Introduction. Investigating inequalities: A new Tocqueville

On February 5, 2016 we held the first jointly organized symposium by the American University of Paris and The Tocqueville Review. It has grown naturally out of the shared mission of an international university and The Tocqueville Society, which has had the association of Europe and United States as one of its fundamental traits.

Great audacities generally make for short careers. But for more than fifty years the American University of Paris, founded in 1962, has offered higher education to students from all over the world. In the tradition of American “liberal arts colleges,” the university is today recognized internationally as an institution that educates citizens of the world through interdisciplinary and intercultural education. The Center for Critical Democracy, established with the support of the Mellon Foundation at AUP, seeks to contribute to this education of the world’s citizens by promoting research and teaching on critical issues faced by our democratic societies and states in the past and today. The CCDS’s partnership with The Tocqueville Society and its review are at the heart of this mission.

Another audacious endeavor which has proven to last, The Tocqueville Society and The Tocqueville Review are seventeen years younger than the American University of Paris. The first issue in 1979, which included an article by Raymond Aron, established the ambition of the review to explore democracy and its characteristics. The project has been marked by its bilingualism and its interdisciplinarity since. Bilingualism was already a risky bet in a scientific world where English has tended to become the dominant language. But the founders of the journal were convinced that the democratic phenomenon could not be understood without recourse to comparativism and, of course, one does not come to terms with similar problems in the same way in different languages. As for interdisciplinarity, we are inundated with its praises while its actual pursuit seems systematically challenged: rankings, classifications, career management, habits of language and thought have made it difficult to practice in spite of the constant ambitions to do so. And yet, the journal has been transmitted from generation to generation and from continent to continent, under the presidencies of Ted Caplow, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Henri Mendras, and Olivier Zunz. A very active editorial committee, several of whom have prepared this symposium, such as Catherine Audard, Michel Forsé, Arthur Goldhammer, Alan Kahan, Simon Langlois and Jennifer Merchant, not to mention Laurence Duboys Fresney who has literally carried the journal since the presidency of Henri Mendras and played a major role in the organization of this symposium.

The colloquium presented in this issue is entitled: “From the ‘Passion for Equality’ to the Struggles Against Inequalities: Realities and Representations.” It is faithful to the spirit of the journal and the Center for Critical Democracy Studies in its ambition to clarify the present through the past, its trans-Atlantic comparisons, interdisciplinarity, and exploration of the relationship between practices and representations.

Coming to terms with the present through the past applies to interpretations of Tocqueville’s work itself as much as the problem of inequality. We are all widely familiar with a reading of Tocqueville that takes as its point of departure a reflection on the passion for equality and the risk of liberticidal government. Such an interpretation is, of course, undeniably present in portions of Tocqueville’s work. It has played a considerable role in the reflection on democracy since the 1970s and in Tocqueville’s resurgence in the decades that followed. But, as the following papers clearly show, such a reading of Tocqueville does not exhaust the question of equality in Tocqueville, far from it. For there is also the question of inequality and the discussion of how, in what ways, and under what conditions it can be remedied. Tocqueville was far from a monochromatic thinker, who repeated the same theses without nuance or qualification. It would be impossible to erect him as a theorist with a permanent fear of any intervention by public authorities to tackle problems such as inequality.

Let us give merely one example of such modalities of public...