Thoughts on Tocqueville, Democracy and Transcendent Standards
Nietzsche was right, but Nietzsche went mad. He was right that truth and morality, science and ethics, are illusions that we have made up – or which some have made up as part of their will to power. He thought we could dispense with them and move to a world based on the affirmation of life. He was an aristocratic anarchist – the powerful and the strong prevail. He went mad. He was one of those he described in The Antichrist as ‘the weak and the botched.’ As we all are. We are all flawed beings and will never be ‘supermen.’ We need the illusion but have seen through the illusion. We have become too clever to be able to conceal the origins of that which we worship.
Such is the conclusion we could draw when observing the extent to which self-made man has snookered himself in his self-made world. It’s not my view. But it is the logical conclusion to be drawn from the views of those who see my view as an illusion. Transcendent standards are just ‘made up,’ after all. Aren’t they? All reality is just a produced reality?
Politics shorn of any originary or metaphysical underpinnings is a power struggle, and no more. It is perfectly possible to cast this endless flux of politics, especially democratic politics, in good light. This is what liberals and democrats have been doing for years, only to be confronted by ailing public spirit and failing political institutions. You can mask the endless struggle all you like with words like ‘pluralism,’ even more realistic terms like ‘conflict pluralism.’ But the basic emptiness and arbitrariness of the struggle, even the victory, will sooner or later become apparent. A politics of endless struggle soon becomes a war of attrition in which contending parties cease to actually stand for something. Instead they organize and act to check, subvert, and destroy others. The result is a public sphere of mutual self-cancellation.
You can reduce politics to a method or procedure, a way of engaging in conflict or handling conflict. And you can put a positive gloss on things by praising the openness of struggle, the ability to accommodate paradoxes. The biggest paradox of all is the extent to which contending parties use terms and advance arguments which clearly presuppose the existence of truth and morality as meaningful and substantial entities when, strictly speaking, in a politics considered no more than an endless flux, they do not. It is all power-plays and projections, which contending parties claiming truth and morality lies on their side, denying it to their rivals.
I don’t care for such a paradox. In fact, I consider it a blatant hypocrisy. I would prefer an open and explicit affirmation of a sophist politics in which victory goes to the strongest – which is what we have now – since it would force those whom I believe to be sincere in their professions of truth and morality to actually bring politics into conformity with an explicit and overt recognition of transcendent standards. Of course, Nietzsche would reject this entirely, seeing this merely a continuation of false projection.
The question is: can society live without truth and morality? I say not. Even more, I say that the mere belief that truth and morality exists is required for reasonable communication, civility, and community. Every utterance made by people must be considered a truth-claim, for it is only by being considered as such that people will communicate with each other. Once we begin to suspect that people are telling lies, being deceitful and duplicitous, using words to advance an agenda, then we will stop speaking and stop listening.
I have read liberal and democratic theorists waxing lyrical about liberal democracy as an open, experimental society, an endlessly dynamic political order that celebrates its own originality. ‘One could scarce forbear to cheer,’ as Thomas Babington Macaulay would have put it. But the view is both complacent and parasitic. Liberal democratic practices and institutions function only against the backdrop of a moral, cultural, and institutional capital created outside of this endless flux, but does not itself replenish this capital. At some point, the process of self-invention becomes a self-consumption. As the emptiness becomes apparent, the effort to sustain endless re-invention becomes too great a burden to bear.
In this, an open politics of the open society mirrors the objectively valueless world. Just as human beings have had to accept that they live in a meaningless universe without purpose or end, giving up their cosmic longing for meaning, so they are having to accept that the struggles of politics are meaningless in any ultimate sense. The result is utterly reductive, with all great ends and ideals progressively stripped away as mere intellectual and moral pretensions until all that is left is the need to win lest one fall into the ranks of the losers. This is the world of Thomas Hobbes and sheer naked power – one accumulates or is accumulated. There is no point to the game other than staying in the game. The victories are merely won to stay in the game, under the imperative of winning further victories. It is a nihilism, the accumulation of power for the sake of further accumulation of power, winning merely to carry on winning.
Tocqueville, who wrote well on the paradoxical character of liberal democracy, justifying its openness in the context of a devotion to public ends and activity, saw the dangers as well as the potentials. He observed the emerging market society, out of which a liberal democratic politics was emerging, and expressed reservation in his journal: ‘Everything I see fails to excite my enthusiasm, because I attribute more to the nature of things than to human will.’
The problem is, in a politics that has discarded any metaphysical assumptions with respect to ‘the nature of things,’ all that there is is an endless clash and contest between a diversity of human wills, a world of assertion and counter-assertion in which contending parties may cite morality and truth, but whose claims are basically no more than projections, attempts to give solidity, or merely the appearance of solidity, to wishes and desires.
The challenge against ‘false fixities’ can appear radical and, indeed, it is. The winners of past victories in this politics as power play attempt to insulate their power from public contestation, challenge, and change by naturalising their victory by way of reference to transcendent standards. In arguing for transcendent standards, I well know the ideological use to which they have routinely been put, dehistoricizing what needs to be historicised. But in radicalising by relativizing the danger is that we lose a sense of transcendent standards as such, and with them notions of truth and morality as substantive and meaningful, that is, as more than projections of human will.
