Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville - neue Art von Liberalismus (vs. Locke, Hobbes); Liberalismus nicht als Resultat abstrakter Prinzipien (Naturzustand), sondern als Beschreibung politischer Praxis in Amerika

Kurzinhalt: The new liberalism needs a “new political science ... for a world that is altogether new,” not set forth in a system of principles by Tocqueville, comparable to the system of seventeenth-century liberalism.

Textausschnitt: Introduction: a new kind of liberal

1a What sort of man was Alexis de Tocqueville? A writer, certainly, and with great style, but a writer of nonfiction conveying fact and truth in compelling terms with brilliant formulations. A social scientist, but without the cumbersome methodology, the hands-off neutrality, the pretended objectivity of today’s version. Tocqueville was a defender and reformer of politics, scientific in some ways but never permitting science to obstruct those goals. A historian? Yes, because he wrote of democracy in America, then and now its principal abode, and of the old regime in France, where according to him democracy—surprisingly, in the form of rational administration by a monarchy—began. He did not write like a theorist, as if he were abstracted from time and place. Yet he was a seeker of causes, not a plain narrator, and he chose to write about the most important events, the “first causes,” he went so far as to say. A philosopher? A difficult question, to which many who identify philosophy with system say no. I say yes, more of a philosopher than he appears to be. We can settle on “thinker,” a less ambitious word for a man who had his doubts about philosophy. (Fs)

1b A great man? For certain. A great man for his insight, but also because he undertook to explain greatness in a democratic age when it was under attack or simply overlooked. A great man who associated democracy and liberty with greatness. (Fs)

3a “A new kind of liberal”: that is Tocqueville’s own description of himself. Today Tocqueville is not known as a liberal, as is his friend John Stuart Mill, who wrote On Liberty to explain and advocate liberal principles. Tocqueville seems to be more descriptive and analytical, like a sociologist, except that he writes so well. Although his books sparkle with insights, his thoughts arise from observation of facts rather than appearing in the sequence of argument, arranged systematically. But I shall try to rescue his own label for himself and show that he deserves the highest rank among liberals just because he is not as theoretical as liberals normally want to be. (Fs)

3b If Tocqueville is a new kind of liberal, this means that liberalism is not itself something new. It is true that the word “liberal” came into use only in Tocqueville’s time, but before this liberalism was given its basis in the doctrine of modern political theorists in the seventeenth century, particularly Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, who made it their first premise that man was naturally free. They meant that prior to any social or political character men might have, man must be supposed to be in an abstract condition (the “state of nature”) in which he was free to consent to the society he might join and to its politics. Tocqueville did not agree that men began in this way “perfectly free,” as Locke said, or that freedom has its origin prior to politics. Tocqueville seems rather to agree with Aristotle, the pre-modern philosopher opposed by these modern theorists, who said that “man is by nature a political animal,” meaning that human freedom has to be found in politics, not in an original state of nature prior to politics. (Fs) (notabene)

3c Tocqueville does not say he agrees with Aristotle. He does not agree with him that philosophy is the highest way of life. He does not argue with philosophers and rarely refers to them; when he does, it is usually to disparage them. In Democracy in America, the Americans he praises for the practice of freedom are said to be “less occupied with philosophy” than any other civilized people. In The Old Regime and the Revolution he decries the philosophes or “men of letters” of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century for pronouncing on politics as theorists, without experience in the practice of politics. In neither work does he mention the liberal state of nature, and in his book on America he omits any discussion of the liberal American principles stated in the Declaration of Independence. Tocqueville is obviously aware of the old liberalism, but he deals with it by ignoring it. (Fs)

4b Instead, he moves to his new liberalism in which freedom is the friend of religion and infused with pride as well as impelled by self-interest. The new liberalism needs a “new political science ... for a world that is altogether new,” not set forth in a system of principles by Tocqueville, comparable to the system of seventeenth-century liberalism. Nor is it the political science of Montesquieu, the more modern political scientist of the eighteenth century, authoritative for fellow liberals in Tocqueville’s time such as Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, and earlier for the American authors of The Federalist. Montesquieu’s new political science was written for the world before the coming of modern democracy that made a world “altogether new,” before the United States came to be. (Fs)

4c Tocqueville’s political science is shown in his depiction of freedom as practiced in America, an actual society, rather than in principles that precede practice. That is why his writing fascinates and convinces his readers with evidence, observation, and examples. Yet his analysis, often apparently spontaneous, even disorderly, does not wander from one point to another; every discussion has its place in a whole that is gradually revealed. In this book I discuss five aspects of his new liberalism. All are somehow concerned with democracy, for democracy is the new world in which liberty must be made to survive and prosper. (Fs)

4d First is the democratic politics in Tocqueville’s own life, for he was a would-be statesman as well as a writer, and a liberal as well as an aristocrat. Then come his thoughts on democratic self-government in America, where in his time and still in ours democracy has its headquarters. His fears for democracy come next, found especially in the second volume of Democracy in America. There he exposes the risks arising from democratic theories that both exasperate and enervate democratic majorities. Then, moving to The Old Regime, we find Tocqueville’s depiction of the rational administrative control by which the French monarchy dismantled feudal aristocracy. He reveals the connection between two things that seem some distance apart: democracy (rule of the people) and rational administration (rule of a bureaucracy). Last is the greatness Tocqueville desires from democracy, such as it can be. For democracy is given to mediocrity that is both stagnant and restive, passive yet dissatisfied, and Tocqueville must teach us how to rescue it from its faults. For him the “true friends” of liberty are also friends of “human greatness.” (Fs)

5a Why does Tocqueville matter today? First, there is general agreement that he matters. It is hard to think of any analyst of American politics and society with a higher or broader reputation today. During his own life and then through the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, his liberalism seemed humdrum and ineffective, and he was eclipsed by radical critics on both left and right. But after the radical right was defeated in World War II and the radical left lost its appeal in the nastiness of communist tyranny, moderate liberals came to the fore, above all Tocqueville. In France the revival was led by the philosopher Raymond Aron and the historian François Furet; in the United States, having always been celebrated for his book, Tocqueville returned to favor as Americans reconsidered their intellectual dependence on Marx and Nietzsche and began again to discuss the nature of “American exceptionalism,” by which America might be a model for all humanity. He has been quoted by every American president from Eisenhower on (not always accurately!), cited widely in academic circles by social scientists and historians, and used to enliven and give authority to many books by popular historians and journalists. Democracy in America also appeals broadly to both left and right, each side having its favorite passages and eager to claim the blessing of his authority. (Fs)

6a Tocqueville has not received his due for the quality of his thought, however. One reason is his very brilliance, which makes him seem merely eloquent, and his sense of the future, which makes him seem uncanny. It is as if anyone who writes so well on the surface must be superficial, and anyone who predicts so well must be a seer. The beauty of his writing can be somewhat distracting to careful analysis of what he says, as for example when he compares a presidential election in America to the passing of a storm. Another reason for the underestimation of his wisdom is the power of abstraction in democratic societies, a power Tocqueville tries to oppose. American democrats like to generalize, or universalize, or equalize, so as to be inclusive, tolerant, and appreciative. America’s intellectuals, cooperating with the democrats, like to theorize, so as to be universal, exact, and free of the past. Even our historians want to start history anew. Tocqueville’s liberalism forces us to consider what we actually do in the practice of self-government, rather than arguing endlessly in the abstract about what we are, and are not, entitled to. For all his reputation, we do not learn enough from him. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; Demokratie: Gleichheit d. Bedingungen, Selbst-Regierung (Ausgang: kein Naturzustand, sondern "sozialer" Stand); Aristokratie (feste Hierarchie) - Demokratie (700-jahre langer Trend); Erbgesetz

Kurzinhalt: Instead of the state of nature producing democracy, as in Hobbes and Locke, democracy produces something like the state of nature, individuals not necessarily in conflict but not strongly bonded with one another.

