De Tocqueville Research Articles

J.S. Mill and A. de Tocqueville: tow concepts of liberty

This paper presents an analysis of the two concepts of freedom, one of which was developed in line with classical liberalism, the second within the conservative tradition. Individual freedom as the supreme value, good and the goal of social development was considered an English liberal thinker John Stuart Mill. Another approach found expression in the works of the brightest representatives of the French conservative thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. In despite of the similarity of some theses, this polemic initiated the development of the two traditions in understanding the concept of civil liberties, continues to create and maintain the discussion of modern theoretical sociology. The research methodology of these concepts, to better understand the fundamental essence of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, seeking to find a balance between individual freedom in various aspects of its expression and the public interest.

When Civil Society Uses an Iron Fist: The Roles of Private Associations in Rulemaking and Adjudication

Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam are but two of the many admirers of the countless private associations that lie at the core of civil society. This article seeks to advance understanding of the law-like activities of these associations. Residential community associations and sports leagues, for example, make rules and levy fines on members who violate them. The New York Diamond Dealers Club and the Writers Guild of America, like many other associations, have established internal arbitral panels for the resolution of member disputes. Courts are highly likely to defer to the outcomes of these arbitrations. The article’s central positive thesis, hedged with qualifications, is that a private association tends to engage in social control when it is the most cost-effective institution for addressing the issue at hand. This thesis is used to illuminate some otherwise puzzling associational practices, such as the efforts of the National Football League and other professional sports leagues to control players’ domestic violence off the field of play.

Democracy as Civil Religion: Reading Alexis De Tocqueville in India

The article explores Alexis de Tocqueville’s explication of democracy as ‘civil religion’ or the new sacred of modern times. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville analyzed democracy as a political system as well as a moral value. The article begins with Tocqueville’s analysis of the religious roots of American democracy. Dissociated from the affairs of the state through the principle of ‘disestablishment’, religion became secure in civil society, whereas the concept of democracy became inviolable and ‘set apart’ as sacred. He noted that the power of the majority acquires an inviolable character in democracy that had the potential to turn against the very principles that it upholds. In the Indian context, the debate around a uniform civil code (UCC) is one such issue that captures this predicament. Working out a roadmap for Indian pluralism signposted with a constitutional commitment to equality, liberty and fraternity has proved to be a task fraught with moral and political complexities, if not impasse. The article argues that Tocqueville’s discovery of the role of religion in civil society, his mistrust of democratic majoritarianism and his emphasis on understanding the ‘practice’ of democracy have something to offer to the polarized UCC debate in India.

America’s Problem of Race: The Black and Latino Man Divided by a Common African Ancestry

What Michael Harrington prophesized in 1962 was only the manifestation of modern-day America’s problem of race. In the 1835 publication of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville accurately predicted that America’s downfall would be the problem of race. In 2014 and beyond, more than 100 years later, America’s refusal to deal with its ugly past of enslavement and genocide of peoples of color remains alive and well. New York City’s notorious employment of “stop and frisk“ and racial profiling in communities of color are symptoms of this unresolved past. While Black and Latino men are the targets of these modern forms of racism, this paper argues that Black and Latino men are one and the same. Colonialism in America treats the so-called Latino man with deference to his skin hue. Until the Latino man acknowledges his African ancestry, his survival too will be fraught with uncertainty.

Democracy and Unfreedom: Revisiting Tocqueville and Beaumont in America

This essay reexamines the famous 1831 prison tours of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. It reads the three texts that emerged from their collective research practice as a trilogy, one conventionally read in different disciplinary homes ( Democracy in America in political science, On the Penitentiary in criminology, and Marie, Or Slavery: A Novel of Jacksonian America in literature). I argue that in marginalizing the trilogy’s important critique of slavery and punishment, scholars have overemphasized the centrality of free institutions and ignored the unfree institutions that also anchor American political life. The article urges scholars in political theory and political science to attend to this formative moment in mass incarceration and carceral democracy.

