Gan Yang, "Liberalism"

Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?[1]

Gan Yang 甘阳
 
Translated by William Sima and Tang Xiaobing 唐小兵
 
Translators’ Introduction
 
Gan Yang 甘阳 (b.1952) is one of China’s leading experts on Western philosophy and intellectual history, and a prominent educator and publisher in this field. Since the mid-1990s he has often been identified as a leading member of the New Left (新左派) in China, although he himself disputes this. Gan was a voracious reader of Western philosophy during his youth in Hangzhou and as an “educated youth” (知识青年) sent to work at the oilfields near Daqing, Heilongjiang province, between 1970 to 1978. In a 2005 interview Gan credited his ability to recite from memory passages of The Social Contract, by the French revolutionary thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau features prominently in the present text) to a formative encounter with the work at age fourteen. In 1973 Gan was tasked with teaching philosophy to workers and peasants at Daqing, and recalls Georg Hegel and Immanuel Kant as being influential to his thinking during the final years of the Cultural Revolution.[2]
 
In 1978 Gan entered the University of Heilongjiang, graduating with a general bachelor's degree in 1982. In 1985 he earned a masters in Western philosophy at Peking University, and soon thereafter attained national renown in the “culture craze” (文化热) of the 1980s, as the lead editor of the influential book series, 文化: 中国与世界 (Culture: China in the World). The series was noted as being the first systematic project to translate Western thought in the PRC since 1949, and had grown to include more than one hundred titles after its first year alone.[3]
 
Forced to leave the country following the June 1989 Tiananmen Incident, Gan undertook further research at the University of Chicago, before moving to the University of Hong Kong in 1999. The present essay, “Liberalism: For the Aristocrats or for the People?”, was published in the influential journal, 读书 (Reading) in the same year. A culmination of Gan’s engagement with liberal intellectual history — as the author self-consciously notes, his 1989 essays on Isaiah Berlin were the first to introduce key aspects of liberal theory to readers in the PRC — it was highly influential in the polemics between the New Left and Liberals (自由派) that began in the second half of the 1990s. In 2000 it was reprinted in 知识分子立场 (Intellectual Positions), a book series covering these debates.[4] In the following translation we present the essay as it first appeared for mainland Chinese readers, and endeavour to preserve something of Gan Yang's grandiloquent, and at times haughty writing style.
 
Gan begins the essay with the charge that liberal discourse in China evinces a pervading concern, born of a kind of intellectual conservatism (保守主义), for promoting freedom for intellectual elites and the upper classes at the expense of democracy and equality for the masses. Stating the need to “reject using liberalism to negate democracy; reject evoking the English Revolution to discredit the French Revolution; reject citing [Edmund] Burke to discredit Rousseau; and reject using all of them to negate twentieth century Chinese revolutionary history”, Gan guides the reader through the work of a broad array of Western thinkers. His aim is to demonstrate that tension between elitist and mass forms of liberalism — which he dubs the “Tocqueville problem”, in reference to the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville — has been evident all throughout the Western liberal tradition, and to a greater extent than contemporary proponents of liberalism and market reform in China are perhaps willing to acknowledge.
           
While Gan's earlier 1989 essays, noted above, along with the present work, have led many to associate his name with the liberal revival in 1990s China, Gan has rejected this association. While influential to a revival in discussions of liberalism, he has been critical of the philosophy and its influence in China and steadfast in his defence of mass democracy and nationalism. Gan later defended the “creative destruction” of the Maoist period as a necessary precursor for reform, and anti-Western protests during the Beijing 2008 Olympic year as a “voluntarily organised” celebration of five thousand years of Chinese civilisation, one hundred years of resisting foreign imperialism between the Opium Wars and the founding of the PRC, and sixty years of national self-strengthening since 1949. Gan has also been a vocal proponent of Carl Schmitt, an anti-liberal German philosopher of the Nazi period who has been popular among Chinese nationalists since the mid-2000s.[5] 
 
