Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Lecture 6 conclued & Lecture 7: Tocqueville on Voluntary Association, Colonies and Slavery


12. It is at this point that Tocqueville claims that modern democracy is beset by paradox. There exists a permanent tension between its two basic principles: majority rule and the individual as sole lawful judge of its own interests. This latter idea which is the basis of popular sovereignty is an essentially anti-corporatist individualism that erodes the solidarity that is supposed to issue from political participation. Not only are the community and the individual in constant tension. Tocqueville further suggests that the greater the degree of individualism, the more will this lead to social homogeneity and loneliness of the individual. While individualism appears to favour individual differences and a cult of variety, it is actually a social creation, the product of a difference denying culture of equality. The success of individualism as an ideology consists in the fact that the modern individual believes and acts as though wholly self-orientating yet is, at the same time, a fervent conformist, rarely acting beyond statistical norms and emphatically pursuing fashions and collectivities. This means that modern democratic culture is a bewildering combination of opposing tendencies that isolate individuals from one another while, at the same time, binding them together as a conforming mass.

 

 

Lecture 7: Tocqueville on Voluntary Association, Colonies and Slavery

1.    In Tocqueville’s initial assessment the forces of atomisation, bourgeois privatism and egalitarian homogenisation, are held at bay by strong countervailing factors in American historical and institutional life. These including:

a) Historical good fortune. A new society created from scratch that was rich, no enemies and no historical baggage of deep social and political hierarchies. (Again here Tocqueville focuses on New England and the mid-west and brackets both the Afro-American and Ameridian issues)
b) Compensatory legislative and judicial breaks on democratic power like bicameral parliaments, independent judiciary.
c) Free press.
d) Voluntary associations.
d) Maintenance of religion and patriotism.

Of course some of these factors are more or less familiar features of contemporary liberal democratic constitutional arrangements and cultures. However, as Tocqueville was the first to really emphasis the importance of voluntary associations to a vibrant democratic culture some more elaboration is required. For Tocqueville, one of the most striking features of the contemporary democratic society was the vitality of its civil life. Individuals of all ages, stations and dispositions tend to form associations of various types from the political to the recreational. He explained this by the fact that in a society without social hierarchical social structure, characterised by equality and independence citizens were incapable of public action unless they associated. Voluntary association was the antidote to potential helplessness. These associations not only allow individuals to act in concert but they also renewed community feelings and ideas, enlarge the heart and understanding by the reciprocal interaction of citizens on each other. Action in concert overcomes isolation and translates into power. Tocqueville argues that newspapers have a decisive role in galvanised this sort of concerted collective power. They are crucial in developing the public sphere as a domain through which the opinion and power of citizens can be articulated and galvanised. He also sees a clear link between the equality of political rights and the vitality of this associational life. Political rights and political participation allows citizens to combine for great ends. This is a valuable practical lesson in the value of helping one another that citizens are able to translate into lesser affairs. In this respect, political association and civic association do not detract but only enhance each other. Tocqueville views this associational life as a great school in the use of collective power and in carrying out all sorts of undertakings in common. Individuals thereby gain competence in, and taste for, associational activity and become more productive and confident. Tocqueville is keen to allay any fears that political association is a dangerous force for instability. In fact, he reads voluntary association in entirely opposite terms. In his view, the American commitment to civic projects cannot tolerate political instability. Associational life transforms individuals into externally directed citizens with commitment to common projects and counteracts the forces of bourgeois competition and atomisation. However, if the private association has a limitation from the political standpoint, it is that such groupings were often predisposed to agreement. Unlike political association where members learn to deliberate their differences in order to develop co-operative action, the membership of private associations is regularly organised around sameness and hence exposed to sectional interests and a narrow political education.

