by John Marini
41 Democracy, 107.
42 Ibid., 145.
43 Koritansky, “Decentralization,” 68n39.
44 Ibid., 68.
45 Ibid., 68–69.
46 Martin Diamond, “The Ends of Federalism,” The Federal Polity, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974), 139.
47 Roger Boesche, “Tocqueville and Le Commerce: A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April–June 1983).
48 Zetterbaum, Problem, 118.
49 Democracy, 57.
50 Quoted in J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Essay in Political Science (New York: Viking Press, 1940), 26. Hereinafter cited as Mayer, Biographical Essay.
51 Democracy, 301.
52 Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Hafner, 1947), 38.
53 John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1963), 238.
54 Zetterbaum, Problem, 86.
55 Mayer, Biographical Essay, 149.
56 Ibid., 37–38.
57 Ibid., 110.
58 Ibid., 111.
59 Alexis de Tocqueville, “The Art and Science of Politics,” trans. J. P. Mayer, Encounter 36 (January 1971): 29–30. Hereinafter cited as “Politics.”
60 Democracy, 405.
61 Ibid., 10–11.
62 “Politics,” 32.
63 Democracy, 428.
64 Ibid., 426–27.
65 Ibid, 427.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 426.
69 Journeys, 66–67.
70 Ibid., 67.
71 Delba Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s Old Regime: Political History,” The Review of Politics 43 (January 1981), 98.
72 lrving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 126.
73 Old Regime, 98–99.
74 Ibid., 160.
75 Ibid., 60.
76 Alexis de Tocqueville, “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. John Lukacs (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), 103. Hereinafter cited as European Revolution.
77 Old Regime, 60.
78 European Revolution, 101.
79 Ibid., 101–2.
80 Democracy, 647.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 648.
83 Ibid., 412.
84 Ibid., 413.
85 Ibid., 413–14.
86 Ibid., 411.
87 Ibid., 86.
88 Ibid., 703.
89 Ibid., 640.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 641.
92 Ibid., 482.
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid., 515.
95 Ibid., 654, footnote 3.
96 Ibid., 485.
97 Quoted in Harry D. Gideonse, “De Tocqueville, Liberal of a New Type,” American Journal of Economics 19 (July 1960): 412.
98 Roger Boesche, “The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980): 553.
99 Ibid., 556.
100 Old Regime, xiv.
101 Democracy, 645.
102 Gargan, De Tocqueville, 65.
CHAPTER 10: ON HARVEY MANSFIELD’S JEFFERSON LECTURE: HOW TO UNDERSTAND POLITICS
1 The text of the Jefferson Lecture, “How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science”, delivered May 8, 2007, at the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC, can be found here: https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/harvey-mansfield-lecture.
2 Tocqueville used the term “centralized administration” to describe a phenomenon that we now call “bureaucracy.” The term was not yet in use in Tocqueville’s time. Bureaucratization grows out of the attempt to rationalize every aspect of human life. The most important philosopher of what came to be known as bureaucracy was G. F. W. Hegel. He attempted to establish the rule of organized intelligence as the fundamental requirement of the rational state.
3 Tocqueville insisted that “as I studied American society, more and more I saw in equality of conditions the generative fact from which each particular fact seemed to issue, and I found it before me constantly as a central point at which all my observations came to an end.” Democracy in America, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.
4 In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), Tocqueville insisted that “freedom and freedom alone can extirpate these vices”—he is speaking of the process of centralization that isolates the individual and leads to despotism—“which, indeed, are innate in communities of this order; it alone can call a halt to their pernicious influence. For only freedom can deliver the members of a community from that isolation which is the lot of the individual left to his own devices and, compelling them to get in touch with each other, promote an active sense of fellowship. In a community of free citizens every man is daily reminded of the need of meeting his fellow men, of hearing what they have to say, of exchanging ideas, and coming to an agreement as to the conduct of their common interests.” xiv. In his view, local freedom makes it possible to reconcile the individual and the general will.
5 The American Founders would have agreed with Edmund Burke’s observation that “men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
6 Strauss has suggested that “it became ever more clear that man’s freedom is inseparable from a radical dependence. Yet this dependence was understood as itself a product of human freedom, and the name for that is history. The so-called discovery of history consists in the realization, or in the alleged realization, that man’s freedom is radically limited by his earlier use of his freedom, and not by his nature or by the whole order of nature or creation.” “Progress or Return?” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 245.
