Is there any sense in establishing a parallel between the works of Tocqueville and Hegel, even if we reduce their work to what they have in common? Other than the vague, general fact that both were concerned with the fate of postrevolutionary societies—in Hegelian terms, the modern state in relation to civil society; in Tocqueville’s, the democratic social condition—such rapprochement is not self-evident. It does not appear that the two ever encountered one another, either personally or intellectually. Hegel, it is clear, never heard of the young French aristocrat who only gained fame with the publication of the first part of his Democracy in America four years after Hegel’s death in 1831. As for Tocqueville, he did mention Hegel’s name once,1 but his work gives us no reason to think that he had ever read him. There is, at the beginning of the first volume of Democracy in America (1840), an allusion to Germans who introduced pantheism into philosophy,2 but it is extremely vague and most likely refers to those involved in the Pantheismusstreit rather than to Hegel himself. Nothing in Democracy in America suggests that Tocqueville had any interest in German philosophy or political history. That changed with The Old Regime and the Revolution, but only as far as Germany’s political and constitutional histories were concerned, not its philosophy. Moreover, Tocqueville must have thought the same thing about German philosophy as he did about French Enlightenment philosophy, which he contrasted to the political reality studied by economists: “philosophers rarely got beyond very general and very abstract ideas about government.”3 This assessment would surely have applied to Hegel. However, the very things that set the two apart also link them together in a silent conversation in which the very status of social and political modernity is at stake.
On many issues Tocqueville and Hegel seem to take opposite sides—so much so that one could call Tocqueville the anti-Hegel; and indeed, those seeking to rehabilitate the liberal tradition against all forms of socialism often say as much. The following two examples illustrate this opposition.
The first concerns the historical role of America. Near the end of his introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel lists the distinctive characteristics of American civilization, and in many respects the list agrees with what we find in the first volume of Democracy in America, for example, the decisive role of commerce, that “very abstract principle.”4 Hegel concedes that the United States’ “republican constitution” does indeed provide “universal protection of property” and guarantees the existence of a formal legal order.5 But he adds that “this formal justice is devoid of integrity”6: the ethical vitality that the state ensures or ought to ensure is lacking from this formal order. In short, the United States is not yet “a real state”;7 at most, it is a civil society in formation precisely because there is not (or not yet) a marked difference between social estates or conditions—in other words, because there is what Tocqueville calls a democratic social condition. Hegel adds,
North America cannot yet be regarded as a fully developed and mature state, but merely as one which is still in the process of becoming; it has not yet progressed far enough to feel the need for a monarchy.8
It would be easy to focus only on the irony of this prognosis, but it is coherent with Hegel’s often-repeated argument that constitutional monarchy (which is distinct from patriarchal monarchy and feudal monarchy) is the political formula best suited to the modern world.9 At the same time, we may wonder whether the later development of presidential power in the United States (a power that Tocqueville considered to be both subordinate to and constantly threatened by the legislature) has not in part proved Hegel right. But ultimately this is not so important. For Hegel, “America is a country of the future”;10 similarly, for Tocqueville, it is, like Russia, “marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”11 But the conclusions they draw from this diagnosis are quite different. For Tocqueville, America is of interest because it foreshadows the probable fate of societies: “in America, I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself.”12 Hegel, to the contrary, concludes his presentation of America with this lapidary judgment: “it is of no interest to us here, for prophecy is not the business of the philosopher.”13 True, the theoretical position of Tocqueville, a sociologist of politics and a historian of ideas and passions, is different from that of the philosopher seeking to “recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present”14 and looking for only “what is eternal”15 in the present. But it is precisely this difference in orientation that is instructive and that perhaps renders any attempt at rapprochement vain.
A second example is even more general in scope: the two authors’ assessments of the future of democracy.16 Tocqueville thought that the “democratic revolution” was the “generative fact” of modernity,17 and from the outset he proclaimed that his book was “written under constant preoccupation with a single thought: the future coming—irresistible—of universal democracy in the world.”18 Hegel, on the other hand, considered democracy to be fundamentally untimely in that the reign of (political) virtue toward which it tends on principle shows itself to be incompatible with the liberation of “the powers of particularity”19 that is the defining trait of modernity. This is why any attempt at actualizing the democratic principle—for example, the French Revolution—necessarily unleashes tyrannical violence against those forces of particularity in a vain attempt to silence them. However, it is easy to explain the differences between the two authors here through their differing conceptions of democracy. Whereas Hegel sticks to the traditional (Greek) concept of democracy and tacitly assumes what goes along with it (an exclusively political definition of living together and a rejection of the division between private and public practiced by modernity), Tocqueville introduces a new definition of democracy as the social condition of equality; thus, he proposes a nonpolitical (in the classical sense of the word) concept of democracy that breaks with the conception used in Hegel’s analysis. Despite these clear differences, it is possible that Hegel and Tocqueville intersect in their analyses, and each have much to suggest to present estimations of democracy.
