Polity

. Volume 40, Number 2 . April 2008

r 2008 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/08 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

American Individualism and Structural Injustice: Tocqueville, Gender, and Race* Jack Turner University of Washington American individualist ideology facilitates structural injustice. Through an analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville on individualism, gender domination, and white supremacy in the United States, this essay explains why. The peculiar social cognition of the American individualist desensitizes him to structural injustice. To preserve his faith that his fate lies entirely in his own hands, he blinds himself to the ways social structure constrains personal freedom and independence; the individualist also construes the unjust benefits of social privilege (like those accompanying whiteness and maleness in Jacksonian America) as products of personal ingenuity and character. Democracy in America (1835/40) thus illuminates the elective affinity between American individualism and structural injustice. Polity (2008) 40, 197–215. doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300088

Keywords

Tocqueville; individualism; social structure; structural injustice; race; whiteness; gender

Jack Turner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. His essay ‘‘Performing Conscience: Thoreau, Political Action, and the Plea for John Brown,’’ appeared in Political Theory in August 2005. He can be reached at [email protected].

*Thanks to K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrie Balfour, Charles Beitz, Jillian Cutler, Patrick Deneen, Eddie Glaude, George Kateb, Stephen Macedo, Benjamin McKean, Susan McWilliams, the late Wilson Carey McWilliams, Jennifer Pitts, Andrew Polsky, Melvin Rogers, Nicholas Tampio, Cornel West, Keith Whittington, Alex Zakaras, and several anonymous reviewers for Polity for help, encouragement, and advice. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2006 meeting of the New England Political Science Association.

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Introduction A recurring question in American politics is whether individualist ideology facilitates structural injustice.1 In his historical and sociological classic, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that individualist ideology obstructed America’s social and economic democratization. Because most white Americans after the Civil War believed that any citizen could succeed through self-discipline and hard work, they refused to support federal programs such as the Freedmen’s Bureau which sought to provide African Americans the economic underpinnings of freedom.2 Today, economists and political scientists find that ideologically individualistic citizens are less inclined to support programs that help those unjustly disadvantaged by race and poverty.3 The evidence on race is especially striking. In a 1986 National Election Study, 59 percent of white respondents agreed that ‘‘It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.’’ Sixty-one percent agreed that ‘‘Most blacks who receive money from welfare programs could get along without it if they tried.’’4 Within American political debate, individualist ideology is unfriendly to the quest to overcome structural injustice—especially racial injustice. Is this coincidental? Is individualist ideology, as some have suggested, simply cover for anti-black prejudice?5 Or 1. By structural injustice, I mean wrongs created or mediated by impersonal social structures; structural injustice is principally distinct from interpersonal wrongdoing. Individualist ideology resists easy summary, but its essential tenet is that each person is solely responsible for his or her success or failure; each is expected to ‘‘pull himself up by his bootstraps.’’ Throughout this essay, I use the terms ideology and ideological descriptively, not pejoratively: ideologies are ‘‘public world-view[s],’’ ‘‘scheme[s] by which the social order is understood and explained.’’ Jeffrey Prager, ‘‘American Racial Ideology as Collective Representation,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 5 (January 1982): 102. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Touchstone, [1935], 1995), 182–83, 601–02. For two excellent discussions of Du Bois on this issue, see Lawrie Balfour, ‘‘Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations,’’ American Political Science Review 97 (February 2003): 35–39, and Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 59–63. 3. Roland Be´nabou and Jean Tirole, ‘‘Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Policies,’’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics 121 (May 2006): 699–746; Donald R. Kinder and Tali Mendelberg, ‘‘Individualism Reconsidered: Principles and Prejudice in Contemporary American Opinion,’’ in Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America, ed. David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 44–74. Kinder and Mendelberg find that prejudice is still more significant as a determinant of white opposition to social welfare for black Americans than individualism. At the same time, they find that contemporary prejudice is ‘‘preoccupied with black Americans’ specifically individualistic shortcomings: that blacks fail to display the virtues of hard work and self-sacrifice that white Americans claim as central to their own lives . . . ’’ (60). Individualism thus continues to play a crucial—albeit intermediary—role in reducing public support for social welfare for African Americans. 4. Kinder and Mendelberg, ‘‘Individualism Reconsidered,’’ 63. 5. Kinder and Mendelberg give an overview of this theory (though it is not their own) in ‘‘Individualism Reconsidered,’’ 58–59.

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is there something internal to individualist ideology that makes it hostile to the fight against structural injustice? This article addresses these questions by reflecting on Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal analysis of American individualism. Tocqueville argues in Democracy in America (1835/40) that American individualists are blind to social structure; more precisely, they are blind to the ways that social structure both enables and constrains personal freedom and well-being. This blindness allows individualists to deny both their indebtedness to society and their moral responsibility for structural injustice. Democracy, however, demonstrates the implausibility of the individualist’s belief in his freedom from social structure. Showing how the individualist relies on gendered structures of inequality to meet basic social and material needs, as well as on the culture of white supremacy to enhance his selfesteem,6 Democracy exposes the individualist’s actual dependence on structures of exploitation for personal freedom and well-being. While Tocqueville never uses the term social structure, he is attuned to its reallife existence and importance. Social structures are systemic relationships between individuals in their social roles; social structures also encompass the formal and informal institutions and networks mediating those relationships. According to Jose´ Lo´pez and John Scott, social structure has two dimensions: On the one hand, there is . . . institutional structure. Here, social structure is seen as comprising those cultural or normative patterns that define the expectations that agents hold about each other’s behaviour and that organize their enduring relations with each other. On the other hand, there is . . . relational structure. Here, social structure is seen as comprising the social relations themselves, understood as the patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy.7 Tocqueville is sensitive to both dimensions of social structure. Yet American individualists, by his account, are sensitive to neither. How does Tocqueville diagnose the individualist’s insensitivity to social structure? And what are the consequences of this insensitivity for American democracy? I address these issues through an active reading of Democracy. Specifying how Democracy reveals the illusoriness of the individualist’s belief in his own independence, I also show that the individualist’s insensitivity to social structures allows him to exploit others with a feeling of innocence. While I sometimes closely reconstruct Tocqueville’s original meanings, at other times 6. As I will demonstrate, Tocqueville’s American individualist is both gendered male and colored white. 7. Jose´ Lo´pez and John Scott, Social Structure (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), 3.

