Chapter 3

CONCLUSION

In the wish [for Eternity], the wound is kept open, in order that the Eternal may heal it. If the wound grows together, the wish is wiped out and then eternity cannot heal it, then temporal illness has in truth bungled the illness.¹

My dear Glaucon, we are engaged in a great struggle, a struggle greater than it seems. The issue is whether we shall become good or bad. And not money, office, honor, nor poetry itself must be allowed to persuade us to neglect justice or any other virtue.²

The Fable of Liberalism

IN ORDER TO begin educating our young, Socrates informs us, we must “tell tales and recount fables.”³ Let us rehearse, here, the fable of liberalism, or at least the more generous rendition of its ascent that began to emerge in the eighteenth century and that was brought to completion in the nineteenth century by Tocqueville.⁴We do so not with a view to corroborating it as factually accurate—for the facts bear only a shadowy resemblance to Truth⁵—but rather with a view to establishing what rules in the souls that are depicted by this fable and whether the typography of defective souls to which we are introduced in the Republic helps us to understand this fable in a new light. Let us, in other words, consider the fable of liberalism not as an account of the facts, but rather as a profession, a resume, a disclosure of, and coordinated reflection on, a type of soul that emerges into the light of day and seeks to understand the world in which it has suddenly found itself.

So let us recite, then, this fable that is appropriate for the young, which we have inherited from our liberal fathers. Our genealogy, so it begins, is marked by two distinct epochs. The first corresponds to a past that is either rapidly receding from view or irretrievably lost and that is known to us through the recorded deeds of men who evinced grandeur of soul that can no longer be fancied, let alone produced. Here loyalty, honor, virtue, manliness, and above all great longings held sway in the souls of a few. Here, too, pettiness, destitution, and squalor overwhelmed the lives of those countless many whose names have been forgotten. In this first epoch, society was a relatively well-understood hierarchy, even if not a well-ordered one, purportedly corresponding to nature itself, in which the bonds of affection where prescribed by the rank into which one was born. Authority was vested in men and not in abstract principles, and formality and protocol were, for the nobility (and not only for them), the “decent drapery of life.”⁶Landed property was the basis of wealth, the consequence of which was the curious elevation of both prudential knowledge and military valor: the former, because the leisure alone afforded to a landed class could give rise to it; the latter, because there was no overarching power to secure the boundaries of landed property itself. The privileged knowledge of the aristocracy, and its incessant warfare, constituted the defining features of the epoch.

Where the warrant for the first epoch was the legacy of the past, the warrant for the second epoch is the promise of the future, a future not under the guardianship of a few great men, but rather the possession of nations, or even of humanity as a whole. The aristocrat was a steward who vouchsafed the mortal patterns inherited from his fathers; the human being of the present moment, however, labors alone—or is perhaps guided by the beneficent hand of a now invisible God—not in order to imitate the fathers but rather to innovate.⁷

Let us add that nature itself offers no guide to human beings in this second epoch, for it, too, arose out of a series of contingent events that could have been otherwise, whether by God’s hand or not, we cannot say.⁸ Gone, therefore, is nature’s familiarity and humanity’s easy confidence about a natural order into which it has been placed and to which its faculties correspond. Here loyalty can mean little, for it depends on organic union, which is illusory; honor can mean little, for it depends on rank, which affronts modern sensitivities; virtue can mean little, for it depends on character, which takes too much time and effort to develop; manliness can mean little, for it depends on the prospect for violence, which has been eliminated; great longing can mean little, for it depends on an emptiness of soul, the awareness of which has been buried by a glut of goods or made the object of therapy.

Where nature offers no comprehensive guide, humanity is thrown back on its own resources, on its “reason,” which is now understood not in its unity as communion with God or with nature but in its dissevered, disenchanted aspects: subjectively, as self-interest; objectively, as science. The multiple and nuanced possibilities of human excellence that emerged in the first, enchanted epoch have here receded and been replaced by the monolith of reason—not incidentally, at the very moment that multiple social ranks collapse and give way to the univocal aspiration for “well-being,” which is the very hallmark of social equality.⁹

Yet this forlorn situation of humanity without aristocratic bearings is not without recompense. Reason so delimited attains its proper object. In its subjective, self-interested aspect, the self-referentiality of reason invites the development of reflective judgment, private conscience, and, above all, individual responsibility. In its objective, scientific aspect, it invites the development of a generalized method of inquiry for the purpose of understanding and transforming the natural world, so that well-being may be secured for humanity as a whole.

Not only does reason attain its proper object in this second epoch, but also, in finally arriving at it, humanity need no longer indulge and exhaust itself endlessly in the passions of war. The calmer and tamer disposition of reason that is both cause and consequence of commerce triumphs as humanity is finally able to make a productive purchase on the natural world.

Commerce cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores.¹⁰

The height to which humanity may ascend through reason is lower than the height to which the aristocratic man may ascend through glory, but reason’s general availability and advantage to all constitutes its superiority. Glory was the purview of a few aristocratic men; reason is the purview of humanity as a whole. On the battlefields, a few great men emerged; in the marketplace, humanity as a whole benefits. The taming of man, and the advent of universal commerce for humanity, is the achievement of the second epoch. Here, money-making supplants the aristocratic longing for glory. A world exhausted by war chooses a more pacific course.

We have finally reached the age of commerce, an age that must necessarily replace that of war, as the age of war was bound to precede it. War and commerce are only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing what is desired. Commerce is . . . an attempt to obtain by mutual agreement what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence. . . .War then comes before commerce. The former is all savage impulse, the latter civilized calculation. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency prevails, the weaker must the tendency to war become.¹¹

The taming of humanity that occurs in this second epoch is a consequence of more than just the victory of reason over glory, however. The collapse of multiple social ranks carries with it the burden and promise of human relations without predicates. The chasms among nations, social ranks, generations, and men and women are if not bridged, then at least bridgeable in principle, since differences among them have no durable foundation in nature.¹² Where the first epoch is characterized by rank and “pathos of distance,” the second epoch is characterized by social equality and “fellow feeling.”¹³ Here, each human being is close enough to every other so that all suffering is noticed, and mutual sympathy is possible. Reason and commerce may attenuate and redirect the passion for glory, and render life orderly; but it is sympathy that finally softens humanity. In the second epoch—and this is one of its most wholesome achievements—concern and solicitude become possible.

The accomplishments and future prospects of the second epoch are not grand, but they are decent. Commerce cannot produce great men, but it can yield well-being for all. Sympathy and concern are no doubt pale affections in comparison to loyalty of the sort that rank inspires; but with loyalty comes cruelty as well, and the advantage of the paler affections is shown by this very conjunction.

It is not too difficult to discern the kinship in this fable between the first, aristocratic epoch and what, in the Republic, is portrayed under the heading of timocracy.¹⁴ In both cases, the ruling principle is honor. In both cases, too, the sons seek to imitate their fathers—as Polemarchus sought, without complete success, to do. Here the spirited, war-like element in the soul rules; the light of reason, which would cast doubt on the “conventions of the city”¹⁵ is dim; and the appetites have not yet come to prominence. The fathers are firmly in command, and the sons follow in their stead. Wealth does not yet rule, but there are nascent signs of its coming prominence.¹⁶

Stable though this timocratic world may have appeared to be, it was unable to hold sway. Any number of explanations can be given for the calamity from which it could not recover: The Reformers undermined the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church by supplanting virtue with faith alone; scientists became suspicious of the vestiges of Aristotelianism, and sought a method that did not rely on the authority of others to vouchsafe their knowledge; the emergence of cities as autonomous centers of commerce undermined a mode of production predicated on landed property; the expansion of empires through conquest made possible global trade and economies of scale that destroyed the guild system, the idea of apprenticeship, and with it the stabilizing effects of prudential knowledge; and political revolutions—whether inspired by philosophical founders or not—extended the franchise and discredited longstanding notions of sovereignty and representation.

