Tocqueville's Diagnosis

I begin with Tocqueville's diagnosis of the problem of human greatness in democracy, drawing out its affinities with Nietzsche's later and more radical diagnosis. Tocqueville gives charming testimony to his untimely preoccupation with human greatness in a letter to his friend and traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont. Having read Plutarch and found his portraits of the great men of antiquity utterly enchanting, he writes: “This reading has captured my imagination so well that there are moments when I fear becoming mad in the manner of Don Quixote. My mind is completely crammed with a heroism that is hardly of our time, and I fall very flat when I come out of these dreams and find myself face to face with reality.”Footnote ⁸ About the reality that falls so short of his quixotic dreams of greatness—the bourgeois world of the July Monarchy and its farcical aftermath—Tocqueville is withering in his Souvenirs and letters. In the former, he writes about the “universal shrinkage” that set in after the Revolution of 1830 with the ascendancy of a middle-class spirit that was orderly, industrious, “moderate in all things except a taste for well-being, and mediocre; a spirit that by itself never produces anything but a government without either virtues or greatness.”Footnote ⁹ In his letters, he speaks of politicians who “traffic, according to the smallest interests of the moment”;Footnote ¹⁰ of the absence of great causes and passionate beliefs; and above all, of the undignified scramble for material gain and personal well-being. At the end of his life, he sums up his disillusionment with his age in this way: “for the moment, people believe strongly in nothing, they love nothing, they hate nothing, and they hope for nothing except to profit at the stock-exchange.”Footnote ¹¹

These antibourgeois sentiments certainly have a Nietzschean ring to them, but they also typify the views of many writers and thinkers at the time in France and Europe in general.Footnote ¹² There is one letter, however, that has a more specific resonance with Nietzsche. Writing to his friend Jean-Jacques Ampère in 1841, Tocqueville speaks of the need for passion, whether good or evil, in the midst of the universal doubt and weakness that characterize the age:

Tocqueville's letters give rich testimony to his profound disillusionment with the petty materialism, lack of passion, skepticism, and weakness of his age, but they do not show how these characteristics are intrinsically related to democracy. For this we must turn to Democracy in America, and in particular to the second volume published in 1840. In the first volume of Democracy, Tocqueville certainly touches on the problem of human greatness in democracy, especially when he characterizes a well-ordered democracy as being less glorious, less artistically and intellectually brilliant, less passionate, and less spiritual than an aristocracy, but also as less wretched, more prosperous, gentler, and more tranquil (DA, I, Introduction and ii, 6). He also mentions two signal exceptions in the American context to the general mediocrity of democratic life: first, the extraordinary statesmanship of the Founders, who at the critical moment after the Revolution put a brake on the passions of the people and “looked at their country more calmly and with greater penetration” (DA, I, i, 8, p. 152); and second, the commercial greatness of the American merchant, who races to China and back just so “he can sell tea a farthing cheaper than an English merchant can” (DA, I, ii, 10, p. 403). But it is only in the second Democracy that we get Tocqueville's most sustained analysis of the problematic relationship between democracy and human greatness.

The first part of volume two, “Influence of Democracy on the Intellectual Movements in the United States,” bears directly on the aspect of human greatness that will be at the center of Nietzsche's interest, namely, intellectual and cultural greatness. Tocqueville begins with a discussion of the philosophical approach of Americans, which he says is characterized by a complete rejection of tradition, prejudice, habit, and authority and an exclusive reliance on “individual effort and judgment.” Without even reading Descartes, Americans have instinctively adopted his radically individualistic and rationalistic approach to knowledge. As a result, no traditional belief or class prejudice is allowed to influence their judgments; and not recognizing “any signs of incontestable greatness or superiority in any of their fellows,” even the influence of one man's mind over another's is extremely limited (DA, II, i, 1). This refusal of influence in a democracy is something Tocqueville pointed to in the first Democracy as well, in the important chapter on the “Social State of Anglo-Americans,” where he claimed that in the ultrademocratic states of the West and Southwest “the population escapes the influence not only of great names and wealth but also of the natural aristocracy of education and probity” (DA, I, i, 3).Footnote ¹⁴

Tocqueville shows how this individualism in intellectual matters does not lead to genuine independence of mind but, rather, to mass conformity. It is impossible for a man to establish on his own all the truths that are necessary for him to act in the world. Some things have to be taken on trust, both by the individual and by society in general; some form of moral and intellectual authority is unavoidable. The question is where this authority resides in a democracy, and Tocqueville answers that it resides in public opinion. Whereas “men living under an aristocracy are naturally inclined to be guided in their views by a more thoughtful man or class,” men in democracy “are readier to trust the mass, and public opinion becomes more and more mistress of the world” (DA, II, i, 2). Unlike Mill, Tocqueville does not think it likely that the “sovereign Many” in a democracy will allow themselves to be guided by the “influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”Footnote ¹⁵ The tyranny of the majority over thought is not so easily evaded.

In addition to the individualism of their philosophical approach, Tocqueville highlights the attraction of general ideas for Americans as a source of their lack of intellectual distinction. Like Nietzsche, Tocqueville does not think that general ideas “bear witness to the power of human intelligence but rather to its inadequacy, for there are no beings exactly alike in nature, no identical facts.” One reason that democratic citizens are attracted to general ideas is that, when they look around, they see human beings more or less like themselves, semblables, or what Nietzsche later will less flatteringly call herd animals. This makes it natural for them to generalize. In aristocracies, on the other hand, individuals are so dissimilar that “one can almost talk of as many different types of humanity as there are classes,” and for this reason they are reluctant to make grand generalizations about themselves or about the world. Democratic citizens are also attracted to general ideas because they usually do not have enough time to study anything particular: “Life is so practical, complicated, agitated, and active, that they have little time for thinking. So democratic man likes generalizations because they save him the trouble of studying particular cases. They contain . . . a lot in a small space and give a great return quickly” (DA, II, i, 3).

