The End of Order, the Order of Ends
Civil Society, Eschatology, Cybernetics
One can say that democracy, as a philosophical category, is that which presents equality. Or again, democracy is what prevents any predicates whatsoever from circulating as political articulations, or as categories of politics which formally contradict the idea of equality.
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics
Moreover, it goes without saying that all forms of the state have democracy for their truth…
Karl Marx Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
The long 19th century was defined by the dissolution of feudal hierarchies, the ascendancy of industrial capitalism, and a series of revolutionary ruptures in political and ideological formations reconfiguring the practices of everyday life. During this period of profound turbulence, intellectuals—like in other moments of crisis— responded dynamically to historically specific social symptoms. Situated between the social contract theorists and the masters of suspicion, early 19th-century thinkers like Hegel and Tocqueville, in retrospect, have served as mediating force to these paradigms by, in vastly different ways, theorizing the emergence of civil society as both a symptom and a structuring force of the sociopolitical transformations of their time.
Exploring the various articulations of the civil society, in this essay, I argue that both Hegel and Tocqueville approached its genesis from a philosophical vantage point– –one that necessarily, due to its speculative nature, entails a teleological conception of History: for Hegel, civil society culminates in the state as the concrete actualization of the Sprit and freedom in the universal World History; for Tocqueville, it leads toward the complete equalization of conditions among human, producing a society of atomized individuals rendered uncreative, politically docile, yet perpetually in motion. I further contend that these divergent trajectories not only illuminate the historical constitution of the category of civil society, but also invite methodological reflection on the epistemic frameworks underpinning our contemporary sociological imagination.
Due to the scope of this essay, the analysis will focus closely on two primary texts: Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
We begin by examining each thinker’s specific treatments of civil society, tracing both the internal logic of their arguments and the potential dialogues between them— despite the ultimately negative conclusions each implies. Hegel particularizes civil society by subordinating it to the state, which he conceives as the embodiment of ethical life. Yet the state remains incapable of integrating the rabble—a structurally produced underclass in civil society excluded from reciprocal recognition. Tocqueville, in turn, observes a different trajectory in the American context, where the problem of the rabble is displaced by the universalization of civil society and its moral economy, effectively subordinating the political and legal to the economic and affective spheres.
The dissolution of class hierarchy, wherein Hegel had anchored the particularity of personhood, gives way in Tocqueville to a condition of radical equality that, paradoxically, fosters new forms of servitude through political centralization and moral homogenization.
Building on these analyses, the essay proceeds to schematize the positions of Hegel and Tocqueville through the lens of cybernetics, in order to clarify their respective orientations toward the categories of order and disorder. This reframing reveals a shared structural limitation: both thinkers fail to adequately engage with real contingency. As a result, Hegel’s model risks petrification—an internal rigidity vulnerable to external rupture—while Tocqueville’s democracy trends toward complete systemic integration, eroding distinctions and dissolving identity into procedural uniformity. In conclusion, we reflect on how social theory, in confronting historical finitude, tends toward eschatological closure—and consider how such teleological temptations might be resisted in our own renewed critical engagement with the present.
Spirit of Hegelianism
Spirit, for Hegel, is the realm of actualized freedom and the foundation of the system of right (PR §4). Yet in the Phenomenology of Spirit, civil society, which was part of the ethical-legal system, remains largely untheorized. In the chapter on Spirit, Hegel constructs a dialectic between family and polity, divine law and human law—each grounded in distinct ethical content and gendered symbolic roles (PS ¶265). This dualistic framework stands in contrast to the tripartite structure of ethical life— comprising family, civil society, and the state—presented in the Philosophy of Right. It is therefore reasonable to hypostatize, though not definitively confirm, that civil society emerged as a later philosophical category, one that reoriented and reconstituted Hegel’s earlier conception of Spirit.
With this speculation in mind, the following section first outlines Hegel’s general politico-philosophical architecture, clarifying the interrelations among will, Spirit, state, right, and freedom. It then turns to a more focused engagement with the section on ethical life, particularly civil society, and examines how within which abstract right and morality are mutually implicated. This leads to a discussion of the rabble, which is not a contingent social aberration but a structurally necessary product of civil society—exposing the internal instability of a social sphere based on Hegel’s attempt to ground it in the quasi-feudal relations of production and recognition, between family and the state. Considered in its wider philosophical context, the emergence of the rabble reveals the limits of Spirit as embodied in custom and habit as second nature, and underscores the unresolved contradiction between Hegel’s normative theory of recognition and the empirical fragmentation of modern society.