Let us begin by discussing a point that is revealing though not decisive. Tocqueville and Hegel both preserve the traditional classification of forms of government and distinguish between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy without omitting their deviant forms—wholly in keeping with Aristotle or Polybius. We may think here of Hegel’s mention of ochlocracy20 or Tocqueville’s constant play on the good and bad forms of aristocracy or democracy, as in his famous phrase, “on whether we next have democratic freedom or democratic tyranny, depends the destiny of the world.”21 But they immediately relativize the relevance of this kind of classification and emphasize its inadequacy to the conditions of political and social modernity.
First, a quote from Hegel:
The old classification of constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy presupposes a still undivided and substantial unity which has not yet attained its inner differentiation (as an organization developed within itself) and which consequently still lacks depth and concrete rationality.22
According to this text, constitutional monarchy is neither a variant of classical monarchy nor a fourth type of constitution; rather, it sums up and relativizes the unilateral moments that classical constitutions represent, and it is their integrative unity, for its internal organization makes room for democratic aspects (parliamentary representation) and aristocratic ones (governmental administrations) as well as for the specifically monarchic aspect of state power. In this way, political philosophy’s traditional question—what is the best regime?23—becomes obsolete. The question is even more obsolete because it is an illusion to think that a political regime can be chosen by a deliberate decision, as in the constitutional debate Herodotus imagines taking place in Persia.24 For Hegel, “each nation . . . has the constitution appropriate and proper to it.”25 Instead, it is more fitting to see the succession of regimes as belonging to the process of historical development of objective freedom through successive, unilateral forms. This is why
No lessons can therefore be drawn from history for the framing of constitutions in the present. For the latest constitutional principle, the principle of our own times, is not to be found in the constitutions of the world-historical nations of the past.26
As for Tocqueville, he spends little time on the typology of political regimes. In Democracy in America we find only scattered remarks on the subject. For example, unlike Hegel (at least the letter of Hegelian texts), Tocqueville maintains that the democracies of antiquity must be distinguished from modern democracy. Of the first, he indicates that “those so-called democracies consisted of elements very different from ours, with which they have nothing in common but the name,”27 but he says no more. Cross-referencing this with other passages shows that Tocqueville considered ancient democracy, slave holding and bellicose, to be an aristocracy in disguise. Another passage, this time from the first volume of Democracy in America, repeats, over the course of a discussion on the institution of the jury, the original classification of regimes presented at the beginning of The Spirit of the Laws and classes aristocracy and democracy as two species of the genus republic, contrasting them both to monarchies.28 But it is clear that this is not essential to Tocqueville’s argument. What is essential is his increasingly clear-cut opposition between aristocratic and democratic societies. The systematic comparison of their properties,29 the observation that government by a single ruler can go with both aristocratic society (as in the monarchy of the ancien régime) and with democratic society (the Napoleonic Empire and the July Monarchy)—these show that for Tocqueville, too, the classification of regimes is neither topical nor relevant. What is important for him, especially in the second volume, is to fully assess and draw out all the consequences of the gap between aristocratic and democratic societies; it is to establish what distinguishes aristocratic passions from democratic passions, what distinguishes the aristocrat from the democrat. Here, Kant had pointed the way for Tocqueville (and for Hegel) by maintaining that the question of Regierungsform is, in the conditions of modern society, which is dominated by the selfish quest to satisfy individual aspirations, less important than that of Regierungsart, that is the mode—liberal (in Kant’s vocabulary, republican) or despotic—of government.30
Nevertheless, democracy is not only a “social condition,” it is also a political regime. What are its characteristics in this regard? What is the specific nature of governing democracy, its properly political definition? The answer is almost trivial: it is the sovereignty of the people. However, there must be no mistaking the meaning of this notion; the stereotypes and ambiguities it generates must be eliminated. “Disentangled . . . from the many fictions with which it has elsewhere carefully been wreathed”31—particularly in France—the dogma of popular sovereignty fundamentally means that political power in no way transcends the social body or the governed; it refers to nothing other than “the slow and tranquil action of society upon itself.”32 In other words, no matter how subtle or complex the mechanisms of representation or the organized balance of powers (the American Constitution, following the canonical definition contained by the Federalist Papers, is a model in this regard), ultimately it is the opinion of the majority—whose “quiet reign33 Tocqueville observes—that holds sway in democracy, where “the opinions, prejudices, interests, and even passions of the people” cannot be hindered “from making their influences felt on the daily direction of society.”34 In short, beyond constitutional fictions, the sovereignty of the people means that “the majority governs in the name of the people.” This is the root of what Tocqueville sees as ambivalent and even troubling in popular sovereignty and thereby in democracy itself. The second volume of Democracy in America returns to this question over and over again: the power of the majority, which has influence over individual judgments and sentiments, constantly threatens to become tyrannical. “Democratic tyranny,”35 exerted by a “power [that] is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild,”36 is, as the Federalist Papers foresaw, the main danger threatening modern democracy.