The consequences for human greatness of the democratic penchant for general ideas are clearly brought out in the chapters devoted to pantheism and democratic historians. In the chapter on pantheism, Tocqueville argues that the increasing likeness of individuals under democratic conditions leads them to think less about individual citizens and more about the people as a whole: “individuals are forgotten and the species alone counts.” Pantheism is the form of religious belief best suited to this homogeneous situation. And because it threatens to destroy human individuality, Tocqueville urges that “all those who still appreciate the true nature of man's greatness should combine in the struggle against it” (DA, II, i, 7). A similar concern surfaces in the chapter on democratic historians. Whereas historians in aristocratic ages tend to “attribute everything to the will and character of particular men,” democratic historians, who have before them men who are similar, weak, and without influence over one another, tend to attribute events to general causes. Tocqueville warns that this emphasis on general causes over individual agency can lead to a fatalism that makes democratic citizens feel even more helpless than they ordinarily do. What we need, he insists, is “to raise men's souls, not complete their prostration” (DA, II, i, 20).Footnote ¹⁶

In the chapter “Why Americans Are More Concerned with the Applications than the Theory of Science,” Tocqueville elaborates on how the obsession with practical life prevents Americans from pursuing knowledge and truth for its own sake. Because there is no aristocratic leisure class in a democracy, everyone is “on the move” in quest of power and gain, driven by a kind of restlessness that “disturbs and distracts the mind without stimulating or elevating it.” Where, Tocqueville asks, “in the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this endless chase for wealth . . . is one to find the calm for the profound researches of the intellect?” In a democracy, men's minds are preoccupied with finding new ways to get wealth more quickly and make pleasures more accessible and numerous. This leaves little room for the passionate quest for knowledge or disinterested love of truth that animated someone like Pascal. While democratic society may give rise to innovators like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Tocqueville doubts that it will produce many Pascals (DA, II, i, 10).

The chapter on the practical applications of science points to the second fundamental cause of the lack the human greatness in democracy, namely, the love of material comfort. Tocqueville discusses this quintessentially democratic passion at some length in the second part of volume two of Democracy, arguing that it has nothing to do with the decadent excesses to which aristocracies are sometimes prey. Rather, it is a tenacious and restrained passion that is satisfied with modest comforts and petty pleasures; it is “essentially a middle-class affair”; and it leads men to “lose sight of those more precious goods which constitute the greatness and glory of man” (DA, II, ii, 10). This passion for material comfort does not, however, always lead to contentment. In the famous chapter on the restlessness of Americans in the midst of their prosperity, Tocqueville shows how the democratic quest for physical pleasure can take on a frenetic and desperate character. Americans always seem to be “in a hurry,” and their minds are continually agitated. As a result of their restlessness, they are incapable of “enduring effort toward one goal” (DA, II, ii, 13). Tocqueville's great worry about the democratic obsession with material comfort is that by improving the techniques for satisfying his petty needs and desires and thus making “life daily more comfortable, smooth, and bland,” democratic man “may lose the use of his sublimest faculties and . . . at length degrade himself” (DA, II, ii, 15).

Besides individualism and love of material comfort, there is one other feature of democratic life that presents challenges to human greatness: the increasing gentleness of mores and growth of human compassion. Here Tocqueville's diagnosis begins to verge on Nietzsche's. Because democratic individuals are so much alike, they easily identify with the suffering of others. Personal feeling is mingled with pity, and this makes the democratic citizen suffer “when another's body is torn.” In aristocracies, on the other hand, the individuals in one class are so different from those in another that they hardly think of themselves as belonging to the same humanity. This makes it difficult for them to understand and sympathize with the suffering of others. Tocqueville dramatically illustrates this point by quoting from a letter by Madame de Sévigné in which she breezily describes the hanging, quartering, and breaking on the wheel of local peasants (DA, II, iii, 1).

Tocqueville sees many positive aspects to the gentleness of democratic mores, in this respect agreeing with one of his great mentors, Rousseau. He refers approvingly to the mildness with which Americans punish criminals and treat their slaves; and in his account of the democratic family, he remarks that even partisans of aristocracy are attracted by its naturalness and gentleness (DA, II, iii, 1 and 8). But he is not always so enthusiastic about the gentleness that belongs to democracy. In a letter to John Stuart Mill from 1841, he worries that the “gradual softening of mores” in France might lead it to sacrifice “its grandeur to its repose.”Footnote ¹⁷ This ambivalence toward democratic gentleness and compassion becomes more evident in the later chapters of part three of the second Democracy.

One can begin to see this in the lengthy chapter “Honor in the United States and Democratic Societies.” There is an obvious connection between honor and greatness, and therefore it is significant that Tocqueville sees honor playing a lesser role in people's minds as conditions become more equal. In order to demonstrate this, he provides his own version of a genealogy of morals, arguing that aristocratic rules of honor, unlike universal moral prescriptions, are based on the peculiar needs of a particular nation, caste, or class. In feudal aristocracy, for example, virtue related to what was proper to the nobility as opposed to the commoners: strength was celebrated and weakness stigmatized; “humanity and gentleness were no part of its law, but it praised generosity; it set more store by liberality than benevolence.” Above all, it honored “those virtues which have their share of magnificence and renown and which easily go with pride and love of power.” In democracy, on the other hand, as people cease to be divided into castes and classes, prescriptions of honor become less numerous, and precepts “draw continually closer to the moral laws accepted by humanity in general.” In contrast to the strict and often bizarre rules of aristocratic honor, these universal moral precepts are also less well defined and therefore weaker. Once inequalities completely disappear among human beings, Tocqueville predicts the notion of honor “will vanish too” (DA, II, iii, 18).

He withholds judgment on this development in the chapter on honor, but his tone becomes decidedly more pessimistic in the ensuing chapter, “Why There Are So Many Men of Ambition in the United States but So Few Lofty Ambitions.” Here Tocqueville returns to his portrait of democratic man as restlessly driven by the passion for comfort and petty pleasures, frustrated by his relative weakness and isolation, and concerned more with immediate success than future glory. It is this paltriness of aim in democracy that fills Tocqueville with dread: “What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant and trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.” Therefore, he warns leaders in democracy against encouraging humility, for what democratic citizens most lack is pride. With a tiny trace of Nietzschean immoralism, he states that he “would gladly surrender several of our petty virtues for that one vice” (DA, II, iii, 19).

