought as in feeling. Such radical privacy and self-sufficiency present a danger to society, its members understandably suspicious of those indifferent or hostile to its strictures. But Rousseau nonetheless publishes his autobiography, albeit posthumously; it gives society a perspective otherwise unavailable to it—the only one eluding the convention-ridden “subjectivity” of social men. In both invoking his own feeling of radical self-sufficiency and inviting feelings of sympathy or compassion from his fellows as the new ‘Jesus’ of nature instead of grace, Rousseau sees that he both threatens and potentially benefits society by replacing Christian social bonds with the natural or sentimental bonds of a politics of compassion. Hence his remark much later on, in Book X, “I had come to see that everything was radically connected with politics, and that, however one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature its government gave it.” What Montesquieu called “the spirit of the laws” will be reanimated in a radical new direction, away from not only the Holy Spirit but from the spirit of commerce Montesquieu, following Locke, intended as the social-political replacement of that Spirit.

    Hartle denies that the Confessions is an autobiography in today’s conventional sense: an outpouring of true personal minutiae. She emphasizes Rousseau’s artfulness. Rousseau “confesses” the truth, but he defines truth in an expansive way. He does not limit “truth” to whatever actually happened. He also includes what could have happened. He writes poetry, fiction, not history. Fiction is “true” if it is “useful” to others but not to himself. He dates what he calls his “uninterrupted self-consciousness” from the time of his “earliest reading” (emphasis added); and he was reading novels, not the Bible. After this education sentimentale, he moved to the writings of philosophers: “After I spent some years in thinking exactly as others thought, without, so to speak, reflecting, and almost without reasoning, I found myself in possession of a fund of learning sufficient to enable me to think without the assistance of another,” an intellectual self-sufficiency that formed in him not an obedient and monarchic but a “republican spirit,” a spirit of “liberty.” It would seem that the ‘return to nature’ itself proceeds not so much through nature directly but through books, through the experience of literary arts.

    Rousseau’s own artfulness discloses itself in his witty arrangements of parallels and contrasts between his own life, poetically conceived, and Augustine’s. These begin, obviously, with selecting the same title for his book. Hartle observes that both men recall stealing fruit in childhood (but for Rousseau there is no sense of original sin). Both experience conversions (but Augustine reads the Bible, experiences joy, and attributes this to the action of God, whereas Rousseau reads an intellectual journal, experiences misery, and attributes it all to “fortunate accident”). Augustine divides his book into thirteen sections, ending with a commentary on the Creation story in the Book of Genesis; Rousseau divides his book into twelve sections, omitting an such commentary. The genesis Rousseau does describe is that of his own book. Augustine describes his Confessions as a work of mysterious Providence; Rousseau describes his as a work of art issuing from his own nature. Rousseau represents human nature as good; while admitting “there is no human heart, however pure it may be, which does not conceal some odious vice,” that vice was not there at birth. Augustine represents human nature as bad, “fallen.” Rousseau’s “revelation of man” owes nothing to divinity. It is a natural “revelation,” the work of a philosopher, not a saint. Godlike, he writes his own book or ‘Bible,’ revealing himself.

    As a philosopher, Rousseau finds Socrates’ life the most relevant parallel to his own. Both men regard philosophy as the process of “learning how to die”; both speak “from the perspective of a dead man,” a perspective undistorted by passions; both tacitly deny the literal survival of the individual soul after death, while appearing to affirm such survival. Unlike Socrates, however, Rousseau writes. In this, he combines Socrates with the artful Plato. Unlike Socrates, Rousseau confronts death by studying books and staying by himself; he is a modern individualist. Unlike Socrates, the threat to Rousseau’s life is natural, a disease, not man-made, political. Both conceive the philosopher as enjoying a sort of “eternal leisure” of contemplation, “arduous and peaceful.” Both receive instruction in wisdom from a woman: Socrates from Diotima, Rousseau from a prostitute who tells him to give up ladies and study mathematics. Augustine listens to God speaking providentially; Socrates listens to his daemon, the voice that saves him from danger; Rousseau listens to himself, a “divine” perspective (worthy of bringing before God on Judgment Day, he tells us), but one “not above him, outside him, but precisely within him.” Augustine seeks God. Rousseau heeds the command heeded by philosophers, “Know thyself.” He seeks nature, in himself.

    Augustine refers the mysteries of the human soul to God’s act of creation, and faithfully awaits further revelations at the end of time. Rousseau replaces divine creation with the human “creative imagination,” which constructs an “ideal world” wherein the self—not a soul in Augustine’s sense—feels at home because this world is made by the self, for the self. The intrusion of reality into this self-made world causes misery: hence Rousseau’s withdrawal from “the world of men,” a measure of the radically asocial character of Rousseauian human nature. “The knowledge of death and its terrors is distinctive of man as different from the other animals.” The final reality, death, does not disturb Rousseau, as death merely annihilates individual human nature and thus ends the painful discrepancy between the imagined and the real.