Hegel is just as hesitant about the sovereignty of the people as Tocqueville—completely normal for a declared adversary of democracy. But what is more surprising is that his argument intersects with the French liberal’s in significant ways. One can only critique the sovereignty of the people if one recognizes what is inevitable about this principle in the political configuration of modernity. The right to vote, that “sole act of the ‘sovereignty of the people,’” is like the symbol—and often it is no more than just that—of the inalienable right of individuals insofar as they also constitute “the people,” to “participate in public affairs and in the highest interests of the state and government.”37 This is why that right is prominently featured in the “elementary catechism” of modern politics, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.38
From the foregoing we can see how Hegel and Tocqueville are both similar and different on the matter of the sovereignty of the people. They are similar—and this is the main aspect—in that they both recognize certain characteristics (to which we shall return) in the postrevolutionary world that make the sovereignty of the people, or at least certain forms of it, inevitable. Their promotion of this dogma is a response to the effacement of all transcendent principles of legitimacy (God, dynasty), and it expresses the immanence of political power to the social body. In this respect, for Hegel as well as for Tocqueville, democracy (in the weak sense) is the destiny of modern societies. However, they clearly diverge in how they understand this new principle.
Tocqueville, not without some anxiety, rallies to the new conception of democracy (new in comparison to the conception expressed by eighteenth-century authors such as Montesquieu and Rousseau) embodied by the institutions of the United States: checks and balances, administrative decentralization, and the practices of local self-administration that had been the anchor of political life there since the beginning of colonization. In the words of the Federalist Papers, we have here a republican government “on which the scheme of representation takes place” and that is entirely different from classical democracy, where “the people meet and exercise the government in person.”39 An attentive reader of the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville is keenly aware of the risk contained in the principle of popular sovereignty even when a powerful representational corrective is implemented: this is the risk of the oppression of minorities.40 But since there is no alternative—and we shall see why—to the democratization of society, there is no choice but to contain this risk, which means “new remedies must henceforth be sought for new disorders.” Tocqueville summarizes the remedies for democratic tyranny thus:
To set broad but visible and immovable limits on social power; to grant certain rights to private individuals and guarantee their uncontested enjoyment of those rights; to preserve what little independence, strength, and originality is left to the individual; to raise him up alongside and support him vis-à-vis society.41
Though Hegel agrees with Tocqueville that since the French Revolution, unequal conditions are no longer appropriate in society, he refuses to see what was not yet named representative democracy as an adequate response to the problems of the modern world and first and foremost to the problem posed by social polarization and the heightening of class conflicts. The democratic vision of the political order is based on a fiction inherited from natural law theories and actualized by political economy: the fiction of a society of individuals constituted by themselves and abstractly equal. Hegel and Tocqueville are simultaneously similar and different in that they start off from similar diagnoses of modernity but propose antithetical solutions to its challenges. But what precisely was this diagnosis, and to what extent do they share it?
The question on which Tocqueville and Hegel at first seem to differ most directly is that of the role of the respective values of freedom and equality in the modern world as well as the institutions and norms that promote them. The debate is significant, for it concerns not only the way the two authors situate themselves with respect to the problematic of the rights of man and the text of the 1789 Declaration but also their fundamental analysis of modern society, their assessment of its negative tendencies, and their hypotheses about its future.