This contradiction ultimately signals a failure to reconcile the category of Spirit—as reformulated since the Phenomenology—with the actuality of social life, thereby undermining Hegel’s claim in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right regarding philosophy’s proper relation to the state. This impasse, in turn, necessitates a reconsideration of the relation between civil society and the state—a reconsideration that leads naturally us to the America Tocqueville documented.
Hegel’s political philosophy is structured around the dialectic of differentiation and unification—a logic already epitomized in the developmental stages of free will outlined in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right. In §§5–7, Hegel sketches three successive moments of the will: beginning with the moment of immediacy, in which the will exists as “absolute abstraction,” formally infinite and devoid of any determinate content, having dissolved all particular desires and drives (PR §5); followed by the moment in which the subject comes to recognize itself as embedded in a world of determinations, thus initiating the transition toward differentiation and finitude, “the absolute moment of the particularization of the I” (PR §6); and finally, the moment in which this particularity is reflected back into itself and sublated into a new universality (PR §7). These three phases are later expanded into the broader architecture of the work: abstract right, morality, and ethical life.
A central claim Hegel advances is that the myriad differentiated structures of cognition and action ultimately reflect moments of a unified rational substance. This dialectical movement—where each finite determination and indetermination is sublated into a higher unity—is not merely a methodological and epistemic device but, for Hegel, discloses the rational and ontological structure of reality itself. In the
Philosophy of Right, this means that both the formal abstraction of legal relations and
the moral interiority of the subject must be sublated within ethical life, where the division between subjectivity and objectivity, norm and fact, is overcome. Within the sphere of ethical life, this dialectic recurs in the triadic articulation of the family, civil society, and the state, which Hegel aligns with the cognitive modalities of feeling, understanding, and speculative reason respectively, as devised in his system of logic.
With these foundations in place, several points become immediately apparent.
First, Spirit is the actuality of freedom, and as such, the system of right—its stages correspond directly to the exteriorized organization of social divisions. Yet this is precisely where the first major complication emerges. Since right, or more precisely the Idea of right, possesses both conceptual and substantial dimensions (PR §1), philosophy—as the synthesis of feeling and understanding within the faculties of Spirit—participates in the development of freedom and right as the free will which wills the free will.
At the same time, however, Hegel maintains that philosophy does not make reality rational but rather apprehends the rationality already immanent within it, it merely procures a rational form to that which is already rational (PR §17), offering a retrospective register of recognition: “when a shape of life has grown old, it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized.” (PR §23). The relationship between philosophy and reality, then, is one of both distinction and indistinction—it is at once a moment within the unfolding of the Idea and a reflective activity that does not intervene in historical actuality but gives it conceptual form. For Hegel, it is essential to inhabit this dialectical tension: philosophy is both implicated in the immanent development of freedom and also a belated witness to its realization, suspended between participation and retrospection.
Civil society and its discontent
Civil society, as we explicated the dual facilities of philosophy, can be seen in new light, since recognition was its constitutive part, and recognition requires cognitions. If one recalls the concrete process of spirit, it is the substantial freedom but as a world of spirit “produced from within itself as a second nature” (PR §4). Indeed, the ethical kernel of spirit does appear as custom and habit, which are the mediating force of nature and culture, norm and facts, so that human can be one with the natural rhythm without restrain (PR §151). The way to make this happen in civil society, Hegel writes, is through education. He differentiated theoretical and practical education, while the former requires the ability of representation from understanding to “grasp complex relation among things,” the latter modifies the faculty of feeling and habituate one into “habit of being occupied” (PR §197). It is in this way, education “irons out particularity to make [uneducated man] act in accordance with the nature of the thing,” and therefore is the liberation and transition to “the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life” (PR §187).
As we have seen, in the context of civil society, philosophy not only renders explicit the rational structure of reality but also introject its constitution by facilitating the interiorization of that structure through processes of education and habituation.