7 In the thinkers who came after Rousseau, this understanding of will was to become the foundation of the moral law. One of those thinkers, Immanuel Kant, made it clear that Rousseau had set him right. Kant’s expression of this understanding of Rousseau resulted in the elevation or primacy of practical reason, or moral reason, as the only thing of absolute worth. In Kant, will and practical reason had become identical. There was no longer a possibility of apprehending the moral law, which was not but the willing of it. At the same time, the old understanding of prudence, or practical reason, is left without any reason for being. Kant consequently undermined the authority or primacy of theoretical reason and the autonomy of prudence, or practical reason. Neither physics nor metaphysics could supply knowledge of the absolute; the only knowledge of the absolute is knowledge of the moral law, which originates solely in the will. Tocqueville’s view of morality also presupposes such a defense of the sovereignty of the will, even when he believes the people may be wrong. Like Rousseau and Kant, Tocqueville thinks there is no appeal—to nature or God—from an unjust law. In such a case, Tocqueville says, “I only appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.” Democracy in America, 240.
8 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953), 278–79.
9 Tocqueville insisted that “freedom alone is capable of lifting men’s minds above mere mammon worship and the petty personal worries which crop up in the course of everyday life, and of making them aware at every moment that they belong each and all to a vaster entity, above and around them—their native land. It alone replaces at certain critical moments their natural love of material welfare by a loftier, more virile ideal; offers other objectives than that of getting rich; and sheds a light enabling all to see and appraise men’s vices and their virtues as they truly are.” Old Regime, xiv.
10 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 281.
11 Ibid., 274.
12 Thus Rousseau’s social contract is not the same a
s that of John Locke, or the American Founders. It is not nature, but the general will of the sovereign—the people—which establishes the ground of morality and legitimacy. The political problem requires a reconciliation of the particular and general; the individual will become moral by being generalized. To be free after he has become a social, or dependent, being, every individual must participate in his own governance; he must be a self-legislator on behalf of the community. This is why a democracy must be small, or, as Tocqueville insisted, liberty must be local liberty.
13 The theoretical dilemma posed by this change of orientation, as it was interpreted by Rousseau’s successors, goes to the heart of the transformation of the understanding of the meaning of nature, and natural right, and its displacement, first by a philosophy of freedom (Rousseau), and subsequently by a philosophy of History (Hegel).
14 Although Tocqueville feared centralization, he understood it as a concomitant of a process of rationalization, or the taste for general ideas. Therefore, his understanding of centralization as a kind of inevitable process indicated his agreement with Rousseau that nature and the faculty of reason does not provide the ground for understanding man and his capacity for choice. It was free will, not reason, that legitimized choice. Rousseau had been partly persuaded by the new science of politics of Hobbes, which incorporated Galileo’s physics. (Hobbes incorporated the discovery of the laws of motion to help explain the passions that drive humans; man is matter in motion.) But Rousseau insisted that science and the laws of motion only explain physical man, not what is truly unique or important about man. “For physics explains in some way the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power are found only purely spiritual acts about which the laws of mechanics explain nothing.” He concluded, “Therefore it is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent.… It is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown” (emphasis mine). Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 2:114. It is here that Rousseau introduced what he thought was indisputable in terms of distinguishing man and animal, the faculty of self-perfection, or perfectibility. Tocqueville agrees: “Perfectibility is therefore as old as the world; equality did not give birth to it, but it gives it a new character.” Democracy in America, 427.
15 Strauss has suggested that “Rousseau’s concept of the general will, which as such cannot err—which by merely being is what it ought to be—showed how the gulf between the is and ought can be overcome.” Nonetheless, Strauss insisted that, “strictly speaking, Rousseau showed this only under the condition that his doctrine of the general will, his political doctrine proper, is linked with his doctrine of the historical process, and this linking was the work of Rousseau’s great successors, Kant and Hegel, rather than of Rousseau himself. According to this view, the rational or just society, the society characterized by the existence of a general will known to be the general will, i.e., the ideal, is necessarily actualized by the historical process without men’s intending to actualize it. Why can the general will not err? Why is the general will necessarily good? The answer is: it is good because it is rational, and it is rational because it is general; it emerges through the generalization of the particular will, of the will which as such is not good.” Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 91.
16 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 276.
