Teorie... (Część I)
Cykl: Tocqueville
1. Tocqueville... (I)
2. Tocqueville... (II)
3. Tocqueville... (III)
4. Tocqueville... (IV)
5. Tocqueville... (V)
6. Tocqueville... (VI)
7. Twórca... (I)
8. Twórca... (II)
9. Teorie... (I)
10. Teorie... (II)
11. Teorie... (III)
12. Teorie... (IV)
Dzięki zajęciom socjologicznym o Stanach Zjednoczonych w ostatnim semestrze miałem okazję powrócić, po ponad dwóch latach, do studiowania twórczości jednego z moich najbardziej cenionych myślicieli, Alexisa de Tocqueville. Ponieważ jednak zawsze podchodzę do moich zainteresowań zbyt ambitnie i zaczytałem się sześciusetstronicową monografią o życiu i twórczości Tocqueville'a, to jak zwykle pozostało mi bardzo mało czasu na napisanie samego eseju i na ostatnią chwilę wyprodukowałem, niestety, pracę wprawdzie bardzo kwiecistą stylistycznie i przekonującą, ale jednocześnie mało merytoryczną. Nikt się jednak na tym nie spostrzegł i dostałem dobrą ocenę. Esej zamieszczam poniżej dla formalności, ale też dlatego, że moim zdaniem właśnie z racji jego oględnego charakteru dobrze się go czyta. Zapraszam do lektury.
"Theories hitherto unknown..." — Continuity and Change in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
INTRODUCTION
Alexis de Tocqueville's seminal sociopolitical treatise — Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique) — has been first published to roaring success in France in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 as an afterthought to Tocqueville's illuminating travels across the United States, which had taken place half a decade earlier in 1831. It was already during the expedition itself that the author realized the significance of his undertaking. As Tocqueville confided in his brother in a letter from America:
We are assembling some magnificent materials and if we should discover in ourselves the talent to put them to use, we shall without question create something new. (1)
Indeed, despite his work having been intended for a French reception (2) and despite its considerable historical distance from modern times, Democracy in America has outlived its own sociopolitical context to no diminished interest and went on to become one of the most often cited milestones of political science, regardless of one's political affiliations. As S. Wolin, a Tocqueville scholar, asserts:
Interpreters have created a certain Tocqueville, one who slips easily into the main dialogue of American politics between self–designated liberals and conservatives. To one he is a "liberal conservative" who values freedom as well as property rights; to the other he is a "conservative liberal" who is alert to the dangers of "too much democracy" (...) (3)
Tocqueville's body of work is not easily identified as belonging to a single ideological system and therefore multiple readings of his writings can exist at the same time. The more conservative reader will focus on those aspects of his writings which praise the Ancien Régime and will look for parallels to the European tradition in the American project. The more progressive reader, however, could as well read into Tocqueville's intentions as favoring (although somewhat critical of) a modern, democratic society with its emphasis on liberté, égalité and fraternité. In other words, his political ideas have been professed both by supporters of continuity and by supporters of change.
Democracy in America has become the essential resource on both democracy and America, perhaps because it has always been a masterpiece of moderation. It is just historical enough to serve as a viable and valuable record on antebellum Jacksonian America and just general enough to also serve as a perfect textbook on both democracy as an ideological abstraction and democracy as applied in its infancy in the United States.
The first of its kind, Democracy in America secured Tocqueville's place as the first sociologist of modern times. Not only is he thus honored by contemporary scholars of political science, but he himself had been aware of creating a new science at the time of writing his seminal treatise. In Chapter I of Democracy in America, Tocqueville points to the groundbreaking significance of his research:
In that land the great experiment was to be made, by civilized men, of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past. (4)
The aim of this paper is to showcase Tocqueville's theories hitherto unknown in Democracy in America and to present their author as a distant observer of both continuity and change in the American project, as contrasted with and compared to the European Enlightenment project of which Tocqueville himself was an active, political member.
(1) Pierson G.W., Tocqueville in America, 2nd ed., JHU Press 1996, p. 131.
(2) What I have sought particularly to highlight in the United States and to have it well understood is less a complete portrait of that foreign society than its contrasts or resemblances with ours... That continual return to France, which I did without calling attention to it was, in my view, one of the principal reasons for the success of the book.
Cited in Mayer J. P. et al., Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1951, I (1) p. 9.
(3) Wolin S. S., Tocqueville. Betwen Two Worlds. The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 3.
(4) de Tocqueville A., Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter I.
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