Tocqueville’s Cultural Racism
Adam Dahl
PhD Candidate
University of Minnesota
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science
Association in Portland, OR
March 22, 2012
1
I.
Introduction
The last two decades have witnessed the steady emergence of a vast though contested
literature on the role of race in Tocqueville’s political thought. Fundamentally at stake in these
debates is whether racism and racial exclusion are incidental or integral aspects of the
Tocquevillean political imaginary. Critics of American exceptionalism follow the work of
Rogers Smith in arguing that Tocqueville treats racism as an anomaly to the liberal, democratic
order, ideologically masking its exclusions. In this reading, Tocqueville perpetuated racial
oppression by placing race outside of democratic politics, allowing it to be ignored rather than
critically confronted. Another group of scholars argue that Tocqueville’s thought both reflected
and reinforced the “herrenvolk (master-race) democracy” of Jacksonian America. While I agree
with these critics about the mutually constitutive relationship between democracy and racial
exclusion, I contest that this practical interaction does not necessarily occur through the bio-logic
of racial superiority implied by herrenvolk democracy. Failing to link his notion of democracy
with his justifications of French colonialism, these accounts cannot explain how Tocqueville
deemed other cultures inferior to Western civilization and legitimized policies that reflected this
judgment in spite of his rejection of biological racism as a valid mode of thought. I thus place
Tocqueville’s conceptions of race and democracy in a trans-national context of empire rather
than in an exclusively national context to reveal unexplored exclusionary effects of his thought.
Taking from Etienne Balibar’s concept of “neo-racism,” in which culture replaces biology as the
central category of difference, I uncover a strand of cultural racism that acted as a constitutive
element in Tocqueville’s conception of democracy and his justification of French imperialism.
In the second part of this essay, I rehearse the key disputes and disagreements over the role of
race and racism in Tocqueville’s political thought and introduce the concept of “cultural racism.”
2
In the third part, I argue that Tocqueville formulated a cultural concept of democracy that he
constructed through the reification of American democratic culture in opposition to what he
deemed the inferior cultures of black slaves and Amerindians. In the fourth part, I turn to his
writings on slavery and the “Algeria question” to show how cultural racism aided in his
justification of French colonialism. In the fifth section, I ask how the concept of cultural racism
challenges dominant periodizations in the history of racist thought.
Before I proceed, it is important to clarify my general line of argument by way of a brief
commentary on the notion of racism. My aim in this paper is not simply to suggest that
Tocqueville was a racist. I do contest, however, that his texts produced effects that legitimized
specific racial hierarchies and that the categories he used to formulate his conception of
democracy were part of an incipient discourse of cultural racism. In referring to “Tocqueville’s
cultural racism” I do not mean to cast the problem in terms of individual prejudice. Such a
conception of racism has been ever-present in American politics, from the nineteenth-century
(most forcefully evidenced in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to the middle
of the twentieth-century (illustrated in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma). For example,
contrary to accepted definitions of racial prejudice as a general type of rational judgment, John
Dewey has argued that prejudice, in coming before a judgment, is “a-empirical” and therefore
irrational. Prejudice, for Dewey, is literally a “pre-judgment.” Myrdal, in his 1944 report on
U.S. race relations, similarly viewed the race problem as a matter of individual beliefs and
irrational prejudices contradicting the rational, egalitarian principles of the American Creed.1
Against viewing it as a form of prejudice, I follow Balibar in understanding racism as a
“mode of thought” that “produces its own community, the racist community,” by inscribing itself
1
John Dewey, “Racial Prejudice and Friction,” John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899-1924, Volume 13
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), pp. 242-243.
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in the practices, discourses, and institutions that give substance to the collectivity. Racism, as a
mode of thought, is not something that an individual consciously controls; instead, it structures
both political reflection and the political community that is the object of that reflection. It thus
has ideological effects insofar as it is a generalized system of signification that acts as a form of
power.2 I argue, then, that there are racist effects of Tocqueville’s concepts and categories that
he himself may not have consciously owned. While this of course requires reading his work
contextually and symptomatically, I maintain that there is evidence of a discursive structure of
cultural racism at work in his thought. But Tocqueville did not formulate this discourse ex
nihilo. Rather, he drew on modes of thought present in nineteenth-century racial discourse that
when combined with the categories employed in the formulation of his concept of democracy
produced racial effects that prefigured those associated with cultural racism.
II.
Racial Categories in Tocqueville’s Political Thought
Rogers Smith has in many ways provided the point of departure for scholars studying the role
of race in Tocqueville’s thought. In the formulation of his important “multiple traditions thesis,”
Smith posits that Tocqueville viewed racial exclusion and oppression as an anomaly to the larger
trend of democratic equality in nineteenth-century American politics. Smith avers that
Tocqueville casts the race problem as one of individual prejudice and in doing so treats racism
and racial exclusion as incidental and ancillary aspects of liberal democracy in America.3
Smith’s engagement with the role of race in Tocquevillean democracy begins with a larger
concern about dominant characterizations of American development, what he calls the
“Tocqueville-Hartz thesis.” In Smith’s view, proponents of the thesis characterize American
development in terms of an overwhelming commitment to a liberal, democratic creed. In
2
Balibar, “Racism as Universalism,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), pp. 200-201.
Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz,” American Political Science Review, 87, 3 (Sept. 1993), pp. 549566. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)
3
4
Tocqueville’s estimation, American citizens, united by shared principles, take part in a collective
consensus over a common, liberal creed that places “moral authority in universal reason” and
“political power in the universality of citizens.” Tocqueville wrote that the American republic
exists without conflict and opposition, united by “a sort of consensus universalis.”4
Smith directs the thrust of his criticism towards the treatment of race in terms of what
scholars consider the “anomaly thesis.”5 According to Smith, the Tocqeuville-Hartz thesis
places racial exclusion outside of liberal development and political culture. It treats racial
inequality as an exception to the egalitarian creed – an aberrant, irrational belief system in an
otherwise rational, liberal order. Like Myrdal, in this reading, Tocqueville viewed racism as
“mere prejudice” that is antithetical but ultimately ancillary to the American Creed, rendering
racial exclusion an anomaly within the egalitarian order of liberal democracy. 6 In Smith’s
reading, Tocqueville’s characterization of U.S. politics in terms of a dominant emphasis on
liberal consensus and democratic equality deems racial exclusion and domination an
“inconsistent afterthought” to American democracy rather than one of its central elements. To
remedy this problem, Smith looks beyond racism as a form of ideational prejudice to understand
how it is written into law, institutions, and political culture. Rather than seeing racial exclusion
as contrary to liberal, republican democracy, Smith accounts for the “recurring admixture” of
different “multiple traditions” (liberalism, republicanism, ascriptive nationalisms) in order to
4
Civic Ideals, pp. 26-35. Democracy in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), translated by
Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, pp. 358-359, 382. Louis Hartz famously built on this idea by locating the
key to the American experience in the “the absence of feudalism and the presence of the liberal idea.” The Liberal
Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1955), p. 11.
5
Jennifer Hochschild first proposed the “anomaly thesis” in The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and
School Desegregation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), ch. 1. For similar tendencies, see August
Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The “Absolute Democracy” or “Defiled Democracy” (Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2003), p. ix; Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville,
Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), ch. 2; Sean Wilentz, “Many Democracies: On
Tocqueville and Jacksonian America,” Reconsidering Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers Press, 1988), edited by Abraham Eisenstadt; Ali Behdad, Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural
Identity in the United States (Duke University Press, 2005), ch. 2.
6
Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz,” p. 552.
5
explain how racial inequality is built into the legal structure and cultural matrix of the American
polity. For Smith, Americans do share a common culture, but one that is “more complexly and
multiply constituted” than Tocqueville depicts.7
There is, of course, good evidence for Smith’s interpretation of the role of racial categories in
Tocqueville’s democratic thought. In the tenth chapter of Democracy, Tocqueville explicitly
states that while slavery and Amerindian dispossession “touch on [the] subject” of democracy,
they are “American without being democratic.” In this reading, Tocqueville steps outside of his
larger conceptual framework, which proceeds by way of an implicit contrast between democracy
and aristocracy, to envisage the New World “from more than one point of view.”8 But we must
be wary of taking any historical thinker at their word, of allowing the text to present itself to us.