Textausschnitt: The image of democracy

18b What is democracy? Tocqueville defines it first as equality of conditions, as a way of life; only when he comes to the Puritans does he begin to describe it as a form of government. Democracy as a way of life is not so worthy of praise as when it means self-government. To its definition as equality of conditions we might object that there are manifest inequalities in democracy today- let alone in his time—to which he would respond that conditions were becoming more equal, that it is in the nature of democracy to become more democratic, as if equality were the only lasting goal even if it is always an unfinished goal. He has in mind the contrast between democracy and aristocracy, between individuals in motion, rising and falling, and a fixed hierarchy of class distinctions. To introduce democracy he presents it as a seven-hundred-year-old trend, dating from the opening of the ranks of the church’s clergy to all, not only to nobles—a hidden trend now coming to view “in broad daylight” in America, the country where Tocqueville came to seek “the image of democracy itself.” (Fs)

19a Yet, unlike liberal theorists, he does not set forth the logic of the image, even though he says he will explore its “theoretical consequences.” He turns to the actual practice of democracy in its “point of departure,” the coming of the Puritans to America. The Puritans called themselves pilgrims because they came to America on behalf of an idea rather than for money or adventure, and the idea, though primarily religious, was also a political theory of democracy in which the people are sovereign, ruling all society, regulating mores, and establishing public education. Democracy appears not only as equality but as self-government that presides over a democratic society or “social state.” The point of departure is a certain kind of society, democratic as opposed to aristocratic, not the state of nature of liberal theory, in which all are individuals and society does not yet exist. (Fs) (notabene)

19b Democracy is a certain social state that is not very sociable. An example in America was the change in inheritance law from primogeniture to equal inheritance or inheritance by choice. Primogeniture is designed to keep aristocratic landed estates intact and to nurture family pride in one’s forbears, while equal inheritance releases individual selfishness from family ties and induces thoughts of the future rather than the past. Equality penetrates all society, sometimes as a passion for competitive excellence elevating humble men to the level of the great—a “manly and legitimate passion,” Tocqueville calls it—sometimes as a depraved taste for envy, prompting the weak to drag the strong down to their level. Instead of the state of nature producing democracy, as in Hobbes and Locke, democracy produces something like the state of nature, individuals not necessarily in conflict but not strongly bonded with one another. (Fs)

20a How are democratic individuals to be strong, not weak? Tocqueville does not say they will necessarily be one or the other. His concept of the “social state” separate from politics sounds like sociology, a science just getting started in his time. But in contrast to sociologists and to other social scientists today, he does not believe that social characteristics determine politics, for to think so ignores the weight of politics on society that he illustrates with the law on inheritance. Does that law come from the social state or determine it? Tocqueville equivocates, for he says that the social state is both a product of fact or law and a first cause of most social behavior. The importance of political liberty appears to be at stake: What good is political liberty if politics is the consequence of a certain social state and cannot decide important questions? So, despite saying that the social state may be considered the first cause of its way of life, he proceeds to speak of the sovereignty of the people—implying the importance of who rules but leaving the impression that democracy is ruled by its social state as much as it rules itself. (Fs)

20b Tocqueville goes so far as to conclude: “The people reign over the American political world as does God over the universe.” The people are “the cause and the end of all things.” But if the American people are like God, they would seem to replace God as sovereign. Man, not God, is sovereign, which is a definite change in the Puritan idea that he called the “point of departure.” Puritan democracy was a theocracy, and Tocqueville would not be a liberal if he wanted that. Political liberty sets limits to democratic politics, preventing the state from the strict regulation of mores that we today call “Puritan,” because it wants democratic individuals to be free. Tocqueville is a champion of the principle of separating church from state. But he endorses the democratic politics that the Puritans brought to America because one is not free unless one rules. In this confusing proportion between man and God, he shows that liberty has both a debt to religion and a claim against it. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; Township, Geschworenengericht: Schule für Freiheit; Gleichheit - Gehorsam (Nützlichkeit)

Kurzinhalt: In aristocracy, individuals are fixed in a hierarchy between those on whom they depend and those who depend on them. Hardly “individuals,” they have their associations supplied for them. But in democracy ...

Textausschnitt: The township

21a Free individuals by themselves are weak, and Tocqueville must explain how they become strong, so that democratic equality results in strengthening them rather than encouraging their envy. What strengthens individuals is association—a key topic in Tocqueville that he approaches through his discussion of the New England township. In aristocracy, individuals are fixed in a hierarchy between those on whom they depend and those who depend on them. Hardly “individuals,” they have their associations supplied for them. But in democracy, men are free—or deprived of—these bonds and must make their associations for themselves. To do this they have a natural disposition to associate with other men at their disposal, second only to their self-love—again a contrast to the “state of nature” that conceives individuals to be at war. (Fs)

21b Township is both natural and fragile. It is “so much in nature that everywhere men are gathered, a township forms by itself,” yet among civilized nations it is found only in America. The reason is that township government is like a “primary school” of freedom, immature and inexpert, which higher authorities are always tempted to interfere with and set right. Only America has the wisdom, or the good luck that Tocqueville has the wisdom to point out, to keep the township intact. Tocqueville calls it a form of government because it is orderly, open to view and public; it is government neither hidden nor remote but in broad daylight. The township, to be sure, is authorized by the state governments to which Tocqueville turns next, but he begins his analysis of democracy as a form of government from the bottom up, where it is most spontaneous. (Fs)

22a The dogma of the sovereignty of the people says that each individual is “as enlightened, as virtuous, as strong” as anyone else. Yet if he is to accomplish anything beyond his own individual powers, he must associate with others; and if he associates, he must obey those who have been set in charge. Tocqueville uses the English word “selectmen” for those in charge of a township; if he had said it in French, he might have called them the elite. Now since each individual is declared equal in capacity to any other person, why should he obey? He obeys not because he is inferior but because it is useful to obey. He swallows his pride for the sake of accomplishing something, such as the building of a road, that he cannot do by himself. And at the end he still has his pride, the pride of accomplishment together with the pleasure of being sociable. He has learned, as if in primary school, that he can obey and still be free. In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville had said that democracy in Europe has been “abandoned to its savage instincts”; here in the American township, it thrives while enjoying the legitimacy it lacks there. (Fs)

22b In the township America teaches itself how to live in freedom, and with his analysis Tocqueville teaches America what it is doing. He admits that township government is not found everywhere in America, and he no doubt exaggerates its virtues, urging them with his praise. If the sovereignty of the people worked from the top down instead of from the bottom up, as in France, it would be imposed and would not be felt. Township government, with many elected offices, satisfies many petty ambitions and attaches citizens to their government as their own. It habituates them to the forms of government, “forms without which freedom proceeds only through revolutions.” Democracy thrives through elections, and, Tocqueville says, it is not that America has elections because it is prosperous, but it is prosperous because it has elections. (Fs)

23a Another form that teaches self-government to Americans is the jury, “a school, free of charge and always open, where each juror comes to be instructed in his rights.” In England the jury of one’s peers was an aristocratic institution, but in America it is democratized. It teaches citizens how to judge, which means how to execute general laws, of the kind democratic legislatures are eager to pass, in particular circumstances where equity may require some adjustment. It teaches “each man not to recoil from responsibility for his own acts”—a manly political virtue, he says. Tocqueville endows the jury with great power. It is the “most energetic means of making the people reign”—perhaps a deliberate exaggeration to suit his strategy of advising or urging in the guise of praising. And what makes the people reign “is also the most efficacious means of teaching them to reign.” In America, a free people learns by doing, not by consulting a theory before acting. (Fs)

23b In general, judging moderates the sovereignty of the people, showing them that their sovereignty has limits, that it must be expressed in laws, and that even good laws, when executed, may be too harsh. At the same time the election of judges in American states reveals that in elections generally the people have an arbitrary power of dismissal that cannot be fully justified or remedied. However controlled and moderated the people’s sovereignty may be, it retains an element of the irrational. The sovereignty of the people may be finally no more rational than that of a monarch; both have their whims. Freedom cannot be made altogether reasonable, and free citizens who see their party and their candidates lose must learn to accept the people’s decision with equanimity. (Fs)

