Melting-Pot Idealism : Alexis De Tocqueville on Democracy, Race, and Women
Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of the political and social climate over the issue of slavery in the textual culmination of his travels throughout the U.S. in 1830s, Democracy in America, casts a shadow over the sustainability of a single American nation-state. Although Tocqueville's comments on matters of racial prejudice, slavery, and racial politics are comparatively scarce given the breadth of his survey of American institutions and culture in Democracy in America, when considered alongside his writings on Algeria, I find that Tocqueville offers two modes of resolving racial tensions: idealistic and pragmatic. Ideally, Tocqueville supports total racial miscegenation; while realistically, he perceives that such a radical break in tradition is doubtful. In either case, Tocqueville is skeptical about the viability of legal prescriptions to racial antagonisms, preferring a solution that is at once sociologically and biologically based. Some interpreters have construed the fusion of biology and sociology in Tocqueville's work on race and slavery as incompatible with his resolution that America was simultaneously becoming more egalitarian (Stokes 1997. Alternatively, I argue that the full realization of such egalitarianism rests, for Tocqueville, with a democratized yet exclusionary notion of the "American (white) woman"? who must forge a basis for kinship between blacks and whites, by revising moral standards, intermarrying, and giving birth to a new mulatto race
Year of publication: |
2011
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Authors: | Moon, Rose |
Publisher: |
[2011]: [S.l.] : SSRN |
Subject: | Demokratie | Democracy | Frauen | Women | Rasse | Race | Schwarze Menschen | Black people | Politikwissenschaft | Political science | Weibliche Arbeitskräfte | Women workers |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
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