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Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
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Podcast Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Gianna Engelard. Dr. Gianna Englert is an Associate professor at Hamilton center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and she's here with us to talk about a recent book that she has published with Oxford University Press. The book is called Democracy, French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage, which came out in 2024. Gianna, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Thanks very much for having me. Looking forward to our conversation.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Thank you. It's a book about democracy and French liberalism, but I feel that it's also very relevant to a lot of things that are happening around the world and I'll definitely ask you a few questions towards the end on that. But before we start to talk about the book. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise and how you were drawn to that field and where did the idea of this book come from?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, so my work, my PhD is in political theory in a government department. So my work bridges the history of political thought, intellectual history, and as you noticed, some concerns from sort of contemporary politics, contemporary political science. This book actually grew out of what was my doctoral dissertation, which actually looked very different. And you learn as you write and do these things that, you know, these projects sort of take on a life of their own. That dissertation was really just looking very carefully at the concept of political capacity, which I'm sure we'll get to in the course of the podcast. But as I was writing the dissertation, finishing it and revising it to become a book, we started to see just in everyday politics, these concerns about liberalism and democracy coming apart. And by that I mean the idea that democratic regimes won't necessarily lead to liberal outcomes, liberal institutions, other features we, we associate with liberalism, such as the protection of individual rights and freedoms. And so as you started to see more and more of that in the political mainstream and political commentary, I started to realize the degree to which the figures I was writing about and thinking about were writing about democracy at a point when liberalism and democracy were seen as fundamentally separate. And so I thought it was interesting to examine that problem by, in a way, returning to the origins of liberal thought in 19th century France.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And I could be wrong. You are the expert. I'll leave it to you to correct me if I'm wrong. I read a book some time ago and liberalism, when it first started, when it was sort of a pejorative term, even democracy as well, I mean, it was like the rule of the mob, especially during French Revolution. Nowadays, of course, we don't tend to think of liberalism or democracy in those terms, in pejorative terms, and we think that they are pretty much aligned. But there has been, as you mentioned, there has been this historical tension between the, the two. Can you just very briefly tell us what that tension was historically and why do you think it's been overlooked?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, I'll say I think for the term liberalism itself, that was less seen as a pejorative term. It was just more of a slippery term or an evasive one. Right. So figures don't really start calling themselves liberals until we'll just say about 30 years after the French Revolution. So when we read that term back into the history of ideas, you know, we're sort of imposing a framework or a frame of analysis on figures who, you know, really didn't call themselves that. But liberals do come to certain figures, do come to embrace that mantle and that label of liberalism, Benjamin Constant being one of them. As to the tension between liberalism and democracy and know why we don't recognize it, I think on the most basic level, you know, some of us tend to assume that the status quo has always been with us. And so in, in the post Cold War era, you see all of this argument about the triumphalism of liberalism and democracy, the idea that liberal democracy is sort of the end of history. And I think, you know, 30 years on, many of us have sort of internalized that idea that, you know, this is, this is the way that it was always meant to be. I also think if we know anything about liberalism and democracy, the two parts seem to be a natural fit as a single whole. And by that I mean we think of democracy as the protection of individual freedoms, mostly the freedom to vote, one person, one vote. We similarly think of liberalism as a philosophy associated with freedom, a philosophy associated with individualism. So, you know, I think we tend to focus on what they seem to share or what we might imagine they share. But the book is really about how, you know, liberalism is a philosophy of institutions, it's a guiding principle for institutions, whereas democracy is, and particularly in this book, I treat it as an electoral arrangement, a set of electoral institutions, an answer to the question of who could vote. And so from the earliest days of liberalism as a self conscious philosophy in which figures are calling themselves liberal, and democracy as an electoral arrangement in which the people, and we might say the whole people, we're talking about universal suffrage, get to participate. From the earliest sort of births of these two things, an institutional arrangement and a philosophy, they were actually in tension with one another. And so the idea was that democracy or liberals believed that democracy, as this institutional arrangement in which the whole people would decide, may ultimately erode liberal freedoms. In other words, the choices of the multitude won't always be to the advantage of freedom itself. And so at the most basic level, that was the origin of this particular tension.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And I'm keen to know why you have. I have an idea, of course, but I'll leave it to you to discuss this. Why you have focused on French thinkers in the context of your research, because, well, they were in touch. Some of these French thinkers were in touch with American, their American counterparts, the British ones. But why to discuss this tension between liberalism and democracy, why have you focused on the French Thinkers only.
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Sure. And, you know, you're absolutely right that there is this international dimension to their thought and to this project. Some of them are looking to America, others to Britain. But why France, primarily? Well, for one, the French Revolution gives us this really dramatic point of rupture in which we see, as Tocqueville will famously say, the end of the ancien regime, the end of the age of aristocracy, and the emergence of this new type of society which these figures call democratic. In addition to that being sort of this historical point of rupture, what you see in the realm of ideas in this time is a number of thinkers really trying to reconsider and theorize the meaning of democracy. And by that I mean there was a vision of democracy, a particular way that democracy manifested in ancient Greece, direct democracy. And that's what all of these figures knew. That was sort of one model in the ancient world. After the French Revolution, you get figures reckoning both with that model of representative democracy as opposed to direct democracy. So democracy as a political form. But you also get figures wrestling with this idea that maybe democracy can be used to define a type of society rather than simply a political regime. And so there's a tension then between liberalism as a philosophy and democracy as a system of electoral politics, as I said earlier. But these figures thought maybe democracy has another meaning as a type of equalized society, and maybe it's really that type of society that we should be designing institutions for that we should be ensuring the freedom of. And so this was a time where thinkers not only got to sort of, in a way, start building institutions from sort of the dust of revolution, as a lot of them will say, but they also started to rethink, what type of society do we have? And really, interestingly, they called it democratic.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Interesting. Before I ask the next question, I got to apologize to you because I'm going to be mispronouncing a lot of these words or names. I don't speak French. And also to our listeners, there's this concept, capacity politic. What does that mean? And how does you use that term in the book to talk about why there is this resistance on the side of liberalism for universal suffrage? So how does it help us to understand that liberal resistance to universal suffrage? And what is that capacity? Capacite politik.
