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    ‘Postmoderns,’ Deconstructed

    by

    Stanley Corngold: The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3, May and September, 1987.

     

    German writers seldom efface themselves. Contemporary French literary critics assert ‘the death of the self.’ North American literary critics assert the apotheosis of the French critics.

    How long can this go on? Pessimists say, ‘Indefinitely,’ but Stanley Corngold is no pessimist. A professor of comparative literature at Princeton, a former student of Paul de Man, and a native of Brooklyn, he comes well positioned and equipped to arraign ‘deconstructionism’ before the bar of common sense. His departure from or overcoming of Brooklyn did not include any foolish attempt to jettison every ounce of Brooklyn baggage. But he knows that Brooklynite common sense will not by itself convince academics, who remain genteel even while assaulting Western civilization and the bourgeoisie—that is to say, themselves. So he writes his critique in ‘Eighties-academic prose. (“My purpose is to institute the modern self as the copresence [‘structure’] of various narratives [‘effects’] of the self which earlier writers have produced.”) He also gives every sign of actually having read most of what the ‘deconstructionists’ and their academic publicists have written—an ascesis more to be admired than emulated.

    Each reader will find his favorite example of this happy conjunction of style and substance, but your reviewer recommends footnote 35, page 244. There Corngold quotes an as-they-say dense passage by Professor Victor Lange on Heidegger (“Historical concretizations of life,” “methodological access,” “suprapersonal presence,” “hermeneutical phenomenology”); with that convincing poker face you prefect only in the old neighborhood, he comments, “It is hard to say this any better.” Truly, Corngold attacks ‘deconstructionism with its own heavy instruments. It is inconceivable that even his most insensible targets will not flinch.

    The poet’s self is Corngold’s topic—”a paradoxical being that must ‘disown’ itself in order to exist.” “Disown” is Hölderlin’s word; he likens poetic self-assertion to the “feeling of the sacred” in ancient tragedies, a feeling that can no longer find immediate recognition, but to which modern readers can carry over their own “spirit” (Geist) and experience. This carrying-over works both ways; the poet’s self carries over into “foreign analogous material,” into what T. S. Eliot calls its “objective correlative,” and the reader’s self carries over, away from itself, to perceive the poet’s intention. Hölderlin is the first of seven German writers Corngold presents, all of whom insist that this carrying-over, though problematic, does occur. The ‘deconstructionists’ claim that the self loses its way (‘shattering’ and ‘diffraction’ are the usual metaphors) among outside ‘structures.’ Attacking the notion of the Cartesian subject, res cogitans, the ‘deconstructionists’ deny the existence of self-knowledge, reject the self as a “coercive authority” and as the basis of autonomous individuality. The self “as the agent of its own development” and the source of poetic making, amounts to little more than a myth.

    Corngold agrees that “the self as particular, the self as self is precisely what cannot be represented in the concept”; the self “cannot at once stand inside itself and give a full description of itself.” The attempt to do so would yield an infinite regress (not knowing when you’ve reached the self’s foundation) or an infinite ‘progress’ (selves followed by super-selves). “Can a self be itself and know that the act by which it is known ‘disowns’ it?” Corngold affirms that it can, thanks to “history,” by which he means narrative. Narrative is an “effect” issuing from but not identical to the self, opposing but not obliterating other selves (including parts of the originative self that the dominant part of that self finds objectionable); the synthesis of these effects approximates “a third term, a project totality” that objectively confirms the existence of both self and other-than-self. “The integrity of the self is established by a style open to the history [here, “history” also means experience] it suffers and perceives—and makes in the stories it tells, with others’ collaboration.” Corngold would defend Rousseau by means of a literary Hegelianism. Rousseau “figures in the carpet of almost everyone of these essays…. He is my eighth ‘German writer.'” Corngold’s German-language writers are Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger, many of whom find themselves subpoenaed by ‘deconstructionists’ as witnesses to the self’s alleged decease.