In spite of his avowal otherwise, does Tocqueville’s analysis of race truly operate separately
from democracy? What hermeneutic possibilities and political dynamics are obscured by
uncritically accepting such an interpretive principle?
While Smith attempts to view racism as a constitutive element of American political order,
he also separates racial exclusion from liberal democracy just as he criticizes Tocqueville for
doing. By attributing inegalitarian practices only to ideologies of ascriptive nationalism rather
than republicanism or liberalism, Smith makes the boundary between racial exclusion and liberal
democracy so rigid as to preclude any consideration of their mutual constitution. In doing so, he
insulates liberal democracy from having any role in the production of racial exclusion.9 Recent
scholarship has challenged the “multiple traditions thesis” by showing that racial exclusion and
7
Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz,” p. 556, 558.
Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 302. Smith, Civic Ideals, p. 20. François Furet argues that in this chapter Tocqueville
sets aside the concept of democracy to analyze groups whose experience is “incompatible with the democracy
prevailing in the Union;” In the Workshop of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 184.
9
See Marc Stears, “The Liberal Tradition and the Politics of Exclusion,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol.
10, 2007, 85-101; and Ira Katznelson’s review of Civic Ideals in Political Theory, 27, 4 (August 1999), p. 569.
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 11-12.
8
6
democratic politics are mutually reinforcing in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on the idea
of “herrenvolk (master-race) democracy,” political theorists and historians have argued that
Tocqueville not only constructed his concept of democracy through a racialized logic, but that he
also legitimized racial hierarchy and white power. As such, racial exclusion is not an
afterthought to Tocquevillean democracy, but is one of its constituent elements.10
Pierre van den Berghe first proposed the notion of herrenvolk democracy to characterize how
the “scope and applicability of egalitarian ideals” was restricted to the part of the community
racially defined as white in nineteenth-century American democracy. The “people” that
democratic authority was founded upon was a racially circumscribed people whose power rested
on the enslavement, exclusion, and domination of inferior races. Herrenvolk democracy entailed
a democratic vision of self-government premised on de jure equality reserved for whites
underwritten by a racial aristocracy. It is democracy applied exclusively to the master-race,
barring inferior slaves and indigenous communities from the universal, egalitarian standards of
liberal citizenship. It is a political system in which power is delegated, de facto and de jure,
solely to the master-race.11
In this political vision, the slave labor of blacks and dispossession of indigenous communities
were not incidental to democratic equality, but provided the economic base upon which political
and civil rights for whites rested.12 Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia expressed the logic of
herrenvolk democracy succinctly: “Break down slavery, and you would with the same blow
destroy the great democratic principle of equality among men.”13 William Wells Brown, in the
10
Smith understands the nature of herrenvolk democracy in his conception of a “white yeoman republic,” but he
places liberal citizenship outside of the racialized construction of democracy; Civic Ideals, pp. 197-200.
11
Pierre van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (Wiley and Sons, 1969), pp. 18, 29. George
Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 4.
12
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. xv.
13
Quoted by George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 62.
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first African American novel, Clotel, clearly understood the nature of herrenvolk democracy.
While whites were governed by what Tocqueville considered “free political institutions” and
“free mores,” black slaves were ruled by “democratic whips” and “republican chains.” It was
not merely the slave owners who cracked the whips that were the despots. The real tyrants were
“the sovereign people… all the free citizens.” Brown implores his readers not to “look upon this
as a paradox,” but to see it as the logic of white democracy.14
Recent work on Tocqueville shows not only that his democratic thought was formed within
the logic of herrenvolk democracy but also that it served to legitimize its racial hierarchies.
According to this argument, American democracy in the Tocquevillean political imagination is
the product of a dialectical process wherein the modern ideal of equality and racial exclusion are
mutually reinforcing. Racial oppression and democracy, argues Joel Olson, are symbiotic
because the “very structure of American citizenship is white.”15 Olson contends that Tocqueville
formulated his conception of democracy within the logic of herrenvolk ideology in spite of his
disavowal of biological racism. Tocqueville’s thought both reflected and reinforced the
racialized class order of Jacksonian society in which equality was restricted to the white world in
order to build a cross-class coalition of male workers, artisans, farmers, and Southern planters.
In this class order, Tocqueville afforded whites a “psychological wage,” providing the symbolic
resources that allowed lower class farmers and workers to distance themselves from blacks in
order to shore up the appearance of their own freedom.16 Far from bracketing race from liberal
14
Tocqueville quoted in Jardin’s biography, p. 154. Brown, Clotel, pp. 14, 180.
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, p. xv.
16
Ibid., p. xxiv & ch. 2. See David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness on W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of a “psychological
wage” (New York: Verso, 1999). A recent set of studies has also emphasized the psychological benefits that accrue
to white citizens from the interaction of racism and democracy: Margaret Kohn, “The Other America: Tocqueville
and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,” Polity, 35, 2 (Winter 2002), pp. 169-193; Laura Janara, “Brothers and Others:
Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism,” Political Theory, 32, 6 (Dec. 2004), pp. 793;
Jack Turner, “American Individualism and Structural Injustice: Tocqueville, Gender, and Race,” Polity, 40, 2 (April
2008), pp. 197-215.
15
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democracy, Tocqueville recognized that racial domination set the conditions of possibility for
white equality. But in doing so, Olson argues, Tocqueville inadvertently naturalized racial
distinctions and authorized the racial oppression at the center of herrenvolk democracy.17
While I agree with this criticism that democracy and racial domination are mutually
constitutive in Tocqueville’s thought, it faces limitations as an interpretation of the role of racial
categories in his concept of democracy. Olson observes that although Tocqueville rejected
Arthur de Gobineau’s biological racism, he was not kept from “judging other cultures inferior to
European civilization.”18 This assertion is certainly valid, but there remains a tension in the
suggestion that even though Tocqueville rejected biological racism his political thought was still
constructed through the logic of racial superiority implied by the concept of herrenvolk
democracy. I do not deny that Tocqueville’s thought reinforced the race and class structure of
Jacksonian democracy in the U.S. But as a racist mode of thought, herrenvolk ideology cannot
explain how Tocqueville judges other cultures to be inferior.
George Fredrickson also suggests that although Tocqueville rejected a “biological
explanation” of American national character, he still drew on the discourse of herrenvolk
democracy. Tocqueville, according to Fredrickson, assumed that the cultural practices and
habits of thought imposed on black slaves by centuries of servitude and domination necessarily
entailed a racially circumscribed democracy restricted to whites. For Fredrickson, then,
Tocqueville’s cultural determinism doubles as a form of biological determinism that has the
same effect of reserving freedom and equality for whites while condemning Blacks and
Amerindians to a world of terror and tyranny. In addition to confusing the way that racial
categories operate to pass judgment on different cultures, such a move obscures the different
17
18
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, pp. 47-53.
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, p. 49. D. Losurdo Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011).
9
racial effects that different racist modes of thought produce.19 Different modes of thinking about
racial difference – whether biological or cultural – lead to different modes of exclusion and
different ideological justifications of racist, political practices.
I do not seek to argue against the notion of herrenvolk democracy as the dominant mode of
racial exclusion in the nineteenth-century North Atlantic world. While the idea of herrenvolk
democracy illuminates crucial aspects of how race operated in the class structure of the
Jacksonian America, it is less able to illuminate how racial categories operate in Tocqueville’s
concept of democracy. The argument I make is that herrenvolk ideology is limited as an
explanation of how democracy and racism are reconciled and mutually reinforcing in
Tocqueville’s political thought and action. Due to his rejection of biological racism, herrenvolk
ideology cannot explain how racial categories operated in his understanding of democracy and
provided the conceptual resources within which he justified exclusionary practices and judged
other cultures to be inferior. The idea of herrenvolk democracy does not exhaust the dynamics
whereby racism, as a mode of thought, governs the mutual constitution of racial exclusion and
democracy in Tocqueville’s political thought. In order to gain traction on these issues, I pose the
concept of “cultural racism” as an interpretation of the role of race in Tocquevillean democracy.
