Autor: Mansfield, Harvey C.

Buch: Tocqueville

Titel: Tocqueville

Stichwort: Tocqueville; informelle Demokratie 2, Tyrannei der Mehrheit;

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: Majority tyranny

40b Tocqueville makes his way carefully in this part of Democracy in America, as if he wants to break the news in stages. He had spoken about tyranny in the first part of the first volume, where he praises American forms of government, but never in regard to the majority. The phrase “tyranny of the majority” appears in the chapter on political associations, then is featured in the title of the seventh chapter on the “omnipotence” of the majority, which in the body of the chapter comes out as the “tyranny” of the majority and finally as a new “despotism.” This is the specter behind the sovereignty of the people, which, up to this point, had been developed and praised. (Fs)

40c Omnipotence, Tocqueville says, is safe with God, because His wisdom and justice are equal to His power. But with imperfect human beings this is not the case. Omnipotence in the human sovereign brings tyranny, not necessarily but probably, unless there is a guarantee against it. Tocqueville does not want his sovereign people to take over God’s sovereignty intact as proposed in the liberal principles of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. (Fs) (notabene)

41a But what is the guarantee against the majority in the United States? Public opinion forms the majority; the legislature represents and obeys the majority; so does the executive; the military is the majority under arms; the jury is the majority issuing decrees. The rule of law is no guarantee against majority tyranny, as Tocqueville shows explicitly in his phrase “the tyranny of the laws.” He defines tyranny as rule against the interest of the ruled, as distinct from arbitrariness without law. So law can be an instrument of majority tyranny, and arbitrary rule can be used in the interest of the ruled, though if it is absolute it is not likely to be. Tyranny is one-man rule, except that when a majority acts tyrannically, it thinks and moves as one man. In America, the majority is flattered by its courtiers and “lives in perpetual adoration of itself,” just like Louis XIV. (Fs)

41b Majority tyranny has a new character under democracy. Under monarchy (“the absolute government of one alone”) despotism would strike the victim’s body in order to reach his soul, but democratic despotism “leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” Democratic despotism, to use Tocqueville’s phrase in volume 2 of Democracy in America, is “mild despotism,” not torture and execution but moral and intellectual domination, not hard but soft. Yet it is not all soft. In a footnote Tocqueville gives two examples of majority tyranny: in Baltimore, two journalists who opposed the War of 1812 were killed by a mob of the war’s supporters, and in Philadelphia, black freedmen were kept from voting by intimidation. The second example of racial discrimination Tocqueville takes up at length in a remarkable chapter on the three races—white, black, and Indian—in America. This chapter, the last in the first volume of Democracy in America, and the culmination of its treatment of the sovereignty of the people, is by far the longest. The subjects covered are particularly American, Tocqueville says, dealing with the three races in connection with the future of America. But his deeper intent is to reveal the nature of majority tyranny and what can be done to prevent it, by way of an analysis of pride and freedom. (Fs) (notabene)

42a The two most offensive instances of majority tyranny in America were, and still are, the virtual extermination of the Indians and the enslavement of blacks. Tocqueville studies the three races, not merely the two subject races, because he wants to show the effects of tyranny on the tyrant as well as on the victims. Tyranny, defined as “not in the interest of the governed,” emerges in modern peoples especially because they have been taught to believe in the omnipotence of man rather than God, “the right and the ability to do everything.” (Fs)

