Tocqueville between Two Worlds

The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life

Sheldon S. Wolin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691114545
  9780691074368
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400824793
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Alexis de Tocqueville may be the most influential political thinker in American history. He also led an unusually active and ambitious career in French politics. In this magisterial book, one of America's most important contemporary theorists draws on decades of research and thought to present the first work that fully connects Tocqueville's political and theoretical lives. In doing so, Sheldon Wolin presents sweeping new interpretations of Tocqueville's major works and of his place in intellectual history. As he traces the origins and impact of Tocqueville's ideas, Wolin also offers a profound commentary on the general trajectory of Western political life over the past two hundred years.


Wolin proceeds by examining Tocqueville's key writings in light of his experiences in the troubled world of French politics. He portrays Democracy in America, for example, as a theory of discovery that emerged from Tocqueville's contrasting experiences of America and of France's constitutional monarchy. He shows us how Tocqueville used Recollections to reexamine his political commitments in light of the revolutions of 1848 and the threat of socialism. He portrays The Old Regime and the French Revolution as a work of theoretical history designed to throw light on the Bonapartist despotism he saw around him. Throughout, Wolin highlights the tensions between Tocqueville's ideas and his activities as a politician, arguing that--despite his limited political success--Tocqueville was ''perhaps the last influential theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political life.''


In the course of the book, Wolin also shows that Tocqueville struggled with many of the forces that constrain politics today, including the relentless advance of capitalism, of science and technology, and of state bureaucracy. He concludes that Tocqueville's insights and anxieties about the impotence of politics in a ''postaristocratic'' era speak directly to the challenges of our own ''postdemocratic'' age. A monumental new study of Tocqueville, this is also a rich and provocative work about the past, the present, and the future of democratic life in America and abroad.

PART ONE

The Abundance of Power

CHAPTER I

MODERN THEORY AND

MODERN POWER

I

[T]he most striking characteristic of the times is the powerlessness of both men and governments to direct the course of political and social changes.

Tocqueville¹

Tocqueville singled out “powerlessness” as the striking characteristic of the politics of the times. Yet those times might also be described as notable for the abundance and variety of powers rather than their scarcity and for actors overwhelmed by powers rather than lacking them. In this and the next chapter I want to develop the paradox of power and propose it as the political and theoretical context for interpreting Tocqueville.

From ancient to early modern times the theoretical problem presented by power lay in its finite amount and consequent social disorder as nations, families, singular actors, groups, and classes struggled for control of a scarce good and by its means the enforcement of their conception of good order.² The symbol of the politics of scarcity was the idea and institutions of privilege by which authority was bestowed on and power restricted to a relative few who were singled out on the basis of birth, an entitlement from a high authority, or great wealth. As late as the eighteenth century Rousseau began his reconstruction of the logic of society by positing a human condition afflicted by powerlessness: men find that “the power of resistance” offered by nature was greater than “the forces” that each individual could bring to preserve himself. Rousseau’s solution of a social contract, whereby each incorporates himself into a community, admittedly did not create power. Instead “by aggregation a sum of forces . . . [would be] brought into play” by “the single motive force” of men “acting in concert.” For “men cannot generate new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones.”³

Beginning in the sixteenth century with Machiavelli, the hallmark of modern political theorists was a preoccupation with power or, more precisely, with the exercise of political power and with the conditions for maintaining and extending it. By the next century power talk ceased to be the monopoly of political theorists. Power became a concern shared with other theoretical forms, most notably in the natural sciences, and in the eighteenth century with political economy. By then the preoccupation of theorists had shifted from the acquisition of power to its production. The growth of modern science, the organization of it around technological applications, the phenomenal expansion of economic production, the development of ever more destructive weaponry, and the growing penetration by Western nations of the non-Western world all meant that powers of unprecedented magnitudes were reshaping the world, uprooting traditional social and political forms, and reconstituting nature.

