What is the relationship to what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism?

~~ TOCQUEVILLE

BETWEEN

TWO WORLDS

The cft1aking of a Political and

Theoretical Life

SHELDON S. WOLIN

PRI NCE T ON U N IVE RS IT Y P RESS

P RI NCETON AN D OXFO R D

CHAPTER II

THEORIA: THE THEORETICAL

JOURNEY

I

I think that my taste far traveling grows by privation. I kmg to npand the horizon, to see new countries, new peopks, and new customs.

Tocqueville1

Alexis de Tocqueville made his political and theoretical mark in the world as the result of a voyage to America. Modern scholars have carefully traced every stage of his American journey and others have reconstructed in detail the evo- lution of the manuscript of Tocqueville's classic. Little if any attention, how- ever, has been given to what might be called the theoretical aura surrounding his journ?'..

That :tfheo~hould have resulted from a journey to a foreign land placed Tocqueville's quest in a certain traditional genre of political discovery. Politi- cal theorists have always been great journeyers, as often to imaginary as to real places. The word "theory" comes from the Greek theoria, and the verb theo- rein (to see, observe). Theoria also had some associated meanings that sug- gested a variety of modes of seeing: journey, spectacle (e.g., a public festival), and even a diplomatic embassy.2 Some of these implications were captured in a remark by the Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus, writing in the first half of the first century C.E. He noted that men might journey for different reasons: some for profit, some "to see the sights of a foreign land," and others to benefit their countries.3

As early as the account of Atlantis in Plato's Timaeus, which, unlike the polities described in Republic and Laws, purported to be about a city that had once existed, theorists have constructed pictures of an ideal society, remote in space or time, removed from the material contingencies of "real" societies and of their historical vicissitudes. Tocqueville's journey, of course, differed from these imaginary accounts because he traveled to an "actual society." Be- fore accepting that distinction as hard and fast, however, we should recall that "America" was only dimly understood. It had not been fully mapped geo- graphically or completed politically. There was no professional political sci- ence to set the terms of understanding, and much about the new land ap-

THE THEORETI C AL JOURNEY 3S

pcared strange-its overpowering physical settings, its vast expanse of un- occupied land, its savage inhabitants, only some of whom were Indians-- which may explain why no one before Tocqueville had considered America as a political subject worthy of theoretical contemplation.

Typically the theoria took the form of a story told by a traveler who has recently returned from a voyage to a distant and hitherto unknown land. Such travels should be considered not as "trips" but as an intimate part of the structure of a theory and so closely connected as to have the status of a meta- phor for theorizing itself. A theoretical voyage imparts an element of action to theorizing that contrasts sharply with the equally ancient conception of theoria as contemplation, as the attempt of thought to imitate the unmoved mover god of Aristotle.4 Typically the voyager describes the people of that place as happy, peaceful, economically self-sufficient, and virtuous because of their exemplary institutions and beliefs. His "description" serves a triple pur- pose of explanation, criticism, and prescription. He shows the causes that have produced the ideal condition and he identifies the principles (e.g., aboli- tion of private property) behind those causes. The essence of utopias is that they should embody extractable principles, which can then be turned back upon the society from whence the journeyer has come: uncannily, virtually every feature of the discovered society, it is revealed, embodies a prescription or principle that can remedy the perceived ills of the traveler's homeland.

While journeying was employed as a metaphor for a special kind of knowl- edge chat required both separation from "real" political life and contact with the ideal, it could also be a search for elements of the ideal that were actually incorporated in the life of some existing society other than the homeland of the traveler. The duality between the search for the ideal as such and the search for its actual embodiments was present in Plato. He compared his dia- lectical method to a journey in search of the ideal forms of truth, but in the Laws he made special provision for a theoros who would travel abroad and return with useful information about the political practices of other cities. 5

Although this genre has a theoretical character, however, it does not pre- sent a formal philosophical argument. The ideal society is meant as the em- bodiment of a theory but the theory becomes, as it were, detachable from and eventually independent of the imagined society. Usually the traveler explains how various practices are representative of certain principles and how the sev- eral principles are interrelated. A unified theoretical structure emerges that can be restated independently of the imaginary setting that has served as a context of discovery. The persuasiveness of the theory does not require the defeat of rival arguments or empirical proof. Rather, the account turns on. the skill of the traveler-theorist to depict a state of affairs that, though fanciful, nonetheless appeals to the experience of his readers--their beliefs, longings,

36 CHAPTER 11

~ears, and_grieva_nces-so that they will not simply be charmed by his tale, or 10dulged 10 their fantasies, but conceive themselves living differently. Much de~~nds on whether the theorist succeeds in preserving the line between the- oriz10g and fantasizing while loosening the preconceived boundaries of reality and enlarging the possible.

II

Use of the theoria allowed for an unqualified description of the "best society," one. that ;'ould not have to make concessions to practicality and contingency. '~lul_e this reason was undoubtedly a consideration for most, if not all, theo- ris~ 1~ the const~uccion of ideal states, it tends to place theories in a doctri- naire light and distracts attention from another feature that, ironically, bears a dose rese~blance to theory consc~uction in the natural sciences, che sup- posed oppome of softheaded utopian speculation. Imaginary societies af- forde? an experimental field that served to unfetter the theoretical mind. The theorist co~ld try out new practices or pursue the implications of a principle or, ~q~ally 1m~ortant, test the structure of existing society to "see" whether by om~tung practices and beliefs that were regarded as "natural" or essential, the soc1e_ty _would crumple. Ideal societies thus provided a means of testing both the limits of the actual and of the possible. Contrary to the common modern political !udgment of "utopian" theories as ineffecrual, some utopians actually succeed 10 one respect: they may have left the existing order intact but not unproblematical.

III

[B}ut about stale travelers' wonders we were not curious. Scylla and greedy Celamos and folk-devoring Laestrygones and similar frightfal monsters are common enough, but well and wisely trained citizens are not everywhere to be found.

Thomas More6

Begi?ning e:""ly in ~e sixteenth_ ~entury,_ the connection between theorizing and JOurneymg acqmred an addmonal dimension due to the voyages of dis- cove~ that brought Europeans into contact with vastly different cultures. The experience, or rath~r the reported experience, contributed to the unsettling of Euro~ assumptions about place, time, and the possible forms of human org.u_uzauon. ~ a result a quantum leap of the political imagination occurred. Mediaeval philosophers had no political utopias. Now, in contrast, Europeans

THE THEORETICAL JOURNEY 37

could imagine themselves living differently, not necessarily by adopting exotic forms of life but by organizing in a consistent way the "rational" or "natural"

possibilities immanent in their own societies. The word "utopia" (literally "nowhere") was first coined by Thomas More

to describe what he called "the best state of a commonwealth."7 More repre- sented his work as the account of a philosopher who has just returned from a voyage that, by the accident of shipwreck, had brought him to an ideal commonwealth on "the far side of the world." The Utopians live according to principles of Christian humanism and Plato's Republic. Their society is without private property or money; and education is the principal concern. By mingling "actual" characters and places with fictitious ones and combining direct criticism of certain social and political practices (e.g., private appro- priation of the traditional commons) with descriptions of ideal institutions (prohibition of gold and silver as media of exchange), More was able to cease the received limits of plausibility and hence of possibility.

Another traveler's tale involving yet another shipwreck was contrived a century later by Francis Bacon. The New Atlantis revealed a different politi- cal imagination, one as far removed in tone and spirit from More's gentle Utopia as that happy land was from the Tudor England that in part More satirized. Despite the gesture toward Plato in the title of Bacon's work, it was not a story about saving cities or souls but an epitaph to the ancient endeavor to link virtue, knowledge, and power. For rule by philosophers Bacon sub- stituted rule by scientists, and instead of the reign of justice and virtue he proposed the organization of research for the control of nature and the in- crease of human power. The New Atlantis was both a monument to the idea of mind-generated power and a constitution for that uniquely modern obsession.

