Tocqueville by Jaume Lucien Goldhammer Arthur

Author:Jaume, Lucien, Goldhammer, Arthur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Yet the same brutal amour-propre becomes marvelously supple through intelligent calculation, or, as Helvétius and later Tocqueville would put it, through self-interest properly understood: “One gives in order to get. This is the source and foundation of all human commerce, which takes a thousand diverse forms. Because man does not simply trade merchandise for other merchandise or cash; he also trades works, services, attention, and civilities…. Thus through commerce all of life’s needs are somehow met without the involvement of charity.”79

The remedy is therefore appropriate to the reality of the disease: society as it is shows how to convert the primordial violence of desire into patience, self-interested prudence, and embellishments. Tocqueville wrote that the doctrine of self-interest properly understood was “marvelously tolerant of human weakness” and that “it turns personal interest against itself and uses the spurs that excite the passions as a means of guiding them.”80 This could hardly be closer to Nicole’s thinking and to the Jansensist conception of l’honnête. At the very least it is a reinvention of Nicole by Tocqueville based on his Pascalian reflections on the “tableau of charity” of which “concupiscence” is capable. It is also possible that the Jansenist source was reinforced by the inspiration that Hume, who was widely read in Tocqueville’s time, drew from it. The remark about “turning personal interest against itself” is explicit in Hume.81

Tocqueville wrote that “when the public governs,” everyone courts the esteem and goodwill of others. When “pride dissimulates, contempt does not rear its head. Egoism is afraid of itself.”82

At times Tocqueville follows the path that Nicole recommends at the beginning of his treatise on charity and amour-propre, to plumb the depths of the human heart, “to consider in its lair and basic inclinations” the monster we bear within us.83 What this yielded for Tocqueville was the following: “And if we plumb the depths of our hearts, won’t we all be frightened to discover what envy makes us feel about our neighbors, friends, and relatives? We are not jealous of these people because they are neighbors, friends, and relatives but because they are our likes and equals.”84

Thus it is envy, as the passion for equality with one’s “likes” (semblables), that moves the human heart. This is obvious in “democracy,” but Tocqueville adds that it is in fact “a truth in all ages and applicable to all men.” “Likeness” is here understood not as it ought to be in the Christian sense (identity and fraternity of the children of God, members of the same body in Christ, all descendants of Adam) but rather in the sense of the society of amours-propres.85 The “like” is a person who must respond to the tyrannical demand that the egoistic individual addresses to him and who is interesting only in that respect. He is of interest to the extent that he can resemble his interlocutor, not in spirit or truth but by virtue of what he possesses.

In regard to this very self-interested concern in the “like,” witness the marvelous duality and

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