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, and you pronounce it just fine. So capacite was liberals answer to ideas of democratic or universal rights. So typically, when we think of liberalism, we think of its association with individual rights. And liberals also of this period, also embraced the Idea that civil rights, and by that I mean you might say right to religious expression and belief, right to a free press, free speech. Liberals acknowledge that these rights were universal and in some cases natural in the sense that we are born as rights bearing creatures, we have the right to believe as we please, worship as we please, we've got the right to a free press, et cetera. There was really little debate about those rights being, I'm sorry, universal. Everyone sort of was on board with that idea. What liberals debated and questioned was the notion that political rights, or the right to vote was of the same status as those civil rights. So just as they said that civil rights were universal, they argued that political rights were of a different status, such that they had to be limited. And so rather than using the language of electoral rights, political rights, the right to vote, liberals spoke about the capacity to vote, the capacity to do so. And by this they meant an individual quality or an individual characteristic that made one capable of exercising the right to vote. So capacity was a, you might call it a precondition, you might call it a precursor to rights. It was really the first step in proving that you merited the exercise of political rights. So notice if civil rights are universal, natural, predicated simply on being born human, political rights have to be earned. And you know, Benjamin Constell famously said, you know, civil rights are universal because they are a shield against power, the encroachments of power. And everyone can wield a shield, but political rights are different. Those are like weapons, Constant said, and you wouldn't trust weapons to just anyone. That's the implication of that particular image. So capacite was liberals answer to the idea of universal or democratic political rights. And in the book I also frame it as their answer to the question, the suffrage question, or the question of who should vote. So who should vote? And liberals would argue it's the capable. Now, as you saw from the book or read from the book, the term capacity is quite messy. It's quite nebulous. Liberals themselves have trouble really defining who are the capable. It's also a messy concept because it is an inner quality that we have to be able to see through some sort of external signs. And those external signs would vary. Sometimes it was residency in a single place for a certain period of time. That was one way to prove you were capable. You had a stake in the community and you could exercise political rights. Sometimes it was property ownership or taxation on property. Some liberals recommended levels of education. So capacity was a slippery concept that had to be revealed by, in some Cases even more ambiguous signs.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
You mentioned Benjamin Constant. I'm kind of embarrassed that I did not know him until, I think it was four or five years ago that I started to read a book about the history of liberalism, the intellectual history of that liberalism as an idea, how it had evolved from ancient times, then to Middle Ages, then Renaissance and French Revolution. While I was kind of embarrassed that I didn't know him and became more and more interested in his works and read more about him before I ask the next question, because I really love his ideas of who has the right, who should have the right to vote, his ideas of representative government. He was also fearful of the rise of, let's say, popular sovereignty that could lead to despotism, such as what we saw in French Revolution under Napoleon. But would you please just very briefly introduce him, who he was, how he advocated, what was his version of liberalism. I think he's called the father of French liberalism, in a way. He wrote a lot of wonderful texts on liberalism. Could you please introduce him first before we get to talk about his ideas about property in suffrage and elections?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Sure. And I should say I don't think you should be embarrassed at all for not hearing about him. So, you know, one thing we sort of say in this field is Constant was really left out of the Western canon for a very long time, despite being influential during his own lifetime. His thought comes to be eclipsed at the end of the 19th century in France. And then, you know, for a long time, people just don't read him. His work is then not translated into English. And so one sort of trope that keeps coming up when you read Constant or literature around Constant is that probably about 30 years ago there was a quote, unquote, revival. So I'm not surprised that you hadn't heard of him before, because according to scholars, he's really just coming back into vogue. So who was he? So he was a Swiss French parliamentarian. He had. He spent much of his career as a member of the independent Left. We could think of them as liberal independence in the French Chamber of Deputies. He also was deeply influenced by the Revolution, by the Terror, the French Reign of Terror. He also, as you mentioned, is one of the first figures to use the term liberal in a political sense. And for Constant, he thought of himself as liberal to oppose, really either extreme that he saw in the wake of the Revolution, the one extreme being the sort of radical Jacobin extreme, and the other extreme being a very reactionary, aristocratic extreme. And so Constant said to be liberal is to be somewhere between these Two poles. And so he, along with Madame de Stael, who at different points in time is his romantic partner, sort of his intellectual sparring partner. Those two together really introduce this term liberal into the lexicon in this period. And, you know, Constant becomes famous, I think, both for his political career and for his writing. So he becomes a staunch opponent of Napoleon, only to be asked later by Napoleon to write a version of the French constitution. He, as you said, opposes tyranny and despotism. He's got a number of, I think, really provocative writings about arbitrary government, what it means to be arbitrary. And I think his most famous text, political text, is his Principles of Politics. And that's the one in which a lot of his, I would call them, sort of systematic statements about the franchise and the extent of the suffrage are brought out. But as I argue in the book, Constant wrote quite a bit about electoral laws in his own time. So he wrote quite a few pamphlets for and against different electoral arrangements, different suffrage arrangements. So, you know, he's one of these fascinating figures who is both writing texts of political philosophy and he's very much embroiled in French politics of the period. And so we can look at both his theory of the suffrage and his arguments in practice about concepts like representative government.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And I guess part of the reason that I, or I feel better now that you said that a lot of other people don't know or don't know him either, it's because the whole discussion of liberalism has kind of been dominated by these Anglo Anglophone tradition. It's in British or American tradition rather than a French or even German tradition, where I think it's had a lot of contributions to the development of this, of liberalism as a political ideology. Let's talk about Benjamin Constant, how he reconciled or he tried to reconcile to support this direct elections with the endorsement of property based suffrage. And he also advocated for pluralism, Amar pluralism and diversity in his political vision of liberalism. Am I right?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