IV

By the late seventeenth century the type of political theory represented by Plato, More, and Bacon was being ridiculed, even though their "Model of an Eutopia," in Locke's dismissive phrase, differed from "normal" theories by a matter of degree rather than kind.8 Locke's own "state of nature" with its "laws of nature" was hardly more "real" than More's commonwealth.

9

Utopians, such as More or, later, Fourier, may seem more "fanciful" because they depicted their ideal societies in far greater detail than, say, Machiavelli or Hobbes, yet "realists" and utopians alike shared certain theoretical assump- tions.10 They were all convinced that it was within the power of theory to describe a set of interconnected principles from which such a picture could be

I I

38 CHAPTER fl

drawn; that such descriptions were meant t b . political totality· and th h O e a representation of a viable ical wh I ,, ' . at. t e representation of "the ought-to-be" as a " olit-

. o e was the pnnctpal business of political theory. p T yp1cally these representations were accom . d .

ceded by a critique of existing socie S ?ante or, ~ore prec1sely, pre- in direct discourse, straightforwardl : i::um.es th~ crmq~e was rendered princely rule in the D · . Oth y, . achtaveili s causttc description of . tscorsz. er wnters took a more bl' tn Montesquieu's account of despotism in Th R . o L ique approach, as relied on abstractions such as th " f e eman etters. Still others (Hobbes) to serve as a' means of ~ ulstate o wlar" (Locke). ~r "state of nature" h stm taneous y charactenzmg d di · t e nature of the political and 'al .1 . . . an agnosmg soc, ev, s m extstmg society. 11

V

Theory as radical cr't' d · . . ical ·ourn b t .•que ~ rep1ctunzat1on is attracted to the idea of a polit- cal f magi:ti::~~:~~gp~o:es an opporru~thity for the release of the theoreti- . encounter wt strangeness M th . Journeyers a~empt ~o convey a sense of astonishment at ~he ~::ar::;ucal rangements ey claim to have "seen.,, Astonishment is . e ar- by the contrast between what is fa.mil' d h . evoked by difference,

Jar an w at ts true though b d strangeness. The evocation of difference si nal . . gar e as to have visited a "strange place ,, th h ~ s a crmcal strategy. In claiming nui . th . . , e t eortSt uses travel to provoke disconti-

tyld. estrange place is isolated and separated from the "know ,, c ·1· wor . By "following" the auth , . n or ramJ Jar . · ors Journey, the read · · d . mg the author's experience of differen ' h' h eri:; ennce tnto repeat- conceptions of . d J • _ce, w ic wor to unsettle familiar is enclosed by ttdi~ffie an p ace b! p~ctunng a better form of life in which truth

a erent organ1zatton of 'al d 'ffi of human energies and a diffi d . soc1f _space, a I erent distribution in ,, an im in , erent ~r enng o ttme. The purpose in "describ-

th: ideal pl! i::\~a~esi::;:1~1t were real is to ~ffect a reversal between logical reversal of ideal/un al d ealr/eal p!ace to which he returns: an onto-

re an re non1deal Th 'd alb . . . becomes the real while th al b . . e I e ecause tt ts nght

' e actu ecause wrong 1 eal Th 'd . case represents the ultimate al· . . s unr_ . et cal tn every humbling power. revers . a society tn which truth succeeds in

Montesquieu's Persian Lette ( ) h ' h n I ,, rs 1721 ' w tc he described as "a kind f

ove ' was a parody of the theoretical ·ourne d f . o intimation that the traditional J Y an ° theory Itself, and an older theories of Plato M hi genllr~ wHasbabpproaching exhaustion. Unlike the

' ac ave ,, o es and Lo k h R . di~ not_depict an ideal or even a desirable so~ie 12 Bc ~' t ~ ~man letters qu1eu disavows the notion that wh I al 1· . ty. y impl1canon Montes-

o es e po meal and s 'al c . regeneration is desirable or poss 'bl Th. oct transrormation/

J e. ts turn toward a more cautious con-

THE THEORETI CAL JOU RN EY 39

ccption of theory was even more pronounced in Montesquieu's great work, TIN Spirit of the Laws (1748). In The Pmian Lettm two nonideal societies are sketched, each in realistic or recognizable terms, but with their features artisti- cally so heightened as to flirt with caricature. In one sketch contemporary France is visible, while in the other, a Persian harem is a disguised representa- tion of the recent despotism of Louis XIY. A third theme represents a theoret- ical journey in reverse. It takes the theoretical traveler from the exotic to the real, from a homeland that becomes foreign to a foreign land that becomes "home" -although somewhat problematically. In the end the bizarre proves all too real: the harem embodies the deepest drives of absolutism, while the real proves bizarre and civilized society becomes a mass of absurdities.

In the story a Persian prince suspects that there are political intrigues against him at the royal court and he decides to go into exile. He secures royal permission to travel in order to gain instruction "in Western knowledge."13

He journeys to Paris leaving behind his harem, a perfect absolutist regime devoted to satisfying the sensual pleasures of one man. In Paris he encounters a society at once enlightened and corrupt. The political point of the tale, which is developed in the letters exchanged primarily between the Persian and the inmates of the seraglio, lies in the ironic commentary on the condition of France only then emerging from the absolute rule of Louis XIV--exhausted, confused, and more than a little corrupted. Montesquieu parodies the theo- retical journey. Instead of a triumphal return the antihero decides to remain in the West. His perplexities are unresolved. Meanwhile at home the harem is in revolt, its despotism clearly crumbling. The journey has enlightened the prince but has produced no clear vision of the good society. Theory appears as negative "social criticism." It hesitates to conceive society in transformative terms because it fears social upheaval as well as the concentration of power and purpose that transformation demands. In Montesquieu's parodic reversal theory's job is to expose "the perpetual contrast between the real things and the odd, naive, or bizarre way in which they were perceived." 14 Its political vision is deliberately unheroic: true politics is "a dull file which cuts gradually and slowly arrives at its end."15

Montesquieu's harem was unique for being a negative paradigm or dys- topia, an "idealized" despotism that consumes itself without the assistance of a counterparadigm to reveal its flaws. It summarizes, nonetheless, two cen- turies of utopian thinking. It follows the tradition begun by More of depict- ing a society independent of time but located in a world that is otherwise identified through historical references. It has no prehistory and is not situ- ated in history at all. 16 Its culture is logical rather than historical, the working out of the idea of despotism, of power divorced from restraints, and of sado- masochistic exploitation rather than civic affection.

