Tocqueville for a Terrible Era

Tocqueville’s incomplete, conflicted reflections on whether honor and war have been safely consigned to the past should alert us to the psychological, not merely sociological, difficulty of adjusting to modernity. His thoughts about memory suggest that one form of adjustment is the attempt to re‐enchant the world. Among such attempts are both the European ideologies that have spread to the Middle East—nationalism, communism, and fascism—and religious fundamentalism. The latter, in particular, responds not only to the loss of premodern enchantment, but to the complexity that makes the modern world so chaotically contingent and changeable—deepening the allure of simple precepts, imposed from above, experienced directly, and adhered to inflexibly. Notes 1. While it would be difficult to find two books more diametrically opposed in their assessment than Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (Citation1977) and Manent’s The City of Man (Citation1998), both reiterate the typology I will rehearse below. 2. This account of the fable of liberalism can be found in Mitchell Citation2006, 167–75. There, I contrast Plato’s Republic with the fable of liberalism, with a view to the question of whether the modern/antimodern debate that lurks in the fable of liberalism can be comprehended by the typological distinction between timocracy and oligarchy in Plato’s Bk. VIII; and the question of whether “philosophy” (as Plato conceives of it) can supersede the terms of that debate. 3. This was Samuel Johnson’s phrase, which Burke adopted to describe the caustic assault on aristocratic sensibilities wrought by the French Revolution. In Burke’s words, But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (Burke [1790] Citation2001, 239) 4. See Mandeville [1714] Citation1988, 284: “Man, as I have hinted before, naturally loves to imitate what he sees others do, which is the reason that savage people all do the same thing: this hinders them from meliorating their condition” (emphasis added). The editor of Smith’s Wealth of Nations cites the passage immediately before this one in Mandeville’s Fable as the possible basis for Smith’s locution, “the division of labor” (see Smith [1776] Citation1976, 7). Marx’s response to Smith is that bourgeois civilization reproduces itself in its “own image” ([1848] Citation1978, 477). Bourgeois civilization destroys one form of imitation, only to introduce another. 5. Adam Smith, to whom I will allude again shortly, was not prepared to go this far. See Smith [1759] Citation1982, 235, emph. added: This universal benevolence, how noble and generous soever, can be the source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe, the meanest as well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and protection of that great, benevolent, and all‐wise Being, who directs all the movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of happiness. To this universal benevolence, on the contrary, the very suspicion of a fatherless world, must be the most melancholy of all reflections; from the thought that all the unknown regions of infinite and incomprehensible space may be filled with nothing but endless misery and wretchedness. All the splendour of the highest prosperity can never enlighten the gloom with which so dreadful an idea must necessarily over‐shadow the imagination; nor, in a wise and virtuous man, can all the sorrow of the most afflicting adversity ever dry up the joy which necessarily springs from the habitual and thorough conviction of the truth of the contrary system. 6. See Smith [1776] Citation1976, 18: “The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labor.” 7. See Smith [1759] Citation1982, 8–9: By our imagination we place ourselves in [another man’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were his body, and become in some measure the same person with him. ... His agonies, when they are brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us. ... This is the source of our fellow‐feeling for the misery of others. 8. Letter of 1 January 1856, cited in Tocqueville [1805–1859] Citation1985, 326. See also Hennis Citation1991, 49: “Tocqueville radicalizes this experience [of loneliness] suffered so much more prevalently in modern society by making this oldest pronouncement of our Judeo‐Christian conception of human history the basis of his entire political thought.” 9. See Arendt Citation1958, 54–55: If the world is to contain a public space [which gathers men together and relates them to each other], it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life‐span of mortal men. Without this transcendence into the potentially earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible. 10. See Tocqueville [1835] Citation1969, 406: “There is no sovereign will or national prejudice that can fight for long against cheapness,” and idem [1840] Citation1969, 614: “Men living in democratic times have many passions, but most of these culminate in love of wealth or derive from it. That is not because their souls are narrower but because money really is more important at such times.” Ibid., 615: “In aristocratic nations money is the key to the satisfaction of but few of the vast array of possible desires; in democracies it is the key to them all.” 11. See Tocqueville [1835] Citation1969, 236: “What can be done in such a condition? Retreat? But nations do not return to the feelings of their youth any more than men return to the innocent tastes of their infancy.” 