In doing so, it contributes to the unification and identification of the individual with the natural and social world they inhabit. This dynamic is most clearly articulated in Part A of Hegel’s account of civil society, which focuses on the system of needs—where the mediation between particular needs and their satisfaction is achieved through labor and social interdependence. Yet this sphere, though rational in form, remains vulnerable to contingency and must be sublated into a higher concrete universal through institutional mediation (PR §188). This movement leads to Part B: the administration of justice, where the universal begins to take on formal existence in contradistinction to subjective particularity, establishing a framework of rights and duties that preserve freedom within a legal order (PR §229). Finally, in Part C, this development culminates in the spheres of police and the corporation, which embody the state, and at the same time the moment of ethical recognition within civil society itself, preparing the way for the full realization of freedom within the state as the concrete universal.
The system of needs, as outlined in Part A of civil society, requires further mediation and sublation precisely because, for Hegel, it represents only one particular dimension of civil society. It differentiates individuals by positioning them within a network of interdependent desires, labor, and consumption. This particularization is not merely an external attribute layered onto an already-formed subject, but is instead constitutive of personhood itself. As Hegel states, individuals attain actuality “only by entering into existence [Dasein]..., and hence into determinate particularity”; to say that one “must be somebody” is to say that one “must belong to a particular estate” (PR §207). The dialectic here proceeds through determination—individuals must embody concrete, differentiated content. Yet this particularity must be given a rational form, before culminating in the sublation of both form and content into a higher unity.
In the context of civil society, this rational form is provided by the administration of justice, which expresses the universality of abstract right and secures the objective legal order necessary for the system of needs to function properly.
However, like abstract right itself, the administration of justice offers only a formal universality: it recognizes persons as abstract legal subjects without reference to their concrete socio-economic conditions. Therefore, it cannot fully address the contingencies and inequalities produced within the system of needs. What is required is not only the juridical recognition of property and personhood, but also the institutional protection of individual livelihood and welfare—what Hegel describes as the recognition of “particular welfare…treated as a right and duty actualized” (PR §230).
This task belongs to the institutions of police and the corporation, situated in Part C of civil society.
Police and corporation serve distinct function, but they contribute together to the recognition of individual as concrete, particular subject within universality.
Different from the Administration of Justice where particular persons are brought to the front of universal order, police serve to guarantee security with authority governed by particular will itself, and therefore remains in the sphere of contingencies.
(PR §231) Such preservation of the universal within the particular, however protective, remain external to them and thus necessitates a universal itself made by particular and therefore protect their immanent interests, namely the corporation. (PR §249)
Rabble’s disavowal
Civil society takes the shape of universal family, and the police, who remains external to the system of need, therefore take up a parental character, whose duty is protect the livelihood of individuals. (PR §239) However, social protection is not simply the security of livelihood as the prevention of starvation, Hegel writes, it is the prevention of the emergence of rabble; it has the duty to not simply feed its members but urge them to “provide for their own livelihood” (PR §240).
The emergence of the rabble in civil society, for Hegel, is not reducible to mere material poverty. Rather, it is constituted by a dual condition: one material and the other spiritual. Hegel writes that the rabble is formed not simply when individuals fall below a certain standard of living, but through “the disposition associated with poverty, by inward rebellion against…society” (PR §244). In this sense, the rabble is defined as much by subjective alienation—by a breakdown in ethical disposition and habituation—as by objective deprivation. The structural production of the rabble thus reveals a limit within civil society’s capacity to mediate particularity through recognition. When the system of needs fails to guarantee material sufficiency, and when juridical universality remains merely formal, the task of integrating individuals falls to the corporation. As a concrete universal generated from the particular itself, the corporation functions as a second family, charged with cultivating ethical disposition through education and habituation (PR §252), through which the processes of recognition are to be maintained and stabilized, thereby forestalling the formation of a population excluded from the ethical totality of civil society.
Indeed, Hegel emphasizes that the corporation is the site where both livelihood and individual capabilities are recognized, and where individuals come to identify themselves ethically with their estate (PR §253). The corporation provides not only material support but a structure of belonging that mediates the individual’s relation to the universal. However, when an individual is excluded from such institutional integration—when he is not a recognized member of a corporation—he is left “without the honour of belonging to an estate” and must seek recognition instead through “external manifestations of success in his trade” (PR §253). As Hegel observes, it becomes impossible “for him to live in a way appropriate to his estate if his estate does not exist” (PR §253). This produces a second form of rabble—not of poverty, but of excess: the rich rabble, whose detachment from ethical life stems not from deprivation but from exclusion from the structures of recognition and ethical participation. Thus, for Hegel, the estate and the corporation represent the final institutional forms by which philosophy observes the reconciliation of individuality, sociality, and the state. Yet his system offers no structural guarantee that every individual will be integrated into an estate or corporation. The absence of such necessity exposes a critical fault line in the dialectic of ethical life: the possibility of a misalignment between the individual and the institutions meant to mediate recognition and freedom.