This list is by no means exhaustive. Neither these accounts nor others of a different sort shall occupy us here, however, since our concern is to illuminate the extraordinary transformation to which history bears witness by rendering it, simply, in light of that portion of Plato’s fable that traces the decline from timocracy to oligarchy. On this latter fabulous account, the cause of the transformation cannot be found in religious, scientific, economic, geopolitical, or intra-national facts, since these are the visible traces, as it were, of an unconcealment of a subsequent defective “type”—an unconcealment that was inevitable, because the timocratic fathers had given their sons a defective pattern on which to base their lives. It was, properly speaking, the unconcealment of this subsequent defective type that gave rise to the transformations and reconfigurations to which I have alluded above. The historical facts are but the shadows of the real transformation, whose cause was the emergence of the contradiction that lurked in the divided souls whose history we chronicle. The sons tried, but could not find the good in imitating their fathers—and not without reason, since the Good cannot be given mimetically, from father to son or from teacher to pupil. In time, this secret came out into the open; and the sons sought to comprehend this familial catastrophe through recourse to what I have here called the “fable of liberalism,” in which the rulership of honor was rejected, and the sons set out on their own course, authorized by their certainty that mortal mimesis had failed them. And it had.

When oligarchy did emerge, as it had to in the absence of philosophy, all the fine distinctions that were made by the honor-loving father collapsed, only to be replaced by the single currency of money set forth by the oligarchic sons.¹⁷ The sons, after all, wanted something more palpable than what the elusive fine points of honor could provide. Herewith, distinctions based on lineage, rank, peoples, and gods—all of which were the predicates of war and the manliness that is coterminous with it—were renounced.

In Plato’s fable, this decision on the part of the oligarchic sons was partially warranted, for honor and manliness are not an adequate basis for justice, compelling as they surely are from a certain merely mortal vantage point. In their easy confidence, however, the oligarchic sons were blind to the ramifications of what they had done. Able to see the inadequacies of what ruled their fathers, they were nevertheless unaware of the deeper inadequacies to which the rule of wealth is subject. The sons believed that they could avert war by deposing the honor-loving part of the soul and by enthroning just this one appetite for money. But once one appetite ruled, the other appetites that were kept in abeyance when honor ruled then pleaded their case to a sovereign that had neither wisdom (philosophy) nor shame (timocracy) to relegate them to their proper place. Formed as they were by their fathers and still under his tutelage, and notwithstanding their efforts to leave their inheritance behind, the oligarchic sons were inoculated from this democratic illness because they retained their honor-loving father’s habit of keeping the appetites well-disciplined, and so could not see the imminent danger. In the souls of their offspring, however, were revealed appetites that in themselves only lay in wait. Here is the democratic soul.

It is beyond our purview here to consider evidence of the gross transformation from oligarchy to democracy that is perhaps now occurring, except to note that were we to undertake this task, we would have to keep firmly in mind the basis of the distinction between the two defective types: the rule of one appetite corresponds to oligarchy, while the rule of all the appetites we have when we are awake—the equality of all appetites, let us say—corresponds to democracy. (Might the fragmented, provocative, but ultimately helpless soul of post-modernity correspond to the shimmering iridescence of tyranny?)

Notwithstanding this distinction, however, these two types—oligarchic and democratic—are similar by virtue of having the common denominator of appetitive rule; and insofar as this is the case, they are both haunted, though to differing degrees, by the fear of death from which the philosopher and the timocrat, for different reasons, are inured. This fear of death, Socrates suggests, arises as a consequence of appetitive feasting, which binds the soul to the body in proportion as such feasting occurs.¹⁸ The soul itself may wish for Eternity; but the soul bound firmly to the body understands eternity only under the auspice of the body living indefinitely. Death, therefore, must be staved off at all costs. For the appetitive soul, consequently, “self-preservation” is the highest good.¹⁹

We postpone, for a moment, the philosophic wager about the fear of death, since that matter will be taken up in the section below on “The Socratic Wager.” In the interim, and before turning to Tocqueville, let us briefly summarize our discussion of the rejection of the timocratic father by the oligarchic sons, for the purpose of more fully clarifying their joint misunderstandings. The oligarchic sons, we said, were correct in rejecting the rulership of honor, but failed to see that because justice requires “rendering each its due,” the honor-loving part of the soul could not be subdued. Yet the account of the movement from the first to the second epoch offered in the fable of liberalism presumes that the principle of honor is not so much inscribed into the soul as it is a historical artifact, capable of being subdued or superceded as humanity progresses. The fable of liberalism supposes, in a word, that warfare can be eradicated because the honor-loving part of the soul will, in time, become an anachronism.²⁰ Manliness, on this account, is quaint, outdated, and an enemy of human progress. Commerce, not war, can rule; just this one appetite for wealth, not spiritedness, can save us. The oligarchic sons were certainly correct in rejecting the rule of honor, but in turning away from what is false they mistakenly thought that what they put in its place was true. Where the timocratic father thought that honor should rule, the oligarchic sons thought that honor had to be cast out and that the wealth had to be put in its place. Both the fathers and the sons were misguided. The fable of liberalism arises out of this configuration of misunderstanding.

The Tocquevillean Wager: Mimesis and the Mediational Site of Renewal

The particular rendition of the fable of liberalism that Tocqueville invokes now requires our consideration, in part because it is the fullest explication yet of this fable, in part because its very comprehensiveness may provide a remedy to the “configuration of misunderstanding,” as I have called, out of which the fable arises. On the other hand, Tocqueville’s thought may confirm that this misunderstanding is irresolvable within the categories of thought provided by the fable of liberalism, in which case the sort of account that I have offered of Plato’s fable in the body of this work may prove more illuminating.

In Tocqueville’s thought, the general contours of the historical argument we have thus far rehearsed remain intact, though the argument is augmented with, among other things, a theoretical insight about the importance of mediation. This insight has two distinguishable idioms: the first, sociological; the second, psychological. In its sociological idiom, Tocqueville’s claim is that there must always be mediational bodies that stand between the one and the many; in its psychological idiom, Tocqueville’s claim is that there must always be a node of experience, as it were, that stands between soliloquy and they say.

What I mean by these psychological nodal points I explain shortly, but at the moment I wish only to attend to the first, sociological expression of Tocqueville’s insight about mediation, since it provides an immediate point of entry into the dispute between the timocratic and oligarchic types.

Like other iterations of the fable of liberalism, Tocqueville’s historical typology is twofold, involving aristocracy, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other. Each is, in his words, “a distinct [kind] of humanity.”²¹ (In the terms of Plato’s fable, again, the distinction we are tracing is between the timocratic and oligarchic type. Tocqueville conflates oligarchy and democracy in his fable, for reasons I hope to make clear shortly.) Different as the ages that give rise to these dissimilar kinds of souls may be, however, in both ages society is a three-tiered affair involving the one, the few, and the many. In the aristocratic age the form that this takes is straightforward: king, aristocrats, and peasants. But because rank disappears in democracy—or, to be less controversial, because the landed property class ceases to exist in democracy—the mediational layer must take a different form there. Instead of being based on rank of the sort that obtains in the aristocratic age, the mediational layer must be formed voluntarily,²² since the aristocratic few no longer have any viable standing. There is, then, an “evacuation of the middle,” so to speak, as aristocracy gives way to democracy, which only voluntary associations can fill. Without voluntary associations that gather the many together, the one (the state) grows more powerful,²³ the many become utterly isolated, and society becomes somnambulant. Human health broadly understood requires a three-fold arrangement involving the one, the few, and the many, irrespective of the epoch.

