Cosmo-nationalism by Oisín Keohane

Author:Oisín Keohane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CHAPTER 5

Philosophical Rights-of-Way: Tocqueville and the American Philosophical Method

Although the inhabitants of Europe have for the past three or four hundred years overrun the other parts of the world and are constantly publishing new collections of travels and reports, I am convinced that the only men we know are the Europeans; what is more, it would seem that, judging by the ridiculous prejudices that have not died out even among Men of Letters, very nearly all anyone does under the pompous heading of the study of man is to study the men of his own country [les hommes de son pays]. Regardless of how many individuals come and go, it would seem that Philosophy does not travel [la philosophie ne voyage point] and each People’s Philosophy is ill-suited for another [celle de chaque peuple est-elle peu propre pour un autre].

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse’ (Note X, part 8)

In this chapter, I analyse a text that not only claims that ‘philosophy travels’, but that the philosophy of one people can also quite properly or appropriately be the philosophy of another – that travelling is not improper to philosophy – namely, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique). It is a text, moreover, that not only describes a national philosophical method, but which uses this method to describe a national character. The opening chapter of the second volume published in 1840, entitled ‘Of the Philosophical Method of the Americans’ (De la méthode philosophique des Américains), will in particular be singled out for analysis, since it asserts that the USA, while not occupied by philosophical schools, has an implicit philosophical method due to its democratic social condition, namely, Cartesianism – that none other than Descartes is the Christopher Columbus of this new philosophical continent.

In examining the traffic between France and America that Tocqueville presents, I highlight the political role that Tocqueville assigns to Cartesianism in his analysis of America, and the way he uses the Cartesian method to underscore his ideas on American national ‘prejudice’, and the three dogmas that Tocqueville invokes, including the dogma of ‘sovereignty’. Central to this is the opposition of national traditions Tocqueville draws between, on the one hand, a ‘popular’ (Franco-American) philosophy derived from the social and democratic conditions of modernity, and, on the other hand, an ‘elite’ (Germanic) philosophy derived from the social and scholastic conditions of aristocracy.

It should also be noted that professional philosophers have not traditionally read Tocqueville as a philosopher, since his observations are often thought to be primarily empirical and socio-political in approach and thus external to philosophy. This is as true in France as it is in the Anglophone world. Pierre Manent, for instance, notes that it has only been since 2002 that Tocqueville has been included in the syllabus for the French agrégation de philosophie (this was also the same year that Derrida, notably, discussed Tocqueville for the first time in public, his talk, derived from a conference at Cerisy, being published later in Rogues).

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