Carceral Democracy: Tocqueville and the Emergence of “New Political Science”

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

There is no space in political life where power is exercised more absolutely than within the walls of the penitentiary. But curiously, prisons and penality remain a peripheral topic in political science and, especially, in political theory. The prison’s marginalization within political science is especially puzzling because modern political science was borne from the prison. Alexis De Tocqueville, the self-professed founder of a “new political science,” first traveled to America in 1831 with Gustave De Beaumont in order to scientifically study the prison. Based on their research, they co-wrote an 1833 book, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France.

Within political theory in particular, the standard interpretation is that Tocqueville came to America to study prisons but ended up writing about democracy. Within the secondary literature on Tocqueville, research on his prison-thinking is limited. On the Penitentiary System is certainly Tocqueville’s least read work, “seldom noted,” writes Marie Gottschalk, “except by a small circle of criminologists.” Representative are the words of Thomas Pangle and Timothy Burns: he “was commissioned to go to America to study prison reform. But Tocqueville knew that there were vastly more important things to learn in and about America.”

This paper sketches a counterargument. Drawing on a newly-issued translation of On the Penitentiary System, as well as epistolary and other sources, I argue that the prison was, from the beginning, intertwined with the method and practice of American social science. This paper provides intellectual context for Beaumont and Tocqueville’s America sojourn, and reads On the Penitentiary System as part of Tocqueville’s larger social scientific project. My aim is to bring Tocqueville's prison writing out from its “dark and ignored” corner of political theory in order to interrogate the fraught role of this new political science in democratic life.

Author

• Elliot Mamet, Duke University