Posts Tagged ‘Alexis de Tocqueville’

“American Political Thought” at the APSA

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Inauguration, 1913 (LOC)

Inaugural Event

The American Political Science Association has recently recognized the formation of a related group called “American Political Thought.” The group was started by Steven Kautz and Benjamin Kleinerman of Michigan State University for the purpose of providing a much needed outlet for scholarship:

Statement of Need:

The purpose of this related group is to promote interest in, and provide an outlet for, the presentation of research on American Political Thought.  American Political Thought comprises, among other things, the study of fundamental and/or authoritative texts that are constitutive of American political life; the study of the first principles that ground constitutionalism and democracy in the United States; and the study of the public philosophies or sentiments that have animated political parties (and ultimately the “public mind,” to borrow Lincoln’s expression) throughout American political history.  It is related to, but distinct from, the study of American political development and institutions, on one hand, and the study of modern political philosophy and contemporary democratic theory, on the other.

Panel:

The inaugural panel, entitled “Philosophy and American Political Thought” will held Saturday, September 4th at the American Political Science convention in Washington D.C. (meeting room TBD):

  • James Ceaser, UVA: “Alexis de Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis”
  • Randal Hendrickson, Duke University: “Liberalism and Republicanism in the American Political Tradition”
  • Thomas Pangle, UT Austin: “Montesquieu and the Basis of Liberal Modernity in America”

Reception:

A joint reception with the Jack Miller Center will be held September 3rd at 7:30 in Columbia 1 at the Hilton Washington.

All are invited to attend.

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Scholars Celebrate Democracy

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

from the Indiana Daily Student

By KATIE DAWSON

Ten panelists from three different continents spoke about one influential Frenchman.

Alexis de Tocqueville scholars from around the world gathered in the Indiana Memorial Union Walnut Room on Friday  to celebrate the publication of a bilingual, French and English, edition of “Democracy in America.”

“The best work on American democracy was written by a Frenchman,” said Aurelian Craiutu, IU associate professor of political science and director of the Tocqueville program.

Started in 2009, Craiutu’s new program promotes the teachings and ideas of Tocqueville’s interpretation of American democracy. The program offers numerous courses and lectures devoted to Tocqueville’s studies and theories of America.

“This conference is one of the most important events the Tocqueville project will have this year,” Craiutu said.

Many of the panelists from the conference helped compile information for the new edition.

“I realized when I started looking at the Tocqueville papers that I could give him another opinion by showing information that was not shared before,” said Eduardo Nolla of Universidad San Pablo in Madrid, Spain, who helped gather information for the new edition.

The information that Nolla assembled in large part was collected from Yale University, where most of Tocqueville’s documents are located.

“In the book we made sure to include his travel notes, his letter that he wrote to his friends and family, the drafts of his book and his manuscripts,” Nolla said.

Tocqueville, a French political thinker, came to America in the early 1800s to study and document how and why democracy works. The result is his two-volume book “Democracy in America.”

Mark Yellin, an employee of the book’s publisher, the Liberty Fund, came to the conference not only because he has worked with many of the panelists but because he said he was impressed that IU was willing to put on a conference dealing with Tocqueville.

“It is so complex to put something like this together,” Yellin said. “It’s a beautiful volume that took 10 years to create.”

JMC Editor: The conference was co-sponsored by the Jack Miller Center.

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ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON HIS WORKS

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

A ONE-DAY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

ORGANIZED BY

THE TOCQUEVILLE PROGRAM AT INDIANA UNIVESITY,

IN COLLABORATION WITH

THE WORKSHOP IN POLITICAL THEORY AND POLICY ANALYSIS, THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND LIBERTY FUND, INC.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON HIS WORKS

March 5, 2010

IU Memorial Union
Indiana University, Bloomington

All meetings are scheduled to take place in the IU Memorial Union, Walnut Room.

