anon_qabo said in #3221 2w ago:
From a twitter post today by Tanner Greer (https://x.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1928597464006738035?t=Cper8b-TzL9_zK8Ggzw-zA&s=19) :
>Again: IMHO Tocqueville is at his most valuable not as an interpreter of things American, but as an interpreter of things modern—what happens to societies when the old categories that defined social and political life (eg “nobility,” France’s three estates) disappear, and men are thrust into a social reality where abstract equality is a guiding cultural ideal, markets are the main mediating social force, and there are few intervening social or political groupings between citizens and centralizing states?
>This process is what Tocqueville means by “democracy.” Democracy to him means social leveling and atomization that comes with the dissolution of the old aristocratic order.
>Many Europeans who observed this process in Europe thought the answer would be something like “bloody anarchy.” But Tocqueville had been to the country where this process was furthest along, and he knew that bloody anarchy was not what he saw there. What he saw there was very different—but why?
>So he has to explain the American of the 1830s. He has to explain many of its unique features. Then he has to argue which of these features are incidental to modernization (due instead to geography, religion, the American constitutional order etc) and which are byproducts of modernization (“democracy”) and likely to be manifested elsewhere. And then he asks which aspects of American culture and its constitutional order actually dampen the effects of democracy. He makes a great of American localism in that discussion, for example. And then he makes predictions for what will happen in countries that ride the democratic wage but don’t do the things Americans in the 1830s are doing—and in doing this he makes some very good predictions for what America looks like in the 20th century. Many of his most famous passages are these ones, where he describes constitutional orders that did not exist in the 1830s, but which look very familiar today.
>Finally he turns his attention back to Europe and looks at many aspects of European culture—poetry, religion, science, industry, and so forth—and asks, “in a general sense cross-cultural sense, how will these things change as equality becomes the guiding social ideal and the social reality of aristocracy and commoner melts away? Will they be like what I saw in America, or will they be different? What does this idea of human equality, and the experiences people have with it, mean for thing x, and thing y, and thing z?”
>Tocqueville’s answers to these questions are often brilliant and always interesting. And if you think—and I do—that the most important transformations of human life happened in the 1750-1850 timeframe, that there things “modern” that distinguish how the people who lived after these transformations lived and thought and worked and fought from those who lived before these transformations—well then I suggest that Tocqueville is the most discerning guide to this revolution.
Our traditional concepts of Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism (as historical phenomena) have been rendered obsolete by the events of the 20th century and bear little relation to the prevailing social order or intellectual paradigm.
20th-century Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis calls this epoch Mass Democracy--a global social formation defined by the atomization of society into mobile individuals and a complex division of labor. Its basis is mass production and consumption, upheld by hedonistic cultural norms. Equality is reinterpreted materially, and redistribution becomes a universal demand. Politics concerns itself almost entirely with distributing economic goods. Traditional boundaries between public/private, State/society dissolve as the State pervades all.
America was early to Modernity.
>Again: IMHO Tocqueville is at his most valuable not as an interpreter of things American, but as an interpreter of things modern—what happens to societies when the old categories that defined social and political life (eg “nobility,” France’s three estates) disappear, and men are thrust into a social reality where abstract equality is a guiding cultural ideal, markets are the main mediating social force, and there are few intervening social or political groupings between citizens and centralizing states?
>This process is what Tocqueville means by “democracy.” Democracy to him means social leveling and atomization that comes with the dissolution of the old aristocratic order.
>Many Europeans who observed this process in Europe thought the answer would be something like “bloody anarchy.” But Tocqueville had been to the country where this process was furthest along, and he knew that bloody anarchy was not what he saw there. What he saw there was very different—but why?
>So he has to explain the American of the 1830s. He has to explain many of its unique features. Then he has to argue which of these features are incidental to modernization (due instead to geography, religion, the American constitutional order etc) and which are byproducts of modernization (“democracy”) and likely to be manifested elsewhere. And then he asks which aspects of American culture and its constitutional order actually dampen the effects of democracy. He makes a great of American localism in that discussion, for example. And then he makes predictions for what will happen in countries that ride the democratic wage but don’t do the things Americans in the 1830s are doing—and in doing this he makes some very good predictions for what America looks like in the 20th century. Many of his most famous passages are these ones, where he describes constitutional orders that did not exist in the 1830s, but which look very familiar today.
>Finally he turns his attention back to Europe and looks at many aspects of European culture—poetry, religion, science, industry, and so forth—and asks, “in a general sense cross-cultural sense, how will these things change as equality becomes the guiding social ideal and the social reality of aristocracy and commoner melts away? Will they be like what I saw in America, or will they be different? What does this idea of human equality, and the experiences people have with it, mean for thing x, and thing y, and thing z?”
>Tocqueville’s answers to these questions are often brilliant and always interesting. And if you think—and I do—that the most important transformations of human life happened in the 1750-1850 timeframe, that there things “modern” that distinguish how the people who lived after these transformations lived and thought and worked and fought from those who lived before these transformations—well then I suggest that Tocqueville is the most discerning guide to this revolution.
Our traditional concepts of Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism (as historical phenomena) have been rendered obsolete by the events of the 20th century and bear little relation to the prevailing social order or intellectual paradigm.
20th-century Greek philosopher Panagiotis Kondylis calls this epoch Mass Democracy--a global social formation defined by the atomization of society into mobile individuals and a complex division of labor. Its basis is mass production and consumption, upheld by hedonistic cultural norms. Equality is reinterpreted materially, and redistribution becomes a universal demand. Politics concerns itself almost entirely with distributing economic goods. Traditional boundaries between public/private, State/society dissolve as the State pervades all.
America was early to Modernity.
From a twitter post