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6 Democracy’s Family Values PRECEDING CHAPTERS REVEAL that Democracy in America’s symbolic family drama stipulates that, for health, democracy generally requires the primacy of male forces over contained though essential female forces, with each facilitating healthy expressions of the other.This final chapter examines Democracy in America’s sections on family, the sexes, and marriage in democracy. In them, the symbolic,conjugal,familial order upon whichTocqueville founds his developing democracy is embodied in the lives of actual male and female inhabitants . In his U.S. democracy, this familial structure appears at its conservative best, with maleness and femaleness ordered as in the symbolic drama, limiting and channeling democratic flux.Precisely for this reason,it is perhaps here that the costs to equality and liberty of Democracy in America’s gendered, familial foundations for democracy are most starkly evident.A related thesis also comes to fruition in this chapter.The work of this book has involved unearthing and interpreting the gendered and familial imagery with whichTocqueville defines and structures,in order to direct,postaristocratic democracy.In relying on such metaphors, his text exemplifies how the culture’s ideas of gender and family inform all dimensions of human life, not just the domestic and the intimate. Reciprocally,just asTocqueville uses familial and gendered metaphors to grasp and order his democracy, so too does he lean upon political metaphors to account for democratic family relations.Democracy and its politics are tied yet again to specific ideas of gender and family. However, in Democracy in America, the modern conjugal family ideal and its gender norms prove ill-suited, both as symbols and in human practice, as foundations for mature democracy. Born amid France’s volatile transition from aristocracy to democracy, Tocqueville was acutely aware of the consequences that a change in“social state” Thank you to Bruce Baum for this chapter’s title. 157 means for family life as well as for politics, society, and culture.Whereas today conjugal nuclear family structure is often mistaken as natural,Tocqueville recognized family as a dynamic historical institution. In Democracy in America, he argues that the form family takes reflects the broader dynamics in which it is situated. He places European feudal family habits in the context of the aristocratic social state, and compares the aristocratic sensibilities with new democratic ones he sees emerging in France, and especially with those already entrenched in the United States. In his chapters on family relations as well as elsewhere in the text, he argues that family is in no way a discrete sphere of life, that “there are certain great social principles which a people either introduces everywhere or tolerates nowhere,” and “the changes that have taken place within the family are closely connected with the social and political revolution taking place under our eyes.”1 An aristocracy can last only if it is built upon a legalized principle of inequality that is “introduced into the family as well as into the rest of society” (D, 379). In Europe’s transition from aristocracy to democracy,“everyone has noticed that ...a new relationship has evolved between the different members of a family,that the distance formerly separating father and son has diminished,and that paternal authority,if not abolished, has at least changed form” (D,585).The “family habits of democracy” in fact “hold together”with“its social state and laws”and“one cannot enjoy the one without putting up with the others”(D,589).Moreover,“political society cannot fail to become the expression and mirror of civil society”;2 and, simultaneously ,“the Americans almost always carry the habits of public life over into their private lives.”3 Tocqueville thus identifies a social state’s characteristic ethos as something that transcends any notion of public and private as discrete spheres. But scholars have overlooked this important dimension of his work: John Stuart Mill was the first to dismissTocqueville’s analysis of family for lacking “any considerable value.”4 In more recent years, although several commentators have addressedTocqueville’s discussion of middle-class family,almost all miss or misconstrue his overarching observation that a society’s dominant mentality governs its family life as well as society and politics.5 This idea implicates our understanding of Democracy inAmerica,of family and gender in democracy , and of democratic society and culture itself. Most recent commentators project onto Tocqueville’s analysis an exaggerated separation of family and public as discrete realms,not only spatially but psychologically. For instance, Delba Winthrop argues that in...

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