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.
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