23c In view of the political advantages of the township and the jury, Tocqueville makes a distinction concerning centralization in government that is still often cited. Centralization of the government is good if it joins together the force of common interests, but centralized administration in executing government enervates people who submit to it because, by demanding uniformity, it tends to diminish “the spirit of the city” in them, the practice of self-government combined with resistance to outsiders reflected in the local freedom of the township and the jury. He admits that centralized administration may be more efficient, but it feeds on itself, becoming ever more invasive and clumsy, oblivious to the harm it does when it takes administration out of the hands of the people, spurning their free cooperation, and keeps it in bureaucrats who direct it from the center. France is the epitome of this error, as the administration of the monarchy by such ministers as Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin set a bad example that was followed by the French Revolution. The United States, however, with its federalism, kept local administration alive and followed the good example of administrative decentralization in England—another instance of an institution adapted from aristocracy and democratized. (Fs)

24a The system of federalism in America is the union established under the Constitution, and Tocqueville turns from the township, described as a natural and spontaneous form, and from the individual states, also called natural, like a father’s authority, to the union, called a “work of art.” He delivers an encomium on the constitutional founding of 1787-89, praising the Americans as a “great people warned by its legislators” of a crisis, looking upon itself for a period of two years, sounding the depth of the ill, finding the remedy at leisure, and submitting to it “without its costing humanity one tear or drop of blood.” This achievement was “new in the history of societies.” In keeping with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, Tocqueville first gives the credit for it to the American people, later praising the founders and the Federalist party for leading the way. He calls them “the finest minds and noblest characters that had ever appeared in the New World.” He seems to suggest that sovereignty is sometimes best shown not in assertiveness but in patience and deference to those with superior virtue. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; Assoziationen, Eigeninteresse (bien entendu); Domokratie - Form (Abneigung u. Notwendigkeit); Sitten - nomos - Gesetze (im klass. Liberalismus über Sitten); Religion (Nützlichkeit; Frauen, Klerus)

Kurzinhalt: Yet precisely democratic peoples, who respect forms less, need them more. Their principal merit, says Tocqueville, is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak ... For Tocqueville, despotism can do without religious faith, but freedom cannot.

Textausschnitt: Associations and self-interest

25a What a sociologist today might call a group Tocqueville calls an association. The word implies that society is made from associating oneself with others (the French verb is reflexive). Associating is natural to humans, if less so than acting on one’s own. But in democracy, all are equal and hence independent of one another; so the passion for equality tends to individualize citizens. Association has to be accomplished and cannot be taken for granted. Tocqueville calls almost any grouping of more than two people an association: marriage (“the conjugal association”), a private club, a joint business venture, a political party, a township, a nation, even the human race. Here is another singular feature of his liberalism. Whereas John Stuart Mill, a more typical liberal, does his best to defend the value of individuality in not conforming to majority opinion, Tocqueville expands on the benefits for liberal society of associating. He is less confident than Mill that individuals can be taught to stand up to the majority, and he wants also to persuade the majority that it need not demand conformity. (Fs) (notabene)

25b Political associations are the first kind he considers, and in the second volume he adds a distinction between political and civil associations. These are both informal associations of what he calls “civil society,” a term widely used today to refer to the realm between the state and the individual. But Tocqueville uses it also for the township, as well as for the other forms of government. To associate is, or tends to be, political; it is an act of political liberty. Tocqueville says that a civil association is one between those of a similar interest, and a political one is among dissimilars, but he does not seem to have his heart set on the distinction, for he actually calls his chief example, the temperance societies of nineteenth-century America, civil at one point and political at another. In the United States today such associations as the National Rifle Association or the American Association of Retired Persons are composed of people with a similar interest, but are obviously very political too. (Fs)

26a The reason that political and civil associations are not distinct is that Americans learn how to associate from associating in politics. The people schools itself, Tocqueville says, first in regard to the township and the jury, then speaking of associations generally: they are to be considered “great schools, free of charge, where all citizens come to learn the general theory of associations.” Now what is that general theory? Tocqueville does not define it, but he does refer to both an art and a science of association, somehow combining human action and human understanding in such manner that the theory arises from the actual practice of association. (Fs)

26b The theory is such that the people can learn it. Associating is a kind of free schooling because it is relatively painless and does not place unreasonable expectations upon democratic citizens, who are, after all, human beings. Americans expect to put themselves first and do not believe they are required to be selfless. The American (or Anglo-American) doctrine is summed up in Tocqueville’s famous formulation, “self-interest well understood”—meaning in the first place a self-interest one must think about. Tocqueville does not say it is his doctrine, but that Americans believe in it. (Fs)

26c In noting American reliance on self-interest, Tocqueville differs from much current discussion on democratic participation, sometimes called “communitarian.” Communitarian sentiment is opposed to self-interest; it wants to be altruistic and selfless, for the common good as opposed to selfish or market-oriented. For him, sentiment on behalf of the community comes out of one’s self-interest and is useful to it rather than selfless and opposed. Today it is also assumed that the only community is a democratic one, community among equals, as in the phrase “democratic participation,” but for him there is also aristocratic community, individuals linked in a hierarchy. And democratic community, we have seen in the township, utilizes and gives opportunity to the talents and ambition of unequal individuals while constructing itself out of equal individuals. (Fs)

27a Of course, much depends on what is included in the “well understood” (bien entendu) part of the formula. It is sometimes translated “rightly understood” as if benefit that is not immediately in one’s interest could be rightly understood as self-interest. Or is it better to suppose that self-interest “well understood” needs to be accompanied by things that seem not to be in one’s interest, such as honor and virtue? (Fs)

27b The issue arises in the discussion of the “necessity of forms” in democracy, a theme throughout the book. In his summary at the end, Tocqueville remarks that democrats “do not readily comprehend the utility of forms; they feel an instinctive disdain for them.” Forms or formalities are institutions (with rules and officers) or mores (ceremonies, rituals, courtesies, and “dressing up”) or legalities (for example, due process of law) that show respect for others and enable common action with people who are not friends or family. To democrats, these often appear to be mere technicalities, inconveniences that delay or get in the way of the rapid consummation of their desires. They seem fussy and irrational in a democracy, like “standing on ceremony” as if you wanted to appear more or less than you are. But this, for Tocqueville, is precisely their virtue. (Fs; tblStw: Politik) (notabene)

27c Forms place barriers between men, as when formal offices create inequalities between government and people. They place obstacles between men and their desires, when formalities require certain ceremonies or polite manners. They require respect for due process when they compel government to pass a law instead of issuing a decree or acting on a whim. They keep distances among men when they enforce respect for privacy or dignity. Democratic peoples disdain forms because they want to go directly to the object of their desires, preferring action to dignity, sincerity to politeness, result to correctness; in sum, substance to form. Such peoples are naturally impatient by virtue of their equality, which relieves them from having to “behave” and please others more important than they. Self-interest in its primary meaning suits this disposition, as it requires looking at everything for one’s advantage, as we say today pragmatically, rather than for its propriety. Yet precisely democratic peoples, who respect forms less, need them more. Their principal merit, says Tocqueville, is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, especially between the government and the governed, forcing the former to slow down and enabling the latter to have time to reflect. Self-interest well understood, for Tocqueville as opposed to his Americans, is to live in a society where one is prevented from going directly to one’s self-interest but compelled to do so legally or constitutionally or conventionally or respectfully or formally. (Fs)

28a Self-interest, then, both supports associations for their utility and undermines them if they become inconvenient. The readiness to form them is matched by the temptation to ignore or dissolve them. So Tocqueville emphasizes the tumult and agitation “constantly reborn” of political activity in the United States, something he says one cannot understand without having witnessed it there. The activity of associating is especially associating for some new idea or moral purpose, and in America the habit of freedom is even stronger than the love of freedom. In the restive activity and energy of associations the true superiority of democracy to despotism can be found. (Fs)