In a rebuttal to an earlier version of this essay, the historian Lei Yi 雷颐 charges that the term “conservative” in Chinese discourse refers not to new trends in liberal thought in China, as Gan implies in his opening lines, but rather to those at this time who continued to uphold the Cultural Revolution, oppose market reforms, and advocate for returning to a planned economy. For Gan to neglect this discursive context and to apply Euro-American concepts of conservatism as a “standard for China”, is, for Lei Yi, “misleading”, and “misses the point”. Lei also accuses Gan of being overgeneralizing in his criticisms of the “intellectual landscape of 1990s China”, all the while ignoring or distorting recent scholarship on the very ideas he critiques.[6]
 
It is indeed difficult to tell whom within the stated “basic trajectory of Chinese thought since the 1990s” Gan intends to direct his attacks. The author uses inverted commas both to emphasize his own ideas and to cite other works, although the distinction between his own rhetoric and quoted text is often unclear (Gan provides no references). In this translation we give footnotes indicating the English-language works, and English translations from the original French and German, that correspond to Gan’s citations.
 
 
Translation
 
The basic trajectory of Chinese thought since the 1990s has, on the whole, evolved from the late 1980s critique of radicalism and moved increasingly towards conservatism and even ultra-conservatism. The basic form of this type of conservatism typically manifests itself by disparaging and denying democratic equality in the name of liberalism, resulting in so-called “liberalism” being understood more as the privilege of the few, rather than as a right possessed by all. In fact, many of the intellectuals who pontificate about liberalism today are talking about liberty for the bosses and liberty for the intellectuals; that is, liberty for the wealthy, liberty for the strong, and liberty for the capable. At the same time, they neglect even to mention that the starting point for the liberal theory of rights is the rights of all, and on this point it must be emphasised that this means particularly those who are unable to protect their own rights: the weak, the unfortunate, the poor, the hired hands and the uneducated. If it is the case that “no error is more egregious than that of confounding freedom with free competition,” as Frank Knight of the Chicago School, who devoted his life to the study of the relationship between the market economy and freedom, sternly warned in his classic, The Ethics of Competition, then it is precisely this great error that has now become the collective faith of the Chinese intelligentsia.[7] That is, they have reduced the idea of freedom to that of freedom of the market, thinking that a free economy will automatically produce the greatest freedom. Within this version of freedom, democracy is an extravagance, equality is even more sinful, and the law of the jungle becomes the first principle of liberalism.
 
I refer to this collective faith as the “shared moral cancer of the Chinese intelligentsia”, because it suggests that the Chinese intelligentsia has already almost lost the most basic sense of morality and justice. At the same time, this collective faith can also be called the “collective feeble-mindedness of the Chinese intelligentsia,” because it reveals their inability to grasp the basic consensus in contemporary scholarship, which is that virtually any inquiry in the humanities and social sciences starts from the ideal of equal liberty, the notion that “each and every person is a free and equal moral individual.” And yet in China, this ideal of liberty is so rare as to have left hardly a trace on the Chinese intelligentsia. On the contrary, what they enthusiastically discuss is actually “unequal freedom.” Especially absurd is that, while the minority frenziedly plunders the assets and increasingly threatens the basic safeguards of the majority, we instead observe many people shaking their heads and wringing their hands about the “tyranny of the majority.” Why not have the guts to do some soul-searching as to whether the Chinese intelligentsia is in fact using its intellectual privileges in support of the minority’s privileges, in upholding the rights of all?
 
The phrase “Chinese intelligentsia” above might not be completely appropriate, because in fact more people nowadays already do not identify with the above-mentioned collective faith. I am only pointing out mainstream tendencies, and not addressing any particular individual.
 
Since the basic discourse of Chinese conservatism in the 1990s was not limited to the ideology of the market economy, but had more to do with debasing democracy and equality in the name of liberalism, this essay will therefore focus once again on the relationship between liberalism and democracy.
 