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I extrapolate points from his empirical observations while still adhering to the spirit of his general theory. The first section sketches Tocqueville’s moral psychological portrait of the American individualist.8 The second section shows how Democracy reveals that America’s sexual division of labor underwrites manly ‘‘independence’’ at the expense of women’s liberty. The third section pulls together Democracy’s analyses of individualism and white supremacy to suggest that white individualists’ blindness to social structure prevents them from seeing how their beneficial placement in America’s racial hierarchy belies their professed sovereign independence. Together, Democracy’s portraits of the sexual division of labor and white supremacy expose the white male individualist’s dependence on unjust social structures for freedom and selfconfidence. Tocqueville’s analysis of gender and race thus falls in line with his conclusion that the individualist’s belief in his absolute independence is folly and conceit.

Tocqueville on American Individualism ‘‘Individualism is a recent expression arising out of a new idea,’’ says Tocqueville. Describing individualism as ‘‘a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men,’’ Tocqueville sharpens his characterization of individualism by contrasting it to egoism, which he defines as ‘‘a passionate and exaggerated love of self that impels man to relate everything solely to himself and to prefer himself to everything else’’: ‘‘Egoism is born of blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment rather than depraved sentiment. Its source lies as much in defects of the mind as in vices of the heart.’’9 On the one hand, Tocqueville’s idea of individualism describes a pattern of public withdrawal:10 so long as government protects the property of individualists and allows them to pursue their private happiness, they will leave public affairs to 8. By moral psychology, I mean an individual’s interpretive proclivities and motives for acting (or refusing to act). On the place of moral psychology in political theory, see George Kateb, ‘‘The Adequacy of the Canon,’’ Political Theory 30 (August 2002): 483. 9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Olivier Zunz (New York: Library of America, [1835/40] 2004), II.ii.2, 585. All subsequent page references to Democracy in America—abbreviated as DA—will be to this edition; to facilitate cross-referencing, I also note the volume, part, and chapter of each citation. Tocqueville analyzed post-revolutionary French individualism in similar terms. See The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor Books, [1856] 1955), xiii. 10. This first aspect of Tocqueville’s description of individualism gets the most emphasis in Tocqueville scholarship. See, for example, Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 87, 135–36; Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), Chaps. 2 and 7; Larry Siedentop, Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 86–92.

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other men and invest all of their energies in private projects.11 Social interaction, most of the time, is limited to the family and a small social circle; private friendship takes the place of public fraternity: ‘‘ . . . having created a little society for his own use, [the individualist] gladly leaves the larger society to take care of itself.’’12 On the other hand, Tocqueville uses the word individualism to capture the modes of personal self-conception and social interpretation that give rise to public withdrawal in the first place.13 As America becomes more democratic, social hierarchy decreases and economic self-sufficiency increases. More and more men have ‘‘enough enlightenment and wealth to take care of themselves,’’ and more and more frequently they think that they ‘‘owe nothing to anyone’’ and ‘‘expect nothing from anyone.’’ Viewing themselves in isolation from society, they take to believing ‘‘that their fate lies entirely in their own hands.’’14 Tocqueville understands the appeal of this self-conception. Seeing oneself as free of social debts and perfectly in control of one’s destiny confers a heady feeling of invulnerability, allowing one mentally to escape the all-too-obvious fragility of human existence. Yet this mode of self-conception and social interpretation is erroneous. Insofar as personal independence is attainable,15 it occurs within a web of interdependence and has social preconditions.16 These preconditions, by definition, lie outside the solitary individual’s control. The individualist, however, tends not to acknowledge these preconditions; he is willfully blind to the dependence of his freedom and happiness on things beyond the reach of his individual effort: ‘‘He trusts fearlessly in his own powers, which he

11. In this way, the individualist conception of liberty is what Benjamin Constant characterized as ‘‘the liberty of the moderns.’’ ‘‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of Moderns’’ (1819), in Constant: Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28. 12. DA, II.ii.2, 585. 13. This individualistic mode of social interpretation is an incipient form of ‘‘methodological individualism.’’ See Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), Chap. 17. 14. DA, II.ii.2, 586–87. In unpublished notes contemporaneous with the publication of Volume II of Democracy, Tocqueville observed, ‘‘There are in individualisme two kinds of effects that should be well distinguished so that they can be dealt with separately. 1. the moral effects, hearts isolate themselves; 2. the intellectual effects, minds isolate themselves.’’ James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, [1980] 2000), 313. 15. While Tocqueville thinks that personal independence in the strong sense—that is, sovereign mastery of one’s own fate, or absolute independence—is delusional, he believes that personal independence—in the weak sense of the freedom and ability to direct one’s own life—is attainable. When he uses the word ‘‘independence’’ in a positive sense, it is this weaker sense of independence which he intends. This idea of independence differs from contemporary conceptions of autonomy: one can be independent while still being deluded; autonomy, however, implies freedom from delusion. For a helpful discussion of autonomy, see Lukes, Individualism, Chap. 8. 16. Much of the point of Democracy in America, after all, is to detail the natural, social, political, economic, and cultural preconditions of individual liberty in America. See especially I.i.1–3 and 8; I.ii.8–9; II.ii.4–8 and 14–15; II.iii.1–4 and 11; and II.iv.1. See also Jean-Claude Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1983] 1989), 174–75.