Tocqueville is an unusual political thinker. He has continued to inspire liberal and conservative thinkers over the years, from the liberal John Stuart Mill in his own time to the Catholic conservative Patrick Deneen in the contemporary age. In parliament, first under the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and then during the Second Republic (1849–1851), Tocqueville sat on the centre-left. Tocqueville’s own description of his political position is one that intrigues me: "the word ‘left’ is... the word I wanted to attach to my name so that it would remain attached to it forever." (Jardin, Andre (1989). Tocqueville: A Biography. Macmillan. p. 299). If Tocqueville is identifying with the Left in politics, it is also clear that he wanted that Left to cleave to a Tocquevillian politics that tempered abstract ideals and rationalism with civility, public spirit, and associational solidarity. And also, I would argue, with standards that are greater than the assertion of the will in politics. Tocqueville is not heavy on these standards, but there is a peculiar flavour to his words that indicate the existence of a background assumption or belief. Although his focus is elsewhere, there are occasional references, between the lines, to ‘the nature of things’ as God-given throughout Democracy in America. This can tend to be missed by those happy to celebrate Tocqueville’s description of democratic originality and novelty. I take Tocqueville’s background assumption of the ‘nature of things’ to be the affirmation of a transcendent principle that serves to constrain, guide, and orient the seemingly endless flux of liberal democracy. I would go further and say that without such a principle, a liberal democracy of no more than assertive human will cannot but consume itself. The effort of living on a destinationless voyage cannot be sustained. Hence the constant use of arguments in politics which cite the truth and morality of one’s own position, and the falsehood and immorality of the positions of rivals. Truth plainly matters to people, the belief in truth in the first place, encouraging a pursuit of truth. Without that shared belief, people can have no hope of holding others to account. At this point, communication breaks down.
For this reason, the celebrations of politics and democratic politics in particular as an endless contest fail. The view sounds radical, subverting the false fixities of the dominant power, seeking as it does to naturalize its historical victories by way of legal and institutional power, but isn’t radical at all – it is rootless and therefore fruitless, capable of deconstructing and destroying power but incapable of embedding and securing its own power without thereby committing the same error of naturalization. All victories are up for grabs in such a political world; we live in a state of permanent revolution, an endless power/resistance. If Nietzsche is right, and there is no truth and morality, then this groundless politics is all that there is. If that is so, then all normative claims must be abandoned, since their character as false projection has been revealed.
Worth considering here is Jacques Rancière’s book Disagreement. For Rancière, that phrase expresses the very paradox of politics: the absence of a proper foundation. Politics, he argues, begins when the demos (which he identifies with the ‘excessive’ or unrepresented part of society) seeks to disrupt and subvert the order of domination and distribution of goods which the dominant class has sought to ‘naturalize’ by way of the institutions of government, law, and police. In this context, the idea of ‘equality’ operates as a game of contestation that constantly substitutes litigation for political action and community. This game, Rancière maintains, operates by a primary logic of ‘misunderstanding.’ To overcome this, he contends, political philosophy has ever been engaged in an attempt to replace the contingency of the politics of appearances with the ‘politics of truth.’ Rancière examines the various transformations of this regime of ‘truth’ sought by those who affirm the philosophical ideal or norm, and their effects on practical politics. In the process, he is concerned to distinguish ‘democracy’ from the practices of a consensual system so as to unravel the ramifications of ‘the end of politics.’
There is a lot to unpack here, particularly in relation to my own work on ‘rational freedom,’ which most certainly identifies me as one who affirms a normative philosophical ideal within a ‘politics of truth.’ I can state clearly and categorically in the first instance that I stand on neither side of the division established by Rancière here. I have from the first challenged this notion that truth entails ‘the end of politics,’ by putting politics as dialogue and deliberation on ice. That is certainly a danger. Whilst affirming transcendent standards of truth and justice, I nevertheless underline that the temper of politics is judicious, and that truth needs to be drawn out by way of a dialectical process of democratic engagement. In fine, I insist on the bridge between the field of theoretical reason (transcendent standards of truth) and practical reason (ethics and politics, the ways in which human beings apprehend the truth). Critics of truth and morality in politics see only abstract metaphysical ‘reality’ on the one hand and false claims within a produced reality on the other, as though the fallacies of the latter pertain also to the former. They are quite distinct, and it is by way of the former that we can expose the falsehoods of the latter.
By holding the two realms apart, it is possible to argue for the creative historical incarnation of transcendent standards in time and place, whilst always being critical of the particular forms of that incarnation. In other words, everything that Rancière justifies in the name of democracy, everything that liberal democratic theorists argue for with respect to an open politics critical of false fixities is contained in my view on transcendent standards. Indeed, the critical perspective is obligatory in the transcendent view, concerned as it is that institutions, practices, and actions in time and place conform to truth and morality. Bear in mind that the natural law tradition is concerned not with the givens of a biological law of nature but with a nature that is seen through the critical and moral and culturally and historically evolving eye of human reason.