You're absolutely right. So I'll start with the pluralism and diversity point. So Constant is responding to a number of figures at the time who argued that the French representative assembly should really mirror a kind of unity in society or should embody a kind of unity in society. And this was coming out of the wake of the Revolution, the idea that the French people should embody sort of one people, that there should be a single spirit. Sometimes you see this written about as a kind of there should be a sort of general spirit. A uniform spirit is the term that Constant uses. And one of his Central arguments was that without a pluralistic society that's reflected in its assembly. At one point he says, you know, uniformity is death and diversity is life. So for Constant, unless individual constituencies and interests and locations and territories and localities were represented or received some sort of representation in the assembly, then politics really didn't quite reflect the broader society underneath it. And so, you know, there's other respects, too, in which he. Other writings, especially his writings on religion, in which he argues for, you know, a kind of religious pluralism to allow for the flourishing of religious liberty. And here Constant says, you know, a free nation is one in which society is allowed to be pluralistic, and that pluralism is then reflected in its politics. And why is this pluralism important in politics? Well, Guizot says, you know, the assembly should be a space for deliberation and contestation and discussion. And if we're really just aiming for uniformity, then what is it that we're deliberating or discussing? There isn't much there to disagree about. Even if disagreements persist. This idea that we're sort of papering them over in the name of unity at the level of an assembly just struck Constant as dangerous. In fact, I mean, this is the path to tyranny and to despotism. So that vision of pluralism, I sort of argue in the book structured a lot of his recommendations about how the. Not only how the franchise should be organized, but to your point, how elections should be conducted. So in addition to talking about who should vote, liberals also talked about how they should vote or how elections should be organized. And there's a debate in the book between figures such as Constant and Guizot, who argue for direct elections so in which the people would directly elect their representative, and those like Tocqueville, who argued for a mode of indirect elections in which people would choose some. We could think of it as electoral colleges. There were arrangements for sort of elitist bodies who would then appoint a representative. And for Constant, direct elections were really important because they established that pipeline between the representative and the constituencies or the localities or the groups that he represented. And for Constant, if you actually wanted to achieve pluralism and diversity in the assembly, you had to make sure that there was really that direct conduit between the vote and those who would represent the voters. So for him, anything that sort of stopped up that. That sort of. That conduit or that relationship was potentially tyrannical. And so he worried about this sort of elitist power of appointment versus a genuine power of election. But as you point out, and I thought this was just fascinating. Despite having this argument for direct elections, Constant argues for a limited franchise. So this is not an argument for universal male suffrage. And we should pause here and say the figures in this book, when they use universal suffrage, no one is really thinking yet in terms of women's suffrage in France. There are some socialists on the fringes in the 1840s who are arguing for it, but it's almost a non argument. So when they use universal suffrage, universal male suffrage. But for Constant, he says, look, if we are going to have this direct path to election, we nonetheless have to have some sort of filtering mechanism that keeps all sorts of populist or revolutionary ideas from reaching the assembly, right? So we just can't throw democracy headlong into politics at this moment. And that sort of stopgap or that sort of filtering mechanism for him happened at the organization of the franchise. Now, there are certain points when Constant says that those who will vote will nonetheless be some sort of representative of the whole, because they're going to at some point capture this diversity, this diverse range of views. There are also points where Constant suggests that this limited suffrage wasn't meant to last forever. And so he argues that as social conditions change, and we talked about that idea of democratic society earlier, as society becomes more and more egalitarian, he thought as commerce spreads, as wealth and land are not monopolized, it may be, and I think he hoped, he genuinely hoped that it would be the case, that the franchise would expand, eventually reaching universal suffrage. But that's not an argument that he made directly in his own lifetime.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And in your book, in each chapter you discuss different thinkers. And another one whom I didn't know before reading your book, I must say I might have heard the name somewhere because the last name sounded familiar to me. But I'm not sure if I knew him before reading your book, was Francois Gizon. And I'm not sure again about the pronunciation again, it would be great if you could tell us he was a politician. He was a conservative liberal, I guess. Would be great if we could first introduce him. And he had some really interesting ideas like capable aristocracy. We'll get to talk about them later. But who was Francois Guizot?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Pronunciation is perfect, by the way. I still got that one too. I would say Guizot is even much more obscure than Constant, especially in English speaking circles. So Guizot really begins his career as a university professor, at least where this particular story picks up in the 18th century, 1920s. He is aligned very broadly with a contingent of liberals known as the liberal doctrinaires. And that doctrinaire term is one that was originally quite pejorative. Right. So this idea that you're so doctrinaire, you're so stubborn about a particular view, you can't be moved. But Guizotrin, the other doctrinaires, really reappropriated this term, and they sat sort of in the parliamentary center. They countered the ultra royalist reaction to the revolution. And in the 1820s, Guizot took up a post as a university lecturer in the old Sorbonne in Paris. He gave a series of lectures in this period. The first on representative government and its history, and the second really fascinating series of lectures on the concept of civilization in European history. And even though Guizot wasn't involved directly in French politics in this period, I should say the doctrinaires had been sort of ousted from their government posts when the ultra royalists took over 1820s, he nonetheless uses these lectures to articulate different political positions or intellectual positions about representative government, about rights and liberal values. But he does it really interestingly from the university lecture hall rather than from the representative assembly itself. Sort of a really fascinating figure in this time. If we do know Guizot, however, it's probably from his reputation associated with the Revolution of 1848. So in the July Monarchy that takes power in 1830, Guizot assumes role for a while, he's Minister of Education, but then he becomes sort of primary minister under the July Monarchy. And it's really his ideas about a limited franchise that over time come to be associated with the downfall of the July Monarchy. Though I show in the book that, you know, Guizot had a long career both as a political figure and as someone who wrote texts of political philosophy and political history. And his views on the franchise were perhaps a lot more nuanced than many people give him credit for. So Guizot is the one, as you mentioned, who originates the. Well, not originates, who I argue sort of in the