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believes to be equal to any situation.’’17 Precisely for this reason, Tocqueville characterizes individualism as the product of ‘‘erroneous judgment rather than depraved sentiment,’’ rooted in ‘‘defects of the mind,’’ not just ‘‘vices of the heart.’’18 The individualist is thus a man of supreme self-confidence but limited sociological awareness. Though his belief in his own self-sufficiency is ‘‘reflective,’’19 that belief is nevertheless fallacious. By letting in only the world’s foreground of individual action and never its background of inherited historical conditions and social institutions and processes, the individualist’s warped social perception deforms his understanding. Because Tocqueville’s direct portrait of the American individualist is an ‘‘ideal type,’’20 it seems a caricature. Yet other sections of Democracy put flesh and bones on the individualist and show the workings of his moral psychology in everyday life.

Individualism and Gender Domination Tocqueville’s analysis of America’s sexual division of labor illustrates the symbiosis between individualistic self-conception and social interpretation, on the one hand, and structural injustice, on the other. Writ small, the sexual division of labor is a relational social structure: a concrete division of breadwinning and household work between a husband and a wife. Writ large, the sexual division of labor is an institutional social structure: a widely shared set of expectations about how husbands and wives will split the task of providing for themselves and their families. Tocqueville’s analysis of the sexual division of labor makes clear that women’s effective management of the household allows men to pursue free public lives: women’s confinement to the home liberates men to be commercial and political actors, to conduct business and acquire wealth, to win recognition of their freedom and independence, and to refine their faculties through association and interaction.21 Men take on the public sphere while women 17. DA, I.i.5, 107. For a powerful contemporary critique of the idea of ‘‘sovereign agency’’—one with Tocquevillian echoes—see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 18. DA, II.ii.2, 585. Cf. Lamberti, Tocqueville and the Two Democracies, 170–76; Dana Villa, ‘‘Hegel, Tocqueville, and ‘Individualism’,’’ The Review of Politics 67 (Fall 2005): 664, 671, 682. Tocqueville is ambiguous about whether individualism proceeds solely from erroneous judgement or from a combination of erroneous judgment and depraved sentiment. Though at first he suggests that individualism results primarily from ‘‘defects of the mind,’’ he suggests immediately thereafter that ‘‘vices of the heart’’ also nourish it. 19. DA, II.ii.2, 585. 20. In the Weberian sense. See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ‘‘Introduction: The Man and His Work,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. Gerth and Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 59–60. On the ways Tocqueville’s sociology anticipated Weber’s, see Siedentop, Tocqueville, 72–73, 142–43. 21. On the content and benefits of men’s free public lives, see DA, I.i.2, 49; I.i.5, 74–77; I.ii.4; I.ii.6; II.ii.5; and II.ii.14.

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handle the private sphere of material necessity.22 Individualistic self-conception and social interpretation, however, prevent men from appreciating the extent to which their freedom, independence, and happiness depend on women’s unrequited sacrifices. Individualism thus keeps men from seeing the injustice inherent in the sexual division of labor. While Tocqueville does not explicitly make these connections, they are implicit in his portrait of both gender relations and individualism. The challenge is to draw out these connections in a way that is faithful to Democracy’s presuppositions. When Tocqueville discusses American individualists in general, he is referring specifically to adult white males. A casual reading of Democracy should make this obvious, but if one needs more concrete evidence, one need only note that Tocqueville treats slaves, free blacks, Indians, women, and children in their own chapters;23 this implies that all other discussion of American individuals center on adult white male citizens—Jacksonian America’s only fully enfranchised citizens.24 Yet though Tocqueville compartmentalizes his discussion of women, children, and non-whites in his narrative, the analysis contained therein tacitly fills out his portrait of the individualist. That analysis subtly exposes both the exploitative nature of gender inequality in the United States and the delusional nature of American men’s individualistic self-conceptions. Famously declaring that American women are mostly responsible for ‘‘the singular prosperity and growing power of [the American] people,’’25 Tocqueville discerns two ways that women facilitate American greatness. First, women make the mores that temper democracy’s excesses.26 Transmitting the spirit and traditional wisdom of religion to the next generation, they make the home a sanctuary from worldliness and 22. On the ways public citizenship requires the conquest of material necessity, see DA, I.ii.5, 225–27. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998), pt. 2. 23. DA, I.ii.10; II.iii.8–12. 24. See Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, Chap. 2; Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Stephen Frederick Schneck notes that Tocqueville’s conception of whiteness seems at first to be under-inclusive. Neither Jews nor the Irish are visible in Tocqueville’s narrative; tellingly, Tocqueville sometimes uses the terms ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘AngloAmerican’’ interchangeably. This partly reflects the fact that during the 1830s, neither Jews nor the Irish fully fell under whiteness’s protective umbrella. Schneck, ‘‘Habits of the Head: Tocqueville’s America and Jazz,’’ Political Theory 17 (November 1989): 647; Schleifer, Making, 275; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 25. DA, II.iii.12, 708. 26. DA, II.iii.9, 692; I.ii.9, 335–40. Cf. Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress’,’’ Political Theory 14 (May 1986): 242; William Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis de Tocqueville,’’ The Review of Politics 57 (Winter 1995): 26–28; Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 85–91.

