Who Reads Tocqueville Today? On the Death of a Sociological Classic

Abstract

Who reads Tocqueville today? In the decades following World War II, sociologists in the United States and Western Europe certainly did. Yet, judging from textbooks, sociology journals and undergraduate curricula, almost no sociologist does any more. This disappearance of Tocqueville from the sociological agenda and discourse, however, contrasts with the success he enjoys in other social scientific disciplines such as political science. Political scientists have never read more Tocqueville than today. The ‘patron saint’ of social capital studies, the ‘darling’ of the right, or the ‘neoconservative superhero’, Tocqueville, especially his Democracy in America, is an undisputed classic in political philosophy and American politics. I propose to tackle the puzzle of Tocqueville’s contrasting paths of canonization – a dying classic in sociology, a rising star in political science – from a pragmatic perspective. This entails analyzing Democracy in America as a sociological object, the meaning of which is semiotically produced in the dialectic between its multiple material incarnations, its content, and the surrounding environment. I offer a genealogy of Democracy in America aimed at explaining its performative success in postwar sociology and in contemporary political science, as well as its performative failure in contemporary sociology. This pragmatic genealogy performs three tasks: it exposes the symbolic violence and exclusionary logic of editorial politics; it destabilizes self-legitimating, essentialist readings of the work; and it builds upon these criticisms to suggest an alternative reading of Tocqueville that is eminently relevant to contemporary sociologists.