It is for these reasons that I have myself been critical of various historical incarnations of ‘the politics of truth,’ whether we go back to Plato or forwards to a contemporary environmentalism which insists government ‘tell the truth.’ Truth-telling is the easy part, but it isn’t politics. The unfolding of truth through the interaction of people in public and civic space is a dialectical process of engagement and disagreement, eliciting truth-seeking responses, leading hopefully to agreement. Political philosophers since Plato have shied away from the public forum. They never recovered from the shock at the fate of Socrates and have kept their distance ever since. Socrates was a man of the public square, taking the truth into the market place and arguing with all and sundry. He was put to death by the democratic regime of Athens for his troubles, and political philosophers have been leery of the people ever since. The psychological roots of ‘the end of politics’ lie here. Basically, people who know the truth, or think they have established the truth, prefer to dictate it or have governments legislate it, educating from the outside, rather than intervening in the public square with people who may not necessarily be truth-seekers. The hard boards of politics are harder still for idealists. I affirm the philosophical ideal represented by transcendent standards whilst also recognizing the need to engage the people as truth-seeking citizens and thereby tread the hard boards.
That’s quite distinct from the view Jacques Rancière proposes in Disagreement. For Rancière, politics is without a proper foundation, there are no grounds, transcendent or otherwise. He recognizes that this leads to politics as being paradoxical in being a constant interplay between a demos, the ‘excessive’ or unrepresented part of society outside of society, and a dominant class. The marginalized fight it out with the dominant, seeking to upset the settled and ‘naturalized’ order of domination, but the game seems endless. This, I take, to be the paradox of politics, since it indicates the extent to which it is illegitimate for any class to ever embed its power, to the extent that any settlement could be construed as a naturalisation. The problem with Rancière’s conception of politics is not that it is radical but that it isn’t radical enough, in that any unrepresented part of society can never legitimately embed its power. Rancière presents a view of a democracy based on an institutional incapacity. On these premises, it is impossible for the subaltern, the excluded, and the marginalized to ever claim public space of their own and establish their own government and legal institutions. Instead of a genuine public community, all that there is is an endless game of contestation that is constantly concerned to unsettle and undermine any attempt at political settlement.
To put it simply, it is perfectly possible to expose the false fixities claimed by dominant powers and institutions in time and place whilst affirming transcendent standards. Those claiming privilege and immunity by way of ‘natural’ and God-given standards are guilty of appropriating those standards to serve particular political ends. Such claims are always open to public contestation, and subversion. At the same time, that challenge is mounted against false claims made in the name of transcendent standards, not those standards as such. The critical target is the conflation of transcendent standards and their historical and political incarnation, not those standards as such.
In this sense, the paradox of politics to which Rancière refers – the absence of foundations – seems more like the paradox of a democracy that is forever engaged in an attempt to establish itself on its own foundations, whilst acknowledging, tacitly, that it will forever fall short of the transcendent standards that alone make democracy work.
Plato knew it, challenging democracy to supply itself with a self-limiting principle to check against its tendency to self-destructive excess. And Rousseau knew it, arguing that the perfection sought by democracy is reserved for ‘gods,’ those beings capable of a superhuman subordination of their passions and feelings to rational control. Rousseau is a political philosopher concerned to determine the most realistic form of government. And his verdict here goes against democracy: ‘Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men’ (Rousseau, The Social Contract SC III. iv). Tocqueville considered this view to be fundamentally true. The earthly struggle for equalisation is endless for the very reason it can never be full attained. Democracy is locked in an endless cycle in pursuit of the unattainable. Therein lies the true paradox of democratic politics. We can gloss this endlessness by arguing that democracy is an always unfinished politics. Insofar as that guards against the false fixities entailed by ‘the end of politics’ – a politics of truth that puts disagreement, dissensus, and deliberation on ice – that is healthy and good. But the character of that statement changes when we say that democracy is an unfinishable project, precisely because it is unattainable. What, then, is the point? Once it is revealed that we are in pursuit of an unattainable end, the resolve to continue the pursuit will gradually weaken and finally collapse. If all great truths ‘never without some illusion prosper, as Hans Sachs puts it in Die Meistersinger, then neither can they withstand the revelation of that enveloping illusion. A democracy that lives forever in the future has a value as a regulative ideal, inspiring effort and orienting behaviour towards some desirable end. I have argued this with respect to Kant’s republic of ends as an ideal human community composed of free and equal members as co-legislators subject to the laws they give themselves (Kant 1965: B.372). This ideal of the perfect community exists as a goal of future society (Critique of Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith trans 1965: B836f). In the sensible sphere, it exists as progress towards communal autonomy as the 'real object of our willing' (Critique of Practical Reason Lewis White Beck trans 1956:121f). Marx was scathing of such a view, denouncing it as a religious ideal that bore as much relation to reality as Heaven does to Earth, making this frequent contrast in his early writings.