The relationship or tension between liberalism, democracy and equality is an old problem in liberal theory. Generally speaking, this tension cannot be resolved through one side prevailing over the other; that is, “unequal liberty” and “illiberal equality” are both unacceptable, and for this reason the crux of the matter lies in how best to maintain, in theory and in practice, the appropriate equilibrium in a tension of this kind. Since in past socialist experience, the ideal of liberty has in general been rejected, and the ideal of equality has at least in theory been approved, intellectual circles have accorded a particular priority to liberty. In fact this has been a particular concern of mine in the past. In 1989, I published “The Idea of Liberty” and “The Enemy of Liberty” in Reading, and I was the first in China to introduce Isaiah Berlin’s ideas on the differences between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom”. Not long after going abroad, I published “Discarding ‘Science and Democracy,’ Establishing ‘Liberty and Order’,” (Twenty-First Century, February 1999). I also concentrated on raising the problem of the tension between liberty and democracy in an effort to describe the differences between the Scottish and French Enlightenments, and the dividing line between the English Revolution and the French Revolution, and put forward “Establishing Liberty and Order” as the summary of what was at that time my political philosophy of “Euro-American liberty.” This basic line of thought also ran through the other essays I published at that time, such as “Progress in Constitutional Drafting in Eastern Europe: A Survey,” “A Critique of the Concept of Civil Society,” and so on (both of which have since been published in my Beyond Radicalism and Conservatism).
 
However, I have since become more and more conscious of the limitations in this line of thinking, because it leads almost inevitably to a certain type of anachronism—that is, impulsively worshipping before the English liberalism of the “pre-democratic age,” i.e. aristocratic liberalism—and thereby neglecting precisely the process in which liberalism, especially English liberalism since the French revolution, has gradually taken a key historical turn towards “democratic liberalism.” The fundamental reason that Alexis de Tocqueville turned to the study of “Democracy in America,” and not “Liberalism in England,” was that he thought that English liberalism before the French Revolution (typically symbolized by the Glorious Revolution of 1688) was pre-democratic liberalism, and that this type of old-style, non-democratic liberalism was already inadequate in helping liberals to face the challenges posed by the democratic age. Tocqueville went on to suggest that the arrival of the democratic age implied a “need for a new kind of political science,” because the question for modern liberalism was not in “reconstructing an aristocratic society, but ... to make freedom spring from within democratic society.”[8] In other words, liberalism in the age of democracy must move towards democratic liberalism. This is why Tocqueville expressed total approval of the contemporary “English radicals” principles for reform: to allow the citizens to take their rightful position as rulers and enable them to rule.
 
I call the change in liberalism from an aristocratic political form to a democratic political form the “Tocqueville problem”, because in the history of liberal thought, Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to focus on the question of sublating aristocratic liberalism and moving towards a democratic form of liberalism. This forces all those who claim to be liberals to answer the question: what is this liberalism that you brag about? Is it non-democratic or even anti-democratic liberalism, or is it democratic liberalism?
 
I personally think that the Chinese intelligentsia’s recent soul-searching on revolution and radicalism has reached its limit, and indeed has started to turn upon itself. Because Chinese intellectuals have not realized that liberalism in modern conditions can only be a democratic liberalism, they have reached a series of specious conclusions. For example, many believe that twentieth century China went down entirely the wrong path, mistakenly imitating the French model instead of taking the English path. Recent studies of early modern history have thus often asked, in an ahistorical way, how modern Chinese people could have gone wrong — for example, why did the Chinese not choose reform over revolution, gradualism over radicalism, freedom over equality, why did they run fanatically after “positive freedom” instead of embracing “negative freedom”? This ahistorical study of history can only lead Chinese intellectual circles to a “liberalism of the pre-democratic era”, in the name of which they constantly belittle democracy and equality and praise conservatism, even ultra-conservatism.
 