Add to this list the enormous force potentially present in mass populations that had been aroused by revolutionary events (1776, 1798, 1848) and kept in motion by promises of material relief, the gradual extension of political and civil rights, the agitative activities of political parties, and even the halting efforts to organize workers—and the result is a kinetic society, a sociogram of forces of unprecedented weight and extent, actual and latent, thrusting ceaselessly, colliding and absorbing, but always transforming and being transformed. The exercise of power was no longer primarily associated with ruling. Instead, commentators noted how its diverse forms were reshaping the social world by altering the most intimate conditions of daily life. By comparison Machiavelli’s pokings into the cruelties and vices of princes and into the mechanics of conspiratorial plotting seemed narrow and antiquated.

By the nineteenth century theorists were confronting a world of diverse powers and dominations, which humankind alone had brought into existence but no one had legislated. There were concentrated powers, like those of emergent industrial capitalism and the centralizing nation-state; diffused powers, such as those represented by small entrepreneurs, local notables, and an unorganized citizenry; and mysterious powers, which came into existence when large masses of people were aroused by appeals to liberty, patriotism, and nationalism.⁴ Writers of a liberal persuasion had taken the lead in encouraging scientific, technological, and progressive political change. Initially they welcomed what seemed to be the benevolent direction of these great powers and defined the political task as one of replacing inherited practices with progressive values. Accordingly, liberals busied themselves with reform of the franchise and of parliamentary procedures, the abolition of slavery and of the poor-law system, the rationalization of administration, the establishment of a civil service based on the seemingly impartial principle of “merit,” the strengthening of the “machinery” of justice and of local government, and the revision of taxation and tariff policies.⁵ By midcentury liberals began gingerly to turn greater attention to issues of popular education, the condition of the working classes, social welfare, and the rights of women—that is, to inequities that appeared attributable more to the new society than to the old.

The recognition of a new class of problems coincided with a loss of confidence among liberals, as though they had suddenly come to doubt that a natural accord existed between the forces molding the age and the liberal view of the world. John Stuart Mill found consolation in the hope that a new era might be dawning in which “the progress of liberal opinions will again, as formerly, depend upon what is said and written and no longer upon what is done.”⁶

I I

Symptoms of liberal despair were but one manifestation of a common anxiety produced by a growing sense of helplessness amid a world bursting with new forces. A feeling that things might be getting out of control contributed to making avatars of many conservative writers. Some were driven toward racism, others to anti-Semitism, and many to virulent nationalisms. Helplessness was not, however, peculiar to those who looked backward. It affected even the futurists such as Saint-Simon and Comte who preached the urgent need for social “organization,” authority, religion, and the revival of social hierarchy as necessary means for warding off social anarchy. Practically every major social and political theory of the nineteenth century, from anarchism to organizationalism, from liberalism to socialism, was tinged by the desperate knowledge that Western societies were being pushed, shaped, and compelled in ways that both fascinated and appalled.

The advocacy of violence by some revolutionaries expressed a kind of last gamble—that by shaking the vital center of society and grabbing its levers of control human beings could regain a hold on their destinies. While the putschist dreams of a Babeuf, Buonarotti, or Nechayev were marginal phenomena, there was an apprehensiveness broadly shared by radicals (such as Marx and Proudhon), conservatives, and liberals that an unplanned connection was being forged between bourgeoning power and irreversibility that would eventually spell an end to heroic, much less demiurgic, action. A future, whether in the form of Marx’s communist society or Mill’s representative government, was envisioned that required the detailed work of administrative clerks and faceless experts rather than political heroes.⁷

Historically, modern conceptions of theory were present at the creation of modern power, and in crucial respects modern power was the creature of modern theory. What, other than its sheer quantity, was modern about modern power and what was theory’s role in its development?

I I I

The bourgeoisie during its rule of scarce one hundred years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground. . . . Modern bourgeois society . . . is like the sorcerer who is unable to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels⁸

This lyrical tribute to the sheer modernness of modern power was composed by the men who dedicated their lives to overthrowing that system or, more precisely, to dislodging the class in control in preparation for the full realization of the system’s productive potential. Possibly no one before or since has equaled Marx’s theoretical mastery of that system. His theory has largely set the terms for understanding how “such gigantic means of production and of exchange” had come into being and with what social, political, and economic consequences. Terms such as class struggle, social labor, concentration of production and ownership, the world system of production and markets, and the exploitation of the working class have all become established elements in the modern grammar of power, even among some who have rejected or sharply modified Marx’s analysis.

