Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet

Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age in and the Internet Democracy Tocqueville Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age is an introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his monumental two-volume study Democracy in America (1835, 1840) that pays particular attention to the critical conversation around Toqueville and democracy since the end of the Cold War during the Internet Age. The book is addressed broadly to beginning students, specialists, and ordinary curious people who wonder if democracy is still possible today and under what conditions. “Jon Delogu’s Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age astutely connects many of the current issues surrounding the present and possible future states of ‘democracy’ in the U.S., France, and the world. The author not only makes a convincing case for the relevance of Toqueville and democracy in the ‘Internet age’ but also demonstrates a command of Democracy in America and the enormous body of criticism and commentary on it.” – William Dow, Professor of American Literature and American Studies, American University of Paris, Université Paris-Est MLV C. Jon Delogu is currently Professeur des Universités in the Department of English at the Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3 in France. He has been a teacher-researcher in France since 1992. He has also taught at Boston University, Connecticut College, Dartmouth College, Hampshire College, and the University of Southern Maine. He has translated five books for Columbia University Press and is the author of an introduction to Emerson in French. Tocqueville and Democracy Cover from a design by Daniel Delogu Delogu in the Internet Age C. Jon Delogu Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age Tocqueville and Democracy in the Internet Age C. Jon Delogu OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of Michigan Publishing University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2014 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12538666.0001.001 Copyright © 2014 C. Jon Delogu This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Cover Art, figures, and other media included with this book may be under different copyright restric- tions. Please see the Permissions section at the back of this book for more information. ISBN-13 978-1-60785-303-9 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents Introduction 11 I Tocqueville 1. Reading Democracy in America 35 2. Tocqueville’s Commentators 78 II Democracy 3. “Who controls the meanings of democracy and, thereby, its fate?” 167 4. Restore Previous Session 204 III In the Internet Age 5. Democracy Watch 2011 253 6. Democracy and the New Dignity 264 7. What Would Tocqueville Do? 288 Conclusion 304 Appendix 312 Bibliography 318 For Rose and Daniel… and in memory of Kevin Boyle and Mohamed Bouazizi. “Has every other century been like this one? Has man always confronted, as he does today, a world in which nothing makes sense? In which virtue is without genius and genius without honor? In which the love of order is indistinguishable from the lust of tyrants? In which the sacred cult of liberty is confounded with contempt for the law? In which conscience casts but an ambiguous light on the actions of men? In which nothing any longer seems forbidden or allowed, honest or shameful, true or false?” – Tocqueville, Democracy in America (from the Introduction) “But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,—when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining,—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” Introduction As the title indicates, this book is about a particular man, an idea, and the time period we live in. The man, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), was a French aristocrat. His name designates a place in Normandy whose people and soil he was linked to, like his father before him, by Old Regime ties of loyalty and mutual service. But he was born in the after- math of the idealistic and bloody French Revolution under Napoleon’s dictatorship and therefore had both an intense theoretical and a practical interest in the history of civil society and the workings of monarchy, aristocracy, and especially democracy. After existing as a term of derision for over two thousand years,1 democracy had become the name of both a form of government and a flourishing way of life in nineteenth-century America where he traveled for nine months in 1831 and 1832 to investi- gate this unexpectedly successful experiment in popular sovereignty. Tocqueville is most remembered as the author of a two-volume study Democracy in America (1835, 1840). It is a digest of his observa- tions about America and offers argued predictions about democracy’s future prospects. It is a work that is still considered by many today, in the Internet age, to be “the best book ever written on democracy”2 and “one of the wisest books ever written about us” [Americans].3 Much has been written about Tocqueville, about his book on democracy, and about democracy in general since 1989, the roughly quarter century that I am calling the Internet Age, which also coincides with the post–Cold War era.4 The purposes and opinions of these recent studies vary greatly and can strike one as a confusing, formidable mass. The task of making sense of Tocqueville and democracy in the Internet age is further complicated by the fact that many commentators seem more interested in being a sun than a satellite and therefore not all that con- cerned by what others have to say. I have tried, like Tocqueville, to be a better listener, as well as a mediator between individuals who seem not to be talking to each other. The result is this book, an extended essay that 12 Introduction proposes an open assessment of both Tocqueville and democracy in the Internet age and asks what the fortunes of both might be over the next few decades. I first became interested in Tocqueville over a ten year period from 1995 to 2005 when I was teaching annual seminars on Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and William James to French students of English at public universities in Toulouse and later Lyon. Despite Tocqueville’s aris- tocratic French origins, I noticed that he had many links to these four. He was only two years younger than Emerson (1803–1882), and he died the year Dewey was born (1859, the same year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which was, like the French Revolution and democracy in America, a major challenge to static visions of the universe). His death occurred a decade after the French civil unrest in 1848 and just before the division and destruction of the American Civil War that he had foreseen as a strong possibility. Furthermore, he had chronic health problems as did Emerson (his eyes) and James (depression), and he died of tubercu- losis like Thoreau. He was also, like all four of these enormously creative, energetic, cosmopolitan Americans, both a thinker (in the moralist, pro- phetic tradition of essayists from Montaigne and Pascal to Montesquieu and Rousseau) and a practical man of action who extolled what Emerson called “the infinitude of the private man” and believed in the possibility of liberty and justice for all. While reading The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson’s wonderful biography of Emerson, during a university strike in 1995, I learned that Emerson had actually met Tocqueville during his second trip to Europe in May 1848—one in a long line of revolutionary “French springs.” I was also struck by the fact that they had both made bold, soul-searching trips to the country and continent of the other practically at the same time and for roughly the same length of time—nine months. The time it takes to give birth, so to speak, to new ideas, projects, and prophecies, and both of them clearly did. Tocqueville arrived in America on May 9, 1831, and returned to France on February 20, 1832. Emerson first sailed for Europe on December 25, 1832, and arrived back in Boston on October 9, 1833. Therefore Tocqueville could have run into Emerson in Boston, in Concord, or somewhere else in America, but I have read no account that Introduction 13 says he did. The man known to his family and friends as Waldo had not yet become Emerson, and there is no reason that Tocqueville and his trav- eling companion Gustave de Beaumont, who were officially in America as government emissaries doing research on the American penitentiary system, would have sought him out.

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