To see justice itself, Socrates advises us in Plato’s Republic to look for it writ large “in the cities.” However, that work culminates in a shocking image of our condition: we are nothing more than prisoners in a dark cave, shackled in such a way that we see only shadows projected on the side we face, shadows of puppets that are carried by handlers hidden from our view on a wall behind us. These include “shadows of the just”: the cave is our political society, the one that from childhood has taught us (yet also mis-taught us) what a good and just man is—what we should most strive to be, and, in a certain sense, what we are.
Since we live in democracies, our view of justice is colored and shaped by a democratic bias. The source of right for us is the proposition that all are created equal, and over time we advance and demand ever-greater political and social equality. To see what true justice is, and also what we are, clearly and free of prejudice, we must discover and confront our political (mis)education: we must turn our heads around, see, and cross-examine those hidden puppeteers of our cave. Liberal education is the opposite of political ‘education,’ or propaganda: it is education that liberates.
It is for this reason that David A. Eisenberg’s ambitious book, Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity, is so welcome and needed. In it, he examines the grand democratizing sweep of Western history and its consequences for human life and thought. In the book’s opening chapter, we confront our greatest puppeteers: the philosophers who most advanced democracy and did so with almost prophetic power, given the great inequalities between men then. From Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, down through Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Eisenberg argues they “all . . . reduced man to a common denominator in order to ground their philosophic visions. Uniform drives and appetites were rendered paramount.” Even Hegel, at first glance an exception with his master-slave dialectic, eventually resolves that fundamental conflict “so that the outcome of the historical process was one where uniformity supplanted man’s deep-rooted dichotomy and did so, moreover, in favor of the slave.”
The modern ‘homogenization’ of man, as a political project, began with Hobbes. His forerunner, Machiavelli, had still retained, Eisenberg says, the distinction “between the few and the many,” the princes and the people, though he broadly favored the “elevation of the people,” who “only want not to be oppressed,” over the few, “who want to oppress”—a “gross oversimplification” very “sympathetic” to the many that “would become symptomatic of modern thought.” Eisenberg even goes so far as to claim, “In the mind of Machiavelli … the few exist for the sake of the many.” But, he says, Hobbes went much further, for the very distinction between these two types, the great and the common, “is nowhere to be found in [his] teachings.” Instead, Hobbes considers man in a state of nature, outside the protection of the sovereign. This is an amoral and lawless state, “the war of all against all,” and a state of equality, insofar as “each possesses the greatest power there is: the power to take the life of another.” Fear for our lives, but with reason as its servant, leads us to surrender our natural or unlimited freedom to a common sovereign, and the fear of the sovereign then checks evil men.
Here we already see the key characteristics of modern political thought. First, there is a low but common end for politics, built on a universal, worldly desire (for self-preservation). Reason acts as mere instrument or calculation and in a form accessible to the masses (the opposite of philosophy, in which contemplation is an end and attainable only by rarae aves). There is a lowering of man’s self-understanding, such that there is no call for moral character, or education in virtue, or meditation on the divine. Finally, the legitimacy of government lies in the universal consent of all, with the rulers as the executives or representatives of their will. In Eisenberg’s account, “Locke’s position is commensurably comprehensive and reductive,” but Locke extends the theme to man’s wealth and domination over nature: “Lockean man is reduced to a property-loving animal”; the “appeal is to man’s baser longings”; “humans, at bottom, are lovers of material comfort and security”; and the “natural world is reduced to matter; its worth is measured wholly by its utilizability.”
One quibble with Eisenberg’s approach is that, in giving a vivid and political reading of the teachings of these philosophers, he occasionally simplifies them, perhaps out of prosecutorial zeal. For example, in Leviathan, Hobbes was conscious that the great and ambitious, whom he occasionally maligned as merely “vainglorious,” were a difficult problem; a type that needed to be “overawed” not just by the sovereign’s sword, but by the spreading power of Hobbes’ materialistic re-education, lest the love of glory lead to war and derail his project. Over time, Hobbes’ teaching is itself a devastating weapon, and he speaks of his book’s power against the ambitious few, if it is taught in the schools and from the pulpits.
Eisenberg says that Hobbes “recognized the power” of “the prospect of eternal damnation,” but judged it “ineffective.” Yet, Hobbes thought that fear was so effectual, at least in promoting civil disorder, that he explicitly and elaborately denies eternal damnation; he suggests that no just god, let alone “the father of mercies,” could send men to hell. The punishment for the wicked is only to be a second and final death; the reward for the virtuous, a new life on this earth. Hobbes knew that the “fear of power invisible”—the fear of the Biblical God—was a great obstacle to the success of any political project founded on fear for one’s (merely mortal) life. Hence he devotes the bulk of Leviathan to an extremely peculiar, even perverse and sometimes scoffing, interpretation of Christianity. Hobbes even dares to say God is corporeal, a body. On the other hand, the great hopefulness—or even confidence—of Hobbes and other modern philosophers regarding the eventual vindication of their political teachings supports Eisenberg’s view that, “each in his own way, took for granted the homogeneity” of the nature of man.
