The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

Description

A collection of original interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville’s major and lesser-known writings

‘The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville’ contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser-known writings on colonies, prisons and minorities. The Introduction by Daniel Gordon discusses how Tocqueville was canonized during the Cold War and the need to reassess the place of Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of post-Marxist social theory. Each chapter that follows compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject with those of other major social theorists, including Bourdieu, Dahl, Du Bois, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Marx.

This comprehensive volume is based on the idea that Tocqueville was not merely a founder or precursor whose ideas have been absorbed into modern social science. The broad questions that Tocqueville raised, his comparative vision, and his unique vocabulary and style can inspire deeper thinking in the social sciences today.

Editor’s Introduction: Tocqueville and the Sociological Conversation, Daniel Gordon; A Note on References to Democracy in America; Part 1. Religion and Immaterial Interests; 1. Tocqueville on Religion, Raymond Hain; 2. Unmasking Religion: Marx’s Stance, Tocqueville’s Alternative, Peter Baehr; Part 2. Language, Literature and Social Theory; 3. Tocqueville Mortal and Immortal: Power and Style, Judith Adler; 4. Tocqueville and Linguistic Innovation, Daniel Gordon; Part 3. Globalism and Empire; 5. Noble Comparisons, Andreas Hess; 6. Tocqueville and Lévi-Strauss: Democratic Revolution at Bookends of Empire, Andrew Dausch; Part 4. Inequalities Inside Democracy; 7. ‘The Tenacious Color-Line’: Tocqueville’s Thought in a Post-Du Boisian World, Patrick H. Breen; 8. ‘The Whole Moral and Intellectual State of a People’: Tocqueville on Men, Women and Mores in the United States and Europe, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen; Part 5. Citizenship, Participation and Punishment; 9. The Dynamics of Political Equality in Rousseau, Tocqueville and Beyond, Peter Breiner; 10. Tocqueville and Beaumont on the US Penitentiary System, Chris Barker; Part 6. An Unfinished Project; 11. Tocqueville and the French Revolution, Patrice Higonnet and Daniel Gordon; Index.

Sujets

• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• General officer
• Ideology
• Social sciences
• General
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783089772
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville
The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville
Edited by
Daniel Gordon
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2019
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2019 Daniel Gordon editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-975-8 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-975-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Tocqueville and the Sociological Conversation
Daniel Gordon
A Note on References to Democracy in America
Part 1 RELIGION AND IMMATERIAL INTERESTS
Chapter 1 Tocqueville on Religion
Raymond Hain
Chapter 2 Unmasking Religion: Marx’s Stance, Tocqueville’s Alternative
Peter Baehr
Part 2 LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND SOCIAL THEORY
Chapter 3 Tocqueville Mortal and Immortal: Power and Style
Judith Adler
Chapter 4 Tocqueville and Linguistic Innovation
Daniel Gordon
Part 3 GLOBALISM AND EMPIRE
Chapter 5 Noble Comparisons
Andreas Hess
Chapter 6 Tocqueville and Lévi-Strauss: Democratic Revolution at Bookends of Empire
Andrew R. Dausch
Part 4 INEQUALITIES INSIDE DEMOCRACY
Chapter 7 “The Tenacious Color-Line”: Tocqueville’s Thought in a Post–Du Boisian World
Patrick H. Breen
Chapter 8 “The Whole Moral and Intellectual State of a People”: Tocqueville on Men, Women, and Mores in the United States and Europe
Jean Elisabeth Pedersen
Part 5 CITIZENSHIP, PARTICIPATION, AND PUNISHMENT
Chapter 9 The Dynamics of Political Equality in Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Beyond
Peter Breiner
Chapter 10 Tocqueville and Beaumont on the US Penitentiary System
Chris Barker
Part 6 AN UNFINISHED PROJECT
Chapter 11 Tocqueville on the French Revolution
Patrice Higonnet and Daniel Gordon
Notes on Contributors
Index
INTRODUCTION: TOCQUEVILLE AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL CONVERSATION
Daniel Gordon