Marx explicitly demanded that Heaven be realized on Earth. Marx establishes democracy as the truth of the constitution: ‘Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth of democracy… Democracy is the generic constitution. Monarchy is only a variant and a bad variant at that. Democracy is both form and content. Monarchy is supposed to be only a form, but it falsifies the content.’ He continues: ‘it goes without saying that all forms of the state have democracy for their truth and that they are untrue to the extent that they are not democracy.’ (Marx Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State). Marx considers democracy to be the solution to the paradox of politics. Democracy is 'the generic constitution' (CHDS 1975:87), the solution to the riddle of every constitution, the constitution founded on its 'true ground' of real individuals, 'the people's own creation' (CHDS 1975:87). Marx proceeds from the demos as the true reality behind all political forms. The 'state is an abstraction. Only the people is a concrete reality' (CHDS 1975: 85). In the process of establishing this truth, Marx exposes the attempts to elevate particular variants of a produced reality to the status of metaphysical truth:
It is just as difficult to erect the idea of the birth of a monarch into a metaphysical truth as the idea of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. This latter notion, a fact of consciousness, can be explained, however, as the product of human illusions and circumstances; the former idea is also an empirical fact and can be explained in the same way.
Marx EW CHDS 1975
Can it be done? If we follow the reasoning above, then not only can it not be done, when it takes the form of realizing Heaven on Earth it can be positively delusional and destructive. Pure democracy, as in Marx’s ‘truth,’ is a chimera in that it is an unattainable ideal.
I have no wish to complicate the discussion here by introducing Jacques Derrida’s political thought, the nuances of which have baffled and bemused many. Derrida’s phrase ‘democracy à venir’ is most usually translated as ‘democracy to come,’ in such a way as we hear avenir as ‘future.’ It is in that sense that I have presented Kant’s republic of ends as ‘an object of willing,’ an unattainable goal of future society which Marx nevertheless sought to attain.
What Derrida means by democracy and the phrase ‘democracy to come’ is not clear to me, so I draw no great conclusions from it. In ‘The Reason of the Strongest,’ Derrida attempts an explanation of the phrase: ‘I have most often used it, always in passing, with as much stubborn determination as indeterminate hesitation--at once calculated and culpable--in a strange mixture of lightness and gravity, in a casual and cursory, indeed somewhat irresponsible, way, with a somewhat sententious and aphoristic reserve that leaves seriously in reserve an excessive responsibility’ (Rogues 81).
Which pretty much sums up the insubstantial nature of all such thought. Such a world is characterised by what Milan Kundera describes as an ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ Kundera describes this condition of modernity in The Art of the Novel: ‘But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.’ (Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher 1986: 41; also Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim 1984).
Such a world is not only unbearable, it is unsustainable. In my writing on Marx I make the case for the realization of democracy as a possibility. At the same time, I am increasingly critical of attempts to realize Heaven on Earth. To make good his emancipatory claims, and to guard against those claims turning repressive in practice, Marx needs the transcendent standards that he was highly critical of when presented as false fixities in politics, society, and political economy. He was right to be critical, exposing attempts to naturalize and eternalize the historical; he was wrong to reject transcendent standards as such.
Democratic mechanisms, argues Tocqueville, stimulate a demand for a social and political equality that cannot be easily satisfied:
Moreover, the democracy is not only deficient in that soundness of judgment which is necessary to select men really deserving of its confidence, but it has neither the desire nor the inclination to find them out. It cannot be denied that democratic institutions have a very strong tendency to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to every one the means of rising to the level of any of his fellow-citizens, as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment at which it thinks to hold it fast, and "flies," as Pascal says, "with eternal flight"; the people is excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown, or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. The lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill-success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. Whatever transcends their own limits appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no kind of superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight.
It has been supposed that the secret instinct which leads the lower orders to remove their superiors as much as possible from the direction of public affairs is peculiar to France. This, however, is an error; the propensity to which I allude is not inherent in any particular nation, but in democratic institutions in general; and although it may have been heightened by peculiar political circumstances, it owes its origin to a higher cause.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Chapter XIII: Government Of The Democracy In America—Part I
Discussing attempts to evaluate and assess political theories in order to determine where the balance of truth lay, my Director of Studies Jules Townshend said it depends on high your ambitions are. That Marx’s ambitions are high expose him to a greater failure with more disastrous consequences. Low ambitions are no less disastrous in their effects in leaving human beings in a condition that falls well short of their potentials. Tocqueville states his view on this:
‘Aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations, to expand it beyond reason.’ (DA Pt II book 1).
Writing to his friend Kergorlay, Tocqueville stated: ‘there are three men with whom I commune a little bit every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.’
The quote from Pascal to which Tocqueville alluded to is worth presenting in full:
‘Extreme things are not ours, any more than if they did not exist; we are not made for them. Either they escape us, or we escape them.This is our real condition. It is this which confines our knowledge within certain limits that we cannot pass, being equally incapable of universal knowledge, or of total ignorance. We are placed in a vast medium, ever floating uncertainly between ignorance and knowledge; if we attempt to go further onward, our object wavers and eludes our grasp; it retires and flies with an eternal flight, and nothing can stay its course.This is our natural condition, yet it is ever opposed to our inclination. We burn with desire to sound the utmost depth, and to build a tower that shall reach infinity. But our whole edifice crumbles, and the Earth opens in an abyss beneath us.