An Anmerkung from the Encyclopedia that I have already mentioned discusses at length the complex relationship between these “simple categories that have often been [used to sum up] what should constitute the fundamental determination and the final goal and result of the constitution,”42 a clear allusion to the preamble to the 1789 Declaration. First, as regards equality, Hegel considers that this principle, clumsily expressed by the phrase “men are equal by nature” (for to the contrary, men are naturally unequal and it is precisely up to law, society, and the state to correct this immediate naturalness), has a social rather than political meaning. If it is applied in a consistent and coherent way, “the principle of equality rejects all distinctions, and thus allows no political condition to subsist.”43 Indeed, any political order introduces a functional hierarchy between rulers and the ruled, and thus an inequality, even if this inequality does not correspond to any statutory difference between those who “by nature” rule and those who “by nature” obey—which is also the case in many aristocratic societies in Tocqueville’s sense. Contrary to a widespread illusion, the principle of equality does not have political significance but rather legal and social meaning: to say that men are equal (and it is only in modern societies that such a thing can be said) is to proclaim that they are equal as persons before the law, which is the same as affirming the existence of a “lawful condition in general.”44 But—and this is where Hegel’s argument becomes profound—the normative principle of the equality of persons before the law, which implies eliminating restrictions that premodern societies put on acquiring personhood,45 has value only insofar as individuals are otherwise unequal: if not, this would not be a norm but rather a trivial factual statement. They are, in fact, unequal: they are so naturally on account of their psychological and physical makeups; they are so also socially because of the positions they occupy within the flexible space of civil society. In other words, and even though this appears to go against the general principles of the Declaration of Rights, “as regards the concrete, apart from their personality the citizens are equal before the law only in those respects in which they are in any case equal outside the law.”46 But for all that, it would be imprudent to count Hegel as a reactionary hostile to equality. It is simply that his realism forbids him from attenuating the distance that separates the level of Sollen from that of Sein and from confusing legal normativity with concrete reality.
As for freedom, Hegel disentangles this notion from the subjectivist and individualist interpretations that dominate modern thought. Such interpretations are connected to a conflation of freedom and free choice. The introduction to the Philosophy of Right indicates that free choice is merely a subordinate moment in the fully developed concept of freedom.47 To that philosophically unsatisfying and politically suspect understanding of freedom Hegel contrasts “objective freedom,” which “could grow to such a height only in modern times.”48 And this objective freedom, of which political freedom (the power recognized in individuals to take part in public affairs) is only one dimension, is precisely structured and guaranteed by the rule of law. Indeed, “every genuine law is a freedom, for it involves a rational determination of objective spirit, and so a content of freedom.”49 In this way, political obligation is not to be understood as a restriction on the freedom individuals originally have but rather as what allows their aspiration to freedom to have institutional grounding and thereby to overcome the unilateral nature of a merely subjective freedom—that is, freedom “taken partly in a negative sense against the willfulness of others and lawless treatment” and thus contrary to “rational freedom.”50
Hegel deduces from this a judgment that at first glance seems to oppose the thesis of Democracy in America point for point:
Thus it has also been said that modern peoples are capable only of equality, or more capable of equality than of freedom. . . . On the contrary, it has to be said that it is just the great development and cultivation of modern states that produces the supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality, whereas, through the deeper rationality of laws and reinforcement of the lawful condition, it brings about a freedom that is all the greater and more firmly entrenched, a freedom that it can allow and tolerate.51
Thus, the modern, postrevolutionary state guarantees the triumph of freedom over equality. But the argument seeks above all to clarify the confusion plaguing “current conceptions” of freedom and equality. For according to Hegel, freedom properly understood, the objective freedom produced and guaranteed by the legal order (the Rechtszustand), is equality itself or rather its condition: without political freedom, without a constitutional state guaranteeing the rule of law, there can be no true legal and social equality among citizens; there would be only a society stratified into castes or estates. In other words, civil equality, the characteristic trait of a society freed of the ancien régime’s strict barriers between estates, lands, and professions, is the consequence of political freedom understood objectively and not only as an individual right to exercise active citizenship. Freedom properly understood is equality properly understood, for it is precisely to the extent that individuals are politically unequal (rulers and ruled/active citizens and passive citizens) and socially unequal (rich and poor) that they must imperatively be legally equal, which is only possible if the political order is a vehicle for freedom.