124

J"k M J· , CHAPT ER VJ J e O Jere s bourgeois gentilh h

writing theory. After com I . ommhe, fie was startled to discover he had been . p etmg t e rst volume of D h It to Beaumont as "un ouvrage ph."J h" emocracy, e described ft fl I osop 1co-politiqu »4o A fc

a er a attering review had a eared . e. ew weeks later, spectively, the theoretical ch PP 'fToh~quev1lle enlarged further, if retro-

k d aracter o is work· "Yc kn h wor e on America a little lik C . [ch . ou ow t at I have . al e uv1er e great geolo . J

anim s, making use at each step of hilos h . g'.st on ante-diluvian That Tocqueville appeared to h pd" op ical deductions and analyses."41

Democracy after he had retu d aveF iscovered a philosophical character to J d rne to ranee suggests ch alch gh evo ve a theoretical outlook h"J . Am . at, ou he had

until he had settled down tow '. e m h enca, he had not fuHy mastered it wme at ome This · "all

some remarks in the introductio D . is pam y confirmed by . ch n to emocracy Thee h m e evolution of his thinki H" fi · e e recounts the stages h . ng. 1s rst paragraph r ds ch · . .

t at equaluy of condition had d "d . ecor e v1v1d impact g~ph makes an implied referen:a t: a un_ng my stay there." The third para- his return ("So the more I srudi d Am ~enod o_f extended observation before

e encan society ") Th seems to assume his return "La h . . . . . e next paragraph hemisphere " and th ,h ter, w en my thoughts turned toward our

· · · , en t at paragraph · fc 1J d was at chat moment that I conce1·v d h "d is fo o":'e by the statement, "It · e t e 1 ea o th1 b k "42 Th Journey thus depended as much on oin h s oo . . e theoretical much on familiarity as on t g g ome as on venturing abroad as

s rangeness. '

VIII

I live in a profound solitude b . d . ,. , une m one itUa J I speaK of Democracy. · · · · can omy

Tocqueville43

The breakthrough had come when Toe . . which he would develop a th "cal quevdle designated a center around f eorea structure and wh h o a theory as a structure with . en e came to conceive

. ch a supporting center He d "b d ch ence m e introduction to the fi J . escn e e experi-

. rst vo ume of Democra h h d" a connection between a "local £ ,, d . cy w en e 1scovered Th J act an a universal and ... . "bl " e atter was represented b " al" f . . 1rres1st1 e force. d Y equ icy o condmons" d b th _egree to which it prevailed amon Am . _an Y e astonishing

noned as the modern equival fgch /oenca~s. Eq~al1cy of conditions func- h enc o e ,gos m an G k

t e underlying organizing principl f ch . c1enc ree philosophy, as be considered the predominant or : ~inct ~~ve~~e. ~at entitled this fact to ter: it shaped the "public mentali p " th p act w_as its all-pervasive charac- acnons of the governors as well : h be. complexion of the laws, and the

as e a its of the governed.

• THE THEORY OF W HAT IS G REAT" 12 5

nee he had grasped the determinative role of equality of condition and its ranging potential as an explanatory force, Tocqueville's thoughts then

cd to the Old World and he saw "something analogous to the spectacle the new world presented to me .. . [ of] democracy ... rapidly advancing d power." That conjuncture produced a kind of epiphanic moment: "At

moment I conceived the idea of the book that is about to be read."44

The primary fact of equality thus connected two of the main concepts in ucville's theory, the New World and the Old, thereby establishing the

evancc of each to the other. The language that Tocqueville employed to "be his discovery, "equality of conditions," appears at first glance an un-

nunate choice because it obscured the dynamics he was concerned to con- tw:'I· His description of equality as "rapidly advancing toward power" revealed equality to be a metaphor for a new kind of power. Not Marx's power of the forces of production, or Saint-Simon's power of organization, but power chat 6rst seems merely quantitative, as the power of sheer numbers that had burst the bounds of the traditional societies in the Old World. In the New Worlc!, however, where no resistive order had existed, quantity had turned into some- thing more formidable.

E-quality = equal-icy: Equality was a condition wherein certain shared values and beliefs were operative, not merely "held," and hence were in the nature of a political, social, and moral force. Equality penetrated the daily lives of the vast majority of the society and left little or no room for sharply different cultural formations or political forces. Tocqueville would repeatedly compare it to a "weight" that "pressed down" and evoked the sensation of suffocation. Equality of condition would turn out to mean equality as the condition for the exercise of a peculiarly modern form of power, one in which coercion was a negligible element, the placing of power in a sovereign center was not a prerequisite of its effectiveness, and, most paradoxical of all, mas- sive power could not be assembled and "used" as kings once "drew" on their authority.

We shall return to Tocqueville's account of equality in the New World and his prescriptions for dealing with it in the Old, but first we need to identify the several moves by which he established the theoretical structure of the work and advanced its political objectives.

IX

The first move took him from writing a book about the practices of American democracy to composing a theory about democracy in America. "In Amer- ica," he declares in the introduction to Democracy, "I saw more than America:

126 CHAPTER VI

I sought the image of democracy itself, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions."45 America as a descriptive field was thus made subordinate to a theoretical construction, "democracy." That decision would also allow for a more general applicability of whatever political truths he could distill; the concept of democracy would shift the emphasis away from America's unique- ness, thereby releasing democracy from dependence upon a particular place (the fate of "Athenian democracy") and enabling it to function as the symbol of an emerging condition about to become universal. That transformation of the empirical particularity of America into "the image of democracy" could be called Tocqueville's theoretization of democracy "in" America. As he put it in a letter to Mill, "America was only my framework, democracy was the sub- ject. "46 He insisted that "what is democratic" should not be confused "with what is merely American."47 By distinguishing democracy from America the theory would not be tied to a particular embodiment: he would be able to say something "of interest not only to the United States, but to the entire world, not to one nation but to all mankind."48

The overcoming of the empirical uniqueness of America was registered in the title that Tocqueville finally chose for his work, not Democratie americaine (American democracy) but Democratie en Amerique (Democracy in America). At one point he had even considered the tide, "The rule [empire] of democ- racy in the United States. "49

Critics would later complain about the vagueness and contradictions in Tocqueville's use of the term "democracy." Such complaints, however, con- fuse the presumed importance of a standard usage for interpreters with the risk taking inseparable from theorizing a novel condition.so Tocqueville was after something other than unambiguous meaning. He would exploit the concept of democracy so as to display ambiguities because he believed them to be politically relevant for the audience he wished most to reach. He wanted democracy to appear as multivalent, not confined to an original meaning and certainly not rigidly restricted to its American version. Perhaps there was a convergence between Tocqueville's political requirements and real ambigui- ties in democracy, such as a high level of local political involvement that testi- fied to the civic skills of the citizens and the vulgar quality of national leader- ship in the Jacksonian era. Perhaps because of the unprecedented freedoms it allowed to so many, democracy was destined to produce contrasts that its critics would seize upon as contradictions.

The problematic character of democracy was of crucial political importance to Tocqueville for it signified the possibility of choice in a world increasingly given over to massive forces. Ambiguity was the modern equivalent to what contingency had meant for the ancient theorists and Machiavelli, the fortuna that made political action possible, freedom a necessary condition of genu-

• .. . THE THEORY OF WHAT IS GREAT" 127

ine action, and democratic virtu its sufficient one. Ambiguity also afforded Tocqueville a tactical advantage in addressing a French audience t~at re- mained deeply divided in its feelings and beliefs about the revolution of

17s9.5 1 Democracy could not be presented as a sh_ar.ply distinct choice, en bloc, without alienating most shades of French opim~n. It had to be con- structed not as a holistic choice between all or nothmg but as numerous choices within the broad limits of a given, that some form of democratic

equality was inevitable. . The second of Tocqueville's moves was less obtrusive but equal~y po~t~n-

tous theoretically. On more than one occasion he confessed that m wntmg Democracy he had scarcely mentioned France, yet he had not written a page without thinking of his homeland. 52

What I have sought particularly to highlight in the United States and to have it well understood is less a complete portrait of that foreign society than its contrasts or resemblances with ours .... That continual return to France, which I did without calling attention to it was, in my view, one of the principal reasons for the success

of the book. 53

"That continual return to France" involved the construction of "France" into a "world," an "Old World" occupying a common theoretical plane w~th the New. While each world was, in an obvious sense, a geographical entity, each assumed the character of a symbolic form signifying more than distinct national identities. Neither was meant as an exact miniature of a specific soci- ety. Each would be a selective distillation whose significance would be re- vealed by the contrasts between the two societies. "It is always, either .by con- trast or by analogy with the one that I succeeded in gi'.'ing an appr~pr~ate and accurate idea of the other."54 Neither world was conceived as fixed m its form or meaning. The New World would have to struggle to remain new, that i~, democratic and free, and not resolve that tension by opting to be democratic and unfree. The Old World was dying and in the throes of a transformation into a democratic world, but in the process its politicians and citizens might be tempted to surrender political freedom in exchange for private freedom to pursue primarily social and economic ends. . , .