In America, I saw the freest, most enlightened men living in the happiest circumstances to be found anywhere in the world, yet it seemed to me that their features were habitually veiled by a sort of cloud. They struck me as grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.
Tocqueville ( 2004 , 625)
An Anguished Life
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was born into an aristocratic family with strong political connections. He served as a representative in the French Chamber of Deputies starting in 1839 and was briefly Minister of Foreign of Affairs in 1849. As an author, he attained instant fame after publishing the first part of Democracy in America in 1835 (the second part appeared in 1840). In 1838, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and, in 1841, to the even more prestigious French Academy whose 40 members were, in principle, the greatest living writers in the French language, known as “the immortals.” In spite of these achievements, his was an anguished life. He was tormented by the depressing fluctuations of his country between revolution and Bonapartism, and by his own political ineffectiveness. Yet, it was not a failed life. Although he was unable to modify the course of history, he succeeded in articulating a new set of terms for the comprehension of political regimes and how they change .
The existential problem at the heart of Tocqueville’s identity was that he was a democratically inclined aristocrat in an era of revolutionary hatred for aristocracy. He would embrace equality but would never disown aristocracy. He would support democratic causes, but he would also worry about the disappearance of noble persons like himself, persons with a sense of historical pride and a desire to rise above the level of the common culture. In our current ideological climate, we tend to divide the world into the haves and the have-nots based on privileges associated with class and race. It is not easy to comprehend how a white European nobleman, born with wealth and easy access to positions of authority, could suffer from the anxiety of oppression. But Tocqueville’s aristocratic family was devastated during the French Revolution. Painful memories of injustice, committed in the name of equality, colored his entire life. The threat of becoming extinct inside the democratic society whose emergence he accepted was forever on his mind .
For Tocqueville, his great-grandfather, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, was a symbol of democracy’s penchant for destroying its liberal elite. Malesherbes was one of the leading political figures during the last decades of the absolute monarchy. In the 1750s, as an official in charge of government censorship of the press, he secretly assisted with the publication of Diderot’s Encyclopedia , the central work of the French Enlightenment. As president of the Cour des Aides , a judicial body dealing with taxation disputes, he issued, in 1775, a widely circulated protest against what he called royal “tyranny.” Malesherbes contributed to the formation of a critical political language, a language that swelled into revolutionary declarations in 1789. Yet, in 1792, with Louis XVI in prison and facing trial, this former opponent of the royal bureaucracy chivalrously volunteered to serve as the king’s legal counsel. For this, and for his aristocratic birth, he was executed by the Jacobins in April 1794, after being forced to watch his daughter mount the scaffold.
Tocqueville, who venerated his great-grandfather, left a handwritten note in his archives:

As to the question of why I should have felt more obliged than others to speak out and write these things, my answer is clear and precise. I am the grandson [ sic ] of M. de M[alesherbes]. No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M[alesherbes], after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions. (Cited by Jaume 2013, 298; see also Jardin 1989, 36)
Tocqueville’s preoccupation with the Revolution provided a basis of complexity and tragedy in all of his writings. When he published Democracy in America , the painful memory of 1789 and its aftermath was evident in the frequency with which he alluded to the French Revolution in this work about North America (discussed in Chapter 11 of this volume). The French Revolution, in fact, raised the principal problem he addressed in Democracy : Is it possible to reap the benefits of an egalitarian social order while bypassing the violence associated with the founding of this order? Is a nonrevolutionary democracy possible? In America, he found a yes answer. “The great advantage of the Americans is to have come to democracy without having to endure democratic revolution” (Tocqueville 2004 , 589). Near the end of his life, when he published The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , he addressed the same problem from the other end: What were the sources of radical revolution in the Ancien Régime, and why in France did revolutionary hatreds outlive the causes that gave rise to them ?
The memory of revolution was formative, but revolution was more than a memory. The political instability that preceded Tocqueville’s birth continued during his lifetime; it exerted an awful pressure on him. He struggled not only to comprehend the past but also to manage the vicissitudes of his era. In 1815, Napoleon’s rule ended; the Bourbon monarchy was restored. In 1830 came the July Revolution, sometimes known as the Second French Revolution; it implemented a parliamentary system in which only the wealthiest were allowed to hold office. Karl Marx described this regime as the rule of “bankers, stock exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron works and forests, [and] a section of the landed proprietors” (Marx [ 1850 ] 1895 , 33). Tocqueville, an aspiring politician, was one of those “landed proprietors.” Though he considered a regime insipid in which neither the aristocracy nor the people but primarily money ruled, he stood for election, successfully, in La Manche, the area in which his family owned a castle. From 1839 to 1848 he held a seat in the Chamber of Deputies .
Tocqueville was a left-of-center deputy who found French domestic politics to be uninspiring and corrupt. He tended to focus on foreign affairs. He authored a report in 1839 recommending the abolition of slavery throughout the French colonies. Tocqueville’s opposition to slavery, and his equally powerful apprehension that racism would long outlive the abolition of slavery, were already evident in the last chapter of volume 1 of Democracy in America , entitled “Some Considerations concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United St