book, systematizes the concept of capacitae. So he attaches it to a theory of history. He really tries to make it an enforceable kind of concept. And by enforceable, I mean he tries to put it into electoral laws that can enfranchise only the capable. And, you know, he's also someone who attaches political capacity to that notion of a democratic or increasingly egalitarian society that we talked about earlier. So according to Guizot, society itself was democratic. And by that he meant that out of the French Revolution, we saw a world without the fixed castes of aristocracy, a world without great families, without social rank. And so he describes democracy as a kind of social state or social condition. And from there, Guizot asks, you know, what kind of politics, what kind of government, what kind of electoral arrangement best fits that particular type of society? And, you know, one intuitive answer we might think is, of course, you put a democratic government or democratic electorate atop a democratic society. But Guizot, I think kind of counterintuitively for us from our vantage point, says, absolutely not. What we need is a capable government led by capable representatives chosen by capable electors. And by that, he meant that we were searching for people, and this is in sort of Guizot's framework, who were able to recognize and participate in and choose with a degree of reason. And so when Guizot was designing his electoral institutions, his ideal sort of electoral institution for democratic society, he was really thinking about who are the most reasonable. And again, you know, you might think that all the problems that plague capacity also plague the standard of rationality or reasonableness. How do you know if somebody's reasonable? And once again, they had to look to external standards to capture this internal kind of quality. So, you know, Guizot is really a multifaceted figure. I think he's a fascinating figure. And, you know, everyone in Europe in the 19th century is talking about Guizot. So it was really at the center of a lot of the questions in the book.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And you mentioned that his idea about who should rule a society, that's a very elitist idea about the government. Am I right?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah. So, you know, it's really interesting how we. So I would say, you know, it's really interesting to unpack how we think about this term elitism. I think, you know, Guizot would embrace the label or the mantle of elitism, for sure. And yet at the same time, he would sit here and say, well, but I want it to be the right elites. And maybe that's a very elitist answer in response to your question. But, you know, both Guizot and Constant feared a kind of oligarchy role of the wealthy. Why? Because really, in Guizot's framework, the wealthy weren't necessarily the most capable. They just happened to have the most money. But it's elitist in the sense that it's certainly not egalitarian. And for Guizot, he actually said something like, why isn't that. Why isn't it the case that we are willing to embrace a kind of inequality in politics? And, you know, Guizot says at some point, you know, we see all kinds of inequality and hierarchy in the world. He says, you know, in nature, in packs, there's always a leader and there are always followers. In the natural world, you've got these natural hierarchies within the animal kingdom. Why shouldn't there be a natural hierarchy or a natural inequality in politics? And so I think he would say, absolutely, there's an elitist element to it, but it has to be this capable kind of aristocracy. And this is really his. One of his terms here. And with that, I think, Guizot resisted the notion that the new elites, the elites of the democratic age or democratic society. He resisted the notion that those new elites had to be the same as the old elites or the old noble aristocrats of Europe. One of Guizot's points here was that age of social hierarchy, the age in which ranks are fixed and great families rule. That idea has just been abolished. That social arrangement has been abolished by the French Revolution. And so what we need now is a new elite really to take its place, but an elite based on the concept of capacity rather than the concept of nobility. So Guizot himself and the concept of capacity occupy this middle ground between a kind of radical egalitarian democracy, which is not what they. What Gizot wanted. But he wasn't an old aristocrat either. He was really trying to find a concept that fit this new democratic age in the sense that it was a more leveled society, but also one that he thought needed the guidance of a capable elite. And that's what he thought he found in the concept of capaciter.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And he also emphasized the role of education. He established a national school system, and he believed that to cultivate his political ideology that education needs to be reformed would be great. If we could talk about his educational reform and his vision of education, how it could support his political vision.
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, that's a great question. So Guizot was interested in questions of pedagogy and educational reform throughout his whole life. In the 1820s, he wrote a series of pamphlets and essays on pedagogy, the kinds of lessons that he thought should be imparted to students at different levels. In 1833, France passes what comes to be known as the Guizot Law, was a really influential law for primary school reform that universalized primary school education and put it under the umbrella of the French states throughout the entire nation. And so Guizot, if he's known today in France, I think it's Both for the 1848 Revolution and for the 1833 law, you know, years later, even after the revolution, everyone's saying, well, you know, we have to give Guizot credit for these strides he's made in educational reform. And one thing that's really interesting is Guizot thought that this particular project of education would support the project of a capable franchise or a capable government.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Why?
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Dr. Gianna Engelard
So, you know, once again, he's very interested in seeing a reasonable, rational government. He's interested in realizing the rule of reason. This is Guizot's term. And so for him, the only way to realize the rule of reason was to have this. And I talk about it in the book as kind of a chain or a chain of linkages between capable voters and their capable representatives who make it into the government. And so Guizot really wanted to see capacity spread throughout society as far as it could possibly go. And so the idea would there be that under this democratic social condition in which more people than ever before can get an education, a primary school education at least, that schools could be used as a vehicle to propagate and sort of spread capacity. Now, having said that, Guizot didn't think that every single lesson should be heard by everybody all the time. In every one of the regions of France, there were specific lessons for specific places. You know, he also didn't think that really the working classes should be sort of thrown headlong into all kinds of lessons all at once. So there was a kind of, we can even call it, to go back to your term, before sort of elitist caution about how we would proceed with these educational reforms. But Guizot certainly saw the project of building capacity through education as something that went hand in hand with the idea of a capable or reasonable government.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's move to the. Perhaps one of the most famous thinkers that or more people might know, Tocqueville and the chapters called Tocqueville's Other Democracy. And how did his observations of America shape his vision of French democracy? What did he learn from them? And two questions. I'll let you answer the first one before getting to the second one.