    Hölderlin teaches that the self’s consciousness of its own mortality, of the most radical otherness, impels it to Bildung, development. This “divided self” does not merely contradict itself, as ‘deconstructionists’ assume. Bildung “turns toward historical and sacred objects and finally toward Nature as that generality enabling, sustaining, and enveloping… particular contacts and negations.” Nature makes the self possible. It also makes self-knowledge possible by affording the self a perspective outside the self. Hölderlin’s “Nature” has nothing to do with stable, Platonic forms; it is as mutable as the self—hence its affinity with the self. At the same time, both self and “Nature” do sustain themselves. Poetic, artful language “assures the permanence [perhaps too strong a word] of relations arresting an eternal ‘slippage’ between signifier and signified.” Language mediates between self and other, thus imitating all-encompassing “Nature.” Corngold does not attempt to prove Hölderlin’s scheme to be rationally sustainable or coherent; a proof of this would require justifying the emphasis on the mutability of which death serves as the most striking example. But he does argue plausibly that Hölderlin makes more sense than the ‘deconstructionists’ do. Corngold shows that Lacan, Laplanche, and Foucault unwittingly imply the existence of the self even in the formulations they use to deny its existence.

    In Dilthey, nature, even nature conceived as mutable, gives way to social and political history. “What must a poetics be in order to sustain the view that the subjectivity of a poet may be authentic and representative of social forces?” Dilthey contends that historical activity includes the study of history, that study makes history, is a praxis. The self ‘objectifies’ itself by political activity, art, and scholarship. “Literature is an institution because it institutes relations of force between acts of creation, reception, and understanding whose thrust is to enter the public order.” But the notion of “force” implies much more than mere history-as-narrative. Predictably, Dilthey brings nature in under the cover of history, saying that statesmen, poets, and philosophers share a “powerful life force of soul,” “energy of experiences of the heart and of the world,” the capacity to generalize those experiences, and “the power of inspiring conviction.” The notion of “historical psychology”—in Dilthey a form of vitalism likely derived from Nietzsche’s writings—implies not only history but technē. Neither Dilthey nor Corngold entirely appreciates this, but the former does write, and the latter repeats, that literature’s “highest function” is “to represent the dignity of the person in the midst of its determination” by ‘history.’

    In the argument between Rousseau and Hegel, Nietzsche incites to war. He rejects the understanding of art as a means of Bildung. If art is Dionysian, the poet’s self becomes more unstable, a field susceptible to possession. For Nietzsche, questioning distinguishes the self from merely determined phenomena. “The self wants itself as a question,”; it “exists as the question of its being and to this extent is self-determined,” as no outside force causes it to question itself. Corngold finds Nietzsche’s conception of the self to be dubious, because Nietzsche appears nearly to identify the self with the body, whose many drives are merely asserted to have a rank. Disorder cannot be said to determine itself. But Corngold adds that Nietzsche’s will to power itself consists of contradictory forces; if the self produces language, an “enterprise of the will to power,” then language, logos, and therefore logic, are not oriented toward discovery but toward overcoming. The self’s self-questioning means not self-doubt but self-overcoming, questioning. “The question of the self must live as an openness, an unansweredness toward being, yet it must bend the world into virtual answers in order to preserve itself as a question.” Nietzsche’s will to power, one might observe, synthesizes part of Rousseauan nature with part of Hegelian history. Corngold dismisses the ‘deconstructionist’ contention that Nietzsche’s texts are “pan-ironic,” noting that “irony can take place only through punctual abrogations of irony.”

