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Tocquevillian spectacular democracy and its two theologies
Abstract
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The article aims to analyse the Tocquevillian relationship between religion, humanitarianism, and the poetry of democracy from the perspective of the concept of three types of theology (theologia tripartita).
THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The article raises the question of the consequences for Tocquevillian thinking about democracy that arise from the abandonment of the Christian conception of the personal subject. The research method is the analysis of the sources constituting Tocqueville’s corpus of works, including unpublished notes and fragments of correspondence included in historical-critical edition of his classic text De la Démocratie en Amérique.
THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article presents Tocqueville’s analysis of Christianity as a political institution and Catholicism as “respecting democratic instincts”. The vision of the relationship between religion and democracy proposed by the author of Democracy in America is interpreted as a modified version of Warron’s concept of three types of understanding of the divine. The content of civil theology and theatrical theology then allows for the depiction of the implied, albeit not explicitly expressed by Tocqueville, vision of spectacular democracy and its anthropological assumptions.
RESEARCH RESULTS: The despotic drift of democracy is the ultimate consequence of dissolving the personal subject on the one hand into individuality, and on the other hand, into abstract universality.
CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The concepts of the jocular man and spectacular democracy highlights the significance of the idea of the person for the analysis of contemporary forms of democratic despotism.
Keywords
spectacular democracy ; theologia tripartita ; new democratic despotism ; jocular man
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