Why are Alexis de Tocqueville's observations of the "Democracy in America",
although 160 years old, still surprisingly relevant to Political Theory
today? They are not only pregnant with a human anthropology that may
bridge the gap between communitarians and liberals, but they also contain
an insightful view into the course of human history, and address and answer
postmodern questions. In sum, "Democracy in America" is a resource
that provides us both with a critique of modern liberal democracy and with
a model for a future civil society.
What will
I do in this paper? I attempt to lay out a liberal answer to
postmodern concerns about identity and history on the basis of an interpretation
of Tocqueville with postmodern vocabulary. Before doing so, I will stake
out the contemporary territory for my discussion of Tocqueville. My general
perceptions about the Enlightenment project and postmodernity, as well
as the current discussion of identity politics, serve as pretext and context
to this discussion. After explaining a key-term to my interpretation, the
term "narrative", I will attempt to rewrite Tocqueville's history of equality
around a political anthropology that regards human beings as story-telling
beings. I shall finally draw conclusions to the effect that a liberalism
constructed with these premises is an answer to postmodern concerns. -
For now, I shall outline a broad Tocquevillian argument about modernity
and postmodernity - about false universalism and lonely individualism,
about false autonomy and the helpless flight into cozy parochialism - and
then explain his most important ideas in more detail.
What is
postmodernity? - This question deserves many answers. But broadly speaking,
postmodernity entails a feeling that life is kaleidoscopically fragmented,
that old grand orders and explanations of the world - which I will call
narratives - are no longer valid, and that truth is largely a matter of
perspective. This idea goes along with the idea that meaning, and thus
"authentic existence" is a relative matter as well, and may mean
different things for different people. - There are those who consciously
realize that truth-seeking is a lonely search for a unicorn in the underwood
of one's own mind, and there are others who merely react to the feeling
that this might be so. The former are philosophers or political theorists
or other culturally fascinated people, the latter are the mass of people
who feel alienation, disenchantment or discomfort in a world order of rapid
change and fewer securities.
Is the upsetting of old securities enchanting or
upsetting? Some bourgeois professors for humanity find that intellectual
search for the unicorn of truth highly entertaining and start juggling
with pieces of underwood. Though they could never admit it, Richard Rorty
has written their narrative. Other people, like the British John
Gray, have the feeling of a brave and optimistic American boyscout who
realizes he has lost his group in the woods, accepts it "as historical
fate", stresses (Heidegger's virtue of) "Gelassenheit" (releasement) and
sees the possibility of "a new relationship with our natural environment,
with the earth and the other things with which we share the earth."
Somewhat more violent than this modern Tarzan would be Nietzsche's idea
of roaming the underwood as a unicornly beast. But for the majority of
the people, the crumbling of the traditional orders of their world is a
more subtle threat, and as an answer, they retreat to joining a pack of
similar people whose pack leaders pretend to actually serve unicorn (called,
according to taste, "authenticity", "ethnic pride", "true America", "true
Christianity", "black power" ect.) to its members at any given time. This
major tendency to join a parochial group with its distinct stories and
habits in the face of postmodern disenchantment and loneliness is described
in Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs McWorld.
How did Tocqueville speak of Nietzsche, Rorty and Gray? If the
search for truth and authentic existence can only be obtained by leaving
the old paths in the underwood, as Nietzsche (the earliest post-modernist),
Rorty and, though not in the language of authenticity, Gray would argue,
then that has been anticipated by Tocqueville when he observed of the democratic
American people (italics by C.G.):
To escape from imposed systems, the yoke of habit, family maxims, class prejudices, and to a certain extent national prejudices as well; to treat tradition as valuable for information only and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them and looking through forms to the basis of things - such are the principal characteristics of what I would call the American philosophical method."
which is, looking through the form to the basis, not merely the American,
but foremost the democratic practice , and, in that it is a very human-centered,
secular, rational philosophical method, a practice that inevitably leads
to the disenchanted state of postmodernity: "Our patrimony is the disenchantment
which the Enlightenment project has bequeathed to us - a disenchantment
all the more profound since it encompasses all the central illusions of
Enlightenment itself" , namely the illusion that a rational construction
of morality was possible.
Did Tocqueville also anticipate the packs that pretend
to serve the unicorn already? He knew that the disconnected self-reliance
produces, in the general person, the air of a know-all : "Seeing that they
are successful in resolving unaided all the little difficulties they encounter
in practical affairs, they are easily led to the conclusion that everything
in the world can be explained and that nothing passes beyond the limits
of intelligence." Being a smarty, distrusting authorities, seems
a democratic condition. The conclusion is that people would believe that
what they choose as answers are the only true answers.