Transatlanticism as Dutch National Spectacle: Universalism and Postpolitics at the North Sea Jazz Festival

The memorable travelogue that earned Baudrillard his reputation as a postmodern Alexander de Tocqueville revealed just how persistent the European drive toward transatlantic “othering” remained before the advent of an equally artificial and selfattracting European Union. In the timeworn narrative pattern, Old World “substance” was valorized in and through fearful and fascinating constructions of New World superficiality. Given New York’s historic, symbolic, and de facto centrality for the jazz world, it should come as no surprise that this narrative pattern played a significant role in structuring a polarizing transatlantic jazz discourse during the past century of cultural exchange. JeanPaul Sartre’s description of his encounter with New York’s authentic bebop—“hurried

Mill and Tocqueville: a friendship bruised

SUMMARYHaving first met in 1835, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville began ‘an extremely interesting and mutually laudatory correspondence'; but their splendid friendship did not last. A popular thesis focuses on letters exchanged in 1840 to 1842 that reflect conflicting views on the Eastern Question and argues that Mill initiated the ‘strange interruption’. Given Mill's commitment to the ‘agreement of conviction and feeling on the few cardinal points of human opinion’ as a prerequisite of genuine friendship, such interpretation sounds plausible. However, circumstantial evidence, most notably Mill's willingness to have a frank discussion with Tocqueville on pending issues, contradicts the assertion that Mill was enraged by Tocqueville's 1841 letter. This essay suggests focusing attention on two additional cardinal differences between them—their contrasting views of François Guizot and confrontation vis-à-vis benevolent imperialism. Moreover, personal matters such as Harriet Taylor's dislike of Tocqueville and Mill's departure from the London and Westminster Review are also believed to have largely led to Mill discontinuing correspondence with Tocqueville.

Алексис де Токвиль против Астольфа де Кюстина: научное открытие или обыкновенная аберрация?

The author of the retort critically analyses a new version of patriotic rhetoric, which is revolving around the conception of the “Russian idea” and based on quite arbitrary interpretation of the Alexis de Tocqueville’s philosophic heritage. A. Savoysky by opposing the Tocqueville’s political philosophy to various ‘vituperators of Russia’ of the kind of Astolphe de Custine tries in vain to persuade the Russian scientific community that both the reputation of the great French thinker is ‘rehabilitated’ and ‘all the Russian people’ is ‘delivered’ from the charge of its bent for slavery as a result of his own ‘reconstruction’ of the original meaning and ‘ideological orientation’ of the famous juxtaposition of the USA and the imperial Russia in the end of the first volume of the book “On the Democracy in America”. The author believes, on the contrary, the Savoysky’ s attempt to substitute the notion ‘servitude’ for the word ‘ministration’ in the corresponding passage of the book is at variance with both the philosophic sense of the dichotomy ‘liberty/slavery’ by which A. de Tocqueville characterizes the contradictions of the European political thought in the epoch of modern and the elementary linguistic and cultural norms of perception of the notion ‘servitude’ in French language and mentality.

Silent citizens: reflections on community, habit, and the silent majority in political life

This article identifies two different senses in which the concept of ‘community’ can be seen to underpin the norm of vocal participation in democratic politics. The first is a broadly liberal view of community – traceable to Alexis de Tocqueville – that promotes active, vocal, and autonomous citizens and acts as a buffer between the state and the individual. A second broadly conservative view of community in the writings, for example, of Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot treats community as organic, passive, and largely silent. It valorizes habit and habitual relationships as supporting political life through obedience to the law and respect for authority. While these two traditions stand apart, what is striking about both views of community is the one point about which both agree: citizens' sense of community is in decline within liberal democracies today. Thus silence and silent majorities are problematic to both traditions, albeit for different reasons.

