Tecniche di democrazia naturale. Pedagogia e politica in Rousseau e Tocqueville
Revistas
Teoria Politica
Teoria Politica 2015
Tecniche di democrazia naturale. Pedagogia e politica in Rousseau e Tocqueville
Tecniche di democrazia naturale. Pedagogia e politica in Rousseau e Tocqueville
Ficha técnica
A «functional coexistence» of two contradictory elements —freedom and necessity, enthusiasm and coercion— is being increasingly adopted by both management discourses and contemporary political storytelling. Enterprises openly demand workers to assume their (usually nonnegotiable) tasks as steps in their own personal development. Similarly, democratic rhetoric wishes citizens to engage in the public sphere neither as simple rights-owners nor by political participation, but rather experiencing enthusiasm. «Voluntary and community sector» and «sharing economy» are the key operational units of this tendency, which we assume to mostly result in more self-exploitation and a higher degree of political domination. In this paper we argue that analogue overlaps were underlying the theories of two of the most important thinkers of the democratic tradition, Rousseau and Tocqueville. We first analyze Rousseau's pedagogic theory, whose primary goal is to lead the child to want natural necessity. We then argue that (although Rousseau's political thought can't obviously be reduced to its pedagogy) Émile could be read as a development (and even as a practical solution) of some of the open problems of the Social Contract. Finally we move to Tocqueville's democratic theory: we mostly focus on his idea of township as a «natural» form of human government. We argue that Tocqueville knowingly revisits the problem of the overlaps between freedom and necessity (or political autonomy and natural development): and by doing that he suggests us a different (and much more emancipatory) way of looking at contemporary economic and political rhetoric.