Thus, when a society lacks sufficient wealth—a condition Hegel treats as contingent and not structurally resolvable—the material basis for the emergence of the rabble remains a permanent potential within civil society. Simultaneously, the ideological integration of individuals—i.e., their disidentification with the rabble—is itself predicated upon another contingency: the prior existence of an estate to which they may belong. This double contingency renders a space within civil society and more generally Hegel’s system of right fundamentally indeterminate. Yet for Hegel, it is precisely through such determination that particularity is sublated into higher universality, thereby attaining substantiality and freedom. In the later sections of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel assigns to the Estates the role of actualizing “the universal interest” and giving determinate form to “the moment of subjective formal freedom” (PR §301). The Estates thus function as mediators—interfaces between civil society and the state—serving as organizing mechanisms that prevent individuals from appearing merely as an “a crowd or aggregate, unorganized…” and becoming “a massive power in opposition to the organic state” (PR §302). In this way, the Estates both subordinate civil society to the state and represent the private point of view of particular interests. And this very representation “at the expense of universal interests” is, Hegel claims, “characteristic of the rabble and of the negative view points in general” (PR §301).
For Hegel, voice and agency exist only insofar as they are organized and mediated through representation within the state; without which the socio-legal system risks collapse under the weight of unmediated particularity. The rabble, in this schema, represents an abstract negativity that refuses sublation and determination: it negates the universality of the state without seeking recognition from it. Instead of striving for freedom through ethical life, the rabble, both rich and poor, reorients its desire toward wealth—perceived as the only universal capable of valuing all things and services, yet a universality not subject to the authority of the state. Thus, their pursuit is no longer freedom through the ethicality of the political state but equality for them to better pursue economic success. This reconfiguration of the dialectics of recognition—where economic universality supplants ethical and political universality as the master—leads us naturally into Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Democratization or Proletarianization?
For Hegel, the rabble occupies the position of the particular within the system of needs—the particular moment of civil society—which itself is the particular sphere within the larger structure of ethical life. How, then, can this absolutely particular moment be rendered absolutely negative, resistant to universalization and determination? The answer, I suggest, lies in Tocqueville’s observation of America, which represents a fuller and more radical manifestation of the very social tendencies that, in Hegel’s time, already embryonic within the framework of constitutional monarchy. Tocqueville describes how the condition of equality, by dissolving formal and preordained hierarchies, emancipates the potentiality of individual’s identity and being. Yet this emancipation simultaneously produces a persistent anxiety of becoming, as identity is no longer anchored in fixed sociopolitical roles according to the acient regime, but is instead mediated through socioeconomic performance and mobility. In this context, the rabble no longer appears as a fixed underclass but as the virtual horizon of every individual within civil society. Because identity is no longer essentially determined by birth, but instead by wealth and relations of production and consumption, the rabble enstantiated its hidden universal dimension within its former particularity, and such a becoming-universal defines a structurally immanent threat that haunts all subject positions in the society.
What Hegel could still treat as abstract negativity—because the rabble was at the time a marginal disposition—has, in Tocqueville’s democratic America, developed into a generalized condition. There, money emerges as a fully actualized universal, displacing the ethical universality of the state and becoming the primary medium through which individuals seek recognition. This shift prefigures what would later be theorized as the spirit of capitalism, which deviates substantially from the Hegelian account of the spirit as the ethical sociality of reason, retaining only its form as the dialectic of recogntition. In this way, although fifteen years apart, Tocqueville picks up where Hegel leaves off: he pushes to its limit the process of the rabble’s becoming- universal and the thoroughgoing equalization of conditions. To understand the implications of this trajectory, we must now turn to a close examination of Tocqueville’s own analysis.