The implications of that construction for Tocqueville s concepuo~ of a theoretical role will be taken up later but here we need to emphasize the theoretical achievement: the creation of a new plane of universality that first transformed the empirical United States into the representation of "de~oc- racy" and elevated it to an abstract plane where it c~uld make c?ntact with a theoretically transformed "France." While in Amenca Tocqueville had been struck by near ideal laboratory conditions for the experiment in democracy: geographical isolation and a bounteous nature allowed democracy to unfold

128 CHAPT ER V I

without distortion or the burden of a long history. The task of bringing the two societies into theoretical juxtaposition was begun while Tocqueville was in America:

What is really interesting in America is to examine the inclinations and instincts of democracy left to itself and to see to what social condition it forcibly leads the soci- ety which it dominates. Such a society is panicularly interesting for the French who are perhaps marching toward despotism, perhaps towards a republic, but certainly toward an unlimited democracy. 55

The France that Tocqueville would create was a society whose unified his- torical character had experienced diremption by revolution, class enmities, suspicions between believers and doubters, and hardened ideological posi- tions, yet was strangely torpid in its social and political life. The cause, Tocqueville believed, was traceable to the destructiveness that accompanied the appearance of democracy in France: a revolution that "overthrew every- thing that has stood in its way, shaking all that it did not destroy. "56 What had been destroyed in France was the political life of civil society, a theme he would later take up in his great work on the Old Regime. The conse- quence was the strengthening of the state. If France was to be depicted as the state without political society, America would be political society without the state. That complementarity of absences would inspire the purpose that Tocqueville would follow more consistently than any other, the re-creation of the political life of French civil society and criticism of the centralized state.

The third move involved the enlargement and complication of the concept of revolution. Tocqueville's account of American democracy would down- play its revolutionary origins in the hope of repeating that operation for France. The United States would be treated as a society that had achieved de- mocracy without a violent political revolution-he virtually ignored 1776- even though the state of that society represented the most extreme example of egalitarianism. 57 France, in contrast, was a society traumatized by revolution, the extreme case of a society left divided and condemned to instability. Tocqueville would discern a providential march toward equality or democ- racy at a universal level where America's revolution in democracy could serve as a lesson for stabilizing French revolutionary equality. Democracy would thus be pressed into serving as accomplice to an obliquely counterrevolution- ary teaching.

In the course of using democracy for that purpose Tocqueville discovered something about modern democracy that would place it in a very different light from ancient and early modern conceptions. In the received understand- ings democracy was associated with radical tendencies, such as the confis-

129 • THE THEORY OF WHAT I S GREAT"

. . . f h wealthy classes or the elimination of inequali- cation of the pro~erty ~ .t e " These tendencies were usually attributed to • based on ment or virtue. . . al Al h h

:Smocracy's elevation of freedom to ~e prin~pal polmcal .\ u:~ed;:ute Toe ueville adopted the older equation ~f emocracy wit in its moral wouid reveal democracy to have a c~n~ervauve ch:Cacterl'. ~~ i:damentals as

. . fu dam ntalism but m its respect ior po me . . and religious n e . d . ns had haunted Western polmcal

di The demos whose appeutes an pass10 . d :i:o~ght from Plato to the Federalist was about to be reconce1ved as a mo er-

aring force. . . h b e more and more The fourth move: In the course of his Journey e ecam l b d

. ressed by the extent to which American politics could on y e a;ount:ai amfo Pb h bits shaped by the broader culture of society, especially by e mo d

r y a . . Th" . e of culture would be graspe teachings supplied by rehi1on._ :11mporc;n~emocrary in which Tocqueville only incompletely in thale rstd1~st . m~ntalo firameworks In the later install-

uld · nl t leg an msutuuon · . wo hmai y treha uld turn to the culture that informed and sustained mcnt, owever, e wo . Th 1 t impor- thcm and defined the character of them as praet1ces. e exp ana o~r d tance that he would assign to political culture as the key to the sta 1~1~e:::s-

lf . h" h in his eyes would recommend democracy, wou se -restraint, w ic ' : . ulture of citizens. sarily shift attention from heroic action to the c . f th

d · · h be put this way· two o e The problem Tocqueville woul raise ~g t k (Adam Smith) master ideas of Enlightenment theory, the idea of the mar ;t l . thout and of administrative organization (Saint-Simon), operate most_y w~ d the idea of civic virtue and often against it. Political cu1ure was mt:e u:e as a third form of ordering, appealing to history r~ther ~u\:nw: rational

. . f th arket and of bureaucratic organiza ' . with concepnons o t ~ as primarily the work of conservative thmk- action. The concept o_ cu~~:: Burke Coleridge, Fichte, and Hegel and of

crs, s~ch ~ Monthes!u;eu,Maistre'. The i~tellectual genealogy of culture pr~- reacuonanes sue . . · tral place m

k th . Was it a way of restoring c1v1c virtue to a cen . . f vo es e quesuon, . . litics be as banal as the politics o democratic politics or, instead, would its po f d . . . ~ w,as it to be

. h the rule o a mm1strat1on. w, markets and no less reacuon_a?' t a~ . . h h been called "the age of the means of romoting polmcal qu1et1sm m w at as . l

. p l . " d hence the conservative alternanve to popu ar po- democrauc revo unons an litical education?

X · h h" di dain for . b c h" -the aristocrat Plato wit is s L"k any theonsts erore im . M d.

I e ~ d the republican Machiavelli observing the e icean Atheman emf oFclorar~ce-Tocqueville would write as though in the presence conquerors o

130 C HAPT ER VI

of a deep political rupture which it was his personal fate co represent theoret- ically and his duty co heal politically.

Throughout his life he felt dogged by an acute sense of estrangement. He attributed it to his membership in an aristocracy chat the French Revolution had not completely eliminated and the Restoration had not fully revived. Un- like his theorise predecessors, however, Tocqueville was not only at odds with the political developments of his era but caught off guard by the scope and rapidity of the changes conventionally ascribed to the advent of modernity. His development as a theorist involved acquiring a conceptual vocabulary for dealing with modernity. "Democracy," "New World," and "revolution" would be among the more important ones. That vocabulary was striking for the nuance of archaism shading terms such as "Old World," "Old Regime," and "aristocracy." These were expressions not only of estrangement and of living amid discontinuity but of an inconclusive opposition.

Confronting change, division, and instability Tocqueville set for himself the role of mediator. He would try to overcome the political estrangement of his class by mediating between it and a postrevolutionary politics struggling for identity and stability. By writing Democracy he would attempt to prove that an aristocrat could give a just and sympathetic account of an antiarisco- cracic society while persuading his own class that its fears of democracy were exaggerated. He would, at the same time, try to introduce a measure of sobri- ety co the intellectual enthusiasts for democracy, warning them that democ- racy lacked "poetry and grandeur' and was sustainable only "under certain conditions of enlightenment, of private morality, of beliefs that we do not have."58

Yet estrangement, in both the political and theoretical sense, lee alone the personal, was not like an illness, a condition co be overcome and eliminated altogether. It was, instead, co be preserved as essential-to the power of theory to furnish insight, to the resolve of political actors co resist the excesses not only of democracy but of modernity, and, not least, to the self struggling co find a harmony between establishing a public self that satisfied private aspi- rations without revealing them. Although Tocqueville on numerous occasions and in public as well as private venues would insist that a basic condition for political reconciliation in France was an acknowledgment of the impossibility of restoring the Old Regime, in the structure of his theory the death of the past was, in effect, denied by preserving it as a theoretical element. The facts associated with a dead past and the living resentments about their passing were resuscitated through concepts such as "feudalism," "honor," "grandeur," and "aristocracy" and contrasted with democracy, more often than not to the disadvantage of the latter.