THURSDAY, MARCH 4, 2010:

Afternoon: Arrival of participants at the Indiana University Memorial Union Hotel

6:30                Dinner  (Lennie’s)

Friday, March 5, 2010:

9:15-9:30:       Mike McGinnis (IUB): Welcoming remarks: Tocqueville and the Workshop in Political Theory

Aurelian Craiutu (IUB): Opening remarks: The Tocqueville Program at Indiana University

9:30–10:45    Roundtable on the Liberty Fund critical bilingual edition of Democracy in America

Moderator: Aurelian Craiutu

PANELISTS: Eduardo Nolla (Universidad San Pablo-CEU, Madrid), James T. Schleifer (College of New Rochelle), Christine D.  Henderson (Liberty Fund, Inc): Editing, translating, and publishing Democracy in America

10:45–11       Break

11–12:15       Open discussion: The relevance of the Liberty Fund critical edition for the Tocqueville studies.

Moderator: Barbara Allen (Carleton College)

Panelists: Eduardo Nolla, James T. Schleifer

12:15-1.30     Lunch (for panelists): Tudor Room, IU Memorial Union

1:45–3:15      Roundtable Discussion on Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Moderator: Russell Hanson (IUB)

Panelists: Aurelian Craiutu (IUB) and Jeremy Jennings (Queen Mary, University of London)

3:15-3:30       Break

3:30-5:00       Roundtable Discussion on Conversations with Tocqueville (Lexington Books, 2009)

Moderator: Filippo Sabetti (McGill University)

Panelists: Barbara Allen (Carleton College), Reiji Matsumoto (Waseda University, Tokyo), Filippo Sabetti (McGill University)

6:30                Dinner (Samira Restaurant)

Saturday, March 6, 2010:

Breakfast and departure at the participants’ convenience.

***

The new Tocqueville program at IU is sponsored by the Jack Miller Center in Philadelphia. For further related events, please see http://www.indiana.edu/~tcqville/

The Liberty Fund bilingual Democracy in America is the fullest historical-critical edition of the Democracy. It includes Eduardo Nolla’s historical-critical edition of the French text and notes on the left-hand pages and James Schleifer’s new English translation on the right. The notes offer an extensive selection of early outlines, drafts, manuscript variants, marginalia, unpublished fragments, and other materials. Features include a translator’s note, list of key terms, foreword, twenty-one illustrations, editor’s introduction, footnotes, appendixes, all works known to have been used by Tocqueville, a bibliography, and French and English indexes.

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Bilakovics on Democracy and Cynicism

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Harvard University Press has accepted the manuscript of Jack Miller Center Fellow, Steven Bilakovics. Prof. Bilakovics is currently a JMC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University where he is teaching a course on the American Founding and an upper division course entitled “The American Dream.” Excerpts from his forthcoming volume appear below:

Political Cynicism and the Democratic Way of Life

(Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011)

Every government harbors within itself a natural flaw that seems
inextricably intertwined with the very principle of its existence
- Tocqueville

My project offers an explanation of the remarkable divergence between the status of democratic principles and the status of democratic political practices – of the paradoxical simultaneity of the enormous faith we place in the ideal of democracy and our near-total loss of faith in the actual political practice of democracy. On one hand we hear that democracy is triumphant, the recipient of near-universal acclaim and the sole remaining source of political legitimacy. This triumph is hardly surprising once we recognize that democracy is linked to most everything good in the world: peace, prosperity, human rights, freedom, equality, justice, deliberative reason, even ethical self-development. On the other hand our attitudes and beliefs regarding everyday democratic politics are characterized by a deeply ingrained – almost reflexive – cynicism. Three decades of the General Social Survey, for instance, attests to an utter loss of confidence and trust in the elected representatives and political institutions of liberal democracy. The same is true of our view of ourselves as participants in democratic politics; the only thing we have less confidence in than our politicians is ourselves as citizens. It seems an almost a priori contempt for all things political – an anti-political prejudice – has taken hold. Indeed, beyond the concept of corruption, politics is increasingly experienced as quite literally a theater of the absurd: a play full of trite, repetitive, clichéd, nonsensical jargon that obstructs authentic expression and meaningful communication. Today, we are reduced to “playing politics” in the electoral “silly season.”

