![]()
1
Reinventing the Concept
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America, demonstrated the importance of political culture. He showed that in order to understand democracy and America, it is necessary to understand the culture that is specific to both, revolving around the cultural orientation of egalitarianism and the social practice of individualism. Later social scientists raised an important issue, more precisely, how does culture make democracy both possible and impossible?6 They have understood that the grand comparisons that Tocqueville made between aristocracies and democracies need much more specific analysis. They addressed a central issue of our times: what does it take for democracy to appear and solidify? Yet, the answers they came up with worry me. I do not deny that the correlations that they observe are real. Protestant-dominant countries have been more likely to be democratic than Catholic countries in the Americas, as S. Martin Lipset once observed, not to mention Muslim-dominant countries in the rest of the world. I am just not sure exactly what such observations reveal. Democracy has been too unproblematically defined. And culture has been too statically conceived. How different are such findings from the stereotypes of a prevailing common sense? In our times, the worst version: Christians (or worse still Judeo-Christians) are civilized and democratic, while Muslims are barbaric and undemocratic. Yet, we do need to examine how the politics of our times are culturally constituted. This, crucially, includes the way culture supports or undermines voluntary association and democratic participation, as Robert Putnam and his associates have studied, but it also needs to be approached in a more nuanced way.7 We do need to understand the cultural dimensions of political conflicts, as well as the supports of political consensus, starting with the politics of local interest, including major geo-political conflicts. Thus the project at hand: the reinvention of the concept of political culture drawing upon Tocqueville’s great insights, critically appreciating the work of more contemporary social science.
In this chapter, I will show how Tocqueville’s study of “democracy in America” illuminates fundamental problems of the analysis of political culture. We will then turn to twentieth-century social science, and more recent studies, to see how the concept was applied to systematic and comparative inquiry in political science and sociology. This will lead us to an examination of what the “political” in political culture is, moving beyond conventional wisdom, trying to rigorously analyze the power in politics, specifically using the sociology of Max Weber and the critical theories of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. We will also consider the problem of the “culture” of political culture, laying the groundwork for a consideration of the relationship between culture and politics as the way political cultures are defined in interaction, the power of culture versus the culture of power, and as the way to comparatively analyze political culture. We start with a review of the concept’s development from Tocqueville to modern social science, and proceed with a critique that leads to a reinvention.
Development: Tocqueville
Americans are natural Cartesians, but no one in America reads Descartes. On this ironic note, Alexis de Tocqueville opens the second volume of Democracy in America, the first systematic study of political culture, though he did not use the term. Tocqueville’s magnum opus is a fine guide for understanding what we mean by political culture and a fine starting point for thinking about its reinvention. Tocqueville establishes the primary field of investigation when he describes how the institutions and practices of democracy, as a form of governance and of association, are correlated with the culture of a democratic society, and he intensively analyzes this correlation.
Tocqueville’s irony reveals his aristocratic ambivalence about democracy, which informed the subtlety of his analysis. He bases his study on his contention that equality is a providential force, a conviction that, though more common now, was not so common then. He illuminates throughout his classic text how equality fosters individualism (a neologism which he helped popularize), for better and for worse. In volume II, chapter 1, “On the Philosophical Method of the Americans,” he maintains that, cut off as individualists are from an unreflective deference to the authorities of the past and contemporary authorities, they base their judgment about what to read upon individual practical calculation. Later this would be called pragmatism, the distinctively American contribution to the history of philosophy (West, 1989).
Descartes, the world-renowned European philosopher, whose philosophy demands the questioning of all received authority, a philosophy based on the critical reasoning of the individual? No reason to read him because he does not help one get on with practical affairs. This, even though, as Tocqueville maintains, Descartes’ philosophy is the philosophy of a democratic age. Thus, Americans do not read a philosopher who questions all received philosophic authority, because they question received authority. They do not read democratic philosophy because they are, in a sense, democratic philosophers. Tocqueville marvels, admires, and is also appalled by this situation (for an enactment of this democratic philosophical approach to a central problem of politics, the question of the public, see the opening chapter of John Dewey’s [1991] The Public and its Problems).
