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Political Theory
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Brothers and Others

Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism

Laura Janara

University of British Columbia

After their voyage through the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont each wrote about the nature of race relations there. The author offers two theses regarding the nature of U.S. racism and its relation to U.S. democracy as revealed in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s texts. First, these works illustrate how European Americans, in subordinating Indians and blacks, produce not a politically and socially egalitarian democracy situated amid an otherwise racist society and culture but, rather, a social state internally structured by inegalitarian relations with non-Europeans. Second, in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s portraits there operate (1) a critical narrative of European Americans’ fraternalized relations with Indians, marked by sibling-rivalry-like democratic envy, and (2) a critical narrative of European Americans’ relations of absolute differentiation with blacks, marked by desire to secure inalienable status. Both strategies are, nonetheless, rooted in European American anxiety over democracy’s flux.

Key Words: Beaumont • Tocqueville • race • Indians • democracy

Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 6, 773-800 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0090591704265931
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Home page
 Political Research QuarterlyHome page
A. B. Tillery Jr
Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
Political Research Quarterly, December 1, 2009; 62(4): 639 - 652.
[Abstract] [PDF]