America after Tocqueville
Democracy against Difference

Mitchell's study uses Tocqueville's Democracy in America to address current tensions in American democracy.

Harvey Mitchell (Author)

9780521030243, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

340 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.503 kg

'The study is … the product of a mature and wide-ranging mind …' History of Political Thought

America after Tocqueville complements Harvey Mitchell's previous book, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996). This study draws on Democracy in America to study the condition of democracy in the United States in our own time. Three aspects of Americanism inform Harvey Mitchell's book, and cannot be separated from Tocqueville's consideration of the three races. First, he addresses tensions in the United States between ideas of equality and a political system that tries to keep it within bounds. He turns to the relationship between this system and the dynamics of American capitalism. and he analyses the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in American life. Overall, he asks if Americans have surrendered to what Tocqueville called the materialization of life; if that compromise means their abandonment of their original spiritual quest; and, if they are on the way to a radical alienation from politics.

References to Tocqueville's Democracy in America
Preface
Part I. Paths to Democracy in America: 1. Introduction: thinking about American democracy
2. Democracy's experiment: from inequality to equality
3. Achieving a democratic civil society
Part II. Beginnings and Democracy: 4. Beginnings and history: red and white in Tocqueville's America
5. The New England township before the revolution: Tocqueville's American pastoral
6. A second beginning: black and white in Tocqueville's America
Part III. American Democracy On Trial: 7. Difference, race, and color in America
8. Maintaining American democracy
9. The state, authority, and the people
10. Conclusion
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], History of the Americas [HBJK]