The same worry about the unaspiring, petty, and overly gentle character of democracy informs the chapter “Why Great Revolutions Will Become Rare.” One of Tocqueville's great insights is that, while democratic society appears agitated and changeable on the surface, it is fundamentally conservative, stable, and monotonous. Preoccupied with material gain, democratic citizens shun everything that would disrupt this peaceable activity; and doubting that one individual can influence another, they despair of their ability to change anything, deferring instead to public opinion. Tocqueville is thus less fearful of revolutions in democratic societies than that the citizenry may no longer experience “those great and powerful public emotions which do indeed perturb peoples but which also make them grow and refresh them” and that “they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish” (DA, II, iii, 21).Footnote ¹⁸

It is but a small step from the fears expressed in part three of the second Democracy to the famous description of democratic despotism in part four. Tocqueville's chilling portrayal of a gentle administrative despotism in which each nation becomes “no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd” lacks nothing of Nietzsche's nihilistic portrait of the “last man” except perhaps the blinking (DA, II, iv, 6). But Tocqueville does not see this sort of despotism as inevitable in democracy, and in the penultimate chapter of the book he reviews the various ways to combat it: administrative decentralization, associations, freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, legal formalities, and above all political liberty. These are the means that “the true friends of liberty and human greatness” will deploy to check the omnipotence of the democratic social power (DA, II, iv, 7). It is time now to look more closely at the measures Tocqueville proposes to counteract democratic mediocrity and promote human greatness.

Tocqueville's Remedies

In taking up Tocqueville's remedies to the problem of human greatness in democracy, it is important to distinguish the measures specifically addressed to this problem from all the other countervailing measures he proposes to address the ills of democracy more generally. The three remedies I take up in this section are religion, the pursuit of ambitious political goals, and democratic poetry. I will not be concerned with the sorts of institutional mechanisms Tocqueville alludes to in the passage cited above. I do not deny that these institutions and practices are of supreme importance in protecting democracy from despotism, but they do little to promote human greatness. This can be seen most clearly with respect to the doctrine of self-interest properly understood, which Tocqueville says is “not at all a sublime doctrine” and “does not attempt to reach great aims.” This doctrine “does not inspire great sacrifices” or great virtues, “but its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens.” For Tocqueville, the doctrine of self-interest properly understood may be the best that democratic individuals can aspire to, the “strongest remaining guarantee against themselves,” especially as the restraining force of religion grows weaker, but he is under no illusion that it promotes human greatness (DA, II, ii, 8).

Of the three remedies just mentioned, religion looms the largest in Democracy in America. In a late letter, Tocqueville states that he is convinced that “man's true grandeur lies only in the harmony of the liberal sentiment and religious sentiment, both working simultaneously to animate and to restrain souls,” and that his “sole passion for thirty years has been to bring about this harmony.”Footnote ¹⁹ Tocqueville's views on religion are, of course, famously complicated, owing to his personal skepticism,Footnote ²⁰ his different treatments in volumes one and two of Democracy (not to mention the Old Regime), his utilitarian approach, and his belief in its naturalness. I will confine myself to considering these views only in relation to the question of greatness and the comparison with Nietzsche.

As we have seen, Tocqueville identifies individualism in intellectual matters and love of material comfort as two important obstacles to human greatness in democracy. Religion, he argues, can serve to moderate both of these dangerous propensities. In the case of intellectual individualism, he points to the American acceptance of the “main dogmas of the Christian religion without examination,” which puts “strict limits on the field of action left open to individual analysis” (DA, II, i, 1). Religion “imposes a salutary control on the intellect” and thus prevents the individual from being completely paralyzed by doubt and uncertainty (DA, II, i, 5). With respect to the love of material comfort, which leads men to chase restlessly after petty pleasures, Tocqueville insists that legislators in democracies must try to counteract it by propagating “throughout society a taste for the infinite, an appreciation of greatness, and a love of spiritual pleasures.” For this purpose, religion, “the most precious heritage from aristocratic times,” is crucial. By inculcating a belief in the immortality of the soul, religion counteracts the preoccupation with material comfort and prosperity that is endemic to democracy. Such a belief in the immortality of the soul is “indispensable to man's greatness” (DA, II, ii, 15).

As he does throughout Democracy in America, Tocqueville here appeals to religion as a force outside of democracy that moderates its most dangerous instincts. But this idea of religion as somehow lying outside of democracy, immune to its individualistic, authority-destroying logic, is highly problematic. It is not clear why religion would not succumb to the same spirit of independence that governs the rest of democratic life. Tocqueville himself acknowledges as much when he says that the generative principle of democracy penetrates religion in America just as much as it does all the other ideas, opinions, and habits of Americans, “for the truths of the other world are held subject to private judgment,” and every “man is allowed to choose freely the path that will lead him to heaven” (DA, I, ii, 10, p. 397).Footnote ²¹ Similarly, it is not clear how religion can avoid being transformed by the materialism of democracy and thus lose its point of anchorage outside of it. This difficulty is glaringly evident in Tocqueville's attempt to reconcile religious belief with the doctrine of self-interest properly understood. In a chapter that seems to be laced with irony, Tocqueville comments that “it is often difficult to be sure when listening to [preachers in America] whether the main object of religion is to procure felicity in the next world or prosperity in this one” (DA, II, ii, 9).Footnote ²²

Tocqueville himself argues that religion will need to adapt itself to the materialism, self-interest, and anticeremonialism of democracy in order to remain an effective moderator of its most dangerous tendencies (DA, II, i, 5). Such adaptation, he believes, will not destroy the natural foundations of religion—the religious hope that is “natural to the human heart” (DA, I, ii, 9) and the “taste for the infinite and love of what is immortal” that are embedded in human nature (DA, II, ii, 12)—but, rather, leave those foundations intact.Footnote ²³ One wonders. In America this process of adaptation has been going on for some time, and it has transformed much of American religiosity into something that would be unrecognizable to Jonathan Edwards, much less Pascal: a flexible faith that is pluralistic, individualistic, nondenominational, devoid of doctrinal knowledge or theological nuance, morally undemanding, nonjudgmental, and therapeutic; a faith, in short, that is practically indistinguishable from the rest of secular American culture. As Alan Wolfe writes: “In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture—and American culture has triumphed.”Footnote ²⁴ Such “secularization” is, of course, perfectly compatible with the high percentage of believers in God found in polls and the (until recently) swelling congregations of evangelical megachurches; but it raises doubts about the continuing ability of religion to counteract the individualism and materialism of democracy and to inspire transcendence, deep devotion, or human excellence.

