Symptoms of democracy: Ambivalence and its limits in modern liberal conceptions of the liberal democratic bond

This dissertation is concerned with liberal thought's confrontation with the ambivalence of the political bond of liberal democratic society. After mapping out the limitations of dominant theories of the liberal bond in terms of interest, virtue, or psychological identification, Rousseau is read as setting the problem of a modern political bond involving citizens' attachment to an object that they constitute and yet that cannot gain full manifestation in political space. The tension between subject and object of political attachment, while absent in the abstract formula of the general will, manifests itself in Rousseau's concern with the political institutionalization of power where desire becomes necessary for the political bond. Even Rousseau's language of virtue, so influential in the French Revolution, is ambiguous about the source of ethical authority that results from the move to political and moral autonomy. Benjamin Constant and Tocqueville develop this concern with political ambivalence as they consider how democratic will must never be fully present in political society despite being a necessary referent. Constant's political thought seeks to solve the problem of how this absent-presence of power can be maintained in the symbolic political order that frames and structures liberal democratic society, while his literature implicitly explores the psychological dangers of a sustained ambivalence in liberal citizenship. Tocqueville, in turn, sees modern democratic society as far more than the conditions of social equality and tends to double the social bond of democracy, first, in terms of forms of political association which at least begin to point us beyond the positivism of the social and, second, in terms of a religious gesture beyond the democratic social. Constant and Tocqueville seek, in different fashions, to understand and contain the effects of an ambivalence that constitutes the modern political subject and are led to seek partial metaphysical buttresses to liberal democratic society. Freud and the project of psychoanalysis are then read as deepening this concern over the promise and peril of ambivalence in a fashion that is of value to contemporary liberal democratic thought. In seeking to understanding the very structuring of liberal democratic society and in confronting the absent-presence of democratic power and the ambivalence of the liberal citizen, this strain of liberal thought is confronting liberal democracy's inherent limits.