131 THE THEORY OF WHAT IS G REAT "

. . . . d a theoretical device/disguise, when While the past was bemg restor~- . :i rld he came to realize that he

Tocqueville entered the ~rench J:~t~orl;:f bourgeois politics that_ he was uld be forever trapped m the h" se of class identificauon was

. to ersuade his peers to accept, is sen ancmpthung d PHe would forever be the theoros in a strange land. strcng ene .

536

II

CHAPTER XXV

The whok earth had one language and few words . . . and [mm] said, "Come kt us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and kt us make a name for ourselves, kst we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whok earth. " [God, threat- ened by the unified power of mankind, intervened to} confose their language, that they may not understand one another's speech . ... [He] scattered them abroad . .. and they kft off building the city.

Genesis11

Tocqueville reverses the story of Babel to recount how local power is drained away and reconstituted as concentrated power. His myth takes shape as the antithesis between polytheism and monotheism, between a decentered world with a plenitude of modest powers and a powerfully centered but depleted world. The French Revolution had obliterated a condition in which power was scattered, decentralized, apportioned among various classes, localities, and professions. The remnants of those powers and authorities may have survived the revolution as mere "debris," much like the irrelevance of the surviving Roman cultic gods once Christianity had begun to take hold, while the new form of power, "simple, regular, and grandiose," and formerly "invisible to the eyes of the crowd," is now exposed for all to see, "especially to the eye of princes." (Louis Napoleon would carry the title of prince.) The work of the revolution continues to be imitated by those who seek to eliminate "immuni- ties" and "privileges," who "mingle ranks and equalize conditions, substitute bureaucracy for aristocracy, uniform rules for local immunities, unified gov- ernment for a diversity of powers."12

Tocqueville's mythos should be understood as post-Christian. Recall his worries that God had abandoned the world to the forces of equality and his exclusion of Providence from his account of the revolution. Tocqueville feared that God has either abandoned the world or that His weakness has allowed the world to be turned upside down. Political polytheism is che ex- pression of fear now turned into resentment and directed against the politi- cal version of monotheism, unified and monopolized power, despotism supported or worshipped by democracy. Monotheism, as distinct from the "sociological" function of religion, is thus complicit in the preparation for revolution.

In the unfinished portion of his work where he developed the discrepancy between "the magnitude of the events" and the ineptness and "singular imbe- cility" of the actors, he concludes on a bitter note: "and I marvel at the power of God who, with levers as short as these, can set the whole mass of human societies in motion."13

POLI TICS O F LOSS 537

II I

Tocqueville's new form combines theory and myth to assert a political role, a mytheoros to accompany mytheoreticus. Once again he drew upon notions first advanced in Democracy. There he had described God as the master theorist because He could simultaneously grasp the general and the particu- lar, the abstract and the concrete while the human mind could do one or the other but not both. Tocqueville had also noted the similarities between the theoretical abstractness he associated with Cartesianism and the theo- logical conception that isolated man from his national and historical con- text. In The Old Regime he asserts that although "the French Revolution was a political revolution, it operated in the manner, and assumed some of the features, of a religious revolution." Among the features he singles out are its proselytizing mission, which spread revolutionary propaganda abroad to di- verse societies. At a "deeper" level he finds a more fundamental similarity in "the general and abstract character" of religions, which, he pointedly notes, was not present in the civic-oriented pagan religions: "The princi- pal aim [of Christianity] is to regulate the general relations between man and God, the general rights and duties of men toward each other, indepen- dently of the particular form of society." He then insists that the French Rev- olution "has operated in precisely the same way" toward the things of this world. "It has considered the citizen in an abstract fashion, apart from all particular societies" and "independently of country and time." The crucial question then becomes, by what means has a type of humanity been prepared that would lend itself to the rule of abstraction, generality, and a certain same- ness-and thus allow those identifying marks of the theoretical to become a practice?14

To answer that question was, for Tocqueville, to embark on a course that would describe how the prerevolutionary world of particularities had been destroyed by a generalizing and centralizing power. How, in other words, the theorist-god had abandoned historicized particularity to allow the hegemony of power that is dehistoricized and abstract. To describe that chain of events was, by the same token, to restore and preserve the actuality of particularity and plenitude. The two interrelated objectives that Tocqueville set were to explain the revolution as having been prepared by a long process of dehistori- cization and, by the methods of explanation, to rehistoricize the political con- sciousness of his contemporaries. This meant challenging the accepted mean- ing of their political identity. The revolution had become enshrined as the founding event that had radically redefined the nation's political identity in libertarian and egalitarian terms. It was also the liberatory moment when modernity acquired authority.

538 CHAPTER XXV

For these profound changes to take hold, the nation had to be prepared for them beforehand. Earlier centuries, Tocqueville noted, had "agitators" who sought unsuccessfully to change "particular customs" by appealing to "general laws of human society." For similar arguments to foster revolutions success- fully, "certain changes" had to occur in "the conditions, customs, and moeurs" to render "the human spirit receptive."15 Those changes involved nothing less than the emptying of a world of richly pluralistic and decentralized political forms and their supporting cultures and the eventual replacement of the "democratic" character of mediaeval "communities" with a culture of "depen- dence." Instead of local assemblies popularly elected, there were sham elec- tions and rule by "a small oligarchy." The loss of municipal liberties was, Tocqueville declared, the most "shameful" aspect of the Old Regime. That loss was the accompaniment to a broad modernizing tendency, which resulted in the elimination of all the bodies of local law and peculiar customs, as well as provincial legislatures, self-governing municipalities, parlements (i.e., courts), and class privileges. The work of the Old Regime made Frenchmen "look exactly alike" and left "a glacial body more compact and homo- geneous than perhaps any hitherto seen in the world." 16 This had been made possible by the destruction of complex patterns of cooperation and civility between unequals, a commonality amid differences: "all common passion, all mutual need, every necessity of understanding one another, every occasion for common action."17

It was not just the disappearance of institutions that would matter but the steady loss of political skills over a long period of time. Depoliticizacion was the other side of the coin of dehistoricization: "It is no small enterprise to bring together fellow citizens, who had lived together for centuries as strang- ers or enemies, and to teach them how to conduct their affairs in common once more." 18 The crucial consequence for a society in which political igno- rance became widespread was that a revolution which should have been fore- seen was not. Its members, regardless of class, were no longer capable of"read- ing" events. The extreme depoliticization that had occurred also explained why the revolution first appeared in France and why it took the awful forms it had:

France being the one country in Europe where all political life had been extin- guished for the longest time and most thoroughly, where individuals had most lost the practice of public affairs, the habit of reading the meaning of events, the expe- rience of popular movements, and even the notion of a people, it is easy to imagine how all Frenchmen could fall all at once into a terrible revolution without seeing it and with those most threatened by it leading the march and opening and widening the road which led to it. 19

POLITICS OF LOSS 539

The modernization of France and its entrance into modernity were the culmination of a lengthy process in which, according to Tocqueville, the steady penetration of local life by the central administration and its agents, the intendants, was accompanied by the emergence of a "new nobility" of "humble birth." The later revolutionaries, misled by the dazzle of pomp and privilege, failed to perceive the dynamic elements that for more than a century had steadily undermined the old order and stifled its vitalities. Before the French Revolution "the central power ... had already succeeded in destroy- ing all intermediary powers, and between it and individuals there yawned an immense void. "20 It had performed the work of revolution, not in the name of liberty but in accordance with a new logic, that of the tutelary state. These developments were summarized by one of the chapter tides in The Old &- gime. "What Is Today Called Administrative Tutelage Is an Institution of the Old Regime. "21

Thus a new power came into being and, while Tocqueville had identified the conditions which had made it possible, there remained something un- canny about the subversive character of the forces at work as well about the great power that had come into existence before the revolution and ~ould survive it. For, although the power of the tutelary state was enormous, It was, Tocqueville insisted, "fragile." It lacked a genuinely political culture. It could absorb local powers and privileges but not recreate the webs of respect, affec- tion, and cooperation by which the local powers had been constituted. It could not, as it were, diminish its citizens by encouraging the privatization of virtue and ability and then expect either its citizens or its own functionaries to display the qualities of loyalty, dedication, disinterestedness, and political skill needed by a political order. Nonetheless, a formidable centralized power had been created, and, even though it seemed suspended in midair, it was able to impose its will and suppress opposition.