- [39:03]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, sure, sure. Okay. So, yeah, the title of this chapter is sort of a play on democracy in America. So I think, especially in the English speaking. More when we think of Tocqueville, we think of Tocqueville as a theorist of American democracy. And we may also think of Tocqueville as the theorist of democracy as a social state. I mean, this is one of the famous interventions that we associate with the text Democracy in America. Tocqueville says, I examined the social state of the Anglo Americans. It was a set of material and intellectual conditions, and their social state is democratic. And then he proceeds to tell us in that text about all the elements of that social state, that American democratic social state. And we think of that as that. You know, that's Tocqueville's democracy. That's what he has to tell us about it. But as I show in the book, Tocqueville thought about other kinds of democracy and other places as well. So we will sort of recall that in the introduction to Democracy in America, he tells us, I'm really writing this for the Old world. I'm really writing this for Europe, so that Europe can understand and maybe draw some lessons about how to navigate its own democratic revolution. So he was also concerned with French democracy. That's one sense in which this chapter is about the other democracy. But he's also really interested in political or electoral democracy as well. So Tocqueville does famously write about democracy as a social state, and this is a perspective and a term that he got from Guizot. So Tocqueville sat in Guizot's 1828 Lectures on European civilization, and he was able to study Guizot's perspective on society and social conditions. But he was also really interested in the extent of the franchise and the extent of the suffrage. And so one of the things I try to do in this book is when we think about his discussions and his observations of America specifically. Yes, Tocqueville certainly gave us all of these rich observations of democratic culture in the New World, but he also was really interested in the suffrages in the United States. So he's interested in the state suffrages. He's interested in the way that universal white male suffrage perhaps forestalls revolution in the United States. These were all lessons in political democracy that I think he conveyed to the French as well. I mean, one huge lesson that he takes from American democracy is the idea that universal suffrage is neither as bad as its European opponents made it out to be, but nor is it as good as the democrats or the Republicans in Europe made it out to be. Right? So he sort of says in America, he investigates its good and its bad sides. What are its bad sides? Well, he says it's sort of all the things that the Europeans say. It doesn't always result in the best outcomes. It doesn't always elect the best. The best people. But what are some of its advantages? He says, well, in a country where everyone can vote. And again, I use that in the context of the way that these thinkers are using it. We know that this means white males in the States. Tocqueville says, in an environment or a situation in which everyone can vote, no single group gets to claim that it's really been left out of the political process. Right? So everyone's at the ballot box. Every vote counts for one. We should, in fact, see people making equal claims on this electoral process. And so, you know, while his contemporaries in France were saying universal suffrage would spell anarchy and revolution and destruction, and these are all arguments that I bring out in the book, Tocqueville says, but actually, the Americans seem to do it pretty well, and maybe there's some lesson we can draw from their experience.
- [43:10]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And as you mentioned, one thing I liked about his work is that he saw both sides of that democracy, both the positive stabilizing elements and also the negative or destabilizing consequences. And why did he question I have. Is why did he, despite the fact that he had some reservations against suffrage, but he ultimately supported the broad suffrage movement? Why was that?
- [43:41]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, that's a really good question. So, you know, just as you said, I think Tocqueville is compelling to us for the reason that he is ambivalent on democracy. He's of two minds. He recognizes its advantages and disadvantages. And I think it was the same with a universal franchise. So first, I think, you know, Tocqueville didn't think that we should take all of the examples of America and just import them directly onto France. So that was never the aim. The aim was never to pick up American institutions and send them to France and hope that they would work. Instead, it was really about experimenting and testing, comparing a comparative kind of model for institutions. So I think, you know, when Tocqueville enters French politics in 1839, he's now at the epicenter of these arguments about the nature of the suffrage in his own country. And so, you know, he's embroiled in political debates. And he says in the debate in 1842, hey, we've expanded. You know, we've got something of a broader suffrage here than we did, or he argues, at least that we did in the 1830s. Their numbers weren't always accurate, but that's a different issue than we did in the 1830s. And I think, you know, for this moment, Tocqueville says, I think we've got enough political democracy here. Only six years later, Tocqueville sees revolution on the horizon. And, you know, he starts to say something like, seems like conditions are changing. And he famously gives a speech in The French Chamber, in which he says, you know, it seems like we're sitting atop kind of a simmering volcano that revolution is on the horizon. But I think in order to interpret some of those terms and to interpret Tocqueville's turn to universal suffrage, we have to think about. Take sort of a long view about a lot of his observations of the July monarchy, of which Guizot was a minister. So throughout the 1840s, Tocqueville says, you know, there's something really sort of missing in this bourgeois regime. Its policies are narrow, its prescriptions are narrow. Tocqueville was always concerned with the lifelessness of France under the regime. He thought, you know, there's not much civil society. There's not a lot of participatory. There's not a lot of public spirit. There's not a robust public sphere. And so, you know, he started to ask, why is that? And he. By 1848, he seems to attribute it to the narrow, in part, at least the narrowness of the franchise. There's also a line of thought in the book. Tocqueville in the 1840s was really a crusader against government corruption. And Will Sellinger at Oklahoma has a really great series of arguments about Tocqueville's suggestions for administrative reforms against corruption. But in this book, I argue that Tocqueville also had a. Imagined the way that a universal suffrage might help to ameliorate the problems of corruption in his own time. So he thought, you know, if you've got a really small franchise and you've got a corrupt system, all you're doing is reproducing that corruption and that patronage over and over again. So the same group of people vote for the same candidates over and over again, same representatives, and we don't remedy the system. We don't fix the system that way. So TOEFL comes to think maybe the time is right to expand this suffrage so as to break some of these, break really this bourgeois monopoly that he calls it in the 1840s and 1830s on representation. So I think there are quite a few reasons for his turn toward more political democracy based really on the conditions of France at the time. Again, some having to do with corruption, some having to do with impending revolution, and some having to do with dissatisfaction about the nature of the current regime.
