Tag: Tocqueville

Disparate Economies (3): Fame (Honor, Meritocracy, Status)

This post will be even more tentative than most.  I am not very certain of how to distinguish fame from status.  Probably I should just accept that they overlap in various ways, even as I resist the idea that they are synonymous.

In any case, let me try to articulate my basic intuitions about what differentiates them while also attending to what they share.  I do want to stick to the notion that status is restricted to circumscribed groups while fame aims for the regard of more heterogeneous and less well-formed multitudes. 

The quest for status is a quest a) for inclusion into a certain group and b) subsequently, for respect within that group.  First one needs to have been granted entry, to become a member.  Then one can strive for a “high place” in the group’s own hierarchy.  With status, social power comes in two forms: a) the power to confer membership on those desiring it, and b) the power that comes with being deemed a particularly esteemed member of the group.

It’s easiest to see how this works with professional cadres.  All professions control their own credentialing procedures, the rites and hurdles that must be endured to be granted membership.  Once within the profession, relative standing is supposed to accrue to the most accomplished, the most competent. But other factors—such as networked relations, where one received one’s credentials, sheer economic resources etc.—can also influence standing.  Such non-accomplishment based “boosts” to status will often be decried as illegitimate, even corrupt, once the notion of meritocracy has taken hold.

Of course, tying status to merit is a new idea historically, dating back to 1750 at the earliest.  Austen’s partial, but fairly fervent, endorsement of meritocracy is evident in her novels, which in many ways trace the transition from other sources of status to claims based on merit.  Once “careers are open to talent” the army and the church will no longer only be open to “gentlemen,” to those who can buy their commissions or convince the local squire to appoint one as the pastor in a parish within his (the squire’s) “gift.”  The transition to meritocracy was long and arduous—and a pure meritocracy never achieved.

The opponents of meritocracy have two major complaints against it.  The first is the Tory Radical distaste for the competition of all against all that “careers open to talent” initiates.  It’s a mad scramble for economic and status once determinants like family origins, whom one knows, and other non-economic and non-accomplishment markers of distinction are cast aside.  This is the traditionalist, conservative case against capitalism—and against democracy.  We get a good taste of it in Tocqueville’s reaction to America.  He is aghast at the way that economic success becomes just about the only measure of a person’s worth once traditional ranks are abolished in favor a general “equality.”  And is equally aghast at the chaos of the generalized competition that ensues once everyone is told they can aspire to anything.  No bars to advancement beyond what the individual can procure for himself (or herself). (I must note that Tocqueville struggles hard to master his antipathy to democratic equality because he is convinced it is the future. Thus we must learn some way to live with it.) A suspicion of what one has solely earned for oneself is Lady Catherine’s objection to Elizabeth.  How dare she presume herself fully worthy of Darcy simply on the basis of her beauty and wit.  Austen allows Elizabeth’s personal qualifications to carry all before them.  The legitimacy of any social impediment to her match with Darcy is fiercely denied. We might call this a rejection of the relevance of any “preexisting conditions.”

The second objection to meritocracy is that it threatens to obliterate “honor” or “character.”  This, of course, is where Austen (to some extent) plays both sides of the fence.  Elizabeth deserves her reward precisely because she is honorable.  She rejects the enormous economic prize that would follow from marrying Darcy because her integrity demands that she marry someone she loves and respects.  Her refusal of his first proposal proves her character.  What appalled Tocqueville, contrastingly, was the shamelessness, the ignorance of and contempt for any form of “honor,” that characterized the (to him, mad) scramble for economic success.  Where such success is the only goal and the only marker of social standing, people will stoop to anything.  All notions of personal integrity as absolutely essential to one’s own self-regard as well as to the regard of others will disappear.  And when we consider the shamelessness of many people of wealth and of many politicians—and of those less successful who ape them—Tocqueville would seem to have a point.  Where success is the only goal, moral considerations are merely an annoyance to be brushed aside whenever and wherever one can get away with it.  To bring up such peccadilloes is to be a killjoy, or a sententious bore (like sister Mary in Pride and Prejudice).  There is nothing quite so old-fashioned as hammering on about integrity or character or how someone should be ashamed of themselves.  Such objections will be easily dismissed as envy, at the scold’s inability to play the game.

