• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • (sub)Text
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Episode 152: Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy in America (PEL Live!)

November 21, 2016 by Mark Linsenmayer 12 Comments

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_152_10-27-16.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:27:38 — 80.3MB)

Democracy is in peril! So said Tocqueville in 1835 and 1840 when Democracy is America was published, and so would he likely say now. Democracy is always just one demagogue away from stripping us of our liberties, though certain structural and cultural features can make that more or less likely.

Tocqueville liked our spirit of volunteerism, our civic activeness, our energy and inventiveness and competitiveness, and the pervasiveness of religion (at the time) in American culture. But he didn't like our groupthink, our tendencies toward materialism and caring only about our own small circle (what he called "individualism"), our lack of philosophical curiosity, and was in favor of a strong separation between church and state. He thought that people in a democracy value equality over freedom, and that in the absence of a strong spiritual countervailing force, we'd spend more energy pursuing material comfort and so would be more likely to allow a tyrant who promises this to us to take control. He also feared the rise of a new aristocracy out of the business world, with bosses becoming the new de facto lords. Then again, he also feared a race war and thought for sure that if the South tried to secede, the federal government would be too weak to prevent this, so there's that.

This discussion was recorded live at Brown University 10/27/16 with Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan engaging the political moment and with an audience during the Q&A portion at the end.

Buy the book or read it online. Our reading selections were, in order of importance to us:

1) Volume II Part II, chapters 1–15; Part IV, chapters 6–8.
2) Volume I Author's Introduction
3) Volume I Part II Chapters 7–8
4) Volume II Part I Chapters 1–3, 5
5) Volume I Part I chapters 5–7
6) Volume I Part II chapter 9, 10

Watch the discussion (thanks to Brown University and the Swearer Center) here or on YouTube.

End song (for the audio version): "Shot of Democracy" by Cutting Crew from Grinning Souls (2005). Listen to Mark's interview with singer/songwriter Nick Eede on Nakedly Examined Music ep. 10.

Tocqueville picture by Olle Halvars.

Please support PEL!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy in america, philosophy podcast, political philosophy

Comments

  1. Making America Great Again says

    November 23, 2016 at 2:01 pm

    @around 1hr20m in:

    I find it kind of silly you claim the objection to Donald Trump taking the stance that he might deny the election results is because people feel we need to have some sort of collective mores and abstract ideals in common, when not a week after having won an election fairly by the same procedures than have endured, those same people were challenging Trump for not having won the irrelevant popular vote, calling on electors to mass defect on a level never seen in American history, begging Hillary to legally challenge the result, and so on.

    If anything, I think this election has shown more than any before that coastal Democrats are NOT interested in sharing a polity or common mores and expectations with people like me, and seek to use my electoral decision to label me with the harshest sorts of label of racist, sexist, misogynist, and other thinks that indicate I should not have an equal opinion in civil society.

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      November 23, 2016 at 5:34 pm

      My point was to explain the press reaction when he made that announcement, and that same norm I think explains why Clinton herself, like Gore, has not contested the election.

      This general point by Tocqueville raises an interesting problem: He says we need this set of common mores to underlie and support the legal framework in order for democracy to work, yet we clearly don’t have this in the way he had in mind: We don’t have a common religion. This to him was important even though even in his time there was no common denomination within Christianity and lots of cultural differences between the North and South.

      So was he just wrong, and Rawls right, in that we DON’T need common mores and in fact the function of the liberal state is to be neutral with regard to mores to support pluralism… or was Tocqueville right about the need for common mores, but wrong in insisting that religion be among them? If he was right about mores, are we currently in a crisis with a lack of these common mores as your comment seems to indicate, or are the mores in question more general, e.g. pay your debts, play fair (or at least give lip service to playing fair), etc.?

      Reply
      • Jasmine says

        November 25, 2016 at 8:45 pm

        Gore did contest the election. He went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court over 60,000 “punch card” ballots in Florida. In court on December 12, Gore lost and then conceded the next day. I think Clinton herself needs to be questioned about her respect for common mores. She ignored protocol the night of the election itself, when she went to bed instead of giving a traditional concession speech. Imagine if Trump had done that. The Democrats and corporate media would have been calling for his head.

        Reply
        • Dan says

          November 27, 2016 at 10:43 pm

          Seriously, what difference does it make? She gave a concession speech the next day… did she have to make it at precisely the time you wanted her to? Did those few hours really make a difference? Get over yourself.

