What are the springs of action that material well-being might unbend or loosen? I suppose they’re all the things that have to do with — acquiring material well-being, up to a point, of course. Everyone seems to agree that somewhere in the range of economic flourishing there is a point at which more money doesn’t make you more happy, but also a point at which less money DOES make you less happy. For all the intense disagreements about the width and location of this range, this is pretty small-l liberal and small-d democratic — or, bourgeois — whichever way you slice it.
It’s likely that Tocqueville can be right in the way he meant about material well-being and the springs of action, yet also wrong in a way he didn’t quite anticipate. Tocqueville certainly didn’t claim that Americans would poop out completely in the face of material well-being — just close themselves off to certain inconveniences of public life that involved a certain kind of effort that had little to do with economic stakes. I’m thinking here of maintaining the intermediary institutions he found critical to American democracy, of the not-very-fun but, on his read, essential tasks that pulled people out of their boutique Rortyan private clubs of friends and family.
One thing Tocqueville seems to have missed out on is the way a certain kind of activity in the soul, when pressed out of politics, seems to be channeled into a kind of episodic social and recreational extremism: not the voluptuous abandon of the aristocratic libertine, but a taste for things like extreme sports and serial sexual relations and other high-intensity, high-physicality kinds of activity . . . activity in which we can perhaps momentarily engage in a mini-packaged sense of the all-meaningful absolutist activity that the successful in aristocratic times sought to ground in politics or in wealth or in pleasure.
This kind of activity might be seen also as a therapy for "losing the name of action" in Hamlet’s (or Nietzsche’s) aristocratic meaning.