I think that today it is particularly necessary to propose the following: that we reject using liberalism to negate democracy; reject evoking the English Revolution to discredit the French Revolution; reject citing Burke to discredit Rousseau; and reject using all of them to negate twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary history since the Republican Revolution, and the history of modern Chinese thought since May Fourth. Rather, all of these should be re-examined from the broad historical perspective of what Tocqueville considers the “advent of the era of democracy.” We need not disavow radicalism and embrace conservatism, but instead ought to “transcend radical and conservative” simultaneously!
 
Allow me to point out first that Isaiah Berlin, a figure already quite familiar to China’s intelligentsia, was neither moved by his profound reflection on “positive freedom” to reject the French Revolution, nor through his explication of “negative freedom”, to embrace Burkean conservatism. On the contrary, in his 1990 work The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Berlin placed Burke in the ranks of the reactionaries, provoking a challenge from his friend, the Burke specialist Conor Cruise O’Brien. But on 10 April 1991, Berlin answered the challenge by stating unequivocally: “I cannot help but feel sympathy for the French Revolution, and to that extent some antipathy to the admirable Burke.”[9] And it was also no accident, Berlin notes, that may later reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre cited Burke as their great master. Much of what Burke advocated was “deeply illiberal,” namely his “respect for hierarchy; and for rule by a gentlemanly elite”. Hence Berlin asked: “Should one describe a man with such views a liberal pluralist?” On June 24 of the same year, he further explained that he stood on the side of the French Revolution, reasoning that:
 
It does seem to me that it [the French Revolution] inspired people to attack prejudice, superstition, obscurantism, cruelty, oppression, hatred of democracy, and to struggle for various liberties. … In France the ideological divisions were always pro-and-anti the French Revolution; and the antis were genuine reactionaries… Hence, if I have to line up, I line up with the Revolution — despite all the fallacies and the horrors.[10]
 
Berlin’s confessional taking of sides after the Cold War was startling and revelatory. In terms of Chinese intellectual circles after 1989, I think it was purely coincidental that they should have simultaneously embarked on a critique of radicalism and utopianism, and begun to question the French revolutionary tradition and Rousseau’s thought. As necessary as it may have been then, in today’s China we have to ask whether this soul-searching has not led toward yet another extreme: has it not, on the one hand, moved from questioning the negative consequences of the French Revolution, to totally disavowing the French Revolution and its momentous influence in modern China? On the other hand, in taking Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution to be the true essence of the “Anglo-American liberalism,” does this stance not also imply that “respect for hierarchy and for rule by a gentlemanly elite,” and similar “deeply illiberal” ideas, are the sacrosanct, inalienable principles of “liberalism”?
 
In this respect, Berlin’s criticism of Burke, and his solemn warning that “all those who are against the French Revolution were genuine reactionaries”, should be taken very seriously by Chinese intellectuals today. This is because his warning reminds us that the liberal critique of the French Revolution is not the same as the Burkean conservative critique; even less should it be tarred with the same brush as the wholesale repudiation of the French Revolution by the “reactionaries.” Here, it must be mentioned that Berlin’s position on the French Revolution comes from an oft-neglected special liberal tradition, namely the French liberal tradition that Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) established after the French Revolution. It is not by chance that Berlin sees Constant and John Stuart Mill as the “fathers of liberalism” because, in fact, Berlin’s famous distinction between the two freedoms (negative freedom and positive freedom) originates from Constant’s well-known 1819 thesis, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” The most significant aspect of what can be called this “post-Revolutionary French liberalism” is that, on one hand, its proponents summed up the historical lessons of the French Revolution, while on the other, they took responsibility themselves to defend the basic principle of the Revolution. Thus, while Burke stood with the ancien regime when he decried the “illegitimacy” of the Revolution, French liberalism begins by first affirming the Revolution’s “legitimacy,” and on this basis proceeds to a critical examination of  the Revolution. It is therefore not surprising that Constant, after reading Burke’s 1790 book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, noted bluntly that it “contained more absurdities than lines.”[11]    
 
