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)