          Reply
          • Thomas Rickarby says

            November 28, 2016 at 3:51 am

            The point isn’t that it was a big deal, the point is that the media would have made it a big deal if trump had done it, which we know, because they made a big deal about him going for a steak insteading of meeting with them at a particular time and place.

  2. David Hughes says

    November 25, 2016 at 10:13 pm

    I think that if religion is used as the basis of common mores, and we accept that all religions have roughly similar ethics, the question of whether society is neutral becomes moot.

    Through most of the discussion – which I thoroughly enjoyed, thank you all very much – I was trying to piece together the link between what de Tocqueville wrote almost 200 years ago and what the country feels like today. His distinction between the aristocrats in Europe and the newly minted democratic people in the US seems to hold true if we replace those groups with the bi-coastal liberals and the rest of the country, respectively. So, as you would expect, the liberals think like Europeans and the middle/southern parts of the country are much more like the society he describes. Does that make sense?

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      November 26, 2016 at 12:44 pm

      There is no analogue among large groups of today’s U.S. citizens for the aristocrats of his day. If we need a parallel, it’s “big business”, in that a single millionaire (like Trump) can actually make things happen in a way that ordinary citizens can’t do without help. But, then, per our Burke episode, a lot of the advantages of the aristocracy in terms of stability and conservative investment (i.e. A hereditary line of succession and estate to worry about like we see on Downton Abbey) aren’t there.

      Reply
      • David Hughes says

        November 29, 2016 at 8:20 am

        Ok. I see that in terms of being able to act as an economic and commcercial independent, But de Tocqueville also said that the aristocrats could be a check against the power of the monarchy, so in a sense, a democratic force (when they acted together to protect their interests), or at least an early example of a civil association. I think that we have just watched “Big Business” dispense with the middleman (the politician) and call an end to such interference. Perhaps that is a conservative investment. 🙂

        One’s politics (and sports) have, until pretty recently it seems to me, been handed down by the older generation, partly through clubs and associations (everything from bowling leagues and church to the Princeton Club). As the social influence of these groups has declined, and new open sources of information have come available, there has been more freedom to make one’s own choices about social and political issues. A good thing which has sent most major western parties into the soul-searching wilderness at least once over the last fifteen or twenty years.

        But it also offered a commercial opportunity to turn citizens into consumers of opinion and perspectives. And so “Big Business” created the vacuum in politics into which it has finally stepped, making the US the most recent victim of a classic bait-and-switch.

        Reply
  3. John says

    November 30, 2016 at 12:17 am

    Mark looked so sad 🙁

    Reply
    • Mark Linsenmayer says

      November 30, 2016 at 8:24 am

      You know this was recorded before the election, right? I don’t recall being sad…

      Reply
  4. M says

    April 7, 2017 at 5:18 pm

    Is there a particular reason you decided to read the Harvey Mansfield translation? I’m trying to figure out what translation to buy. I think I’m between the Mansfield version and the newer Goldhammer translation. Does anyone have any thoughts on which they like better?

    Linked is an article by Goldhammer explaining why he believes his version is better: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~agoldham/articles/Mansfield.htm

    I’m somewhat hesitant to go with Goldhammer because it seems it might be less literal.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Episode 156: Philosophy and Politics Free-Form Discussion (Part One) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    January 23, 2017 at 10:27 am

    […] is no text for this episode, though we've got Aristotle, Burke, and Tocqueville firmly in mind, and Wes brings up this article from the Guardian, "Welcome to the Age of Anger," by […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

PEL Live Show 2023

Brothers K Live Show

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Select list(s):

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Bibliophile on Pretty Much Pop #143: Pinocchio the Unfilmable (Yet Frequently Filmed)
  • Mark Linsenmayer on Ep. 302: Erasmus Praises Foolishness (Part Two)
  • Mark Linsenmayer on Ep. 308: Moore’s Proof of Mind-Independent Reality (Part Two for Supporters)
  • Mark Linsenmayer on Ep. 201: Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism with Ryan Holiday (Citizen Edition)
  • MartinK on Ep. 201: Marcus Aurelius’s Stoicism with Ryan Holiday (Citizen Edition)

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Ad-Free
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Supporter Exclusive
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2023 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in