The great historian of French liberalism, Francois Guizot (1787-1874), introduced to Western historiography the concept of the “history of civilization” to link “the past” with “the present.” He emphasized that modernity as represented by the French Revolution was not a total rupture from the past; rather, it was the “legitimate inheritor” of civilizational progress. This liberal historiographical interpretation of “history” broke the Conservative’s monopoly on explaining the “historical past”. Guizot’s father was guillotined during the French Revolution, forcing the seven-year-old son and his mother into exile overseas, yet still he refuted the Burkean conservative critique of that Revolution. He once famously declared, in a line that is most representative of the French liberal position on the Revolution’s “legitimacy,” that despite the numerous errors and crimes of the Revolutionary period, it was still a “terrible but legitimate battle of right against privilege, of legal liberty against despotism … to the Revolution alone belongs the task of regulating itself, of purging itself.”[12]
 
In other words, only by first “standing on the side of the French Revolution” can one truly critique and examine it. Guizot’s student Tocqueville quickly took this basic perspective and transformed it into the notion that “only by standing on the side of democracy” can you truly critique and examine democracy, for according to Tocqueville, the French Revolution was essentially a “democratic revolution,” and thus the question of the French Revolution was, at its core, a question of democracy.
 
Today’s readers will not generally ask why at that time Tocqueville decided to forego what was close at hand and seek what was far away, going to America to investigate democracy rather than going to England to investigate liberalism. In fact, this question is not only crucial to understanding Tocqueville’s thought, but also incredibly important to understanding liberalism’s own development. According to Tocqueville, his decision to focus on America emerged first from his belief that for post-revolutionary France and Europe, the model provided by England’s so-called “Glorious Revolution” was not a useful example to follow; in fact it was just the opposite, for England’s past revolution had occurred in a pre-democratic age, and as such its meaning was localized and partial. The French Revolution, on the other hand, was global and universal, and as such he believed that the question going forward was not that of France imitating England, but rather that England sooner or later would have to follow the course that France had taken. The only issue was whether England could avoid the terrible violence that had marked the French experience. After examining the English reforms of the period, Tocqueville pointed out that the changes that had occurred in the wake of the “Reform Bill” of 1832 were different than England’s past revolution in that they were now already a part of Europe’s democratic revolution, and that in fact they were the continuation of the French Revolution in Britain: 
 
The previous revolutions that the English have undergone were essentially English in substance and form. The ideas that gave birth to them circulated only in England. … It is no longer so today: today it is the European revolution that is being continued among the English … Now, the English have indeed taken our [French] ideas. … They are European in substance, English in form.[13]
 
Here it should be pointed out that the concept of a so-called “Anglo-American liberalism” (I myself have used it in the past) is actually an extremely ambiguous and misleading term, for it greatly blurs the important differences that exist between England and America. In Tocqueville’s age, America and England in fact represented two very different political choices. After the French Revolution, particularly after the fall of Napoleon in 1814 and the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy through to Tocqueville’s publishing of the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, the intellectual atmosphere in France and in Europe resembled the intellectual world of contemporary China. It was full of comparisons of the English and French models, and brimming with a desire to take England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution as a template. At the time, Burke’s critique of the French Revolution had enormous influence over all of Europe, and it was seemingly very natural for people to use the English model as a means of thinking about the question of European reconstruction in the post-revolutionary period. If Tocqueville also saw the question in this way then there would have been no need to go to America to investigate “democracy”; he would have gone to English to investigate liberalism. 
 
