Les nouvelles formes de servitude. Penser la face somber de l'individualisme démocratique

Abstract

Tocqueville's work should not be viewed as an ideological monistic conception. It is crucial for us because it provides an access to an anthropological standpoint on democracy, which conceptualization is often of a tragical sort. The sociological use of Toc-queville by Raymond Aron, who can be credited for the renewal of Tocqueville's readings in France, is not directed against marxist orthodoxy as much as against durkheimian sociologism and, more generally, positivism and historicism. If we read Tocqueville thanks to Aron, it is not certain that we read him for the same reasons and, more importantly, that we take from his work the same critical inspirations. Aron read Tocqueville against hitlerian and stalinian fanaticism, while we read him against scepticism. Since it is a matter of internal critique of democracy, our tocquevillian reading of the present seeks to explore what can impede the possibility of the modern subject, that is, of autonomy, but this time, and paradoxically, from the inside of the democratic social world. © 2001 Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.