A GREAT CONSERVATIVE

...The next moment, however, he is warming up the old chestnut that, "although the Soviet Union may not honor our values, it may cherish values of its own—some of which the West may lack—as its title to a place in the roster of civilized societies...

...At the same time, his rejection of all three is tempered by so many reservations that his "essay" has the virtue neither of ringing affirmation nor of forthright negation...

...for equality singularly facilitates, extends rind secures the influence of a central power...

...Traditional autocv racy had never succeeded in dominating completely all intermediary^yistitutions of society...

...In the midst of the democratic enthusiasm of 1848 he could thus calmly remark...

...De Tocqueville was one of the few to avoid such pitfalls...

...By H. Stuart Hughes...

...Though he stressed, just as much as De Bonald, De Maistre or Burke the corroding effect of the rational, inorganic and centralizing state power upon all other social institutions, he did not share their obsessive concern with reviving a world that the French Revolution had destroyed...

...Yet this period was as decisive in Tocqueville's life as it was for the subsequent history of France...

...he was too much of a country squire to feel sympathy for the- revolting proletarian masses of Paris and too much of a democrat not to perceive the dangers which inhered in the plebiscitarian "democracy" that brought Louis Bonaparte into power...

...No wonder that it was hard for him to situate himself clearly in the political spectrum of the day...

...Tocqueville saw in the most "modern" "democratic" aspects of social and political life the menace of a new and vastly more dangerous form of absolute domination than monarchical absolutism had ever been...

...And although there were so to speak no Republicans in France, I did not look upon the maintenance of the Republic as absolutely impossible...

...never thought for a moment that a "restoration" could be the solution...

...Perhaps only a generation which has lost its dreams and which has watched with horror the total apotheosis of mass-democratic society in the total destruction of the individual, can begin to understand Tocqueville's prophetic warning...

...Knopj...

...Is the sense of personal participation in constructive endeavor the Soviet worker or collective farmer may frequently have a more positive consciousness of self-fulfillment than a comparable member of Westernsociety...

...A different emphasis in American foreign policy" during and since the war, he notes ruefully, "might have helped democratic socialism to a more favorable competitive position...

...2.75...

...What I mean when I say the republican form of government, is the elective Executive power...

...from thinking that institutions, ideas, mores which were suited to one historical context could, by being applied to a new historical situation, revive the old virtues...

...The Radical Left, still dreaming of reenacting the Jacobin period of the French Revolution, repelled him, the centralism of the Left was just as detrimental to the cause of liberty as the absolutism of the Right...

...Reviewed by LEWIS A. COSER ' I <HE MOST BASIC INSIGHTS about nineteenth century liberalism I we owe t* socialist and conservative thinkers...

...The people will take on the appearance of an army and society of military barracks...

...He is repelled by an uncouth, politically immature America suddenly propelled from isolationism into a position of leadership in a world whose motive forces it but dimly comprehends...

...The Recollections cover only roughly two years of Tocqueville's life, from the beginning of the Revolution of 1848 to the end of his ministry under President Louis Bonaparte in October, 1849...

...Mr, Hughes pulls no punches in describing Soviet Russia as "a highly bureaucratic, authoritarian regime, relying heavily on terrorist police methods for suppressing actual or suspected opposition...

...Tocqueville had already foreseen in Democracy in America many of the reasons why a Bonapartist regime must grow almost inevitably out of 19th century democracy: "Every central power courts and encourages the principles of equality...

...Hughes does not trouble to say...

...Only during this period did the author of Democracy in America become an active participant in political battle...

...T,he rational domination of the State over society, the undermining of the authority and weight of all autonomous social institutions by the all-pervasive Influence Lewis A. Ceeer is teaching Social Science at the University of Chicago...

...Hughes, who is an assistant professor of history at Harvard and the grandson of the late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, rejects the regimented brutajitarianism of Moscow...

...196 pp...

...of the central power, these were Tocqueville's central concerns...

...He had become Foreign Minister of the French Republic yet he could write: "I did not believe then, any more than I do believe now, that the republican form of government is best suited to the needs of France...

...Thus even accepting office he remained in essence a skeptical onlooker, commenting amusedly on the reasons for the weakness of his own cabinet, convinced that at best he and his friends of the moderate center could temporarily stall the decline of the Republic...

...For the present our best course is to cultivate intellectual honesty, a good temper, and e broad appreciation of the ultimate humanistic goals that unite and transcend the competing Ideologies of our era...