Before I demonstrate these points, it is necessary to gain some conceptual traction on the
discourse of cultural racism. While it has many formulators in contemporary political and social
theory, Etienne Balibar has posed perhaps the most forceful critique of the discourse.20 Balibar
asks: is there a new racism that is irreducible to the old models of biological superiority of the
master-race variety? The new racism, in Balibar’s formulation, is a form of racism without
19
Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination, ch. 6.
Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York: Verso, 1991). I
adopt Balibar’s concept of neo-racism as an interpretive lens, but opt to call it cultural racism in order to deemphasize the “newness” of the concept. Stuart Hall provides a similar critique of the “new politics of
representation” in “New Ethnicities,” Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996).
20
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biological races. Relying on the assumption that social difference is historically constructed,
neo-racism substitutes culture as the categorical stand-in for biology or nature. Rather than
upholding the biological superiority of one race over another based on natural, immutable
characteristics and capabilities, cultural racism posits the “insurmountability of cultural
differences” and cautions against the potential pathologies of immediately eradicating social
divisions between groups. In cultural racism, the appeal is not to racial supremacy but to
“cultural uniformity.” It treats difference not as a mark of natural superiority or inferiority, but
as a matter of cultural containment, of respecting and keeping intact the cultural borders that
separate groups. The political aim of cultural racism is not the strict exclusion or elimination of
cultural differences, but rather their management and regulation via “differential inclusion.”21
To clarify my concepts, I understand culture not as a specific sphere of human practice
among others – law, politics, religion, economy – but as the “semiotic dimension of human
social practice in general.” It is the dimension of social practice concerned with the production
of shared meaning.22 Because social relations are always part of a historical process that is
produced and re-produced through human action, cultural meaning too is produced through such
processes and is thus necessarily dynamic. Indeed, scholars often use the concept of culture to
debunk the ideas of scientific racism that rendered racial difference an innate feature of the
natural order of the world.23 Culture, however, is easily reified by taking it as a substantial entity
rather than a relationally constituted process. When culture is reified as a bounded object that
exists prior to historical processes, it becomes stabilized and acts as a categorical substitute for
biological race. Cultural racism rejects the old ideological system by seeing racial difference as
21
Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?,” p. 21. Henry Giroux, “Living Dangerously: Identity Politics and the New
Cultural Racism,” Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies (Psychology Press, 1994), p. 33.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 194.
22
W. Sewell, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Logics of History (University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 164.
23
For example, Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Altamira Press, 1997), p. 319.
11
historically constructed, but it has a functionally equivalent effect when culture is naturalized as
a static, bounded entity. Balibar contends that the reified concept of culture comes to function
like nature insofar as it locks individuals and groups into determinations that are immutable in
origin.24 Racism can equally operate through cultural determinism as biological determinism.
Nevertheless, as I demonstrate in section four, the racial hierarchies and exclusionary structures
that each of these racist modes of thought authorize are often different, and that we must account
for these differences in order to have an adequate critique of power.
III.
Democratic Culture and Racial Exclusion
According to Sheldon Wolin, there are two dominant traditions of understanding democracy
in American thought: as a political form and as a political culture. Viewing democracy as a
political form involves seeing politics in terms of the construction of political institutions and the
development of constitutional principles, while to speak of it as a political culture is to talk of
politics in terms of the norms, habits, and customs that characterize the political community. If
the former locates the nation in the institutions that organize political community, the latter finds
the nation in its national character, cultural ethos, and shared spirit. If the first tradition is that of
Publius, the second is that of Tocqueville. The construction of a democratic culture entails not
only the founding act of setting up the political institutions that bind a community together but
also requires the ongoing cultivation of habits, norms, and practices that make those institutions
and membership in them meaningful.25 Tocqueville understands democracy, first and foremost,
24
Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?,” p. 22. On these points, also see George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 7.
25
See Wolin’s essay “Tending and Intending a Constitution: Bicentennial Misgivings,” in The Presence of the Past
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Also see his essay, “Fugitive Democracy” in Democracy
and Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an extensive discussion of these two
understandings of democracy, see Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001); especially chapters IX & X. Also see James W. Ceaser, “Alexis de Tocqueville and the TwoFounding Thesis,” Review of Politics, 73 (2011), pp. 219-243; Harvey Mansfield, Tocqueville: A Very Short
12
not as a set of constitutional principles embodied in political institutions but as a set of mores,
habits, and practices that shape the shared ethos and collective spirit of a political community.
Rather than viewing democratic culture as stemming from the constitutional form of the
polity, Tocqueville held that mores, norms, and practices underwrite political institutions. In a
letter to Gustave de Beaumont near the end of his life, Tocqueville emphatically asked, “What is
more powerless than institutions, when ideas and mores do not nourish them at all!”26 More
significantly though, Tocqueville understood democracy as a political culture: a general way of
life in which equal and active participation in public affairs was among the supreme virtues. His
conception of democracy, envisioned as a political culture, was a complex of habits, customs,
and norms that enshrined political and social equality as the preeminent value. Democratic
culture was thus a practical “web of meanings” that both expressed and shaped American
national character – the spirit of a people that prompts political action.27
Against archaic notions of culture, Tocqueville’s was a thoroughly modern one.
Conservative thinkers such as Montesquieu, Hume, and Burke understood national culture as the
result of settled forms of human congregation that coalesce over long periods of time.
Tocqueville, rather, conceived democratic culture as a distinctively modern construction that
exceeds the archaic sedimentations of ancient tradition.28 The modern revolution destabilizes all
that is rendered fixed and static by inherited tradition; it “crushes or shatters all that comes across
its path,” leaving in its wake only a “shifting and impalpable dust on which democracy sits.”
Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 3; and Stephen Frederick Schneck, “Habits of the
Head: Tocqueville’s America and Jazz,” Political Theory, 17, 4 (Nov. 1989), pp. 638-662.
26
Tocqueville to Beaumont, February 27, 1858. In The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics
(Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 340.
27
Roger Boesche, “Why Could Tocqueville Predict so Well?,” Political Theory, 11, 1 (Feb. 1983), p. 85.
28
My understanding of what I consider the modern versus archaic conception of culture and its relation to the
modern nation form is drawn from Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983). Also see Sheldon Wolin’s Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, chs. IX, X, & XVI.
13
The hallmark of modernity, for Tocqueville, was that those who wanted social and political
equality had the material and symbolic resources to effectively demand it.29
But Tocqueville found in America a democratic culture that, though expressive of the general
flux of modernity, nevertheless provided the basis for stable political government and liberal
property rights. Rather than keeping social life in perpetual motion, political culture could be
settled so as to provide a bulwark against the hyper-democratic tendencies of radical politics in
Europe. Wolin writes, “The very point of Tocqueville’s conception of a culture whose purpose
was to make democracy safe for the world was not to prepare democratic man for political action
but to neutralize him.” The essential elements of democratic culture in America – the spirit of
religion, spirit of liberty, and spirit of enterprise – are integral to the re-reification and renaturalization of democracy that serves to ensconce popular power in national form.30 In looking
for a model to serve as a guide to action in the midst of the 1848 revolution in France,
Tocqueville relied on a reified nation-state as an exemplar of democratic culture, a culture that,
through its atomistic though enlightened individualism, promised social equality even as it
undermined the leveling tendencies of socialist politics.
The construction of America as democratic proceeded through the reification of the racial
boundaries of American national ethos. Marking the limits of democratic culture, the racialized
construction of democracy as a political culture served to contain popular power and fostered the
exclusion and domination of freed persons, slaves and Amerindians. Tocquevillean democracy,
then, is partly anti-democratic insofar as it attempts to contain rather than cultivate the power of
29
Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 47. On these points, also see Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19thCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 70-74.
30
Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, p. 336. Tocqueville explicitly articulated the controlling function of
democratic culture later in his life. He saw in American culture a model for curbing the egalitarian impulses
unleashed by the 1848 Revolution in Europe. See Tocqueville’s speech to a popular banquet at Cherbourg and the
preface to the twelfth edition of Democracy in America (1848), in Tocqueville on America After 1840 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 372-376. On the three spirits see Tocqueville’s Democracy, pp. 43 & 154.