It seems to me a fair historical generalization (again in relation to England, France, and the US, the only societies I am in any position to opine about) that “fame” was the prevalent concept used to discuss such matters before 1750 while “status” (although the term itself is not often invoked until the sociologists emerge in the very late nineteenth century) more accurately describes the situation after 1750.  In other words, once some ideology of “equality” (however, imperfect and non-inclusive since women and non-whites were decidedly not “equal”) emerges, the general competition for eminence that Tocqueville observed is on.  That’s what generates the “social” novels of the 19th century (of which Proust’s novel is the great culmination) in which “social climbing” is the master passion of so many characters.  Rastignac in Balzac’s Pere Goriot is not seeking fame; he is seeking status, which means acceptance into a Paris that is closed to him as young man newly arrived from the provinces.  Goriot’s master passion is parental love, which motivates his sacrificing contact with his daughters because they believe they must disavow him to maintain their newly won—and very precarious—toehold in the social circles they wish to be members of.  Swann, by way of contrast, already has membership in the most exclusive circles—and his presence there (as a Jew and a commoner) attests to the fact such circles can be penetrated by outsiders and to the qualities of his character since only its agreeableness (what Austen calls “amiability”—literally lovable) could assure him the access and esteem he enjoys.

Swann shows that, in the informal world of “the social,” as contrasted to the more structured world of “the economic” (where money provides an “objective” marker of success), character can still count.  In other words, the social in the 19th century tries to hold out against the complete triumph of the economic.  Tocqueville is saying, among other things, that the social is much weaker in America than in France.  There is not the prejudice against trade, against the vulgarities of “conspicuous consumption,” against the sharp tricks of commerce in America that there is in France.  Yes, as Edith Wharton shows, there are some pockets of resistance in “old New York” and perhaps in Brahman Boston, but both are reckoned anomalies and doomed to extinction.  Of course, Proust is also an elegist; he knows that the world he describes is not long for this world. 

Meritocracy, as measured by economic success, will sweep all before it. That is actually too monolithic a view.  Sub-groups will continue to form, with different criteria of entry.  And as I noted in the previous posts, those sub-groups in contemporary America are generally distinguished along lines of taste.  Thus, a huge divide between the rich who go in for the competition over who has the biggest, most luxurious, yachts and the rich who scorn such displays.  Or, much further down the economic scale, between those devoted to footballs and NASCAR and those who go to the opera and theater.  To the bemusement of leftists everywhere, contemporary politics in the US and Britain certainly, a bit less so in France, follows the lines of these taste divides, not class divides (where class is a technical term designating whether one earns one’s living primarily from the ownership of capital or primarily as income for labor preformed.)  That members of taste cultures that are deemed less prestigious are “looked down upon” by their presumptuous betters motivates voters more than any economic hurt they receive from those who possess economic power (as employers or as the providers of necessities).  In America, this divide is particularly aggravated by the feeling among less prestigious sub-groups that they are constantly being accused of being “racist,” a charge they vehemently deny and deeply, deeply resent.  The cultural elite are thus perceived as those sanctimonious scolds who moralize as just another way (along with their scorn for NASCAR and Burger King) to assert their (unjustified) belief in their superiority.  When taste is moralized—or to say it another way, when meritocracy extends to taste (i.e. some tastes are more meritorious than others, and tastes themselves become forms of merit)—social and political toxicity/animosity appears to reign almost free of any check.

All of which is to say that the desire to be esteemed by one’s peers is pretty basic.  And that desire encompasses the complexity of determining whom one’s peers are even as scorn is often directed at those who are not deemed my peers—and who, even worse, might be trying to pretend to be or to thrust themselves upon me as my peers.  That’s what snobbery is: I scorn the temerity with which you claim the right to associate with me as an equal.  You are beneath my notice. And snobbery, in contemporary America, rankles with an intensity hard to overestimate.

