Tocqueville and Nietzsche on the Problem of Human Greatness in Democracy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Jean Yarbrough, and especially Catherine Zuckert for their very helpful comments on this article.

Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Nietzsche are in many ways an odd pair of thinkers to bring together for purposes of comparison. Tocqueville was an aristocrat who accepted democracy, albeit not always enthusiastically; Nietzsche was a village pastor's son who denounced democracy and called for a new type of aristocracy. Tocqueville was a thoroughly political man who served as a representative in France's legislative chamber and as a cabinet minister; Nietzsche considered himself to be the "last antipolitical German" (EH, "Wise," 3)¹and generally expressed nothing but contempt for ordinary politics. Tocqueville professed little interest in philosophy and the abstractions of metaphysics;²Nietzsche possessed unmatched philosophical eros and was one of the boldest speculators in the history of Western philosophy. Tocqueville emphasized the utility of religion and the morally beneficial influence of Christianity; Nietzsche famously proclaimed that God was dead and called Christianity the "calamity of millennia" (EH, "Wise," 7).

For all of their differences in political outlook and intellectual temperament, though, Tocqueville and Nietzsche share a common concern with the tendency to mediocrity and loss of human greatness in modern democratic life. For Tocqueville this is an important problem with democracy;³for Nietzsche it is arguably the only problem. They are by no means the only thinkers in the nineteenth century to be concerned with this problem; reflection on it can be found in writers as various as Goethe, Stendhal, Carlyle, Emerson, and John Stuart Mill, to name just a few. But what links Tocqueville and Nietzsche distinctively together and makes them particularly comparable is that they view the problem of greatness in democracy from the standpoint of aristocracy, and this allows them to discern the possibilities and limitations of democracy more clearly and profoundly than their nineteenth-century contemporaries, not to mention we who live almost wholly within the democratic horizon with no real connection to the aristocratic past. Whereas Mill optimistically believed that the good qualities of aristocracy and democracy could somehow be combined,⁴Tocqueville and Nietzsche understood that these two regimes reflect "two distinct kinds of...