Perhaps because Tocqueville has an inkling of this, he proposes two other remedies to the problem of human greatness in democracy that actually presuppose the diminishing power of religion in the lives of democratic citizens. The first involves what might be called Tocqueville's version of “great politics.” We live in an age of doubt and skepticism, he writes, “the light of faith is growing dim,” and this makes it easier for men to “give way to ephemeral and casual desires” and give up on anything that requires protracted effort, with the result that “they may never achieve anything great or calm or lasting.” As an antidote, Tocqueville urges that rulers set distant goals for their citizens, giving them an “interest in the future which neither religion nor social conditions any longer inspire.” He goes on to suggest—and here his reasoning becomes murky indeed—that by regaining an interest in the future citizens will be unwittingly led back to religious faith (DA, II, ii, 17).

Tocqueville's recommendation to pursue ambitious political goals recalls his complaints about pacifism and the sacrifice of grandeur to repose in his 1841 letter to Mill. It also informs his defense of French colonial policy in Algeria, a policy he hopes will someday enable France to “raise a great monument to our country's glory on the African coast.” For France to abandon its colonial project in Algeria, he argues, “would be a clear indication of our decadence” and a proclamation that “its age of greatness is over.”Footnote ²⁵ Here, too, Tocqueville's fascination with Napoleon is relevant. Though no admirer of Napoleon's despotic attempt to deprive the French people of their liberty, he was nevertheless drawn to Napoleon's grand project of imperial conquest, calling him “the most extraordinary being who has appeared in the world for many centuries.”Footnote ²⁶

Perhaps the most intriguing of Tocqueville's remedies to the problem of human greatness in democracy—and the one that resonates most with Nietzsche's cultural preoccupations— appears in the chapter “On Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies.” Similar to Nietzsche and in contrast to the realism emergent in the French literature of his time, Tocqueville insists that poetry is not merely the portrayal of reality but the “search for and representation of the ideal.” While such idealization is natural in aristocracies, it is alien to the democratic taste for what is useful and actual. Nevertheless, Tocqueville believes that there is a conception of the ideal in democracy that can serve as a source of poetic inspiration. It is not to be found in the old springs of poetry: skepticism has “depopulated heaven,” and “gods and heroes [are] gone.” It is not even to be found, pace romanticism, in nature. Rather, it is to be found in man himself, in human progress and perfectibility. As faith in positive religions wavers, an even vaster conception of divinity can be traced in the “destiny of the human race.” In a less Hegelian vein, Tocqueville goes on to predict that the human soul and its “hidden depths” will become the “fittest subject” of the democratic poet of the future:

Unfortunately, Tocqueville does not develop this response to the problem of human greatness in democracy; and in general he remains quite skeptical that any of the resources he has identified will enable democracy to achieve the greatness found in aristocracies. This is nowhere more evident than in the final chapter of Democracy in America, where he tallies up once more the advantages and disadvantages of democracy in comparison with aristocracy. It is true, he writes, that in democracy “habits are orderly, violence rare, and cruelty unknown,” but there is “little energy of soul” and very few “exalted, brilliant, and pure virtues.” “Life is not very glamorous, but extremely comfortable and peaceful.” The extremes of human greatness and misery are obliterated “to make room for something average, less high and less low, less brilliant and less dim, than what the world had before.” Tocqueville confesses that the “sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills” him, but adopting the perspective of God he sees that the well-being of everyone outweighs the glorious achievements of the few: “Equality may be less elevated, but it is more just, and in its justice lies its greatness and beauty” (DA, II, iv, 8).

It is a beautiful conclusion but not entirely satisfying. In the first place, there is the somewhat contrived God's-eye point of view Tocqueville appeals to, despite his religious skepticism. And second, the greatness he attributes to democracy here seems to have a completely different meaning from the greatness he invokes and laments the loss of in the rest of Democracy in America. It is a greatness without elevation.Footnote ²⁸ We are left with a somewhat ambivalent Tocqueville, the “sad liberal” (as one commentator has characterized him)Footnote ²⁹ who accepts democracy as unavoidable, tries to mitigate its worst inclinations, but is ultimately resigned to its mediocrity. In Nietzsche, such sadness and resignation will give way to a more bracing—but also more unsettling—vision of the possibility of human greatness in the modern world.

Nietzsche's Diagnosis

In treating Nietzsche's diagnosis of the problem of human greatness in democracy, I will draw out its affinities with Tocqueville's diagnosis, while at the same time pointing out some crucial differences. Though it is not clear that Nietzsche ever actually read Tocqueville,Footnote ³⁰ there are many similarities between his analysis of the ills of modern, democratic society and the Frenchman's. This is especially true of Nietzsche's early writings, which are pervaded by a Tocquevillean concern with the individualism, materialism, and restlessness of modern life and the obstacles they form to individual and cultural greatness. In the unpublished essay “The Greek State” (1871/72), for example, Nietzsche criticizes the liberal, individualistic understanding of the state as a mere means for people to achieve their selfish aims, guaranteeing them the “most undisturbed coexistence possible.” Against this liberal view, Nietzsche holds up the Greek idea of the state as “the aim and goal of the sacrifices and duties of the individual,” enabling the latter to overcome his egoism and engage in “truly heroic acts.” And like Tocqueville, though with infinitely less circumspection, Nietzsche praises war as the moment when the state ceases to be merely “a protective measure for egoistic individuals, but instead produces from within itself an ethical momentum in the love of fatherland and prince, which indicates a much higher destination.”Footnote ³¹

In the “Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche deepens his critical analysis, tracing the individualism, materialism, and restlessness of the modern age to the growth of the historical sense. Whereas Tocqueville attributed the weakness of the modern individual to equality of conditions, Nietzsche sees it as the result of an excess of history. By destroying the horizons which give life meaning, purpose, and orientation, the historical sense condemns the modern individual to a kind of restless wandering or “homeless roving” in which vigorous action is impossible. Exposure to everything leads to the influence of nothing: the individual becomes a “strolling spectator,” and “even great wars and revolutions are able to influence him for hardly a moment” (UDH, 5; BT, 23).