Fame is a bit different it seems to me.  Crucially, fame like status can only be conferred on someone by others.  All discussions of fame are troubled by this fact: that it is fickle and that it rests on nothing other than being noticed and known by others.  There seems nothing substantial about it—and moralists from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the present day warn us that it is a cheat.  To pursue it is madness—and to believe one’s press notices (as the saying goes) true insanity.  Still, the moralists have no effect on the minority who crave fame.  (How big is that minority?  Who knows? But a desire for fame is among the prime motivators of human agents.) 

Commentators prior to 1750 had more good to say of fame than ones after that date.  Despite warnings about its possible deceptions, the desire for fame has a nobility about it which various writers commend.  It is the spur to ambition, it raises the level of one’s game.  (Is it fair to say that competition is now seen to play that role: as the pathway to upping one’s game?  Of course, competition for fame can be one form competition takes.  In any case, encomiums to the benefits of competition are rare before 1750.)  Just as Austen delineates the positives that come from a “justified” pride in Pride and Prejudice even while denouncing the ill effects of pride and the bad behavior of the prideful, so writers like Shakespeare, Milton, and Edmund Burke offer qualified praise for the desire for fame.

To anchor that praise, of course, one has to try to give fame some substance.  It can’t just be gaining the attention of the fickle crowd.  It must be based on real accomplishment.  And here, I think, is where the difference between fame and status resides.  It’s a matter of scale.  Status is confined to one’s contemporaries and to confined groups identified as one’s peers.  Hence the idea of a “succès d’estime, or of a “poet’s poet.”  Esteem is not fame.  Fame is more general; it is being known beyond the circle of those devoted to your kind of accomplishment.  The sports blogger Joe Posnanski is currently trying to rank the 50 most famous baseball plays of the last fifty years.  His criteria is that these players must be known through their accomplishments on the field, but (crucially) are known to even the most casual fan and even to those who do not follow baseball at all.  Thus he is clear that he is not identifying the 50 “best” players of the stated time frame, but the 50 “most famous.”  To take an earlier example (i.e. prior to 1973) Mickey Mantle was certainly more famous in the 1950s than Henry Aaron or Stan Musial, but it is debatable that he was a better player.  So it was possible that Mantle was less esteemed by his fellow players than Musial even though he was more famous.

Similar effects are often seen in cultural matters.  Mailer is more famous than Roth, but I think it fair to say Roth is more esteemed among the cultural cognoscenti. Of course, such distinctions provide fodder for snobbery.  Those “in the know” can scorn someone who declares Mailer a better writer than Roth. 

Still, especially for the pre-1750 writers, fame’s larger scale recommends it.  The seeker of fame is daring to play in the largest game.  Milton aspires to be one of the immortals, remembered for all time as Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are.  Hence the nobility of the quest for fame: it is to risk all, it is to aspire to be among the greats, and, thus, to hold oneself to the standard set by the greats.  Such ambition is certainly presumptuous, but only such presumption yields the highest results.

A poet friend of mine once remarked that he wrote for posterity; his great desire was that his poetry would “last,” that it would still be read after his death.  The remark made me consider my own ambitions—which upon reflection I had to realize were of a much different cast.  I wanted to be read in my own time, to garner responses from my peers (readers of similar interests) and, in my wildest dreams, of a wider readership.  I would have loved to write a best-seller.  If I wanted to be “known,” it was by my contemporaries.  I have no interest in, no desire for, readers after my death.

Partly that lack of desire is that I won’t be around to enjoy the attention of others once I am dead.  I can’t have a desire for something I will not experience.  But the lack of desire is also diffidence, an inability to take my chances in a larger game.  My poet friend is playing for higher stakes than I am—and that very fact surely shapes how he goes about his work in contrast to how I go about mine.  His ambitions do appear more noble than mine—even if negative words like “grandiose” and “presumptuous” could also be used to describe his aims.