The abolition of aristocratic class raises the obvious question of what happens to honor in the democratic age. Let us begin by asking where and what, in fact, is honor? In Tocqueville’s account, honor is not located in a class of people, and so does not, strictly speaking, disappear in the democratic age, as classes tend to do. Nor is honor an aspect of a multifaceted soul, in which parts vie for ascendancy, as Plato’s fable suggests. Rather, honor is an artifact of societies in which there are relatively stable social inequalities. Honor is the currency by which such inequalities are delineated.²⁴ In the democratic age, on the other hand, where there is increased social mobility, money, not honor, is the currency of choice.²⁵ With money, social inequalities are measured, but not delineated. Unlike money, honor cannot exist without relatively stable “social distance.”

The democratic age brings with it the collapse of the social distance between classes and, therefore, an effective end to the idea of honor. Let us add to this two other considerations that bear on the collapse of the idea of honor: first, the moral vocabulary of the democratic age is that of self-interest, and the idea of honor cannot last long in an environment of strict, and sometimes stingy, calculation; second, the carrier of the idea of honor is the father, and his declining standing in the democratic family26 makes it unlikely that the idea of honor can long survive.

This bleak conclusion about the future of the idea of honor in the democratic age is mitigated, however, by Tocqueville’s reflections on the military, which lead in a diametrically opposed direction. Within the confines of domestic life, broadly understood, honor has little currency. The radii of deliberation in all of its forums emanate from self-interest,which is their self-evident center; and human life is oriented by commerce and the search for well-being. In this restless search for well-being, however, each competes with everyone else, which prompts some to look elsewhere than in the civil sphere for advancement. A few opt for “place-hunting” in the administrative apparatus of the government.²⁷ More opt for the military. In the democratic age, those who enter the military have their fortunes and standings yet to make, “which causes soldiers to dream of battlefields.”²⁸ In the aristocratic age, by contrast, officers already possess a rank in society, and so have no need of military campaigns to establish their standing. Thus, the paradox: “[O]f all armies those which long for war most ardently are the democratic ones, but of all peoples those most deeply attached to peace are the democratic nations.”²⁹ War, then, is an unanticipated and unintended consequence of equality itself.³⁰

One of the cardinal tenets of the fable of liberalism, of course, is that as history progresses war is supplanted by commerce, until finally it is all but eradicated. Tocqueville’s rendition of the fable, however, not only makes allowance for war, but suggests that rather than being an atavism that can almost be done away with, it is integral to democracy itself—not in the civil sphere, to be sure, but rather outside it, in the military.

It is worth noting that this spatial allocation, as it were, of the honor-loving aspect associated within the extra-civil domain of the military, has a sociological rather than psychological foundation. Tocqueville’s account of military ambition in the democratic age contains no reference to the idea that the love of honor is inscribed in the human heart.³¹ If the love of glory appears, then presumably it could be tempered or eliminated by altering social conditions—say, by making sure that there are plenty of opportunities for advancement in civil society.

The love of honor, then, makes an appearance in Tocqueville’s rendition of the fable, but it is an exception, a paradoxical consequence of the general movement toward commerce and tranquility, of the ascendancy of a kind of humanity that knows nothing, really, of glory.³² The iron logic of the fable of liberalism precludes Tocqueville from returning to the love of glory that characterized the first epoch, which is now but an anachronism. Yet he also seems unsatisfied by a world without it and troubled by the prospect that without war, humanity will be unable to renew itself.³³ Within the typology of Plato’s fable, Tocqueville occasionally seems haunted by the thought that the oligarchic sons may not have made the “advance” over their timocratic fathers that they think they have.

We should not forget, however, that the burden of Tocqueville’s project is to illuminate the manner in which the sons and daughters have broken with their aristocratic fathers. “We should not strive to be like our fathers,” he says, “but should try to attain that form of greatness and of happiness which is proper to ourselves.”³⁴ So, if not by honor and war, how then is society renewed and advanced on Tocqueville’s account of the fable of liberalism?

The reflexive answer is, of course, commerce. And in an important sense, that is correct, though under Tocqueville’s auspice the idea of commerce is thought through in terms of a larger theory of mediation, the gross features of which we have already considered. To be sure, he praises the Americans for their commercial spirit, but it is not an unmitigated good.³⁵ Commerce is not so much the basis of renewal as it is a visible and beneficent effect of local politics that draws the self out of itself and unleashes the sort of energy that only face-to-face relations can generate. This is the reason why Tocqueville conflates oligarchy and democracy together: Robust commerce is the consequence of politics based on equality at the local level.

The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations. Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.³⁶

This idea, the very epithet of Democracy in America, will shortly bring us to the psychological nodes to which I referred at the outset of this section. First, however, let us continue along the sociological path we have taken thus far, and consider how the political institutions that robust commerce requires are produced and maintained.

In the democratic age, recall, voluntary associations must occupy the mediational space once occupied by men of rank during the aristocratic age. With the advent of the democratic age in Europe, however, this changeover did not occur, because aristocratic habits of thought that were anathema of democratic freedom still lingered.³⁷ In the absence of robust voluntary associations and local self-governance, political power became concentrated in the hands of the state, and commerce remained relatively anemic. In the United States, on the other hand, the political situation was reversed: Local government arose before the state,³⁸ and so was well instantiated before the state began to develop. The Puritans of the early seventeenth century, not the Founding Fathers of the late eighteenth century, were the real progenitors of the United States. They resolved the problem of the democratic age, which to the Europeans remained intractable. The commercial spirit of the Americans, consequently, dwarfed that of the Europeans.

We come now the linchpin of Tocqueville’s analysis, on which the prospect for the future of democratic freedom in America and elsewhere hangs: the relationship between founding events and subsequent conditions.

Go back; look at the baby in his mother’s arms; see how the outside world is first reflected in the still hazy mirror of his mind; consider the first examples that strike his attention; listen to the first words which awaken his dormant powers of thought; and finally take notice of the first struggles he has to endure. Only then will you understand the origins of the prejudices, habits, and passions that are to dominate his life. They whole man is there, if one may so put it, in the cradle. Something analogous happens with nations. Peoples always bear some marks of their origin. Circumstances of birth and growth affect all the rest of their careers.³⁹

Whatever is established in the beginning endures. Patterns, established early on,⁴⁰ reproduce themselves over and over again, in their own image.⁴¹ The good fortune of the Americans, Tocqueville suggests, is to have been the descendents of the Puritans, who themselves had the habit of forming associations—political and otherwise—of the sort that democratic freedom requires. For the Americans, mediating institutions were familiar, while in other countries with different historical origins, they were not.⁴²

Tocqueville’s analysis, then, is based on the idea that human beings are mimetic beings. Indeed, not only does this insight pertain to the Puritans and the happy legacy of democratic freedom to which the Americans are heir in the opening portions of volume 1 of Democracy in America, but it also pertains to the three peoples about which Tocqueville writes in the closing portions of that same volume: the American Indians, the African slaves, and the Russians.⁴³ In short, volume 1 of Democracy in America is about the beneficent, poignant, agonizing, and ominous implications of mimesis—past, present, and future.

