°Tocqueville weaves
To weave - or tangle - some threads from Long Sunday: from the discussions of Schmitt that turned to Tocqueville, as well as Tronti’s reading of Tocqueville (and thereby perhaps reaching back to the discussion of Benjamin), but also recent commentaries on democracy, nationalism and Zizek (as well as patriotism and that game) …
Some excerpts from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. […]
The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them. […]
a democratic government increases its power simply by the fact of its permanence. Time is on its side, every incident befriends it, the passions of individuals unconsciously promote it; and it may be asserted that the older a democratic community is, the more centralized will its government become.
This may more completely explain what frequently takes place in democratic countries, where the very men who are so impatient of superiors patiently submit to a master, exhibiting at once their pride and their servility. […] When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. […] Every central power, which follows its natural tendencies, courts and encourages the principle of equality; for equality singularly facilitates, extends, and secures the influence of a central power. In like manner it may be said that every central government worships uniformity; uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule. Thus the government likes what the citizens like and naturally hates what they hate. These common sentiments, which in democratic nations constantly unite the sovereign and every member of the community in one and the same conviction, establish a secret and lasting sympathy between them. The faults of the government are pardoned for the sake of its inclinations; public confidence is only reluctantly withdrawn in the midst even of its excesses and its errors, and it is restored at the first call. Democratic nations often hate those in whose hands the central power is vested, but they always love that power itself. […]
To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.
The rest of Democracy in America can be found here.
At some point, I’ll work this up into a more deliberated post. For now, the threads.
His comments on democracy and pantheism are a little weird at times. Pantheism must have been an idea he brought with him to America; its doubtful he’d find many people openly advocating a pantheistic religion for the American people.
Craig [June 26, 2006 @ 1:16 am]
The stuff on pantheism can be read as baggage, and I’m not sure what he means by the reference to Germany, etc.
That said, I think the remarks on pantheism makes sense if they’re read according to Tocqueville’s discussion of democracy as the sovereignty and deification of the people - ie., pantheism in the strict sense of ‘god is everywhere’, depersonalised sovereignty, and so on.
s0metim3s [June 26, 2006 @ 2:03 am]
It likely is baggage, but I wonder if it is superfluous or extra baggage. The point comes up often enough in the book that it is doing real theoretical work for him, the question is why he presented democracy as pantheistic if his audience in France, as well as in the US, would not ‘get’ the point? He’s also vague to the extent that it isn’t clear where he’s drawing the pantheism from. Did he, for instance, read Spinoza? He likely wasn’t exposed to any pantheistic cults. (Are there any?)
I’m not convinced that “pantheism = god is everywhere” is the best gloss. A better one might be “god is everything” or, the Spinozistic formula, “everything participates in god” or, again, “deus sive natura”, proposing an identity between god and nature. But, then, what about the social, which this book is most certainly about?
Unrelated, have you looked at Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, written, incidentally, a few years before Tocqueville’s and also the product of an extensive adventure through the American wilds?
Craig [June 27, 2006 @ 3:37 am]
Just because the reference to pantheism seems peculiar now doesn’t mean it was then - and it’s fairly clear that Tocqueville is not writing for an American reader. I have no idea whether he read Spinoza - but it would be interesting to compare dates, debates at the time and so on, if one were inclined to.
That said, while it’s a peculiar reference, I doubt it’s superfluous. I wouldn’t fuss too much about whether it’s ‘god is everywhere’ or ‘god is everything’. He’s obviously talking about the deification of ‘the people’. And the trajectory that would link that political theology of democracy to the Durkheimian theology of the social as causa sui (which is how I’d put it before) would be interesting to track - but that’s the job of yr phd, right? ;)
My two cents: the emergence of a social theology - as sociology - has to do with the emergence of social capital, etc - Tocqueville predates this. Unless he’s talking about Rousseau.
Oh, and I haven’t come across Martineau. Interesting?
s0metim3s [June 27, 2006 @ 4:49 am]
I think Tocqueville’s concern with or sympathy for pantheism has to do with his understanding of the native American population, which had after one hundred and fifty years of fur trading become seriously intermingled with what remained of French influence on the North American continent. The myth of the noble savage had more to do with French aristocratic bloodlines than with the warrior ethic of Uncas and Chingachgook. Native Americans baptized in the Catholic church had a much better chance of staying alive, off the reservation and out of prison than their ‘pantheistic’ brethren. Indian removal to reservations greatly undermined the pantheistic aspirations of New England dissenters willing to brave the wilderness.
Blameless Caterpillar [July 18, 2006 @ 11:20 pm]
On that point, BC, it is worth noting that Henri de Boulainvilliers introduced Spinoza into France via commentaries and translations.
Craig [July 19, 2006 @ 4:52 pm]