At the end of the Introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville states that the aim of the first volume is “to show the direction that democracy…has naturally given to laws, government, and in general, the power it has obtained over affairs,” while the second is intended “to paint the influence that…government…exerts on civil society, on habits, ideas, and mores” (DA 13). At the outset of the second volume, he further remarks that the democratic social state has generated not only new political laws and mores but also “a multitude of sentiments and opinions,” the former having been “treated five years ago,” and the latter constituting the object of the current inquiry; these two parts, Tocqueville claims, “complete one another and form a single work” (DA 399). I argue that the structure of Democracy in America presents a recursive, doubly dialectical system in which political institutions, disciplinary political mores, and social mores continuously reproduce and reinforce one another within the framework of the equality of condition. Volume one traces the political transformation from feudalism to a disciplinary society. While part one describes the democratic political constitution as one governed not by personal and subjective authority but by impersonal rules, objective procedures and administrative rationality, part two analyzes how these institutional forms exert a normalizing influence on individuals through processes of civic habituation and interiorization of discipline. Volume two, on the other hand, describes the effect of this process of disciplinarization have on the cultural, moral, and social state of individual subject, and reflects upon the course of humanity in general, which contributes recursively to the equality of condition that undergirds the entire system. This section will go over these parts of Democracy of America sequentially, in order to arrive accurately Tocqueville’s final speculation, which we will take as the starting point to reflect our human condition.
In Part One of Volume One, Tocqueville details how the equality of condition in America gave rise to a political system characterized by the dispersal and fragmentation of power across multiple institutional levels. Through a series of checks and balances—between federal and local authorities (DA 40), legislative bodies oriented toward complaint and judicial bodies tasked with inspection (DA 74), and political versus administrative functions (DA 84)—the American political system is designed not to prevent all error but to ensure that only limited, reparable mistakes can occur (DA 223). This institutional architecture is not merely procedural but fundamentally structural: power is so widely distributed and functionally differentiated that it becomes difficult to locate a singular locus of sovereignty. “That is what causes one not to perceive it,” Tocqueville writes; “power exists, but one does not know where to find its representative” (DA 68), characterizing the disciplinary society Foucault described.
Comparing to laws, Tocqueville places more emphasis on mores, and this duality persists throughout the whole work. With such a framing, Tocqueville suggests that behind the apparently contested field of politics, underlies in fact a uniform mores that prevents the American Union from falling apart. Indeed, as he puts it, in the moral world, everything “is classified, coordinated, foreseen, decided in advance,” while in the political world, everything “is agitated, contested, uncertain” (DA 43). Moreover, the harmony of the former is in fact precisely the precondition of the latter, and these two apparently opposed tendencies “lend each other mutual support,” as, for example, religion, which belongs to the moral world, “sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man” (DA 43). When Tocqueville predicted the future of American democracy at the end of the first volume of his book, he analyzed it by separating the concepts of the Union and the republic. While the American Union exists “principally in the law,” the republic “has more profound roots” and “is the slow and tranquil action of society on itself” (DA 379). Based on the analysis above, Tocqueville concludes, that since the Union exists in the law, and the law has its foundation in the mores, if the republic ideal still exists and penetrates its citizens, even “the law changes frequently, the foundation of the Constitution is respected” (DA 382).