To end by returning to economy.  The competition for fame differs from the competition for status, then, mostly as a matter of scale.  The seeker of fame wants, to be very extreme about it, to be “known” by everyone, even by people who will be alive after he is dead.  The downside of fame (as all the moralists point out) is that is can be empty.  To be famous is not necessarily to be esteemed, while it is certainly true that the more people “know” who you are, the fewer of those among that number are actually in a position to “esteem” you, to judge with any degree of accuracy the quality of the achievements that made you known.  And fame is notoriously self-referential.  Your achievements, after all, may have various effects in the world; they accomplish something.  But fame accomplishes nothing.  It is just a garnish on top of your actual deeds.  And this garnish is something you can strive to bring about, but which you cannot command.  It is offered entirely on the whim of others, manufactured by the various engines of publicity that a given society possesses. 

To be concrete: I can work at and make myself an adept at hitting a baseball.  I can make that happen as a consequence of my actions.  Success in that endeavor is much more under my control than making myself famous, which is more a by-product of my accomplishments than a product.  Of course, I can do various things in the way of self-publicity to achieve fame, but such work is often deemed vulgar.  Which returns us to the issue of shamelessness.  Shameless self-promotion is often scorned—but can still be fairly successful for all that.  As Tocqueville saw with a shiver, shamelessness pays.  Which is why the economy of fame is always viewed with some suspicion.

Independence and Freedom Not the Same

“It would be wrong to muddle independence with freedom.  No one is less independent than a free citizen” (269, footnote 46, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution).

No statement in Tocqueville more succinctly captures the difference between his version of conservatism and the hyper-individualistic ideology that passes as conservatism in contemporary America.  I sympathize with the Corey Robin point that conservatism is always about protecting privilege, that Burke’s corporate conservatism and Hayek’s individualistic conservatism may look different in various ways, but, au fond, they are both about preserving power and wealth in the hands of thems that already gots.

That’s why republican virtue is perhaps the best tradition to attach Tocqueville to. He is against liberal individualism if that means vigorous pursuit of economic prosperity; but he is all in favor of individual rights, seeing the protected civil liberties are essential—and that they should be extended to all.  In that respect, he is not a conservative.  He has no truck with privileges being granted to only one class of citizens.  He is an egalitarian.

But . . . He also believes that there should be a political class that takes on the responsibility of managing public affairs.  It is that class which truly enjoys “freedom,” but which lacks independence precisely because of its great responsibilities.  Self-government (which is freedom) is not an exemption from the collective; it is, rather, action within the collective.  That’s where he is not liberal—and where he tends to conservatism because he is an elitist about this political class.  But it is also where he is most at odds with contemporary American conservatives for whom independence is the essence of freedom—the very mistake that Tocqueville deplores.

Two complications.

1. “The aims recommended by the reformers were many and varied but their methods were the same.  They wanted to borrow the strength of central government and use it to smash everything and rebuild it according to a new plan of their own devising.  Such a task could, they thought, be accomplished only by the central power” (77).  This is the liberalism of fear (Judith Schlar’s term.)  Fear the accumulation of power.  Build in checks and balances; disperse power so it resides in several locations.  Yes, he wants a political class—but he also wants to hem in its power by various institutional safeguards. Revolutionaries are to be feared both because they want to smash everything, want to rebuild according to a plan grounded solely in unrealistic theory, and because they are all about accumulating power into their own hands.  They are the quintessential centrailizers.

2. Not completely clear in Tocqueville what he sees as the optimal relation of the legislative to the executive power. He is very clear that local assemblies, the more local the better, should legislate.  But he also seems to say in various places that a truly free people executes its own decisions.  The doing should be done by the people who are also the beneficiaries of those actions.  So he can seem a very radical proponent of direct or participatory democracy at times—even while at other times he relies on a distinct political class to alone be the political actors.  So he can write with despair about a situation in which “no one imagined that an important matter could be brought to a successful conclusion without the involvement of the state” (77)—suggesting that his ideal is when the state proves unnecessary because the people take matters into their own hands.  But he will show a deep distrust of the people in other places.  And, of course, his anti-state bias in favor of a republican mode of citizen involvement has all the classic scale problems that afflict the republican tradition.  The emphasis on the local works against any larger political entity—but empire and, subsequently, the nation-state are persistent historical forms that swallow up small-scale city-states and their like.