The political monotheism represented by the centralized state reflects the wavering religious convictions of Tocqueville. He wanted the assurance of order that a benevolent power could extend but he also wanted a god who, while solicitous of common humanity, was not to be its political ally. One result is a love/hate fascination with Napoleon I, the political monotheist extraordinaire, who performs the impossible deed of bringing the revolution to a halt and, at the same time, harnessing its clan to create a military and imperialist power unmatched in Europe, while destroying liberty at home, perfecting centralization, and establishing the model of modern despotism for his nephew. Despite his antipathies, there is more than a trace of a proto- Nietzschean admiration for the power of a single man who, in the age of anonymous masses, can dominate an entire era and set the the impress of his

564 C HAPTER XXVI

the repressed, emerge to vex the stability of the theory. Apparently the nature of language makes it cleverer at insinuating countertextual meanings than au- thors are in eradicating them. Language appears as the handiwork of a Carte- sian demon, malevolent but artful, the real creator-god of meaning-which is why some deconstructionists have maintained that language, not the au- thor, writes the text.

Tocqueville once described himself as "the last of his species."7 The refer- ence was, in part, to his aristocratic origins, but mainly it was a protest against the way that parliamentarism trivialized politics. Accordingly he presents himself as the ideal victim for the deconstructionist block. For Tocqueville thought that politics was sacred, not as Bossuet had, as "politique tiree des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte," but because it held the possibility of being theoretically or truthfully constituted.

In this as in so many other of his theoretical claims Tocqueville seems a throwback to early modern (e.g., Hobbes) and ancient modes of theorizing. His illusions appear to embody the myths of a whole tradition and to culmi- nate a genealogy of illusion.

But what would the world have to be like for a nonsovereign, appropriately humble, illusion-free theory to make sense and be preferable? Or is that ideal itself an illusion? The questions have prompted the choice of Tocqueville as a theorist who helps us to see into the many forms of the postmodern political predicament. And this not in spite of his illusions and extravagances but be- cause of them. The absurdity that cavorts at the edges of Tocqueville's think- ing and tempts it into posturing is the effect of a condition in which the po- litical is becoming absurd-that is, dangerous-because while politics is being trivialized the magnitude and variety of the powers available to postmodern ruling groups are unprecedented. In the self-consciously postmodern world of "the cool," it would be difficult to find any resonance for Tocqueville's con- ception of the grandeur of the political as the noblest of humw settings, of public life as the highest calling, and of the public good as the supreme object of political action. Political virtue, either of elites or of citizens, has become a curiosity, or, rather a prurient curiosity. Perhaps, then, Tocquevillean gran- deur, instead of being dismissed as romantic posturing, might be viewed as a valuable measure, not of how impossibly high Tocqueville set his political sights, but how distressingly low the theorists and politicians of interest poli- tics have set theirs.

Precisely because of the odd and surprising mix of contingent elements that attaches to the being we have come to call "Tocqueville," he was able to see differently and more deeply than many of his contemporaries-and not just, as he put it, able to see "further." Tocqueville has valuable things to say about modernity, the importance and complexity of political cultures, the condi-

POST DEMOC RAC Y 565

tions necessary for a genuinely political life, the political consequences of rapid change and extreme social mobility, the difference between a ~olitics arising out of and directed against nature and one shaped by and duected against history. In large measure he was able to see diffe~endy and further because of a premodern or "archaic" stratum which made him supremely sen- sitive to the inhospitable aspects of the modern world. He would not only write about the l'ancien regi,me and forever carry its birthmarks; he cultivated it and made it integral to his vision of the present. At a time when a great number of theoretical minds were struggling desperately to rid themselves of inheritance--Marx of his Judaism and Hegelianism, Mill of his Benthamism, and Nietzsche of Christianity-Tocqueville was attempting to incorporate his and to make it a vital part of the analysis and, ultimately, of the theoretical

imagination.

III

In gaining some familiarity with the range of Tocqueville's theories against the background-or foreground-of his political lives, it is possible to gauge whether the theories matched the political and theoretical intentions of its author or whether there was slippage, loss of control, unanticipated, even un- wanted, revelations that made Tocqueville the first victim of his own theoriz- ing. Initially the world revealed by his theory jeopardized and eventually de- feated his political program for the renewal of French political life. The sense in which Tocqueville "failed" matters. More than any other political writer after Rousseau and before Gramsci, he made the revival of the political his primary concern. For that project to become politically anachronistic and the- oretically absurd; for theory to theorize its own disconfirmation so as to find a world and lose a theory is to find one's self in the world heralded by some of Tocqueville's contemporaries and accepted as home by their successors in the social sciences. For the latter the truest theory is one whose values find confirmation in the world's practice.8

Tocqueville's claim, that he stood between two worlds, might strike later readers as pretentious and yet the element of truth in the posturing lent a specific thematic structure to his thinking, a set of categories, and a character- istic way of analyzing reflectively. Thematically the most important element was the archaic. It gave a distinctive cast to his thinking, shaping it to see into and through modernity.

Usually the archaic refers to a practice or belief that has survived the time to which it "properly belongs." Most of Tocqueville's archaisms derived from the Old Regime, which had governed France before the Great Revo- lution. The principal archaisms in Tocqueville's theory were "feudalism:"

566 CHAPTER XXVI

"aristocracy," and "political liberty."9 As an element in a theoretical strategy, archaism aims at unsettling the present, bringing it to a temporary pause, insisting that it historicizc its self-understanding. But the present instinctively resists historicization. 10 It wants nothing more than to interpret itself by itself, that is, by its own notions and categories, by its own self-confirming narrative. The intrusion forces the present out of its self-contained hermeneutical circle. Archaism can accomplish this effect because, unlike the present, it has been stripped of its context. It confronts the present like some displaced refugee caught between times and without place. Precisely because it cannot represent the abandoned past to a present whose identity is staked on the death of the past, the archaic trails an odor of death, an unwelcome reminder to the pres- ent that change not only brings new things into the world but causes other things to languish and disappear. The archaic forces the modern into self- questioning, slowing the urge to totalizc. While premodern societies fetish- izcd the past and were in constant fear of losing it, modernizing societies seek to escape by fetishizing the future.