We are left with the contradictory sense that democracy (or maybe better, democratization) is as inevitable as the political practice of democracy is impossible. We expect ever more from, but ever less of, democracy. A gap between principle and practice hardly requires explanation, but how can we account for this opposite movement – this simultaneous waxing of democratic ideals and waning of democratic political practices? How is it that democracy has taken on the characteristics of a utopia?

(continue reading)

Democracy as Self-Subverting
(Introduction)

More Than Kings Yet Less Than Men:
Tocqueville on Elevation and Degradation in the Democratic Imagination
(chapter 1)

Civilization Without the Discontents:
Tocqueville on Democracy as the Social State of Nature
(chapter 2)

The Regime of Revolution:
Claude Lefort on History, Nature, and Convention After the Democratic Revolution
(chapter 3)

Political Phoenix:
Sheldon Wolin on the Limits and Limitlessness of Democracy
(chapter 4)

Democratic Silence
(Conclusion)

Research

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Tocqueville Program at Indiana University

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The new Tocqueville Program at Indiana University, announces its new program.

The Tocqueville Program is directed by Aurelian Craiutu and hosted by the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, which was co-founded by Vincent and Lin Ostrom, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. The program is sponsored by the Jack Miller Center in Philadelphia, and will bring to campus in the years ahead scholars who work on Tocquevillian issues and American democracy.

Through its interdisciplinary focus, the new Tocqueville Program is expected to have an important and broad impact on undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at Indiana and beyond.  The goal of the program is to foster an understanding of the central importance of principles of freedom and equality for democratic government and moral responsibility, as well as for economic and cultural life.  It focuses on the theoretical foundations of democracy, and the development of liberal democratic institutions particularly in the American historical context.  It includes a lecture series that will bring top scholars and public figures to Indiana to interact with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.

  • The first event will be on Friday November 6, 12.1.30 pm., in the Tocqueville Room, at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 513 N. Park, Bloomington. It will feature Professor Matthew Mancini, who will present a lecture entitled “

“What’s Wrong with Tocqueville Studies, and What Can Be Done About It”

Matthew Mancini is Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. He received his A. B. in English from Fordham, and the PhD in American Studies from Emory. He is the author of Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (2006), Alexis de Tocqueville (1994), and One Dies, Get

Another: Convict Leasing in the American South (1996); and the coeditor of Understanding Maritain (1988). Most recently, Professor Mancini has published “Too Many Tocquevilles: The Fable of Tocqueville’s American Reception,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (April 2008).

  • Another major Tocqueville event will occur next spring (March 4-5, 2010), featuring the editor and translator of the critical edition of Democracy in America (Eduardo Nolla and James Schleifer), forthcoming with Liberty Fund, in January 2010. At the same time, we shall also have panels on two other books on Tocqueville published by faculty affiliated with the Center (Tocqueville on America after 1840, and Conversations with Tocqueville).
  • April 23, the Tocqueville program will co-sponsor a talk by Professor Jonathan Israel (School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton).

More information will be available soon on our new website:

Tocqueville Program, Indiana University

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Craiutu Translates Forgotten Tocqueville

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings

Translated by:

Aurelian Craiutu and
Jeremy Jennings

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has been recognized as an indispensable starting point for understanding American politics. From the publication of the second volume in 1840 until his death in 1859, Tocqueville continued to monitor political developments in America and committed many of his thoughts to paper in letters to his friends in America. He also made frequent references to America in many articles and speeches. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes of Democracy in America published in 1835 and 1840? If so, which of his views changed and why? The texts translated in Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings answer these questions and offer English-speaking readers the possibility of familiarizing themselves with this unduly neglected part of Tocqueville’s work. The book points out a clear shift in emphasis especially after 1852 and documents Tocqueville’s growing disenchantment with America, triggered by such issues as political corruption, slavery, expansionism and the encroachment of the economic sphere upon the political.

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