Tocqueville seems to take the opposite view, for he maintains—and this is even the central theme of Democracy in America—that equality of conditions, a “providential fact,”52 is the defining trait of democracy, or rather of the democratic social condition in modern societies. The “passion for equality”53 that equality arouses simultaneously engenders and opposes the aspiration to personal and political freedom, which is why “democratic peoples show a more ardent and enduring love of equality than of liberty.”54 The deepening of civil equality and the tendency to leveling it creates can undoubtedly lead to the “ideal,” which would be the conjunction of perfect equality and complete freedom; but it can also lead—and this is clearly what Tocqueville considers most likely—to the disappearance of political freedom. Once it has been posited that equality is the “first passion”55 of democratic societies—and we know that this expression designates the “state” of society rather than the political regime—we see that the “ills that liberty sometimes brings on,”56 and whose effects are more immediate than those of extreme equality, can lead to the sacrifice of freedom. From equality to servitude the distance is not so great, and administrative centralization, one of the core tendencies of modern societies, brings them even closer.57 Thus, we see the outline of the threat of “democratic tyranny,” the dangerous alternative to “democratic freedom.”58 And it is clear that Tocqueville takes this threat very seriously:
When I think of the state in which several European nations already find themselves and toward which all the others are tending, I am inclined to believe that soon there will no longer be room in Europe for anything but democratic liberty or the tyranny of the Caesars.59
However, equality and freedom cannot simply be understood as the terms of an alternative, as certain schools claiming (erroneously) to follow Tocqueville would have it. A passage at the end of The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution analyzes in dialectical terms the two “principal passions” driving the history of modern France: equality and freedom. The love of equality, or rather the “violent, inextinguishable hatred of inequality” is certainly “older and more deeply rooted.” But it also arouses and feeds the passion for freedom, which is more fragile because it is “more recent and less deeply rooted.”60 The Revolution, at least at the beginning, offered an astonishing example of the interaction between the two because the passion for equality powerfully encouraged the emergence of institutions of freedom, and in that case, the institutions of constitutional monarchy. Tocqueville comments that it was then that “the French were proud enough of their cause and of themselves to believe that they could enjoy freedom and equality together” and that “alongside democratic institutions they therefore created free institutions everywhere.”61
But the passion that “has continued to dwell deep within the hearts it was first to capture” is indeed the passion for equality.62 Therefore, even though equality can aid in the development of political freedom, it can also destroy it, and this is what most often occurs. This is what is demonstrated by the events of the Revolution, which Tocqueville analyzes in terms Hegel would not have repudiated. The reversal of freedom into despotism (the emperor’s despotism followed naturally from the despotism of freedom) was made even easier by the fact that administrative centralization, which the Revolution inherited from the ancien régime and which Napoleon perfected, “offered remarkable assistance to despotism.”63 Thus, in the span of a few decades, the democratic passion for equality both encouraged spectacular progress in political freedom and paved the way for its greatest threat: centralization and administrative despotism. And yet, within the conditions of all modern states, there is no other remedy for this threat than freedom itself:
But I maintain that to combat the evils that equality may engender, there is only one effective remedy: political liberty.64
In the postrevolutionary world, it is decidedly not a question of choosing between equality and freedom (Tocqueville observes that the enemies of equality are not necessarily supporters of political freedom) but rather of arriving at an exact understanding of the tense connection that unites them.
We can see that beyond their differences, the two thinkers’ arguments regarding freedom and equality in state and society are responses to a concern they share: what might the shape of the political be in the aftermath of the two revolutions (French and American) that marked the beginning of a new era? What institutional forms can ensure the maintenance and development of political freedom in a world stamped by equality: equal rights, equal conditions, equal aspirations? The convergence of problematics between Tocqueville, a democrat in principle65 and an opponent of administrative centralization, and Hegel, a partisan of liberal monarchy and the bureaucratic state, is more decisive than the divergence of their particular judgments. At bottom, this convergence stems from their similar approach to the nature of modern society.
