On the Evolution of Some European Attitudes Toward America's Class System

• In Event: 1455 - Section on History of Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 1

Abstract

America’s political culture in comparative perspective is discussed, with some emphasis on the work of Alexis de Tocqueville in comparative perspective. A major resource used is Claus Offe, Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber, and Adorno in the United States (Polity Press, 2005). Though Tocqueville was one of the earliest and most influential theorists on mass society, his work is best understood as a meditation on the cultural values important to the rise of modern democracy in his time, but not on democracy’s connection to industrialization and bureaucratization for which later scholars such as Max Weber emphasized details he didn’t. This essay emphasizes not only social and political modernization and cultural understandings of this but how some European scholars have interpreted American modernization over time in ways that reflected the biases and the conditions of their home societies and only in part overlapping with typical American biases toward our own society. There also is a time factor at work since different European scholars focused on America at different points in our social evolution.

Author

• Jerome Braun