Yet Tocqueville had early on began to doubt this automatic tendency to glorify England, and in his important long work, “Reflections on English History”, he reached his own conclusions. The work offers a summary of English history from the Norman conquest down to Tocqueville’s age, and was the product of considerable reflection. What is particularly meaningful is that Tocqueville provides a positive appraisal of England’s 1640 Revolution, while his view of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 is decidedly negative. He believes that the Revolution of 1640 was a victory for England’s common people, which saw the establishment of a republic, while the Revolution of 1688 was a restoration of the feudal aristocracy, which rendered the 1640 revolution incomplete. Before he ends his work, Tocqueville stresses that he cannot see any benefit in the way that French people of his age hoped for their own 1688 revolution, and he states that after summarizing England’s history he himself feels “prouder  to be born on this side of the channel” (meaning France).[14] It is not strange then that, two years later, when France’s July Revolution broke out, and with many liberals in the country looking upon it as France’s own 1688 revolution, Tocqueville further affirmed his sentiment that “England could not be looked upon as a model,” leaving France for America.[15]    
 
We should note that when Tocqueville returned from his travels in America, but before he began formally writing Democracy in America, he decided that before he could begin writing he had to go to England to investigate conditions there, so as to confirm his basic belief that, even in England, the system of aristocratic liberalism was no longer sustainable. The results of his investigations completely confirmed his premonition, that England was itself already in the whirlwind of democratic revolution: “If any fundamental change in the law, or any social transformation, or any substitution of one regulating principle for another is called a revolution, then England assuredly is in a state of revolution. For the aristocratic principle which was the vital one of the English constitution, is losing strength every day, and it is probable that in due time the democratic one will have taken its place.”[16] After returning from this trip to England Tocqueville hesitated no longer, and threw himself wholeheartedly into writing Democracy in America.   
 
What needs to be pointed out here is that it is not advisable to translate the famous title of  Tocqueville’s book as “American Democracy.” Rather, it should only be translated as “Democracy in America,” for just as Tocqueville himself emphasized, his book sought to express “a single thought”, which was: “the thought of the approaching irresistible and universal spread of democracy throughout the world”.[17] In other words, Tocqueville’s central question is above all the coming of the age of democracy, and he emphasized that the question of democracy is “universal and enduring.” For this reason he repeatedly emphasized that the question that his book raised “is of interest not to the United States only, but to the whole world; not to one nation, but to all mankind.”[18] The reason why he became interested in the condition of democracy “in America” was because he believed that the precondition for the arrival of the “democratic age” in Europe was, without exception, the destruction of the aristocratic system, and that this was a phase that the “democratic revolution” had to go through. Because America’s history was short, it did not have an “aristocratic age,” and as such the uniqueness of “democracy in America” was that it did not require the overthrow of an aristocratic order as its precondition. As such, it avoided democratic revolution of the European kind. Tocqueville believed that because democracy in Europe emerged only through revolution, many people had become accustomed to believing that there was a necessary relationship between democracy and chaos and revolution. Yet his investigations regarding America sought to tell us that the chaos that democracy brings is a temporary phenomenon belonging to a transitional period. It is not the essence of democracy, for the true relationship between democracy and revolution is without doubt: the more developed democracy is, the less chaos there will be, with revolution becoming less and less likely. 
 
We know that Tocqueville entertained no notions of “democracy as a panacea”; on the contrary, he emphasized the inevitability of the approaching democratic era and the myriad complications it would produce. He anticipated how his analysis of democracy might be used both to defend and to criticize democracy, and therefore set himself a two-fold objective: to remind democracy’s defenders not to imagine democracy as infallible, while convincing the detractors that democracy was not something to be feared. He hoped to “diminish the ardor of the former … and the terror of the latter … so that society could advance more peacefully toward the necessary fulfillment of its destiny”.[19] Any more detailed discussion of Tocqueville’s theory of democracy is beyond the scope of this essay, yet here one should at least note its most important premise, that the antithesis of democracy is aristocracy. All of Tocqueville’s theory is in fact rooted in an analytical framework that takes democratic and aristocratic systems as opposites. Viewing democracy as something uniquely “modern”, he asserted that neither the ancient Greek city-states nor the Roman Republic were democratic systems; rather, they were merely “aristocratic republics”.
 