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help ‘‘restrain the frenetic activity of men, ultimately . . . allowing them to focus and deploy their energies more effectively . . . .’’27 Second, women administer the home economy. ‘‘The modesty of fortunes forces women to stay home every day in order to supervise the minutest details of domestic administration,’’ Tocqueville observes.28 Americans understand marriage’s advantages to be not just moral and religious, but also economic: ‘‘Religious peoples and industrial nations have a particularly serious idea of marriage. The former take the view that the regularity of a woman’s life is the best guarantee and surest sign of the purity of her morals. The latter see it as the certain warrant of the order and prosperity of the household.’’29 The value of an orderly and prosperous household is more than intrinsic; it functionally enables ‘‘a thriving commercial society.’’ 30 Believing the purpose of sexual difference ‘‘was to assign different uses to the diverse faculties of each,’’ Tocqueville remarks, ‘‘Americans applied to the two sexes the great principle of political economy that dominates today’s industry. They carefully divided the functions of man and woman in order to carry out the great work of society more effectively.’’31 Men and women thus contribute to ‘‘the great work of society’’ differently but equally: ‘‘No country in the world has been more persistent than America in tracing clearly separated lines of action for the two sexes or in wanting to proceed at an equal pace but along two permanently different paths.’’32 While women’s confinement to the domestic sphere deprives them of the satisfactions of public life, Tocqueville reckons the benefits of such confinement as equal to the costs: You do not see American women managing the family’s outside affairs, conducting a business, or entering the sphere of politics, but neither do you find American women forced to do hard labor or engage in any of the arduous activities that require the development of physical strength . . . . If the American woman is not permitted to escape from the quiet circle of domestic occupations, neither is she ever compelled to leave it.33 Spared from hard physical labor, women nevertheless shape the mores of the nation and manage the economy of the household.34 Insofar as the nation 27. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, ‘‘Editor’s Introduction,’’ in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Mansfield and Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), lxxx. 28. DA, II.iii.11, 702. 29. DA, II.iii.10, 695. 30. Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman,’’ 241. See also Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 111–14. 31. DA, II.iii.12, 705. 32. DA, II.iii.12, 706. 33. DA, II.iii.12, 706. Tocqueville’s analysis here applies mainly to middle-class families; women in working-class settings bore their fair share of hard labor. 34. Women thus possess social and moral agency, despite their subordination.

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recognizes the indispensability of this service to ‘‘the great work of society,’’ the nation recognizes women’s contribution to national prosperity. At the same time, Tocqueville is aware of the all-too-frequent invisibility of women’s contribution to the commonweal; moreover, he sees the irony of the fact that, in mid-nineteenth-century America, the realization of independence for men usually entails the denial of it to women. Tocqueville’s consciousness of this phenomenon comes across most sharply in his portrait of American boys’ development into manhood. Tocqueville notes the rapidity with which the typical American son becomes ‘‘master of his thoughts and soon thereafter of his conduct’’: ‘‘In America, to tell the truth, there is no such thing as adolescence. When boyhood ends, the man stands forth and begins to set his own course.’’35 Yet behind the budding independence of boys is the labor and self-sacrifice of mothers. Though American women—especially girls—enjoy significantly more freedom and independence than their European counterparts,36 the American institution of marriage still demands that women surrender their claims to self-direction: ‘‘In America, a woman forfeits her independence forever when she embraces the bonds of matrimony.’’ 37 Insofar as marriage underwrites American boys’ achievement of independent manhood, that achievement structurally entails women’s surrender of independence. The honor and glory of American women, Tocqueville remarks, stems precisely from ‘‘the voluntary sacrifice of their will.’’38 In a vivid portrait of an American frontier woman nurturing her boys for Western manhood, Tocqueville dramatizes this selfsacrifice: Her children crowd around her, and they are full of health, rambunctiousness, and energy. They are the true sons of the wilderness. From time to time their mother glances at them with a look of mingled melancholy and delight. To judge by their strength and her weakness, it might seem that she has been draining herself to give them life, yet she seems to feel no regret about what they have cost her.39 While men share the burdens of frontier settlement, women’s burdens are greater since they cannot enjoy the self-direction that is men’s special province. 35. DA, II.iii.8, 685. 36. As emphasized in both Pierre Manent’s and George Kateb’s readings of Tocqueville on gender. See Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 69–70; Kateb, ‘‘Democratic Individualism and Its Critics,’’ Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 294–95. 37. DA, II.iii.10, 695. 38. DA, II.iii.12, 706. 39. DA, II.iii.10, endnote 20, 865. The scene appears in almost identical language in ‘‘A Fortnight in the Wilds,’’ in Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971), 365.

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Tocqueville’s portrait of the frontier woman is one of self-loss—self-loss that, for better or worse, is stoically accepted.40 Women’s self-loss in American family life is all the more tragic because Americans encourage the independence of young girls to a degree unparalleled in Europe. Tocqueville observes, ‘‘nowhere is a girl more quickly or completely left to herself. . . . Before her childhood has quite ended, she is already thinking for herself, speaking freely, and acting on her own. . . . [S]he is full of confidence in her own strength, and her confidence seems to be shared by everyone around her.’’41 Americans, furthermore, expose girls fully to the ‘‘great spectacle of the world’’: ‘‘Rather than being hidden from her view, more and more of it is revealed to her as time goes by, and she is taught to consider it with a steady and tranquil eye.’’42 Yet Tocqueville shrewdly notes that the ultimate aim of this instruction is to make girls more resigned to the social subordination they will endure as adults. By the time she reaches adulthood, she knows she is expected to stay ‘‘within the restricted circle of domestic interests and duties’’ and that the deepseatedness of this expectation makes it impossible to challenge without ‘‘jeopardizing her tranquility, her honor, and even her social existence . . . .’’43 Predisposed by socially inflected prudence acquired in girlhood, the American woman accedes to gender expectations, and upon matrimony, yields to male authority: ‘‘ . . . the American woman never falls into the bonds of matrimony as into a trap set to ensnare her simplicity and ignorance. She has been taught in advance what is expected of her, and she accepts the yoke freely and of her own accord.’’44 Tocqueville’s description of women’s socialization helps us make sense of his remark that ‘‘American women did not . . . appear to regard conjugal authority as a felicitous usurpation of their rights, nor did they believe that it was degrading to submit to it. On the contrary, it seemed to me that . . . they prided themselves on the voluntary sacrifice of their will . . . .’’45 Noting that women did not regard the usurpation of their rights as felicitous, Tocqueville slyly indicates that American women regret and may even resent their subordination. At the same time, women’s pride in their social vocations indicates that they derive a certain

40. For a sharply contrasting interpretation of this passage’s significance—one that reads it as a ‘‘romanticized distillation of the experience of the French nobility’’ in the wake of democratization—see Cheryl Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 200–204. 41. DA, II.iii.9, 692. 42. DA, II.iii.9, 692. 43. DA, II.iii.10, 695. 44. DA, II.iii.10, 696. Cf. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 329–33; Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 68–72; Mathie, ‘‘God, Woman, and Morality,’’ 17–19. 45. DA, II.iii.12, 706.

