Who Reads Tocqueville Today? A Pragmatic Genealogy of Democracy in America

• In Event: 498 - Regular Session. History of Sociology/Social Thought

Abstract

This article addresses a central puzzle in the history of academic disciplines: Why has Alexis de Tocqueville, and his magnum opus Democracy in America, recently been subject to a process of decanonization in American sociology and canonization in neighboring political sciences? Existing approaches emphasize either aspects internal to the text or to the figure of the author, or external factors such as historical contexts and disciplinary dynamics. My explanation questions the assumption that texts are stable and explores the pragmatic interplay between text-artifact-metaphor. The result is a pragmatic genealogy of the successive material incarnations of Democracy since the 1830s. This allows me to account for the various meanings that have been associated with Democracy (and Tocqueville) at key historical moments in terms of the cultural work of collectives of agents around the text and its material form so as to make it the icon of certain political and disciplinary projects.

Author

• Filipe Carreira da Silva, University of Lisbon