…Tocqueville marveled at the way
Americans – in contrast, he thought, to continental Europeans – participated in
countless associations and thereby breathed life into their democracy. Instead
of appealing to a state authority to solve their problems, Americans founded an
association, taking their lives into their own hands and working for the common
good. For these reasons, freedom of association, even more than freedom of the
press, was, for Tocqueville, one of the most important political rights. It is
the practical advantage an active citizenry brings to a polity – in addition to
the freedom of commerce and the press and the right to property and free
elections – that contemporary political theorists attribute to ‘civil society’.
But Tocqueville was interested in
more than the associations’ purely practical significance. Tocqueville
continued the tradition in classical political theory that investigates the
impact a form of government has on its citizens and their virtue and measures
the quality of the government accordingly. His primary concern was not just the
political constitution of a polity, but rather the ‘constitution of the souls’
the polity produces. In other words, he was concerned with the social and moral
basis of politics and, hence, of democratic governance.
Tocqueville considered human
feelings and the process of their formation more significant for politics than
rationally thought-out rights and interests. He was convinced that ‘state were
not defined by their laws, but rather from their origins by the feelings,
thought processes, ideas, and hearts and minds of their inhabitants’. As an ‘aristocratic
liberal’, Tocqueville shared scepticism about the coming democratic age with
his contemporaries John Stuart Mill and Jacob Burckhardt. He considered
himself, in the words of Wilhelm Hennis, an ‘historian of the soul’, an analyst
of the order and disorder of human souls in the age of democracy. The decisive
question for Tocqueville was how to avoid, particularly in a democracy, the
impoverishment of citizens’ souls that would lead to despotism. The Terror of
the French Revolution was never far from his thoughts.
Tocqueville saw an answer to this
danger in voluntary associations. According to Tocqueville, only in sociable
interaction could people develop their ideas and enlarge their hearts. This interaction,
which was subordinated to strict rules in corporate societies, had to be
brought to life voluntarily in a democracy – something only associations could
bring about. Tocqueville believed that the most significant associations in
this regard are those that remain purely sociable and exist to improve their
member’s mores and manners and to enrich their emotional lives. Such
associations are much more significant than those that promoted explicitly
political or commercial purposes. Only those associations that are – at least
at first glance – non-political and above special interests can free their
members from selfishness and create new bonds in modern, egalitarian societies.
These are precisely the bonds that play such an important role in Tocqueville’s
political thought. ‘Among the laws that rule human societies’. Writes Tocqueville,
’there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all others. In order
that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be
developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality or conditions
increases’. Conversely, he thought, if the bonds between individuals loosen,
democracy’s political foundation will erode. The less citizens practice the art
of association, the greater the toll on their civility and the greater
likelihood that equality will degenerate into despotism….
Excerpt
from Steffan-Ludwig Hoffmann (2006), Civil
Society.