    Of the two twentieth-century literary men Corngold discusses, Mann does not interest him whereas Kafka does. The latter’s novels contain “breaks” in perspective—as when Joseph K. is described in the third person, a violation of the novel’s otherwise non-“authorial” point-of-view. Such “breaks” appear to exemplify what ‘deconstructionists’ call the “undecidability” of a text, symptomatic of “the death of the Author.” One might of course suggest that these “breaks” instead reveal the incompetence of the author, but Corngold has a better suggestion. Even as an author, Kafka has a horror of construction, which is one more instance of the mastery or control satirized in The Trial. Kafka objects to perfection of technique, on principle. Therefore, Kafka’s narrator “is as much subject to inauthenticity and blindness as any character”; “like the loopholes in bureaucratic procedures which, as Adorno writes, are the institutional equivalent of mercy, random breaks in narrative consistency grant the hero a sort of merciful liberation from the schematism of ‘character,’ from the privations of an irremediably personal perspective.” Of course, this can only go so far. Kafka is the one who lets the “random” breaks stand. In being allowed to stand, they are no longer random. Corngold does not quite say it, but Kafka cannot avoid presenting us with a coherent self even in his attempts to show mercy to his suffering characters. He cannot really relinquish control, only imitate such relinquishment. He approaches relinquishment of control in fiction.

    Corngold attacks the ‘deconstructionist’ misreading of Freud, describing the interpretive method involved as “the disfigured expression of a will to power bent on masking its own contradiction.” Freud’s texts are not literary. The psychoanalyst attempts to “insert” the reality of biological life into fiction invented by a patient or a writer. To Kafka, such a “cure” would itself cause injury; like Rousseau, who deplores self-interest, “Kafka’s self is defined not by particular interests but by its narrative attentiveness to the products of dream play,” by “indifference to the practical concerns of an aimed empirical consciousness.” ‘Deconstructionists’ call Freud’s texts literary because they do not know what literature is, or perhaps are hostile to it. Although they claim to ‘deconstruct’ in order to liberate readers from authors’ allegedly coercive grip, they in fact coerce texts into saying nothing, the better to fit them into the ‘deconstructionist’ construct.

    Heidegger “joins a tradition subverting the western philosophy of language which normally founds meaning on, and subordinates rhetoric to, grammar and logic.” The “most primordial” character of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein is a resolute return to “one’s ownmost Self.” Whereas Nietzsche begins with self and sees his general principle, the will to power, in it, Heidegger begins with his general principle, Dasein, which “make[s] a resolute return to the Self.” Wherever the emphasis falls, this anti-traditional tradition attributes a cognitive significance to human “moods,” beyond mere “sensation-bound feeling.” From Rousseau to Heidegger, “mood stands for a disclosive power whose reach cognitive understanding cannot attain.” The disclosive power of moods evidently has waned. Corngold’s Germans increasingly perceive that moods are “fragile” and “strange” when one sees them in others, even if they appear strong and ‘authentic’ in oneself; one self/subject cannot often coincide with another if the means of coincidence is mood. Corngold sees that historicism arises from this increased subjectivism, although he does not elaborate on this fact as much as he might—having availed himself of a sort of historicism.

    Corngold would halt this waning of Rousseau’s project before it slides into ‘deconstructionism,’ which he rightly considers an absurdity. “If a text were only a self-deconstructing motion, a play of ineffable differences, a representation of nothingness, it could not weigh heavily enough upon the reader to produce a mood.” For all the formidable doctrine historicists have produced, the basis of their enterprise remains embarrassingly natural—even if so inchoate a naturalness as that seen in human moods. Corngold may concede too much to historicism and also to Rousseau, who at times has been credited with inventing an early form of historicism. When historicism, following subjectivism, eschews dialectic based on the principle of non-contradiction and asserts a “mood”-based dialectic of synthesizing opposites, an effort that eventually ranks rhetoric over logic, it finds such projects as ‘deconstructionism’ hard to resist.

    A scholar might examine this matter by examining Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche with an eye toward the classical reason they attacked and the ‘deconstructionism’ they somehow fostered. Corngold’s “postscript” and “prospect” bring to mind a less elephantine approach. Identifying his own book as a confession of sorts, a confession of the distance traveled between Brooklyn and ‘Germany,’ Corngold indicates a readiness to disown or overcome ‘Germany,’ too. One way of doing this would be to measure the language of Brooklyn against the language of ‘Germany,’ and vice-versa, in order to determine what common sense lacks that ‘Germany’ offers, and what ‘Germany’ offers that common sense can bring down to earth, or even falsify. (Socrates, for example, begins with the language of the marketplace, transcending it only when it deserves to be transcended). Despite the egalitarianism of many aspects of post-Rousseauan thought, this thought betrays a contempt for common sense that yields convolution in theory and extremism in practice. One way to get beyond ‘Germany’ is to return to ‘Brooklyn.’