14
the demos through the nationalization of a political ethos. The cultures of black slaves and
Amerindians served as the limits of democratic culture and they defined the boundaries by which
demotic power was contained in national form. Balibar has noted that though racism is not
equally manifested in all forms of nationalism it “always represents a necessary tendency in their
constitution.” Racism is thus internal the logic of the nation form.31 Tocqueville’s construction
of a national ethos in America has a form of cultural racism built into it that operates through the
reification of democratic culture, which entails the imposition of racialized limits around
democracy according to the logic of cultural racism.
Evidenced by Tocqueville’s correspondence with Arthur de Gobineau, the eminent
proponent of biological racism in the nineteenth-century, Tocqueville clearly rejected biology as
a valid social category. In The Inequality of the Human Races, de Gobineau argued that the
biological category of race was the key to understanding the history of the universal ascendance
of white power. Gobineau affirms that all that is great and noble in civilization is derived from a
single origin, and that “one family alone” has ruled the entire universe. The history of humanity,
according to Gobineau, presents evidence for the “undisputed superiority of… the white race.”
Gobineau locates the origin of racial inequality and white racial superiority not in the historical
process, but in differences between “primitive stocks” that are “absolutely separate.”32
It was precisely this point about “permanence of racial types” that was the crux of
Tocqueville’s dispute with Gobineau. Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau that the doctrine of racial
separation is a “kind of fatalism or predestination” that results in the “complete abolition of
human liberty.” In Tocqueville’s view, such a doctrine is “probably wrong and very certainly
pernicious” because it is based on the view that differences between human groups are
31
32
Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class; pp. 48 & 53.
Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), pp. xiv, 208, &133.
15
“invincible,” an idea that cannot be proven.33 A few years later, Tocqueville wrote that the
“historical doctrine” of “distinct, unequal races” based on the assumption of original dispositions
that “cannot change” violates the “spirit of Christianity,” which upholds the “unity of
humankind.” In these letters, he deliberately rejected Gobineau’s doctrine because it fixes the
development of human communities as static entities that are mere expressions of innate traits.34
Tocqueville’s disagreement with Gobineau thus ran deeper than a mere disdain for the
latter’s prejudices. Gobineau’s racial determinism was antithetical to Tocqueville’s own
conceptual framework based on cultural categories that are subject to historical change, rather
than those associated with natural science. Gobineau never proved or disproved the monogenist
hypothesis, which views all the races of mankind as having equal claim to Adamic origins, but
he nevertheless actively promoted the idea that social, cultural, and political conditions have no
impact on the development of civilizations. Gobineau held that European civilization emerged
from a germ whose logic was set in advance of its historical progression.35 The debate between
the two was thus a larger theoretical dispute about how to understand the historical development
of human communities. Gobineau’s racism was not simply pernicious to Tocqueville; it entailed
a scientific framework contrary to his own cultural understanding of democracy.
Yet in spite of his rejection of Gobineau’s biological determinism, Tocqueville relied on
reified cultural categories that reinstate their own form of determinism throughout Democracy in
America.36 Tocqueville constructed the idea of democratic culture in opposition to what he
33
Ibid., p. 133. Tocqueville to Gobineau, November 17, 1853; Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics
and Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), p. 298.
34
Tocqueville to Gobineau, January 24, 1857; Selected Letters on Politics and Society, p. 343.
35
See Ivan Hannaford; Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), p. 268.
36
Tocqueville’s correspondence with Gobineau extended throughout the 1850’s, so the shift back to the 1830’s
might seem abrupt. James Schleifer has demonstrated, however, that Tocqueville’s response to Gobineau exhibits a
striking parallel with his previous reflections in drafts of Democracy, in which he also rejected the biological
doctrine of race. Thus, Tocqueville’s condemnation of biological racism did not first emerge in the 1850s but
16
deemed the inferior cultures of black slaves and Amerindians. In doing so, he set up rigid
boundaries between different cultural practices, systems of shared meaning, and social relations
that served to exclude other cultures from having any part in the modern, democratic revolution.
For Tocqueville, the two non-Anglo races – Blacks and Amerindians – represented two extremes
of civilization: an extreme form of liberty marked by stubborn pride and an extreme servitude
produced by generations of domination and servility. Tocqueville writes, “The Negro is placed
at the ultimate bounds of servitude; the Amerindian at the extreme limits of freedom.” If the
servility of one race condemned them to slavery, the pride of the other race condemned them to
death. In between these extremes was what Tocqueville considered the “spirit of liberty” of the
Anglo-Americans that was tempered by enlightened self-interest and the “spirit of religion.”
American liberty was a moderate liberty – premised on a notion of “self-interest well
understood” – in which individuals are able to pursue their own interests but at the same time
locate themselves in a larger political community through the adoption of common habits.37
Each race marked the outer limits of American democratic culture. On one side of American
democracy was the extreme liberty of Amerindians. In the first chapter of Volume I of
Democracy, Tocqueville outlines the geographical conditions that provide the material basis for
the democratic social state, locating the Amerindian in direct view of this landscape. Painting a
portrait of a harsh and violent wilderness that is unsuitable to European inhabitance, he writes
that, in America, the “forests concealed a profound darkness” and that “death struck here
relentlessly.” Amenable to inhabiting such a landscape, the Amerindians occupied a social state
that was markedly different from that of the Anglo-Americans and from what was found in the
Old World. Having lived “freely in the heart of their wilderness” and “grown up in the savage
shaped his earlier work. The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2000), ch 5.
37
Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 305-306, 500.
17
independence of his nature,” the Indian lacks the refinements of Western civilization, namely,
notions of morality and religion that allow a more tempered and tamed form of liberty.38
In addition to lacking moral restraint requisite for the moderate ethos of modern democracy,
the extreme liberty of the Amerindians also evinces a destructive sense of pride. In the first
chapter of Democracy, Tocqueville writes that Amerindians’ “sense of their inferiority and
dependence irritates and humiliates them,” wounding their collective glory and pride. Having
read Chateuabriand’s Natchez series and the first installments of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking tales, Tocqueville expected to see the magnanimous nations of lore, but instead
saw a devastated people with only the shambles of what was once a thriving civilization. But it
was their insolent pride and resistance to the inexorable profusion of democracy across the
western landscape that ensured their demise. “The Indian races,” Tocqueville wrote, “are
melting in the presence of European civilization like snow in the rays of the sun. The efforts
they make to struggle against their destiny only hasten for them the destructive march of time.”39
Extreme liberty, marked by the lack of moral boundaries and prideful arrogance, imprints
itself on Indian cultures, shaping the fate of indigenous communities: “That internal state of soul
is reproduced in their mores as well as in their language; they are at once insolent and base.” In
this passage, the devastated soul of the individual Amerindian maps onto the collective spirit of
an afflicted people. Because the individual soul of the native is degraded to the point of
impotence, Tocqueville deemed indigenous cultures degenerate and dependent, lacking the
independence for participation in democratic politics. By their very insistence on their
independence stemming from an arrogant pride, according to Tocqueville, the indigenous are
38
Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 24-25.
Ibid., p. 24. See Tocqueville’s notes in Journey to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960) on
his first impressions of the Amerindians, pp. 123, 198-199. Also see Tocqueville’s essay “Fortnight in the
Wilderness,” in George Pierson’s Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1938), p. 233.
39
18
inevitably condemned to virtual extermination and cultural genocide. In a letter to his mother,
Tocqueville expressed lament at the sight of the Choctaw being led across the Mississippi on the
Trail of Tears: “There was a general air of ruin and destruction in this sight, something that gave
an impression of a final farewell, with no going back; one couldn’t witness it without a heavy
heart.”40 Tocqueville seamlessly combined sympathetic lament about the fate of Amerindians
with a moral judgment about their cultural inferiority and inevitable ruin. This judgment of
inferiority, however, does not arise from biological categories associated with herrenvolk
ideology but stems from assumptions about the cultural unsuitability of indigenous forms of life
to modern social and political conditions, namely, political equality and liberal individualism. In
his travel essay “Fortnight in the Wilderness,” Tocqueville affirms the point that the inevitable
ruin of Amerindians arises not because “the native of the new world lacks natural aptitude,” but
because his character leads him “obstinately to reject our ideas and arts.”41 Tocqueville locates
the cause of Amerindian demise in cultural values such as civilizational pride and extreme liberty
rather than a natural incommensurability between groups based on biological categories.