42b Tocqueville says nothing about the natural or inherent superiority of a race. Rather, the three races are distinguished by the pride they show, or the lack of it. The white or Anglo-American in the New World Tocqueville calls “man par excellence,” for he treats other races as a man would treat a beast, man over nature. He tyrannizes two subject races, which hold two opposite extremes. The Indian in his barbarous independence represents the extreme limit of both pride and freedom, and the black is kept down in the opposite extreme of servile imitation and slavery. The behavior of the two subject races is quite contrary: the black accepts white civilization and tries to join white society, which rejects and repels him, while the Indian, proud of his ancestry and confident of the bounty of nature, refuses white civilization and remains aloof. The Indian knows freedom, but because he lives under the illusions of his nobility, he cannot control himself and cannot preserve himself. The black knows how to preserve himself but cannot find dignity in being the possession of another man, so cannot improve himself and be free. Each extreme situation reveals the result of majority tyranny as an abuse of pride: too much pride brings the fate of the inflexible Indian, too little brings the subjection of the black. Without a due concern for pride the white majority could suffer the same calamitous misfortune it imposes on its victims. Reason needs to be linked with pride in order to produce freedom, for in democracy it can always seem reasonable to trade freedom for administrative efficiency. But pride needs reason to temper its illusions and to bring it to submit to civilization. To civilization, Tocqueville makes clear, not merely to expertise. (Fs)

43a In endorsing pride, Tocqueville again differs from liberalism in the original form laid down by Thomas Hobbes. His theory claims that men must not merely temper but renounce their pride in order to produce civilization. In the state of nature men live in a state of war, a war of all against all, and in that state the illusions of their vanity need to be plunged into a cold bath of fear for their self-preservation. After this experience, either in fact or imagination, men are ready to be civil and accommodating, if not servile, to their fellows in civilized society. For Hobbes and his many followers, freedom and pride are in conflict, and the lesson is that civilized men must learn to be sensitive and get along. (Fs)

44a Tocqueville takes a course opposed to this, displayed in this same chapter. Instead of a social contract constituting a trade-off of pride for civilization, he wants to retain human pride as being inseparable from human freedom. The Indian with his primitive freedom must be combined with the black and his willingness to be civilized. The result would be a “white” who preserves his freedom because he keeps his pride and who preserves himself because his dignity is not based on illusion. Of course such a “white” would not have to be racially white, but whites as they are would have to renounce their prejudice against the two subject races—which Tocqueville does not think likely. (Fs)

44b When slavery is allied with race, as in America and in modern slavery generally, the slave is marked forever by his color. The prejudice of the white sees him as inferior in humanity, somewhere between a man and a beast. Liberals may assert—and the Declaration of Independence may declare—that all men are created equal, but the claim actually makes slavery more difficult to abolish because the whites do not see blacks to be fully human. A despot could abolish slavery in America, as the European powers abolished it in their colonies. (Fs)

44c Democratic Americans, however, take pride in the equality of whites only, while at the same time (even in the North) they fear revolt from the slaves. The racial pride they show is not understood by liberal theory, which glosses over the question of race, and the fear they reveal works against racial equality instead of in its favor, as supposed by liberal theory. The proud behavior of the Indians, rejecting the ways of whites, shows that liberal theory takes the attraction of civilization for granted and does not understand that one must submit to it. The prejudice of whites, rejecting the blacks, shows that, despite the penchant of democracy contrary to pride, pride does not disappear and must be dealt with, and wholesome objects found for it. The pride many Americans reveal in their prejudice must be turned to the advantage of pride in the freedom of self-government. One cannot merely equalize all pretensions in the state of nature and proceed to a social contract, as liberals often presume in their theories. (Fs)

45a Tocqueville agrees with liberal theory that slavery is unnatural, but not because we all begin equally free in the state of nature. Indignantly he exclaims that in slavery we see “the order of nature reversed.” Yet in another sense of nature, it was all too natural for Europeans to enslave a different race they perceived as inferior—it was understandable. The order of nature is for the best, but the best is not achieved automatically; indeed it faces obstacles from the pride natural to humans. Liberal theory believes it has conquered pride in the state of nature, and it aligns the order of nature (natural law) with the most powerful human passion, fear for one’s self-preservation. For Tocqueville this is an elegant but too simple solution. His thought on democracy is absorbed with pride, and he focuses not merely on opposing prejudice and abandoning false pride, as we do so readily today, but rather on the more difficult task of finding a remedy for lack of pride. Democracy is uncomfortable with the pretensions of pride, which always imply some sort of inequality, but it needs the pride to be found in its own sense of importance and accomplishment as seen especially in its politics. (Fs)