...American leadership of the non-Communist world, and remarks: "If American hegemony is a yoke, it is the lightest one that a dependent people has ever been required to bear...

...he says, "naturally points toward interference — if only indirect—in the internal affairs of other nations...

...And yet I sincerely wished to maintain the Republic...

...Under these conditions what could a President elected by the people be other than a pretender to the Crown...

...The administrative system will take on some of the military spirit and the military some of the civilian spirit...

...If this process of centralization has gone far enough, thought Tocqueville, the time for the new dictator has come: "I am convinced that a sort of merging between the attitudes of the clerk and the soldier will take place...

...It culminates, as a result, in s plan of political action remarkable chiefly as a makeshift and a compromise...

...Yet it would be even more inexact to classify him with the classic liberals of the 19th century...

...Tocqueville believed on the contrary that a society of acquisitive, private and nonpolitical individuals is precisely the ideal seedbed for the growth of a new State tyranny...

...Yet, he is quite prepared to concede the inescapable logie of Louis Jay Herman is a frequent contributor to The New leaser...

...Straddling the Cold War Fence AN ESSAY FOR OUR TIMES...

...It is rather the "co-existence" of two powers which are, "for the present at least, not prepared to close with each other in a struggle for life or death...

...Tocqueville can hardly be classified neatly among the political thinkers of his time...

...The Socialism of a Louis Blanc or a Ledru-Rollin could only be repugnant to the conservative and the libertarian in Tocqueville...

...HAVING THUS canceled out every affirmative with a negative and straddled every political fence, the author at last comes forward with a prescription for the future which is a masterpiece of tergiversation, to wit: "peaceful coexistence" of the Communist and nonCommunist worlds...

...One wonders why it was worth the try, however, when he comments later on Continental Socialists' "breadth of . . . under standing" combined with "constitutional inability to translate their understanding into action...

...we had retained the spirit of the Monarchy, while losing the taste for it...

...And among the conservatives, only a handful were free from what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, i.e...

...They thought that if the individual could be sufficiently protected from the State, if the State could be so weakened to be reduced to the status of a sort of night watchman, freedom would be assured...

...These recollections prove that as a participant Tocqueville never lost the lucidity that as an "outsider" he had acquired over many years...

...It is not, to be sure, the "peaceful co-existence" of Malenkov or of Wallace...

...TOCQUEVILLE SAW in the relationship between the modern State and society the crucial question of political and sociological theory...

...He was too shrewd a political thinker to feel anything but contempt for the theatrical grandiloquence and muddleheaded inefrectualness of the Left, too much of a traditional gentleman to go along with the adventurers and underworld characters that Louis Napoleon had gathered around himself...

...Aa for British Socialism: "The spirit in which the British are carrying out the slow readjustment of their society may inspire respect but not the sort of infectious enthusiasm that sets out to build new worlds...

...But in a rationalized and centralized political order, with the growth of technical and economic rationality, the drift toward unified and standardized regulation of man's entire life became almost inevitable...

...It is indeed a feeble reed to lean on — but it is the only one there is...

...The result will be military government, regular, clear, precise and absolute...

...He expressly disavows the Wallace "policy of appeasement I which] . . i represents little more than an act of faith in the intentions of the opposing party to reciprocate in kind...

...Yet, one suspects that even he is not prepared to dignify temporizing and flight from responsibility with the name of a constructive foreign policy, when he observes limply at the end of his book: "Surely, then, we have arrived at a strange position — a doctrine of coexistence in which neither side believes with any deep sincerity...

...f * • AMERICA'S new-found internationalism, the author fears, may be yielding increasingly to the influence of the "internationalists of the Luce publications," who favor "a recognized American hegemony won through the realistic application of economic pressure.'' "This sort of thinking...

...economic man could take care of himself...

...How we are to retain an initiative which will prevent the Kremlin from choosing the time and circumstances of the eventual trial of strength, if it comes, Mr...

...Reviewed by LOUIS MY HERMAN THE BESETTING FAULT of this intelligent and frequently provocative politico-philisophical survey of the cold-war world is the author's curious inability to take a decisive stand for or against anything or to follow any line of thought through to its logical conclusion...

...His attitude toward" democratic socialism is equally ambivalent...

...Finally, he is dissatisfied with a democratic socialism which is either, as on the Continent, too ineffectual to take power, or, as in Great Britain, too uninspirational when in power to capture the imagination of the peoples of the world...

...He, the conservative, could write in his recollections: "I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which we have grown accustomed, and that in *»*tter of social constitution the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine...