As he further explained, “I believe that the right of war authorises us to ravage the country and that we must do it, either by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-round by making those rapid incursions called razzias, whose purpose is to seize men or herds.” He contended that the second-most important step in the conquest “after the interdiction of commerce, is to ravage the country”. Tocqueville’s plan to subjugate Algerians and replace the population with European settlers included several concrete steps. His thoughts on the merits of democracy and individual liberties clearly did not extend to North African natives. When the French government and its elites were debating the merits of domination as opposed to partial colonisation of Algeria, Tocqueville wrote, in his 1841, Essay on Algeria, an unequivocal endorsement of a full-on colonisation. Tocqueville was not just a theorist with a knack for travel he was a member of parliament from 1839 to 1851 and was briefly French foreign minister during the Second Republic in 1849. His praised work on democracy, however, was built on the twin practice of glorifying democracy in a white-settler society – the US – and defending a French-led total war against North Africans in their own territories. In the classroom, he is taught as a classic, timeless thinker in many comparative politics and political theory syllabi.

Writing Democracy in America in 1835 made him a hero of sorts, with streets, hedge funds, and restaurants named after him across the US.

Tocqueville, who is almost synonymous with liberalism, democracy, and individual rights in the US, is known to be an apologist for colonisation and white settlers in North Africa. The removal of Wilson’s name from Princeton University buildings has shaken the ivory tower, in particular, scholars of international relations who are being pushed to think or rethink the way they read, teach and write about these classic figures of political thought.īut while Princeton’s decision is welcome, it is merely one of many steps the discipline of political science must take in order to reckon with its explicit and implicit epistemic violence.Īlexis de Tocqueville is a case in point.

It was the latest in a series of anti-racist acts that included the toppling of statues of racist historical figures and the removal of racist emblems from state flags. The news that Princeton University had finally given in to years of student protests and calls to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs – finding that the former president’s “ racism makes him an inappropriate namesake” – reverberated across academic institutions in the United States.

Alexis de tocqueville