Therefore, mores for America are far more important than laws. Such is the necessity produced by the universalization of civil society, in which the state is subordinated under the democratic deliberation of every citizen. However, this is not to say that the law has no reciprocal effect on the mores. Part two of volume one analyzed not only how mores contribute to sustain the American Union, but precisely also how certain devices are designed to stabilize and sustain the proliferation of mores. For example, it is already observed by Tocqueville that the preoccupation of penal laws is not punishment itself but to take good care of “maintaining moral order and good mores in society; so, they constantly penetrate into the domain of conscience” (DA 38). Similarly, Tocqueville connects universal suffrage with the freedom of the press. He observes that since the civil society owns political power, it is important that civil subjects are governed and stabilized, and here it is through the freedom of the press to achieve some form of mental control. He states that “when one accords each a right to govern society, one must surely recognize his capacity to choose among the different opinions that agitate his contemporaries...” (DA 174). However, it is also due to this connectivity of minds that contributes to a homogenization of opinions and mores; hence, it is said that “the tyranny leaves the body and goes straight for the soul” (DA 244): Not only has the power of the sovereign been extended, as we have just seen, into the entire sphere of former powers; this is no longer enough to contain it; it overflows on every side and goes on to spread over the domain that individual independence had reserved for itself until now. A multitude of actions that formerly escaped the control of society entirely have been subjected to it in our day, and their number constantly increases, (DA 653) and it results in …the sovereign extend[ing] its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. (DA 663) Indeed, when power is formally given to the individual, it is no longer power but individual who needs to be more fine-grainedly controlled. It results in the inperceptable penetration of the microphysics of power into everyday life. Tocqueville describes this in the effacement of the public private distinction and an enforcement of their “common existence” (DA 577), which examplifies in the idea of jury in school games or form of parliament in ordering banquet (DA 292), or when the father becomes not the magistrate of the family but only “an older and richer citizen than his son” (DA 559). Moreover, such increase of control is not of a conscious choice made by a subject, but determined by the infinitely differentiated political and social processes which, as described earlier, finds no subject. This is the general political tendency, for Tocqueville, humanity is heading to, namely as equality of condition demands individual more power, the level of control shifts from the body to the soul, and by a political actor whose agency cannot be localized. Just as money was invented to serve as a universal equivalent in the economic realm—ensuring commensurability and fairness in exchange—democracy, in the American context, was institutionalized to guarantee procedural justice and equal agency for all. In both domains, individuals relinquish direct control over the terms of their existence, delegating authority to abstract mechanisms presumed to be neutral and universally accessible. Power, whether political or economic, is thus mediated through impersonal systems to which all are equally subjected and from which no one is formally exempt. Tocqueville captures this dynamic when he observes that Americans place “moral authority in universal reason,” just as they vest “political power in the universality of citizens” (DA 359). Yet it is precisely this commitment to procedural abstraction—designed to preserve equality—that leads modern individuals, paradoxically, onto a “surer path toward servitude” (DA 640). Equality becomes not merely a social condition but an organizing rationality, one that can depersonalize authority and efface responsibility under the guise of neutrality.
Equalization or diempowerment?
We have considered volume one where Tocqueville exmaines political institution, political mores, and their effects on each other. We observed that America in fact examplifies paradigmatically a disciplinary society in which the politico-legal structure is complex and impersonal, while its citizens’ mores are carefully controlled, normalized, and have little agency in political processes. Now we move on to the pricinple subject of volume two of this book, which deliberates the effects of such disciplinarization of the political have on the social mores.
There are two principle aspects of the chaning social mores Tocqueville concluded. One we have touched upon, which is the equalization of condition making individuals “fall[ing] into impotence” (DA 490), with “imagination extinguished” (DA 602). They can act only in association and think passing with the same given framework. That is, each individual witin the state are less differentiated, have less fixed social relation with others but also easlier to form temporary relationship like associations. In comparison to the ancient regime, which we might for the time being equates it with the Hegelian organicism, in which everyone play their own differentiated role and contribute to an universal state. If so, then the democratic America here can be characterized by a quasi-Spinozist ‘flat ontology,’ where every attributes are radically equal in front of the substance, namely the central power as “the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement” (DA 644).
This ‘flat ontology’ not only attributes radical equality, but also accelarates movments and increases intensity, making everyone “always in a hurry,” for he has “limited time to find them, take hold of them, and enjoy them.” (DA 512). This is the second principle feature of the social mores Tocqueville tries to describe. As mentioned ealier, the equalization of condition makes no one to be naturally above anyone. However, that is to say, anyone can be previledged by their becoming in the world, and this hierarchy is precisely defined by the universality of money: When, on the contrary, ranks are confused and privileges destroyed, when patrimonies are divided and enlightenment and freedom are spread, the longing to acquire well-being presents itself to the imagination of the poor man, and the fear of losing it, to the mind of the rich. A multitude of mediocre fortunes is established. Those who possess them have enough material enjoyments to conceive the taste for these enjoyments and not enough to be content with them. They never get them except with effort, and they indulge in them only while trembling (DA 507).
