Indeliberate Democracy: The Politics of Religious Conversion in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive

Abstract

Indeliberate DemocracyThe Politics of Religious Conversion in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive Elizabeth Fenton (bio) While toiling in a quarry in Algiers, Updike Underhill, the narrator of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), encounters an Englishman who has converted to Islam. Once a slave like Underhill, the man now lives as a free Algerian. Describing the process that effected his transformation, he explains, “I was visited by a Mollah or Mahometan priest … [who] opened the great truths of the mussulman faith” (126). His conversion has been political as well as religious: in Algiers, the Christian who becomes a Muslim is also the slave who becomes a citizen. When Underhill expresses horror at this apostasy, the Englishman merely replies, I respect your prejudices … because I have been subject to them myself. … But I have conversed with the Mollah, and I am convinced of the errours of my education. Converse with him likewise. If he does not convince you, you may glory in the Christian faith; as that faith will then be founded on rational preference, and not merely on your ignorance of any other religious system. (126–27) Conversion, in this account, is a deliberative process: discussion and debate allow individuals to make reasoned choices about their beliefs. “Rational preference” stands as a corrective to the “ignorance” and “prejudice” of tradition, and conversation is the path to all kinds of liberty. This is an appealing notion, perhaps, but by placing it in the mouth of a convert to Islam, Tyler was inviting his eighteenth-century audience to receive it critically. Having made an informed decision, the Englishman also has abandoned that which, within the context of the novel, he should have held most dear. The Englishman’s offer to Underhill situates The Algerine Captive within late-eighteenth-century discussions of the relationships between deliberation, [End Page 71] citizenship, and democracy. “Deliberative democracy” is an umbrella phrase, under which a variety of individual political systems might fit. But at base, it describes a system in which citizens or their representatives forge and legitimize public policy through debate. Proponents of deliberative democracy, as John Elster explains, hold that “democracy revolves around the transformation rather than simply the aggregation of preferences” (introduction 1). Deliberative systems thus foster public expressions of disagreement and compel citizens to explain rather than merely enact their choices.1 Discussion is crucial to democratic practice, Seyla Benhabib contends, because “the formation of coherent preferences cannot precede deliberation; it can only succeed it” (71). In the past three decades, political theorists and philosophers have debated the parameters necessary to promote appropriate public deliberation.2 This scholarship has focused mainly on praxis, treating deliberation and democracy as current and pressing concerns. But though the phrase “deliberative democracy” first emerged in twentieth-century theory, political thinkers since Aristotle have grappled with deliberation’s place within a republic. Deliberation was a topic of interest and debate in the early American Republic and, as James Kloppenberg notes, “from the seventeenth century to the present, it is possible to identify strands of deliberative democracy in the discourses of politics in America” even before it was named as such (104). Tyler’s concern with the formation of “rational preferences,” then, is not anomalous. Indeed, scholars have usefully excavated the strains of deliberative thought that run through discussions concerning the founding of the United States and the ratification of its Constitution.3 Despite its prominence in the period, though, deliberative democracy has received relatively little attention from scholars of early US literature. As Sandra M. Gustafson correctly notes, “between Madison’s defense of the Senate as a deliberative body and twenty-first century aspirations to deliberative democracy there is a largely untold history” (3). This essay follows her lead in telling a part of that history, but rather than focusing on the development of deliberative models in the period, I am uncovering a strain of suspicion about the potential efficacy of deliberative systems. Mistrust of deliberation, about citizens’ abilities to form and enact rational preferences, is a driving force within The Algerine Captive, as the novel suggests time and again that the notion of truly equal citizens being productively open to each other’s influence...