Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”: A Postmodern Reading

Abstract

Based on the current forms of knowledge we can outline the features of modernity in nuce existing in the American society from the early nineteenth century. Kinetics on the outside, in relation to nature, to which corresponds a defined internal kinetics of social mobility and political democracy, the birth of a subject capable of supporting the kinetic movement, subject who is acting on a project basis, motivated by the need for equality and freedom, in a constant effort of profane and innovation and that is constantly threatened by anomie and despotism; these are the topics of this analysis dedicated to the American modernity and prefigured to be of the Western society as a whole.