28b Another aspect of self-interest that needs to be “well understood” is the democratic mores (moeurs) of Americans. Tocqueville takes for granted the calculation of self-interest in economic activity, but he adds to that the practical experience, habits, and opinions—the mores—that sustain society. Any reader who does not feel the importance he has given to mores, he says, has missed “the principal goal” he proposed to himself in writing his book. Mores were featured in the political philosophy of two eighteenth-century mentors of Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and played a role in the rise of nineteenth-century sociology. Classical political philosophers would have spoken of law in a wide sense (nomos), including both written and unwritten laws, but Tocqueville accepts the liberal distinction between the two. In the liberal theory of Hobbes and Locke, the purpose of the distinction is to elevate laws made by a sovereign and derived from the consent of the people above customs that might hinder the decisions of the sovereign. But for the sake of political liberty Tocqueville wants those sovereign decisions to be not so much hindered as scattered at large in democratic society. In another disagreement with pristine liberal theory he elevates mores above laws, since mores maintain the laws. Laws may sometimes change mores, as a new inheritance law helped to democratize the American family, but mores, “habits of the heart” as well as those of the mind, comprise the “whole moral and intellectual state of a people.” (Fs)

30a Mores therefore include religion. Is religion a factor in the American doctrine of “self-interest well understood”? The answer: in a complicated way. Tocqueville treats religion in both volumes of Democracy in America, but somewhat differently in each. In the first, religion is the root of the mores that help maintain a democratic republic in America. It is considered for this function, not for its truth—and he says that what is most important is not that all citizens profess the true religion, but that they profess a religion. In this political view, religion serves politics, rather than politics serving religion, as with the Puritans. Religion “harmonizes the earth with heaven” by compelling humans to respect insurmountable barriers, “certain primary givens” that restrain their will. Religion sets limits to human sovereignty and therefore to the sovereignty of the people in a democracy. It does this mostly through women rather than men, for democratic men are hardly to be restrained in their desire to become rich, but women make mores, and religion “reigns as a sovereign over the soul of woman.” (Fs)

30b The weight that Tocqueville assigns to mores in politics, he thus assigns also to women. Paradoxically, one sees in his discussion of women in volume 2 that the condition of women’s influence is that they stay out of politics themselves. The same condition applies to the clergy. Tocqueville firmly supports the separation of church and state, and the main reason is that religion loses its concern for the other world when it interferes in the politics of this world. To secure its power, religion must keep its purity—and then, when it stays out of politics, it can have the most power in politics—for the sake of fostering restraint. Both women and the clergy hold their power indirectly, by refraining from exercising it directly. Together religion and the family represent an indispensable nonpolitical supplement to politics that keeps it under restraint with the reminder of a higher and more intimate life than political life. Both religion and family are, however, in a sense political because they are necessary to self-government. (Fs)

31a Thomas Jefferson wrote the last letter of his life (on June 4, 1826) about the Declaration of Independence he had authored and in it did not hesitate to insert a swipe at “monkish ignorance and superstition” as the enemy of Enlightenment. For Tocqueville, despotism can do without religious faith, but freedom cannot. Though Americans do not allow religion to mix directly in government, he says, it should be considered as “the first of their political institutions,” not so much giving them their taste for freedom as facilitating their use of it. In their minds they “completely confuse Christianity and freedom,” a conclusion enabling him to avoid judging how sincerely Christian Americans are. Americans believe religion to be useful, but it would appear to be useful only if they believe in it because it is true, rather than as a political institution. Religion cannot be “well understood” in the manner of self-interest, as if Americans were impiously looking on their religion from outside it in order to conclude that their piety is a good thing. (Fs)

31b In this context Tocqueville, leaving Jefferson untouched, inserts a swipe of his own at those in France who condemn Americans for not believing with the atheist philosopher Spinoza in the eternity of the world. In the introduction to Democracy in America he had put among the “intellectual miseries” of Europe the parties that set religion and liberty in fierce opposition, and clearly an alliance between the two is the first principle of his new political science and a distinguishing feature of his new liberalism. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; Aristokratie - Demokratie; T.: Rechte (politische Tugend), Gesellschaftsvertrag, Stolz (vs. Hobbes u. Locke), Seele - Selbst (Schwächung d. Seele in D.)

Kurzinhalt: Tocqueville believes that the desire to dominate is not the passion most to be feared in democracy ... His new liberalism is liberalism with soul, as it is indebted to the old notion of soul that liberalism tried to replace with the self.

Textausschnitt: 32a Although the religion the Puritans brought from England was democratic and republican, religion in general is “the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries.” There are a number of aristocratic features of democracy in America that Tocqueville brings to our attention singly. While noting each one, he never adds them up—perhaps because the sum would make aristocracy too conspicuous. For him, aristocracy and democracy are successive eras in history, and aristocracy as a whole, as a principle, has left the scene, gone for good. But if aristocracy is gone for good, it is no longer a danger to democracy. Tocqueville can help us appreciate its virtues and charms without seeming to stand up for its defense. He does not attempt to mix aristocracy with democracy, and he declares resoundingly that the mixed regime is a “chimera” because in every society one always discovers “one principle of action that dominates all others.” In rejecting the mixed regime, Tocqueville abandons the central strategy of classical political science and casts doubt on the idea of liberal pluralism. But he retains the idea of mixing holdover aristocratic features into democracy as long as its principle is not challenged. (Fs)

32b Democracy and aristocracy are two wholes, each being a way of life driven to make itself absolute, thus constituting “as it were, two distinct humanities.” So Tocqueville declares at the end of Democracy in America. Yet he wants to moderate the absolute and partisan character of the democratic humanity without challenging the democratic principle of the sovereignty of the people. He leaves it to his readers to sum up the democratic mores and institutions that are said to be aristocratic in origin or character. Besides religion, he mentions the jury, once aristocratic as being judged by one’s peers, now democratized. America’s devotion to local self-government, to free speech, and to its free press also come from aristocratic England. Democratic associations are artificially created substitutes for the influence of “aristocratic persons,” and lawyers with their love of order and of legal formalities comprise a conservative aristocracy within democratic America. The “secondary powers” Tocqueville repeatedly recommends as a cure for democratic centralization are natural to aristocracy, and so are the democratic forms he praises: indeed, the American Constitution was made by the Federalist party and inspired by its “aristocratic passions.” (Fs)

33a Most striking in this list is Tocqueville’s attribution of rights to the English landed aristocracy. The idea of rights was brought over from England not in the political philosophy of John Locke (his name does not occur in the book) but, he says, was taken from the practice of English nobles who stood up to the king, preserving individual rights and local freedoms. In America “freedom is old, equality comparatively new.” So in speaking of the practice, mores, and institutions of freedom, he does not introduce rights as the basis of practice, as in the Declaration of Independence where men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights prior to the existence of government, but as the practice of self-government itself. (Fs)

33b Rights must be exercised with “a political spirit that suggests to each citizen some of the interests that make nobles in aristocracies act.” That spirit could remind one of the spiritedness (thumos) that Plato and Aristotle describe as bristling like an animal in defense of one’s own interests. It is altogether different from economic and social rights guaranteed by government, known today as “entitlements,” which are intended to provide security to individuals. For Tocqueville, rights are derived from virtue, from “virtue introduced into the political world.” That virtue would prompt one to risk one’s security in the defense of liberty—like the signers of the Declaration who mutually pledged their “sacred honor”—or in everyday practice, to abandon the comforts and complacency of political apathy and join an association or run for office. (Fs)

33c In using the word “aristocracy,” Tocqueville refers to a distinct form of humanity alternative to democracy, but not to the literal sense of the word: “rule of the best.” He means a landed aristocracy of noble families. But the aristocratic features of America come from England, and he therefore speaks not only of Americans but frequently of “Anglo-Americans” when he wants to call attention to the continuity—in some regards—between English aristocracy and American democracy. One can say further that Tocqueville’s liberalism relies on the nation as well as the social state, rather than the social contract, to describe liberal society. When dwelling on the Anglo-Americans, he says quite pointedly that he will never accept that men form a society merely by recognizing the same head and obeying the same laws—namely, the social contract idea. Instead of that idea, he recounts the actual covenant that the Puritans adopted in God’s name and not for the sake of individual self-preservation, as with liberal theory. That America acquired its identity partly from the English stamped it quite differently from what it might have received from another nation and not only in what we today call ethnicity. Its politics and religion, even its philosophy and morals, for example, the notion of self-interest well understood, came to America from England and characterize the dual nation of Anglo-Americans. (Fs)