But what precisely are the cultural incompatibilities that drive Amerindian extinction? What
makes democratic culture distinct from Choctaw or Cherokee culture? Due to their lack of a
sedentary, agricultural basis, Tocqueville considers indigenous societies incommensurable with
republican self-governanment because an “instinctive love of their native culture attaches them
to the soil that has seen them born.” Along with the march of democratic modernity westward,
however, the wilderness is vanishing, and with it the social bonds of indigenous societies are
weakening. In light of this inauspicious fate, natives can either resist or civilize, becoming
equals with whites. In Tocqueville’s account, they chose resistance because indigenous leaders
40
41
Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, quoted on p. 169.
George Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, p. 273.
19
failed to demonstrate that settlement was necessary for a civilization that focused on “cultivating
the soil.” Such a task is complicated by that fact that “civilization is the result of a long social
endeavor that operates in the same place,” and that is transmitted generationally. To have norms,
manners, and customs in line with democracy necessitates the habituation of a community to a
specific locality, i.e. a habitat. Absent the sedentary culture that comes along with the adoption
of liberal and individualistic arrangements of private property, the norms and customs requisite
for democratic government are impossible to obtain. Tocqueville thus re-reifies democratic
culture by rendering it the result of long social processes and settled forms of life, as well as
through the imposition of impenetrable boundaries between incompatible social practices.42
One sees a similar dynamic with Tocqueville’s treatment of the extreme servility of black
slaves. Unlike Amerindian cultures that are characterized by extreme liberty and stubborn pride,
slave culture is shaped by a kind of “spiritual despotism” and “the habit of servitude.” The
debasement of the intellect wrought by slavery, for Tocqueville, problematizes the experience of
emancipation. “To free a slave is to free someone incapable of citizenship.”43 If the slave attains
freedom, a lack of education in the arts of liberty imposes on him a burden that is heavier than
slavery itself. The freedman carries with him the trace of his servitude, which penetrates the
marrow of his being. Due to his habituation to the condition of servitude, the mark of slavery
prevents the freed slave from acquiring the habits of liberty and equality central to democracy.
The habits of servility are then generationally transmitted. Because “race perpetuates the
memory of slavery,” Tocqueville writes, “the Negro transmits to all his descendants, with their
existence, the external sign of his ignominy.” The social condition of the slave imprints itself on
42
Democracy, pp. 310-313. For Tocqueville on the role of agriculture in Amerindian culture, also see pp. 26-27.
On Tocqueville’s Lockean understanding of property, see William Connolly’s “Tocqueville, Religiosity, and
Pluralization” in Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
43
Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 121.
20
the soul of the individual, which then translates into a cultural ethos that runs counter to the spirit
of liberty in spite of emancipation.44 Because slavery saps the vivacity of the individual soul, it
de-animates the spirit of democracy and collective ethos that sustain self-government.
What makes us political beings, for Tocqueville, is the ability to have and generate a
common culture – a shared set of norms, beliefs, practices, habits, and customs that give
membership in a community meaning. In being subjected to a “domestic dictatorship,”
Tocqueville considers slaves incapable of cultural generation and collective regeneration. The
reasons for this are several-fold, but a primary factor is that slaves lack the “spirit of religion.”
Tocqueville asserts that “negroes have as yet conceived only very obscure and unsettled ideas on
the subject of religion.” Against Tocqueville’s misrecognition of black cultural forms, historians
have shown that social relations in slave life were marked by profound world-making capacities.
While Southern slave codes generally forbade black religious meetings, slaves were able to wrest
religious control from their masters in various ways. Slave masters often allowed only Sunday
meetings, but slaves also held meetings in secrecy. Meetings would be announced cryptically,
often by singing gospels while at work.45 Tocqueville was thus unable to pay credence to forms
of civic association cultivated among black slaves due to the way the legal structure of slave
society rendered slave religion an “invisible institution.” It is not simply the case that he ignored
modes of political activity and cultural forms that were cultivated in slave communities. The
legal structure of the Southern society literally made them invisible to him.46
44
Tocqueville, Democracy, pp. 304, 345, & 347.
Democracy, p. 360. The Abolition of Slavery, p. 8. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves
Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), pp. 236-237.
46
Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004). On these points I am also influenced by Michael Shapiro, “Literary Geography and
Sovereign Violence: Resisting Tocqueville’s Family Romance,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 25, 1 (JanMar 2000); and Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
45
21
Tocqueville, along with many historians and political theorists, depicts slaves as
“dehumanized victims, without culture, history, community, change, or development.” The
slave, in this view, left behind nothing worthy of historical interest because she was a “total
victim” of a totalitarian and dehumanizing system of racial domination.47 Tocqueville tragically
condemned the slave and freed person to perpetual tyranny and domination, allowing them no
place in the American future due to their cultural incapacity for democracy. His lament over the
total domination of slaves led him to pontificate, “Oppression has with one blow taken from the
descendants of the Africans almost all the privileges of humanity!” He thus criticized slavery for
stripping the slave of the agency and mastery necessary for the exercise of modern freedom.48
But by presenting slavery as a system of total dehumanization, Tocqueville affirmed the very
thing he sought to evade: the rendering of the slave as absolutely dominated, and thus absolutely
incapable of freedom.
In reifying the boundaries of democracy by setting up rigid limits around cultural difference,
Tocqueville aligned the cultural pathologies of both groups with other white groups that are
placed outside of democracy. On one side, in “Fortnight,” Tocqueville explicitly equates natives
degraded by the forces of Anglo civilization with the “lowest rabble of our great European
cities.” In Democracy, Tocqueville draws a similar equivalence between Indian and masses
when he states that democracy in France has “been abandoned to its savage instincts.” 49
Without the moral order provided by the tempered ethos of the Americans, the French masses are
left to misery. In consideration of the neutralizing effects of liberal democracy, the racialized
construction of democratic culture combines the exclusion of inferior civilizations with the
containment of popular pressures that threaten bourgeois property arrangements. The necessity
47
George Rawick, From Sunup to Sundown: The Making of Black Community (Greenwood Publishing, 1972), p. 3.
Tocqueville, Democracy, p. 304.
49
Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, p. 231. Democracy, p. 7.
48
22
of the civilizational demise of natives in America paralleled the necessity of the political defeat
of the canaille in France, with their own form of extreme and unruly liberty. The settlement of
democracy in national form, and with it the racial exclusion of Amerindians and the containment
of popular power in Europe, aims at the suppression of the fugitive elements in modern
democracy that threaten political stability, cultural homogeneity, and liberal property rights.
On the other side, Tocqueville equates the servility of black slaves with the slavishness of
Southern slave masters. Slavery supplants the primacy of labor and the “spirit of enterprise” in
the American polity by introducing “idleness into society.” When elevated as the supreme
principle of an entire social system, slavery “penetrates to the very soul of the master” and
enervates American national ethos characterized by the “spirit of liberty,” undermining the
primacy of the democratic way of life.50 In this sense, Tocqueville does consider herrenvolk
ideology directly antithetical to American democracy, but this does not keep racism from
shaping his political thought. In both of these cases, cultural racism marks the limits of
democracy by excluding white and non-white elements from liberal, bourgeois society.
IV.
Tocqueville’s Colonial Project
If cultural racism plays a role in Tocqueville’s political thought that is not reducible to the
logic of herrenvolk democracy, then we must cue attention to the different political implications
of these two racist modes of thought. Drawing on the ideology of the American Colonization
Society, Tocqueville’s cultural racism led him to reject slavery as a legitimate political system in
favor of a model of colonization that stresses the moral and social improvement of inferior
cultures. But Tocqueville did not adopt from colonizationists the discourse of cultural racism en
toto; rather, I contend that the conjunction of colonizationist ideology and the categories of
democratic culture produced exclusionary effects that prefigured those of cultural racism. In this
50
Democracy, pp. 31 & 333.
23
section, I demonstrate that the discourse of cultural racism played a role in Tocqueville’s
justifications of French colonialism in Algeria, and furthermore that the racist and exclusionary
effects that it authorized are different from those produced by herrenvolk ideology.
