Abstract
In March 1957, Ghana became the first Black African country to gain its independence from a colonial power. To commemorate this momentous event, Life magazine featured a picture of Ghanaian judges grandly attired in powdered wigs and black robes on its cover. Democracy in Africa, in those days, seemed to be simply a matter of the new nations adopting Western models and forms of democracy.
A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst; everybody sees it, but by no means everybody judges it in the same way.1
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Chapter One Tocquevillian Analytics in Africa
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Edited by J.P. Mayer (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), p. 9.
For some of the rare examples of scholars systematically usingTocquevillc to understand democracy in the non-Western world see Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997);
Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and
Sombat Chantornvong, “Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Third World,” in Vincent Ostrom, David Feeny, and Hartmut Picht (eds.), Rethinking Institutional Analysis and Development: Issues, Alternatives and Choices (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1988), pp. 69–99.
For a discussion of Tocqueville’s overturning of the prevalent European idea of the state and sovereignty, see Larry Siedentop, Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 41–43.
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 26.
For a vigorous defense of Tocqueville’s approach affirming the importance of decentralized politics and local self-government in fostering freedom, see Michael Hereth, Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats to Freedom in Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 39–44.
Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), pp. xiv–xv.
For the coining of the concept and its implication, see Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 62–108.
Scholars have described countries that hold free and fair elections but restrict civil rights and other basic freedoms as illiberal democracies. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs,Vol. 76, No. 6 (1997), pp. 181–195.
For critiques of the Western developmental model based on the nation-state, see Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State 1992;
Sheldon Gellar,“State-Building and Nation-Building in West Africa,” Building States and Nations: Models, Analyses, and Data Across Three Worlds, Vol. 2 (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1973), pp. 384–426.
Gerti Hesseling, Histoire Politique du Sénégal (Paris: Karthala, 1985), p. 349.
In recent years, there has been a new literature arising that looks at local understandings of democracy in Africa. For example, see Maxwell Owusu, “Democracy and Africa—AView From the Village,” The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1992), pp. 369–396;
Mikael Karlstrom, “Imagining Democracy: Political Culture and Democratization in Buganda,” Africa, Vol. 66, No. 4 (1996), pp. 485–505; and Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden.
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© 2005 Sheldon Gellar
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Gellar, S. (2005). Tocquevillian Analytics in Africa. In: Democracy in Senegal. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982162_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982162_1
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