17 Ibid., 276–77.
18 Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 86. Interestingly, in his review of Democracy in America in 1840, John Stuart Mill concluded the opposite. “It is perhaps the greatest defect of M. de Tocqueville’s book, that … his propositions, even when derived from observation, have the air of mere abstract speculations.” Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1963), 238. Paradoxically, both Mill and Zetterbaum might be right. Tocqueville was concerned with placing politics within a proper historical framework, but he was aware that every society is animated by certain ideas. Indeed, Tocqueville believed that it was the science of politics itself that gave “birth or at least form to those general concepts whence emerge the facts with which politicians have to deal, and the laws of which they believe themselves the inventors. They form a kind of atmosphere surrounding each society in which both rulers and governed have to draw intellectual breath, and whence—often without realizing it—both groups derive the principles of action. Only among barbarians does the practical side of politics exist alone.” Tocqueville, quoted in J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Essay in Political Science (New York: Viking Press, 1940), 149. The question arises, however: Where does the science of politics originate? Zetterbaum seems to deny that Tocqueville understood politics in a philosophical way. If so, does it mean that Tocqueville was primarily concerned with placing politics within a proper historical framework? Even if that is so, Tocqueville, as Mill understood, was aware that every society is animated by certain general ideas. Did Mill believe that Tocqueville’s observations were too dependent upon mere abstract speculation? Tocqueville, himself, insisted upon what he called “the mingling of history proper with historical philosophy. I do not yet see how I can mix the two things (and it is most important that this should be done, for one can put it that the former is the canvas, the latter the color—and both these are necessary to make a picture).” Quoted in Mayer, 111.
19 Indeed, the political science that came after Tocqueville—certain that history had revealed itself as intelligible and that theory was rationalized will—abandoned prudence in exchange for a scientific or empirical methodology.
20 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 274.
21 It was Hegel, who purportedly solved the political and the human problem, which required uniting true knowledge of public right with perfect knowledge of the end or purpose of the historical process. As a result, it was possible to transcend all those distinctions that the earlier liberalism (particularly that of John Locke) had thought to be rooted in nature, or human nature. It was those natural distinctions that brought about the necessity of separating church and state, government and civil society, the public and private sphere. Those sources of factionalism could not be transcended or ameliorated, except in a regime of civil and religious liberty. Consequently, constitutional or limited government is necessary to preserve a kind of liberty that is compatible with equality and human nature. A rational solution to the political-theological problem is possible, but no such solution to the human problem is possible, unless man becomes fully wise. The philosophy and end of History made such knowledge accessible to man. Strauss notes that “Hegel’s time was the absolute moment, the end of meaningful time; the absolute religion, Christianity, had become completely reconciled with the world; it had become completely secularized or the saeculum had become completely Christian in and through the post-revolutionary State; history as meaningful change had come to its end; all theoretical and practical problems had in principle been solved; hence, the historical process was demonstrably rational.” Leo Strauss, “Relativism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 24–25. Tocqueville, unlike his friend Gobineau, was never persuaded by Hegel or the Germans.
22 However, Tocqueville did not believe that the individual and general will could be reconciled on the level of the rational state, but only under conditions of local liberty. Therefore, Hegel insisted, “this essential being is itself the union of two wills: the subjective will and the rational will. This is an ethical totality, the state [Hegel’s italics]. It is the reality wherein the individual has and enjoys his freedom—but only in
sofar as he knows, believes, and wills the universal.… As against this negative concept of freedom, it is rather law, ethical life, the state (and they alone) that comprise the positive reality and satisfaction of freedom. The freedom which is limited in the state is that of caprice, the freedom that relates to the particularity of individual needs.… For we must understand that the State is the realization of freedom, i.e., of the absolute end-goal, and that it exists for its own sake.” Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett Books, 1988), 41. Tocqueville still understood human freedom, in terms of the private, or individual, capacity for self-government.
23 In the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln provided a political defense of the idea of natural right in his attempt to ground the principle of equality, and the regime based upon it, in the “abstract truths” of the Declaration of Independence, or the laws of nature and nature’s God. Lincoln’s defense of the Union and the Constitution required a defense of natural right, or the grounding of the Constitution in the principle of equality. But after the Civil War, particularly in the American university, the victory of historicism and positivism undermined the theoretical and intellectual ground of natural right. Consequently, many of the new social scientists, even those who admired Lincoln, and who had fought for the Union, became Progressives and embraced the historical understanding of man, made scientifically respectable by Darwinism. Subsequently, they became enemies of constitutional government. That was so because they had accepted the view of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel—that nature, natural right, and metaphysical reason could provide no moral guidance for human life. Instead, the Kantian view of practical reason had created the foundation for the primacy of moral will. That view would establish the theoretical framework that provided the grounds for positivism and, after Nietzsche, moral relativism and nihilism. In the absence of a theoretical or metaphysical defense of nature and reason, it is nearly impossible to make a defense of limited or constitutional government.
24 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7.