INTRODUCTION

This chapter appears in a collective work along with other chapters focused upon such topics as Tocqueville's political philosophy, theory of revolution, and analysis of the ancien regime. No doubt their authors will discuss Tocqueville's theories of liberty, and the ways in which equality, revolution, and administrative centralization endanger liberty in modern democracies. Hence, these subjects will be alluded to when relevant to my own concerns, but not discussed in detail. My purpose is to clarify Tocqueville's conceptualizations of modern regimes incompatible with liberty - that is, those governments he classified under the rubrics of “despotism” and “tyranny.”

These regime types have played a significant part in political thought since classical antiquity. They may appear to be curious choices of terms for a theorist such as Tocqueville, who insisted on the radical novelty of modern post-revolutionary democracies. Another paradox derives from the fact that Tocqueville conflated the concepts of ''despotism'' and ''tyranny,'' terms that had been historically distinguished from one another until the late eighteenth century.

The ambiguities and resources of comparative method

Comparison and contrast were used by eighteenth-century European thinkers to characterise their nations and continent, as well as their historical epoch. This was done by distinguishing the arrangements of each nation from its neighbours’, by contrasting European regimes, societies, economies, cultures, and religions with those elsewhere in the world, and by juxtaposing their own time with periods preceding it. This comparative mode of analysis was deployed in conflicts between the champions and enemies of Enlightenment, in the sharp disagreements separating defenders of absolutism from those opposed to it, and in disputes about established churches and their theologies. Although political theory was often conducted through comparison and contrast between European regimes, the application of the method to the rest of the world was no less significant. Some modern interpreters hold that European thinkers assumed their continent’s superiority, and thus that ‘Enlightenment’ went hand in hand with imperial subjugation of non-Europeans. Others, on the contrary, say that xenophilia, étrangisme, and the conviction of European inferiority, decline, and corruption prevailed among intellectuals (Baudet 1988, pp. 50–1).

This chapter addresses some of the numerous and complex ways in which European writers used comparative discourse. It examines the extent to which key concepts in this discourse were shaped by theorists’ preferences and their positions on domestic controversies within their respective nations, as well as on issues during conflicts among European states within their own continent and in overseas competition for colonies. It asks whether there was any consensus about the superiority of Europeans over the rest of world, or about the legitimacy of European conquests, colonisation, and commerce, including the slave trade.

This book was occasioned by a conference noting the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état of the Eighteenth Brumaire (November 9), 1799. At that time no one could have imagined that this nearly botched seizure of power would put an end to the First Republic, lead to the Consulate and First Empire, and thus alter the course of European and world history. Often taken to be the squalid end to the great revolution begun in 1789, this first coup of Napoleon Bonaparte's served as the precedent for a second in December 1851 by his nephew, Louis Napoleon. Then another Bonaparte terminated another great revolution, that of 1848, by replacing the Second Republic with his own empire.

What was the significance of these ostensibly repetitive sequences: a major revolution against a relatively mild monarchy, overthrow by force of the successor republican government, and the creation of an empire much more repressive than the monarchy prior to its republican predecessor? After 1851, many acute analysts of European politics concurred in the judgment that, taken together, these events constituted a qualitatively new phenomenon, a type of rule at once growing out of the French revolutions and a reaction against them.

Much has been written about Tocqueville's concept of liberty. But how did he conceptualize the types of regime most threatening to liberty in societies of the sort (état social démocratique) he declared inevitable? While some important answers have been offered, they are limited to De la Démocratie en Amérique, which tends to be treated as though there were no subsequent developments in Tocqueville's concept of democratic or administrative despotism. Nor has there been critical analysis of the ambiguities, shifts, and varied applications of this concept, as Tocqueville used it throughout his life. For despite his cogent criticisms of “despotism” and “tyranny” as classifications of modern regimes, Tocqueville nevertheless retained these terms when he dealt with those regimes systematically denying political liberty. To understand the concept as employed in Tocqueville's thought, his formulations of it must be located both within his texts and considered in relation to his experience within the three decades of his career as political theorist, politician, and historian. Tocqueville never stopped analyzing how the regimes founded first by Napoleon and then Louis Bonaparte were related to those concepts which dominated his thought: democracy, revolution, centralization, liberty, and equality.

After many vacillations, Tocqueville diagnosed the two Bonapartes, their coups d'etat, and their empires as distinctively modern, as post-revolutionary and post-democratic. He emphasized the unacknowledged paradox that from the two French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, the greatest hitherto known, had emerged not emancipation, but a regime considerably more repressive than the monarchies that had been overthrown.

Peter Burke has established three main approaches to the history of ideas, each of them dominant in a different language area. ‘In Germany there is Begriffsgeschichte, a “history of concepts” on the border between the history of language and the history of society.’ Within this German style, there are significant variations in how this relationship between the histories of concepts and societies has been perceived and practised. Although these differences will be discussed briefly, my concern here will be primarily with that theory of Begriffsgeschichte developed by Reinhart Koselleck in his writing on historiography, the theory of historical knowledge (Historik) and the history of concepts. His programme has been applied by himself and many other contributors in more than 7,000 pages of the great lexicon, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG), which he guided to completion after the deaths of its two other editors.

This chapter will centre on the relationship of Koselleck's theory and practice of conceptual history to current controversies about language, meaning and the interpretation of texts. After having spread from literary criticism and philosophy to historiography and intellectual history, these disagreements are now moving on to centre stage in discussions of how the history of political thought ought to be written. It is thus worth considering the implications of the history of political language as treated in this German version of the ‘linguistic turn’. Unlike French theory, whether in its structuralist, post-structuralist or deconstructionist variants, the principal challenge from German sources to Begriffsgeschichte in Koselleck's style has been posed by what he has called the ‘radical hermeneutics’ of Heidegger and Gadamer. His complex relationship to them needs explication.