Pascal, Thoughts of Blaise Pascal
The same thoughts apply to God, as an anarchic excess forever escaping reason. Democracy is for gods, said Rousseau. For finite beings to aspire to the power and knowledge of the infinite is one thing, to appropriate God's plan of justice as our own something altogether more dangerous. Marx sought to realize transcendent standards through their abolition, a view which would leave us within a wholly self-authored world. Rousseau affirmed the existence of transcendent standards as against a mere conventionalism and sophism of an endlessly circulating power. I’m left wondering the extent to which Tocqueville himself affirmed such view. The affirmation of the God-given nature of things isn’t too far below the surface in Democracy in America. Rousseau makes explicit statements of transcendent standards:
In order to discover the rules of society best suited to nations, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them would be needed. This intelligence would have to be wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it through and through; its happiness would have to be independent of us, and yet ready to occupy itself with ours; and lastly, it would have, in the march of time, to look forward to a distant glory, and, working in one century, to be able to enjoy in the next. It would take gods to give men laws.
He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. The more completely these natural resources are annihilated, the greater and the more lasting are those which he acquires, and the more stable and perfect the new institutions; so that if each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest, and the resources acquired by the whole are equal or superior to the aggregate of the resources of all the individuals, it may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of perfection.
The Legislator occupies in every respect an extraordinary position in the State. If he should do so by reason of his genius, he does so no less by reason of his genius, he does so no less by reason of his office, which is neither magistracy, nor Sovereignty. This office, which sets up the Republic, nowhere enters into its constitution; it is an individual and superior function, which has nothing in common with human empire; for if he who holds command over men ought not to have command over the laws, he who has command over the laws ought not any more to have it over men; or else his laws would be the ministers of his passions and would often merely serve to perpetuate his injustices: his private aims would inevitably mar the sanctity of his work.
Thus in the task of legislation we find together two things which appear to be incorruptible: an enterprise too difficult for human powers, and, for its execution, an authority that is no authority.
There is a further difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into popular language. Conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote are equally out of its range: each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realize the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose. For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law. The Legislator therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or reason, must have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.
This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognising the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man, might obey freely, and beat with docility the yoke of the public happiness.
This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the Legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move. But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the Legislator is the miracle that can prove his mission.
Rousseau The Social Contract II. vii
‘This complete equality slips from the hands of the people at the very moment when they think they have grasped it and flies, as Pascal says, an eternal flight’.
Tocqueville, DA Vol 1 p 285
Maybe Nietzsche is right. There’s nothing in Nietzsche’s view that would surprise Tocqueville. ‘If royalists could see the internal functioning of this well-ordered republic,’ he wrote, ‘the deep respect its people profess for their acquired rights, the power of those rights over crowds, the religion of law, the real and effective liberty people enjoy, the true rule of the majority, the easy and natural way things proceed, they would realize that they apply a single name to diverse forms of government which have nothing in common. Our republicans would feel that what we have called the Republic was never more than an unclassifiable monster…covered in blood and mud, clothed in the rages of antiquity’s quarrels.’ Where, one may ask, are the transcendent standards of the nature of things in this?
In praising the originality and vitality of liberal democracy, Tocqueville also notes its narrowing of the spirit. In several places in Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes the many ways in which the democratic political form diminishes and even extinguishes the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of life. Lacking a leisure class, democracy cultivates people with practical minds but produces no enduring works of art, poetry, literature: ‘The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal.’ Where religion was once a public expression of faith shared with others, now ‘everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.’ The whole ‘philosophical method’ of democracy is pragmatic, with individuals focusing their efforts on making their own sense of existence.
This idea entailed a moral revolution that elevated private interests over the public good, with the result that, as Max Weber argued, ultimate values retreated from public life into the private sphere of individuals:
the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world’. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values, have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.
Weber Science as a Vocation in Gerth and Mills ed. 1961: 155
That passage states concisely the predicament of modern society. Whilst human beings as social beings require a public life in order to actualize and individuate themselves, the dominant conceptions of freedom and rationality of modern society are based upon an extension of instrumental rational knowledge that brings about the disenchantment of public life. With our precious cultural and religious values retreating into private life, the public square is left value free and without common identity and purpose.
The common ground has dissolved and, with it, the common language that makes mutuality and solidaristic exchange possible. Michael Sandel writes of the fundamental right of self-ownership at the heart of the libertarian conception of freedom: ‘my life, labor, and person belong to me and me alone. They are not at the disposal of the society as a whole.’ (Sandel Justice 2009: 104). There is little love in this world, beyond a self-love that itself is lacking in the nourishment that only connection with another or others in a public context can give. The idea of self-ownership, consistently applied, Sandel argues, has implications that only an ardent libertarian can love: ‘an unfettered market without a safety net for those who fall behind; a minimal state that rules out most measures to ease inequality and promote the common good.’