    Rousseau’s self owes this unity to imagination. But “poetic” truth is one thing, madness something else. How does this self know it is not mad? Hartle advances a provocative interpretation of Rousseau’s answer. Almost every reader in this century has supposed that Rousseau’s account of the “Great Plot” against him, recounted in the final section of the Confessions, betrays a descent into paranoia. But Hartle suggests that Rousseau thereby parodies Augustine’s account of the works of Providence. To interpret one’s life as “the working out of God’s design for him”—as Augustine does—is to Rousseau real madness. As Augustine faithfully imitates the Christ, Rousseau, blasphemously opposes him. Rousseau is an ironic Christ, or anti-Christ, self-created, his “life or “confessions” being “his own construct.” Madness believes. But Rousseau does not believe. Knowing that one does not believe resembles, but is not identical to, the Socratic claim to know what one does not know.

    Rousseau’s creative imaginings issue from a self that lucidly sees that it produces creative imaginings. In imagining consciously, it stays linked to reality, to nature. The “state of nature,” that famous condition described in Rousseau’s political writings, need not be sought in distant events; a philosopher need only scrutinize himself. In the philosopher’s self, nature asserts Itself. This contrasts with what goes on in the social “selves” of other men, determined largely by conventions, the opinions of others. Human nature is this “inner self,” underlying its own history and obscured by conventions. “For Rousseau the nature of man is a private self-defining impulse, a feeling of self, beyond law, above time and without limit.” Rousseau regards himself as the first human being who has discovered this. He writes his Confessions to insure that this unprecedented insight will not be lost.  Plato designs his writings in order to protect the Socratic enterprise and its practitioners from their enemies. Although Rousseau’s writings had brought misery up to the time of the Confessions, perhaps the sympathy inspired by Rousseau-the-confessor will protect his enterprise and win disciples. Or so Rousseau thought—and subsequent events have not entirely disappointed his hopes.

    Ann Hartle has written a book no less succinct and graceful for being scholarly. Previous commentators have believed Rousseau’s autobiographical works (the Dialogues, the Confessions, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker) to be “romantic,” sub-philosophic. Hatle sees that they complement rather than contradict such political-philosophic works as the Discourses, The Social Contract, and the Emile. In so doing, she shows how a philosopher of Kant’s stature could learn from Rousseau, and why religious men of the eighteenth century—of any century—could and should find in him a formidable enemy.

    The Fate of French Collaborators After the World War

    by

    Herbert R. Lottman: The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators After World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

    Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 3, 1986.

     

    In 1940, Charles de Gaulle set out to make a political revolution in France. For years he had judged a revolution necessary. Parliamentary republicanism was failing to act decisively to defend the country against Nazi ambitions. When Hitler’s troops circumvented the Maginot Line, occupied northern France, and allowed the establishment of a collaborationist French government under the elderly Marshall Pétain in southern France, de Gaulle escaped to London. As the only member of the last administration of the Third Republic to oppose surrender, he established France Libre, a government-in-exile with himself at its head. De Gaulle intended France Libre not only to participate in an Allied victory over the Axis and the liberation of the occupied territories, but to found a new republican regime with a strong executive capable of assuming responsibility for France, and especially for its military and foreign policies. With its petty intrigues and vacillation, parliamentarism had prevented France from achieving the greatness de Gaulle insisted was in her, and at last could not even protect France from conquest.

    Simply to participate in the liberation and to restore parliamentary government were ambitions at that moment beyond the average Frenchman, and the average French politician. De Gaulle’s enterprise assured him unusually big obstacles. Man of the French who joined him in London would have opposed de Gaulle’s envisioned new form of republicanism, had he been so foolish as to make his intention explicit. President Roosevelt reacted badly to de Gaulle’s uncompromising independence, and spent much of the war trying to arrange for his replacement with some more pliable soul. At home, both Right and Left had their own revolutions to pursue.

    The Right, still anti-republican a century-and-a-half after 1789, generally supported Pétain and at first admired Hitler. The Left, after enthusiastically supporting the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler, just as enthusiastically joined the Resistance after Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the Soviets in 1941. French Communists intended to use the Resistance as a vehicle for their own revolution against ‘fascism,’ which they imagined to be as much a product of capitalism as they claimed parliamentarism was. Finally, and predictably, the majority of the French little understood or cared about political ambitions, noble or base. While not actively collaborating with the Nazis, they passively cooperated, hoping for liberation while not seeing much they could do to effect it, and in the meantime wishing to be left alone by their occupiers.