The polysemous nature of Tocqueville’s conception of democracy has often been noted.66 However, the defining moment in his analysis is his definition of democracy not as a political regime or as a form of exercising power but rather as a social condition. This moment comes in the first volume of Democracy in America67 and even more so in the second volume, where it is constantly assumed. The social condition of democracy is characterized by equal conditions, the “basic fact” of the “great democratic revolution [that] is taking place among us,”68 in other words, the fact that “when citizens are divided into castes and classes, not only are they different from one another, but they have neither the taste nor the desire to look alike.”69 This definition of democracy in social rather than political terms is Tocqueville’s major theoretical innovation. It explains his replacement of the classical typology of regimes with a distinction between aristocratic and democratic societies—a distinction remarkable above all because it does not admit the possibility of a third alternative. This distinction is the backbone of the second volume of Democracy in America, which develops an unrelenting comparison between the properties of aristocratic societies (inegalitarian) and democratic ones (egalitarian).
This social definition of democracy is made necessary by a thesis that is very interesting in comparison with what Hegel says:
For in the long run, political society cannot fail to become the expression and image of civil society, and it is in this sense that one may say that there is nothing more political about a people than its civil legislation.70
This is remarkable from the point of view of the history of the political lexicon: in 1835–1840 Tocqueville uses the distinction between civil society and political society that Hegel was the first to have explicitly drawn around the year 1817, and he does so as if the distinction is self-evident. In the space of a few years, the concept of civil society, which had undergone such a profound transformation, became perfectly familiar and even indispensable all across Europe. Tocqueville’s work aims to account for this fact by showing to what extent the democratic social condition transforms classical representations of politics.
But if Tocqueville seems to be similar to Hegel because he invokes the distinction between the state and civil society, he is not at all Hegelian in the way he uses the distinction; he is closer to Lorenz von Stein and even to Marx, which may seem surprising. In Hegel, the distinction between civil society and the state goes along with the clear subordination of the former to the latter. It is extremely important for him—and in this he remains a classical author—to preserve the rights of the political and to avoid not only conflating the state with civil society but also, and above all, subordinating the state to the representations and modes of regulation that reign in civil society. This is what Tocqueville does when he writes that the social condition determines (in a way that is not entirely clear) the political configuration:
There is no doubt in my mind that sooner or later we will come, as the Americans have come, to an almost complete equality of conditions. I do not conclude from this that we will one day be compelled to draw the same political consequences as the Americans from our similar social state. I am not at all convinced that they have hit upon the only form of government that a democracy may adopt. If, however, the same root cause has given rise to new laws and customs in both countries, then that is reason enough for us to take an immense interest in finding out what effects that cause has produced in each.71
While Hegel affirms the normative primacy of the political over the social, Tocqueville proclaims the primacy of the “social condition”; the “form of government” is not its mere reflection or “consequence,” but it cannot contradict it for long, for it is the social condition that is the cause “influencing the manners of the country.” If it is true that the move toward a democratic social condition is inevitable, we must ask what the inevitable consequences of this phenomenon are for the political sphere.
Regardless of the scope of their differences, Hegel and Tocqueville define civil society in similar terms. For Tocqueville, the equality of conditions, the fact that no one is attached by birth to a specific estate, is the sole generator of the democratic social condition, or in Hegelian terms of modern civil society. For Hegel, equality is not what characterizes civil society above all; civil society, resulting from the interaction of particular actors, an interaction orchestrated by various universalizing controls (the market, the law), represents, within Sittlichkeit, “the degree of difference,”72 because there particular interest is subjected to the universal rather than freely converging with it. But in reality, the “requirement of equality”73 is directly implied by civil society’s distinctive trait: the needs and activities of each individual intertwine with the system of needs to help create the well-being of all; the “legal constitution”74 of this society presupposes strict legal parity between social actors. Of course, this equality of position and rights does not exclude strong economic and social inequalities; it even goes along with their reinforcement. Hegel, in discussing the “objective right of particularity” emphasizes that it
does not cancel out [nicht aufhebt] the inequality of human beings in civil society—an inequality posited by nature, which is the element of inequality—but in fact produces it out of the spirit itself and raises it to an inequality of skills, resources, and even of intellectual and moral education.75
Tocqueville says the same: equal conditions are not incompatible with the persistence of strong inequalities, in particular on the economic level; such equality, spread and magnified by “public opinion” is a “sort of imaginary equality.”76 Equality, including what may be phantasmagoric about it, is thus indeed the characteristic proper to civil society (in Hegel’s sense) or the democratic social condition (in Tocqueville’s sense).