Founded in 1816 by Robert Finley and Henry Clay, the American Colonization Society
advocated for the resettling of freed slaves in Liberia. Motivated by anti-slavery sentiment,
many members thought the settlement of freed slaves in Africa would buttress the gradual
abolition of slavery. Many explicitly rejected biological racism, choosing instead to emphasize
environmental conditions – shared habits, government, climate, geography – as the primary
factors producing racial differences. In a speech before the Kentucky Colonization Society in
1830, Clay argued that “slavery was a potential state of war that would eventually erupt into
open conflict.” Clay and many colonizationists opposed slavery not because of empathy for the
suffering of slaves but because they viewed the slave system as politically and economically
unstable. Clay also challenged the belief of biological racists about the “inherent slavishness and
irrationality of the Negro,” suggesting that slaves were “rational beings like ourselves.”51
In spite of such apparent liberality, the underlying assumption of colonization was that freed
slaves could not assimilate to the American way of life enough to overcome the negative effects
of white prejudice. While assumptions of biological superiority certainly shaped arguments over
colonization, most who promoted Liberian colonization did so not on the basis of naturally
rooted distinctions between superior and inferior races, but on the basis of a fundamental
incompatibility between white and black culture. Such assumptions cast racial conflict as a
disjuncture between opposing social practices that are inherited through time rather than as
derived from natural differences. For many advocates of colonization, though not lacking in
natural capacity, slavery had so degraded freed slaves that, in their present condition, they were
51
Fredrickson, Black Image, pp. 7, 9-11.
24
incapable of republic self-government.52 Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, cautioned against
filling up Liberia with “an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the
chains of slavery.” Stowe implored Northern churches to educate freed slaves in the “advantages
of Christian republican society” before they settled Liberia.53 With the seeds of republican
education planted, freed slaves could then continue their moral improvement in their fatherland.
Tocqueville’s interaction with proponents of Liberian colonization significantly influenced
his understanding of race in American democracy. For instance, John Latrobe, a Maryland
colonizationist, said to him, “We mustn’t deceive ourselves; the white and black populations are
in a state of war. Never will they mingle. One of them will have to yield place to another.”
Similarly, the French linguist living in America, Peter Stephen Duponceau, who had ties to the
American Colonization Society, relayed to Tocqueville, “The spirit of the century tends toward
giving the slaves their liberty. I don’t doubt that the blacks will eventually all become free. But
I believe that one day their race will disappear from our soil”54 The staple of colonizationist
thought was a distinction between two outcomes for the fate of slaves in America: either slavery
would end and freed slaves must be exported from American soil, or slavery would end, and
freed persons would stay only to be tragically exterminated in conflict with the white race.
Either way, the American future was freedom, but the black race had no place in that future. The
former option was obviously preferable, for it would not only divert violent conflict, but it would
also lead to the redemption of the African continent through the spread of Christian values and
Western cultural forms, among them, democratic social practices.
In spite of this influence, there are clear differences dominant modes of environmentalism in
the nineteenth-century and Tocqueville’s cultural racism. Much of nineteenth-century
52
Fredrickson, Black Image, pp. 9-14.
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), p. 376.
54
Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, p. 22; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, p. 514-516.
53
25
environmentalism was wedded to a Lamarckian evolutionary framework in which social traits
were not only hereditable but also became written into the biological constitution of human
beings over time. In other words, Lamarckian biology held that human differences arising from
different social and physical environments produced biologically transmittable characteristics.
In this regard, social evolution and biological evolution were seen as part of the same process.55
Tocqueville is here usefully contrasted with Hyppolite Taine, who sought to explain differences
in national literature as a matter of environmental conditions, or the “surroundings” different
races find themselves in: climate, geography, government, and social conditions. For Taine, in
prolonged situations “these surrounding circumstances” produce “the regulating instincts and
faculties implanted in a race… the mood of intelligence in which it thinks and acts.”56 Race is
not naturally given but is historically produced. Nevertheless, clearly influenced by Lamarckian
biology, Taine wrote, “That which was habit becomes instinct; the form acquired by the parent is
found hereditary in the child.”57 Over time, social characteristic become rendered fixed and
innate in biology. While environmentalists such as Taine certainly exhibited forms of cultural
essentialism in their thinking, culture was always attached to biology in a Lamarckian
framework. Thus, in separating culture from biology, Tocqueville’s thought partially produced
the discourse of cultural racism through the interaction of environmentalism and the modern
concept of culture he employed in his interpretation of American democracy.
In any event, the project of colonization clearly appealed to Tocqueville. In Democracy, he
briefly spoke of the promises of Liberian colonization, expressing an unequivocal enthusiasm for
the project. In Liberia, Tocqueville writes, “Barbarians have drawn the enlightenment of
55
Smith, Civic Ideals, p. 292.
Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 156. From The History of English Literature (1864).
57
Quoted in Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), p. 200.
56
26
civilization from the midst of servitude and learned in slavery the art of being free.” In this
passage, Tocqueville envisions democracy as a civilizing force that operates through the colonial
imposition of a particular cultural ethos, even as it affirms its own universality. Tocqueville saw
in the “founding of Liberia… a beautiful and great idea” that, though may prove “sterile” for the
New World, could be quite “fruitful” for the Old World.58 The implication is clear: Tocqueville
found in the American Colonization Society a model for the French colonial project that
encapsulated the civilizing mission that it set as its task. He presaged these sentiments in early
ruminations on French colonialism, reflecting that teaching the “art of governing oneself” is
essential to improving those societies “that are born and develop as colonies.”59 Not only did
colonizationist ideology – with its emphasis on cultural difference as the chasm separating
human groups – accord with Tocqueville’s conceptual framework, it also shaped his own
theorization of American democracy and justification of French colonialism.
Based on the colonizationists’ influence on Tocqueville, Fredrickson has argued that “social
environmentalism” – the idea that human character is determined by social conditions – produces
the same effects as herrenvolk ideology by making the cultural boundaries between black and
white impermeable and permanent. Fredrickson thus contends that Tocqueville and the
colonizationists succumbed to a “protoracist form of biological determinism” by naturalizing
cultural difference. Against this argument, I contest that Tocqueville’s political thought does
reify and naturalize the boundaries of democratic culture, excluding what he deemed inferior
cultures from democracy, but I maintain that the political effects of this racist mode of thought
are not reducible to those associated with herrenvolk ideology. By collapsing colonizationist
into herrenvolk ideology, Fredrickson cannot explain the different political implications of these
58
Democracy, p. 345.
Tocqueville, “What Prevents the French from Having Good Colonies” (1833), Writings on Empire and Slavery
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), edited by Jennifer Pitts, p. 3.
59
27
ideologies.60 Rather than directly justifying brutal oppression based on the natural inferiority of
subjugated races, Tocqueville’s cultural racism is derived from a sense of sympathy for the
oppressed and leads to a political project that paradoxically aims at both the moral improvement
of the excluded and their continued exclusion from modern democracy.
Tocqueville’s cultural racism represents a clear departure from the discourse of herrenvolk
democracy put forth by Southern apologists who saw slavery as, in John C. Calhoun’s words, a
“positive good” due to its ability to bring naturally inferior beings within the scope of modern
civilization.61 E.N. Elliott contested that, unable to emerge from barbarism and achieve the
benefits of civilization in their own land to become “equals among the nations of the earth,”
black slaves must remain under the “tutelage of a superior race” because they are “liable to
retrogression as soon as the influence of a superior race is removed.”62 William J. Grayson, a
U.S. Representative of South Carolina, similarly wrote:
“The negro never originated a civilization of his own. In Africa he is found always and everywhere in a state
of rudest barbarism. In our own day the folly of France has enabled him to prove, that after having been
trained to a high degree of efficient industry and improvement, he relapses, when left to himself, into hopeless
savageism… If then he is ever to enjoy the advantages, physical, moral, and religious, of a highly civilized
society, it must be in permanent connection with a race superior to his own… But with such a race he cannot
hope to live as an equal.”63
As evidenced by Grayson and Elliott, herrenvolk ideology explicitly rejects the French civilizing
mission, and implicitly the logic of Liberian colonization, because the impetus to improve the
African ignores their natural inferiority. The two differing modes of racist thought led to
different colonial projects – one aimed at improving inferiors in their own element, the other at
keeping inferiors in perpetual servitude so as to not violate the natural order of the world.
