expire in the woods’ (1990: 342–3). Thus, as
Connolly has helpfully suggested, Tocqueville’s
depreciation of nomadic life forfeits insights into
how the American state might modify its own ten-
dencies to centralization and ‘fend off its cultural
drive to sustain the purity of civilization through
the extermination of the other’ (1994: 31). But
such a forfeiting of insight is sharply conditioned
by a racially prejudiced vision.
This is clearly shown in Tocqueville’s overall
discussion of the ‘three races in the United
States’, in which one reads that ‘ the most formi-
dable of all the ills that threaten the future of the
Union arises from the presence of a black popu-
lation upon its territory’ (1990: 356). This is seen
as the case since the civilized European can
scarcely acknowledge the common features of
humanity in this stranger whom slavery has
brought among us, and we Europeans are ‘almost
inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate
between man and the brutes’ (1990: 358). Such a
viewpoint finds an echo in other writings of
Tocqueville, including his interpretation of
French colonialism in Algeria. His support for
colonialism is expressed in clear and stark terms.
He wrote, for example, that burning harvests,
emptying granaries and seizing women and
children are ‘unfortunate necessities that any
people wishing to make war on the Arabs must
accept’. He went on to argue that in Algeria there
should be two quite distinct legislations for there
are two very separate communities, the coloniz-
ers and the colonized, and it was only the colo-
nizers who would have their rights legally
protected. War, he added, was a science that
had been well developed by the French in
Africa. These short quotations come from a
recent article by the French political scientist Le
Cour Grandmaison, who refers the reader to
Tocqueville’s complete works republished in- Le Cour Grandmaison (2001: 13–14) asks
the question: why is it that Tocqueville’s open
support for French colonialism and his justifica-
tion of violence against the Algerian popula-
tion are very rarely if ever mentioned by French
political theorists in their consideration of
Tocqueville’s contribution to political thought?
Whilst Trouillot refers to the ‘silencing of the
past’ in the case of the Haitian Revolution, we
might suggest that the racist and colonialist
prejudice present in the writings of founding
figures such as Tocqueville is also passed over in
silence. Is it because contemporary writers think
that such prejudices are no longer significant,
simply being residues from a more racist age?
Have such prejudices disappeared? Or must we
preserve the honour and integrity of our founding
western theoreticians?^5
In a similar vein to Tocqueville, and writing a
little later, the liberal theorist J.S. Mill (1989)
drew a connection between the right to social
justice and liberty and the existence of a ‘civilized
community’. For Mill, the principles of justice
only applied to human beings in the maturity
of their faculties, so that one could leave out of
consideration ‘those backward states of society
in which the race itself may be considered as in
its nonage’ (1989: 13). The ethnocentric ground
on which Mill and also Tocqueville built their
arguments was not unique for the nineteenth cen-
tury, or for following periods, and the binary
splits between civilized and barbarian, or peoples
with history and those without, received later
elaborations in the twentieth-century context of
modern versus traditional and developed versus
developing.
Overall, my point in this section is to
re-emphasize that the way the temporal and
geopolitical configurations of the democracy
problematic have been and continue to be inter-
preted is centrally affected by an ethnocentric
universalism that is profoundly rooted in the
formation of occidental thought. And that
anchorage is frequently avoided in the contem-
porary western literature. But if we are to con-
struct more equal forms of cultural dialogue in
times of acute political instability, it is crucial to
be continually aware and critical of these histor-
ical roots if we are to ever go beyond them.
Finally, a post-colonial perspective ought to
encourage us to cast a more critical eye on the
evolving nature of western democracy from
within. This is not a task only relevant to such a
perspective since increasingly critical questions
are being asked from a wide range of positions.
For example, it has been noted that with the con-
tinual extension of the powers of surveillance
(Boyne, 2000), coupled with the extension and
deepening of the bureaucratization of social life,
a notion of ‘totalitarian democracy’ might not
seem too inappropriate (Fiske, 1998). Fiske
exemplifies his argument by referring to the
extension of electronic surveillance, particularly
noticeable with the growth in coverage of CCTV,
reflected for instance by the fact that the whole of
the downtown in cities like Minneapolis, Newark
and Detroit are now covered by cameras that can
zoom in to read a credit card. But also relevant,
for Fiske, are appeals to moral totalism, intensi-
fied policing and the appearance of charismatic
leaders, a point perhaps that should not be over-
emphasized given the banality of much current
political discourse. Along a related analytical
pathway, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1997)
make the point that the distinction between
totalitarianism and democracy can sometimes be428 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 428