Nietzsche comes very close to Tocqueville in this essay in his distaste for fatalistic histories that diminish the agency of the individual. He condemns Hegel's “naked admiration for success” and “idolatry of the factual”; he heaps scorn on Eduard von Hartmann's fatalistic submission to the historical world-process; and he rejects histories written from the standpoint of the masses that seek to derive historical laws based on statistics. In opposition to these grand constructions of the historical process, Nietzsche emphasizes the role of great individuals in history, “who form a kind of bridge across the turbulent stream of becoming. . . . One giant calls to another across the desert intervals of time. . . . The goal of humanity cannot lie in its end but only in its highest exemplars.” He concludes by reaffirming the importance of human greatness—“I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing . . . in pursuit of the great and the impossible”—and by condemning the “doctrine of sovereign becoming” promoted by the historical sense because it leads only to “petty egoism” and greed (UDH, 8–9).

The passage in Nietzsche's early writings that perhaps most closely echoes Tocqueville's diagnosis of the individualism, materialism, and restlessness of modern democratic life appears in “Schopenhauer as Educator,” where ours is characterized as “an age of atoms, an age of atomistic chaos.” It is an age in which “haste and hurry” are universal and contemplativeness has disappeared. With the “waters of religion ebbing away” and skepticism spreading, the educated classes are increasingly “swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy,” and they “grow daily more restless, thoughtless, and loveless” (SE, 4). How can this nihilistic situation be rectified? Nietzsche is convinced here, as he was not in “The Greek State,” that the solution must be sought in the realm of culture and not in the state. And the goal of all culture is the production of individual great men, geniuses—the philosopher, artist, and saint—who redeem the rest of humanity by providing insight into the metaphysical significance of existence (SE, 5–6).

It is this theory of culture, especially in its romantic-Wagnerian form, that Nietzsche abandons in the first of his middle works, Human, All Too Human. In this work, he no longer looks to art or the Greeks to resolve the aimlessness and fragmentation of modern culture but to the scientific spirit embodied in the Enlightenment. The main problem with romantic or Wagnerian art is that it is reactionary. It seeks to take over from declining religion the function of providing cultural wholeness and greatness, but in doing so it merely perpetuates the old religious and metaphysical errors of mankind. The romantic artist-priest must be replaced by the free-spirited knower as the linchpin of cultural renewal.

Nietzsche's critique of romantic art thus rests on a critique of what he considers to be the errors of religion. And it is in Human, All Too Human that the hostility toward religion and Christianity that sharply divides Nietzsche from Tocqueville first appears in unambiguous form. Several years before his madman will announce that “God is dead,” he writes: “Since the belief has ceased that a God broadly directs the destinies of the world,” human beings have to take responsibility and set “ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth” (HH, 25). Nietzsche's critique of religion focuses on its alleged naturalness, an idea that occupied a prominent place in Tocqueville's understanding of religion. Nietzsche generally approaches this idea through Schopenhauer's doctrine of the “metaphysical need,” according to which religion springs from and provides consolation for the natural wonder human beings feel as they confront death, finiteness, and the vanity of all effort.Footnote ³² In keeping with the historical approach of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche repeatedly denies the naturalness and universality of this metaphysical or religious need, calling it “an acquired and consequently also a transient need” based on an erroneous and irrational understanding of the world and human psychology (HH, 27, 110, 111, 131).

The big question is whether the skepticism that belongs to postreligious, scientific culture will deprive human beings of the faith necessary to create enduring works and institutions. This is the question Tocqueville asked in his chapter on the importance of setting distant goals in ages of democratic skepticism, and Nietzsche ultimately answers it in the affirmative: “The sum of unimpeachable truths” produced by science “can in time become so great . . . that on the basis of them one may resolve on ‘everlasting’ works” (HH, 22). This is the tremendous task of the future free spirits: to acquire an “unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals” (HH, 25). The sort of knowledge Nietzsche has in mind here is primarily historical knowledge. In a striking reversal of his earlier attack on the modern historical sense, he now claims that “the striving for knowledge of the entire historical past, which ever more mightily distinguishes the modern age from all others,” may someday allow us to arrive at “cosmic self-consciousness” (AOM, 185). In our increasingly “ignited” age, which romantic art merely stokes, such historical knowledge will have a moderating, calming effect; and it will serve as a counterweight to the restlessness and “lack of repose” epitomized by America (HH, 38, 285).

In the two works that follow Human, All Too Human—Daybreak and The Gay Science—Nietzsche develops his ideal of the free spirit, his image of human greatness in the middle period. In these writings, there is a new emphasis on knowledge as a passion, involving self-sacrifice, courage, and heroism. The idea of the “passion for knowledge” (Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis) appears for the first time in Daybreak, where the free spirit is said to delight in the dissatisfaction of the quest for knowledge in the same way that a lover delights in his unrequited love. Nietzsche even suggests that mankind may perish in the heroic pursuit of this passion for knowledge (D, 429; see also 45, 327, 459). Similarly, in The Gay Science, he claims that it “is something new in history that knowledge wants to be something more than a means.” For the free spirit, life itself becomes a means for knowledge, an “experiment for the seeker of knowledge,” evoking “a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play” (GS, 123, 324; see also 3, 283).

