Teorie... (Część III)
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)
"Theories hitherto unknown..." — Continuity and Change in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
METHODOLOGY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Because of his scientific approach to his subject matter, Tocqueville has been lauded as the first modern sociologist. The value of his scholarship can be attributed to his constant effort to examine and eliminate his preconceptions and biases. Tocqueville has been both a theorist and a politician and as the latter he shared the strong convictions and biases of his social class. In his posthumous work Recollections, which was never intended for publication, he allowed himself to make condescending comments and personal remarks. Nevertheless, in his scientific research for Democracy in America, as a theorist conscious of his subjective approach, he wished to distance himself as a person from the subject matter and to enter into God's point of view, and to consider and judge human affairs from that detached perspective. For contemporary readers of Democracy in America, Tocqueville's God's point of view might seem the pretentious, presumptuous perspective of an all–knowing sage. The 19th century has seen, after all, the formation and development of grand, totalizing ideologies, both theoretical and applied in practice. Tocqueville, however, is far from making claims of grandeur. A further annotation to Democracy in America invites readers to better understand his methodology of research:
I must attempt to get away from particular points of view in order to take a position, if possible, among the general points of view which depend neither on time nor place.
Apart from objectiveness being his scientific creed, Tocqueville is also the first political scientist to consider democracy a valid research topic. (7) Contrary to the title of his treatise, Democracy in America is not first and foremost, as the title might suggest, about democracy in the United States, but rather, about the general mechanisms of democracy as an abstraction, to be detached from its sociopolitical context of America and applied in France. In one of his letters, Tocqueville wrote:
In America I saw more than America: I sought the image of democracy itself, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions.
In another, he succintly paraphrased himself:
America was only my framework, democracy was the subject. (8)
This is pehaps the reason why some critics of Democracy in America are wrong in judging its author on the accusation of failing to provide a detailed enough account of the United States. In his article Unprophetic Tocqueville. How "Democracy in America" Got the Modern World Completely Wrong, D. Choi provides a criticism of Tocqueville's methodology on the grounds of the author's bold assumptions and predictions about America's future:
One may be surprised therefore to hear that "Democracy in America"'s predictions about modern civilization’s future were wrong on nearly all essential points because Tocqueville incorporated into the definition of modern democracy the concrete social and economic features of early-nineteenth–century democratic societies. (9)
The claim that many of Tocquevile's predictions about the United States have turned out wrong with time is, indeed, correct. However, it was not Tocqueville's intention to extrapolate the future of the democratic system in America. Instead, his concern was to create an abstraction of democracy to apply in the France of his contemporaries. He was well aware of the fact that democracy does not exist in limbo — it was, after all, on the forefront of political and social change, and Tocqueville has defined change as being the only stable, continuous aspect of the modern world. Since democracy is always rooted in reality, Tocqueville described enough of America to build a functioning model of democracy upon his description. S. Wolin agrees that Tocqueville's methodology sacrificed a detailed account of America in favor of an abstraction of democracy:
The emphasis on clarity is the accompaniment to the modern assimilation of theory to a mode of "construction" that depends of "conceptual rigor" to produce the interlocking building blocks of which a theory is allegedly made. Tocqueville's theory, in contrast, would be panoramic rather than architectonic. He often described himself as attempting to "paint" a "general condition". (10)
(7) Tocqueville was the first political theorist to treat democracy as a theoretical subject in its own right and the first to contend that democracy was capable of achieving a genuine, if modest, political life–form.
Wolin S. S., Tocqueville. Betwen Two Worlds. The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 59.
(8) Pierson G.W., Tocqueville in America, 2nd ed., JHU Press 1996, p. 151.
(9) Choi D., "Unprophetic Tocqueville. How Democracy in America Got the Modern World Completely Wrong", The Independent Review, v. XII, n. 2, Fall 2007, pp. 165–178.
(10) Wolin S. S., Tocqueville. Between Two Worlds. The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 96.
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Tocqueville
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