It has been 32 years since Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history and the victory of liberal democracy over its ideological rivals. Since this peak of liberalism’s confidence in its future, it is fair to say that our faith in liberal democracy’s inevitable triumph has been deeply shaken. The persistence of economic and social inequality, the rise of illiberal populist groups, the growing polarization among political parties, the declining trust in liberal democratic institutions, and the increasing atomization of liberal societies represent for many political thinkers an indication of some fundamental flaws or at least tensions within liberal democracy itself. Recently, scholars have located the source of our political woes in liberalism (Patrick Deneen), neoliberalism (Wendy Brown), populism (Nadia Urbinati), meritocracy (Michael Sandel), democracy (Jason Brennan), or capitalism (Thomas Piketty), to name just a few efforts.
In The Democratic Soul, Aaron Herold joins this cause but instead argues that the Enlightenment itself is the ultimate source of the pathologies of liberal democracy. Yet his argument is unlike the critical theory indictment—associated above all with Horkheimer and Adorno—that the Enlightenment unleashes a form of instrumental rationality that, aiming at the domination of nature, ends up also dominating human beings. Instead of the Enlightenment being too powerful and all-pervasive, Herold contends that it is too constrained, envisioning too cramped a conception of spiritual fulfillment. Its emphatically this-worldly concerns fail to satisfy our human longing for the infinite, and so despite its universal promise, including the promise of the end of history, perpetual peace, and universal human rights, there remains something deeply unsatisfactory about the broader meaning and purpose of this promise, giving rise then to Enlightenment’s many discontents.
Herold makes his case by critically examining Baruch Spinoza—in his view, the exemplar of Enlightenment politics and philosophy—with the help of Alexis de Tocqueville, the hero of the book who corrects Spinoza with a more satisfying account of spiritual longing. Much of the book consists in novel, penetrating readings of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Herold approaches these familiar modern texts with his comprehensive concern of examining the theology behind the Enlightenment, and the result is splendid. I did not think that, for example, much more could be said that is new about Democracy in America, but Herold proved me wrong.
The book has two parts. In the first part, consisting of the first two chapters, Herold examines Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s work is one of the deepest critiques of religion in the modern age. Herold sees its critical potential at work most powerfully not in Spinoza’s textual criticisms of the Bible but in his broadsides against the religious conception of the highest form of life, the life of piety, which inevitably requires on Spinoza’s view a form of blind submission. This submission betrays what is highest in human life, our freedom and rationality, capacities that can only be fully realized in the life of philosophy and in the institutions of liberal democracy.
For Herold, however, Spinoza’s liberation of human beings from all religious fetters leaves the philosopher with a conundrum: What kind of normative order should govern human beings characterized as free and rational? As Herold points out, Spinoza’s notion of natural rights justifies not “what ought to be” but rather only “what is” (p. 87). Natural right thereby legitimates the natural pursuit of liberated self-interest in all its forms, even when one’s self-interest might conflict with another’s. According to Herold, faced with the need for a doctrine of virtue but without the philosophical grounding for it, Spinoza must defend groundless “ideologies” to maintain stability and order (p. 112): Spinoza’s own defense of the “freedom from all ruses” will thereby “be the product of a ruse” (p. 110). In sum, then, Herold argues that this contradiction in Spinoza’s project reveals that the Enlightenment attempt to purge the psychology of submission to the divine fails. All societies must rely on something beyond human agency to ground and limit human ambition.
Not all Spinoza scholars will be convinced, I trust, by Herold’s readings of Spinoza. Herold aims not only to show that there are contradictions in Spinoza’s argument but also that Spinoza himself was aware of them and tried to hide them. At points, Herold’s reading stretches Spinoza’s intentions too far, as, for example, when he argues that Spinoza “tips his hand and reveals that he cannot be entirely serious in speaking of natural rights as rights” in an “important endnote” (p. 88). The evidence provided in that footnote strikes me as less than decisive. Nevertheless, I do find his general critique of Spinoza’s project to be well motivated and worthy of scholarly confrontation. One significant reply to Herold would involve turning to Spinoza’s Ethics, which is not discussed in Herold’s book. On one reading of this text, Spinoza is attempting to re-enchant a thoroughly secular, modern scientific world with an immanent God and thereby restore a place for spirituality within the modern world, an interpretation offered by and influential on German Romantic thinkers. I would be interested in Herold’s assessment of the success of Spinoza’s efforts on this front.
In the second half of the book, Herold turns to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. One of the most interesting parts of the book is that Herold rereads many of Tocqueville’s familiar criticisms of democracy as criticisms of the Enlightenment more broadly. For Herold, Tocqueville worries about the tendency, for example, of the Enlightenment to countenance the infinite striving after material goods, which results in the endless expansion of our desires without any complete satisfaction. To address these limitations of the Enlightenment, Tocqueville counsels maintaining some institutions from the aristocratic world, such as honor and religion, that can sublimate and ennoble our desires, giving them significance and limits.
Readers of Tocqueville tend either to deny or affirm that he held a view of human nature. The historicist camp sees Tocqueville as defending a view of the human being as thoroughly shaped by the social state in which she is educated. By contrast, the alternative view sees Tocqueville as defending a core conception of human nature that can be partially shaped by one’s social state. Herold belongs to the second group and places great emphasis on those chapters in Democracy in America in which Tocqueville claims that religious longings are natural to the human soul, especially the longing for immortality.
The main issue I would raise with Herold’s Tocqueville is that it strikes me as an excessively aristocratic interpretation. Herold places most of his emphasis in his reading on honor, human excellence, and the pursuit of the sublime as means for combating the homogenization and leveling of democratic life. Undoubtedly these elements are present in a big book such as Democracy in America. However, Herold mostly overlooks the democratic side of Tocqueville, who counters democracy’s excesses with more democracy, such as self-interest rightly understood, or social and political associations, or lawyers, or administrative decentralization, and so on. Very little of the motivation in these latter, more well-known solutions involves spirituality. Perhaps, then, it might be possible to characterize Tocqueville not as breaking from the Enlightenment but as limiting and modifying it.
The Democratic Soul offers a great model of scholarship in the history of political theory—innovative close readings of classic texts that contribute to our understanding of the fundamental problems facing our age.
