"Free Takes": Reinhardt's Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt

Both liberals and communitarians read Alexis de Tocqueville as promoting a powerful civic virtue in the citizenry so as to save democracy from itself. Marxists read Karl Marx as arguing for an inexorable dialectic unfolding toward a final end in communist society. And, the inner circle of Arendtian scholars read Hannah Arendt as trusting like a Stoic that a politics of great-souled action had some enduring, if not transcendental purpose. Mark Reinhardt’s book, The Art of Being Free, toys with these and similar “standard” readings of these authors. Not rejecting the standard takes, exactly—instead, Reinhardt nibbles his way through interpretations and primary texts of Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt. Like a teenage girl playing with her salad, there is much poking and scrutinizing of tidbits from the literature, only at the end to find a few judiciously selected nuggets fished out for a final meal.

In his treatment of Tocqueville, for example, Reinhardt samples the arguments from many writers who find in the French aristocrat a crafty architect and advocate for civic virtue as the foundation for democracy. In such readings, Tocqueville encouraged particular mores, sentiments, and institutions such that citizens’ hearts and souls would be disciplined, thereby domesticating the wild, ambiguity of democracy in order to preserve it from its potential excesses. Mark Reinhardt’s own thesis takes its bearings from such understandings of Tocqueville. Indeed, he shares the concerns of some (including me) who are troubled by the narrowing of differences and the closure of meaning that Tocqueville’s transcendent civic virtue suggests. Yet, in the end, Reinhardt brackets such concerns and finds (ostensibly in concurrence with Tocqueville) a need for some degree of civic virtue in order to preserve difference in the face of democracy’s own homogenizing tendencies. As he puts it...

Rather than simply imposing conformity in the name of sovereign freedom, then, Tocqueville paradoxically imposes conformity in the name of difference, using freedom and democracy as the middle terms of this transaction.

(p. 81)

Somewhat like a good capitalist who fears the impact of monopoly on the market, Reinhardt’s Tocqueville fears social and political hegemonies in democracy and looks for some foundational remedy beneath democracy to maintain difference.

Indeed, although he might phrase it in more contemporary language, like “regimes du savoir” or power relations, Reinhardt seems to think that, left to its own devices, democratic society would promote majoritarian repressions and tyrannies—not only in government, but also and more powerfully in sentiments, “habits of the heart,” and consciousness. Hence, democracies need “foundations that will necessarily foreclose as well as open possibilities, subordinating some (parts) of us even as they authorize and empower others.” Although, he hopes (now breaking with Tocqueville) that even these foundations “need not remain uncontested or unchanging.” (p. 84)

Still, Reinhardt’s break with Tocqueville is intriguing and important. Where Tocqueville is presented as endeavoring to secure difference on a foundation of privileged identity, Reinhardt is up to something importantly different. Rather than generally privileging identity, both difference and identity are to be privileged. Each is presented as constitutive and limiting the other with the intention of simultaneously problematizing and securing each. Reading Tocqueville’s purported concern with difference against his concern for identity and vice versa, Reinhardt pries open a gap where both identity and difference have equal even if contradictory validity. Therein lies a sense of the book’s title: the “art” of being free.

Similarly, at least at first, Reinhardt pursues a parallel to this Toquevillian treatment in his reading of Marx. With Marx it is two contending approaches to freedom that are juxtaposed. “Freedom as transcendence” is sketched in the place of identity. “Freedom of political practice” is the stand in for difference. In the parlance of Marxist orthodoxy, freedom as transcendence (identity) refers to Marx’s understanding of the meaning of history that begins with the alienation of labor and culminates in the revolution. On the other hand, freedom as political practice (difference) refers to the critical practices by which...