34a What particularly distinguishes the Anglo-Americans from all other peoples is the sentiment of pride, and this is particularly true of Americans, who have “an immense opinion” of themselves. Even their religious zeal “constantly warms itself at the hearth of patriotism,” and they send preachers to the frontier as much to improve their country as to save souls. American patriotism is distinct from the England’s because it is inspired by democracy rather than the native land and comes out of the exercise of self-government. It is made rather than inherited, and rational, reflective, and enlightened rather than instinctual. For when citizens are active in government as in America, they take credit for the result. They see a connection between their own interest and the common prosperity, and as they work for both, their pride becomes mixed with the desire to become rich. Tocqueville endorses what we now call the American Dream of hard work rewarded, but with emphasis on its basis in politics. American patriotism is “irritable” and annoying to visiting foreigners like Tocqueville, because national pride aggravates and justifies the vanity of each individual so that one is permitted only to praise, never to criticize. It is a consequence of democratic freedom at work, but with significant borrowing from English aristocracy. (Fs)

35a Pride is a great feature of Tocqueville’s new liberalism. “I would willingly trade several of our small virtues for this vice.” He says this against “moralists” who complain against pride, and it applies as well to the formal liberalism of Hobbes, who wants pride or vainglory to be subdued by government, and Locke, who reduces it to a feeling of insecurity or uneasiness. Both thinkers put the right of self-preservation to the fore, declaring that fear for one’s life, rather than pride in one’s virtue, is the strongest natural desire in humans. For them, and for liberalism in general, pride is the enemy of liberty because it induces the desire to dominate others; and it is contrary to self-interest because a proud person easily becomes hot and fractious, abandoning calculation and charging forward imprudently. Tocqueville disagrees, but he ironically accepts that pride is a vice and adds it to the list of things apparently against one’s interest but comprehended in self-interest well understood. (Fs) (notabene)

35b Tocqueville believes that the desire to dominate is not the passion most to be feared in democracy and that the habit of calculating one’s interest works more against liberty than for it. In the matter of pride, he shows what he fears as well as what he praises in American democracy. He praises its self-government and the pride of accomplishment by free human beings, giving evidence of their elevation above the rest of nature that merely obeys and cannot rule itself. But he also observes that democracy acts against pride and tends to subdue it, as when a rich man runs for election. The intent of democratic moralists and liberal theory toward this very end has been achieved in great part by democratic society acting on its own and without their advice. Yet in humbling the proud, democracy creates a pride of its own as necessary in its way as the pride of aristocrats in aristocracy. (Fs)

36a Because pride is so important to liberty, Tocqueville returns to the soul. Pride means that you are conscious of your self, hence above yourself—one elementary meaning of “soul.” The soul can take a view of the self, an approving view in pride, a reproving one in shame. Such a soul introduces, or reintroduces, complication to his notion of human nature. He speaks frequently of the “soul.” His new liberalism is liberalism with soul, as it is indebted to the old notion of soul that liberalism tried to replace with the self. The liberal self had an interest in gain that was not complicated by the critical view of a soul above the self. The liberal self was not capable of pride or shame and unlikely to be satisfied; it just wanted more. Tocqueville does not simply return to the classical notion of an orderly soul, but he invokes the classical and Christian notion of an elevated soul. (Fs) (notabene)

36b Thus the main fear Tocqueville expresses in the introduction to Democracy in America is that democracy as seen in Europe degrades souls. Aristocracy, he says, was based on the belief that the nobles’ privileges were the immutable order of nature, an illusion to be sure, but considered legitimate by the people who had to obey. Democracy, however, has not established legitimate institutions there to replace aristocratic privileges that have been overturned, and the people, though no longer “serfs,” obey existing powers out of fear rather than love and respect. Obedience from fear is acting out of urgent necessity, which degrades the soul because the people feel the shame of their base surrender to authority, even to democratic authority, and cannot respect themselves or think themselves free. (Fs)

36c The cause of this depressing condition is not so much moral faults as certain “intellectual miseries” in the present landscape of Europe. These same errors are at work in the actual democracy in America, where citizens feel proud and believe their government to be legitimate and their obedience to it reasonable. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 1, Macht der Mehrheit;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Chapter 3
Informal democracy

37a Tocqueville approves of the formal democracy in America that gives effect to the sovereignty of the people. He praises the constitutional forms, conceived in all their calculated complexity by its founders, the simple, spontaneous form of the township brought to America by the Puritans, and the art of association that underlies them. These forms enable the people to govern themselves effectively and, as a result, to live sensibly and prosper economically. They make political liberty possible because they are political liberty, which is liberty in practice, not merely in theory. In governing themselves, the American people feel the pride that goes with being free, while making a success of democracy. (Fs)

Majority power

37b Yet Tocqueville sees there is an informal democracy more powerful than the formal one. Forms of association provide structure—both hierarchy and procedure—that enable people to work together—but these channels or enabling devices are also barriers that delay or obstacles that prevent the will of the people from getting its way immediately. They can bring frustrated, impatient pride instead of pride in accomplishment. In the second part of the first volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville announces a shift in his presentation from the principle or dogma of the sovereignty of the people (announced in chapter 4 of the first part) to its actual governing. The second part begins with the chapter title “How one can say strictly that in the United States the people govern.” He declares that “the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the people” have “no lasting obstacles” to their will. The people govern through a representative form of government, but they choose their representatives frequently, direct them, and keep them dependent. Moreover, “the people” refers not to a formal body never acting but to the majority that rules in their name. (Fs)

38a Informal democracy is just what the old, formal liberalism tried to forestall with the ideas of representation and separation of powers. Hobbes and Locke conceived of a formal democracy in the state of nature, but it had only a fleeting existence, if that, and its purpose was to legitimize a sovereign that would govern in the name of—that is, instead of—the people. Locke and Montesquieu, seeing that the people’s representatives might be unfaithful, worked out a formal separation of powers that would compel the government to check itself. And The Federalist perfected these two fundamental forms of free government, so that the American Constitution was entirely representative in every branch and the separated powers were set in a new, improved balance, together with a newly invented federalism. These measures were carefully designed to “refine and enlarge” the people’s will through elections, and if that did not happen, to provide “auxiliary precautions” to deal with a runaway government or an unruly people, installing the reason of the people to regulate its passions. (Fs) (notabene)

38b Tocqueville disagrees, and his “new kind” of liberalism abandons the hope of the old liberalism that a democratic beginning, in the state of nature, can avoid a democratic conclusion in the government that results. Liberal forms designed to keep the sovereign people under discipline will simply be overrun. To say that there will be no lasting obstacle to the people’s will implies that immediate whims may be curtailed ... but maybe not. It is an idea closer to Rousseau (one of Tocqueville’s acknowledged masters) than to the liberals whom Rousseau also criticized for their sophisticated stratagem of having the people be represented instead of ruled. But Tocqueville did not accept, and did not allude to, Rousseau’s proposal to substitute a new form of the social contract for liberal representative government. Whatever forms theorists offer, the democratic people will eventually do what it wants. (Fs)

39a Having asserted that the people strictly rule, Tocqueville moves to the informal instruments of its rule, and first to political parties. Parties are not properly speaking about ethnic identity (as we would say) but divisions over common interests affecting all groups equally. They are an evil inherent in free governments, he says, agreeing with the traditional disesteem for them, and they may be divided into great parties, parties of principle like the Federalists and the Jeffersonians, and small parties without ideas that are concerned only with holding office. Yet even small parties such as the Jacksonian Democrats at the time of Tocqueville’s visit to America have “secret instincts” that refer to the two great parties to be found in all free societies—the democratic instinct for extending the power of the people, and the aristocratic desire to restrain them. Informally, even in democracy, where the people are sovereign, there is a party that wants to restrict them, as if aristocracy even when discordant were irrepressible in human nature. (Fs)