And that, I argue, is unsustainable. The fragmented, endlessly contested, public space of liberal democracy ultimately consumes the effort required to keep it going – power for the sake of power is not a good enough end for creatures that crave meaning, power the sake of avoiding the predation that comes with predation is even more enervating, generating a pervasive hopelessness.
For Tocqueville, the vitality of a public culture and its political institutions depends ultimately on the spirit of the people, a spirit that is itself cultivated in civic association and responsibility. The spirit of democracy, insofar as this entails individuals closing in on themselves, contradicts this public spirit. Tocqueville underlines the way that democracy unsettles settled ways of thought and action, indicating the extent to which human beings are capable of transcending themselves and their society. So far, so radical. The problems come with respect to embedding that power in settled ways without at the same time being subject to similar challenge and contestation. It may sound radical, but such a spirit means that there can never be a settled public culture affirming shared values and a shared language, only an endless contestation in which rival claims fight it out. This is not a public, it is the anti-public. With the loss of truth and morality, then, comes the loss of politics as the public life human beings as social beings require in order to flourish. Instead, there is endless contestation and negation. Such a liberal democracy subverts life’s certainties to extend a lived sense of the permanent mutability of the power relations which encompass on and all. Contingency is the only end-state of liberal democracy, a state which continues until the effort to sustain the destinationless voyage becomes too great to sustain. Sooner or later, such an order faces a crisis of communication, belief, and legitimacy. At some point, people will ask ‘what’s the point?’ and seeing that there is none, will give up.
More optimistic theorists argue that the liberal democratic spirit tutors individuals’ sense of pluralism. That was a big claim in 1950s pluralism, and can still be heard today (oddly, by left democrats, just as original pluralists like Dahl and Lindblom became more critical in light of the way that entrenched inequalities undermined the idea of pluralism as a fair and open interplay of forces). The liberal democratic spirit encourages people to be sceptical of all claims that certain actions, institutions, and policies are ‘natural.’ The argument for transcendent standards I make never argues that institutions, laws, and forms of power in the temporal world are anything more than historical incarnations in time and place, approximations of transcendent standards, always open to challenge and change, and never fixed for all time. But my position – and I believe Tocqueville’s position too – is different from the view that all that there is is a ‘perpetual mutability.’ That’s an expression that Tocqueville uses to describe the emerging liberal democracy of his day. In those early stages it was possible to praise this spirit, especially the idea that citizens must keep a watchful eye on power and its representatives, and see that much that is presented as ‘natural’ and unalterable is in fact historical and open to challenge.
It is here, however, where the fatal switch takes place, effectively throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Just because claims to naturalness and fixity made in time and place are false assertions does not mean that transcendent standards do not exist, merely that the attempt to conflate them is false. It is here, in my view, that a fatal error is made by way of an illicit extra step, from rejecting the claims of particular historical incarnations of power to be natural to the rejection of the metaphysical idea of an objective, transcendent, reality as such. The problem is that the loss of the latter means that we lose the idea of morality and truth as substantive conceptions able to hold temporal incarnations of power to account, with respect to truth claims and moral arguments. ‘Only power arrests power,’ argued Polybius. Only power checks power, only power overthrows power. Without transcendent standards there is no morality and no truth, only power. Tocqueville kept the principle of ‘the nature of things’ as a background assumption, but it is present in his work. He gives reasons for why the spirit of liberal democracy in time weakens the sense we have of a reality that is permanent and in superior relation to power, holding it to critical account. In breaking down the false fixities of the powerful in time and place – which is certainly a democratic achievement to be lauded – we risk also losing the very standards of truth and morality that enables such subversion to proceed in accordance with emancipatory principles. Without those standards, subversion may continue, but only in accordance with a power stripped of pretensions to truth and morality. People are too busy celebrating their assertion of power against dominant power to see the dangers. They see this ‘reality’ claimed to be natural, fixed, and eternal as no more than a produced reality that has emerged in time and place through the assertion of certain interests, and seek to challenge and overthrow. This ‘reality’ is accompanied by theories and rationalizations by which the dominant class and its ideologists purport to persuade one and all that this reality exists for all-time and functions in the interests of all. I am all in favour of exposing false fixities and for historicizing and relativizing the events and ideas of time and place that dominant powers seek to naturalize and eternalize. Marx was a pioneer of such critical thinking in his critique of the supposedly eternal categories of political economy as well as of absolute, abstract ideas in defence of the state. But the viability, indeed the very point, of such critique begs an ontology of truth and goodness itself, or else there is nothing but power. ‘Where there is nothing,’ wrote Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, ‘both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’
For Weber, future prospects were gloomy:
Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years from now. Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that by then the period of reaction will have long since broken over us. It is very probable that little of what many of you, and (I candidly confess) I too, have wished and hoped for will be fulfilled; little – perhaps not exactly nothing, but what to us at least seems little. This will not crush me, but surely it is an inner burden to realize it. Then, I wish I could see what has become of those of you who now feel yourselves to be genuinely ‘principled’ politicians and who share in the intoxication signified by this revolution. It would be nice if matters turned out in such a way that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102 should hold true:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days.