60
Fredrickson, Black Image, p. 16-17; Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, p. 50. On social
environmentalism, also see Winthrop Jordan, White Man’s Burden: The Historical Origins of Racism in the United
States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 119.
61
See John C. Calhoun’s “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in Union and Liberty: The Political
Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis, IN: The Liberty Fund, 1992), pp. 474-475.
62
E.N. Elliott, “Slavery in the Light of International Law,” Cotton is King (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott, and
Loomis, 1860), edited by E.N. Elliott, pp. 736-737.
63
William J. Grayson, “Slavery of the South,” Southern Quarterly (October 1845), p. 19.
28
Tocqueville in turn refuted the logic of herrenvolk democracy proffered by these ideologues,
and he actively campaigned for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies as an elected
official in the Chamber of Deputies. In an 1839 report on abolition issued to the Chamber,
Tocqueville affirmed earlier arguments that the political deficiencies of slaves are not naturally
created but are produced by the institution of slavery. Against herrenvolk ideology, he held that
it was unreasonable to believe that slavery can destroy the vices and deficiencies which slavery
itself created. Tocqueville also thought, however, that slaves cannot be educated in the arts of
liberty while still subjected to despotism. It is only in the experience of “liberty long possessed”
that the slave can cultivate the capacities requisite for self-government. But this entails a
conundrum, for freed slaves, lacking skills in the art of government, cannot be made immediate
equals to white settlers, but must be placed under the tutelage of the state. Tocqueville
considered it an “inevitable evil” that the ex-slave must undergo a transition period before they
are granted the rights of free citizens, in spite of formal emancipation. If the “State should
become the only guardian of the enfranchised population,” French colonialism required
administrative centralization, with the state acting as the manager of colonial race relations.64
Because herrenvolk ideology and cultural racism have different political implications and
exclusionary effects, the idea of master-race democracy fails to capture how Tocqueville’s racist
mode of thought shaped his advocacy for the immediate abolition of slavery, a centerpiece of his
justification of French imperialism. Affirming the positive qualities of French imperialism,
Tocqueville envisioned abolition as a civilizing project: France “intends not only to bestow
liberty on the enslaved, but to constitute civilized, industrious, and peaceable societies. She will
not refuse to her government the means of attaining these ends.” Abolition is at the heart of the
64
Tocqueville, The Abolition of Slavery, p. 9, & 47-48. Also see, Jardin’s biography of Tocqueville, p. 306.
29
civilizing mission that Tocqueville thought was instrumental to achieving French imperial glory,
and administrative centralization was a necessary means of reaching this goal.65
Tocqueville’s advocacy for the abolition of slavery is perfectly compatible with his
justification of French imperialism.66 As an official in the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville
was considered an expert on the “Algeria question” and issued several reports on the matter.67
Jennifer Pitts explains that between the “Letters on Algeria” (1837) and the “Essay on Algeria”
(1841), Tocqueville’s thinking underwent a dramatic shift with regard to colonization. In the
earlier letters, Tocqueville was concerned with the integration of Algerians into a “new
civilization” and shaping the contours of what this new society would look like.68 Tocqueville
was convinced that if French glory was to be retained, this should be achieved by subduing the
indigenous “by our arts and not by our arms.” In Algeria, Tocqueville thought the Kabyles
would easily assimilate to French culture, but he found the situation of Arabs more difficult.
While he considered Islam incompatible with democratic values and customs, he did not think
that Muslim society was fixed in its current state. He concluded that the colonists can only hope
Arabs will adopt French customs through prolonged interaction, but that “our new Algerian
65
The Abolition of Slavery, p. 25. “The Emancipation of the Slaves,” Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. 207.
See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 200-201.
67
There is a bourgeoning literature on Tocqueville’s positions on French colonialism and the civilizing mission. For
Cheryl Welch, Tocqueville’s rationalization of French colonialism in Algeria did not depend on a “paternalistic
civilizing mission;” “Colonial Violence and the Rhetoric of Evasion: Tocqueville on Algeria,” Political Theory, 31,
2 (April 2003), p. 242. Against this argument, see Roger Boesche, “The Dark Side of Tocqueville: On War and
Emoire,” The Review of Politics, 67 (2005), p. 746. I agree with Pitts that Tocqueville saw French imperialism as
essential to the pursuit of national glory and the stabilization of French liberty in the metropole. I hold, however,
that he viewed the civilizing mission and spread of liberty abroad as instrumental to the achievement of national
glory. Pitts, “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria Question,” The Journal of Political Philosophy,
8, 3 (2000), pp. 295-318. Also see Richard Boyd, “Imperial Fathers and Favorite Sons: J.S. Mill, Alexis de
Tocqueville, and Nineteenth-Century Visions of Empire,” Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville (State
College, PA: Penn State Press, 2009), edited by Locke and Botting. I do not contend that the French doctrine of a
civilizing mission is necessarily derived from or leads to cultural racism. Colonial racism in France did often
depend on master-race ideology. Contrast Tocqueville’s more subdued rhetoric with that of Jules Ferry, a colonial
architect of the Third Republic. Prohibiting fusion among the races, Ferry upheld the right and duty of “superior
races… to civilize the inferior races.” Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in
France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 13.
68
Pitts, Introduction to Tocqueville’s Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. xxii.
66
30
subjects” must never be placed “under French administration.” In the end, he advised that it
would be a severe oversight to conclude that Arab customs made them incapable of adapting to
French culture.69 Early in his political career, Tocqueville separated Algerian subjects from
freed slaves by placing the latter but not the former under the tutelage of colonial administration.
By the “Essay on Algeria,” however, Tocqueville became preoccupied with imperialism for
imperialism’s sake, expressing concern for how colonization would add to France’s national
glory and international power. At this point, Tocqueville reversed his earlier position, asserting
that if France is to retain control over Algeria, Arabs must be placed under the rule of colonial
administration. In this essay, Tocqueville expressed that any attempt to provide for a fusion of
the French and Arabs was a mere “chimera” and more directly advocated harsh and brutal rule of
Muslims.70 Turning back on his earlier views that were skeptical of reified cultural categories,
Tocqueville located the essence of the Arab in a fixed cultural tradition, and became increasingly
concerned with maintaining social borders in colonial Algeria.
In his 1847 reports on Algeria, Tocqueville shied away from his advocacy of the harsh rule
of Arabs expressed in the 1841 essay, but he retained the emphasis on static cultural differences
as the primary problem of colonial administration, abandoning the more dynamic view of culture
expressed in the 1837 letters. In these reports, he unequivocally affirms his earlier views that it
was dangerous and useless to suggest French culture, norms, and customs to Arabs. He
proposed, however, neither complete separation nor total integration of Arabs, but a form of
managed inclusion achieved through colonial administration. Tocqueville explicitly
acknowledged the limits of colonial administration in this task: “There is no government so
wise, so benevolent, and so just that it can suddenly bring together and intimately unite
69
70
“Second Letter on Algeria,” Writings on Empire and Slavery, pp. 20-25.
Pitts, Introduction to Writings on Empire and Slavery, p. xxii.
31
populations whose history, religion, laws, and practices are so profoundly divided.” In this
passage, Tocqueville reifies cultural distinctions between the French and Arabs by placing the
resolution of social differences outside of the scope of political intervention. But it would be a
mistake to insist on the complete exclusion of Arabs from the French colonies in Algeria.
Tocqueville feared that Arabs, though “backward” and “half-civilized,” have already entered into
the course of modern civilization.71 Having begun to learn the arts of liberty, Arabs may come to
challenge France’s rule in Algeria, undermining the quest for national glory. The safest option
was to bring Arabs under the rule of colonial administration so as to maintain cultural separation.
In Tocqueville’s pursuit of national glory, the ascendance of liberal democracy at home
required colonial administration abroad. Tocqueville proposed a colonial project that
necessitated the administrative centralization capable of managing cultural differences.