39b The free press in America is a weapon of its parties and also an informal factor in the sovereignty of the people. Government by the people is government by their opinions, which they choose: the power of the press is to formulate the opinions that the people choose. This is the power of the enlightened, but in the United States there is no intellectual capital equivalent to Paris, and the enlightened are dispersed so that they cannot readily address the whole nation. The spirit of the journalist in America by contrast to France, where he has more power, is one of coarse attack, appeal to passion, avoidance of principle, and scandalous revelations. In sum, a free press is a mixture of goods and evils that has to be accepted as such, there being no tenable middle between a press completely free and one silenced and enslaved. (Fs)

40a Another feature of informal democracy, also a mix of good and bad, is the political association. Americans enjoy an extreme freedom of political association that is considered dangerous even among liberals in Europe. Yet it sometimes happens, Tocqueville says, that extreme freedom can correct the abuses of freedom. This does happen in America, where there is great tolerance of opposition, as in the nullification crisis of 1831 to which he alludes. But such action comes often at the cost of sacrificing independence of thinking within the association as it seeks a united front. Such associations do good because by seeking change they “weaken the moral empire of the majority,” yet by seeking the consent of the majority they also endorse its moral force. The sovereignty of the people implies the equal capacity of each and the moral force of all, but in fact it is the rule of the majority over each in the name of all. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 2, Tyrannei der Mehrheit;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Majority tyranny

40b Tocqueville makes his way carefully in this part of Democracy in America, as if he wants to break the news in stages. He had spoken about tyranny in the first part of the first volume, where he praises American forms of government, but never in regard to the majority. The phrase “tyranny of the majority” appears in the chapter on political associations, then is featured in the title of the seventh chapter on the “omnipotence” of the majority, which in the body of the chapter comes out as the “tyranny” of the majority and finally as a new “despotism.” This is the specter behind the sovereignty of the people, which, up to this point, had been developed and praised. (Fs)

40c Omnipotence, Tocqueville says, is safe with God, because His wisdom and justice are equal to His power. But with imperfect human beings this is not the case. Omnipotence in the human sovereign brings tyranny, not necessarily but probably, unless there is a guarantee against it. Tocqueville does not want his sovereign people to take over God’s sovereignty intact as proposed in the liberal principles of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. (Fs) (notabene)

41a But what is the guarantee against the majority in the United States? Public opinion forms the majority; the legislature represents and obeys the majority; so does the executive; the military is the majority under arms; the jury is the majority issuing decrees. The rule of law is no guarantee against majority tyranny, as Tocqueville shows explicitly in his phrase “the tyranny of the laws.” He defines tyranny as rule against the interest of the ruled, as distinct from arbitrariness without law. So law can be an instrument of majority tyranny, and arbitrary rule can be used in the interest of the ruled, though if it is absolute it is not likely to be. Tyranny is one-man rule, except that when a majority acts tyrannically, it thinks and moves as one man. In America, the majority is flattered by its courtiers and “lives in perpetual adoration of itself,” just like Louis XIV. (Fs)

41b Majority tyranny has a new character under democracy. Under monarchy (“the absolute government of one alone”) despotism would strike the victim’s body in order to reach his soul, but democratic despotism “leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” Democratic despotism, to use Tocqueville’s phrase in volume 2 of Democracy in America, is “mild despotism,” not torture and execution but moral and intellectual domination, not hard but soft. Yet it is not all soft. In a footnote Tocqueville gives two examples of majority tyranny: in Baltimore, two journalists who opposed the War of 1812 were killed by a mob of the war’s supporters, and in Philadelphia, black freedmen were kept from voting by intimidation. The second example of racial discrimination Tocqueville takes up at length in a remarkable chapter on the three races—white, black, and Indian—in America. This chapter, the last in the first volume of Democracy in America, and the culmination of its treatment of the sovereignty of the people, is by far the longest. The subjects covered are particularly American, Tocqueville says, dealing with the three races in connection with the future of America. But his deeper intent is to reveal the nature of majority tyranny and what can be done to prevent it, by way of an analysis of pride and freedom. (Fs) (notabene)

42a The two most offensive instances of majority tyranny in America were, and still are, the virtual extermination of the Indians and the enslavement of blacks. Tocqueville studies the three races, not merely the two subject races, because he wants to show the effects of tyranny on the tyrant as well as on the victims. Tyranny, defined as “not in the interest of the governed,” emerges in modern peoples especially because they have been taught to believe in the omnipotence of man rather than God, “the right and the ability to do everything.” (Fs)

42b Tocqueville says nothing about the natural or inherent superiority of a race. Rather, the three races are distinguished by the pride they show, or the lack of it. The white or Anglo-American in the New World Tocqueville calls “man par excellence,” for he treats other races as a man would treat a beast, man over nature. He tyrannizes two subject races, which hold two opposite extremes. The Indian in his barbarous independence represents the extreme limit of both pride and freedom, and the black is kept down in the opposite extreme of servile imitation and slavery. The behavior of the two subject races is quite contrary: the black accepts white civilization and tries to join white society, which rejects and repels him, while the Indian, proud of his ancestry and confident of the bounty of nature, refuses white civilization and remains aloof. The Indian knows freedom, but because he lives under the illusions of his nobility, he cannot control himself and cannot preserve himself. The black knows how to preserve himself but cannot find dignity in being the possession of another man, so cannot improve himself and be free. Each extreme situation reveals the result of majority tyranny as an abuse of pride: too much pride brings the fate of the inflexible Indian, too little brings the subjection of the black. Without a due concern for pride the white majority could suffer the same calamitous misfortune it imposes on its victims. Reason needs to be linked with pride in order to produce freedom, for in democracy it can always seem reasonable to trade freedom for administrative efficiency. But pride needs reason to temper its illusions and to bring it to submit to civilization. To civilization, Tocqueville makes clear, not merely to expertise. (Fs)

43a In endorsing pride, Tocqueville again differs from liberalism in the original form laid down by Thomas Hobbes. His theory claims that men must not merely temper but renounce their pride in order to produce civilization. In the state of nature men live in a state of war, a war of all against all, and in that state the illusions of their vanity need to be plunged into a cold bath of fear for their self-preservation. After this experience, either in fact or imagination, men are ready to be civil and accommodating, if not servile, to their fellows in civilized society. For Hobbes and his many followers, freedom and pride are in conflict, and the lesson is that civilized men must learn to be sensitive and get along. (Fs)

44a Tocqueville takes a course opposed to this, displayed in this same chapter. Instead of a social contract constituting a trade-off of pride for civilization, he wants to retain human pride as being inseparable from human freedom. The Indian with his primitive freedom must be combined with the black and his willingness to be civilized. The result would be a “white” who preserves his freedom because he keeps his pride and who preserves himself because his dignity is not based on illusion. Of course such a “white” would not have to be racially white, but whites as they are would have to renounce their prejudice against the two subject races—which Tocqueville does not think likely. (Fs)

44b When slavery is allied with race, as in America and in modern slavery generally, the slave is marked forever by his color. The prejudice of the white sees him as inferior in humanity, somewhere between a man and a beast. Liberals may assert—and the Declaration of Independence may declare—that all men are created equal, but the claim actually makes slavery more difficult to abolish because the whites do not see blacks to be fully human. A despot could abolish slavery in America, as the European powers abolished it in their colonies. (Fs)

44c Democratic Americans, however, take pride in the equality of whites only, while at the same time (even in the North) they fear revolt from the slaves. The racial pride they show is not understood by liberal theory, which glosses over the question of race, and the fear they reveal works against racial equality instead of in its favor, as supposed by liberal theory. The proud behavior of the Indians, rejecting the ways of whites, shows that liberal theory takes the attraction of civilization for granted and does not understand that one must submit to it. The prejudice of whites, rejecting the blacks, shows that, despite the penchant of democracy contrary to pride, pride does not disappear and must be dealt with, and wholesome objects found for it. The pride many Americans reveal in their prejudice must be turned to the advantage of pride in the freedom of self-government. One cannot merely equalize all pretensions in the state of nature and proceed to a social contract, as liberals often presume in their theories. (Fs)

45a Tocqueville agrees with liberal theory that slavery is unnatural, but not because we all begin equally free in the state of nature. Indignantly he exclaims that in slavery we see “the order of nature reversed.” Yet in another sense of nature, it was all too natural for Europeans to enslave a different race they perceived as inferior—it was understandable. The order of nature is for the best, but the best is not achieved automatically; indeed it faces obstacles from the pride natural to humans. Liberal theory believes it has conquered pride in the state of nature, and it aligns the order of nature (natural law) with the most powerful human passion, fear for one’s self-preservation. For Tocqueville this is an elegant but too simple solution. His thought on democracy is absorbed with pride, and he focuses not merely on opposing prejudice and abandoning false pride, as we do so readily today, but rather on the more difficult task of finding a remedy for lack of pride. Democracy is uncomfortable with the pretensions of pride, which always imply some sort of inequality, but it needs the pride to be found in its own sense of importance and accomplishment as seen especially in its politics. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 3, Macht d. Mehrheit über Gedanken;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 45b Almost immediately after introducing majority tyranny, Tocqueville speaks of the “power that the majority exercises over thought.” He makes the flat statement that “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” It is not that a dissident need fear being persecuted or burned at the stake, but that nobody will listen, and he will be dismissed from consideration, finally shushed. This is an “intellectual” violence that closes the mind and, more effectually than the Inquisition, takes away from authors even the thought of publishing views contrary to the majority’s opinion. Tocqueville cites as evidence the fact that “America has not yet had great writers.” (Fs)

46a Of course Tocqueville’s own book was translated and published in America soon after it appeared in France, apparently regardless of the majority’s opinion. But several times in the book he shows himself wary of being thought hostile either to America or to democracy, and particularly at the beginning of volume 2, where he declares his unwillingness to flatter either the great parties or the little factions of his time. Moreover, a modern reader might respond that America’s great writers, such as they are, were soon to appear: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter in 1850, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1851, to mention only two. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) came out in time for Tocqueville’s consideration in this judgment. Still, one would not want to run afoul of his stricture against Americans, none of whom, he says, can stand the least criticism of their country. (Fs)

46b In the chapter on freedom of the press, Tocqueville remarks that there are three kinds of opinion: belief, doubt, and rational conviction. The last is achieved by very few; most people live in belief, during ages of religion, or in doubt, in the democratic age. Here is one of his brilliant paradoxes: he says that in times of belief, people will change their opinions when they are converted, but in times of doubt they hold to their opinions. Why the latter? When men doubt, they see no better opinion than their own and feel no closer interest, which is likely to be a material interest easily compatible with stubbornness, prejudice, and fixity of opinion. (Fs) (notabene)

46c A free press, therefore, does not induce people to live by rational conviction or by truth. Claims made today for the press that the people have a right to know are too lofty. Most people do not live on the basis of knowledge but of complacent opinion. They are skeptical: ‘You can’t believe what you read!” And we say today that the media always get it wrong. Consequently we believe that we are right, there being no authority above us to say we are wrong. Democrats like to pride themselves on independence of thought, which is just the kind of independence they display the least. Tocqueville identifies two hidden advantages of a free press: employment for the ambition of talented writers using their vulgar cleverness against one another, and stability of opinion engendered by the very confusion that enables people to distrust or dismiss what they are told. (Fs)

47a In volume 2 Tocqueville addresses the authority of science, which attempts to produce rational conviction of a sort in the people, halfway between full knowledge and uninformed opinion. But in this discussion he lays stress on both the “inestimable good” that a free press provides and the irrational self-indulgence of the majority that it nourishes in the name of enlightenment. With characteristic moderation he measures it against both a regime of censorship, a usual contrast for liberals, and reason in the highest sense, not so usual. The result is quite a different picture from the paean to “liberty of thought and discussion” to be found in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859, the year of Tocqueville’s death. (Fs)

47b Mill was a friend and, as reviewer of Democracy in America, an early patron of Tocqueville, but they differed deeply in their view of the relationship between reason and pride. Mill believed that the prejudice of ordinary people could be overcome by persons now called “intellectuals,” who could direct society without actually governing it; he regarded human pride as an impediment and political liberty as an instrument of progress in knowledge. Tocqueville sees pride as both good and bad for democracy, bad when it enthrones the prejudice of a democratic majority, good when it helps to correct that prejudice in the “free school” that political liberty provides. For him, the highest reason represents “the last refuge” of human pride, and though theoretical discoveries may lead to social improvement, they must be undertaken for their own sake. Humans are distinct from animals by their reason; this is the reasonable basis of pride and must be respected in those who are capable of the highest reason. But most humans use their reason, most of the time, to take pride in defending their prejudices. Spreading prejudice is the occupation and calling of a free press. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 3 - Gleichheit und Ähnlichkeit;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Equality and similarity

48a Behind informal institutions is the informal sovereignty of public opinion. In this Tocqueville agrees with Mill, but he is far less optimistic. Mill believed that public opinion could be led by intellectuals like himself, exuding enlightenment, but Tocqueville, while agreeing that the few are more enlightened than the many, thought it more likely that intellectuals would be led by public opinion than lead it. They would not be listened to if they tried to lecture and exhort in the manner of Mill; they would be compelled to serve public opinion. Democratic intellectuals such as Mill tend to be more democratic than the democratic people, while reserving an exception for themselves as instructors of the people. True, Tocqueville himself seeks to “instruct democracy,” as he says in the introduction to Democracy in America. But he does so through candid analysis of its virtues and faults, mixed with muted praise, rather than by arguing for democracy and blaming its opponents. Without indignation he calmly contrasts democracy with aristocracy. (Fs)

48b Public opinion has greater power in democracy than in aristocracy because in the former all are equal or thought equal. No individual or group has more authority than the people, so no one can stand up visibly against them, as happens easily in an aristocracy. The rule of public opinion is in accord with the democratic social state, the Tocquevillean concept that is both prior to politics and determined by politics. Though public opinion in fact rules in a democracy, it does not seem to rule because it has no identifiable representative to whom one must listen. It is, to be sure, formed by intellectuals, politicians, and journalists, but since all claim to follow it, no one takes responsibility for it. When public opinion changes, replacing favor with disfavor or vice versa, it does so without explanation, as it is not accountable to anyone. Some may try to interpret public opinion, but public opinion will not say whether they are correct. Its sovereign decisions are not subject to reason, and one cannot object to them that they are inconsistent or short-sighted. Public opinion will be heard but will not listen when it does not wish to. (Fs) (notabene)

49a Democratic public opinion rests on equality, but the nature of this equality needs to be considered. How does democracy deal with obvious natural inequalities? In a democracy each person thinks himself equal to everyone else. The thought of equality is more powerful than the fact of inequality because it can create equality when it does not find it. Your neighbor may be richer than you, but if you think of him as your equal, that is what he becomes. Tocqueville uses the notion of one’s similars (semblables), or those like oneself, to denote the creative power of democratic public opinion. Your neighbor is not exactly your equal but is someone like you, despite being more or less rich or beautiful or intelligent. Therefore you can treat him as equal, which means that his inequalities do not confer any authority on either him or you. (Fs) (notabene)
49b One must apply the notion of semblable to Tocqueville’s statement that the democratic revolution is bringing greater equality of condition, a statement some readers object to because it seems to overlook obvious inequalities that continue in what we call “democracy.” But what we call democracy is democracy. Democracy is the rule of equals and unequals, both considering themselves similar to one another. People perceived equal are equal in fact as opposed to equal in the abstract, an equality seen rarely if ever, and conceived by liberal theorists as the state of nature. Tocqueville replaces the so-called natural equality of man with the conventional equality of those who think all others are like themselves. Yet the conventional equality of similars is not simply arbitrary; it stands on the basis of the pride in human nature, by which each thinks himself important. For one can feel proud in having no superior (democracy) as well as proud in being superior (aristocracy). (Fs) (notabene)

50a When you bow to public opinion, you are not bowing to a particular person or group that might seem to be in authority over you. The vagueness of public opinion not only protects it from being accused or held accountable but also permits it to be an authority without feeling like one. Similarity in a democratic people makes democracy feel natural even though it is in good part conventional. While accepting the distinction between human nature and human convention, Tocqueville does not try to sharpen it in the manner of liberal theory, opposing the two as if they were hostile to each other, but instead he blends what is given with what is made. (Fs) (notabene)

50b Pride is both flattered and humiliated in the working of democratic public opinion. When one individual compares himself to another, he feels proud that he is the equal of each, but then when he compares himself to “the sum of those like him,” a vast body of people, he is overcome by the sensation of his own insignificance. Thus general opinion “puts an immense weight on the mind of each individual,” enveloping, directing, and oppressing him. The more people resemble one another, the weaker one person feels in face of all the others. He begins to distrust himself when he finds himself in disagreement with the majority, so that the majority “does not need to constrain him: it convinces him.” That is why great revolutions are rare in democracy, Tocqueville says. Democratic peoples have neither the time nor the taste to seek out new opinions; they stay with the familiar despite its faults regardless of the humiliation they suffer because they are subject to the majority. (Fs)

Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy

Titel: A Student's Guide to Political Philosophy

Stichwort: Politische Philosophie (gute erste Bestimmung); Meinungsverschiedenheit (Beispiel: Liberale - Konservative) - gemeinsames Gut - Schiedsrichter; Unterschied: pol. Ph. - Politikwissenschaft; Relativismus (fauler Dogmatismus)

Kurzinhalt: Political philosophy reaches for the best regime, a regime so good that it can hardly exist. Political science advances a theory ... that promises to bring agreement and put an end to partisan dispute. The one rises above partisanship, the other ...

Textausschnitt: PARTISAN DIFFERENCES
I
3a Each side defends its own interests, those of schoolteachers versus those of stockbrokers, for example, but they also appeal to something they have in common: the common good. Defending their interests, each says, contributes to the common good. At the same time, the parties appeal to someone in common, a common judge who would decide the issues between them. Normally this judge is merely the person they are trying to persuade or impress, but he could be a person competent to judge. Arguments, good or bad, are made with reasons and so are aimed implicitly, if not usually, at a reasonable judge. Here is where political philosophy enters. Most people reason badly, but they do reason—and political philosophy starts from that fact. In America today, liberals argue that wealth is unjustly distributed, for example, but they overlook the need to generate wealth. Conservatives do the reverse; preoccupied with wealth generation, they pay little attention to how it should be distributed. (Fs; tblStw: Politik) (notabene)

4a A partisan difference like this one is not a clash of "values," with each side blind to the other and with no way to decide between them. A competent judge could ask both sides why they omit what they do, and he could supply reasons even if the parties could not. Such a judge is on the way toward political philosophy. (Fs)

4b There is a long tradition of political philosophy dating from Socrates and consisting of a series of great books, each written to comment favorably or adversely on a contemporary or a preceding philosophy. A scholar can devote his life to this tradition or a part of it, and anyone serious about political philosophy will want to acquire at least some knowledge of the tradition. But one does not have to go to books of political philosophy to find political philosophy. All the books of political philosophy could be lost, if one can imagine such a calamity, and yet the activity could be generated anew directly from political life. The partly rational character of politics calls for completion in political philosophy—even though it takes a great thinker, to whom we are all greatly indebted, to answer the call. (Fs)

5a Politics always has political philosophy lying within it, waiting to emerge. So far as we know, however, it has emerged just once, with Socrates—but that event left a lasting impression. It was a "first." I stress the connection between politics and political philosophy because such a connection is not to be found in the kind of political science that tries to ape the natural sciences. That political science, which dominates political science departments today, is a rival to political philosophy. Instead of addressing the partisan issues of citizens and politicians, it avoids them and replaces their words with scientific terms. Rather than good, just, and noble, you hear political scientists of this kind speaking of utility or preferences. These terms are meant to be neutral, abstracted from partisan dispute. Instead of serving as judge of what is good, just, or noble, such political scientists conceive themselves to be disinterested observers, as if they had no stake in the outcomes of politics. As political scientists, they believe they must suppress their opinions as citizens lest they contaminate their scientific selves. The political philosopher, however, takes a stand with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who said that while he himself was not a partisan, he undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties. (Fs) (notabene)

6a To sum up: political philosophy seeks to judge political partisans, but to do so it must enter into political debate. It wants to be impartial, or to be a partisan for the whole, for the common good; but that impartiality is drawn from the arguments of the parties themselves by extending their claims and not by standing aloof from them, divided between scientist and citizen, half slave to science, half rebel from it. Being involved in partisan dispute does not make the political philosopher fall victim to relativism, for the relativism so fashionable today is a sort of lazy dogmatism. These relativists refuse to enter into political debate because they are sure even before hearing the debate that it cannot be resolved; they believe like the political scientists they otherwise reject that nothing can be just or good or noble unless everyone agrees. The political philosopher knows for sure that politics will always be debatable, whether the debate is open or suppressed, but that fact—rather welcome when you reflect on it—does not stop him from seeking a common good that might be too good for everyone to agree with. (Fs) (notabene)

6b Political philosophy reaches for the best regime, a regime so good that it can hardly exist. Political science advances a theory—in fact, a number of theories—that promises to bring agreement and put an end to partisan dispute. The one rises above partisanship, the other, as we shall see, undercuts it. Now, why should we prefer the former? So far I have argued for political philosophy, but what's wrong with seeking agreement instead of reaching for the moon? (Fs) (notabene)

7a The question is more complicated than we have seen so far, because an important historical fact has not yet been mentioned: political science came from political philosophy. More precisely, political science rebelled from political philosophy in the seventeenth century and in the positivist movement of the late nineteenth century declared itself distinct and separate. The controversy we see now between political science and political philosophy within university departments of "political science" is a consequence of this earlier, deeper rebellion. Today political science is often said to be "descriptive" or "empirical," concerned with facts; political philosophy is called "normative" because it expresses values. But these terms merely repeat in more abstract form the difference between political science, which seeks agreement, and political philosophy, which seeks the best. Political science likes facts because it is thought possible to agree on facts as opposed to values, and political philosophy provides values or norms because it seeks what is best. (Fs) (notabene)

8a When we contrast political science and political philosophy we are really speaking of two kinds of political philosophy, modern and ancient. To appreciate the political science we have now, we need to look at its rival; to do that, we must enter into the history of political philosophy. We must study the tradition that has been handed down to us. The great political philosophers read the works of their predecessors and commented on them, sometimes agreeing, often disagreeing. This history has less of the accidental in it than other history because, to a much greater degree than citizens or statesmen, philosophers are reflecting upon, and reacting to, thinkers that came before them. In considering the history of Western civilization, one must not forget the tradition of Western thought that inspires and explains the actions of peoples and statesmen. It is both more and less than a tradition in the usual sense—more, as it is more thoughtful, and less, being divided against itself and open to argument and correction. The tradition of political philosophy is not a sequence of customs; still less is it a "canon" established by some dominant political power, as is sometimes said. It is the only tradition that does not claim to be an authority, that on the contrary constantly questions authority; quite unlike the various non-Western traditions, it is not exclusive and not peremptory. It is philosophic. No one can count himself educated who does not have some acquaintance with this tradition. It informs you of the leading possibilities of human life, and by giving you a sense of what has been tried and of what is now dominant, it tells you where we are now in a depth not available from any other source. (Fs)

9a Much political theory today feels no obligation to examine its history and sometimes looks down on the history of the subject as if it could not be a matter of current interest. But our reasoning shows that the history of political philosophy is required for understanding its substance. The question of what view to take of partisan debate is still an issue today; some people relish their partisanship, some—perhaps a growing number—feel uncomfortable with loud arguments and deplore partisan attitudes. In recent decades the political science profession has been subject to successive new theories such as behavioralism and rational choice, each of which promises to put an end to the old debates over values and to do away with political philosophy. But somehow political philosophy survives, despite efforts to supersede it, just as, despite the failure of those efforts, political science in the modern sense reemerges periodically to make another try at bringing consensus and doing away with debate. To see what each of them is we must look for their origins. (Fs)