Chapter 4 focuses on democracy, specifically the creation of a violent American political process. By the 1840s, the right to vote expanded to include nearly all White men in the United States. The establishment of this racialized and gendered space put the nation at the global forefront of White male political participation. These voters elected militant candidates, used violence to set boundaries around the electorate, and physically intimidated political opponents. They demonstrated the import of Whiteness and violence to democratic development. The chapter covers Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the election of 1828, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, and Bleeding Kansas.

The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something – and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? – Would this defect be comparable to colour-blindness or to not having absolute pitch? – We will call it “aspect-blindness”– and will next consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.) —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I want now to look at three ways to think past, against, and sometimes with the myth of rigging and thus toward both the political possibilities and limits of actually existing democracy. And, in thinking toward and hopefully past those limits, I want also to think about the relation between democracy understood as a set of real and sometimes incommensurate historical facts and democracy understood as a set of variously wrought and deployed conceptual forms – forms that must, after all, limit and shape what will seem real to us about our political lives. Insofar as democracy exists not only in its practical instantiations but also within the imaginative frames or ideological horizons on which it at different moments depends (and which it, in turn, helps to shape), thinking about democracy also means thinking about thinking, which is to say, thinking about all the ways in which we think and struggle to think about the meaning of lives lived with other people while also living exactly the lives we’re thinking about. The need to think about the possibilities and limits of a system while dwelling within that same system makes any serious effort to understand democracy also a critical effort; and, at a moment when most societies identify themselves as democratic even – or even especially – when they are not democratic, the effort to identify a standpoint from whence we might perceive, understand, and perhaps think beyond our conceptual limits – to think otherwise about our democratic norms and expectations – is essential.1

The collapse of traditional hierarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries forced political thinkers to wrestle with the practical implications of social and political equality, and gave birth to the liberal tradition of political thought. The liberal response to this development came in two overlapping stages. First, the democratization of public and private life made it clear that the power that we exercise over each other in modern societies is reciprocal, insidious, and pervasive, and gave new urgency to the problem of carving out a domain of nonresponsible conduct. Second, the rise of industrial capitalism exposed the tension between the dependence that we experience in our private lives and the independence that we are expected to display as citizens, and gave new urgency to the task of creating the conditions under which people become fit to be held responsible for what they do. Because these two projects are often at odds with one another, the characteristic note of liberal political thought is one of balance and compromise as we seek to strike an appropriate balance between republican and market freedom.

Chapter 6 traces the intellectual consequences of the unravelling of Ireland’s grain export boom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For British political economists such as Malthus and James Ramsay McCulloch, the path towards Irish recovery could only lie through the assimilation of Ireland to what they took to be an English model of large-scale tenant farming and concentrated land ownership. For European thinkers, however, the parlous condition of the Irish countryside was proof not of Ireland’s divergence from, but its identity with, the monstrous and unsustainable condition of Britain’s ‘aristocratic’ social order. Their critiques were taken up in Britain by a new generation of liberal economists led by John Stuart Mill, and in Ireland by a group of Francophile nationalist intellectuals, Young Ireland. These thinkers re-cast the problem of Irish improvement anew, tying it not to the integration of Ireland into British or imperial markets, but on the creation of a stable class of peasant proprietors to match those that had been created in large parts of continental Europe through French, or French-inspired, land reforms.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

George Grote developed aspects of Bentham’s and James Mill’s philosophy into an endorsement of German Historismus, the fruits of which can be seen in his landmark History of Greece (1846–1856). While his historiography is associated more with James Mill than Bentham, Barrell argues that his conception of philosophical history more closely resembled Bentham’s science historique than James’s scale of civilisations, and that his attraction to German Historismus can be explained, at least partly, by his Benthamite logic; like Bentham, he stressed the past’s particularity and distinctness, in pursuit of which he embraced the hermeneutic, philological, and critical strands of Historismus. Greece’s ‘peculiarity’ provided opportunities for reflection without resorting to a vacuous presentism. His examination in the history of ‘democratical sentiment’ and ‘constitutional morality’ illustrated modern society’s comparative selfishness and the difficulty of reproducing those sentiments ex nihilo. The chapter ends by considering the ways in which J. S. Mill drew on these arguments to reconcile modern individuality with extensive civic duties.

Nineteenth-century British and French intellectuals set the terms by which Europe evaluated Irish and American cultures before World War I. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America proposed that democratic literatures would be deformed by social levelling and market forces and unable to rival aristocratic literatures for distinction. Rare exceptions might occur at brief tipping points when democratic and aristocratic cultures mutually contested and energized each other, but the emergence of a new mass culture less sophisticated than classical or aristocratic literatures seemed inevitable. In Studies in Celtic Literature, Matthew Arnold proposed that though the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom were too unruly to govern their own affairs, their literatures possessed qualities of lyrical imagination that might usefully correct the worst elements of a materialist modern English culture. Nineteenth-century literary renaissances in Ireland and the United States were founded upon and reacted against these discourses. William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound emerged as especially important figures, daringly reworking received literary discourses to set the terms for a brilliant new modernism that sometimes became stridently anti-democratic in its bid to challenge the degradation of taste that nineteenth-century liberal writers like Tocqueville and Arnold had forecast.

Comparison in anthropology often entails a hermeneutic confrontation between two systems of thought. Starting from an implicit grounding in a home culture, the anthropologist “encounters” a different culture, tries to understand it in its own terms, and then uses those terms to critique home-style thinking. Rather than compare differences, this chapter compares two things understood to be “the same.” I begin with a comparison of two jazz renditions of the song, “Tangerine.” Comparing an amateurish version to a classic recording taught me more about the song’s structure than either version could have done alone. Using this example of a “better-worse” comparison, I turn to anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who wrote a series of essays contrasting what she saw as a “good” individualism, that of American Indian peoples, to the “bad” individualism of the contemporary United States. In Lee’s work, it was not a nonindividualist social formation that became the comparative touchstone for rethinking US culture as in de Tocqueville’s hierarchical-egalitarian contrast. Instead, Native American ways of living provided a model truer to the spirit of an ideal individualism than that celebrated in the United States.

While Alexis de Tocqueville is most famous for his analysis of American democracy, this chapter argues that when it came to France, he preferred parliamentarism over the American constitutional model. During his long career in French parliamentary politics, Tocqueville in fact developed a distinctive theory of parliamentarism, which was different from Constant’s, but which also differed from the conception of parliamentarism propagated by Constant’s great rivals, the Doctrinaires. Tocqueville rejected Constant’s argument for a monarch who reigned but did not govern. However, he agreed with Constant that corruption posed a severe threat to the survival of French parliamentarism.