2. As mentioned earlier, in Vol 1 Tocqueville’s analysis accentuates the positive potential of the American experience as a model that reconciles democracy with stability, where the immanent potential of democracy towards tyranny was balanced by modifications that preserved a balance between freedom and equality. However, in the later Vol 2 he explores the condition where democracy has become the dominant cultural force. In this context, the positive potentials are very much under threat from the rising tide of centralised power, atomised and competitive individualism and social uniformity. The aspiration to equality and the universalisation of economic calculation imposes a dull sameness of motives, tastes, and perspectives. The great vice of democratic culture is envy. In a society where the principle aim is living well in a materialistic sense and individuals live in close proximity, competitive comparison becomes a preoccupation. In such a social condition it is harder for the modern individual to aspire to greatness: they know their fellows intimately and see them up close. At the same time, rules and regulations eliminate the social spaces of eccentricity and variety. This adds to a growing convergence of condition. Whereas Hegel stresses the unruly character of modern bourgeois civil society, Tocqueville views the all-powerful, centralised and rational modern state as a real danger. (D in A 336). In Tocqueville’s scenario the unruly character of Hegel’s view of bourgeois social relations is displaced by the threat of a paternalistic state despotism that stems from the desire for equality. For Tocqueville, the uniformist state connives with the egalitarian passions of its constituency. However, from a contemporary perspective the danger seems to lie elsewhere. The danger seems to be less that individual liberty becomes endangered by a centralised state expressing the demands of an egalitarian minded majority, than that individuals loss all taste for politics as they subside into a privatised, consumption focused liberty.

3. Having presented the main lines of Tocqueville’s view of democracy, we need to briefly mention his attitude to the race question in America. We have seen that in order to describe democracy as a way of life his main focus is on white civilisation and especially the New England towns. However, in a single chapter towards the end of Vol 1 he maintains that the race issue is vital to the future of America. This chapter begins with a consideration of the Amerindians who he considers to be doomed. They are trapped between their dependence on novel goods of civilisation and their inability to abandon the freedom of their hunting mode of life. They soon became dependent on European merchandise yet could exchange nothing for them other than furs. They soon exhausted these resources and the animals of the hunt were further disturbed by the onrush of European civilisation. Without game and reluctant to farm, most Indian tribes were faced with the stark alternatives of famine or resettlement further West. Tribal existence becomes fragmented and finally destroyed by the need to survive in new lands already inhabited by their own indigenous populations. Tocqueville sees no end to the misery of the Amerindians short of their complete destruction. This is a human tragedy but an almost evitable consequence of the clash of two different levels of civilisation in a single space and time.

4. In Tocqueville’s view, the case of black slavery was more complicated. The fundamental problem was that the institution of slavery had bound together the fate of two peoples that would never mingle. The great evil of slavery was that it had linked inferiority to race. Tocqueville views racial inequality essentially as a cultural not a biological issue. Cultural characteristics lie deep in the mores of a people’s way of life and cannot change overnight. While the law might change, the ignominy of subordination as an inequality rooted in nature persisted in the mores of American culture. This meant that white pride and ambition would not allow it to mingle with the blacks. Tocqueville saw evidence for this proposition in the intensity with which colour prejudice persisted in the North where slavery had been abolished. There black political and civil rights existed but could not be exercised owing to the strength of public animosity. The persistence of this prejudice came to a head with the issue of abolition. For Tocqueville, the persistence of this institution was no longer based on economic grounds. Observers had long agreed that slavery with its repugnance for the value of work was an inhibition on prosperity. Certainly the Southern economy was more dependent on slavery and would not find it easy to adjust to its abolition. However, the main issue was the existence of a very large minority population that once liberated would be rebellious element no longer tolerating its dehumanisation. Tocqueville contemplates a number of scenarios. His basic proposition is that the strength of race prejudice was such that the two populations were unlikely to mingle. In the South the whites possessed all the land and resources. A free Negro population would not accept this dispensation forever. Immigration schemes to return blacks to Africa were already in existence but these could never even meet the rate of natural increase of the black population in the South. He also believed that abolition would increase repugnance of the black population amongst the Southern whites. Contemplating the future he views race conflict as very likely. Either the whites in North and South would stand in unity to defeat the Negro rebellion or the whites might even be defeated in the South. In any case, he believed that great misfortune could not be avoided. Either masters or slaves would finally abolish slavery but not without great ensuing misery. In this respect it is interesting to note that the impetus for emancipation to the extent realised today comes from the quarter least expected in Tocqueville’s general diagnosis of democracy. In his general analysis, the local is the bastion of freedom against the homogenising demands of the centralised state. However, in the dynamics of the American civil war, the demands for civil freedom finally gravitated to the central government whereas the southern states came to the defence of slavery and inequality.