Volume 2 of Democracy in America, written some five years later, has a very different cast to it. The opening chapter reveals the contours of an American “philosophical method” that is suspicious of anything whose reason for existence pertains to durability and inheritance.⁴⁴ This anti-mimetic disposition, as it were, we have encountered already in the oligarchic sons we described in our overview of the fable of liberalism. The pertinence of this anti-mimetic disposition throughout volume 2 should not be difficult to discern: Having dedicated no small effort in volume 1 to explaining why democratic freedom is vouchsafed by mediating institutions in America that owe their origin and maintenance to mimetic good fortune, the fateful question—treated equivocally by Tocqueville—is this: Which is more powerful, mimesis or the anti-mimetic disposition that is unleashed by the oligarchic sons? A perusal of Democracy in America, volume 2, part IV, will convince the reader of Tocqueville’s foreboding apprehensions about which of the two will prevail.

The Tocquevillean wager, at least insofar as we have encountered it through a consideration of the sociological ruminations about mediation that inform his rendition of the fable of liberalism, is that democratic freedom is a matter of establishing mediating institutions, which themselves will be maintained mimetically once human beings have been properly introduced to them. Said otherwise, only mediating institutions can save us. Democratic freedom requires not philosophy, but rather “institution building.”

Let us turn now to Tocqueville’s analysis of what I earlier called the “psychological nodes” of the democratic age. There I suggested that democratic freedom requires a locus of experience, as it were, that stands between soliloquy and they say. To understand what is meant by these nodes, or loci, let us attend briefly to what Tocqueville thinks about the nature of authority in the democratic age.

[In the democratic age] intellectual authority will be different, but it will not be less. Far from believing that it is likely to disappear, I anticipate that it may easily become too great and that possibly it will confine the activity of private judgment within limits too narrow for the dignity and happiness of mankind. I see clearly two tendencies in equality; the one turns each man’s attention to new thoughts, while the other would induce him freely to give up thinking at all. . . . Thus it might happen that, having broken down all the bonds which classes of men formerly imposed on it, the human spirit might bind itself in tight fetters to the general will of the greatest number.⁴⁵

In the aristocratic age, authority was vested largely in intermediary bodies, the consequence of which was that truth was not understood as abstract, universal, and discernible by “reason,” but was rather vested in a name.⁴⁶ In the democratic age, on the other hand, there are no such intermediary bodies, and so authority and truth change their location and character. They do not, however, disappear.

In the democratic age, the two nodal points where authority and truth lie are, in Tocqueville’s words, “private judgment” and the “general will.” Americans, he says, naturally suppose two things at once: Authority and truth are personal matters, unique to each individual, which are disclosed in the warp and woof of their own soliloquy, and that public opinion—what “they say”⁴⁷—is the final authority and truth. The nodal point of soliloquy accords individuals the freedom to rehearse and stage endlessly their personal narratives without real interruption; the nodal point of “they say” emboldens individuals to rebuff the voice of conscience and condescend to the level of unreflective brutes. Neither one of these nodal points, which the democratic age produces, dignifies humankind nor renews civilization.

As might be expected in light of the centrality of mediation in Tocqueville’s thinking, this intractable paradox can be attenuated only by the presence of a nodal point between “private judgment” and the “general will,” that is, by a coherent locus of human experience that is neither utterly private nor comprehensively public. This locus is generated in the mediational space of associational life, in the face-to-face relations, where human beings must gather together for the purpose of addressing the problems of daily life.

As soon as common affairs are treated in common, each man notices that he is not as independent of his fellows as he used to suppose and that to get their help he must offer his aid to them.⁴⁸

Here, human beings are drawn out of themselves, gathered together as neighbors, and brought to “self-interest rightly understood,”⁴⁹ that sublime achievement of the democratic age that bridges the chasm between soliloquy and “they say.” Without this nodal point of common affairs at the intermediate level, new ideas cannot coalesce from the “mental dust”⁵⁰ out of which a provisional consensus about authority and truth emerge, and human beings hold fast to the well-worn apparati of personal “narratives” and public platitudes.⁵¹

I said above that Tocqueville could be said to hold to the view that only “institutions can save us.” Let us, however, dwell on what such a formulation entails psychologically, on what it tells us about this intermediary node of experience that is integral to his wager about the democratic age. I have, on a number of occasions here, mentioned that Tocqueville’s real concern was the renewal of civilization. There is, of course, no corollary for “renewal” in Plato’s fable, and this warrants our attention. In Plato’s fable, as in Tocqueville’s writing, there is attentiveness to the soul; and also an account of the “powerful [public] beast”⁵² that is every bit as chilling as Tocqueville’s. To this let us add that Plato’s fable is concerned about the human tendency to be self-satisfied and, so, in its own way could be said to be offering the same sort of mediational alternative, whereby human beings are drawn out of themselves in face-to-face encounters with others, which roust them from their slumber.

The sort of encounter toward which Tocqueville directs our attention is not, however, a philosophical one. “Nothing is so unproductive for the human mind as an abstract idea,” he says.⁵³ While we may certainly point out that in Plato’s fable there is no real interest in abstract ideas, either (since abstractions are to be found in the world of coming-into-being- and-passing-away), this corrective in no way alters the difference between them: Tocqueville simply did not believe that philosophy was necessary to save democracy.⁵⁴ Nor is it the case that Tocqueville thought that such face-to-face encounters were for the purpose of grand politics of the sort that provides a forum for human beings to show forth heroically in speech and in deed, against the backdrop of necessity.⁵⁵ Tocqueville’s view was comparatively ordinary. Face-to-face encounters between human beings in these mediational fora make their world more expansive, broaden their horizons, unleash their energies—all so that they do not withdraw into themselves and broodingly shut out the world. Neither philosophy of the sort Plato’s fable invites, nor noble politics in the Aristotelian sense, captivated Tocqueville’s attention. On his reading, unless certain steps were taken, the end of history would be a time of resignation and stupor. Face-to-face relations between human beings, over “common affairs,” draw them out of their soliloquies and renew their lives in and through their relations with those immediately around them.⁵⁶ Human beings truly live, he thought, only in the mediational space between soliloquy and “they say.”

It would be incorrect to conclude, on the basis of this rather ordinary and institutional understanding of face-to-face encounters, that Tocqueville’s own account of the fable of liberalism conforms entirely with its postulate that the second, oligarchic, epoch tames man and leaves him alone and unmoved, with calculating reason, a faculty that knows nothing of great longing,⁵⁷ as his only guide. Great longing—say, for Beauty—involves a pull from above, so to speak, of the sort that calculating reason, which, in having “preferences” itself sits still , and therefore cannot discern. That kind of longing, Tocqueville thought, would no longer be possible.⁵⁸

While Beauty is not available to modern man, however, religion of a rather novel form finally is; and herein lays an important modification in Tocqueville’s account of the fable of liberalism.⁵⁹ In the post-aristocratic age, he thought, God would show Himself not through the carefully coordinated formalisms of the Church, but rather in an unmediated fashion—as is perhaps fitting for an epoch naturally disposed to be suspicious of mediation of any sort.⁶⁰

[In this new epoch, every man,] raising his eyes above his country, begins at last to see mankind at large, [and] God shows himself more clearly to human perception in full and entire majesty. [Under these circumstances] God’s intervention in human affairs appears in a new and a brighter light.⁶¹

Notwithstanding the fact that human life in the post-aristocratic age is in one sense smaller than during the aristocratic age, because Beauty is foreclosed and calculative reason rules, in another more important sense human life is larger, because the luminous wonder and sublime consolation of religion shows forth in its unmediated glory—often under the guise of “Fundamentalism.”⁶²

But how, we may ask, can this new, unmediated, relationship to God be juxtaposed with that other naked fact about the post-aristocratic age, viz., the fixation on money as the single measure?