    Robert H. Horwitz, 1923-1987

    by

    This remembrance of Robert H. Horwitz, whom I met as a student at Kenyon College in 1971, appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 15, Numbers 2 and 3, May and September 1987. Republished with permission.

     

    In his class on modern political philosophy at Kenyon College, Bob Horwitz told a story on himself. He recalled walking along a street in Chicago at night with his friend Herbert Storing, when some youths, out to intimidate, ran directly at two professors. (These were not former students, current or former.) “Storing stood there like a real man,” Bob said, illustrating this by planting his own feet firmly and expanding his chest. Then, his enormous eyes widened in mock terror, he shuffled  few steps to the left, narrowed his eyes in a sideward glance, and muttered, “I got off the sidewalk.”

    He was teaching undergraduates the difference between Aristotelian citizen and Hobbesian man. The lesson worked: I have remembered, and now you probably will, too. But Bob left the teaching unfinished, with respect to himself. Sixteen years later, back at Kenyon for his memorial service, I learned that Bob had won the Bronze Star in World War II. His laugh came back to me then; it always sounded as if Santa Claus had read Machiavelli—not losing his liberality but putting a surgical edge on it. At the service, Bob’s student, colleague, and friend Phil Marcus said, “Bob Horwitz was always more than most saw, until it was too late.”

    Robert Henry Horwitz was born in El Paso on September 3, 1923, and he remained a kind of Texan all his life. He thought big. He talked and acted to back up those thoughts, for the sake of them and the friends who shared them. He didn’t talk or act for the sake of just anybody, having a Texan contempt for “the pusillanimous and the timid, the compromisers, and the like,” as he himself once put it. A student wrote that Bob “knew two things I didn’t: how to have enemies and how to have fun. Preferably at the same time.”

    Bob learned early how to reconcile contraries, or balance them. He grew up in Tennessee, a Jewish Southerner in the 1930s—a minority of a minority, both minorities sometimes embattled. This must have given him a certain distance from, but a nonetheless passionate interest in, the workings of the political order. It surely prepared Bob to appreciate the response made to the political order by a supremely intelligent man, John Locke, whose careful way of writing was to be rediscovered by Leo Strauss. By striking coincidence or providence, Bob’s confirmation statement concerned the relation of John Locke’s thought to the Declaration of Independence. The fruitful tension, the artful contradiction, the occasional outright conflict: Bob learned these not from books or teachers at first, but by experience in a southern prep school, in the European war, at Amherst College, in New York (where he studied piano at the Juilliard School, met his match and wisely married her), and then in Hawaii, where he undertook the Sisyphean task of teaching adult education. He learned the Lockean lesson of tolerance, and of the limits of tolerance—the latter not only in the war but especially in 1948, when Stalin’s troops crushed Czechoslovakia and harshly taught at least one Henry Wallace-style student about the evil of leftist totalitarianism.

    At the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss took Bob’s knowledge, acquired by reconnoitering a wide, sometimes rough terrain, and elevated it so Bob could see the whole all at once and measure its proportions. Strauss taught Bob what philosophy is, and what political philosophy must be, if philosophy is to survive. Bob never forgot those lessons. Out of them he fashioned a life with friends, sometimes in collaboration with fortune’s wheel, as often in conflict with it. With respect to fortune if not friendship, neither the ancient nor the modern stance could quite satisfy Bob. So he assumed either one, as circumstance required and prudence advised. He didn’t lose his balance.