Political Liberty and Material Comforts

A long passage from Tocqueville that captures one essential theme of his work, followed by a short comment by me.

“I have often wondered where this passion for political liberty comes from—a passion which, throughout all ages, has inspired men to the greatest accomplishments of human kind—and what feelings feed and foster its roots.

I see quite clearly that, whenever nations are poorly governed, they are quite ready to entertain the desire for governing themselves.  But this kind of love for independence, which has its roots only in certain particular and passing evils brought on by despotism, never lasts long; it disappears along with the accidental circumstances which caused it.  They seemed to love freedom; it turns out they simply hated the master.  When nations are ready for freedom, what they hate is the evil of dependency itself.

Nor do I believe that the true love of liberty was ever born of the simple vision of material benefits it makes available, for this vision is often hidden from view.  It is indeed true that, in the long term, freedom always brings with it, to those who are skilled enough to keep hold of it, personal comfort, wellbeing and often great wealth.  But there are times when freedom briefly disturbs the enjoyment of such blessings; there are others when despotism alone can guarantee a fleeting exploitation of them.  Men who value only those material advantages from freedom have never kept it long.  What has tied the hearts of certain men to freedom throughout history has been its own attractions, its intrinsic charms quite separate from its material advantages.  It is the pleasure to be able to speak, act and breathe without restriction under the rule of God alone and the law.  Whoever seeks anything from freedom but freedom itself is doomed to slavery.

Certain nations pursue freedom obstinately amid all kinds of danger and deprivation.  It is not for the material comforts it brings them that they appreciate it; they look upon it as such a valuable and vital blessing that nothing else can console them for its loss and when they experience it they are consoled for all other losses.  Other nations grow tired of freedom amid their prosperity, which they allow to be wrenched from their hands without a fight, for fear of compromising, by making an effort, the very wellbeing they owe to it.  What is missing to keep such nations free?  The very desire to be so.  Do not ask me to analyse this lofty desire; it has to be experienced.  It enters of itself into those great hearts which God has prepared to receive it.  We have to abandon any attempt to enlighten those second-rate souls who have never felt it”  (167-68; end of Book III, Chapter 3 of The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution).

Lots to say here, but I will try to restrain myself.  “Freedom” in Tocqueville is as content-less as it is in Arendt—and requires love.  It must be pursued for its own sake.  And the ability to pursue it in such purity is a gift from the gods, is a function of grace.  And there is also the familiar Christian paradox that you’ll get other rewards (namely “material comforts” in this case) if you don’t pursue such rewards directly.  You are aiming for salvation, but you must have faith or do good works (depending on your version of Christianity) for their own sakes, not because you want salvation.  A pure heart is everything.

Also the persistent—unto our own day—association of vulgarity with the pursuit of money.  “Great hearts” have other things on their mind.  Leave it to “second-rate souls” to be the business men.  Almost everyone I know (as my generation reaches its fifties and slides into its sixties) wants to write a novel.  A surprisingly large number of them has actually done so.  Art is today’s way of avoiding vulgarity, of attending to things that matter, of having an ambition one needn’t apologize for.  Tocqueville’s idea that politics can be so lofty is, in our day and age, risible.  Politics is even dirtier than business.  At least in commerce there is some possibility of an honest day’s work honestly done.  The desire for purity persists; the ability to find a place to experience such purity (outside of art and the private realm of family and friends) recedes.

Tocqueville’s conservatism lurks beneath the surface, especially in the way that “freedom” in his view always brings “order.”  He is of “the party of order” despite his not feeling comfortable with many explicit paeans to that virtue.  It’s rather a neat rhetorical trick to praise “freedom” when, in many cases, what you really admire is order.

That said, however, it is worthwhile considering the extent to which “order” does deliver “material comforts.”  I have always thought that there should be an “order” tax.  That is, when thinking about economic competition between nations, we greatly underestimate the extent to which investors crave order.  A well ordered nation does not need to match wages or other economic incentives 100% to attract investors.  That’s why—as Tocqueville shrewdly notes, even though it rather undermines his point–“despotism” can also provide material comforts.  (Think Singapore or China.)  And that “order premium” or “order tax” should underwrite stricter laws for capturing tax revenues from companies like Apple that free ride on US stability and rule of law while using shell games to claim their profits are generated in Ireland—or some such tax shelter.