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pleasure from the self-discipline required by self-sacrifice.46 American gender hierarchy, in Tocqueville’s eyes, is in the end functionally stable. The nation’s deliberate cultivation of women’s practical rationality inclines them to view challenges to gender hierarchy as useless. While it is true that the American form of gender hierarchy as Tocqueville portrays it is softer than its European counterpart—in that the intelligence of women is recognized and their enjoyment of a circumscribed freedom is encouraged and validated47— American gender hierarchy is less breakable precisely because it is more bendable. Although Tocqueville speculates that American democracy ‘‘is raising woman and will make her more and more the equal of man,’’48 his analysis also implies the very softness of American gender hierarchy will make it harder to undermine. Tocqueville’s analysis of the sexual division of labor illustrates how the ‘‘independence’’ of men works at the expense of the autonomy of women.49 He thus indirectly—perhaps even unknowingly—adds a new dimension to his critique of American individualism: individualist ‘‘independence’’ is underwritten by the sexual division of labor, belying the individualist’s conceit that his fate lies entirely in his own hands. Without his wife’s efficient management of the household, he could not so aggressively acquire the wealth and enlightenment that give him his sense of self-mastery. Furthermore, the individualist’s maturation into free and public manhood depends on his mother’s dedication to his upbringing; in the antebellum American context, this requires her voluntary subordination to gender hierarchy and confinement to private life.50 Insofar as the individualist insists that he owes nothing to anyone and expects nothing from anyone, he obscures the efforts of both the mother who made him ‘‘independent’’

46. Cf. Winthrop, ‘‘Tocqueville’s American Woman,’’: Tocqueville ‘‘never says that American women are happy. Rather, they tend to be sad and resolute, albeit proud’’ (239). 47. DA, II.iii.12, 707. 48. DA, II.iii.12, 705. 49. For contemporary critiques of modern liberal theory and practice along these lines, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 50. Tocqueville also observed in a letter to his sister-in-law that, instead of having their own public lives, American women pass the time by buttressing their husbands’ self-regard: ‘‘When a woman marries, it’s as if she entered a convent, except however that it is not taken ill that she have children, and even many of them. Otherwise, it’s the life of a nun; no more balls; hardly any more society; a husband as estimable as cold for all company; and that to the life eternal. I ventured the other day to ask one of these charming recluses just how, exactly, a wife could pass her time in America. She answered me, with great sang-froid: in admiring her husband.’’ Tocqueville to E´milie (Mme Hippolyte), New York, 9 June 1831, recorded in George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 144. For a similar observation by Gustave de Beaumont—Tocqueville’s traveling companion during their nine-month American journey—see Marie, or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America, trans. Barbara Chapman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1835] 1999), 19–20.

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and the wife who enables him to live ‘‘self-sufficiently.’’ 51 Self-deception thus lies at the center of American individualist self-fashioning. Sometimes it shades into a ‘‘vast egotism’’ wherein ‘‘one cannot be sure whether [the American man] regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself.’’ 52 This egotism exposes a love of mastery. In this way, individualistic self-conceptions are self-contradictory. As Rousseau argues, the will to mastery is ultimately rooted in enslavement to irrational, even inhuman, desire: ‘‘ . . . although man had previously been free and independent, we find him . . . subject, by virtue of a multitude of fresh needs, to all of nature and particularly to his fellowmen, whose slave in a sense he becomes even in becoming their master . . . .’’ 53 The more insistently American individualists assert their mastery over women, the greater dependence on women they disclose.54

Individualism and White Supremacy Whereas Tocqueville’s analysis of the sexual division of labor exposes the individualist’s dependence on gendered social structures for increased freedom and prosperity, his analysis of white supremacy exposes the individualist’s dependence on racist social structures for enhanced social standing and selfesteem. As with the sexual division of labor, white supremacy has both relational and institutional dimensions. On the one hand, white supremacy is a direct relationship of deference and scorn between particular individuals. On the other hand, socially shared valuations of skin color define the relationship: widely held expectations about how light-skinned persons and dark-skinned persons behave toward each other set the parameters of interracial interaction. Socially and culturally institutionalized expectations thus mediate the interaction.55 In his long chapter at the end of Volume I on ‘‘The Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States,’’ Tocqueville tries to distance his portrait of white supremacy from his general investigation of democracy, insisting that white supremacy is ‘‘tangential’’ to his subject, being ‘‘American but not democratic.’’56 At the same time, he concedes that he will discuss white supremacy not in 51. Partly for this reason, according to Janara, Tocqueville figures American individualism as ‘‘hypermasculine.’’ Democracy Growing Up, 130–33. 52. Tocqueville, ‘‘Fortnight in the Wilds,’’ in Journey to America, 363. 53. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 67. 54. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, ed. J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807] 1977), y178–96. 55. White supremacy fits Talcott Parsons’s definition of institutional social structure: ‘‘The institutional structure of a social system, then, is the totality of morally sanctioned statuses and roles which regulate the relations of persons to one another through ‘locating’ them in the structure and defining legitimate expectations of their attitude and behaviour.’’ See Lo´pez and Scott, Social Structure, 31. 56. DA, I.ii.10, 365.

