The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery

In this paper I argue that Tocqueville, when read in concert with the work of Beaumont, his often overlooked collaborator, provides a compelling analysis of the coexistence of liberal democracy and racism. I offer a reading that challenges the conventional wisdom that Tocqueville's fascination with bourgeois democracy blinded him to Jacksonian America's pervasive racial hierarchies. Tocqueville's claim that the extension of equality was both inevitable and providential was always modified by his fears of renewed despotism, racial conflict, or even the emergence of a new, irresponsible plutocratic aristocracy. Tocqueville and especially Beaumont were tragic thinkers who recognized the tension between social equality and individual insecurity. This reading draws upon three sources: the text of Democracy in America, unpublished drafts of that work, and Beaumont's novel Marie.