Aristocracy in America: Tocqueville on White Supremacy

Ikuta, Jennie C.; Latimer, Trevor

doi:10.1086/709861

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…There is nothing normatively complicated about the gross injustices of genocide and slavery. But democracy in America is riddled with normative complexity since there is no actual world in which its development was not causally intertwined with these unambiguously unjust developments, as Tocqueville recognizes (Ikuta and Latimer 2021; McQueen and Hendrix 2017; Tillery 2009).…”

Section: Implications For Contemporary Politics and Democratic Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

Thompson

2023

Political Theory

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One of Tocqueville’s best-known empirical claims in Democracy in America is that there is no national-level public administration in the United States. He asserts definitively and repeatedly that “administrative centralization does not exist” there. However, in scattered passages throughout the text, Tocqueville points to multiple federal agencies that contemporary historians and APD scholars characterize as instances of a growing national administrative system, such as the Post Office Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I reevaluate Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucracy in America in light of this evidence. I contend that Tocqueville, perhaps in spite of himself, reveals even the most paradigmatic examples of active, democratic self-government in Democracy in America—townships and other voluntary associations—to be embedded in and causally supported by a network of interrelated, centralized public administrative institutions. Crucially, Tocqueville never resolves the tension between his acknowledgment of the causal power of these institutions and his claims that they do not exist. This new picture of the empirical and normative complexity of Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucratic institutions offers a rich set of conceptual resources for contesting, among other claims, the political construction of nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time before bureaucracy in America.

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Section: Implications For Contemporary Politics and Democratic Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

Thompson

2023

Political Theory

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“…However, more recently, there are also interpretations that more positively evaluate what Tocqueville was writing about colonization and slavery. In Democracy in America for example, he insisted that slavery and racism undermined democratic culture in the United States (Hart, 2018: 22; Ikuta and Latimer, 2021). These kinds of observations by Tocqueville are said to ‘presage’ the theses of American critical race scholars in the 20 th century, who place systemic racism and white privilege at the heart of US history and who often are pessimistic about the possibilities of American democracy to ever overcome the racial hierarchies that were co-constitutive of its creation (Tillery, 2009: 640).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A post-colonial reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on slavery and its aftermaths

Maussen

2023

Ethnicities

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This article develops a postcolonial and comparative reading of Tocqueville’s writings on slavery. It argues, first, that Tocqueville analyzed the ending of slavery as a revolutionary social transformation involving changes in laws, social relations and mores, and second, that he employed the same analytical framework consistently to discuss processes of abolition in the United States and in the French Caribbean Islands. In the United States the process of abolition of slavery was deepening rather than ending racist prejudices, racial segregation and hatred between the black and the white populations. This would, so Tocqueville predicted, undermine democracy in America. In the plantation colonies he believed the French could draw lessons from the English experiences when organizing the abolition process. Only when legal changes and changes in mores developed in tandem there could be economic and political stability in the aftermath of slavery. This would allow the French to end slavery peacefully, which he deemed necessary if they intended to continue exploiting the colonies. The article argues that Tocqueville demonstrated a deep and critical understanding of the reprehensible, long-lasting role of anti-black racism and slavery in barring the emergence of democratic cultures based on equal standing and integration across racial difference. Yet, he combined this critical perspective on racist slavery with an accepted defense of European supremacy and with a sense of pessimism about the possibilities for Africans to ever become capable of self-government.

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“… 31. See previous section, “Other Exclusions, Other Removals.” Recent work connecting Tocqueville to current issues of race includes Tillery (2009), Henderson (2022), and Ikuta and Latimer (2021). …”

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confidence: 99%

Revisiting Tocqueville’s American Woman

Henderson

2023

Political Theory

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This paper revisits Tocqueville’s famous portrait of the American female, which begins with assertions of her equality to males but ends with her self-cloistering in the domestic sphere. Taking a cue from Tocqueville’s extended sketch of the “faded” pioneer wife in “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and drawing connections to Tocqueville’s criticisms of the division of industrial labor, I argue that the American girl’s ostensibly free choice to remove herself from public life is not an act of freedom. Rather, it is a manifestation of a particular type of unfreedom that reveals underappreciated connections between the two great dangers about which Democracy in America warns: tyrannical majoritarianism and soft despotism. My argument that the girl’s choice to withdraw from public life is coerced rather than free thus highlights the nonpolitical sources of oppression that exist within democratic societies. The paper concludes by raising questions about the need for coercion within Tocquevillian democracy and the implications of this for Tocqueville’s “new” political science—indeed, for his liberalism more generally.

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Aristocracy in America: Tocqueville on White Supremacy

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

A post-colonial reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on slavery and its aftermaths

Revisiting Tocqueville’s American Woman

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