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isolation from his subject but ‘‘in relation to’’ Americans as a ‘‘democratic people.’’57 Both Margaret Kohn and Laura Janara have recently argued that Tocqueville suggests a psychosocial connection between white supremacy and democratic culture. Because democracy spawns unprecedented levels of social flux, the democratic individual is consumed by a ‘‘fear of falling’’ down the social ladder. Desiring immutable status, the democratic individual wishes that some of his fellows would become ‘‘permanently subordinate’’; the doctrine of white supremacy thus appeals to him.58 Janara argues that Tocqueville’s Democracy— together with the writings of Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s traveling companion during their nine-month American journey—show how white supremacy allays ‘‘postaristocratic anxiety’’: white supremacy gives whites ‘‘property in their whiteness—a property that cannot be lost, unlike other forms of postaristocratic property, which are susceptible to the new democratic flux.’’59 Assuring them that they will not fall to the social bottom,60 white supremacy helps Euro-Americans cope with democracy’s social instability; it also satisfies their nostalgia for ‘‘the lost order and certainty that once guaranteed every individual a defined place in society.’’61 Kohn and Janara pinpoint a major psychosocial affinity between individualism and white supremacy: personal insecurity amid democratic flux drives individuals to merge their identities with that of an exalted group. Yet Kohn and Janara fall short of specifying how the individualist’s evasive cognitive tendencies allow him to exploit this racist social structure while still preserving his belief in his own self-sufficiency. One of the functions of anti-black racism in Tocqueville’s America was to assure the white individualist that he was not a slave, that he was indeed free, independent, and self-sufficient.62 Yet the only way he could 57. DA, I.ii.10, 365. 58. Margaret Kohn, ‘‘The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,’’ Polity 35 (Winter 2002): 191. 59. Laura Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others: Tocqueville and Beaumont, U.S. Genealogy, Democracy, and Racism,’’ Political Theory 32 (December 2004): 775, 793. Janara’s formulations here are indebted to Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness and Cheryl I. Harris’s ‘‘Whiteness as Property,’’ Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1709–91. See also Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 160–63, 166–69. 60. Cf. James Baldwin, ‘‘Princes and Powers’’ in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 147: ‘‘ . . . we were . . . almost personally indispensable to each of them, simply because, without us, they could never have been certain . . . where the bottom was . . . .’’ 61. Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 778. For another important recent critical theoretical consideration of Tocqueville on race in America, see Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 47–53. 62. Those familiar with the last chapter of Volume I of DA will note that I do not address Tocqueville’s analysis of the relationship between the ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘Indian’’ ‘‘races.’’ This is because the complexity of that analysis warrants a separate exegesis, one extending beyond this essay’s theoretical framework. Janara provides a highly original interpretation of Tocqueville’s analysis of white-Indian relations as ‘‘a critical narrative of European Americans’ fraternalized relations with Indians, marked by sibling-rivalrylike democratic envy . . . .’’ See ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 773, 777–86. Readers interested in the relation between American individualist identity and the conquest of Native Americans should consult Michael

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maintain this self-conception was by evading his own dependence on structures of racial hierarchy and representation. For the individualist to see himself as free, independent, and self-sufficient, he had to blind himself to the ways he needed white supremacy for self-confidence and psychic stability. Distinctly individualistic modes of self-conception and social interpretation therefore enabled white individualists to rely on racist social structure and still preserve their self-images.63 The theoretical framework of Tocqueville’s Democracy thus illuminates not only the peculiarly individualistic anxieties that promote American white supremacy, but also the peculiarly individualistic cognitive mistakes that facilitate it. ‘‘Individualism is more pronounced at the end of a democratic revolution than at any other time,’’64 Tocqueville argues in Volume II. A rapidly increasing number of independent citizens, ‘‘having achieved independence only yesterday, are drunk with newfound power’’: ‘‘Such people have a presumptuous confidence in their own strength, and, oblivious of the fact that they may some day need to call on their fellow men for assistance, make no bones about showing that they think only of themselves.’’65 This ‘‘presumptuous confidence’’ usually arises after the collapse of aristocracy. Unable to ‘‘forget their former grandeur,’’ 66 the exalted men of the old order resent their former inferiors for obtaining civic equality. The lesser men of the old order, however, feel both triumph and terror in the face of their old superiors: triumph in their achievement of independence, terror in their fear of reverting back to subordination. The mutual suspicion felt between former masters and servants pushes them apart: ‘‘ . . . Democratic revolutions encourage them to shun one another and perpetuate in the midst of equality hatreds Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), Chaps. 2 and 5. 63. Tocqueville’s chapter on ‘‘The Three Races’’ does not elaborately theorize the relationship between racism and individualism, but we should remember that Tocqueville published the chapter several years before he worked out individualist moral psychology in Volume II of Democracy. His understanding of individualism had yet to mature. While Tocqueville never retracted his statement that white supremacy was American but not democratic, he took pains to ensure that the two volumes of Democracy were consistent. The absence of a retraction cannot establish that Tocqueville did not revise his assessment—for Tocqueville was not disposed to make retractions. Tocqueville’s unpublished notes and drafts, furthermore, make some direct connections between white supremacy and general democratic tendencies. In one draft, he wonders whether people’s tendency toward materialist explanation during democratic times accounts for the ascendancy of the idea of race as a unit of social explanation. Why didn’t Tocqueville draw out these connections in Democracy? Schleifer speculates that Tocqueville may ‘‘have shied away from an elaborate application of his ideas to the racial issue in America because of an unwillingness to tread upon Beaumont’s territory.’’ Finally, as Cheryl Welch points out, Tocqueville from the start was disinclined to elaborate any relationship between racism and democracy: his overriding goal was to address French democratic dilemmas and he foresaw ‘‘no similar problems of racial subordination in the old world.’’ Zunz, ‘‘Chronology,’’ in DA, 891–95; Schleifer, Making, 36, 91, 275; Kohn, ‘‘Other America,’’ 173–74; Welch, De Tocqueville, 62. 64. DA, II.ii.3, 588, chapter title. 65. DA, II.ii.3, 588. 66. DA, II.ii.3, 588.

