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From Oblivion to Apotheosis: The Ironic Journey of Alexis de Tocqueville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2010

MATTHEW J. MANCINI
MATTHEW J. MANCINI
Affiliation:
Matthew J. Mancini is Professor and Chair, Department of American Studies, Saint Louis University. E-mail: mancini@slu.edu
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Abstract

Scholarship on the theme of Alexis de Tocqueville's changing roles in American culture constitutes a remarkably coherent discourse with distinctive conventions, structures, metaphors, and plots. Especially pronounced in the literature is a constantly repeated narrative – really a myth – that portrays Tocqueville as a vanished hero who suffered a prolonged period of oblivion and then made a celebrated return to play the role of guide to Americans as they faced the perils of the postwar world. Because of the lack of empirical support for this narrative, scholars inadvertently find themselves violating or disregarding elementary rules of evidence and logical argument when they address it. The extraordinary stability and coherence of this discourse are its most notable features: they have persisted, with no oppositional counternarrative, decade after decade for the past forty years. But all discourses have cracks and fissures. This essay reveals the ubiquity as well as the banality of the standard tragic-heroic narrative, and it provides a taxonomy of Tocqueville metaphors – Tocqueville as Orpheus, as Proteus, and as Christ. The supposed facts of Tocqueville's reception (with which these metaphoric clusters are identical) are false. There was no departure, oblivion, or triumphant return of Tocqueville. The mythic discourse advanced an account that had no support in the historical record.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 21 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Francis Bowen, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1862); idem, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862).

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7 A detailed account of Tocqueville's abiding importance after the Civil War appears in Matthew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Times to Ours (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), esp. 99–149.

8 Kloppenberg, “Life Everlasting,” 73.

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21 Kloppenberg, “Canvas and Color,” 498.

22 Ibid., 497, 496.

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24 Kloppenberg, “Life Everlasting,” 74.

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27 Kloppenberg, “Life Everlasting,” 73.

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36 Ovid, Metamorphoses 10: 79–85.

37 As illustrations of “not merely the intense politicization of Tocqueville but also the trivialization of Democracy in America,” Kammen observed that, while the conservative Washington Times cites Tocqueville more often than any United States publication, liberals and the left “by and large … simply do without Tocqueville.” Kammen, Alexis de Tocqueville, 36.

38 For a fuller account of Nisbet's misrepresentations on this issue see Mancini, “Too Many Tocquevilles.” While the Nisbet article is canonical, in the sense of being recognized as the standard account, this should not be taken to mean that the point of view expressed therein represents that of the editor who chose to include it.

39 Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings, “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840,” introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Craiutu and Jennings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1; Craiutu, “Tocqueville's Paradoxical Moderation,” 602, original emphasis; Joseph Epstein, “Introduction” to Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam Classics, 2000), xxxiii–xxxiv; Welch, “Tocqueville in the Twenty-First Century,” 15; Audier, “Vers de ‘Nouveaux Tocqueville’?”

40 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 4: 432–35; 466–71.

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