But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph exactly now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter or baunistic?
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation
Those questions are being put to us now with renewed vigour.
My answer (so far) is contained here:
The influence of Montesquieu and Rousseau upon Tocqueville is apparent in a number of respects. Both Montesquieu and Rousseau argued that democracy could be free only through the cultivation of virtue among the people so that they would become citizens possessing a love of the republic which was backed by the willingness and the desire to serve it. Virtue involved a patriotism in which each citizen would consider the good of the community when it came to matters of public policy. Rousseau went so far as to advocate a civil religion which taught reverence of the civic constitution as well as the Supreme Being. To ensure the vitality of this virtue, Rousseau taught a broad political and social equality, to the effect that marked social inequality must be eliminated. In The Social Contract, Rousseau argued:
‘With regard to equality, this word must not be understood to mean that degress of power and wealth should be exactly the same, but rather that with regard to power, it should be incapable of all violence and never exerted except by virtue of status and the laws; and with regard to wealth, no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.’
For both Montesquieu and Rousseau, the ideal basis for democracy was an association of small property owners.
Montesquieu’s great book was The Spirit of the Laws. Rousseau, too, emphasized the mores, Tocqueville ‘the habits of the heart.’ Writing on democracy in America, Tocqueville argued that the strongest guarantee of freedom was to be found in the spirit of the people. The social and moral ecology nurturing and maintaining this spirit, then, matters a great deal when it comes to sustaining political institutions and the laws. Without that spirit, political forms wither and die.
Tocqueville argued that this spirit was in part a product of social and political institutions – town meetings, jury, trial, the free press – but is actually rooted in something much deeper, in the habits and customs of the people. The view clearly savours of Montesquieu’s spirit of the laws as well as Rousseau’s stress upon the mores as well the respect people are taught to have for the law. Without this spirit and reverence, the laws and political institutions are powerless and cannot function effectively.
In Being at One, I underlined the emphasis that Tocqueville placed on the need to foster the habit of association so that individuals were able to join together to protect their rights and their liberty and to secure and advance their interests. Tocqueville thus argues that the ‘voluntary association of the citizens’ can supplant ‘the individual authority of the nobles’ and, in so doing, create a strong, resilient community that is immune to the twin evils of tyranny and license. (Tocqueville, Democracy in America Part 1, p.7).
In Being at One, I highlight the concern that Tocqueville had for the way that the radical individualism and materialism attendant upon democratic equality had a tendency to erode the social authorities and hierarchies that bond individuals together in community. He thus writes of the tendency for democratic equality tom isolate citizens from one another and ‘to bring each of them to be occupied with himself alone.’ (Tocqueville 2000: 419). The moral vision progressively narrows until the only thing that remains is the individual:
‘In democratic societies each citizen is habitually occupied with contemplating a very small object, which is himself.’
Tocqueville 2000: 464
Such individualism mires society in a gross, shallow, myopic materialism, with the result that the body of active citizens devoted to public service is dissolved into a congeries of self-obsessed individuals preoccupied with the pursuit and possession of material wealth. In consequence, the spirit of the people, politics, and the laws diminishes in scope, undermining loyalty to and hence the viability of political institutions. At the same time, individuals lose the connection they have to both past and future, destroying the pact that holds between past and future generations. As Tocqueville writes, ‘each man forget his ancestors’ and ‘hides his descendants from him and separates him from his contemporaries; it constantly leads him back toward himself alone and threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.’ (Tocqueville 2000: 484).
In Being at One I paid particular attention to Tocqueville’s views on the social and functional efficacy of religion, a view that would later find expression in the work of Émile Durkheim. Tocqueville identified religious devotion as a crucial aspect in forming the spirit of the people, teaching the virtues of self-restraint and moderation. Tocqueville thus considered religion, along with patriotism, to be our best hope when it came to checking the tendencies to radical individualism and hedonistic materialism unleashed by the modern world. In particular, religion raises human will and desire beyond the sensuous immediacy of earthly goods and elevates the human soul to a sphere beyond the senses, places the individual within a matrix of duties and obligations that stand in common relation to others, drawing the individual into a world that is greater than the ego (Tocqueville 2000: 419).
In Being at One I made these points not to suggest that religion is the solution to our converging social and environmental crises, but to underscore the importance of a practical education in the virtues to address issues with an appropriate moral-psychological depth. My argument here is not as fanciful as it may sound. Minteer and Taylor thus draw attention to the remarkable similarity between Tocqueville's analysis and recent trends in environmentalist writing:
Like conventional critics of democracy, much environmentalism has feared the humanism and materialism and individualism of democratic society. And, like Tocqueville and other critics, environmentalists not uncommonly promote a view of nature that will teach moral truths beyond this humanism, materialism, and individualism.