Paralleling this new emphasis on knowledge as a passion in Daybreak and The Gay Science is an increased focus on the way in which modern morality, derived from Christianity, is steadily draining the world of passion, danger, and heroism. Nietzsche's critique of morality here clearly recalls Tocqueville's observations on the lack of passion, desire for material comfort, and softening of mores in democracy. The focus of Nietzsche's critique is on the valorization of pity and altruism in modern morality. He considers this to be an aftereffect of Christianity but also importantly different from original Christianity, which was primarily (and egoistically) preoccupied with personal salvation. As this aspect of Christianity weakened, the subsidiary belief in love of one's neighbor came to the fore, so that in the nineteenth century, in thinkers like Comte, Mill, Schopenhauer, and Spencer, all that remains is the “cult of philanthropy” or the religion of pity. The great danger of this modern religion of pity is nothing less than the complete “abolition of the individual.” Craving security and the removal of “all the dangers life once held,” this religion of pity is “well on the way to turning mankind into sand. . . . Small, soft, round, unending sand!” (D, 132, 174; see also 92, 153). Nietzsche's later critique of herd morality and the last man is well in sight.

In addition to railing against the softening and weakening of human beings in the modern religion of pity, Nietzsche decries the way in which modern economic and political life destroys the possibility of individual greatness. In the modern work-economy, the young are “worn out daily” and thus prevented from developing into mature human beings (D, 178; see also 166, 173, 175). This is particularly true of the United States, where the “breathless haste with which [Americans] work . . . is spreading lack of spirituality like a blanket” and making it impossible for people to engage in reflection or contemplation without a feeling of guilt (GS, 329; see also 6, 280). Modern politics has a similarly debilitating effect on the young, depriving them of “all genuine productivity” and insuring that the “profound speechlessness of pregnancy never comes to them.” The most gifted spirits in society ought not to waste their time and energy on political and economic affairs but, rather, leave these to “lesser heads.” The goals of politics and economics, which are directed to “universal security,” are mediocre goals and should not “be pursued by the highest instruments . . . which ought to be saved up for the highest objectives” (D, 177, 179).

Nietzsche's critique of democracy in his later works is not significantly different from that found in his earlier writings, and it touches on many of the concerns that Tocqueville had about democracy. Like Tocqueville, only more so, Nietzsche emphasizes the softening of mores, the valorization of pity, the craving for security, and the weakness, timidity, and mediocrity that go along with democracy. The doctrine of equality that is at the heart of democracy renders human beings similar (semblable) to one another, destroying the “chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—that which I call pathos of distance—[that] characterizes every strong age” (TI, “Expeditions,” 37). Again like Tocqueville, but with a very different evaluation, Nietzsche traces democracy and its doctrine of equality back to Christianity: “mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality in a religious context” (WP, 765); “the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement” (BGE, 202).Footnote ³³ But Nietzsche does not simply equate democracy with Christianity. As he suggested in Daybreak, democratic gentleness is merely the “echo of Christianity,” stripping the latter of the spiritual tension, passion, and self-laceration magnificently exemplified by Pascal and replacing it with a “gentle moralism” and bland “cult of philanthropy” (D, 92, 132; see also WP, 215, 240).

One of the most Tocquevillean aspects of Nietzsche's critique of democracy in his later works is how the individualism and skepticism that belong to democracy make it incapable of the enduring efforts and grand organization characteristic of aristocratic society. In the latter, individuals accept their station in life and even believe themselves predestined for this station, and this enables them “to erect those monsters of social pyramids that distinguish the Middle Ages.” In democratic societies, on the other hand—and here Nietzsche cites the United States as the quintessential example—the individual believes “he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role.” As a result, he becomes an actor, constantly changing roles, without a fixed core or nature. Also as a result, the “strength to build becomes paralyzed; the courage to make plans that encompass the distant future is discouraged.” The final consequence of this hyperindividualism and postmodern role-playing exemplified by Americans is that we no longer possess “the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future in plans of such scope, and to sacrifice the future to them” (GS, 356; see also TI, “Expeditions,” 39).

It is precisely because of this lack of strength in democracies “to will something for a long time” that Nietzsche longs for Europe to acquire a “long, terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence” (BGE, 208). This belongs to the project of “great politics,” which constitutes Nietzsche's distinctive solution to the problem of human greatness in modern, democratic society.

Nietzsche's Remedy

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche raises the fundamental question that has hovered over this entire essay: “today—is greatness possible?” In contrast to Tocqueville's equivocal position on this question, Nietzsche answers it in the affirmative, ascribing to his new philosophers the task of finding “a new greatness of man, a new untrodden way to his enhancement” (BGE, 212). This goal of Nietzsche's great politics has as its condition the very thing that Tocqueville believed impossible in our democratic age, where nothing escapes the “generative principle” of the equality of conditions: namely, the reestablishment of a spiritual aristocracy. “Every enhancement of the type ‘man,’” Nietzsche again writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again” (BGE, 257). With its doctrine of the fundamental equality of all human beings, democracy at bottom “represents the disbelief in great human beings” (WP, 752). Therefore, in an age of democracy, Nietzsche feels “impelled to reestablish order of rank” (WP, 854).