The greatest challenge of modernity is precisely that every person demands to be treated as an equal individual. The ancient Greeks and Romans could not accept this in theory, while the Christian church of the middle ages could accept it only in theory, as something unobtainable in “life on earth” and to be hoped for in the “afterlife”. The reason that old-style European aristocratic liberalism could never adapt to the democratic era is because it was still rooted in an “unequal freedom;” that is, freedom as a privilege for the few, rather than a right possessed by all. Tocqueville thus evoked the “equality of conditions” in his summary of modern democracy. That throughout his life Tocqueville saw Rousseau as one of two his two most respected intellectual mentors (the other being Pascal) and commented that he read a little of Rousseau every day is hardly surprising. His own exhaustive analysis of democracy as an “equality of conditions” in fact follows directly from Rousseau’s critique of “inequality;” furthermore, this is especially true of the analysis of the basic characteristics of democracy in the second volume of Democracy in America, where even Tocqueville’s writing style shows the influence of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
 
Tocqueville’s great contribution to democratic theory was that, unlike the earlier view of democracy as simply one form of the polity, he saw democracy as a process of profound, far reaching change in all fields — from politics, law and social structure through to thought, the emotions, psychology, cultural and intellectual activity. The second volume of Democracy in America is a detailed inquiry into democracy as an “equality of conditions”, in relation to intellectual movements (in part one), sentiments (part two), mores (part three), and the effect that democratization in all areas of society and culture has on politics (in part four). In Western intellectual circles, Tocqueville has received renewed attention in recent decades because he articulated the perpetually unfolding nature of democracy, something which has only become even more pronounced in the last half of this century. The so-called challenges of postmodernism, feminism and so on are actually just increasingly intensified manifestations of what Tocqueville called the “democratization of culture;” they make the problem of “democracy”  today even more complex.
 
Tocqueville’s central concern is the constant tension between the mentality of modern humanity (what he calls “democratic man”), with his strong desire to pursue an “equality of conditions,” and the “system” of democratic society. Yet he points out a paradox of modern democracy, which is that while “equal conditions” continuously permeate all other fields of society, democracy, by contrast, might never advance in the “political” field. On this point, Tocqueville famously concluded that people in the democratic age would cherish equality far more than they cherish freedom. The kind of “freedom” that Tocqueville insists on here is “positive freedom”, or what Constant called “ancient liberty” (liberty of political participation).
 
I noted above that Berlin’s theory of the two types of freedom was born of Constant’s differentiation between ancient and modern liberty; that is to say, Berlin’s distinction between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom” is the same as Constant’s “liberty of the moderns” (liberty in one’s private life) and “liberty of the ancients” (liberty in political participation). Tocqueville exposition on this theme can also be traced to the same origin as Constant’s “two kinds of liberty” thesis. Constant had already noted that one of the greatest errors of the French Revolution was that the revolutionaries, taking their cue from Aristotle’s idea that men are “political animals,” understood liberty mainly as the “political liberty” of citizens participating in the public life of politics. They ignored the fact that the “liberty” sought by “modern man” mainly entails liberty in one’s private life and the protection of individual rights. Constant therefore highlighted an inherent danger of the “liberty of the ancients,” that public affairs and politics might infringe on people’s private lives, yet he also emphasized that: “the danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.” In other words, the twin danger of modern society is the “overpoliticization” of social life, and its “overprivatisation”; it is often the case that the former leads to the latter. For instance, “overpoliticization” during the French Revolution led to a widespread distain for politics, which in turn gave way to an “overprivatization” culminating in Napoleon’s rise to power. With this in mind Constant stressed especially: first, that individual liberty is always safeguarded by political liberty, and that if the citizens all refrain from political participation and thus abandon effective restrains on public power, the final result will be the end of guarantees of individual liberty. Second, only when its citizens fully exercise their right to political participation will a people develop strength of character, because “political liberty … enlarges people’s spirits, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.” Therefore, the relationship between the so-called “two kinds of liberty” — individual liberty and the liberty of political participation — is certainly not a mutually exclusive one; what is important is to “learn how to combine the two kinds of liberty”.[20]  
 
