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 a critical narrative of European Americans’ fraternalized relations with Indians, marked by sibling-rivalry-like democratic envy, and 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. (shrink)

Locke's political theory centres on juridical matters of law, right, consent and legitimacy. Despite his concern to differentiate politics from family and posit a free and equal post-familial individual as political subject, this apparently abstract political theory is itself conveyed through a narrative of family. Locke rejects patriarchal absolutism that casts the king as a patriarchal father by thinking politics through alternative conceptions of father, sons and brothers. As such, Locke did not in fact help muster liberalism by instantiating a (...) vivid public-private divide that insulated the political imagination from ideas of family. (shrink)

To contribute to contemporary debates about the human self, historical constitutedness and capacity for critical agency, I turn to Niccolo Machiavelli's account of human virtuosity. There I retrieve a vision of political action that centres on a critically conscious intelligence or 'I' engaged in the continual fracturing and manipulation of identity. Machiavelli shows this critical intelligence to be something developed by way of a mental standpoint I call critical in-betweenness -- a disposition that imperfectly enables positive political innovation. To account (...) for what proves to be a non-modernist Machiavellian view of a multiplicitous and capacious self, I turn to one of Machiavelli's ancient influences, Cicero, and his theory of four personae. I then further illuminate such virtuoso capacities for political innovation by way of a case study, Elizabeth Tudor of England. Finally, I briefly link this discussion to late/post-modern political and social theory, and to issues of democratic citizenship and education. (shrink)