    Almost all the work Bob did during and after his years in Chicago concerned political philosophy’s practical aspect or embodiment, civic education. In his doctoral dissertation he contrasted the ways Aristotle, Rousseau, and Dewey seek to educate citizens in various regimes. He sharply questioned Dewey’s optimistic belief that “growth,” conceived as the infinite expansion of democracy, could overcome the tension between city and man. Bob co-edited two books on modern ideologies, those attempts to make political structure and propaganda cohere with philosophy reconceived as science. Bob had a less than sanguine view of such schemes. He also had too much respect for ‘the common man’ to believe that citizens would sit still for enlightenment. And he knew too much about philosophy to imagine it identical to the propaganda of modern science, or even to regard it as especially well defended by that propaganda.

    Bob particularly deplored the effect of modern social science methods. He was convinced that they narrow and vulgarize the way students conceive of politics, and thus ultimately debase the way politics are practiced. In his contribution to Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, a book he conceived, he dissected the “scientific propaganda” of Harold D. Lasswell. Lasswell rejected the classical idea of political science as an architectonic art, by slyly subordinated scientific description and prediction to a program of social control by, as Bob called them, “psychologist-kings.” Unlike Socrates’ philosopher-kings, Lasswell’s ruling class was to be empowered only to wither away; the master propagandists eventually will so arrange human life, redo human nature itself through a sort of universal enlightenment, that no politics will be necessary any longer. This strange, simultaneous maximizing of tyranny and anarchy elicited Bob’s vigorous condemnation, and he was struck by the equally vigorous condemnation the Essays provoked in professional journals, then firmly committed to ‘behaviorism.’ Bob went through enemy fire in a different kind of war. He knew that simply to provoke that war, to force social scientism to defend itself on territory not its own, was to win a battle, if not the war.

    Bob did some work that came close enough to the sort of work done by most contemporary political scientists to demonstrate clearly the difference between his understanding and theirs. In the mid-1960s, he published a series of monographs on land use and politics in Hawaii; a student of his in those days remarked that Bob showed how politics determined the use of the land, how “the very trees growing on the watersheds were the outgrowth of the regime.” Now more than twenty years old, these studies are still used by specialists, some of whom might learn from them things beyond their specialty, even as citizens might learn from them an appreciation for how politics pervades even the physical landscape in which they move.

    Bob thought of his political science classes as opportunities for the civic education of his students, who could be depended upon not to have had much of that previously. During his ten years at Michigan State University, he conceived and taught courses on modern ideologies and on political philosophy. He worked with the University’s College of Education to establish courses on civic education itself. He did not confine his teaching to academia, but addressed state and federal legislators, secondary school teachers, military personnel, hospital administrators, Rotarians and Lions; he appeared on several radio programs and, at least once, on television.

    Bob went to Kenyon College to serve as chairman of the political science department. In a letter written shortly before Bob’s death, Robert Goldwin recalled:

    “Kenyon then was probably the best liberal arts college in the country to have virtually no instruction in political studies at all…. Under your leadership, we built the best undergraduate political science department in the country…. It helped that we had a clean slate, but that was only part of it. Your ‘plan’ was the essential element. Before I left Chicago for Gambier [Ohio], I tried to draw for Leo Strauss the little diagram you used to explain your plan for the department: a base of political philosophy; one pillar, our political system; the other pillar, other political systems; across the top, international relations. Strauss showed little interest in the diagram, and when I asked what he thought of Horwitz’s scheme, he said, ‘If there is a plan for the department, it is already better than all the others.'”

    Bob found the right people (among the first and surely the foremost in service to Kenyon, Harry Clor) to teach these subjects. Then he let them teach.

    With Goldwin, he transplanted the Public Affairs Conference Center from Chicago to Kenyon. The PACC annual conferences brought prominent politicians, scholars, and journalists to Gambier to educate (they started out by assuming) and to be educated (they quickly realized). With students he reversed this process, and stretched it out over their lifetimes. Later on, Bob worked with two young colleagues, Charles and Leslie Rubin, to develop a summer course on the teaching of political science, a course that distilled the lessons learned by the teachers at Kenyon during the years his “plan” was in effect. Now some version of that course, “The Quest for Justice,” exists at more than one hundred schools.