- [47:31]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And another thinker, again, whom I didn't know, and by the way, I'm beginning to feel better because you kind of confirmed that a lot of people don't know these thinkers. So that makes me feel a little Bit better.
- [47:40]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Especially these last two. Especially these last two. If you're going to listen to.
- [47:44]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Absolutely. I'm sure a lot of people won't know them. And I'm not sure about the pronunciation. I've been lucky so far, anyhow. The other one is Edouard Laboulaye. I guess I really enjoyed the way that he talked about political capacity. He tried to redefine political capacity as Enlightenment. So he sought to kind of reconciled universal suffrage with liberal principles. And he was obviously influenced by Benjamin Constant and Tocqueville. He defined democracy as self government. He also had a lot of emphasis on education, morality, civil society. And he tried to kind of replace that idea of capacity with enlightenment. Would you talk about that, please? That aspect of his work. Tell us who he was and then talk about his idea of political capacity as Enlightenment.
- [48:35]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, and I think, you know, these last two figures, Edouard Laboulet and Duvalger de Horon, were. These are. These are fairly obscure people, so I don't really expect many people to know who these figures were. Lauble is interesting, though, because despite his relative obscurity, he was a really important figure in Anglo French relations in this period. So it was La Boule who helped to conceive of the idea of the Statue of Liberty as a gift to the United States. And, yeah, he raised money for it. There's an excellent book called Sentinel, which goes through this. It really tells in very sparkling detail the narrative of how the Statue of Liberty came to be. And La Boule plays a starring role in that story. He himself was an admirer of American democracy. He was a reader of Tocqueville. He never actually came to the United States in the way that Tocqueville did. He always cited ill health. I mean, I'm not sure exactly why he never came, but he studied American institutions from afar. He was a professor of constitutional law. He was a jurist. And after the 1848 revolution, he not only enters politics, but he publishes a number of recommendations pamphlets on the French Constitution, on French republicanism. And then during the French Second Empire, he assumes a role. I mean, we can think of him as a peacemaker among the liberal factions at the time. He really tries to unify the Liberal party under a set of principles. And I talk in the book how I think those principles were really influenced by his readings of Constant and Tocqueville. But La Valet is also indebted to this tradition of liberal thought that approaches democracy as a kind of social state. And so we've already seen how, for Guizot and Tocqueville the idea of a democratic social state structured their recommendations about the franchise. La Valle goes even further than these other two in imagining what a democratic social state is. So for lack of a better term in the book, I call it the new New democracy because Guizot gave us the first new democracy. But La Boule says, you know, if you look around post 1848, the working classes are exhibiting all of the signs of self government, he says, and really we can think of it all the signs of capacit. They are forming worker associations, they are creating unions. Lebelli himself founded a series of free subscription libraries around France and he gave a number of lectures to the working classes. So you can say, you know, he's one of these rare people in history who actually puts his principles into practice and spreads a kind of enlightenment. You know, in thinking about capacity as enlightenment, I think Guizot is trying to change the terms through which French liberals thought about the franchise. So, you know, when Guizot uses the term capacity, he's using it as a limiting concept. As we talked about earlier, one had to be capable to exercise the franchise. One had to display some sort of outward sign of reason in order to exercise this right to vote. So it was a qualification and it was a limitation. Writing after 1848, when France institutes a republican constitution with universal suffrage, Lavallee says, look, liberals can't fight now against the constitutional status quo. This is a matter now of constitutional law. And so the question is, how do you then achieve a quote, unquote capable government when you can't control the size or the shape of the electorate? And Leball says, why don't we turn in fact to the process of using or thinking about institutions as vehicles of enlightenment? So Laboulet, very much like Guizot, interested in education, wrote quite a bit about the American education system. But he argues that, you know, civil society itself, this sort of associational life in a Tocquevillian vein, is capable of, or, I'm sorry, it's. Yeah, it's capable of spreading a kind of enlightenment. It's capable of allowing workers to receive the kind of knowledge that they might need, knowledge of political life, of the public sphere, that they may need to then enter politics. And so by shifting the terms from capacity to a kind of enlightenment, La Bolay is acknowledging a new kind of politically democratic status quo, but I think still trying to maintain liberals role within it. Not any longer as sort of the. The limitations on the suffrage right or the final arbiters on who can, who can, who can vote, but really as the figures who are leading this project of education to spread enlightenment.
- [53:40]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And there was another concept that he had, which is. Sorry, I'm mixing it with the other next chapter.
- [53:50]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Oh, it's okay.
- [53:52]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, it's. How. How. How would you say that his vision of liberalism would mark a departure, maybe a point of difference, from earlier French liberal. Liberal thinkers?
