Richard Avramenko

Democratic Dystopia: Tocqueville and the American Penitentiary System

It is well established that for Alexis de Tocqueville the future of democracy is contingent. This essay argues that in his oft-neglected report on the penitentiary system in America, Tocqueville bears witness to one of these futures—a dystopic democracy in which the essential bulwarks of liberty have been stripped away, leaving behind perfect equality but also perfect servitude. Specifically, the penitentiaries deprive prisoners of their basic religious freedoms, attack their habits of association, and subject them to the tyranny of public opinion through the rigorous but mild disciplinary regime of the warden. By presenting a tangible imaginative of democratic equality taken to its limits, Tocqueville encourages his readers to heed his later recommendations for the maintenance of institutions and practices without which freedom is, at best, contingent.

Tocqueville and the Religion of Democracy

Abstract The relationship between religion and democracy is a perennial debate in democratic theory. Recent arguments have been made that certain religions, especially Anglo-Protestantism, are particularly conducive to democracy. Other scholars argue that democracy can be made to fit almost any religion. This article sheds theoretical light on this confusion by construing religion differently. Although there are many religions in the world, they are all informed by an underlying dogma (i.e., an epistemological framework). On the basis of an interpretation of Alexis de Tocquevilles Democracy in America, I establish two dogmas determining the shape of political and social life: the dogma of equality and the dogma of inequality. By establishing the character of these dogmas, it is demonstrated that democracy rests on the dogma of equality, but it requires religious habits to be liberal.

Subprime Virtues: The Moral Dimensions of American Housing and Mortgage Policy

The so-called “subprime mortgage crisis” has led to intense scrutiny of American housing policy, mortgage finance, and even the goods of homeownership. Some critics allege that the housing bubble and ensuing financial crisis were consequences of misguided state intervention, whereas others contend that the sources of the crisis lay in the pathologies of unregulated markets. Still others point to international debt burdens and capital flows as the root cause. Regardless of the ultimate sources, and despite the seemingly endless hand-wringing and fingerpointing by pundits and policy-makers, the events of 2007–09 have primarily been viewed through the economic lens of cost-benefit analysis. How much did the economic crisis cost, and who ought to pay for it? This is unfortunate, we suggest, because mortgage and housing policy—like all public policy—has a moral dimension easily overlooked. Over the past three decades the effects of public policy on moral character have been of great interest to political scientists. Ever since Theda Skocpol revealed the link between Civil War pensions and the development of the modern welfare state, scholars have gone to lengths to demonstrate that as politics creates policy, policy in turn transforms the political landscape from which it came. Social Security and Medicare, as Andrea Campbell illustrated, gave rise to a new constituency of seniors ready to defend their entitlements. Likewise, Suzanne Mettler documented how the G.I. Bill created the “Greatest Generation”—a generation with unparalleled levels of civic engagement. Of course, not all policy creates better citizens, as Joe Soss and others have shown with regard to poverty governance. Drug testing for welfare, they have argued, diminishes recipients’ civic engagement and other aspects of good citizenship. Whether policies further or thwart civic engagement, it has become a truism that policies do, in fact, have moral implications and can foster particular sets of citizen dispositions and capabilities. What, then, of housing and mortgage policy? Not only is housing and mortgage policy inevitably normative, it can also be pivotal in fostering a particular set of citizen virtues. We recognize that this position may be controversial. Is it appropriate, for example, to use state power to pursue a particular vision of the good life? And if so, who is to say what constitutes the good life, or what virtues are constitutive of good citizenship? To the first question, we answer unequivocally—all policies have normative consequences, whether we like it or not. To the second, we affirm what we call the subprime virtues: truth-telling, promise-keeping, frugality, moderation, commitment, foresight, and judgment. These basic virtues, absolute prerequisites for any decent society, were a survey of all the major moral traditions—be it the Western philosophical North Hall News

The Grammar of Indifference: Tocqueville and the Language of Democracy

This essay analyzes what Alexis de Tocqueville calls an “application of linguistics to history.” Beginning with Tocqueville’s position that language is the ground of meaningful bonds between people, I argue that the internal logic of a language—the grammar—is correlated with the internal logic governing the social order that both begets and is begotten by that language. Social orders therefore have both linguistic and political grammars and, as the internal logic of language changes, so too can the political grammar. This essay thus traces what Tocqueville envisions as the historical importance of language: from the language of aristocracy and the grammar of difference, to revolutionary language and the grammar of concurrence, to democratic language and the grammar of indifference. It concludes with Tocqueville’s suggestion of how good grammar might be taught in democratic ages.

Sportsmanship and Politics: Xenophon on Ponos and Democratic Competition

ABSTRACT Even though agonistic democratic theory espouses and celebrates competition, it seemingly lacks a coherent ethic for decent winning and losing in everyday political life. This article is an effort to fill this void by suggesting a practice-based, non-perfectionist ethic drawn from sport. Focusing on Xenophons On Hunting, we argue that sport, properly defined, offers an appropriate experience with ponos (toil, suffering) that teaches citizens perseverance, humility, generosity, empathy, and stewardship. This sporting ethic, we argue, provides a more suitable model for winning and losing in public life than the martial basis of agonistic democratic theory.

SymposiumGreen’sJeffrey E.The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, ISBN 9780195372649, Hardback, 296 pages,

Jeffrey Green’s The Eyes of the People (EOP) outlines a basic distinction between two models of popular power in a democracy. On the one hand, there is what Green calls the vocal model, which has dominated the way popular power has been conceptualized since the rebirth of democracy at the end of the eighteenth century. According to this model, the People is understood as a legislative voice—as a set of preferences waiting to be translated into laws and policies. EOP demonstrates that despite the diversity of approaches to democratic theory, the vocal model has informed virtually all philosophies of democracy. For example, it informs not only democratic idealists of the nineteenth century, like Mill and Tocqueville, but equally contemporary models (like aggregationists and deliberative democrats) who, even if more skeptical about popular self-legislation in any simplistic sense, continue to envision the People as a vocal, decisional force. The problem with the vocal model, Green explains, is twofold: failing to account for the fact that most citizens most of the time are not engaged in political decision making, it is disconnected from reality; second, it is hegemonic because, leading ordinary citizens to exaggerate their political capacity, it blinds them to the distinction between an elite with special decision-making authority and the great many without power. It is not surprising, then, as Green notes, that the very notion of the People has come under pressure in recent years, as numerous scholars of democracy (e.g., pluralists), unwilling to treat the People as a monolithic vocal being, have argued for jettisoning the concept altogether. But rather than abandon the idea of the People, Green develops a competing model of popular power, which he calls the ocular model—or also the plebiscitary model. Within the ocular model, the People—the mass of everyday citizens in their collective capacity—is conceived as a spectating rather than decision-making being: it watches leaders and other elites who appear on the public stage. If the central ideal of the vocal model is autonomy (the People’s self-authorship of the laws), the central ideal of the ocular model is 516414 PTXXXX10.1177/0090591713516414Political Theory research-article2014