5. The foregoing analysis of the race question in early 19th century America anticipates Tocqueville’s views on European colonialism. As mentioned, he became the Foreign minister for a short time after the 1848 revolution. However, even before this time he wrote articles on the question of slavery and French colonial policy. His views on this question, like his views on slavery and the indigenous peoples in America, was conditioned by a theory of historical progress that hierarchised civilisations on the basis of societal achievements. When discussing the rational of contemporary slavery he makes it clear that while this inhuman institution is doomed, the great nations of Europe are now engaged in a struggle on the world stage. Any country that aspires to greatest and desires to play a role in the great theatre of human affairs must be prepared to support colonies even if this sometimes requires policies that temporarily compromise indigenous rights. Interestingly, in a further justification of a colonial policy, he argues that the growing importance of the working class in the European nations means that industrial crisis can quickly escalate to political crisis. With this in mind, European nations do well to protect the stability of the external markets by trading with colonies with which commercial relations are less likely to be subject to sudden variations. Clearly behind these political considerations both internal and international is the affirmation of the ethnocentrism of the West and its unquestioned cultural superiority. This was associated with Christianity and its concern for liberty, individual worth and individual conscience. While it is already clear that Tocqueville did not seek a biological foundation for this cultural superiority, he nonetheless thought its legitimated a version of the “white man’s burden” in bringing these cultural goods to other parts of the world and a sense of inevitability about European colonialism. While aware of the greed and hypocrisy that was always associated with these ventures and counseling fair and humane concern for native populations, Tocqueville never doubted the cultural superiority that justified the colonial enterprise as a whole.

6. Let’s now return to Tocqueville’s general analysis of democracy with a more critical eye. I earlier mentioned positively the vagueness of his definition of democracy. Conceived as a way of life it becomes possible to understand democracy in a more comprehensive way as multi-dimensional social condition with a vast array of social and political potentials. However, the deficiency in this reading is that it does not discriminate between separable components and their logics. It treats bourgeois capitalism and democracy as a totality without attempting to distinguish these aspects of modernity and align them with the excesses indicated in his general diagnosis of democracy. Why did Tocqueville fashion his image of modernity under the signature of democracy alone? The answer is buried in the historical context. His early thought is pre-occupied with pre-industrial model of society. America was in the main a rural, dynamic but stable middle class society. This was especially relevant in the French context where an independent peasantry had been greatly augmented by the ex-appropriations of the revolution. This had created a vast class of independent, small holding property owners. This was a non-revolutionary estate whose economic ethos was quite compatible with the 19th century bourgeois. On this basis Tocqueville initially envisaged the possibility of a great historical convergence of democracy and capitalism. Yet this model was both backward looking and overly optimistic. It presupposed an exclusively middle class, mainly agrarian, society where the main great historical causes of inequality and poverty were no longer evident. However, the sources of inequality have not disappeared from the modern world. In fact, we live amidst increasingly complex social world where general formal political and legal equality co-exists with steep hierarchies of privilege and power.

7. In general, Tocqueville’s ideas on economics are wholly conventional. He is more interested in economic psychology: hedonism. His account of economic evolution is betrayed by his aristocratic bias: he stresses increased physical gratification and the creation of new needs, not technology or the organisation of new production. On this basis, he suggests that economic crisis is not accidental to democracy but the product of an inflamed thirst for well-being. The universalisation of this hedonist man portends a flat monotony of everything being subordinated to the quest for individual accumulation and well-being. Tocqueville misses the role of productivity and innovation as decisive social mechanisms and goals and therefore misses the supra-individual logic of capitalism and industrialisation. His initial hope for an unproblematic convergence between democracy and capitalism was based on the minimisation of those aspects of the former that threatened his vision of a moderate, stable egalitarian democracy.

8. Late in Vol 2 he notices some of the emerging tensions. Visiting industrial cities he noted the new grinding extreme, division of labour, industrial fortunes, increasing role of government. On a trip to England in the 1830’s he visited Manchester and writes in his notebook:

“ From the foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles and civilised man is turned back into a savage” (Journeys to England and Ireland Ed J P Mayer, pp107-108)

This polarisation of wealth and poverty with all its dehumanisation contradicts his equality thesis. Industrialisation also facilitates centralisation of power and increasing dependency on the state. But he views the industrial city as an exception and does not completely comprehend the coming real impact of the urban industrial economy.


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