It's Not about Strauss

Melzer's irrefutable point is that what has been labeled “esotericism” in a condemnatory way is in fact the multilayered reality of written expression evident in all cultures across all history. There is virtually no text that does not call for some degree of interpretation, and any act of interpretation will turn up additional meanings “between the lines.” Philosophy Between the Lines is in a class by itself, but it has one very familiar echo: Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Against all expectations, the common thread between the two books is more Alexis de Tocqueville than Leo Strauss. The argument taken up in each case pertains to the homogenized opinions and “presentism” that marks American democracy. Bloom's critics displayed no interest in this Tocquevillian strain; for them, the hot button was Strauss. The culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s displayed a fascinating confluence of elitism and populism: Bloom was attacked as an elitist absolutist at the same time that he was put down as a vulgar populist. That same confluence of elitism and populism reappears in Philosophy Between the Lines. But Melzer now owns the debate, in the full understanding that if one is going to address esotericism, that binary is going to arise. That has been the case since Socrates took on anyone in the marketplace who agreed to speak with him; his invitation was open to all, but his elenchus spared no one.

Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers

When Louis F. Anderson took over the editorship of the Houma Ceres in 1856, he admitted that he was “not … very distinguished as a ‘knight of the gray goose quill,’” but assured his new readers that “our pen will not lead us into difficulty” because “our ‘principal assistant,’ the scissors, will be called into frequent requisition—believing as we do, that a good selection is always preferable to a bad editorial.”2 Thus, Anderson sums up a set of attitudes toward the production, authorship, and circulation of newspaper content within a system founded on textual borrowing. In the antebellum US context, circulation often substituted for authorship; the authority of the newspaper rested on networks of information exchange that underlay its production. “Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment,” Alexis de Tocqueville writes, describing circulation as a technology—like the rail and telegraph—compressing space and time, linking individuals around the nation by “talk[ing] to you briefly every day of the common weal” (111). In both examples, the newspaper's primary value stems from whom and how it connects.

Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II ed. by Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly (review)

Reviewed by: Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II ed. by Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly Thomas J. Shelley Empowering the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II. Edited by Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly. [Catholic Practice in North America.] ( New York: Fordham University Press. 2014. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8232-5400-2. The name “Catholic Action” never became popular in the United States partly because it seemed too European for American Catholic tastes. However, the concept of “the participation and the collaboration of the laity with the Apostolic Hierarchy,” as Pope Pius XI defined Catholic Action in the encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno (1931), gained widespread appeal under many different names. This volume offers a sample of eleven of them. Patrick J. Hayes resurrects from the grave through extensive archival research the forgotten story of the Catholic Club of the City of New York, which for more than a half-century was the most prestigious and influential lay Catholic organization in the nation’s largest city. Katharine E. Harmon calls attention to the role of American Catholic laywomen not only in fostering the liturgical revival but also in keeping it faithful to its original close connection with social reform (aka Catholic Action). William Issel demonstrates that in San Francisco for several decades in the early-twentieth century, the combination of progressive bishops, priests, and lay leaders (both men and women) imbued local politics and also organized labor in California with the principles of Catholic social teaching. The Jesuit John Courtney Murray was an ardent advocate of Catholic Action, but he doubted that the neo-Scholasticism of his seminary education was capable of providing the theological justification for laypeople to assume leadership roles in Catholic social activism. Christopher D. Denny describes Murray’s efforts to establish a suitable theological grounding for Catholic Action. Mary Elizabeth Brown, the leading expert on Italian American Catholicism in New York City, ventures into new territory in her fascinating study of post–World War II Italian-American Catholicism in Boston and Washington, DC. The evangelization efforts of the Catholic Extension Society, which date from 1905, are well known, but Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello focuses on an all-but-forgotten subgroup: the Extension Lay Volunteers, [End Page 686] which was composed of some 2000 young Catholics (80 percent of them women) who between 1961 and 1971 attempted to promote the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council among some of the most disadvantaged American Catholics on the parish level across the United States. At the time of the Council, in the words of Sister Patricia Byrne, C.S.J., “Catholic education in the United States [was] the largest private educational enterprise known to history.”1 However, within a decade of the Council, says Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, “this dynamic would be in tatters” (p. 172). She offers a revealing insight into this puzzling development by tracing the heroic struggle of the Chicago Province of the Sisters of Mercy to explore new forms of ministry while maintaining their educational apostolate, especially in inner-city neighborhoods. In an admirably balanced revisionist study of the National Council of Catholic Women (NCCW), Mary J. Henold describes how her research into the history of the NCCW led her to discover the unexpected evolution of this traditionally conservative organization into a source of support for a moderate form of Christian feminism. The most dangerous time for a bad government, Alexis De Tocqueville claimed, is when it begins to reform. The last three chapters illustrate the wisdom of that remark by describing the difficulties encountered by some of the most progressive U.S. bishops as they attempted to provide a role for the laity in the governance of a hierarchical Church. Jeremy Bonner concentrates on the efforts of Bishop Victor Reed in the Diocese of Oklahoma City and Tulsa; Samuel J. Thomas traces the leadership role of Cardinal John Dearden both in Detroit and nationally as the chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Andrew S. Moore explores the limits of consensus-building in Atlanta where even Archbishop Paul Hallinan and Auxiliary Bishop Joseph...