This conjunction may seem incongruous for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is not immediately obvious how the technological advancements that attend the division of labor, extensive markets, and the pervasiveness of money as the currency of exchange can happily complement Christian religion, in the increasingly unmediated aspect it takes on in the post-aristocratic age. Tocqueville’s argument, as brief as it is provocative, can be understood in the context of his comparison between Christianity and Islam.⁶³ The former, he says,proffers only general specifications about the relations between the divine and the human economy. For that reason, when the modalities of mediation that characterize the aristocratic age begin to falter, there is no reason, in principle, that Christianity cannot be comprehended in different, less mediated, forms, of the sort that, say, the Reformers had in mind. Christianity emerged in the aristocratic age; but the form in which it appeared during that age did not constitute its essential features, which, again, were general, not specific. This, Tocqueville says, assures that “Christianity is destined to reign in this age, as in all others.”⁶⁴ The post-aristocratic age is characterized by the absence of mediation, in all domains of human life: The naked currency of money strips away “the decent drapery of life” in the realm of exchange, no less than does the direct and unmediated experience of God strip away that “decent drapery” in the realm of religion. Juxtaposing money and God along the axis that separates things “secular” and things “sacred” misses what is really going on in the post-aristocratic age. The real issue is what happens to mediation. The love of money and the more direct experience of God are the visible markings of this new, unmediated post-aristocratic soul.

In Tocqueville’s account of the fable of liberalism, then, the oligarchic sons are largely sustained—in the United States, at least—by mimetic good fortune. The habit of gathering together in mediational fora, bequeathed to them by their Puritan ancestors and precariously nurtured by the governmental apparatus of federalism, draws solitary individuals out of themselves and unleashes enormous energy, most of which “spills over” into commerce.⁶⁵ Commerce does, indeed, rule in this second epoch, but it is made possible in no small part by what Tocqueville called “local liberty,”⁶⁶ which is to say, by democratic participation at the local level. There is, therefore, no historical inevitability that the oligarchic sons will prevail, only the likelihood that they will do so if mediating institutions of the sort that are so precarious in the post-aristocratic age fill in the “evacuated middle” about which I spoke at the outset of this section.

Threatening this happy mimetic fortune, however, is the anti-mimetic proclivity of a misnamed philosophical method that would undermine local liberties in the never-ending search for efficiency, uniform rules, and rationality—all of which are impatient with the blunders that local liberty engenders.⁶⁷ Curious light is shed on this anti-mimetic proclivity by Appendix I, Y, of Democracy in America, which I iterate here nearly in its entirety.

Men think that the greatness of the idea of unity lies in means. God sees it in the end. It is for that reason that the idea of greatness leads to a thousand mean actions. To force all men to march in step toward the same goal—that is a human idea. To encourage endless variety of actions but to bring them about so that in a thousand different ways all tend toward the fulfillment of one design—that is a God-given idea.⁶⁸

Tocqueville is suggesting that this democratic impulse, which forever seeks to separate the wheat from the tares,⁶⁹ and which has no corollary in the Greek world, is in reality the outwork of bad Christian theology. The mystery of God’s providence is His use of the imperfections of creation to bring about perfection at the end of time. Human beings in the post-aristocratic age, however, do not have the patience to wait. Whatever the content of their aspirations may be—an efficient state, uniform laws, public reason, and so on—the spirit behind it is thoroughly Christian.⁷⁰ Thus, the mimetic good fortune of the Americans may be undermined, ultimately, by a philosophic method that is itself the bastard offspring of Christianity—an irony of no small proportion in light of the fact that Christianity is the fertile ground out of which democratic freedom emerged.⁷¹

Tocqueville’s wager, finally, is that if mediating institutions can be instantiated and mimetically reproduced, and if the fugitive search for perfections of one sort or another can be averted by a theology that is cognizant of the mystery and final irresolvability of human suffering in a partially broken world,⁷² then human freedom may be saved and the future redeemed. A residue of honor, from the aristocratic age, still obtains and is present on the borders of civil society, in the military. But it need not pose a threat to the oligarchic sons and daughters, who are assured of their standing by the march of history itself. In this victory, however, philosophy plays no part. Against the backdrop of a historical movement that renders life evermore naked, lonely, and exposed, only mediation—or rather, only the mimetic reproduction of vestigial mediational fora from the aristocratic age that remain: family, religion, municipal associations, and so on—can save us.

The Socratic Wager: Mimesis and the Philosophical Practice of Death

From the vantage point of philosophy, neither the ruling principle of honor nor of wealth, which delineate the two epochs specified in the fable of liberalism, do justice to the mortal condition in shadowy times. To be sure, the oligarchic sons are correct in rejecting mimesis of the sort that their aristocratic fathers had in mind—what, in the Republic, is referred to ironically as a “truly noble concept of education.”⁷³ They are also correct in rejecting the rule of honor, since the noble (but not philosophic) practice of death that war involves is defective. The question, however, is whether the oligarchic sons understand the reason why both mimesis and the timocratic practice of death are defective.

In Plato’s fable, mimesis is defective because all merely mortal patterns are “no measure at all”⁷⁴ in comparison to the divine pattern that illuminates the philosopher. The oligarchic sons properly reject mortal patterns—think of Smith’s dubiety about a system of production based on apprenticeship—but mistakenly conclude from this contingent world without durable mortal patterns that “markets,” along with all that they entail, are the most adequate response. Tocqueville’s rendition of the fable of liberalism modifies this understanding in important ways, since he recognizes that commerce is impossible without mediational life. This position, in effect, reintroduces mortal patterns into the equation (sociological, not economic), because the ability to form associations depends on whether the habits necessary to do so have been passed down from generation to generation. This modification, however, does not absolve the predicament to which life that is not oriented toward the divine pattern is subject. It is an expedient measure, which averts the collapse of the oligarchic dream only for a time—as Tocqueville himself may have understood in the concluding chapters of Democracy in America.

Whether the oligarch seeks a justification for rejecting mortal patterns in the domain of economics (Smith) or seeks to reintroduce mortal patterns in the domain of society (Tocqueville), the rule of wealth—of one appetite alone—cannot long prevail. To be sure, there is considerable confusion and disagreement among liberals about this matter, with some arguing that markets must make further assaults against entrenched mimetic patterns, against “inefficiency,” and others arguing that markets must not be allowed to undermine that amorphous set of mimetic patterns now called “social capital.” But these debates misapprehend the deeper issue involved, namely, whether wealth has stature enough to be sovereign. The ambivalence toward mimesis exhibited by the oligarchic sons suggests that there is a contradiction in the inner workings of the sovereign that has been set up in their soul. For the moment, while the afterglow of the events of 1989 has not fully faded, the Tocquevillean disposition still has the upper hand: There is a great interest in nourishing “social capital” in regimes outside of the Anglo-American orbit whose social fabric is fragile. Yet after the stiff realization has settled in that not all nations have the historical antecedents—the mimetic inheritance—to generate social capital, we can be sure that the other oligarchic moment will once again assert itself, in the name of “efficiency.”