However, there is a corollary to the equality of conditions: the mobility of individuals and social structures themselves. Hegel equates the man of civil society (the bourgeois) with man tout court.77 What is the reason for this surprising identification of man per se with the bourgeois who is separated from his own existence as political citizen? It results from the fact that civil society, by stripping the individual of all the statutory attributes that would grant him a fixed, immobile position in the political universe, has literally invented man in general; it has thus given concrete basis to the abstract discourse of the rights of man. One of the consequences of this abstraction (of the democratic social condition) is that there, all else being equal, the individual is free to choose his estate. Far from being rigidly determined by factors out of individuals’ control (birth, etc.), “for the subjective consciousness . . . [the choice] has the shape of being the product of its own will,”78 and this will is contingent and fluctuating. Consequently, mobility, in all the senses of the word, is implied by the very nature of civil society insofar as it disregards the political bond and political hierarchies.
At the very moment when he introduces his doctrine of the representation of social interests, quite undemocratic in itself, Hegel evokes the “changing element in civil society.”79 This can be compared to what Tocqueville writes in the second volume of Democracy in America regarding the “mobility” and “agitation” of democratic society:
In enlightened and free democratic centuries, there is nothing to separate men or keep them in their place. They rise or fall with singular rapidity. All classes have one another constantly in view because they live in close proximity. They communicate and mingle every day and emulate and envy one another. To the people this suggests a host of ideas, notions, and desires they would not have if ranks were fixed and society immobile.80
In conclusion, despite the differences in emphasis that stem from the two authors’ specific national and intellectual histories (a good example of which is the issue of corporations), Hegel’s “civil society” and Tocqueville’s “democratic social condition” refer to similar realities, though perhaps grasped in a different light (for Hegel, economical-legal; for Tocqueville, political-ideological). But above all, their analyses reveal surprisingly convergent concerns. Each one strives to measure the consequences of the autonomization of the social for the political and for the state, though it is clear that their orientations and proposed solutions are far from identical. This process is what they focus on, for it has given modernity its particular features, both fascinating and disquieting. The common point between these two approaches is thus the following question, which in many ways is my question as well: What happens to the political in a society where politics in the traditional sense (i.e., the institutionalized form of the relation between command and obedience) no longer determines, or no longer solely determines, how humans live together?
1. In 1854 he wrote to F. de Corcelle: “You undoubtedly know the role of philosophy in Germany for fifty years and particularly the school of Hegel. You are probably aware that the latter was protected by governments, because his doctrine established in its political consequences that all the facts were respectable and legitimate simply because they occurred and [thereby] deserved obedience.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), xv–2, 107–8.
2. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2004), 39; De la démocratie en Amérique, pt. 1 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1:37.
3. Alexis Tocqueville, Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 143; L’ancien régime et la révolution, pt. 2 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 1:209.
4. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 208; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 168 (modified).
5. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 207; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 168.
6. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 207; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 168.
7. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 207; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 168.
8. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 207; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 169.
9. See Enzykl, § 542, GW 20, p. 516 (Encyclopedia 241). Cf. Hegel, Die Vernunft in Der Geschichte, 147; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 119. The distinction between three types de monarchy (ancient or patriarchal, feudal, constitutional) is specified in the Philosophy of Right: RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 228 (Elements, 311; see Outlines, 262).
10. Hegel, Die Vernunft in Der Geschichte, 209; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 171.
11. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 476; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:431.
12. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 15; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:12.
13. Hegel, Die Vernunft in Der Geschichte, 210; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 171.
14. RPh, GW 14.1, pp. 15–16 (Elements, 22; see Outlines, 15).
15. RPh, GW 14.1, pp. 15–16 (Elements, 22; see Outlines, 15).
17. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3 (modified); De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:1.
18. De la démocratie en Amérique, forward to the 12th ed. (Paris, Pagnerre, 1848), xliii.
19. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 228 (Elements, 310; see Outlines, 261).
20. RPh, § 278 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 231 (Elements, 316; see Outlines, 266). The word ochlocracy appears in Polybius (The Histories, trans. W. R. Paton [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), 2:38, 6) to refer to the perverted form of democracy, which Aristotle called democracy in order to distinguish it from authentic politeia.
21. De la démocratie en Amérique, xliv.
22. RPh, § 273 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 226 (Elements, 309; see Outlines, 259).
23. See Strauss, What Is political philosophy?, 34. Cf. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (Hamburg: Miner, 1955), 1:140.
