| The dissertation explores the character of Tocqueville's profoundly ambiguous embrace of modern democracy and demonstrates the inadequacy of the notion of the tyranny of the majority as an analytical tool for understanding his deepest aims and purposes. Tocqueville's dilemma is that the justice of democracy rests on a recognition of the universality of the essentially human that necessarily undermines those attachments to particular cities, orders, or nations that he believes bear the seeds of human nobility. Conversely, Tocqueville shows that the nobility of these devotions not only depends upon, but indeed in turn produces a spirit of exclusivity that necessarily obscures the universality of humanity upon which the greater justice of democracy rests. It is instructive that Tocqueville analyzes these ennobling attachments under the rubric of patriotism, with its dual connotations of public spirit and collective partisanship.;Against the backdrop of his nightmare vision of the indifferent mass that he denominates the troupeau d'animaux, the herd of animals, Tocqueville seeks to re-invigorate public life. The moral risks involved in such a project are made abundantly clear in Tocqueville's own imperial ambitions in North Africa. The dissertation examines Tocqueville's activity as a founder of French Algeria in order to elucidate those longings and trepidations that we analyze in his more formal and reflective works, especially Democracy in America. We similarly reexamine Tocqueville's praise of local self-government and religion.;Tocqueville's analysis of the ineluctable relation between the narrowness of attachment and its strength reveals, and even emphasizes, the artificiality of these particular attachments, and serves, therefore, to raise the question of the ultimate benefit of the very truthfulness of equality. By focusing on Tocqueville's admiration for political ambitiousness, we arrive at a fuller if unsettling portrait of Tocqueville that illuminates a radical undertone. What begins as a Romantic longing, and often appears as a conservative nostalgia, is in the end a concern for nobility quite distinct from and often quite opposed to the justice of universal equality, a nobility that comes surprisingly to resemble the poetic ornamentation of human life. |