Tocqueville does seem right in suggesting that fear of losing prosperity will lead to the sacrifice of freedom.  It does often seem to me that the “stability” of US democracy (which is, in actual fact, a plutocracy at this point, offering freedom of the Tocqeviullian sort to few, if any) boils down to the fact that people are managing to get by, and are more terrified by the thought of losing what they have than by any other thought.  People are grimly hanging on for sheer life—and can only imagine that any change would be for the worse.  They have no faith that politicians or the government could ever do better; they could only make things worse.  So they acquiesce, as Tocqueville suggests, in their unfreedom in return for getting by.  A very bad bargain, no doubt.

It is interesting that Tocqueville always writes as if freedom once did walk the earth.  It is always something that has been lost.  A skeptic like me would like to see some attempt to prove that point.  The middle ages just don’t appear to me a golden age of freedom.  But I must also admit that the same habit of thought pervades my thinking.  When I say the American people has made a bad bargain, I am basing my claim, in part, on the notion that the freedom that has been lost since 1950 has not come with economic benefits.  Except for blacks (and even there the record is very, very mixed) and for the top 10%, Americans today are demonstrably worse off economically than they were in 1965.  All the statistics about average wages and family wealth prove that point.  The erosion of the average American’s prosperity has been slow but steady since 1970.  So we have sold our freedom for a mess of pottage, not even for the real goods.

 

Centralization, Freedom, and Bourgeois Desire

Tocqueville mostly discusses political centralization, the collecting of power in the central state.  He shows how that centralization empties out the provinces in two ways: 1. It leads elites to move to the metropole and to the court, an especially severe problem in France because Paris becomes everything; and 2. It turns provincials into imbeciles because they have no responsibility for their own welfare or governance.  Strip people of any ability to shape their own destiny and of any responsibility to see that things actually function and you make them passive, sullen, apathetic, cynical, and bitter (perhaps not all five, but some combination of this soup.)

Tocqueville is less interested in economic centralization.  But he does recognize that economic inequality is a serious problem for any polity.  His way of thinking about this is curious. He believes that all Frenchmen are becoming increasingly alike.  His basis for this claim, never made explicit, seems to be that everyone now pursues economic gain. Self interest of the Adam Smith variety is now universal.  It is here that Tocqueville’s idealization of the “manly virtues” (a term he uses constantly) of the aristocracy is hardest to credit.  “The men of the eighteenth century were hardly aware of that form of passion for material comfort which is tantamount to being the mother of servitude, a feeling, flabby yet tenacious and unchanging, which is ready to fuse and, as it were, entwine itself around several private virtues such as love of family, reliable customs, deference to religious beliefs and a lukewarm and regular practice of established Christian ritual.  While this supports integrity, it forbids heroism and excels in turning men into well-behaved but craven citizens.  Those men were both better and worse.”  Against this timid middle class, always worried about its financial well-being and security, we get the “ancient idols” of the aristocracy: “Courage, reputation and, I dare say, generosity” (122 in the Penguin Classic edition).

But that aristocracy has been destroyed and we must acknowledge that “much more freedom existed then (during the ancien régime) than nowadays,” although Tocqueville admits that this freedom was “disjointed and spasmodic” and “almost never went so far as to provide citizens with the most natural guarantees they needed” (123).  I can only guess that by “guarantees” he means rights established in law and protected in practice.  The aristocracy’s “generosity” never extended so far as to provide such rights for “citizens” (a concept that was itself foreign to aristocratic thinking).

His view on economic inequality seems to be this: we need an aristocracy that is above economic worry.  But that aristocracy only gets that privilege if it makes sure the rest of the nation doesn’t suffer penury.  By not resisting the monarchy’s over-taxation of the non-aristocrats, using its power instead to secure exemption from taxes for itself, the aristocracy of the ancien régime created the conditions for the Revolution—and the intense hatred of the other classes for the aristocracy.  If, instead, the aristocracy had resisted the monarchy’s centralization of power by attending to the local communities over which it once held sway, then the old order would not have collapsed.  Once they ceded power over the local community to centralized government, the aristocracy no longer had a distinctive function—and they became just like everyone else.