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Democratic Citizenship: Not Such a Simple Legacy

Democratic Citizenship: Not Such a Simple Legacy Kevin Mattson (bio) Shelley Streeby. Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013. 368pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $94.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Michael C. Steiner, ed. Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013. xv + 399 pp. Illustrations, footnotes, and index. $27.95. Michael Stewart Foley. Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013. 401pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.00. What is it that inspires certain people to take action on behalf of themselves and others to improve their world? What is the basis of democratic citizenship—that fierce amalgamation of passionate commitment and sacrifice? I recall here a photograph from James Miller’s “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. It shows Sharon Jeffrey, one of the New Left’s most energetic welfare-rights organizers in Cleveland, sitting on a couch during a meeting. Above her is a woman yawning, next to her is a woman passed out; Jeffrey herself looks dazed and exhausted. The photo is captioned “Freedom is an endless meeting.” The look on Jeffrey’s face always suggested to me the difficulty and strain of sustaining democratic citizenship.1 Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville made his observations about citizenship and democracy in 1840, there has been a noted paradox: a weak state (or government) often encourages democratic activism. Tocqueville recognized that the bonds of civil society were stronger in America than in his home country, France, where a monarchical government had sole power to solve problems. Tocqueville was amazed by Americans’ energy: “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. . . . Where in France you would find the government . . . , in the United States you are sure to find an association.”2 [End Page 134] Democratic citizenship stems from America’s republican (small-r) traditions. But it also occupies a central part of the American Left. Consider Michael Kazin’s important and expansive book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011), which includes an examination of radical abolitionism, the feminist and suffragette movements, labor organizing, a movement for birth-control legalization, and numerous antiwar eruptions. Making democratic citizenship a reality for all Americans—no matter their class, race, gender, or sexual orientation—is a central component of American history. And, as with much else, it is a far more complicated story than might first appear. Shelley Streeby reminds readers about an internationalist anarchist and socialist Left that was once very active and associated with the Haymarket Affair and with strong opposition to U.S. imperialism. Haymarket—a labor strike in Chicago in 1886 that prompted protests, the dynamiting of police, and the eventual hanging of the prosecuted—was international because “most of the men on trial at Haymarket were immigrants” (p. 41) The exception was Albert Parsons, who was born in America and married Lucy Parsons, herself Texas-born and a central figure in Streeby’s book. Instead of analyzing details of events leading to Haymarket, Streeby scrutinizes visual reporting about the affair, especially in publications such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Immediately in Haymarket’s wake, there was a conservative imaginary. Many illustrations depicted Chicago anarchists “as ‘beasts’ with out-of-control monstrous bodies that had to be subdued by the police” (p. 48). In one illustration, two older male anarchists are rustled out of bed, suggesting, in Streeby’s mind, a linkage between homosexual activity and noir terrorism (p. 50). Yet there were other images that humanized the Haymarket activists, but not until they were “whitened” and their families foregrounded (p. 53). Even in Leslie’s, we find an image of Albert Parsons, in prison clutching his daughter on his knee, with Lucy faintly shown on the other side of the grate (so as not to see her racial hues). Lucy Parsons, in her Life of Albert R. Parsons, provided an “honorific, sentimental . . . portrait” of her husband (p. 58). When she included a gallows scene in a later edition, she...