In describing the philosophical approach of Americans, Tocqueville presents his key insights about political culture, applied throughout volume 2. He examines how the associations within a social order shape the attitudes of people, and vice versa, and he, crucially, understands democracy to be not only a form of governance, but also a type of human association. More specifically, he explores the culture that supports democracy, the culture that results from democracy, and the enduring tensions between culture and democracy. His exploration includes the analysis of a variety of complex relationships: religion and autonomous politics, individualism and democratic possibility, equality and freedom, and their social consequences, and egalitarianism and cultural excellence. These have become the standard field of examination in the study of political culture.
Religion is central in the formation of a political culture. In America, Tocqueville maintains, it provides the common commitment that holds Americans together, making for a coherent political community, but doing so in such a way that does not destroy a robust and free political life (2000: 417–24).
In America, individualism sets the grounds for self rule: autonomous political subjects capable of deciding for themselves matters of public and private concern, who are not atomized and engage the interests and needs of their fellow citizens (482–92).
The relationship between the ideals of equality and freedom are central to modern political cultures. Tocqueville thought that in democracies equality is the primary normative ideal, while in aristocracies, freedom is. But he noted that equality without freedom is the grounds for tyranny. He was particularly concerned with the problem of the tyranny of the majority and specifically intrigued by how Americans avoid this tyranny (235–63).
He was fascinated by how democracy, egalitarianism, and individualism transform culture beyond the life of the mind to the full range of human creativity. He was convinced that there is a fundamental tension between equality and cultural excellence. He foresaw a literature, architecture, poetry, and painting of a middling sort. He foresaw mass culture, in which quantity replaces quality, from the making of the apparently fine homes he saw upon arriving in New York harbor, to timepieces, and literature, to theater and the writing of history and the making of monuments (403–78).
And this all suggested a stark tension at the core of democratic society. In the terms of our times, he saw the potential within democracy for mass, and even totalitarian, society. In the graphic words of Tocqueville:
Tocqueville did not expect this of America. Americans are not only individualists emanating from their egalitarian situation. They also readily associate, and their free association works against the dangers of the modern tyranny. There is a need to balance individual commitments and an understanding that one’s personal situation is linked to the fate of one’s fellows. Tocqueville was sanguine that Americans know how to do this, calling it an individualism that is properly understood. But a balance is in order. Too much commitment to individual concerns, separate from commitment to the larger community, and the tyranny Tocqueville imagines is the result. On the other hand, too much commitment to community, especially the community one is born into, that one is part of as a matter of inherited obligation, rather than voluntary commitment, and the dynamism of democratic society is frustrated. Students of political culture view the capacity to voluntarily associate, to turn away from inherited associations and their obligations, and to be individualistic in orientation, all as components of a modern democratic political culture.8 Tocqueville, rather, sees these things in tension. He does not present a recipe for the culture that will support an enlightened democracy, but a field upon which democracy and its discontents are at play in the democratic age.
A successful political culture for democracy, Tocqueville maintains, is a result of a balance of political and cultural forces. A common cultural core, most often based in religion, what Emile Durkheim would later name a collective conscience (417–24), is necessary to hold a society together. But if this common core, the religious commitment, decides not only theological issues, but political ones as well, there is no room for a free democratic life. Thus Tocqueville asserts that while Christianity provides a strong grounding for democracy, in Islam, there is no democratic potential.
Tocqueville is sometimes wrong about the relationship between culture and democracy, but he is wrong in very interesting ways. This has intriguing implications for our understanding of political culture.
Christianity is a favorable support for the development of democracy first because it fosters equality. The divine equality of souls yields the profane equality of individuals. It further supports democracy because, according to Tocqueville, in contrast to Islam, it recognizes the distinction between the affairs between people and their God, and the affairs among people. Islam cannot support democracy, Tocqueville asserts, as the distinctively modern form of politics, because it does not recognize the distinction between the theological and the political, while Christianity does. There is no doubt ignorance and a Eurocentric prejudice in Tocqueville’s political judgments. Islam is barbaric, Christianity civilized, in his prejudiced eyes. But his argument can undo his prejudice. It can be observed that there are many Christians who do not draw the distinctions that Tocqueville understands as being desirable in general, and particularly in the United States, on the issue of abortion for example. And it also can be demonstrated that in the Islamic tradition there are important distinctions that have been made between the laws of God and the laws of man, and the necessity of drawing a clear distinction between the two (Arjomand, 2008). The illumination of the analytic dimensions of political culture and democratic potential can undermine the limitations of Tocqueville’s worldview.
