No abstract

Tocqueville's writings on pauperism have gained renewed attention in the last decade. Scholars study hisMemoir on Pauperism(1835) to contextualize his thought in the nineteenth century, to question the extent of his liberalism, or to locate his policy solutions on a spectrum from private charity to state welfare. Yet Tocqueville's response to pauperism must be interpreted in light of “the social question,” or the problem of how to alleviate not only the material ills of poverty, but also the phenomenon of social exclusion that accompanied it. His discussion of the social question, I argue, illuminates his particular theory of rights and their possibilities. His thoughts on the poor laws culminate in a novel theory of the educative potential of property rights. This theory of rights prompts us to revisit his position on extending political rights and on the role of political participation in overcoming class division.

What does it mean to be an American citizen? We might immediately answer this question in terms of suffrage, a right that represented much of the historical struggle for inclusion and now extends to member qua member. In Learning One's Native Tongue: Citizenship, Contestation, and Conflict in America, Tracy B. Strong cautions against such an answer. American citizenship, Strong emphasizes, is a political matter about "what or who one is," its criteria open to contestation, dispute, and redefinition (2). Learning One's Native Tongue is a conceptual history of citizenship that highlights these disputes from the Puritans to the present. Its story tracks that of America; the citizen, like the nation, has always been an unfinished "project," the development of which cannot be captured by reference to rights alone (9). The right to vote, or what Strong often calls an increasingly "abstract" view of the citizen, obscures more than it reveals about America's past and about what might come next. For Strong, the dominant narratives of American history and culture have similarly left us with a reductive understanding of who the citizen is. However formidable the challenges to Louis Hartz's "liberal tradition" thesis from the republicanism of Bernard Bailyn and J .G. A. Pocock or the communitarianism of Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, Strong concludes that a "Lockean" individualism continues to mark the American experience and the character of the citizen within it. Seen through the Lockean model, American citizenship amounts to little more than individual independence, later coextensive with industrial capitalism. This liberal caricature is Strong's central target, but his thesis challenges all of the interpretive models of America as insufficiently political, or ignorant of the varied "grammars of contestation" that clashed and overlapped to produce changing visions of the citizen in different times. The book's chapters trace the concept alongside the nation's wider challenges, first to define itself domestically even before the Founding (chaps. 1-4), then to address the standing of the excluded within its own borders (chaps. 5-6), and finally to find its place internationally (chaps. 7-10). One of the merits of this book is the author's talent for storytelling. The conceptual history in these pages is not a series of events but a lively unfolding of American life with the citizen at the center. Strong is at his best when weaving

In The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, Ryan Hanley argues that Fénelon was a realist who aimed to elevate and educate self-love—rather than resist it—in order to avoid tyranny. This roundtable article examines two of Fenelon’s arguments for how self-love, well-directed, could circumvent a king’s absolutist and tyrannical inclinations: 1) the king’s need to be loved and to love in turn, and 2) the relationship between faith and politics / church and state. Contrasting Fénelon with Machiavelli, I question whether the ruler’s “need-love” for his people leaves him susceptible to forms of domination or at least, as Machiavelli warned, renders them politically weak. Given Hanley’s interest to recover Fénelon for the present day, I conclude by arguing that the thinker’s insights about the limiting role of well-directed self-love are inescapably tied to his critiques of absolutism. The same need-love of the people, I argue, cannot similarly check executive power under democracy. Nonetheless, Fénelon’s perspective remains valuable, as does Hanley’s project of recovery, since democracies continue to reckon with particular problems raised by self-love.

No abstract