    Bob’s scholarly work for the last fifteen years centered on John Locke, particularly Locke’s educational writings. Bob collaborated with Judith Finn on a study of Locke’s artful reworking of Aesop’s Fables; he wrote on Lockean civic education in his anthology The Moral Foundation of the American Republic; and, in what will likely be recognized as his finest work, he wrote an introduction to and an extensive commentary on Locke’s Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, to be published with scholarly apparatus by Diskin Clay and an English translation by Jenny Strauss Clay. Bob discovered missing portions of this manuscript (controversial portions Locke himself had hidden with various friends) and proved that they were intended to form part of the whole. In each of his essays Bob concerns himself not only with Locke’s teaching but with how Locke taught and for whom Locke wrote. Locke was indeed an Aesopian writer whose life, as Bob demonstrates, mirrored some of the labyrinthine character of his writings. Locke’s Questions were prepared for use in the university, where the philosopher addressed future English rulers with the consummate circumspection a theologically sensitive topic deserves.

    Bob described Locke as his hero, and he did emulate Locke in some of his circumspection. But, as he immediately added, Bob was a friend to controversy as Locke was not, confessing that he “attempted to be unfailingly kind and generous in helping his friends, but could never understand the maxim that we should love our enemies.” He saw that Locke’s thought and influence had helped to make such spirited confrontations, civil, but he also wanted to show that Lockean commercial republicanism need not extinguish all spiritedness, especially the spiritedness needed to defend these regimes of tolerance.

    Bob’s final controversy at Kenyon was a defense of civility in its academic form, liberal education. The same kind of ideology he had espoused in the 1940s, studied in the 1950s, and opposed on campus and within the American Political Science Association during the ‘New Left’ days of the 1960s and early 1970s, reappeared in yet another permutation at Kenyon in the 1980s in the forms of feminism and ‘globalism.’ Their partisans wanted to transform liberal education into political education in the propagandistic sense, asserting that “all education is political,” because they saw no difference between rhetoric and a philosophy that is politic. Physically weakened by chronic illness, Bob gave his adversaries a few lessons in politics—both in his sense of the word and in theirs.

    Both Aquinas and Hobbes teach that fear can lead to civility. As a founder in his own sphere, Bob read and taught Machiavelli and regarded it as an open question whether it is better to be loved or feared. I think finally he might have answered, “That depends upon the souls in question.” In some he preferred to inspire fear, simply. In others, fear came first, but led to friendship or at least to respect. A very others needed not to fear him at all—or, at least, not too much. Women students and colleagues had a certain advantage in this, because Bob never lost a degree of Southern courtliness, piquantly mingled with that U. S. Army/University of Chicago brashness. Bob was almost unique among my acquaintances in that I never met a woman who regarded him as an overgrown boy—as most women understandably regard most men. To a woman, they thought him a man, one of them going so far as to write, “You are drawn to the problems that separate the men from the boys.” If I ever discover how he managed this effect, I shall report back for the benefit of men everywhere.

    Nor did men think of him simply as an intellectual warrior, although with us it often began that way: A professor who met him in 1980 recalled, “They told me he was older, he had mellowed, he was no longer as combative as he used to be. This may have been true, but I still found him exhausting.” But it wasn’t long before the laughter came, if you deserved to share it. One of his last students recalled how Bob “would defiantly fire a piece of chalk at a buzzing clock marking the end of class: time was short, and there were many important jokes which still needed telling.”

    For a short time after Bob’s death, some of us worried that his commentary on Locke’s Questions might only exist in notes or in some unpublishable form. We were wrong; the manuscript was discovered, nearly complete, to be finished by several longtime co-workers. So it will be published thanks to both parts of Bob’s life as I knew it: his scholarly passion and his friendliness with those who shared his passion for knowing and his prudent but no less passionate care for the ways we come to know, and to wonder.

     

     

    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.