In Plato’s fable, however, this hardened trajectory will only deepen the rift between the rich and the poor⁷⁵ and, eventually, produce a countervailing reaction against the disciplines of the oligarchic sons, in the name of equality—of the right of every mortal model, every “life-style,” to perdure. Since the desideration is not who rules and what visible structures obtain, but rather what rules in the soul,⁷⁶ this will mark the true onset of democracy. Oligarchy first undermines mimesis (Smith), and then looks to mimesis for support (Tocqueville). In any event, it cannot survive because oligarchy is an incoherent basis of rule, informed by the partially correct insight that mortal patterns given by the timocratic fathers are not enough. Today we stand on the threshold of this event. Denying the existence of a divine pattern, the oligarchic sons oscillate back and forth between rejecting mortal mimesis, which thrusts us ever deeper into the logic of markets, and all that they entail, or embracing mortal mimesis, which seeks to redeem oligarchy through the instantiation of institutions that even in the most salutary conditions may not be able to long endure against the onslaught of markets, as Tocqueville’s own melancholy prognostication attests. In Plato’s fable, of course, mimesis cannot save us—not, at any rate, the mortal sort of mimesis that institution building supposes. Only philosophy, which is attentive to the divine pattern, can save us.

Let us turn now to the practice of death. From the vantage point of the oligarchic sons, the practice of death brings to mind the war-like passions that their timocratic father championed. Indeed, the fable of liberalism supposes that the practice of death must be understood in these terms and no other: Death is an affair of the body, honored by the timocrat and abhorred by the oligarch. The former welcomes it for the sake of glory; the later censures it for the sake of commerce.⁷⁷

Cessation of the body is, of course, the only way that death can be understood when reason’s light is dim. In this respect, the difference between the timocrat and the oligarch is negligible. For our purposes here, we must remember that the death of the body that they both understand bears but a shadowy resemblance to the philosophic death about which we hear Socrates speak, which pertains to the soul. Herein lays the real chasm, in comparison to which the divergence between the timocrat and the oligarch is nearly unmeasurable.

Yet in this nearly unmeasurable divergence lies what I called, at the end of the section entitled “The Fable of Liberalism,” above, “the configuration of misunderstanding” that gives rise to the fable of liberalism. In the light of Plato’s fable, this misunderstanding may be characterized in the following way. The oligarchic sons, themselves unilluminated by the divine pattern, mismeasure their honor-loving fathers and, in casting out honor, lose sight of the spirited part of the soul, which is the necessary precursor to philosophic death that is needed. In Plato’s fable, the soul ruled by honor is violent and unbridled, while the soul without honor is stingy and fearful. Neither is capable of philosophical death. The timocratic fathers are certainly mistaken that honor must rule; the oligarchic sons are even more misguided in attempting to banish honor altogether.

The honor-loving part of the soul, however, cannot be banished by the sleight of hand that underwrites the fable of liberalism. Honor is neither a historical nor sociological artifact, as that fable suggests. Even when it is shamed into submission, the means by which it is silenced confirms its ineradicable presence—for shame is the very currency of honor. The honor-loving part of the soul is not an artifact; it is indigenous. Without it, the oligarchic sons, along with their democratic and tyrannical descendants, are haunted by the specter of death, all the while living in the condition of “lingering death”⁷⁸ that obtains in the world of coming-into-being-and-passing-away. Neither living nor dying, they seek refreshment where it cannot be found, until they themselves pass away.

The fear of death that haunts the oligarchic sons cannot be averted by denouncing the honor-loving part of the soul that invites death, nor, let us add, by their hope that death may be eliminated in the future, through advances of science that are both the cause and consequence of the love of wealth. Moreover, even if the death that is brought to mind by the honor-loving part of the soul could be banished, the insatiate appetites themselves would bring death near. Let us not forget that the spirited element of the soul emerges only in the “city in fever,” when the appetites show themselves under the guise of unboundedness. The oligarchic sons, it is true, still believe that such unboundedness will not befall them; but we have seen elsewhere⁷⁹ that they lack the antidote to forestall this from occurring. In a bounded world, appetitive transgression is the precursor to war and to death.

Like cattle they graze, fatten, and copulate. Greed drives them to kick and butt one another with horns and hoofs of iron. Because they are insatiable, they slay one another. And they are insatiable because they neglect to seek real refreshment for that part of the soul that is real and pure.⁸⁰

Try as they may, then, the oligarchic sons cannot escape the proximity of death that prompted them to reject their timocratic father in the first place. And now, having renounced honor, they have no remedy for death’s sting. What matters their Midas touch if they cower in their castles of gold?

Those souls located on the honor-loving side of this “configuration of misunderstanding” are quick to point out—as, say, Rousseau did—that war is a constitutive activity of human affairs and that it is at no small cost that the oligarchic sons renounce honor.⁸¹ True though this certainly is, the objection in no way ascends to the level of philosophic insight, which understands the honor-loving part of the soul to be a necessary propaedeutic to the practice of death, rightly understood, but nothing more. The oligarchic sons make a grave mistake in setting up the appetitive part of the soul as sovereign; but returning the honor-loving part of the soul to the throne is equally ill advised.

In Plato’s fable, neither wealth nor honor should rule; but neither should wealth be shunned nor honor emasculated, as those on this mortal side of philosophy are wont to do, some siding with wealth, others with honor. The fable of liberalism establishes an antinomy between wealth and honor that subsists only for those who know nothing about the philosophic practice of death. Without this practice of death—which is generated by the seed of appetitive transgression, nourished in the soil of spiritedness, but brought to full flower only by philosophy—“there can be no end to troubles . . . in our cities or for all mankind.”⁸² Justice, after all, entails “rendering each its due.” Illuminated by the light of the Good, philosophic reason is able to rule and grant what is proper to both the honor-loving and appetitive parts of the soul. Short of that, this “tale that has been saved and not lost,”⁸³ this fable of Plato’s that points beyond lingering death, will be supplanted by the lesser contest we witness today, to which the fable of liberalism bears witness. Neither wealth nor honor, however, can provide what is needed. While we may hope, as Polymarchus did in the opening passages of the Republic, that what we have inherited in the way of love of honor or of wealth is adequate, the wager of Plato’s fable is that in truth only philosophy can save us.

¹ Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Streere (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), ch. 10, p. 149.

² Plato, Republic, Book X 608b.

³ Plato, Republic, Book II 376d.

⁴ I leave aside, in this account, the superb twentieth-century retelling of this fable given a generation ago by Albert Hirschman, and more recently by Pierre Manent. While it would be difficult to find two books more diametrically opposed in their assessment of this fable than Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests and Manent’s The City of Man, both authors reiterate its typology.

⁵ In Plato’s fable, facts would correspond to the domain of opinion, whereas truth corresponds to the domain of knowledge. Truth avails itself to the philosopher only; facts appear in that world that is between light and darkness, and therefore shift to and fro. See Oakeshott, “Political Philosophy,” in Religion, Politics and the Moral Life , ch. 10, p. 141: “[Facts] are not another world from the world of opinions; they are merely relatively unshakable opinions.”

⁶ This was Samuel Johnson’s phrase, which Burke adopted to describe the caustic assault on aristocratic sensibilities wrought by the French Revolution. In his 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 under-standing 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” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.C.D. Clarke [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001], p. 239).