- [54:05]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, that's a great question. Laboulay is right. That's what you're asking, la's vision. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's really funny because. Or it's fascinating to me because I think Lavallee is someone who is looking to the liberal tradition for guidance. Right. So he's one of these figures who is looking. I mean, we know he's reading Constant. We know he's reading Tocqueville and gaining quite a lot from them and trying to, I think, merge the two perspectives to create his own. You know, I think for Laboulet, he doesn't see, as I said, sort of liberalism as wedded to the concept of capacity as a limitation on the franchise. He also often talks about liberal democracy. This is really one of the first times where we get that combination, and not as a combination that's necessarily dangerous or unnatural. So, you know, for Laboulet, liberal democracy is possible as long as liberalism now becomes this philosophy of a kind of enlightenment, a philosophy of a project of education or an ideology of education. So, you know, I think he's taking. The way that I sort of frame it in the book is that he's taking existing elements of liberal philosophy and sort of turning them on their head and saying they have to necessarily undergo a transformation. But it's a transformation that I think Level A thinks other liberals ought to or would have acknowledged, because it's a transformation consistent with the idea of democracy as a social state. So I think if, you know, if we could ask Lavoulet, I think he would say, look, I'm not departing really with the foundations that Constant took, Phil. I think even Guizot have given to the Liberal Party. He says, I'm really just. I mean, kind of, for lack of a better term. Right. I'm really fulfilling what they said about liberal democracy or about democracy as a social state by combining this idea of a universal franchise with the concept of enlightenment as a liberal goal.
- [56:11]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's talk about the last figure and this one. I'm sure I'll get the pronunciation.
- [56:16]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
That's all right. That's all right. Let's do it.
- [56:17]
Morteza Hajizadeh
A few minutes. Do we gear? Well, I'll leave it to you.
- [56:19]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Duvalger. Duvalger.
- [56:21]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Duvalger. First introduce him. Tell him. Tell us who he was. Like, I'm absolutely. Again, he's someone I absolutely didn't know anything about before reading your book. First tell us who he was. Briefly introduce him, and then I'll have a couple of questions on him as well.
- [56:36]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah. So this one is the most obscure of all of them. In a book of obscure figures, he is the most obscure in part because he has a much more famous father who outlives him. So his father's name is Prosper Duverger de Horon the younger. The one I write about is Ernest Duverger de Horon, the younger Duverger his father. So the elder Prosper Duverger is an official under the July Monarchy. He was once aligned with Guizot, but he sort of famously breaks with Guizot and the party of order that Guizot leads. And so when the younger Duverger is growing up, he's really growing up in all of these liberal circles. He hears talk of Tocqueville. He understands the perspective of Guizot and those around him. When he is 21 years old, he undertakes a trip, or he begins a trip to the United States. He spends eight months in America, and he publishes his observations as a series of essays in a French paper, a liberal paper. Review of Two Worlds is the translation. And so he's sending these, you know, they're somewhere between journal entries and essays and observations. He's sending them one by one back to his father in France, and his father's publishing them one by one. So it becomes sort of a series that readers can sort of pick up each week or every two weeks, I think it was. And he spends eight months in America. The volume is eventually published under that title. And while Duverger is there, I think we should note, first of all, he comes during the American Civil War, and so he's seeing a very different side of America than Tocqueville did. But he writes in the introduction to the volume, when it's eventually published, he says, what better way to study democracy in America than to see it really tested in wartime? You know, it's this idea that we can really see the true colors of something or recognize the value of something if we test it under difficult conditions. And so, just as Tocqueville did, he wrote a series of observations about American style democracy. The reason that I include him in the book, the reason that I think he is important is not only for this American Tocquevillian style perspective in the sense that he's bringing American insights to think about French problems. But I think he's interesting because he has this concept of political parties as in some way reconstituting a capable aristocracy for a new age.
- [59:16]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And one of these concepts that I liked was the idea of natural powers and how it's sort of in contrast with that traditional liberal elitism. What did he mean by natural powers, and how did he challenge that idea of liberal elitism?
- [59:35]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, you know, so this is a. This is a really great question. So let's go back to Guizot for a moment. Guizot really invoked, as we talked about earlier, that idea of nature as a justification for the new aristocracy. So remember, he sort of said, in the natural world, we see all kinds of hierarchies. Why wouldn't we have them in politics, too? And, you know, Duvanger goes on to say, you know, there's a. There's a cosmological kind of image that he uses where he says, yeah, it's true that, you know, in the heavens in space, great planets are orbited by small ones, and it must be the same in the political world. But he doesn't use that same image of nature in the way that Guizot does, in that he doesn't use it to justify a kind of political or electoral hierarchy. Instead, he says, what kinds of institutions, what kinds of political social institutions, groups, associations, can we create that mimic those natural powers or that order of nature in the political world? So Guizot said, I want to mirror the order of nature by restricting the franchise to the capable and achieving rationality or capital r reason in the government diverge. De Horan comes along again in the context of universal suffrage, and he says, okay, so we're not going to return to sort of that old liberal strategy of achieving rank and hierarchy and mirroring nature by restricting who can vote instead, and this is one of his great innovations, let's think about political parties as those great planets around which smaller planets orbit. In other words, he thought. And he's beginning to conceive of political parties as kind of unifying organizations with a single platform, a way of conveying information. So they had this epistemic role, they had this unifying role. They had an associational role. It was also a way to go back to sort of Constant's image of pluralism and deliberation. And political parties, he thought, would sort of stage a debate. I mean, again, from our vantage, this is a very idealized way that political parties work. But in the 19th century. He's really just thinking of this sort of embryonic kind of institution that can possibly approximate all the functions of a capable franchise without restricting who can actually vote. So in that way, I think you're right. He's pushing against the traditional elitism. But notice that for all of these figures in this book, there's still some aristocratic or meritocratic, we might call it. There's some sort of aristocratic counterpoint to democracy itself. None of them really abandon that. It's just a question of where you place that counterpoint, where you put a kind of aristocracy. Do you place an aristocracy at the level of the franchise and less limit who will vote, or do you try to find other kinds of institutions that approximate what an aristocracy does? And that's what duvaljer tries to do.
- [62:34]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And I really like how he described parties as estates within a state. I found that a quite interesting analogy there.