Review of "Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music" by David Janssen and Edward Whitelock

David Janssen and Edward Whitelock. 2009. Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint LLC. While any attempt to characterize a nation and "a people" is bound to expire in dubious generalization, claims about the essence of the United States and constitution of the "American character" have often been marked by especially outlandish and totalizing rhetoric--by American and non-American writers alike, both affirmatively and critically. (1) One example is Jean Baudrillard's 1986 book America. Poised as the postmodern successor to Alexis de Tocqueville, Baudrillard, perceiving American culture simultaneously as pre-civilized (an old trope) and as the paradigm of hypermodern simulacral "spectrality," characterizes the nation as both "the only remaining primitive society" and as "a giant hologram." (2) If representations of the United States from the last half-century are inflected by the post-World War II phase of American exceptionalism, this has affected not only imperial apologists and vulgar nationalists but even, residually, writers on the left, like Baudrillard. More generally, the United States has always been a strongly symbolic nation, whether imagined as the singular beacon of democracy or as the paradoxical no-place/no-face of late capitalism. For this reason, critical studies of the American mythos are important, and, as Greil Marcus realized some decades ago, popular music serves as a good lens through which to view the agglomerated fragments of "America." (3) Clearly indebted to Marcus, David Janssen and Edward Whitelock, professors of English at Gordon College and authors of Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music, take as their entry point into the American imagination a perceived deep relationship between rock and apocalyptic thought. Although forsaking Baudrillard's shimmering, overtly hyperbolic style, Jannsen and Whitelock nevertheless exhibit a more muted version of his tendency to paint American culture in overly broad brush-strokes. This is seen in the book's thesis of sorts, found in the authors' introduction. Quoting Frank Kermode, the authors observe that in examining the history of apocalyptic thought "the end is immanent rather than imminent," and go on to explain: The difference between an imminent and an immanent apocalypse is the difference between "The end is near" and "the end is here." We will show that apocalypse is a permanent and central part of the American character. As rock and roll is a reflection of that character, apocalypse remains one of the most consistent and evocative threads in the development of the musical form itself. (3, italics mine) But what does it mean to speak of a "permanent" part of an "American character"? From the outset it is unclear whether Janssen and Whitelock are attempting to complicate and deconstruct the idea of the "American character" or simply reify it. If this thesis raises eyebrows, it does, at least, gesture toward answering a primary question about the book: Why apocalypse ... now? By positing the "permanence" of apocalyptic thought in American culture, the authors would seem to foreclose the question of relevance. I will return to questions of the book's historiographic specificity in my conclusion. Throughout the volume, Jannsen and Whitelock attend mostly to rock-from Elvis to Sleater-Kinney-but also to other genres, energetically tracing the theme of apocalypse through American musics and musicians as diverse as gospel, country, and John Coltrane. Proceeding roughly chronologically, the book is organized in four parts (with two to four chapters apiece, most of which concern a single band or album): Part 1--"Apocalypse USA" sets the stage; Part 2--"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" discusses Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and the music of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen; Part 3--"Artifacts From the Blast Zone" covers Love's Forever Changes, Devo, and R. …

A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism. By Mike O’Connor (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2014) 287 pp. $34.95