⁷ See Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1988), part II, dialogue vi, p. 284 [335]: Cleo). “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, Wealth, vol. I, book I, ch. I, p. 7). Marx’s response to Smith is that bourgeois civilization reproduces itself in its “own image” (“Communist Manifesto,” in Marx-Engels Reader, p. 477). Bourgeois civilization destroys one form of imitation, only to introduce another.

⁸ Adam Smith, whom I allude to again shortly, was not prepared to go this far. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1982), part VI, sec. II, ch. III, p. 235: “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 overshadow 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” (emphasis added).

⁹ See chapter 2, note 552. The collapse of multiple social ranks into one corresponds to the collapse of multiple, socially embodied measures into the single measure of disembodied public reason, without social rank. Rawls’s project, which begins from the vantage point of a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls, Theory of Justice, part 1, ch. 1, sec. 3, p. 12) and out of which citizens without a socially constituted history emerge, is a resume of a social order without rank.

¹⁰ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harrold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), part 4, book 20, ch. 1, p. 338.

¹¹ Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation,” in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), part I, ch. 2, p. 53.

¹² See Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. I, book I, ch. II, p. 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.”

¹³ See Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments , part I, sec. I, ch. I, paras. 2 and 3, pp. 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. . . . [T]his is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others.”

¹⁴ See, e.g., Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part III, ch. 18, p. 618: “The medieval nobility reckoned military valor as the greatest of all the virtues. . . . [It] was born of war and for war.”

¹⁵ See Plato, Republic, Book V, 449c, where Adeimantus suggests to Socrates that “right needs to be defined, like everything else, in terms of the particular community in question.” The “first wave” in Book V wrestles with just this question, under the guise of a conversation about the equality of the sexes. Socrates suggests to his interlocutors that without reason, there can be no basis of distinguishing what is good or bad within a particular city. The light of reason allows the philosopher to make distinctions that those who would wish to honor their city (and receive honors from it) fail to understand. See, in this regard, David Walsh, The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999), ch. 2, p. 103: “The distortion of our world derives directly from our incapacity to deal with the boundary problems, and the latter is rendered inaccessible because the sense of what constitutes a boundary is crucially dependent on the revelation of transcendent Being.”

¹⁶ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, Author’s Introduction, p. 10: “In proportion as new roads to power were found, the value of birth decreased. In the eleventh century, nobility was something of inestimable worth; in the thirteenth century it could be bought.” Marx, too, would have concurred in the view that the aristocratic order concealed within itself forces that would later undo it.

¹⁷ Marx is helpful in illuminating this collapse. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (“Communist Manifesto,” in Marx-Engels Reader, p. 475).

¹⁸ See Plato, Phaedo, 116e–117a: “But Socrates, said Crito, I think the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set. I know the others drink the poison quite a long time after they have received the order, eating and drinking quite a bit, and some of them enjoy intimacy with their loved ones. Do not hurry; there is still some time. It is natural, Crito, for them to do so, said Socrates, for they think they derive some benefit from doing so, but it is not fitting for me.”

¹⁹ See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Its Basis and Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), ch. VIII, p. 129: “[Hobbes’s political philosophy can be characterized as a] movement away from honor as a principle to fear of violent death as a principle.”

²⁰ Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism settles on just this point: “Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one’s might? even will it? even promote it” (Genealogy , First Essay, sec.17, p. 54).

²¹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part IV, ch. 8, p. 704.

²² See ibid., vol. I, Author’s Introduction, p. 14: “Understanding its own interests, the people [in a democratic age] would appreciate that in order to enjoy the benefits of society one must shoulder its obligations. Free associations of the citizens could then take the place of the individual authority of the nobles” (emphasis added).

²³ This was Tocqueville’s explanation for the emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte. The destruction of the aristocracy, without its replacement by voluntary associations, led to the concentration of power in the hands of the state. Once he assumed control, there was little or no opposition to his power, both in France and throughout Europe. See Democracy in America, vol. II, part IV, ch. 4, p. 675.

²⁴ See ibid., vol. II, part III, ch. 18, p. 617: “Each of these associations [nations, classes or castes] forms, as it were, a particular species of the human race, and though they differ in no essential from the mass of men, they stand to some extent apart and have some needs peculiar to themselves. . . . Honor is nothing but this particular rule, based on a particular state of society, by means of which a people distribute praise and blame.”

²⁵ See ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 10, p. 406: “There is no sovereign will or national prejudice that can fight for long against cheapness”; ibid., vol. II, part III, ch. 17, p. 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”; and p. 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.”

²⁶ See ibid., vol. II, part III, ch. 5, p. 585: “In America the family, if one takes the word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, no longer exists.” Consider, in this context, Socrates’ observation that democracy is the regime of “boys and women” (Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 557d).

²⁷ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part III, ch. 20, p. 633: “To increase their comfort at the expense of the public treasury strikes them as being, if not the only way, at least the easiest and most expeditious by which to escape from a condition [of competition in civil society] which they no longer find satisfactory.”

²⁸ Ibid., vol. II, part III, ch. 22, p. 648.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 647.

³⁰ Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, ch. xiii, para. 3, p. 75: “From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore, if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.” It is not differences among people that cause faction and war, but the fact that they are sufficiently alike each other in their tastes—but not in their judgments. It is this gap that justifies the need for an arbiter who stands over all.

³¹ In his account of the American Indians, however, he suggests that a warrior, once civilized, never loses his desire for glory. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, part II, ch. 10, p. 319n., and pp. 331–32n. Democratic civilization, there, is a veneer on the surface of the aristocratic longing for glory.

³² See ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 9, p. 278, where the exploits of General Jackson are invoked as proof that the United States had no men who understand glory in the old, aristocratic sense.

³³ See ibid., vol. II, part III, ch. 22, p. 649: “I do not wish to speak ill of war; war almost always widens a nations mental horizons and raises its heart.”

³⁴ Ibid., vol. II, part IV, ch. 8, p. 705. See also ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 9, p. 285, where the Americans are said to “flee from the paternal hearth.”

³⁵ Consider, e.g., Tocqueville’s worries about blatant materialism (ibid., vol. II, part II, ch. 13, pp. 535–38; the development of a new aristocracy based on wealth (ibid., ch. 20, pp. 555–58; and the need for boundaries beyond which the accumulation of wealth should not be possible (ibid., part III, ch. 19, p. 630). Finally, it is worth noting that when Tocqueville discusses property rights, there is scarcely any mention of its relationship to productivity—a connection that is central, say, in the thinking of Locke. See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ch. V, secs. 25–51, pp. 285–302. Tocqueville’s concern is to show how practical experience with property rights renders the idea of rights in general thinkable.

³⁶ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part II, ch. 5, p. 515.

³⁷ See ibid., vol. I, Author’s Introduction, pp. 12–13: “A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new. But it is just that to which we [Europeans] give least attention. Carried away by a rapid current, we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight on the bank, which the stream whirls us backwards—facing toward the abyss” (emphasis added).

³⁸ See ibid., vol. I, part I, ch. 2, p. 44: “In most European nations political existence started in the higher ranks of society and has been gradually, but always incompletely, communicated to the various members of the body social. Contrariwise, in America one may say that the local community was organized before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the Union.”

³⁹ Ibid., vol. I, part I, ch. 2, p. 31.

⁴⁰ Cf. Plato, Republic, Book II, 378d–e: “Whatever [young] minds absorb is likely to become fixed and unalterable.”

⁴¹ Cf. Plato, Republic, Book VI, 492b.