We must pass over Eisenberg’s rich treatment of the other democratizing philosophers, but I note this exception to his theme: Rousseau, with his attraction to Sparta and classical virtue, could perhaps have “engendered a diversification of human wants, ideals, values, morals, cultures, and the like,” but only had he been part of a different “historical unfolding.” By then, democratization was such a strong force that Rousseau’s doctrine of the “general will” and of man’s perfectibility instead “ushered in an absolutism that was far more uncompromising” than the one Hobbes espoused: the Reign of Terror.
Eisenberg is guided by two of the greatest critics of this democratizing sweep: Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat by birth yet friendly—with some reservation—to democracy; and Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher famously hostile to it. Eisenberg presents their portraits and judgements of the aristocratic man and his characteristic morality and psychology in the second chapter; and of the democratic man, in the last chapter. In the interim, Eisenberg guides us through three great revolutions that led us from the aristocratic to the democratic age. These are the Socratic revolution—or the triumph of rationalism and science over instinct and poetry; the Christian revolution—or the triumph of ressentiment and slave morality over master morality; and the French revolution—or the triumph of the passion for equality and its great servant, the centralized state, over the love of freedom and local, independent powers. For the first two revolutions, Eisenberg draws on Nietzsche; for the third, on Tocqueville.
Eisenberg asks us to imagine a society in which a small class of landed nobles, established for generations, rule over the many—not as representatives or public servants, but as sovereigns in their own name, their judgment and their good constituting the end and standard of political life. They “had no doubt that they were the most important element in society and established its attitudes and values.” Their rule is backed, not only by blood and family, and (in contrast to oligarchies) not only by wealth and privilege, but also by virtue: virtue in the form of military command; protection of the land and care of its tenants; discharge of high political, judicial, and church offices; superior education; and highly developed tastes. In such societies, a vast distance between men, even greater than that between man and beast, is always before one’s eyes: the nobles “scarcely believed themselves to be a part of the same humanity” as the lower classes. Such distances maintained over generations foster what Nietzsche called “the pathos of distance.” Here, the soul lives at the top of a fixed order of rank, and the virtues (or vices) that dominate reflect habituation to the exercise of command over others and oneself: great pride and ambition, magnificence, liberality, and magnanimity. Aristocratic man “values something ineffable, something that is irreducible to material want and utilitarian longing,” whether it is “glory or honor or virtue.”
In aristocratic times, one generally makes for oneself “very vast ideas of the dignity, power, and greatness of man.” The arts and sciences focus on lofty, or eternal, or divine subjects, without any regard for the practical application of their knowledge. Thus, painters of the Renaissance “ordinarily sought great subjects above themselves, or far from their times, that left a vast course to their imaginations.” If Raphael had a much poorer skill in rendering anatomy than the precise realism of a Jacques-Louis David, his imagination reached much higher: Raphael didn’t aspire to depict man physically, but to elevate and glorify him, to make of man “something … superior to man.” There is a “divinity in his works.” The taste and judgment of aristocratic patrons leaves its mark on the artists; for example, a “rarefied literature” arises because the readers are demanding and few, connoisseurs with a taste for “refined and delicate pleasures.” What do artists strive for now, when their patrons are a mass audience, with little leisure and a practical education, and democratic habits and opinions? The reader will have to decide for himself whether greater democracy has led to greater refinement, imagination, and beauty in the arts.
Eisenberg closes with democratic man. The twin social and political dangers we face, despotism and nihilism, arise from our ever-increasing democratization. Drawing on Nietzsche and Tocqueville, he provides a frightening yet sobering account of their possibility. Unfortunately, it may no longer take their imaginative, prophetic thought to bring their warnings to life for us, because reality has been catching up with speculation. Are we not, for instance, uncomfortably close to the “last man” whom Nietzsche predicted? Isn’t our society characterized by lack of any higher end, or star, that could command reverence and elicit longing, and provide a basis for self-respect? Are social ties and bonds not weakening between us? And hasn’t there been an acceleration of demands that the state cure newly discovered forms of inequality and oppression, as Tocqueville predicted (with equality our only but grim ‘star’)? In considering how to judge the health of our democracies, Eisenberg rightly expects us to take our bearings from the best and most demanding standard we can find, even if that should point us beyond democratic principles.
Eisenberg is solemn when looking at our future. He argues that Tocqueville’s project of “moderating democracy” appears to have been a “futile task”: his “democratic palliatives” have done little to arrest the advance of the “pernicious proclivities” in the “democratic soul”: “materialism, conformism, and statism ascend to ever new heights.” Nietzsche’s project of “overcoming” democracy is, as Eisenberg notes, “by his own admission, insane.” It hinges on the arrival of the Übermensch, the “Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ.” Yet, Eisenberg counsels against despair, or even resignation: there is hope for a solution, only so long as we preserve awareness of the problem. However, I would add, in our unrelenting search for a solution oriented to true justice and what is highest in man, we may discover unsolvable problems with politics and morality as such. It is because Socrates is so uncompromising in his search for true justice and virtue, that he discovers that he does not know anything noble and good (Plato’s Apology, 21d). The best city may exist only in speech (Rep. 472c-e, 592b).