Minteer and Taylor 2002
Since that is so, then why not go further, and instead of an environmental appropriation of Tocqueville’s thought, and the thought of others, engage in a recovery of such thought in its own terms? In face of myriad and converging crises, we are charged with developing the collective wit and will to be able to respond and act effectively. Tocqueville argues that: ‘Patriotism and religion are the only motives in the world that can long urge an entire body of citizens towards the same end.’ The cultivation of that spirit of cooperation is crucial, argued Tocqueville, since freedom within democratic institutions is impossible without ‘the common sense and virtue of the citizens.’ (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part 1, pp. 94, 124, 126-127).
There is a need to recognize, of course, that neither Rousseau nor Tocqueville were devout Christians in an orthodox sense. Tocqueville never recovered his faith in the dogmas of the Catholic Church in which he was brought up, but was to remain a sincere Deist for the rest of his life. Richard Herr writes:
‘Nevertheless, thanks perhaps to the teachings of the family priest, perhaps to the influence of his parents, perhaps to his observation of Protestants and Catholics in America or his fears of the lower classes in France, his view of the religion needed by a good democracy was more closely Christian than Rousseau’s had been.’
Richard Herr, Tocqueville and Old Regime
My view is that Rousseau’s civil religion is a well-meaning attempt to establish peace and unity on a rational basis, overcoming the religious conflicts that had been disturbing the civil peace for centuries, but ultimately unsustainable, Tocqueville’s Deism likewise. There is no substitute for the qualities of true religion, and surrogate religions, for reasons of social efficacy, will go the same way as all moral theories in the modern world. It takes true religion to check such diremption.
Criticizing the atomistic conception of democracy and the hedonistic conception of materialism, democracy, the democracy of self-absorbed individuals that Tocqueville criticised as a diminution of public life.
Tocqueville did not necessarily agree with Rousseau, and departed from his view in many respects, such as the importance of intermediary associations. At the same time, Tocqueville was aware of the extent that Rousseau’s concerns were the key ones, particularly the preoccupation with establishing the relationship between liberty and equality, cultivating the mores and the habits of the heart, and fostering the moral principles that lead to a commitment to democracy and public life. Rousseau argued that liberty and equality were not only compatible but that reach required the other. Liberty and equality were to be realized together or not at all.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau argued for an equality yielding an independence so that liberty could take the place of privilege: ‘in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.’ Only with such independence could each citizen be so in control of his own interests and be able to pursue them vigorously so as to avoid dependence on others. By participating in a genuine public community, exercising sovereignty jointly with others, citizens retain their autonomy, substituting moral or civil for natural liberty, replacing the illegitimate chains of external constraint for the legitimate chains of voluntary constraint undertaken with others. This is a demand for the rational restraint which Lewis Mumford saw as essential if we are to meet the challenge of civilisation, learning the values of service and sacrifice to the common end. Rousseau establishes this demand in conditions of political equality. Tocqueville acknowledges such equality as expressing a profound moral claim which arises, ultimately, from the common origin and nature of all humankind. His fear, however, was that a thoroughgoing egalitarianism would come to undermine liberty. It was this caution that was to find its way into John Stuart Mill, with equality considered to raise the spectre of a tyranny of the majority. (Robert Derathé, ‘La place et l’importance de la notion d’égalité dans la doctrine politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’ R. A. Leigh (ed.), Rousseau After Two Hundred Years: Proceedings of the Cambridge Bicentennial Colloquium (London, 1982 ) pp. 55–63).
To meet this challenge successfully requires a recovery of the principle of self-assumed obligation and voluntarily embracing a system of rational restraint that supersedes the split between individualism and collectivism which arises from the liberal ontology that falsely separates these two essential aspects of human nature and its social expression.
The flaw in liberal democracy lies in an ontology that falsely separates individuality and sociality, identifies liberty with a freeing of the individual from constraint, and identifies sociality – and morality – with that constraint. Liberal democracy contains a truth about human beings but a truth that had been falsely divided and which in this distorted and bifurcated form could not constitute the whole truth even when put back together.
In the course of my researches on ‘rational freedom,’ I noticed early on that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx were responding to the individualist conceptions and libertarian implications of liberalism in a particular way. There was a peculiar flavour to their arguments, a view of freedom that drew on more than contemporary liberal roots. To the extent that we attempt to achieve freedom in the Hobbesian or Lockean tradition, the results will be flawed and contradictory, issuing not in freedom but its obverse. Far from being a collective response to an individualist freedom, the ‘rational freedom’ I discerned in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx drew on older, pre-modern, sources, which held that human beings had both an an inviolable personal identity but also a social identity. I therefore developed ‘rational freedom’ as a critical appropriation of Plato and Aristotle’s concern with politics as the regimen of human flourishing on the terrain of modernity. I therefore developed the idea of an Hellenic Sittlichkeit, a modern polis democracy, but still noticed the extent to which it was vulnerable to the criticism of Weber (following Nietzsche). This view understood the extent to which human beings are social beings and hence that the self is relational – the inviolable personal identity was thus embedded in society. This social and relational quality is missing in individualist conceptions, an absence which, in time, invites a surrogate commonality and sociality in its place.