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originating in inequality.’’67 Tocqueville, however, argues that Americans have escaped the array of resentments born of democratic revolutions. Because there was no old feudal structure, no institutions of social immobility, Americans were fortunate enough ‘‘to have been born equal rather than become so.’’68 Yet in drawing this conclusion, Tocqueville overlooks the lessons offered at the end of Volume I in his chapter on ‘‘The Three Races.’’ There he predicted that ‘‘the freer the Whites of the United States become, the more they will seek to isolate themselves’’ from black Americans.69 ‘‘There is a natural prejudice that leads a man to scorn a person who has been his inferior long after that person has become his equal,’’ Tocqueville writes in ‘‘The Three Races.’’ ‘‘The real inequality resulting from fortune or law is always replaced by an imaginary inequality rooted in mores.’’70 While this ‘‘natural prejudice’’ generally applies to democratic societies that were once aristocratic, in this context Tocqueville refers to relations between Euro-Americans and African American freedmen. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, significant numbers of African Americans either escaped slavery or won legal manumission to enjoy a freedom comparable, if not equal to that of whites. Because American slavery was racial, however, black freedmen were unlike ancient freedmen who ‘‘so nearly resembled the freeborn that it soon became impossible to tell the former apart from the latter’’: ‘‘ . . . for the Moderns, the immaterial and transitory fact of slavery combines in the most disastrous way with the material and permanent fact of racial difference. The memory of slavery dishonors the race, and race perpetuates the memory of slavery.’’71 Because former slaves and former masters are so easily identifiable, the codes of honor and dishonor bound up with slavery live after emancipation. Yet prejudice against blacks involves more than the dishonor associated with having once been a slave; it also implicates the resentment felt by many white Americans that former bondsmen enjoy a freedom comparable to theirs. ‘‘Two powerful passions will always keep the American of the South apart from the Black,’’ Tocqueville writes, ‘‘fear that he might come to resemble his former slave, the Negro, and fear that he might sink below the level of his neighbor, the White.’’72 White Americans experience an anxiety of equality similar to that experienced by former aristocrats in the aftermath of democratic revolution.73 But because black freedmen remain in the minority, and white Americans in the

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

DA, II.ii.3, 589. DA, II.ii.3, 589. DA, I.ii.10, 411. DA, I.ii.10, 393. DA, I.ii.10, 394. Cf. Marie, 214, where Beaumont makes the same observation. DA, I.ii.10, 412. For Beaumont’s reflections on this subject, see Marie, 225, 231. Cf. Welch, De Tocqueville, 64.

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majority, the dynamics of power and resentment attending the emancipation of slaves differ from those attending democracy’s emergence from revolution. Black freedmen cannot safely show the braggadocio that commoners display after aristocracy collapses. White Americans, however, can violently reassert their privileged identities and institutionalize them in cultural rituals and social structures. These rituals and structures consist of segregation, physical violence, and racist speech-acts. Tocqueville observed all of these during his time in the United States,74 recounting in a notebook one New Orleans dignitary who remarked, ‘‘There is not a white beggar but has the right to bully the wretch he finds in his way and throw him in the dirt, crying out: ‘Get off, mulatto!’’’75 The utterance ‘‘Get off, mulatto!’’ reinforces the beggar’s sense that he enjoys a dignity in American society not dependent on wealth but only on whiteness. In making the utterance, he reassures both himself and those around him of his exalted standing.76 This is a strong temptation in democracy, for—as Patrick Deneen points out—social equality renders individuals anonymous and insignificant, ironically giving birth to a ‘‘sense of lost dignity in practice.’’77 In America, Tocqueville realized, dignity meant personal freedom and independence, and the presence of slavery made the value of freedom and independence all the more clear.78 Slavery marked the boundary between dignity and insignificance not only for the southerner, but also for the northerner, whose social anxiety took a different form but was just as acute.79 Northern workers were worried that the social distance between them and American bondsmen was getting shorter than the distance between them and American capitalist elites and landowners. When individual black Americans won freedom and took place alongside European Americans in the workforce, whites feared that their station was sinking toward bondage and drudgery.80 Needing a sign to mark the dignity of their status as independent freedmen, as well as a way to distract themselves from their increasing dependence on bosses, bankers, landlords, and merchants,

74. DA, I.ii.10, 395–97; I.ii.9, 320–21fn; cf. Beaumont, Marie, Chap. 13 and appendices A and L. 75. Non-Alphabetic Notebooks 2 and 3, ‘‘Conversations with Mr. Guillemin, French Consul at New Orleans, (1st January, 1832),’’ in Journey to America, 100–101. 76. Cf. Shklar, American Citizenship. 77. Patrick J. Deneen, ‘‘Lonesome No More!: Individualism and the Rise of Democratic Despotism,’’ The Hedgehog Review 4 (Spring 2002): 65. 78. Cf. Kohn, ‘‘Other America,’’ 189: ‘‘American ‘dignity’ consists primarily in the fact of being free. But the only way for whites to feel assured in their illusive sense of freedom is by the absolute certainty that they are not black.’’ 79. It is important to note that Tocqueville interpreted white supremacy in the South in terms of its resemblance to European aristocratic social relations, although at moments he observes distinctly democratic anxiety among southerners. Tocqueville found white supremacy in the North more fascinating—for here was a hierarchical structure arising in the absence of aristocratic tradition, fueled only by democratic anxiety. 80. Cf. Janara, ‘‘Brothers and Others,’’ 793.