Tocqueville's archaism was the product of a tension between his awareness that he was prone to fantasize a restoration of a certain past and a recognition both of its impossibility and of the imprudence of openly acknowledging it. He resolves the conflicts by attempting to enlarge modernity's understanding of progress to include the experience of loss. When archaism is thrust into the conversation of liberal democracy, it causes notions of equality to be viewed phenomenologically: not just as the acquisition of rights or of a common status among citizens but as the erasure of differences, of "becoming distanced more and more from the ideas and sentiments peculiar co a class, a profession, or a farnily." 11

Modernity and equality thus conceal a specific trauma. A regime of equal- ity is not simply a leveled condition where all have been reduced to the same economic and social plane-as antidemocratic critics, citing Tocqueville, have maintained. Equality signifies a condition in which human beings draw apan as cenain bonds of identity slacken: bonds of generations, families, reli- gion, economic obligations, and political communities. Archaism is a protest against what it exposes as the principal form of destructiveness inherent in modernity, the disconnectedness of existence. Tocqueville's conception of a democratic modernity was as much a warning about individualism as about the threat of the masses, and this despite the apparent affinity between indi- vidualism and liberty. 12 The vulnerability of democracy-modernity is revealed in its drift toward self-caricature: the free but privatized individual turns out to be the jargon by which identity conceals from itself that it is identical and, as such, the condition of despotism rather than its polar opposite.

POST DEMOCRACY 567

Thus democracy is poised to become for our times what aristocracy was for Tocqueville's, the archaic remains of a superseded past. Unlike Tocqueville's aristocracy, however, the passing of democracy, if that is what is happening, is not being experienced as loss, as entrance into a time of postdemocracy, but as freedom from an impossible obligation.13

Tocqueville speaks to this condition not as the prophet of democracy but as the critic of modern ambivalencies, not when he speaks authoritatively but hesitantly, not of what has happened in the past or of what is happening now but of the novel character of what is coming to be, of what is emerging. The advent of modernity means that thereafter what will come to be will have been deprived of the past as a reference point: "Everyone recognizes [Tocque- ville wrote] that the whole political system which Europe had followed for forty years has changed; that all of the old alliances are loosened or destroyed as new interests and forces have come into play; and that the past is no guide

to the future." 14

The theme of a deepening divide between past and present recurs through- out most of his writings and may be said to be a comment upon his own fate. We might think of Tocqueville as representing a point of intersection for three mutually hostile historical tendencies. He is both the representative and the theorist of the premodern, of the traditional society, of ancimneti. He is also the critical theorist of the modern, of Enlightenment, democracy, and revolution. Finally, he is the theorist of the postpolitical and the postdemo- cratic. l 5 The first represents an archaic, predemocratic moment; the second, an apocalyptic moment of radical change followed by periodic aftershocks, the third, the domestication of democracy and the emergence of a uniquely

postmodern regime. Returning to Dmzocracys imagery of the "abyss," imagine Tocqueville

standing at its edge. The edge of the abyss is not the moment when one chooses but a condition from which one recoils but cannot retreat. The con- dition is not an either/or dilemma because it is not a spatial problem, as the notion of an abyss first implies, but a temporal one. A second image, this time of a theory that represents a dividing line, entails not a theory that is a divid- ing line but one that represents its own acute self-consciousness of a world that has wandered, marched, or happened into a different "time," from a time when privilege ruled the public, social, and cultural life of society to a time when anonymity reigns. 16 That self-consciousness might be described as a growing awareness of being condemned to live when change has co-opted revolution to create a continuum of fabrication: once revolutions were fo- mented, now change is "produced." Revolution abandons the clandestine; it is not plotted in the cafe or lavatory but in the boardroom and laboratoty.

568 CHAPTER XXVI

The modern emerges and then accelerates, until finally the process of produc- ing the new becomes a matter of course, precisely the opposite of what the new was believed to be. The new becomes the prosaic.

This can be stated in somewhat different terms that may bring out the unresolved problem in Tocqueville between the New World and the Old. If a comparison is made between the impressions that he committed to his note- books of his travels into the sparsely settled interior of the New World and the impressions of the revolutionary events of 1848 that he recorded in his Souve- nirs, two strikingly different versions of modernity emerge. The American wilderness is the scene of the struggle to subdue nature. The westward migra- tions are a triumph over natural space but the subjugation of nature effectively marked the destruction of a certain notion of time as well, one in which na- ture and history had cooperated by sharing certain metaphors of slow growth, customary ways, timeless values. Premodernity: when time was slow and plen- tiful. America, the home of spatial plenty, was the triumph of an ironical notion of the timeless. There it was the growing scarcity of time, its shortage, the exhaustion of time in the conquest of space by beings in a hurry. Past time is no longer of consequence, and the present and the future are continually collapsing into each other. Once space has been conquered, however, time returns as measurable moments, as deliberately compressed into process. Modern time is the displacement of cultural time by economic time, by time homogenized. Frederick Taylor is its Moses, Henry Ford its Aaron, Detroit

the promised land. The intellectual is the symbol of the impending transformation of modern

time. In ancient times he was the thinker as the creator of timeless worlds; in modern times, when time is quick, he is Promethean, the overthrower of old, time-bound worlds; he is Marx, yet he is also Hegel, the figure who, in self- conception, is outside changing time even as he claims to be attuned to it.

The outside as a metaphor of intellectual distance, hence of the condition for disinterested theorizing, collapses under the pressure to restore culture in a form that will promote social stability while adapting to a new version of timelessness in which process sheds any relationship to teleology and becomes its opposite: instead of "development" or the fulfillment of potential, culture is end-less process, the formalized method by which artifacts are produced continuously-but conditionally. The condition is destruction. Its symbol is the idea of "the latest," whose appearance is conditional upon the new artifact rendering an existing one obsolete. The intellectual cannot stand outside the process of production except by choosing to be irrelevant. Even that most rarefied embodiment of intellectualism, the theorist, is drawn into the process of production, either by joining a "program" at a "research university" or by becoming a pundit-performance theorist.

POST DEMOCRACY 569

IV

I want to imagine under what novel ftatum despotism could hap- pm in the world.

Tocqueville17

If the Old Regime was the regime of ancienneti and democracy the regime that ushered in modernity, what political regime follows modernity? The Tocquevillean answer is: very possibly a despotism. That answer naturally in- vites reference to Hider and Stalin and to their mass support and seems proof of Tocqueville's prescience. What could be clearer instances of democratic despotism, of what one acclaimed study labeled "totalitarian democracy"?18

Or what could be more misleading. Tocqueville's conception depended on precisely what was absent in the prior history of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: prolonged exposure to the experience of democracy, not sim- ply to its catchwords or to a brief and thin experience of Weimar electoral politics and of cultural experiment. Despotism in Tocqueville's formulation signifies simultaneously the conquest of democracy and the mimicry of it. It is postdemocratic; the key to its distinctive character is not harshness but the opposite, not regimentation but privatization, not Brezhnev drabness but glit- ter and lavish consumption.

In support of the suggestion that Tocqueville's democratic despotism con- tains an outline of a postmodern, postdemocratic possibility, recall his claim that the "species of oppression which threatens democratic peoples" would not resemble anything that had occurred before. No word, he wrote could

exactly capture ht's meaning: "the ol~ords 'despotism' and 'tyranny' do not fit. " Nor will democratic despotisr; ?t the political category of "mixed government," by ich ancient, mediaeval, and early modern theorists meant a system that combined important features of the good regimes-that is, monarchy, aristocracy, and "polity" or limited democracy (Aristotle's rule by a propertied middle class). Nor was it to be understood as a species of the "perverted" forms of tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule. 19 Democratic des- potism was the product of a new time. Its appearance was impossible earlier because the enabling conditions were unavailable and certain predisposi- tions were as yet unformed. The administrative means were lacking for ruling large numbers of people, superimposing a mass culture on cultural diversi- ties, and overriding local authorities. Ideas of freedom had not yet legitimated a universal chase after "small and ~lgar pleasures" and a yearning for the joys of private life.20 Nor an ethos of democratic equality, which would condition men and women to submit to uniform rules that applied to everyone.