The reason for this is not that the modern understanding of power is Marxist but rather that Marx’s theory, as he himself recognized, both paralleled and intersected with the orthodox or hegemonic understanding of power as represented by classical economics and modern liberal political theories. Although he contested what he perceived as the ideological and ahistorical biases in the liberal conception of modern power, he not only shared but expanded its major assumptions: that economic forces were primary, that political life was secondary to the central problem of organizing the productive powers of society, that a rational society would see to it that politics was gradually displaced by public administration, and that technical education was emblematic of the cultural needs of a modern society.⁹

The reason why Marx’s ideas are mentioned in a study of Tocqueville is that, like the classical economists he criticized, Marx centered the meaning of modernity around power: how it is generated by the exploitation and processing of the natural world and by the organization of human labor, and by what rules it is socially acquired and distributed. This way of inquiring into power has become so widely shared as to seem axiomatic. But, by and large, it was not Tocqueville’s mode of understanding.

Although, like Marx, Tocqueville was convinced about the revolutionary nature of modern power, about the crucial importance of grasping it through historical categories, and, above all, about revolution as the defining experience of modernity, he differed sharply about the meaning, even about the location and form, of revolution and hence about the promise of modernity. Marx is customarily cast as the antithesis to modern liberalism, yet his ideas were as much an extension of liberalism as an attempt to remedy certain of its deficiencies, such as the subordination of science and technology to the dictates of the market and of moral and aesthetic values to money. The sharper his criticism of capitalism, the more it exposed a core of Enlightenment values that he shared with liberalism: the primacy of science, equality, progress, popular education, rationality, freedom, and humanity. The main difference was that Marx retained the revolutionary impulses that liberal capitalism preferred to sublimate into a vision of unending material progress.

To say that Marx was obsessed by revolution would be an understatement. The two polarities of his theory, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, were each symbolic of revolutionary force. The bourgeoisie symbolized not only a new form of power but also the demise of privilege. The bourgeoisie, Marx never tired of saying, was a revolutionary class, the dynamic embodiment of the form of power that was continuously changing society. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist,” he declared, “without constantly re...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE
• CHAPTER I MODERN THEORY ANDMODERN POWER
• CHAPTER II THEORIA: THE THEORETICAL JOURNEY
• PART TWO
• CHAPTER III DISCOVERING DEMOCRACY
• CHAPTER IV SELF AND STRUCTURE
• CHAPTER V DOUBT AND DISCONNECTION
• CHAPTER VI “ THE THEORY OFWHAT IS GREAT”
• CHAPTER VII MYTH AND POLITICALIMPRESSIONISM
• CHAPTER VIII THE SPECTACLE OF AMERICA
• PART THREE
• CHAPTER IX SOCIAL CONTRACT VERSUSPOLITICAL CULTURE
• CHAPTER X THE CULTURE OF THE POLITICAL:“THE RITUALS OF PRACT
• CHAPTER XI FEUDAL AMERICA
• CHAPTER XII MAJORITY RULE OR MAJORITY POLITICS
• CHAPTER XIII CENTRALIZATION AND DISSOLUTION
• CHAPTER XIV THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY
• PART FOUR
• CHAPTER XV TRAGIC HERO, POPULAR MASK
• CHAPTER XVI THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CULTURE
• CHAPTER XVII DESPOTISM AND UTOPIA
• CHAPTER XVIII OLD NEW WORLD, NEW OLD WORLD
• CHAPTER XIX TOCQUEVILLEAN DEMOCRACY
• CHAPTER XX THE PENITENTIARY TEMPTATION
• PART FIVE
• CHAPTER XXI THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE
• CHAPTER XXII SOUVENIRS : RECOLLECTIONS IN/TRANQUILLITY
• CHAPTER XXIII SOUVENIRS : SOCIALISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE POLITI
• CHAPTER XXIV THE OLD REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION: MYTHISTORICUS E
• CHAPTER XXV THE OLD REGIME:
• CHAPTER XXVI POSTDEMOCRACY
• NOTES