O’Connor’s engaging survey of leading debates about political economy throughout American history helps to explain why many of us are oblivious to the role that the federal government necessarily plays in our market economy. Despite the enduring popular appeal of laissez-faire from the Jacksonian era to the present, the “American government cannot help but alter market outcomes, often significantly” (243). Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential analysis in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), O’Connor posits an ongoing tension between “liberty and equality,” the central concepts around which controversies over capitalism and democracy have pivoted in the history of American liberalism (244). As they “struggled to reconcile their commitment to the political sovereignty of the people with their equally fervent desire to ensure the integrity of markets and to protect private property,” Americans have perpetuated a tension that defies resolution and defines democratic capitalism.O’Connor’s study begins with a Hamiltonian tradition of “stewardship” that linked the federal state with elite investors and the promotion of manufactures. Despite resistance from reactionary Republicans, Alexander Hamilton established a central role for the state in fostering a “diverse and healthy economy” (47). Jacksonians resisted federal intervention—most notably in banking—but embraced markets. Their “laissez-faire populism” proved ill-equipped to deal with the business cycle and paved the way for a return to power by neo-Hamiltonian Whigs and their successors (61). But suspicions of state power remained the democratic default in future decades, disabling efforts to curb concentrations of private wealth and power. However significant the federal government’s role has always been in the economy, American voters have been reluctant to use their power to promote egalitarian outcomes. The collapse of the New Deal consensus and the triumph of the populist right’s anti-tax orthodoxy confirm the democratic legitimacy of supposedly free markets.O’Connor’s best chapters help to explain why Americans are reluctant to interfere in markets. Led by Justice Stephen F. Field’s influential dissent in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Supreme Court transformed the corporation from a grant of power to achieve a public purpose to a “sort of placeholder for individual interests,” thus providing “a Liberal, individualist justification for what was effectively an illiberal, collectivist enterprise” (110). Field’s jurisprudence showed the importance of ideas in determining the character of democratic capitalism. In contrast, modern liberals fell short on the intellectual battleground, failing to elaborate a rationale for social democracy and the welfare state before it was too late. In O’Connor’s sympathetic analysis, John Rawls’ enormously popular Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) ironically served as an epilogue to liberalism’s brief and limited ascendancy. Conservative, pro-market theorists and pundits would instead carry the day, as their “antitax message” developed into an “overarching theory of government” (203).A Commercial Republic does not pretend to be a comprehensive synthesis. O’Connor could have drawn on a rich new literature in American political development that has “brought the state back in[to]” our understanding of political economy. Moreover, any one of the themes that he addresses—from trade to currency policy to taxation—could have been much more systematically developed. But O’Connor has succeeded admirably in showing how previous generations have engaged with the policy controversies that continue to define the character of political economy in America.

The Rights Revolution Continues: Why New Rights are Born (and Old Rights Rarely Die)

Why do Americans, as Alexis de Tocqueville first noticed, turn public policy issues into matters of legal right? What exactly are the forces that created the rights revolution? And how will the continuing expansion of rights policies shape American politics? This Article draws on recent developments in rights politics and on academic analyses of the politics of public policymaking in order to answer these questions.

Diversity, federalism and the nineteenth-century liberals

This paper provides an argument in favour of federal institutional design on the basis that it is more congenial to the preservation and promotion of normatively desirable societal diversity than its unitary alternative. Seeking inspiration in the work of three of the most influential liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century: John Stuart Mill; Alexis de Tocqueville; and Lord Acton, I construct a novel case for federalism that focuses on the inherent benefits of a dual/multi-layered governmental structure. Section one argues for the value of diversity, stating that it can both improve the authenticity of individually exercised autonomy, and improve the quality of individually espoused moral views. Section two considers the potential dangers posed by the unitary state to the flourishing of diversity through the centralisation of key institutions. Section three shows how the federal model sidesteps these pitfalls, and offers a more auspicious environment for the cultivation and enjoyment of diversity.

Is Democracy in Decline?

