Tocqueville's Dilemmas, and Ours: Sovereignty, Nationalism, Globalization

273 Pages·2022·11.106 MB·English

by  Ewa Atanassow

tocqueville’s dilemmas,
and ours

Tocqueville’s Dilemmas,
and Ours
sovereignty, nationalism,
globalization
ewa atanassow
prince ton university press
princet on & oxford
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This book has been composed in Arno
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents who tried to hold together
an impossible world.
To my daughter hoping she might succeed.

contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 (Popu lar) Sovereignty and Constitutionalism 20
2 Nationalism and Democracy 62
3 Whither Globalization? 105
Conclusion: Sustaining Liberal Democracy 149
Notes 179
Bibliography 223
Index 247
vii

preface
this book rec ords my long journey in the com pany of Alexis de
Tocqueville. It began on an after noon in the mid-1990s in Poland,
at a street bookseller in downtown Kraków where I first chanced
on Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution in the brand-
new Polish edition put out by the Stefan Batory Foundation. I had
recently graduated with a master’s degree from Jagiellonian Uni-
versity’s Institute of Psy cholo gy and was on a quest for new vistas.
What made me look for those in The Old Regime, I no longer re-
member, but I do recall being dazzled by the bright light that Toc-
queville’s account of eighteenth- century France shone on the to-
talitarian experience that my part of the world had been through
for much of the closing c entury.
My intellectual path, which had originated in communist Bul-
garia and taken shape in Poland in the early years of the postcom-
munist transition, took me next to KU Leuven in Belgium where
I first experienced life in Western Eu rope, and had a chance to
grapple with Tocqueville in academic En glish. This paved the way
for my greatest educational adventure: doctoral studies at the Uni-
versity of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Though I had
spent time in the West, moving to the United States came as a
shock: from the pace of daily life to its intensely participatory uni-
versity culture, this country was unlike anything I had known. And
amid the strangeness of Amer i ca, the uncompromising spirit of
the University of Chicago seemed stranger still. It was only when
I reached for Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer i ca that this unfamil-
iar experience began to make sense, much in the way Eastern
ix