24. Herodotus, The Histories, 3.80.
25. RPh, § 274 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 229 (Elements, 312; see Outlines, 263).
26. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 143; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 120.
27. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 716; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:230.
28. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 233; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:284. See Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Caroly Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1:2, 10–21 (Spirit of the Laws citations give book and chapter followed by modern translation page number).
29. See Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:242–43 and 2:293 ff.
30. Kant, Frieden, Ak. 8, pp. 352–53; PP, pp. 324–25.
31. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 64; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:56.
32. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 456; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:412.
33. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 456; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:413.
34. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 197; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:177.
35. De la Démocratie en Amérique, p. xliv.
36. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 818; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:324.
37. Hegel, Reformbill, W 11, p. 112; Reform Bill, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 318.
38. Hegel, Wurtemberg, W 4, p. 49; Proceedings, in Hegel’s Political Writings, 270.
39. The Federalist Papers, no. 14, p. 68.
40. See The Federalist Papers, no. 10.
41. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 829 (modified); De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:334.
42. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 509 (Encyclopedia 237).
43. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 509 (Encyclopedia 237).
44. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 510 (Encyclopedia 238).
45. Even if this is a retrospective generalization (Max Kaser, Das römische Privatrecht, 1:234), we may think of the triple conditions of status required by Roman law to achieve personhood: status libertatis (personal freedom), status civitatis (citizenship), status familiae (being head of a family).
46. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 510 (Encyclopedia 238).
47. See RPh, §§ 14–17, GW 14.1, pp. 38–40 (Elements, 47–50; see Outlines, 37–40).
48. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 512 (Encyclopedia 239). On this notion of objective freedom, see also RPh, § 258 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 202 (Elements, 276; see Outlines, 229).
49. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 511 (Encyclopedia 238).
50. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 512 (Encyclopedia 238).
51. Enzykl, § 539 Anmerkung, GW 20, p. 511 (Encyclopedia 238).
52. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 6; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:4.
53. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 584; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:334. See also “Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to satisfy it to the full.” Democracy in America, 226 De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:204.
54. Democracy in America, 581; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:101. Chapter title. On the same page, Tocqueville reminds us that “the first and most intense of the passions to which equality gives rise is love of equality itself.”
55. Democracy in America, 581; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:101.
56. Democracy in America, 583; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:103.
57. “I am convinced, moreover, that no nation is more likely to succumb to the yoke of administrative centralization than one whose social state is democratic.” Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 109; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:97.
58. De la démocratie en Amérique, xliv.
59. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 363; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:329.
60. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 182; L’ancien régime et la révolution, pt. 2, p. 247 (III/8).
61. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 183; L’ancien régime et la révolution, pt. 2, p. 247 (III/8).
62. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 184; L’ancien régime et la révolution, pt. 2, p. 248 (III/8).
63. Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, 183; L’ancien régime et la révolution, pt. 2, p. 248 (III/8).
64. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 594; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:112.
65. “In that case, the gradual growth of democratic manners and institutions should be regarded, not as the best, but as the only means of preserving freedom; and without liking the government of democracy, it might be adopted as the most applicable and the fairest remedy for the present ills of society.” Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:328; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:329.
66. See H. Laski, introduction to the first volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, xxix, and throughout. See also Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 18 ff.
67. “The social condition of the Anglo-Americans is essentially democratic.” See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 52 (modified); De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:45.
68. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:1.
69. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 780n; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:288n.
70. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 686n; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:201n. See also the important subtitle of chapter 3 of part 1 of volume 1: “Political Consequences of the Social Condition of the Anglo-Americans.”
71. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 14; De la démocratie en Amérique, 1:11.
72. RPh, § 181, GW 14.1, p. 159 (Elements, 219; see Outlines, 180).
73. RPh, § 193, GW 14.1, p. 167 (Elements, 230; see Outlines, 189).
74. RPh, § 157, GW 14.1, p. 143 (Elements, 198; see Outlines, 162).
75. RPh, § 200 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 170 (Elements, 233–34; see Outlines, 192).
76. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 674; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:189.
77. See RPh, § 190 Anmerkung, GW 14.1, p. 166 (Elements, 228; see Outlines, 188).
78. RPh, § 206, GW 14.1, p. 172 (Elements, 237; see Outlines, 195–96).
80. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 520; De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:45.