Colonial Violence And The Rhetoric Of Evasion

Abstract

Tocqueville's contradictory writings on imperialism have produced interpretations that range from unrepentant realism to lapsed universalism. This essay considers the moral psychology that underlies his position. It argues that Tocqueville's writings on colonialism exemplify his resort to apologia when his deepest apprehensions are aroused and offers a typology of Tocquevillean rhetorical evasions: the mechanisms by which he attempts to quell perceptions of moral dissonance. It also argues that Tocqueville's evasion of the challenge of Algeria illustrates a particular kind of liberal failure and a peculiar liberal temptation. By avoiding rather than confronting the conflicting intuitions underlying his moral judgments, Tocqueville betrays the promise of his liberalism by failing to explore the tensions implicit in the practice of liberal democracy. These strategies to deaden awareness of complicity in colonial violence appear disturbingly familiar in a world in which national interests and universally acknowledged "human maxims" increasingly collide in the liberal conscience.

Making the Strange Familiar: Geographical Analogy in Global Geopolitics*

“…The net effect is that "blame" is localized. In this way, the analogies contribute to what has been called "a rhetoric of evasion" (Welch 2003).…”

Tocqueville in Jacksonian Context: American Expansionism and Discourses of American Indian Nomadism inDemocracy in America

“… 48 Wolin 2003, 268; see also 230. Cheryl Welch identifies a related, but somewhat different, strategy of containment in Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria, in which he “attempts to quarantine and thus seal off the moral evils necessary to conquer North Africa” and to crowd out ethical concerns by focusing “on the techniques of warfare and the administrative details of policy making”; see Welch 2003, 252. …”

The Politics of Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

“…It is political theorists interested in leading French liberal thinkers, especially Alexis de Tocqueville, who have begun to break this exclusive focus on republican imperialism. 10 Important as their work is, however, it risks reproducing the focus on imperial "tensions" and "contradictions" within otherwise admirable ideologies, simply substituting nineteenth-century liberalism for eighteenth-or twentieth-century republicanism. The contributions to this special issue represent a new wave of scholarship that brings the insights of recent post-Revolutionary historiography to the process of colonial transition, when people across the empire saw in the uncertainties of the period opportunities and obligations to restructure colonial states, economies, and societies and to reimagine the relationship between France and its colonies.…”