    The French purge of collaborators after the war must be seen in this political context. In his sensible, journalistic history of the purge, Herbert R. Lottman rightly begins by observing that “the liberation of France also liberated anger.” Having returned to Paris from the French colonial city of Algiers, where he established himself after his initial stint in London, de Gaulle gave rein to just enough of that anger to quicken justice, while reining it firmly enough to reestablish the rule of law in the midst of war.

    In his radio broadcasts before his return, de Gaulle had rarely called for vengeance. He left that to lesser France Libre spokesmen, thus availing himself of popular anger while carefully distancing himself from it. De Gaulle had his allies among the Resistants criticize the circulation of blacklists within occupied France. In this moderation he received fortuitous help from the Communists, late in the war, whose leadership was told by Moscow in June 1944 “that the liberation would not be accompanied by revolution,” and therefore abstained from widespread terror.

    In a risky but necessary and successful move, while still in Algiers de Gaulle gave his “Regional Commissioners of the Republic” near-absolute power—executive, legislative, and judicial—precisely to establish the rule of law by extraordinary means, simultaneously denying power to both the Allied armies and Stalin’s Communists. “Above all,” Lottman writes, the Commissioners “were to represent the ‘new spirit’ of post-Vichy France.” Consistent with that spirit, de Gaulle took a strong but not dictatorial position, establishing a system of laws and courts of law in consultation with representatives of centrist political parties and Resistants, particularly the Christian Democrats.

    Ever as pragmatic in life as dogmatic in their theorizing, the French restrained themselves. Lottman does not overlook the “few instances of personal revenge,” illegal shootings, and even torture, but he insists that were indeed few, even in the first, anarchic days of liberation. Summary courts martial scarcely reached the highest standards of legal due process, but they probably averted mob violence, and did in fact acquit many individuals. The French bought time for themselves until, “slowly, step by step, the central authority (which was now Charles de Gaulle and his ministers) transferred their headquarters…to Paris, curbed the anarchy, and dominated.” As Justice Commissioner François de Menthon said at the time, “Tomorrow, when one looks back at the way the purge was carried out in France, we won’t have to blush.” The “Commissioner of the Republic” in Lyon, a Socialist with firm Communist ties, spoke more for the spirit of republicanism than for any leftist ideology when he cautioned, “Wrong opinions are never punishable…. The purge must have its limits, both in time and in its very concept. Otherwise, ‘a pure man always finds a purer man to purify him.'” It is hard not to suspect that the French had learned something from the French Revolution, after all.

    Although some of the many surviving collaborationists have claimed that deaths numbered over 100,000, and the historian Robert Aron estimates between thirty and forty thousand, Lottman agrees with the estimate cited by de Gaulle in his War Memoirs and corroborated by subsequent researchers: 10, 842 deaths, most of them after some sort of trial. As in so much else, republican government with the rule of law, even a shaky rule of law, proved far less sanguinary than does state terrorism by ideological fanatics, Right and Left. France actually saw fewer postwar arrests and convictions per capita than did liberated Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway.

    If anything, one might call the purge too lenient, and surely too uneven. Newspaper columnists were among the first to be tried, and a few were executed, but wealthy businessmen for the most part escaped personal injury. (It is true that businessmen would contribute rather more to France’s economic recovery than journalists could; this suggest the unfanatical—some would say cynical—wink that accompanies so much Gallic bombast.) No major literary or other artists stood trial for collaboration—not even the despicable Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had complained during the war that the Nazis were not killing enough Jews. Sentimentality about artists is as French as doctrinairism and cynicism, but more appealing than either. The French know that artists can correct one another; Lottman tells the story of the old Fauviste painter Maurice de Vlaminck, who, visiting Germany during the Occupation, saw a painting by a Nazi-approved artist, “stepped back, then commented, ‘Looking at that, you see how people lose a war.'”

    Despite many injustices, some nearly inevitable and some not, Lottman concludes that “the French need not be ashamed of their purge.” They nonetheless prefer not to discuss it, and this too marks them as a civilized people. The war set those obedient to republican laws and principles against those obedient to the laws of Vichy; the purge attempted to discriminate between the merely obedient and the enthusiasts of collaboration. This task was necessary, difficult, and in some respects impossible. A police official in the small town of Bayeux “pointed out that in a township of four hundred inhabitants it would be possible to arrest five or six persons for collaborationist activity–or ten times that number, and still remain moderate.” The irremediable imprecision of such judgments, and the painfully unlike consequences of them for citizens of villages all over France, make a certain degree of forgetting more than discreet. After the failure of the Fourth, and still parliamentarian, Republic in 1958, de Gaulle and his successors wisely preferred to celebrate France Libre and the Resistance, leaving the purge to students of history.