How to characterize “everyone else”?  Tocqueville understands the new reality of “equality” to mean that all the classes share the same desires—for “material comfort” as he puts it.  Thus, like Arendt much later, Tocqueville thinks the triumph of commercial society—and of the levelling that it produces by turning everyone into economic agents—also entails the destruction of a political class, a group of men (it’s always men) who pursue glory and honor, not wealth, and discover the “public happiness” of political effort.

Now comes the hard part.  Tocqueville believes that having different classes, ones with very different desires and ambitions (and, although he does not say it, very different duties and responsibilities), gives us more interconnection between the classes.  When each station has its duties, then we don’t get the competition of all against all, and we also don’t get the effort to be utterly self-reliant.  Each class needs the others—and will live amidst the others.  Paradoxically, then, less class division means less class interaction.  Once everyone is equal, once everyone is pursuing the same course of action, there is no need for interaction.  Instead, we get segregation, with like only dealing with like.

The big picture: we are all slaves to money.  We acquiesce in political centralization because we want to be left alone to pursue our fortunes.  And we have very little contact with our fellow citizens beyond commercial relations because we have no need to “associate” with them.  And, of course, just those local, small-scale “associations” are what Tocqueville believes provide the best security against the tyranny of centralization.

What he doesn’t see, of course, is the centralization of economic power.  Partly that’s because he is in deep denial about the aristocracy’s economic position even as he idealizes its political role.  He simply doesn’t seem to register economic coercion, the ways in which economic necessity tramples on freedom.  And he doesn’t see the rise of the corporation, of the urge to centralize economic power that is as much a threat as the urge to centralize political power.

Still, when we today are obsessed with the ways that economic inequality has undermined the interaction among classes (which it certainly has), it can be useful to think of the institutional and geographic formations of inequality along with tracking the dollars.  Instead of fixating on the billionaires, maybe we should think about the places—Wall Street, Silicon Valley—and the institutions—the Stock Exchange, Google—that reside in those places.  What happens when the rest of the country is emptied out—both of people and of economic resources?  Surely it is right to claim that parts of America are more foreign to each other in 2017 than they were in 1960.  Even as other parts of America—black America, gay America—are less foreign than they once were.

I know, I know: putting it this way implies “less foreign” to a certain segment of “privileged” white America.  Allow me that solecism for the nonce; I am in search of other game at the moment.  And, of course, “less foreign” hardly means anything like fully transparent.  But the point isn’t some kind of Kantian “universal communicability.”  It’s about opportunities for interaction, for daily collaboration in some common enterprise.  The Tocqueville and Arendt complaint is that we don’t have such opportunities except in commercial enterprises.  We don’t any longer govern our small communities together as places we must make work for all of us.  We have out-sourced that responsibility to central government—and, I am adding, we have also outsourced making the goods we need (food, clothing etc.) to large corporations.  In that way, the local food movement is a Tocquevillian project.

The larger point is the way that Tocqueville sees equality and freedom in tension (whereas we are liable to see them as complementary).  Freedom needs to be enacted—and, for Tocqueville, it is enacted through collective action: the making of the laws and social arrangements that we then obey because we have made them ourselves.  But equality discourages collective action.  (Here is where Tocqueville is absolutely distinct from Arendt, who firmly believes that equality enables, is a sine non qua, of collective action.)  How so?  Equality fosters individualism, the competition of all against all, even as it also generates a sense of the individual’s political powerlessness (this from Democracy in America).  How can my one vote make a difference?  Thus equality provides lots of incentives to being non-political, of simply not partaking in collective decision-making or collective implementation of those decisions.  Again, let’s just out-source those tasks.  We’ll hire our political servants to do that work for us.

The result is “thin” as opposed to “thick” democracy.  And a society in which different groups barely interact beyond commercial transactions.