Cheryl Welch

Colonial Violence And The Rhetoric Of Evasion Tocqueville on Algeria

Tocqueville’s contradictory writings on imperialism have produced interpretations that range from unrepentant realism to lapsed universalism. This essay considers the moral psychology that underlies his position. It argues that Tocqueville’s writings on colonialism exemplify his resort to apologia when his deepest apprehensions are aroused and offers a typology of Tocquevillean rhetorical evasions: the mechanisms by which he attempts to quell perceptions of moral dissonance. It also argues that Tocqueville’s evasion of the challenge of Algeria illustrates a particular kind of liberal failure and a peculiar liberal temptation. By avoiding rather than confronting the conflicting intuitions underlying his moral judgments, Tocqueville betrays the promise of his liberalism by failing to explore the tensions implicit in the practice of liberal democracy. These strategies to deaden awareness of complicity in colonial violence appear disturbingly familiar in a world in which national interests and universally acknowledged “human maxims” increasingly collide in the liberal conscience.

The Cambridge companion to Tocqueville

Part I. Theory: 1. Tocquevilles comparative perspectives Seymour Drescher 2. Tocqueville on 1789: preconditions, precipitants, and triggers Jon Elster 3. Tocquevilles new political science Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop 4. Tocqueville, political philosopher Pierre Manent Part II. Texts: 5. Tocquevilles Democracy in America reconsidered James T. Schleifer 6. Translating Tocqueville: the constraints of classicism Arthur Goldhammer 7. The writer Engage: Tocqueville and political rhetoric Laurence Guellec 8. The shifting puzzles of Tocquevilles The Old Regime and the Revolution Robert T. Gannett Jr. Part III. Themes: 9. Tocqueville and civil society Dana Villa 10. Tocqueville on threats to liberty in democracies Melvin Richter 11. Tocqueville and democratic religious experience Joshua Mitchell 12. Tocqueville on fraternity and fratricide Cheryl B. Welch Part IV. Two Traditions: 13. Tocqueville and the French Francoise Melonio 14. Tocqueville and the Americans: Democracy in America as read in nineteenth-century America Olivier Zunz.

Tocqueville's resistance to the social

This essay examines Tocquevilles conception of the “social” against the background of debates over the relationship between the social and the political in France from the Revolution to mid-century. It focuses on three groups: those associated with the social philosophy of industrialisme, those concerned with the evils of pauperism from the standpoint of Catholic social reform, and those allied with the new Doctrinaire view of society and politics. It argues that Tocqueville consistently resisted the primacy of the “social” as articulated by these thinkers, even in the seductive form offered by François Guizot, whose influence on Tocqueville is examined in light of recent debates over this issue.

The receptions of Elie halevy’s la formation du radicalisme philosophique in England and France

That Elie Halevys The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism is a classic text of history and theory is a judgment repeated too often to be in doubt. But what makes it a classic? The most obvious sign—that it is widely recommended as a standard work in its field generations after its publication—raises the question of why and how a text becomes a leading work or “master” piece. Literary classics are sometimes said to fuse style, substance, and significance in a mysterious alchemy that continues to stimulate thought beyond the original context. Similarly, discussions of historical works that enlarge the imagination sometimes center on the literary qualities of these texts. Most famously, Hayden White dwells on their allegedly fruitful exploitation of a preexisting “linguistic protocol” such as tragedy or irony. White also notes, however, that a necessary condition for any work of history to resonate powerfully with its audience is that readers are subconsciously prepared to be moved by it.

Out of Africa: Tocqueville's Imperial Voyages

Introduction As Tocquevilles writings on empire have become more available in translation, and as both Anglophone and Francophone political theorists have begun to grapple with the transnational aspects of democratic theory, scholars have increasingly puzzled over the apparent dissonance between Tocquevilles liberal and imperial voices. How can his dedication to human freedom co-exist with his embrace of permanent colonial domination in Algeria?1 This essay attempts to contextualize this paradox in Tocquevilles thought without turning historical context into an apologia.

Les injustices révoltantes: Gustave de Beaumont and the Pre-history of Crimes Against Humanity

If Alexis de Tocqueville was the anthropologist of modern equality, his companion in America and lifelong associate Gustave de Beaumont was the horrified observer of the anachronistic persistence of inequality: morally polarized worlds of black and white, slave and master, bound and free, conquered and conqueror, famine and opulence. Beaumont’s writings in fact cluster around a set of cases that have often been retrospectively collected as “crimes against humanity” avant la lettre: enslavement of Africans, extermination or “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous peoples by the English in Ireland the US in America, and the French conquest of Algeria. I read Beaumont’s texts as a privileged entre to reconstructing what nineteenth-century liberals understood to constitute conduct that was morally beyond the pale, either in peace or war. In the last half century the notion of a category of crimes that shock the conscience of humanity has emerged at the intersection of humanitarian and human rights law. Yet the notion of scandalizing or sinning against humanity, and even the phrase “crimes against humanity” itself, was used earlier and more widely—in both English and

Creating Concitoyens: Tocqueville on the Legacy of Slavery

From his entry into the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 to his principled withdrawal from political life a decade later, Tocqueville was guided by his deep-seated desire to negotiate a practical transition to democracy without sacrificing liberty. But he never managed to carve out a leading political role in the July Monarchy; instead, he steered an independent and uncertain course among the opposition. He was most visible not as a party leader or follower, but as a neutral expert on philanthropic and foreign policy issues: prison reform, public charity, military affairs, North African policy, and the abolition of colonial slavery. Of these, the cause that Tocqueville thought most clearly transcended ‘petty politics’ was slave emancipation in the French colonies. It also posed the most stubborn and frustrating of dilemmas. Abolition offered French policy-makers the chance to promote liberty, but in circumstances decidedly not of their choosing. Indeed, to borrow a phrase from Marx, those circumstances ‘weigh[ed] like a nightmare on the brain of the living’.1 Under the pressures of the democratic revolution, ties of mutual loyalty among equal citizens had come to have an important role in self-government. Yet the introduction of modern slavery had created exclusionary identities in which democratic majorities shunned and dehumanized subordinated groups, who in turn fashioned solidarity out of victimization.