It is this inversion—where money, originally a secondary means of exchange, comes to occupy a position of primacy as an object of pursuit in itself—that, for Tocqueville, characterizes the social state of democratic America. Once a neutral intermediary facilitating economic circulation, money becomes the dominant horizon of value, substituting the pursuit of greatness or public virtue with a generalized and interchangeable pursuit of wealth. As a result, individuals no longer strive for enduring or creative accomplishments but for that which can be readily converted into any good or social advantage. This flattening of value structures, Tocqueville argues, leads to a distinct set of psychological pathologies: a “habit of inattention,” a “restive and insatiable vanity,” and a paradoxical condition in which individuals are “monotonously agitated”—restless yet directionless, consumed by the ceaseless motion of exchange without any enduring telos (DA 584–587).
The social mores of restlessness and monotonous agitation do not merely describe individual psychological states; they actively sustain the dynamism of an ever-shifting social landscape. These dispositions, Tocqueville suggests, are contagious and self-perpetuating, halted only by external contingencies rather than internal limits. In his contrast between the North and the South, Tocqueville notes that free laborers in the North are more productive than Southern slaves precisely because they are incentivized through wages, while slaves “receive little fruit from their efforts” (DA 332). More significantly, he observes that democracy has altered the nature of domination itself. In aristocratic regimes, the relation between master and slave was framed as a form of “divine obedience,” a hierarchical and metaphysically sanctioned order. Under democracy, this relation is replaced by a functional and transactional obedience: the enslaved now “consent to serve and…are ashamed to obey,” desiring “the advantages of servitude, but not the master” (DA 552).
This transformation—from slaves to wage laborers, from divine subjugation to contractual obedience—marks a shift in the underlying political anthropology of modern individuals. They come to perceive themselves as fundamentally equal, bearing no preordained ties to others, yet increasingly enter into temporary and instrumental relations governed by the imperatives of capital. As Tocqueville writes, within the labor contract, individuals may function as “conditional masters and slaves,” but outside the contract, they revert to being “two citizens, two men” (DA 550).
This logic, fueled by the anxiety of becoming and the imperative of mobility, tends to dissolve all fixed social roles and natural distinctions, rendering every relationship provisional and transactional. The result is a society propelled by the formal pursuit of equality, yet deprived of creativity, stability, or enduring transformation. In the end, this condition leads to a paradoxical stasis: a humanity in perpetual motion that no longer advances, as Tocqueville chillingly concludes: …too unchangeably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same mores, so that the human race will stop and limit itself; that the mind will fold and refold itself around itself eternally without producing new ideas, that man will exhaust himself in small, solitary, sterile motions, and that, while constantly moving, humanity will no longer advance (DA 617).
Tocqueville’s depiction of the ultimate fate of democratic society—where movement persists but meaningful transformation ceases—bears a striking resemblance to the thermodynamic concept of heat death in statistical mechanics. This hypothesis envisions the end of the universe as a paradoxical state: simultaneously chaotic and static, marked by maximal entropy. At this point, all usable mechanical energy has been irreversibly converted into thermal energy, eliminating the possibility of large-scale motion. What remains is only the random, isolated motion of individual particles—each governed by the same statistical distribution, each indistinguishable in its energetic significance. No new structure can emerge; time, in any meaningful sense, has effectively ended. This scientific metaphor powerfully captures the condition Tocqueville fears: a society in which equality and abstraction have leveled all differentiation, producing a uniformity that renders creativity and transformation structurally impossible. We will return to this analogy in greater detail when we turn to cybernetics. For now, however, let us conclude and synthesize the argument thus far.
In this essay, we examined the articulations of civil society in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, tracing a conceptual trajectory that reveals civil society as an increasingly autonomous and encroaching force structuring the dynamics of modern life. In Hegel, civil society emerges as a sphere of particularity—one that must be mediated and ultimately subsumed under the universality of the state, which for Hegel represents the actualization of freedom and the proper locus of recognition. We saw that philosophy plays a dual role in this process: it participates in the habituation of individuals into ethical life as second nature, and it retrospectively discloses the rational structure of reality, making it available to self-consciousness. Yet within the system of needs that defines civil society, the structural production of the rabble—those excluded from both recognition and freedom—marks a failure of mediation. The rabble undermines the dialectical movement toward the ethical totality of the state and redirects the axis of universality toward money, thereby replacing the pursuit of freedom with the pursuit of equality.
