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Tocqueville and Nietzsche on the Problem of Human Greatness in Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2014

Paul Franco
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Abstract

Nietzsche and Tocqueville share a common concern with the tendency to mediocrity and loss of human greatness in democratic life. This essay explores the many similarities in their diagnoses of this problem, which they both view from the distinctive standpoint of aristocracy. Both thinkers focus on the way in which the individualism, preoccupation with material comfort, restlessness, and valorization of compassion that belong to democracy undermine human aspiration, intellectual excellence, and spiritual depth. Nevertheless, they differ sharply in their responses to the problem of human greatness in democracy. Tocqueville calls chiefly upon religion to elevate democratic citizens but otherwise resigns himself to the mediocrity that comes with democratic life. Nietzsche starts from the pessimistic premise that God is dead but more optimistically affirms the possibility of reestablishing aristocracy and finding a new greatness for human beings. The essay ultimately finds Nietzsche's solution more convincing but not without difficulties.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , Summer 2014 , pp. 439 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

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References

1 Nietzsche's works are for the most part cited parenthetically by aphorism, note, or section number with the following abbreviations: A = The Antichrist, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (London: Penguin Books, 1968)Google Scholar; AOM = Assorted Opinion and Maxims, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1966)Google Scholar; BT = Birth of Tragedy, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)Google Scholar; D = Daybreak, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; EH = Ecce Homo, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)Google Scholar; GS = The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)Google Scholar; HH = Human, All Too Human, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; KSA = Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Colli, Giorgio and Montinari, Mazzino (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980)Google Scholar; SE = Schopenhauer as Educator, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; TI = Twilight of the Idols, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (London: Penguin Books, 1968)Google Scholar; UDH = Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; WS = The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; WP = The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 See Tocqueville's letter to Louis-Firmin Bouchitté of 8 January 1858, quoted in Lamberti, Jean-Claude, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 156–57Google Scholar.

3 Harvey Mansfield in particular has drawn attention to Tocqueville's concern with human greatness in his and Delba Winthrop's introduction to their translation of Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar and in his Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. See also Lawler, Peter, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993)Google Scholar.

4 See Mill's 1835 review of Democracy in America, in Mill, John Stuart, Collected Works, vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), esp. 71–86Google Scholar. For an attempt to bring Mill and Nietzsche closer together, see Mara, Gerald and Dovi, Suzanne L., “Mill, Nietzsche, and the Identity of Postmodern Liberalism,” Journal of Politics 57 (1995): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more perceptive account of the fundamental differences between Mill and Nietzsche, see Devigne, Robert, Reforming Liberalism: J. S. Mill's Use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal, and Romantic Moralities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 182–85Google Scholar, 207–8, 221–23.

5 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George (New York: Harper and Row, 1966)Google Scholar, cited parenthetically as DA by volume, part, and chapter number.

6 The only article of which I am aware that treats the Tocqueville-Nietzsche relationship in a sustained way is Boesche, Roger, “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” in Tocqueville's Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution, and Despotism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 127–47Google Scholar. This article focuses on Tocqueville's and Nietzsche's common worry about the degrading effects of the quest for material comfort in commercial society; it is much stronger on Tocqueville than Nietzsche. Joshua Mitchell devotes a section of his book Fragility and Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87–101Google Scholar, to the Tocqueville-Nietzsche relationship, but he stacks the deck against Nietzsche by portraying him as a kind of hypervoluntaristic Pelagian who believes the burden of history can be overcome and “salvation” achieved through a heroic act of will, whereas the Augustinian Tocqueville accepts the providential character of history and with it a more circumscribed role for politics. Don Dembowsky devotes a chapter of his book Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 101–30Google Scholar, to Nietzsche's relationship to Tocqueville and other “aristocratic liberals” like Burckhardt and Taine, arguing that while the latter shared with Nietzsche a concern about the leveling effects of democracy, they did not reject democracy altogether or subscribe to Nietzsche's “Napoleonic Caesarism.” Briefer discussions of the Tocqueville-Nietzsche relationship can be found in Ansell-Pearson, Keith, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6–8Google Scholar; and Lawler, The Restless Mind, 29–31.

7 Appel, Frederick, Nietzsche contra Democracy (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, sums up the consensus view when he writes that while both Tocqueville and Nietzsche worried that the “democratic emphasis on equality and rights was eroding the sociopolitical conditions for flourishing and human greatness,” Tocqueville is in many ways “more palatable for the egalitarian-minded, largely because his worries are balanced by a genuine admiration for democratic virtues and the hope that countervailing factors (especially religious belief) would check its narrow materialism and sustain some element of transcendent striving in the democratic populace. Perhaps Nietzsche's continuing ability to disconcert lies in his uncompromising rejection of all Tocquevillean calls for countervailing measures” (167).

8 Tocqueville to Beaumont, 21 March 1838, in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Boesche, Roger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 125Google Scholar.

9 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. Mayer, J. P. and Kerr, A. P. (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), 5Google Scholar.

10 Tocqueville to Beaumont, 22 April 1838, in Selected Letters, 129; see also Tocqueville's letter to Royer-Collard of 27 September 1841, in Selected Letters, 153–57.