When it comes to the issue of the kind of culture that democracies encourage, Tocqueville’s personal limitations are again evident, as the power of his analytic framework helps to indicate the way to overcome limitations. As a European and an aristocrat, he did not understand how democracies could support an independent and distinctive culture of quality.
Tocqueville uses a clean logic. Culture, as the arts and sciences, is hierarchical; democracy, egalitarian. The tension between the two yields a culture that appeals to the broad public, that is easily understood without much preparation, that is produced in great quantity, but not specifically concerned with quality. In the cultural work of the United States, and of democracies more generally, we seek to appeal to the broadest popular tastes, compromising quality. Such things are clearly observable.
Yet, Tocqueville misses other things: strikingly, the power of the vernacular. At exactly the time when a literary Renaissance was emerging in America, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, et al., Tocqueville judged that fine literature would not be likely in democratic societies. But the works of these authors are reflections upon and reactions to the democratic condition. They are the literary fruits of a democracy. He would not understand how the most theoretical of sciences would flourish under democratic conditions, at institutions of higher education and research in an institutionally differentiated society. He would not expect that English literature would be most vibrant not following aristocratic canons, but as it distanced itself from such canons. In his lifetime, the case in point was the great nineteenth-century American authors, who were at least as excellent as their British colleagues. This was followed in the twentieth century with the writings of Catha, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison, Roth, Updike, and Morrison, among many others, and post-colonial writings coming from throughout the former British Empire, Achebe, Rushdie, Sen, et al. The democratic ethos of inclusion of popular sensibilities enriched rather than diminished the literary imagination.
The tension between equality and quality has led not only to mass culture with little literary value, as Tocqueville expected, but to a more open and enriched literature and other arts that have explored the experiences and sensibilities of the previously excluded. The tension he observed between the hierarchy of cultural judgment and the equality of democracy enriched rather than undermined refined cultural pursuits.
Observing these limitations in his judgment underscores the insight of his fundamental framework for considering political culture. It is a field of continuity and contestation, conflict and creativity. Correlations are observed, alternative outcomes can be highlighted, but they do not lead to easy predictions. It is fun to read Tocqueville and consider how he seemed to predict the future of a major superpower, with industrial and post-industrial power, second to none, when industrial capitalism was in its infancy, before the Civil War and the wars of the twentieth century (Reeves, 1982; Lévy, 2007). But his contributions for the study of political culture are more analytical. The analytic insights were developed by social scientists working on the research and theory of modernization.
A Modern Social Scientific Concept
Political culture came to be a major concern in post-World War II social science. The primary issue was straightforward: What are the cultural supports for democracy? Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba worked around a simple formula: economic development + political culture = democracy or dictatorship (1965: 9). Given the presence of an identified set of values, attitudes, and beliefs, democracy is more likely. The social scientific study of political culture wanted to show how specified cultural attitudes support or undermine the establishment and functioning of democratic systems of governance. It specified Tocqueville’s analysis for the contemporary situation, at the time of the Cold War, when modernization seemed to have two paths, that of the United States and that of the Soviet Union. The democratic path required, social scientists found in their research, trust beyond immediate primary circles, belief in equality rather than hierarchy, valuing liberty over coercive order, and a commitment to legality. These were among the cultural orientations that analysts of political culture comparatively measured. Pragmatic as opposed to ideological styles of politics, and belief in government output, supported by good experiences with an ongoing political process, and belief in its legitimacy, were also studied. They proposed that such cultural orientations, also already highlighted in Tocqueville, were a necessary cultural basis for democratic life (1965; see also Verba and Nie, 1972; Pye, 1972).
Seymour Martin Lipset put it most bluntly when arguing for the centrality of political culture, as already mentioned above. He bases his argument on broad and clear correlations, “the correlations of democracy with Protestantism and a past British connection point up the importance of cultural factors.” He noted that the more Catholic Latin America (including Quebec, which he studied in his comparative study of the United States and Canada) was less democratic; the more Protestant America (including Anglo Canadians) was more democratic (1990: 82). He, further, underscored the negative correlation between Islam and democracy.
What is striking about Lipset’s position, which it shares with much of the literature on political culture linked to modernization theory, is that it analyzes both the political and cultural in political culture as they operate within conventionalized institutions. He and...