There is a sense in which democratic despotism is not a "form" at all. Save

570 CHAPTER XXVI

for an omnipresent bureaucracy, it has little in common with the highly per- sonalized tyrannies of the twentieth century and their charismatic leaders. Tocqueville's despot appears as faceless and nameless, a shadowy presence, enveloping rather than domineering. How he attained to power is never dis- cussed but, significantly, there is no suggestion that he would seize it by a coup. Rather he seems to combine superbureaucrat with mediocre politician, as though he might easily disappear into the system, as though despotism is the archetype of the impersonal, which overcomes even the despot. The des- pot is not required to be heroic, but simply administer a society of stunted individuals who have embraced lives emptied of political responsibility. Be- cause postdemocratic man wants to be led while feeling free, rule will, accord- ingly, be "milder" than traditional tyrannies although wider in scope. It would "degrade" rather than "torment."21 Moreover, a society in which the public has been educated, and where power and wealth appear to be diffused, where public moeurs have become "more humane and gentle," the despot will not feel threatened but inclined to be solicitous of the welfare of his citizens.

For Tocqueville despotism did not qualify as democratic simply because the despot appealed to certain notions associated with democracy. Demo- cratic despotism presupposed a society whose members had experienced de- mocracy and importantly were shaped by some of its values, such as self- interest and equality, and by some of its practices, such as administrative centralization. What is crucial to the appearance of despotism is the virtual disappearance of cbc culmce ofpw;jcjpation and its replacement by a culture of privatism, isolation, and what Tocqueville could not have foreseen, con- sumerism. The importance of the democratic experience in preparing the way for despotism consists not only in its positive contributions but in ele- ments of loss.

If, as Tocqueville believed, self-government would be the crucial loss, how might that loss be concealed or, better, sublimated so that it appears to be flourishing? If despotism signifies, at the minimum, the destruction of the political in its todern form, we ne~ to ask, What was that form? The answer is not _obscure. (:.he modern pol!t!~as expressed as the concept of popular sovereignty, the idea that the cmzenry should rule. That idea, however, as- sumed a politically engaged citizenry capable of disinterestedness. Without that assumption, democracy becomes all-purpose, infinitely plastic, and the question becomes, Who controls the meanings of democracy and, thereby, its fate?

For democracy to be exploited a semblance of popular sovereignty has to be preserved. One example: throughout the nineteenth century and until the Great Depression of 1929 most classical economists had viewed politics and political notions as antithetical to the economic. Now economic discourse is

POST DEMOCRACY 571

comfortable in referring to "consumer sovereignty" and attributing to it a "force" that commands the market to respond to the wants of ordinary citi- zens. A purchase is a vote and the consumer is to the economy as the citizen is to the polity. Accordingly, the original notion, its assumptions subtly changed by the economizing context, is returned to the political domain, which, meanwhile, has become increasingly directed by corporate economic powers that have become politically self-conscious. As the imprint of the eco- nomic upon the political increases, the political is discovered to be more com- prehensible by economic modes of analysis. Concepts of popular sovereignty collapse into theories of "rational choice" and "voter preference," while voter surveys become indistinguishable from consumer research.

The evolution that saw electoral politics become assimilated to the prac- tices of the marketplace--candidates marketed as products, elections reduced to slogans and advertisements, voters maneuvered into the position where caveat emptor becomes their most reliable guide-suggests a conclusion, that postmodern despotism consists of the collapse of politics into economics and the emergence of a new form, the economic polity. The regime is, as Tocque- ville suggested, benign, power transmuted into solicitude, popular sovereignty into consumerism, mutuality into mutual funds, and the democracy of citi- zens into shareholder democracy. If postmodernity signifies the sovereignty of economy, not only as the domain where the most dazzling deeds are per- formed, where real power is to be had, where the fate of society as a whole is ultimately decided, then, as the successor to conceptions of government or of the state, it is plausible to believe that it may be subject to vicissitudes and alteration. Would a depoliticized form, an economic polity, respond to crisis by assuming the characteristics of a "democratic" despotism?

The historical conjuncture that found modern power and democracy ex- panding together posed the question of whether the "political moment" within democracy, but by no means synonymous with it, could be preserved and cultivated, or whether democracy would gradually shed its civic potential- ities and become simply a cultural subset with a functional role in the mainte- nance and reproduction of modern power. Stated slightly differently, the question came down to whether the "masses" were to be prepared for citizen- ship or for a work force. Modernity might be described as the moment of that choice, postmodernity as its decision.

Far from being valued as symbolizing an aspiration toward the democrati- zation of power and a participatory society of political equals--democracy as subject--democracy would come to be regarded by late-modern power elites as object, an indispensable yet malleable myth for promoting American pol~t- ical and economic interests among premodern and post-totalitarian societies. At home, democracy is touted not as self-government by an involved citizenry

572 CHAPTER XXVI

~ut as economic ~ppor~ity. Opportunity serves as the means of implicat- '.ng the populace m anttdemocracy, in a policicoeconomic system characcer- i~d by ?1e dominati~g power of hierarchical organizations, widening class differentials, and a society where the hereditary element is confined to succes- sive g~nerations of the defenseless poor. Democracy is perpetuated as philan- thropic gesture, contemptuously insticutionalired as welfare, and denigrated as populism.

~ NOTES

INTRODUCTION

I. For a thoughtful study of Tocqueville's ideas and relevant contemporaries, see Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1987); Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, john Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1992); Lucien Jaume, L'individu efface, ou le paradoxe du libtra/isme fran fais (Paris: Fayard, 1999). For studies of Tocqueville in a broader context, sec Bruce James Smith, Politics and Remembrance: &publican Themes in Machiavelli, Burke, and Tocque- ville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Tocqueville figures importantly in Claude Lcfort's thoughtful study, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1988). Unfortunately the stimulating volume by Mark Rein- hardt came too late to my attention: The Art of Being Fru: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a critical but highly suggestive (somewhat Foucauldian) reading of Tocqueville, sec William Con- nolly, "Tocqueville, Territory, and Violence," Theory, Culture and Society 2 (1994): 19- 41. The best general survey is Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

2. In France there has been a growing scholarly interest in what kind of liberalism Tocqueville represented. See Andre Jardin, Histoire du liberalisme politique: De la crise de l'absolutisme a la Constitution de 187J (Paris: Hachette, 1985). In addition to the study by Jaumc, L'individu efface, sec Fran~oise Mclonio, Tocqueville and the French (Charlottes- ville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). Also Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville et ks deux dhnocraties (Paris: Presses Univcrsitaires de France, 1983), pp. 102-3; published in translation by Harvard University Press, 1989 and the earlier study R. Pierre-Marcel, Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Alcan: Paris, 1910).

3. Like many who write on theory and action, I owe my earliest interest in the prob- lem to Hannah Arcndt's discussion in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

4. Fran~is Furet would be an important exception. Sec his essay, "Tocqueville, cst-il historien de la Revolution &an~sc?" Anna/es, no. 25 (1970): 435-451.

5. Hcrodocus described Solon's travels abroad as a theoria (1.30). Sec also Norma Thompson, Herodotus and the Origins of the Political Community: Arions Leap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 5-6.

6. Tocqueville was an inveterate traveler. In addition to his travels to North America, he visited Sicily, Italy, England, Ireland, Algeria, and (as yet ununited) Germany.

7. In the course of a letter of 1852 to his father, Tocqueville protested vehemently against any attempt that implied he favored Bonaparte's government: "I have never de- sired power, only reputation. Mine is mixed with liberal ideas and institutions. To asso- ciate me, even indirectly, with a government which is destroying them in my country, to permit it to be believed that I shall seek a reconciliation with it, is to diminish me in the public's estimation . . . . The one essential is the respect which is attached 'to a