It is precisely this transition—from ethical integration to economic abstraction—that Tocqueville takes up.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville reflects on a nation where the equality of condition reigns supreme. He observes that, driven by this desire for equality, the American political system is constructed with such intricate checks and balances that no single actor can consolidate power. At the same time, universal suffrage ensures that every individual is implicated in the political process and thus has a stake in the management of social life. As a result, civil society does not simply subvert or transcend the authority of the state; rather, it absorbs and redistributes it. This is not a negation of the political superstructure but a diffusion of political functions into the everyday structures of civil life, producing what might be called a decentralized and faceted regime of control. Individuals are formally empowered through rights, yet they are also endlessly subject to mechanisms of political discipline and normalization.
We also examined how this condition gives rise to new social mores—an intensification of what would later be called the spirit of capitalism. Individuals become weak, restless, and directionless, endlessly pursuing without aspiration to greatness or distinction. The pursuit of equality thus feeds into a self-reinforcing dialectic: a society in which abstraction and mediocrity proliferate under the banner of freedom, completing a closed circuit or the dialectics of democratized control and cultural exhaustion.
Technics and Time
As we concluded our examination of the respective trajectories of Hegel and Tocqueville—situating them within their historical constellations through their engagement with civil society—we are left with a crucial question: what legacy do we inherit from them, and what insights do they offer into our present? I propose that this legacy can be clarified through the conceptual framework of cybernetics, which, as the theory of control and communication, offers a compelling lens for interpreting a society increasingly structured by complex mechanisms of regulation and mediated exchange. In what follows, I recast Hegel’s theory of the state as an autopoietic system— not merely a mechanical totality in which each part functions to sustain the whole, but a temporal and self-evolving structure that eliminates contingency by continuously generating higher-order synthesis through recursive self-organization.
Tocqueville’s America, by contrast, exemplifies a closed system in the thermodynamic sense—one in which no energy is exchanged with the external environment. Within such a system, entropy increases irreversibly, resulting not in explosive chaos but in a form of stabilized disorder. In terms of systemic behavior, then, Hegel’s ethical state models a process of recursive order, where disturbances are continuously sublated into renewed stability. In the case of Hegalian state, its vulnerability lies in the fact that once disorder exceeds the system’s capacity, for self- regulation, which examplifies the system’s rigidity, disintegration becomes inevitable—just as an organism collapses under systemic stress. Tocqueville’s democracy, by contrast, constructs a form of pseudo-randomness: it cultivates the appearance of individual variation and dynamism, while subtly regulating this variation to conform to second-order norms. It is a system of disorder in form, but order in effect—where control does not suppress randomness directly, but conditions the field within which randomness can occur.
The fundamental limitation in both models, I argue, is their inadequate relation to real contingency. In Hegel, civil society is particularized and ultimately subordinated to the universality of the state. But this particularity, which cannot be fully contained, reemerges as an unintegrated surplus—what we called the rabble.
Tocqueville, on the other hand, universalizes civil society, but in doing so elevates its economic logic into a foundational condition that undermines both moral agency and political autonomy. In both frameworks, development appears deterministic, in part because both thinkers remain within the philosophical discourse of regularity and systematization—a discourse that reveals the internal logic of a structure but cannot accommodate rupture and transformative praxis, which ultimately leads to variations of eschatology.
To fully grasp the emergent possibilities of civil society today, we must begin by engaging seriously with the categories of the impossible—those excluded elements and dissonant potentials that current systems foreclose. What appears impossible within a given epistemic or institutional horizon may become possible only by transforming that horizon itself. And such transformations are only ever catalyzed in moments of genuine encounter with contingency.
What this essay has ultimately sought to foreground is not merely a critique of Hegel’s or Tocqueville’s particular configurations of civil society, but a methodological imperative: to remain attentive to the structural blind spots of systematic thought when it encounters contingency. Both thinkers illuminate essential dimensions of modernity—the teleological rationalization of political life in Hegel, and the recursive diffusion of power in Tocqueville—but each, in their own way, circumscribes the horizon of possibility within already existing forms. By recasting their insights through the language of cybernetics, we have tried to expose the tension between systemic control and the radical indeterminacy that underlies historical becoming. It is precisely this tension that demands a renewed engagement with praxis—not as the application of theories, but as the opening of a space where the impossible may interrupt the logic of the actual. In this sense, our inheritance of Hegel and Tocqueville is not to preserve their conclusions, but to transform their questions, carrying them beyond the closure of their systems into a future still unformed.