Is Democracy in Decline? Marc F. Plattner (bio) Since the publication of its inaugural issue in January 1990, the Journal of Democracy has published well over a thousand articles, exploring all aspects of the workings of democracy and the struggles of democratic movements. But we have been especially concerned with tracking democracy’s advances and setbacks around the world. For 25 years, we have been “taking the temperature” of democracy. Since 1998, we have published annually an article summarizing Freedom House’s survey of Freedom in the World, and we have featured numerous other essays analyzing democracy’s global trajectory, beginning with Samuel P. Huntington’s classic 1991 article introducing the concept of the “third wave” of democratization. So it should not be unexpected that we turn to this subject as the central theme of our twenty-fifth anniversary issue. Some may be surprised, however, by the headline on our cover—“Is Democracy in Decline?”—which faithfully reflects the way in which we posed the question to our contributors. For a journal that is unabashedly in favor of democracy, this obviously is not the kind of celebratory theme that might be preferred for marking a historic milestone. Yet this seemed to be the question that everyone was asking as 2015 approached, and we decided that it deserved a thorough examination. Tracing the viewpoints and opinions expressed over the years in the Journal (especially on its five-year anniversaries) suggests how evaluations of and sentiments about the state of democracy have evolved since 1990. The editors’ introduction that Larry Diamond and I wrote for the inaugural issue was animated by the view that democracy was experiencing a “remarkable worldwide resurgence,” but also by a concern that [End Page 5] it lagged behind its rivals with respect to political ideas and organization. Five eventful years later, we recognized not only that democracy had spread to many more countries but also that it had hugely improved its standing in terms of ideas and organization. We asserted that democracy had “gained enormous ground” with respect to “international legitimacy” and that it now “reign[ed] supreme in the ideological sphere.” Multilateral organizations were increasingly endorsing democratic principles, and a whole new field of international democracy assistance had emerged. At the turn of the century, these trends seemed only to be growing stronger. In introducing a special tenth-anniversary issue on “Democracy in the World” modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, we argued that Tocqueville had supplanted Marx and concluded, “We are all Tocquevilleans now.” By 2005, however, our tone had grown far more downbeat, and we acknowledged a darkening mood among supporters of democracy. We attributed this in part to the travails of democracy-building in postinvasion Iraq and to Russia’s descent back into authoritarianism, but argued that the overall global trends were mixed and did not justify discouragement among democrats. By 2010, we were prepared to grant that “there now may even be grounds for speaking of an erosion of freedom over the past few years, though its dimensions are very slight.” Confronting Decline Yet here in our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, we feel compelled to confront head-on the question of whether democracy is in decline. Why? There are two aspects to the answer, which although intertwined are in some measure separable. The first deals with what is actually taking place on the ground: How many countries are democratic? Is their number rising or shrinking? What is the situation with respect to such liberal-democratic features as freedom of the press, rule of law, free and fair elections, and the like? The second, more subjective, aspect concerns the standing of democracy in the world: How is it viewed in terms of legitimacy and attractiveness? It is in this latter dimension that the evidence, or at least the widespread perception, of decline is most striking. As readers will see, the first dimension is open to differing interpretations. The divergence among them is most sharply posed by comparing Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s essay on “The Myth of Democratic Recession” with Larry Diamond’s on the need for “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession.” Levitsky and Way point out that...

Checks and Balances for Democratic Souls: Alexis de Tocqueville on Religion in Democratic Societies

AbstractFor Tocqueville, well-balanced souls were as important to freedom as a well-balanced constitution. Such spiritual checks and balances were essential, in his view, for the preservation of political freedom and individual human greatness. Religion was the prime source of such spiritual checks and balances, offering a parallel source for the checks and balances to democracy provided by secular mechanisms such as associations and self-interest well understood. Tocqueville envisaged religion from two different viewpoints, utilitarian and perfectionist. From a utilitarian perspective, religion helped to limit democratic societies and preserve them from excess. From a perfectionist standpoint, it encouraged human beings to become great. Not all religions, however, were equally capable of performing these functions.