11 Tocqueville to Gobineau, 16 September 1858, in Selected Letters, 376.

12 For Tocqueville's affinities with the French writers and thinkers of his time, see Boesche, Roger, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

13 Tocqueville to Ampère, 10 August 1841, in Selected Letters, 152–53.

14 Pierre Manent has a particularly illuminating discussion of this passage and the whole phenomenon of the erosion of individual and intellectual influence in democracy in Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. Waggoner, John (Lanham, MD: Littlefield, 1996)Google Scholar.

15 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Collini, Stefan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66Google Scholar. Mill expresses his difference with Tocqueville on this point in his 1835 review of Democracy in America, 71–86.

16 Tocqueville criticizes Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races for its deleterious fatalism; see his Correspondence with Gobineau, trans. Lukacs, John (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959)Google Scholar, esp. Toqueville's letters of 11 October 1853, 17 November 1853, 20 December 1853, 8 January 1856, and 30 July 1856.

17 Tocqueville to Mill, 18 March 1841, in Selected Letters, 150–51.

18 In contrast to the self-doubting conservatism of democracy, Tocqueville praises the early French Revolutionaries for their self-belief, heroism, patriotism, disinterest, and “true greatness”; see de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution, vol. 1, ed. Furet, François and Mélonio, Françoise, trans. Kahan, Alan S. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 208Google Scholar.

19 Tocqueville to Corcelle, 17 September 1853, in Selected Letters, 295.

20 Tocqueville's personal religious beliefs are notoriously elusive and therefore the subject of much scholarly debate. The view that he was not a religious believer receives its strongest support from his letter to Madame Swetchine of 26 February 1857, in which he describes his loss of faith at the age of sixteen (The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics, ed. Zunz, Olivier and Kahan, Alan [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 335–36Google Scholar). See also Tocqueville's letter to Gobineau of 2 October 1843, which begins “I am not a believer” (Oeuvres Complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1951–], IX, 57Google Scholar); for some reason Lukacs omits this line in his translation of this letter, in Correspondence with Gobineau, 205–10. For a good treatment of Tocqueville's skepticism about religion, see Jardin, André, Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 61–63Google Scholar, 384–85, 451–52, 512, 528–32.

21 Tocqueville discerned quite early in his trip to the United States how the individualism of Protestant beliefs undermined the power of religion in America; see his letter to Kergolay of 29 June 1831, in Selected Letters, 47–52.

22 For a brilliant account of the difficulties involved in Tocqueville's teaching about the relationship between democracy and religion, see Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, chap. 8.

23 Catherine Zuckert argues for the viability of this Tocquevillean solution, at least as far as the preservation of liberty in democracy is concerned; see “Not By Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” Review of Politics 43 (1981): 259–80Google Scholar; “The Role of Religion in Preserving American Liberty—Tocqueville's Analysis 150 Years Later,” in Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, ed. Lawler, Peter and Alulis, Joseph (New York: Garland, 1993), 223–39Google Scholar.

24 Wolfe, Alan, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3Google Scholar. For similar accounts of the “secularizing” or “disenchanting” transformation of American religion, see Kelly, George Armstrong, “Faith, Freedom, and Disenchantment: Politics and the American Religious Consciousness,” in Religion in America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age, ed. Douglas, Mary and Tipton, Steven (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 207–28Google Scholar; Bellah, Robert et al. , Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985)Google Scholar; and Sanford Kessler, “The Secularization Debate: A Tocquevillean Perspective,” in Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty, 265–79. For an account of the “secularizing” transformation of religion in the West more generally, see Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Burge, Oscar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

25 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Pitts, Jennifer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 24, 59Google Scholar. In her review of this volume in Society 40 (2002): 110–13, Delba Winthrop nicely brings out the importance of the theme of greatness in these writings.

26 Tocqueville to Clamorgan, 17 April 1842, in Selected Letters, 158. Tocqueville's ambivalent attitude toward Napoleon is evident in his notes for the projected second volume of the Old Regime, where he refers to Napoleon as “more extraordinary than great”; see de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution, vol. 2, Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, ed. Furet, and Mélonio, , trans. Kahan, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27, 185–88, 238–55Google Scholar. For a good treatment of this ambivalence and a comparison of Tocqueville's attitude toward Napoleon with Nietzsche's, see Boyd, Richard, “Tocqueville and the Napoleonic Legend,” in Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, ed. Atanassow, Ewa and Boyd, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 264–87Google Scholar.

27 Tocqueville mentions Byron, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine as writers who have illuminated “certain dark corners of the human heart,” but interestingly he does not mention here or elsewhere the contemporary French writer who was most dear to Nietzsche's heart and whom Tocqueville knew personally, namely, Stendhal. For an interesting discussion of the differences between Tocqueville and Stendhal with respect to the possibility of transcending democratic mediocrity and achieving individual greatness, see Boyd, Richard, “Politesse and Public Opinion in Stendhal's Red and Black,” European Journal of Political Theory 4 (2005): 367–92Google Scholar.

