“The Monetary Link”: Tocqueville on the Second Bank of the United States and Liberal Political Economy

Wolf, Brianne

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-34937-0_3

Cited by 1 publication

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“…At first glance, it seems reasonable to conclude that Tocqueville is talking about “governmental as opposed to administrative centralization” in these cases (Wolf 2020, 41; cf. Bambrick 2018; Jaume 2013; Maletz 2003; Mansfield 2010; Pittz 2011; Rahe 2009; Wolin 2001) .…”

Section: Government Vs Administrationmentioning

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: Government Vs Administrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

Thompson

2023

Political Theory

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show abstract

“The Monetary Link”: Tocqueville on the Second Bank of the United States and Liberal Political Economy

Cited by 1 publication

References 21 publications

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

Tocqueville and the Bureaucratic Foundations of Democracy in America

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