For Tocqueville, the threat that “overprivatization” in social life might lead to atrophy in political life posed an even greater problem. His declaration that the democratic age needed “a new political science” was made to address precisely this problem: that is, because people in the democratic age are naturally more concerned with “equality” in nonpolitical fields, and are not concerned about politics, it takes a great deal effort to prevent political dysfunction. Half a century later, Max Weber highlighted exactly the same problem as Tocqueville, stressing in particular that an apolitical people is not qualified to participate in world politics. It would be fitting for me to end this essay with the concluding passage from Weber’s “Suffrage and democracy in Germany”:
 
“Democratization” in the sense that the structure of social estates is being levelled by the state run by officials, is a fact. There are only two choices: either the mass of citizens is left without freedom or rights in a bureaucratic, ‘authoritarian state’ which has only the appearance of parliamentary rule, and in which the citizens are ‘administered’ like a herd of cattle; or the citizens are integrated into the state by making them its co-rulers. … Democratization can certainly be obstructed — for the same moment — because powerful interests, prejudices and cowardice are allied in opposing it. But it would soon emerge that the price to be paid for this would be the entire future of Germany. All the energies of the masses would then be engaged in a struggle against a state in which they are mere objects and in which they have no share. Certain circles may have an interest in the inevitable political consequences. The Fatherland certainly does not.[21]
 
 
Notes
 
[1] “自由主义: 贵族的还是平民的?”, 读书 [Reading] 1 (1999), pp.85-94.
 
[2] For Gan Yang’s early life and background through to the 1980s, see his interview in Zha Jianying 查建英, 八十年代访谈录 [The Eighties: Interviews], Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2016, pp.166-245.
 
[3] See Chen Fong-ching and Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese Popular Culture Movement and Political Transformation, 1979–1989, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997, pp.170-171.
 
[4] Li Shitao 李世涛 (ed.), 知识分子立场: 自由主义之争与中国思想界的分化 [Intellectual Positions: Debates on Liberalism and the Splintering of the Chinese Intellectual World], Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2000. An earlier version of this essay, published in the Hong-Kong journal, 二十一世纪 [Twenty-First Century], in 1997, was translated by Xudong Zhang. See “Debating Liberalism and Democracy in China”, in Xudong Zhang (ed.), Whither China: Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, pp.79-101.
 
[5] See Junpeng Li, The Making of Liberal Intellectuals in Post-Tiananmen China, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2017, pp.90-95.
 
[6] Lei Yi, “什么是保守? 谁反对民主? [What is Conservative? Who is Opposing Democracy?]”, Twenty-First Century 42 (April, 1997), pp.121-125.
 
[7] Frank Hyneman Knight, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 52. 
 
[8] Alexis de Tocqueville, George Lawrence (trans.), Democracy in America, New York: Harper & Row, 1966, p.670.
 
[9] Berlin to O’Brien, quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p.614.
 
[10] Berlin to O’Brien, ibid., pp.613, 617-618.
 
[11] Constant, cited in Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p.210.
 
[12] Guizot, cited in Stanley Mellon, Political Uses of History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958, p.29.
 
[13] Alexis de Tocqueville, Roger Boesche (ed.), Selected Letters on Politics and Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, p.106-107. Emphases in the original.
 
[14] Alexis de Tocuqueville, George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer (trans.), J.P. Mayer (ed.), Journeys to England and Ireland, London: Faber and Faber, 1958, p.39.
 
[15] Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1964, p.24.
 
[16] Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, op. cit., p.66.
 
[17] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, op.cit., p.lxxxvii.
 
[18] Ibid., p.286.
 
[19] Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters, op.cit., p.99.
 
[20] Benjamin Constant, Biancamaria Fontana (trans., ed.), Benjamin Constant: Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p.326-327.
 
[21] Max Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy in Germany”, in Weber, Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (eds.), Weber: Political Writings, Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.129. Emphases in the original.