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Hegel, Tocqueville, and “Individualism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Dana Villa
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Abstract

Critics of liberal individualism have pointed out the many failures of “atomism” as a method in social and political philosophy. Their methodological criticisms have a tendency, however, to devolve into repudiations of moral individualism as such. In part, this is due to a misreading of Hegel and Tocqueville, two critics of individualism who nevertheless upheld the importance of individual rights and what Hegel called “freedom of subjectivity.” My essay brings these two very different theorists together in order to show how each deliberately dispensed with the ontology inherited from eighteenth-century social contract theory, the better to focus on associational life and public freedom. The end result is not a relapse into the rhetoric of civic republicanism, but a refurbishment of that tradition from the standpoint of modern liberty: the liberty of the individual. This common project links Hegel, the idealist philosopher, and Tocqueville, the liberal-republican, in unexpected but complementary ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , Fall 2005 , pp. 659 - 686
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

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52. These functions comprise, in part, the activity of the polizei in Hegel's conception of civil society.

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57. In his Introduction to Hegel's Political Writings, Lawrence Dickey presents Hegel as intensely committed to the principle of popular participation, if not self-government. This is a useful corrective to the usual “statist” interpretations, but I think Allen Wood is more on target when he observes (in his Editor's Introduction to PR) that “Hegel plainly intends real political power to be in the hands neither of the prince nor of the people, but of an educated class of professional civil servants” (p. xxiv).

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59. Ibid. See p. 161, where Hegel writes of the ideal state in “recent theories”: “a state is a machine with a single spring which imparts movement to all the rest of the infinite wheelwork.” Cf. PR, sec. 303.

60. For the Tocqueville/Weber connection, see Mayer, J. P., Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960)Google Scholar. For the Hegel/Weber connection, see Dallmayr's, Fred essay “Max Weber and the Modern State” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Horowitz, Asher and Maley, Terry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 49–67Google Scholar.

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62. This characteristically “liberal” critique of Hegel is echoed by—of all people—Adorno, Theodor in his Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 349–50Google Scholar.

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64. See Hegel's, letter from 11, 1807Google Scholar, where he complains to his friend Niethammer that “so far we have seen that in all the imitations of the French only half the example is ever taken up. The other half, the noblest part, is left aside: liberty of the people; popular participation in elections; governmental decisions taken in full view of the people; or at least public exposition, for the insight of the people, of all the reasons behind such measures.” In Hegel: The Letters, trans. Butler, Clark and Seiler, Christine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 151Google Scholar.

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68. By “corporation” Hegel primarily meant trade or professional groups. However, he also included churches and municipal governments in this classification. See PR, sections 250–56; 270 and 288.

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88. For the first item on this list, see Hegel, , PR, addition to sec. 182Google Scholar; for the second, see PR, addition to sec. 270; for the third, see PR, Preface.

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96. The more exotic strands—Black Africans and native Americans—were ruthlessly enslaved or exterminated, as Tocqueville knew all too well. See DA1, chap. 18.

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