Nietzsche's aristocratic great politics has, of course, been the subject of much scholarly controversy. A number of scholars take Nietzsche to be literally advocating an aristocratic political system in which the gifted few rule over, manipulate, oppress, enslave, and sometimes even exterminate the mediocre many. Reacting against the antipolitical interpretation of Nietzsche most often associated with Walter KaufmannFootnote ³⁴ and, more recently, the radical democratic interpretation of Nietzsche put forward by Mark Warren, William Connolly, and others,Footnote ³⁵ these tough-minded scholars highlight the most troubling passages in Nietzsche's writings where he advocates slavery and cruelty, calls for the “annihilation of the decaying races” (WP, 862) and the “extermination of millions of failures” (WP, 964), speaks warmly of Cesare Borgia and Napoleon, and looks forward to the coming of the “future masters of the earth” (WP, 957, 958, 960).Footnote ³⁶

If Nietzsche's aristocratic great politics turned out to be as unpalatable and tyrannical as these tough-minded interpreters suggest, the choice between Nietzsche's and Tocqueville's solutions to the problem of human greatness in democracy would not be difficult to make. Fortunately, this is not the case. Without reverting to the antipolitical or radical democratic interpretations of Nietzsche, I will argue that Nietzsche's aristocratic great politics does not involve an actual set of political institutions through which the elite few exercise political power—or “ruthless political control”Footnote ³⁷—over the herdlike masses. Rather, it consists in a “society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man” (BGE, 257). Such an aristocratic society and system of valuation is clearly at odds with the democratic belief in the equality of conditions, which is what makes it political in a way that Tocqueville in particular would appreciate, given the centrality of beliefs, values, and mores in his conception of politics. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily incompatible with the existence of democratic political institutions.Footnote ³⁸ How Nietzsche understands this peculiar opposition and coexistence of aristocracy and democracy will emerge in what follows, but a note from 1883 provides a revealing clue. Commenting on the relationship between the last man and the superman, Nietzsche writes: “The aim is by no means to conceive the latter as masters of the former. Rather: two types are to exist beside each other—separated as much as possible; like the gods of Epicurus, the one not meddling with the other” (KSA, 10:7 [21]).Footnote ³⁹

In order to gain a more precise understanding of Nietzsche's belief in the possibility of the coexistence of democracy and aristocracy—or of what I will call an aristocracy within democracy—it is necessary to go back to his discussion of politics in Human, All Too Human and its sequels, a discussion which defenders of the “aristocratic radical” view of Nietzsche often dismiss as anomalous with respect to his later conception of great politics.Footnote ⁴⁰ As he does throughout his writings, Nietzsche here views politics through the lens of culture and worries that the former can have devastating effects on the latter.Footnote ⁴¹ This is the source of his scathing attack on the kind of “great politics” that advocates the “revolutionary overturning of all social orders” (HH, 463). He also condemns great politics in the form of nationalism and war, paradoxically sounding more pacifistic than Tocqueville. The problem with the prosecution of costly wars in pursuit of national greatness is that the talent and energy previously dedicated to culture is sacrificed on the “altar of the fatherland,” thus leading to “spiritual impoverishment” (HH, 475, 481). Nietzsche does not deny, however, that the state can play an important auxiliary role with respect to culture, providing a stable structure within which the free spirit can pursue knowledge. Quoting Machiavelli, he writes that “‘the great goal of statecraft should be duration.’ . . . Only when there is a securely founded and guaranteed long duration” is cultural progress possible (HH, 224).

With respect to democracy, Nietzsche, like Tocqueville, regards the “democratization of Europe [as] inevitable” (WS, 275). And he even concedes that such democratization is a legitimate demand on the part of the many: “If the purpose of politics really is to make life endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life.” Unlike Tocqueville, though, who saw equality of conditions as a “generative principle” that penetrates into every aspect of democratic life, Nietzsche insists that the narrow-mindedness that belongs to democratic politics must not be allowed to infect all spheres of activity, especially higher activity. The few must be allowed to “refrain from politics” and assume an “ironic posture” with respect to the “happiness of the many” (HH, 438). The latter, who constitute the class of workers, Nietzsche regards as no different from slaves, by which he means anyone “who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself.” But the idle few do not merely enjoy life at the expense of the workers. Indeed, they suffer more than the latter; their “enjoyment of existence is less, [their] task heavier” (HH, 283, 439, 462).

Nietzsche's analysis of the inevitable democratization of Europe in Human, All Too Human and its sequels clearly shows that he does not regard it as incompatible with cultural aristocracy. Indeed, he suggests that this democratization may in fact serve as a secure and durable foundation for the “cyclopean building” of culture in the future; it may turn out to be the ultimate “prophylactic measure” that makes it “henceforth impossible for the fruitful fields of culture to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents.” To be sure, Nietzsche does not speak here as a committed democrat; he conceives of democracy merely as a means, providing the protective walls and trellises required by the “supreme artist of horticulture” to carry out his more spiritual task (WS, 275).

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche is much less optimistic than Tocqueville about the fate of religion in democracy. In a lengthy aphorism entitled “Religion and Government,” he argues that democracy undermines the complementary relationship between religion and the state that exists under an aristocratic, tutelary government. In the latter, the governing classes, while not necessarily believers themselves, cultivate religion among the masses because it promotes a “calm, patient, trusting disposition.” Such an instrumental, not to say hypocritical, use of religion, however, presupposes a gulf between governors and governed that disappears in democracy.Footnote ⁴² As a result, religion loses its public function and becomes a merely private affair, which initially strengthens religion (as Tocqueville hoped) but eventually weakens it through the pluralistic proliferation of sects. Gradually the state loses its sacred aura, and the individual's relationship to it becomes grounded in utilitarian self-interest. Like Tocqueville, Nietzsche worries that this will lead democratic citizens to devote themselves exclusively to their momentary self-interest and cease to engage in “undertakings that require quiet tending for decades or centuries if their fruits are to mature.” Nevertheless, he does not despair: if the state can no longer control the forces of democracy, then an invention more suited to that purpose “will gain victory over the state” (HH, 472).

The idea of an aristocracy within democracy that is sketched in Human, All Too Human is more fully developed in Nietzsche's later writings. In The Gay Science, he distinguishes between the noble and common types on the basis that the latter has a healthy sense of its own advantage, considering “all noble, magnanimous feelings inexpedient and therefore incredible,” while the noble type is more “unreasonable,” sacrificing its interest and possibly its life for a passion—the passion for knowledge, for example (GS, 3; see also 2, 10, 20, 31, 42). Precisely because of their unreasonableness, Nietzsche realizes that society cannot be made up entirely of such noble spirits. Society—and this includes democratic society—requires the “universal binding force of a faith.” The “most select spirits bristle at this universal faith—the explorers of truth above all”; but Nietzsche urges them to do everything in their power “to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance.” The exception always needs to be defended in democratic society, but it ought never to want to become the rule (GS, 76; see also 55).