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European Americans began to create and inflate myths of white supremacy—the idea that white skin denoted superior lineage, intelligence, beauty, and character.81 In ‘‘The Three Races,’’ Tocqueville impersonates American whiteness’s outlook: You can make the Negro free, but you cannot make him anything other than an alien vis-a`-vis the European. . . . [T]his man, who was born in degradation, this alien placed in our midst by servitude—we scarcely recognize him as possessing the common features of humanity. To us his visage seems hideous, his intelligence limited, his tastes base; we come close to regarding him as something intermediate between brute and man.82 Tocqueville observes that ‘‘white men in the North shun Negroes all the more assiduously as the legal separation between them diminishes:’’83 ‘‘Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere is intolerance greater than in states where servitude was unknown.’’84 In his own account of race relations in America, Beaumont explicates Tocqueville’s paradoxical contention that the more remote from slavery a region is, the more racist it is: It is not rare, in the South, to see whites who are kindly toward Negroes. Since the distance between them is immense and unchallenged, free Americans have no fear, in approaching the slave, of raising him to their level or of descending to his. In the North, on the contrary, where equality of all is proclaimed, the whites keep their distance from the Negroes, so as not to be confused with them; they avoid them with a sort of horror, and relentlessly ostracize them as a protest against an assimilation which would humiliate them, thus maintaining by custom the distinction which the law no longer makes.85 Through racial aversion, white northerners reassure themselves of their dignity, freedom, and independence. White supremacy underwrites their individualism— their sense of self-sufficiency and significance. 81. Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness is the seminal study of the emergence of white privilege among the American working class in the nineteenth century. For another important study of the ways nineteenth-century American writers used black slaves and freedmen as a counterpoint by which to construct ‘‘the American’’ as the ‘‘new white man,’’ see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 82. DA, I.ii.10, 394. 83. DA, I.ii.10, 412. 84. DA, I.ii.10, 395. 85. Beaumont, Marie, 72. Cf. 243.

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Democracy thus reveals—albeit indirectly—how the degraded image of the Negro demarcates the individualist’s idealization of himself. The individualist sees himself as free, independent, and self-possessed, while characterizing African Americans as helpless, slavish, and base. The American image of the Negro is a photonegative of the individualist’s self-image. Individualist and white supremacist ideology, in this regard, structure each other: insofar as one is not black, one is free and independent, and insofar as one is free and independent, one is not black.86 Yet as Democracy illuminates the contradistinction between the individualist self-idealization and anti-black stereotypes, it once again exposes the individualist’s dependence on social structure. The individualist exploits socially shared imagery of black debasement to define his identity. Assuring him of his fitness for liberty, white supremacy emboldens him to assert himself vigorously. White supremacy, moreover, tells him, ironically, that he is capable of absolute independence: by equating whiteness with sovereignty and blackness with dependency, white supremacy encourages him to think he is master of his own fate. The causal directionality between white supremacy and individualism, however, runs both ways. Individualistic social interpretation also facilitates white supremacy. Because the individualist is willfully blind to social structure, he cannot appreciate how subscription to white supremacy diminishes his selfsufficiency. He thus depends on white supremacy without any sense of selfcontradiction. The individualist’s refusal to give credence to social structure, moreover, prevents him from examining the ways his participation in white supremacy implicates him in the moral violation of other people. By interpreting social phenomena in an individualistic (i.e., anti-social manner), the individualist can participate in unjust social structures with a sense of perfect innocence. Individualism protects its adherents from knowledge of their complicity in social injustice. The individualist’s mode of social cognition thus befits white supremacy.

Conclusion: Tocqueville’s Mirror Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is canonical in the study of American political culture because of its enduring power as a sociological mirror. We turn back to it again and again because it so shrewdly specifies the underground rhythms of American democracy. On the question of the relationship between American individualism and social injustice, the book still sheds light. Democracy helps us see why individualism impedes the struggle for social justice. 86. Cf. Olson, Abolition of White Democracy, 128: ‘‘ . . . in the United States the ideals of individual autonomy and equal opportunity were constructed against a backdrop of Black subordination and white advantage, and are so intertwined that they are not easily separated.’’

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Individualists assign no weight to the idea of social structure; set on seeing themselves as masters of their own fate, individualists deny social structure’s significance and even existence to preserve their self-image and worldview. Rebuffing the real-life importance of social structure also allows individualists to think that the manifold goods which accidents of birth have given them are the result of their own exertion and ingenuity. Individualistic social cognition thus reinforces social injustice by allowing privileged people to believe that unjustly held social goods are justly held, and by excusing them from moral selfexamination. Social injustice, in turn, makes individualistic social cognition more attractive to the privileged, for it assures them of their moral innocence and indulges their conceit. Democracy also sheds light on why individualist ideology, masculinist prejudice, and anti-black racism are intertwined in American political culture. The original embodiment of the American individualist was a free white man innocently enjoying the privileges of white supremacy and gender domination. It is thus no surprise that the ideology of individualism sometimes reeks of masculinist self-assertion.87 Neither is it a surprise that the language of individualism is the moral rhetoric of choice for prejudiced whites. Donald Kinder, Tali Mendelberg, and Lynn Sanders have shown that contemporary prejudice’s ‘‘public expression and private language are preoccupied with black Americans’ specifically individualistic shortcomings: that blacks fail to display the virtues of hard work and self-sacrifice that white Americans claim as central to their own lives . . ..’’88 This preoccupation is rooted both in white Americans’ deep commitment to the ideal of self-sufficiency and in the deep American assumption that self-sufficiency is white people’s special province. Democracy illuminates the history of both this commitment and this assumption; it thus remains a valuable mirror as America works toward racial justice.

87. See Pateman, Sexual Contract, 113–14, 168, 184–85. 88. Kinder and Mendelberg, ‘‘Individualism Reconsidered,’’ 60. See also Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 105–106.