America after Tocqueville : democracy against difference / / Harvey Mitchell [[electronic resource]]

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910813195503321
• Autore: Mitchell Harvey
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2002
• ISBN: 1-107-12553-7; 0-521-03024-2; 1-280-15962-6; 0-511-12038-9; 0-511-33007-3; 0-511-51173-6; 0-511-04532-8; 0-511-14771-6
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xi, 324 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Disciplina: 320.973
• Soggetti: Democracy - United States; Equality - United States; United States Politics and government; United States Social conditions To 1865
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-309) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Introduction: thinking about American democracy -- Democracy's experiment: from inequality to equality -- Achieving a democratic civil society -- Beginnings and history: red and white in Tocqueville's America -- The New England township before the revolution: Tocqueville's American pastoral -- A second beginning: black and white in Tocqueville's America -- Difference, race, and color in America -- Maintaining American democracy -- The state, authority, and the people.
• Sommario/riassunto: America after Tocqueville complements Harvey Mitchell's previous book, Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised (1996). This study draws on Democracy in America to study the condition of democracy in the ; United States in our own time. Three aspects of Americanism inform Harvey Mitchell's book, and cannot be separated from Tocqueville's consideration of the three races. First, he addresses tensions in the United States between ideas of equality and a political system that tries to keep it within bounds. He turns to the relationship between this system and the dynamics of American capitalism. and he analyses the criteria for inclusion and exclusion in American life. Overall, he asks if Americans have surrendered to what Tocqueville called the materialization of life; if that compromise means their abandonment of their original spiritual quest; and, if they are on the way to a radical alienation from politics.