Teorie... (Część IV)

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"Theories hitherto unknown..." — Continuity and Change in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America

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CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

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During his travels across America in 1831 with his friend Gustav de Beaumont, Tocqueville adopted the attitude of a distanced observer of the American project as both a direct continuity of the Enlightenment project and an obvious, political and historical novelty opposed to the old regimes of Europe. America had been to him an inconcieveable paradox — combining aristocratic values with an egalitarian government; combining a new democratic form of government with powerful, federal potential; combining populist ideas with greatness. The United States witnessed a peaceful domestic "revolution" and managed to avoid the atrocities of the French Revolution. America was undoubtedly a new "project", and at the same time it had managed to salvage across the Pacific more traditional, European values than post–revolutionary Europe has kept itself. S. Wolin writes:

Although he was acutely aware of living in an era of discontinuity, his theoria would maintain that in France one archetypal disruption, the revolution of 1789, was being replayed in the several revolutions over the next half century: disruption was the continuity. (11)

What is true of France is also true of the United States. Although in the popular consciousness America is understood to be a discontinuity — a clear detachment from the European project — Tocqueville's Democracy in America proves that democracy could develop on the new continent precisely because of the values brought from ante–revolutionary Europe.

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WORKS CITED

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• Choi D., "Unprophetic Tocqueville. How Democracy in America Got the Modern World Completely Wrong", The Independent Review, v. XII, n. 2, Fall 2007
• de Tocqueville A., Democracy in America, Volumes I & II
• Mayer J. P. et al., Œuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1951
• Pierson G.W., Tocqueville in America, 2nd ed., JHU Press 1996
• Wolin S. S., Tocqueville. Between Two Worlds. The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001

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(11) Tocqueville. Between Two Worlds..., p. 3.

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