⁴² Putnam, too, wrestles with this problem of path-dependency, in his study of Northern and Southern Italy. His findings prompted one civic leader from the South to proclaim: “This is a counsel of despair. You’re telling me that nothing I can do will improve our prospects for success. The fate of the reform was sealed centuries ago” (Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993], ch. 6, p. 183).

⁴³ For Tocqueville’s discussion of the American Indians, see Democracy in America, vol. I, part II, ch. 10, pp. 321–39; for his discussion of slavery, see pp. 340–65; for his discussion of the Russians, see pp. 412–13.

⁴⁴ See ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 1, pp. 429–33. Cf. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1991), pp. 5–42.

⁴⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part I, ch. 2, p. 436.

⁴⁶ See ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 2, p. 434: “[In the democratic age, mankind has] a very high and often thoroughly exaggerated conception of human reason.” See also ibid., part III, ch. 21, p. 641: “For, taking the general view of world history, one finds that it is less the force of an argument than the authority of a name which has brought about great and rapid changes in accepted ideas.”

⁴⁷ See James Fennimore Cooper, The American Democrat (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1956), p. 233: “ ‘They say,’ is the monarch of this country. No one asks ‘who says it,’ so long as it is believed that ‘they say it.’ Designing men endeavor to persuade the public, that already ‘they say,’ what these designing men wish to be said, and the public is only too much disposed blindly to join in the cry of ‘they say’ ” (emphasis in original).

⁴⁸ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part II, ch. 4, p. 510 (emphasis added).

⁴⁹ See ibid., vol. II, part II, ch. 8, pp. 525–28.

⁵⁰ See ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 1, p. 433.

⁵¹ It is not simply a coincidence that the liberal/communitarian debate occurs in the United States during the Cold War and after the New Deal. Both events consolidated federal power and undermined mediational sites, without which we are left with both a caricatured understanding of the individual and a vacuous notion of community. Neither is adequate to the challenges of the democratic age. See Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ch. 5, p. 258: “Without [associations] we are condemned to oscillate back and forth between . . . an insular concrete personal life that is abstracted from community and a substantive community that abides only as an empty and dangerous, even if imaginative, abstraction; between the solemn impotence of self-enclosure and the euphoric identification with a national forum of politics that promises to fill the void in our souls but simply cannot.”

⁵² See Plato, Republic, Book VI, 493a–d.

⁵³ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part III, ch. 18, p. 617.

⁵⁴ Consider, among other things, Tocqueville’s criticisms of the attempt by European thinkers to found democracy on philosophical ideas (ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 9, p. 294; and his assessment of the impossibility of plumbing to first principles with philosophy (ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 4, pp. 443–44).

⁵⁵ Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition, ch. II, sec. 7, pp. 54–55: “[I]f 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.”

⁵⁶ I add here that Tocqueville thought that while the idea of rights may have originally had a religious justification, in this troubled time the only way to secure the idea was through the practical experience with political rights at the local level. See Democracy in America, vol. I, part II, ch. 6, p. 239. See chapter 2, section on “Rights and the Relativity of All Things.”

⁵⁷ Cf. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Prologue, sec. 4, p. 17: “The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soul is still rich enough. But one day this soil will be poor and domesticated, and no tall tree will be able to grow in it. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir!”

⁵⁸ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part I, ch. 17, pp. 482–87.

⁵⁹ See ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 9, p. 295: “Eighteenth-century philosophers had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit this theory at all.”

⁶⁰ See ibid., vol. II, part IV, ch. 2, p. 668: “The idea of secondary powers, between the sovereign and his subjects, was natural to the imagination of aristocratic peoples, because such powers were proper to individuals or families distinguished by birth, education, and riches, who seemed destined to command. Opposite reasons naturally banish such an idea from the minds of men in ages of equality.” For a consideration of the multiple forms that religion may take in America in the future, see Joshua Mitchell, “The Trajectories of Religious Renewal in America: Tocquevillean Thoughts,” in A Nation under God?—Essays on the Future of Religion in American Public Life, ed. R. Bruce Douglass and Joshua Mitchell (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 17–43, especially part II, sec. 2.

⁶¹ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part I, ch. 17, p. 486.

⁶² The term “fundamentalist” emerged in the early years of the twentieth century, as a consequence of the publication of a multi-volume series entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, ed. R. A. Torrey (Los Angeles: Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1917). Two of the important predicates of fundamentalism are sincerity and literalism, both of which are distinctively democratic idioms. Said otherwise, fundamentalism is a form of religion to be expected in the democratic age.

⁶³ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part I, ch. 5, p. 445. An additional difficulty, he says, is the matter of scientific advancement. Christianity can accommodate it; Islam cannot. Notwithstanding Galileo’s treatment by the Roman Catholic Church, Christianity, unlike Islam, proffers no scientific cosmology. The First Article of the Nicene Creed—I believe in God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth—is mute with respect to the features of the cosmos, their respective relationship one to another, as well as the manner in which, together or in part, they can be known; and so can accommodate a vast array of technological advancements.

⁶⁴ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, part I, ch. 5, p. 445.

⁶⁵ See ibid., vol. I, part II, ch. 6, pp. 241–45.

⁶⁶ Ibid., vol. II, part II, ch. 4, p. 511.

⁶⁷ See ibid., vol. I, part I, ch. 5, p. 61: “A very civilized society finds it hard to tolerate attempts at freedom in a local community; it is disgusted by its numerous blunders and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is finished.”

⁶⁸ Ibid., Appendix I, Y., pp. 734–35.

⁶⁹ See Matt. 13:24–30.

⁷⁰ See, again, Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, sec. 9, p. 36: “It is the Church, and not its poison, that repels us.”

⁷¹ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I, Author’s Introduction, p. 10: “The ranks of the clergy were open to all, poor and rich, commoner and noble; through the Church equality began to insinuate itself into the heart of government”; ibid., part II, ch. 9, p. 287: “Every religion has some political opinion linked to it by affinity”; and ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 3, p. 439: “All the great writers of antiquity were either members of the aristocracy of masters or, at the least, saw that aristocracy in undisputed possession before their eyes. Their minds roamed free in many directions but were blinkered there. Jesus Christ had to come down to earth to make all members of the human race understand that they were naturally similar and equal” (emphasis added).

⁷² See ibid., vol. II, part I, ch. 8, p. 454: “Aristocratic nations are by their nature too much inclined to restrict the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations sometimes stretch it beyond reason.” See also Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Tower of Babel,” in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), pp. 27–46.

⁷³ Plato, Republic, Book III, 401d.

⁷⁴ Plato, Republic, Book VI, 504b–c.

⁷⁵ See Plato, Republic, Book IV, 422e–423a; Book VIII, 551d.

⁷⁶ See Emerson, “Circles,” in Selected Essays, p. 404: “The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

⁷⁷ See Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, ch. xiii, para. 9, p. 76.

⁷⁸ Plato, Republic, Book III, 406b.

⁷⁹ See chapter 2, section on “Oligarchy,” p. 82–89.

⁸⁰ Plato, Republic, Book IX, 586b–c.

⁸¹ See Rousseau, First Discourse, part II, para. 43, p. 19: “What, then, precisely is at issue in this question of luxury? To know what matters most to Empires, to be brilliant and short-lived, or virtuous and long-lasting. I say brilliant, but with what lustre? A taste for ostentation is scarcely ever combined in one soul with a taste for the honest. No, minds debased by a host of futile cares cannot possibly ever rise to anything great; and even if they had the strength, they would lack the courage” (emphasis added).

⁸² Plato, Republic, Book VI, 473d.

⁸³ Plato, Republic, Book X, 621c.