It is in Beyond Good and Evil and the corresponding notes from The Will to Power, though, that the idea of an aristocracy coexisting with and ultimately justifying democracy is most fully developed. “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocracy,” Nietzsche writes in the opening aphorism of the chapter “What is Noble,” and he adds that such enhancement also requires “slavery in some sense or other” (BGE, 257). In the aphorism that follows he is even more explicit, stating that in a healthy aristocracy an untold number of human beings must be sacrificed, “reduced to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments,” for the sake of the higher, more spiritual human beings (BGE, 258). But what exactly does Nietzsche mean by slavery here? In Human, All Too Human, he defined a slave broadly as anyone “who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself,” and this broad understanding of slavery seems to extend to his later writings as well. In a note from 1884, for example, he claims that slavery exists in every society, “whether you want it or not: for example, the Prussian civil servant, the scholar, the monk” (KSA, 11:25 [225]).

As in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche does not see the aristocratic order of rank he is advocating here as being necessarily incompatible with the leveling tendencies of democracy. Indeed, he argues that there is a way in which the democratization of Europe is inadvertently creating conditions for a new and even more refined aristocracy: “The very same new conditions that will on average lead to the leveling and mediocritization of man—to a useful, industrious, handy, multipurpose herd animal—are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of a most dangerous and attractive quality.” The process of democratization thus serves as a training ground for “slavery in the subtlest sense” and for the “cultivation of tyrants” in the most spiritual sense (BGE, 242). Nietzsche frequently uses the image of base and superstructure (not in the Marxian sense)—or trellis and plant—to describe the complementary relationship between the democratic many and the aristocratic few. For him a “high culture is a pyramid” that requires a broad, sturdy base to support the lofty spiritual achievements of the few (A, 57). Or as he puts in The Will to Power: “A high culture can stand only upon a broad base, upon a strong and healthy consolidated mediocrity” (WP, 864; see also 866, 890, 903).

The base-superstructure analogy suggests something else about the relationship between the few and the many; namely, that the former do not “rule” or “lead” the latter in any sort of conventionally political sense. This was intimated in the note quoted at the beginning of this section (KSA, 10:7 [21]), but it is made explicit in many of the notes from Nietzsche's later years. In one, he writes: “Main consideration: not to see the task of the higher species in leading the lower . . . but the lower as a base upon which the higher species performs its own tasks” (WP, 901; see also 876). In another, he says of the “master race” so often excoriated by his critics that it is not a race “whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture, manners . . . a hothouse for strange and choice plants” (WP, 898). The “masters of the earth” do not seek to impose their values on the herd—what could their values have to do with the needs of the herd (WP, 287, 904)?—rather, they exist far apart from the herd, creating and self-legislating in their own sphere, working artistically on themselves as a means of enhancing the type “man” (WP, 960). In this way, they serve as “a kind of goal, redemption, and justification for the democratic movement itself” (WP, 954).

But what of Nietzsche's frequent favorable references to explicitly political artists and sculptors of men like Caesar and Napoleon, who seem to engage in much more than self-legislation? We are especially interested in Nietzsche's attitude toward the latter figure, given Tocqueville's own qualified admiration for this “most extraordinary being.” Clearly Nietzsche admires Napoleon, though not uncritically (see WP, 1026); but more often than not, Napoleon seems to function for him as an example of the qualities needed by his philosophical creators and self-legislators—objectivity, hardness, and severity—rather than as a model for actual political action (WP, 975; see also 983). Though Nietzsche certainly construes politics as an aesthetic activity in many places, he is even more concerned to bring out that art or philosophy is a political activity that requires “terribleness” and “evil” in the sense of what is “hard, painful, enforced” (WP, 1017, 1026). He frequently compares Napoleon and Goethe, but his emphasis generally falls on how the former serves as an inspiration for the self-disciplining and self-creating activity of the latter (TI, “Expeditions,” 49).Footnote ⁴³

With respect to the relative happiness of the aristocratic few and the democratic many, Nietzsche makes clear here, as he did in Human, All Too Human, that the former suffer more and bear a heavier burden than the latter: “Life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases” (A, 57). Virtually the whole of the second half of the chapter “What is Noble” is taken up with all-too-personal reflections on the vulnerability, corruption, isolation, and loneliness of the noble human being. Nietzsche writes there that “it almost determines the order of rank how profoundly human beings can suffer. . . . Profound suffering makes noble; it separates” (BGE, 270). And in order to protect himself against “obtrusive and pitying hands,” the noble human being finds it necessary to disguise himself with cheerfulness, masks, and dark glasses. It is significant that the chapter that begins with what seems to be the most aggressive statement of Nietzsche's aristocratic great politics ends with multiple references to hermits, caves, solitude, and silence (BGE, 270, 278, 284, 289).

At the other end of the spectrum, Nietzsche does not begrudge the mediocre their happiness: “For the mediocre it is happiness to be mediocre. . . . It would be quite unworthy of a more profound mind to see an objection in mediocrity as such. It is even the prime requirement for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditional upon it.” For this reason he considers it a duty for the exceptional human being to treat the mediocre with gentleness (A, 57; see also WP, 893). Passages such as this one suggest that it may not be entirely accurate to claim, as some scholars have, that it is Nietzsche's advocacy of harshness and cruelty that ultimately differentiates his solution to the problem of democratic softness and mediocrity from Tocqueville's.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nevertheless, Nietzsche's “gentleness” is not unproblematic. Is it really possible to preserve and promote individual greatness in a regime in which the vast majority of human beings are consigned to herdlike happiness? By writing the masses off in the way that he does, does Nietzsche ultimately render them unequipped to serve as a reliable base for the social pyramid he envisages? The unapologetic mediocrity of the base threatens to overwhelm the peak or leave it ineffectually stranded. At this point, one might look to Tocquevillean liberty and association to educate, elevate, and inspirit the demos to the limited extent that it is possible.