- [62:44]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah. So he learns about some of this. Oh, sorry. Yeah, he learns about some of this because he's here during the 1864 presidential election in the United States. And so he attends the Democratic convention in Chicago, and he gets there and he says, oh, this, you know, this spectacle just seems to be alarming. People are so riled up about politics. It's so partisan. But by the end, he says, you know, there seems to be something to this institution. It seems to organize when. And, you know, even says, like, when the election is over. Yes, there's still a civil war going on, but most people do go back to business as usual. There's not a lot of rioting in the streets because the parties sort of keep things organized. So, you know, he says that they form kind of a state within a state in that they can form a kind of platform. And in saying that, he's also sort of pushing against this notion of a single, unified, homogenous, or we might think of it as like an autocratic state. He says there are other intermediary institutions in society that can perform organizational roles, and the party can be one of them.
- [63:58]
Morteza Hajizadeh
One final question. It is related to the book. I always try to end the podcast that I have with a question about the present time and how the content of the book can help us better understand the challenges we're facing today. Your book is not trying to give us a definition of liberalism. In a way, it is an intellectual history of how different thinkers thought about liberalism and democracy. And you know, that I guess you agree that a lot of people would say that liberalism is in crisis these days. And even 20 years ago, John Gray talked about post liberalism, and I have no idea what that means. People there are conservatives like Patrick Deneen have a completely different idea of post liberalism compared to other liberals who are more critical of liberalism as it is today. But again, the question of liberalism and democracy, it's a prominent one. And I'm guessing even in the past two years with the conflict between Palestine and Israel and how more and more people have been taken to the street to protest against the government supporting one party or another, and they have started to even question the idea of liberalism and liberal governments more and how, whether it is even democratic or not. I'm wondering, do you think liberalism today as we understand it is more aligned with democracy despite the fact that we are seeing the rise of right wing populists around the world, more authoritarian governments everywhere in the world? What do you think of the tension or alignment between liberalism and democracy in 2025?
- [65:42]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, this is a great question. We should do a whole other podcast on these series of questions, actually. Whole separate one. You know, I liked sort of the way you frame this in terms of their intellectual sort of questions about liberalism that are fueled by kind of political chaos, political questions about the viability of liberalism, the viability of free governments. There's even a question, and you sort of got at this, what, what liberalism even means today. This has become a term, sort of a catch all term. It means all things to all people. People who don't like liberalism use it as a pejorative. People, some people want to reclaim it. Right. And so it, it brings all good things. You know, in terms of the tension today, I think this is an interesting question. I don't think the tension has certainly gone away or faded away. I think we're coming at it from the other side now. So liberals and Democrats in my book, or liberals and Republicans as those who generally argued for universal franchise, you know, they were trying to, in liberals case, keep something that was originally separate, separated, whereas Republicans were trying to bring it together. And now I think most of us concerned with the fate of global politics and really our global welfare are trying to think about how to keep these two things together. Really trying to hold on to these two things as being unified. You know, one thing that my book sort of leaves us with is just this question of how long that's possible for or whether that's possible and whether it's possible without something that looks illiberal. And by that I don't mean illiberal in sort of an autocratic, despotic, tyrannical sense, but I mean, do we need to have certain kinds of regulating institutions that in fact seem inegalitarian from our perspective, things that don't fit very easily within a liberal egalitarian framework? And so, you know, as you know from our earlier discussion, someone like Guizot talked about a capable kind of aristocracy. The other figures talk about, you know, political parties feeling, filling this role. And so, you know, I think now it really directs us to the problem. But from the other direction, if we really do think that we ought to be holding these two things together as a matter of world freedom, as a matter of global welfare, then I guess one lesson from the book is for us to really rethink what liberalism and democracy need as the glue that would actually keep them together. And I think the figures in this book offer a series of pretty provocative answers in that direction.
- [68:32]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Is there any other book or project that you're currently working on?
- [68:37]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Yeah, so my second book that I'm working on is really about receptions and interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, mostly following his death and into the 20th century. So the working title is it goes back to this crisis framework that you gave us, Tocqueville and the Crises of Democracy. So I look at how different figures appropriated and used Tocqueville's vision of democracy at different moments of perceived sort of political crisis. So one is at the end of 19th century France, the second is interwar Britain, and the third is Cold War era United States. One of the angles that I'm trying to take in this book is to think about how Tocqueville was not only appropriated by those we might most closely associate with him, so traditional sort of liberal Republicans, or in America, you know, those on the religious right or those who identify as some sort of broadly conservative, sharing some broadly conservative sympathies. I do look at those figures, but I'm also interested in how figures on the political and cultural left look to Tocqueville at these moments. So the chapter that I'm actually working on now is really Tocqueville himself talking to a series of leftist writers and figures who read and learned quite a bit from democracy in America. What I'm really interested in is what did they learn? Which visions of democracy did they take from Tocqueville? What did they think could be discarded? And then really, how did they appropriate that for Europe?
- [70:11]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Well, I certainly hope to be, but it sounds like a fascinating topic similarly relevant to today's challenges and issues. And I hope to be able to talk to you about that book. I'm guessing you might be out in the market in a year or so.
- [70:24]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Hey, let's go for two. Let's go for two years now.
- [70:27]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Okay. Two or three. Takes a long time to write a book.
- [70:31]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
A lot of pressure.
- [70:32]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You're right. Yeah.
- [70:33]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Blame that on publishing timelines, not me publishing.
- [70:36]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah. So I certainly hope to be able to talk to you sometime soon about your new book as well. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network. The book we just discussed, what Democracy Tamed French Liberalism and the politics of suffrage. Dr. Diana Engelart, thank you very much for your time on New Books Network.
- [70:56]
Dr. Gianna Engelard
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure and really fun to discuss this with you.
- [71:05]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Sam.