Administrative centralization was a necessary component of what Tocqueville thought was
France’s heroic mission to civilize Africa. Ironically, the reason the American colonization
project failed – the absence of political will able to sustain centralized administration requisite
for the possession of overseas colonies – is the same reason the French colonial project
succeeded.72 In any case, Tocqueville thought that French imperialism would further the
democratic revolution that found its highest expression in America. Indeed, the fate of American
democracy and the French Empire were entwined developments in Tocqueville’s mind. At a
popular banquet in Cherbourg, Tocqueville called for the “close union of the two republics” to
extend their empire over the world.73
71
“First Report on Algeria” (1847) pp. 140-145; and “Essay on Algeria,” p. 61; Writings on Empire and Slavery.
While Liberia started as an American colony, in 1847 the Liberian settlers declared themselves an independent
nation. Liberian colonization failed because it required positive national action as a federally subsidized program at
a time when political elites under Jackson were entrenched in a heated battle against the banks based on laissez-faire
ideology; Fredrickson, Black Image, pp. 26-27.
73
Boesche, “The Dark Side of Tocqueville,” p. 745. The speech is in Tocqueville on America after 1840, p. 374
72
32
V.
Cultural Racism: Modern or Postmodern?
If these arguments are viable, then the presence of a form of cultural racism in the
nineteenth-century complicates the historiography of racist thought. Specifically, how should we
then periodize racist modes of thought? To clarify, my argument has not been that cultural
racism is the dominant mode of racial exclusion and racist thought in nineteenth-century politics
and culture. If democratic politics and racial exclusion were to be reconciled in the modern
political imagination, herrenvolk democracy was undoubtedly the dominant mode of doing so in
the antebellum, colonial, and Jim Crow eras in American and French history. I do maintain,
however, that cultural racism illuminates important features of a present, if only incipient, racist
mode of thought in the nineteenth-century. More forcefully, I contend that cultural racism was
integral to the emergence of modern democracy as registered in the Tocquevillean imagination.
If so, then how should we understand cultural racism historically: is it modern or postmodern?
In the French context, Balibar speculates that cultural racism is a postmodern mode of
racialist thinking that developed in the context of decolonization in the 1950s and 60s, which was
characterized by the reversal of population flows in the colonial period. As individuals in newly
independent nations once under colonial rule came to the metropole, the defenses of modern
racism underwent a destabilization, necessitating the emergence of a new ideology that aided in
the configuration of new nation and class formations.74 In the American context, Olson similarly
divides race politics into herrenvolk and post-herrenvolk periods (post-Civil Rights). In Olson’s
periodization, with the fight for Civil Rights, the disintegration of schemes of white superiority at
the center of the Jim Crow system gave way to a form of race politics in which racial conflict
was cast as a cultural phenomenon. In the post-herrenvolk era, the abolition of white privilege as
74
Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?,” Race, Nation, Class, p. 21. Also see Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 4-8.
33
a form of political and legal standing transforms whiteness into a cultural norm that racially
structures the democratic polity in spite of affirmations of a multicultural or color-blind society.75
While such periodizations are undoubtedly valid, they both reveal limitations insofar as they rely
on the logic of the break, in which the continuities between different modes of racism are split by
a rupture, an event that renders the logic of the previous mode unsuitable to present conditions.
Against Balibar and Olson, I argue that cultural racism is not a postmodern mutation of
biological racism, but in fact developed alongside it, providing justification for both an
exclusivist form of liberal democracy and colonial rule.76 If this is the case, then why should
such rigid dichotomies between modern and postmodern forms of racist thought persist?
Frederic Jameson has remarked that hegemonic historical narratives are often characterized by
the dissolution of transition periods between historical eras, replacing the transition with the
break: “[B]y the very force of things the logic of the period, or the moment, or the system,
necessarily turns back on the idea of the transition and dispels it.”77 Viewed in consideration of
Jameson’s point, the postmodern form of cultural racism requires the representation of a glacial
transition from the modern to postmodern in terms of a break. In casting the history of racism in
terms of a break, proponents of cultural racism craft historical narratives in which the
postmodern is cleansed of the original sin of modernity. In doing so, they are able to rinse their
hands of the violent racisms of imperialism, colonialism, and slavocracy that plagued the modern
75
Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, ch. 3.
To be sure, Balibar speculates that cultural racism may have its roots in nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, but he
fails to fully explore the point; Race, Nation, Class, pp. 23-24. In his book Politics and the Other Scene (New York:
Verso, 2002), Balibar similarly states that cultural racism has “deep roots in [European] history, even if we should
never present that history in terms of a linear determinism.” But again, he fails to give the point sustained
theoretical or historical treatment (p. 40). Colette Guillaumin suggests, in passing, that there is a link between
Tocqueville and the “culturalism” that expressed the dominant tendencies of racist thought after World War II;
Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 88. My argument affirms what Karuna
Mantena calls a “deep and revealing complicity between liberalism and culturalism” in nineteenth-century imperial
politics; Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010), p. 184.
77
Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 28-29.
76
34
era. Such narratives authorize present political formations by affirming their moral superiority to
previous ones, purporting the innocence of the present through a disavowal of the past. The
national theodicy exhibited in the trope of the break evinces a commitment to historical progress
that allows apologists of racial exclusion to proclaim, “Oh my, what a long way we have come.”
The logic of the historical break potentially plays into nationalistic narratives that present the
postmodern era as a utopian “end of history” in which racial difference has been all but
dispelled. The dissolution of the transition period by the trope of the break serves purposes of
national theodicy by casting past forms of exclusion in terms of a narrative of original sin that is
wiped clean through the salvation and sacrifice of the historical break (e.g. the sacrifice of the
Civil War and decolonization or the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement).
My point is not that there can be no distinction between postmodern and modern racisms, but
that their dual existence troubles the notion of a historical break as a way of characterizing the
history of racism. I would not have critical theorists dismantle the periodization of modern and
postmodern. As Jameson affirms, no theory of modernity can make sense if it does not represent
itself in terms of a postmodern break with the modern. With regard to the racial discourses and
other salient dimensions of historical social formations, the distinction between modern and
postmodern does capture differences between dominant historical tendencies. But by completely
separating the two periods – a periodization we cannot not have – we risk reproducing the
national theodicy of the historical break. We must acknowledge the periodicity of the modern
and postmodern and at the same time recognize that they are both defined by a transition period
that is itself indefinite. While it expresses the dominant tendency of postmodern racial
formations, cultural racism has its conceptual and practical roots in modernity. We must
therefore resist forms of historiography that reify the modern and postmodern, an abstraction that
35
leads to the dissolution of the transition period that in turn reproduces the national theodicy of
imperial politics. Cultural racism should be analyzed in relation to the longue durée of
modernity rather than solely in reference to postmodern constellations of power.
VI.
Conclusion
In this paper I have demonstrated that Tocqueville’s thought both reflected and reinforced a
racist mode of thought that substitutes a reified conception of culture for the biological notion of
race. What I have called cultural racism played an integral role in both Tocqueville’s
understanding of American democracy and his justifications of French colonialism. While
racism is a central component of Tocqueville’s democratic thought, this relationship does not
occur through the logic of natural superiority implied by the idea of herrenvolk democracy.
Arguments relying on herrenvolk ideology as the means by which democracy and racism are
reconciled in Tocqueville’s thought fail to explain the different political implications and
exclusionary effects that his work produced. Furthermore, they cannot explain how Tocqueville
deemed other cultures to be inferior in spite of his rejection of biological racism. The cultural
racism evident in Tocqueville’s thought emerged through a combination of the social
environmentalism of “soft racists” in the U.S. – namely, proponents of Liberian colonization –
and the concepts and categories implicit in his understanding of democracy.
This challenges
the position that nineteenth-century racism in America should be viewed as a “unified
ideological construct” that combined the “hard racism” of Democrats and biological racists with
the “soft racism” of Whigs and colonizationists.78 If racism is a mode of thought that in part
constitutes the political community in a racially delimited way, then different forms of racism
constitute the democratic polity differently. Historians of racist thought ought to launch further
inquiry into the way that cultural racism is woven into the fabric of modern, liberal democracy.
78
For this argument, see Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, pp. 149-150.
36