28 Mansfield tends to take a more optimistic view of the compatibility of democracy and human greatness; see his Tocqueville, 1, 5, 81–82, 111.

29 Manent, Pierre, Les Libéraux (Paris: Hachette, 1986), 2:379Google Scholar.

30 There is only one reference to Tocqueville in Nietzsche's writings, and it is somewhat indirect and relates to Tocqueville's work on the French Revolution rather than America. It comes in a letter to Franz Overbeck on 23 February 1887, where Nietzsche reports that he is reading Heinrich von Sybel's work on the French Revolution, “after studying the relevant problems in the school of de Tocqueville and Taine” (Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Middleton, Christopher [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969], 261)Google Scholar. Interestingly, Nietzsche takes issue with Sybel's Tocquevillean claim that it was the “feudal regime, and not its collapse, [that] gave birth to egoism, avarice, violence, and cruelty, which led to the terrors of the September Massacres.” He complains that “such a blatant hatred of the Middle Ages” is typical of “liberalism” and asks Overbeck if he knows of a work like Montalembert's Moines d'occident that shows “what benefits European society owes to the monasteries.” Montalembert was a leader of the Catholic party in France in the 1830s and 1840s and a friend of Tocqueville's.

31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “The Greek State,” in On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Ansell-Pearson, Keith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 180–84Google Scholar.

32 Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Payne, E. F. J., vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1969)Google Scholar, sec. 17.

33 See DA, II, i, 3, where Tocqueville says that “Jesus Christ had to come down to earth to make all members of the human race understand that they were naturally similar and equal.”

34 Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. For other antipolitical readings of Nietzsche, see Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bergmann, Peter, Nietzsche, “the Last Antipolitical German” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Thiele, Leslie, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

35 Warren, Mark, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Connolly, William, Identity/Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Other democratic readings of Nietzsche include Kariel, Henry, “Nietzsche's Preface to Constitutionalism,” Journal of Politics 25 (1963): 211–25Google Scholar; Honig, Bonnie, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Owen, David, Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (London: Sage, 1995)Google Scholar; and Hatab, Lawrence, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995)Google Scholar.

36 The locus classicus of this tough-minded, “aristocratic radical” interpretation of Nietzsche's politics is Detwiler, Bruce's Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar. For similar interpretations, see Dannhauser, Werner, Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 29–31, 38–39Google Scholar; Dannhauser, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” in History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed., ed. Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 848–49Google Scholar; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche as Political Thinker, 39–44, 95–97, 148–55, 161–62; Abbey, Ruth and Appel, Fredrick, “Nietzsche and the Will to Politics,” Review of Politics 60 (1998): 83–114Google Scholar; Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy; Dembowsky, Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics.

37 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche as Political Thinker, 155.

38 My argument here has much in common with Clark, Maudemarie's in “Nietzsche's Antidemocratic Rhetoric,” in “Nietzsche and Politics,” supplement, Southern Journal of Philosophy 37, no. S1 (1999): 119–41Google Scholar; and Church, Jeffrey's in Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Though of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 170–90Google Scholar.

39 Hatab quotes this unpublished note but states that “it does not accord well with the published material” (Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 254n71). I will argue that it does.

40 See Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, esp. chap. 8; also Ansell-Pearson, who takes a somewhat ambivalent position on the relationship between the middle and later writings, arguing on the one hand that there is not a radical break between them, and on the other that “in his ‘mature’ thinking [Nietzsche] jettisons [his] former insights and places his hopes for a regeneration of humanity on a new legislation and new enslavement” (Nietzsche as Political Thinker, 95, 162; see also 96–97).

41 The classic expression of this view in his later writings appears in Twilight of the Idols: “Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself over this—are antagonists. . . . All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline; that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political” (TI, “”Germans,” 4).

42 For a similar analysis of the difficulties involved in Tocqueville's utilitarian approach to religion in democracy, see Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 89–96. Nietzsche is more receptive to a utilitarian approach to religion with respect to the masses in BGE, 61.

43 Here I disagree with Paul Glenn's claim that Nietzsche's use of the example of Napoleon proves that his higher man is to be understood as a political leader who uses the “state as the medium for his self-overcoming and spiritual growth” (“Nietzsche's Napoleon: The Higher Man as Political Actor,” Review of Politics 63 [2001]: 140, 150, 155–56Google Scholar). See also Dembowsky, who argues that Nietzsche advocates a “Napoleonic Caesarism” in which “political authority [is] exercised through a state apparatus” (Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics, 110–13, 166–67); Appel and Abbey, “Nietzsche and the Will to Politics,” 92–94; Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy, 119–21.

44 See, e.g., Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Balinski, Rebecca (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 111–12Google Scholar.

45 As Werner Dannhauser puts it, though Tocqueville is particularly adept at using religion to elevate and add spiritual depth to bourgeois life, “he does not excel in confronting the Nietzschean argument that God is dead and that the utility of religion is fatally damaged by a declining faith in the truth of religion” (“The Problem of the Bourgeois,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin, Clifford and Tarcov, Nathan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997], 17Google Scholar).