12. The course of Nietzsche’s works exemplifies both nodal points of this rhythm. The Birth of Tragedy reflects the fervent attempt to re‐enchant the world, while Ecce Homo reflects his effort to confront the hard truths of a disenchanted world. 13. Berman Citation2003 sees some of the linkages, but does not focus enough on the manner in which the comprehensive antimodern doctrines of Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche have worked their way into twentieth‐century Islamic thought. 14. Rawls’s project, which begins from the vantage point of a “veil of ignorance” (Citation1971, 12), and out of which citizens without a socially constituted history emerge, is a résumé of a social order without rank. 15. Consider, for example, Rousseau [1755] Citation1997, 20: “One cannot reflect on morals, without taking delight in recalling the image of the simplicity of the first times. It is a fair shore, adorned by the hands of nature alone, toward which one forever turns one’s eyes, and from which one feels oneself moving away with regret” (emph. added). 16. Because of its historical roots in America and its theological roots in Christianity, there is considerable debate about the applicability of the term fundamentalism to Islamic politico‐theological speculation of the last century. Some aspects of what I am here calling the fundamentalist complex certainly appear in the Muslim world, and it is provocative to consider the deeper meaning of analogous developments in different parts of the globe. Christianity, however, emerged against the backdrop of an already existing political order, and linked its origin to the incarnational event that marks the “good news” of redemption from the pre‐political problem of original sin. Islam dates its origin not to the revelations Mohammed received first in Mecca, but to the founding of a political community in Medina. This suggests not that Christianity has no politics, but that as a religion, its relationship to politics ranges from compatible to separable enough, so that distinctly modern political forms could emerge without destroying it. It is not yet clear that such compatibility or separation within Islam is possible, since the founding religious event was simultaneously political. Christianity, Tocqueville says, will prevail in the modern age because it offers only general moral injunctions, not political prescripts. Not so with Islam (Tocqueville Citation1969, 445). On this reading, then, the more virulent strains of Islamic politico‐theological speculation should be seen first and foremost in terms of the problem of memory and re‐enchantment outlined above; and secondly, as exhibiting certain fundamentalist responses to that problem. By this I mean that many of these movements seek—amidst the painful disjunction between the apparatus of modernity and the premodern mores that still prevails in vast regions of the Muslim world—to re‐enchant the world by returning to the time of the primordial Islamic community in Medina. Like many modern‐day Christian fundamentalists, however, they lack an ecclesiological basis on which to found such a community. Put otherwise, Christian fundamentalism in America is not politically virulent because, as Tocqueville pointed out, Americans have no memory of an enchanted aristocratic past that they wish to retrieve. It is the memory of an enchanted age, and the wish to re‐enchant the world, that is the root cause of the problem. Christians know that the Fall of Adam marks the end of such enchantment. Islam has no such doctrine of the Fall

Aesthetics · Art · Barbarism · Communism · Epistemology · Fable · Fundamentalism · Honor · Ideology · Liberalism · Literature · Modernity · Nationalism · Passions · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tragedy (event · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies · Religious Studies

• The Theory of Moral Sentiments

  Adam Smith, D D Raphael et al.•The Glasgow Edition of the Works…•1759

  Add to list

• A Theory of Justice

  John Rawls•Theory of Justice•1971

  Add to list

• Alexis de Tocqueville

  Henry C Clark•History of European Ideas•1987

  Add to list

• Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America

  Alan S Kahan, Alan Kahan et al.•Journal of American History•1994

  Add to list

• The Passions and the Interests

  Albert O Hirschman, Amartya Sen et al.•Passions and the Interests•1977

  Add to list