<\/em>\u201cnew political science\u201d and a search to answer, \u201cWhat was Tocqueville putting behind him?\u201d with his declaredly new approach.<\/p>\nThe University of Virginia professor took as his first clue to answering this central question that Tocqueville\u2019s thorough study is perplexingly silent on the Declaration of Independence, though an important American work of his contemporary, Thomas Jefferson.<\/p>\n
Ceasar considered many possibilities to finally deduce of the\u00a0 omission was deliberate.<\/p>\n
He quoted Tocqueville as once writing that Thomas Jefferson was \u201cthe most powerful apostle democracy has ever had\u201d and put aside the possibility that the snub of the Declaration of Independence was meant for its author.<\/p>\n
Instead, he concluded that Tocqueville left out the Declaration of Independence, with language borrowed heavily from the writings of John Locke, because its basis in the theory of\u00a0 Natural Rights.<\/p>\n
Ceasar identified Natural Rights Theory and\u00a0 the 17th century political science of Locke and Adam Smith as what Tocqueville wanted to usher out for his new age of new political science.<\/p>\n
The Revolution of 1789 had left many in France disillusioned with natural rights theory as it played out in their own country.<\/p>\n
At the core of Democracy in America<\/em> is Tocqueville\u2019s choice to focus his observations on the institutions, habits, social customs, and \u201csoul\u201d of America rather than the written record of its philosophical origins in 1776.<\/p>\nCesar invoked the work of many other scholars in examining his conclusion that Tocqueville\u2019s new science was a depreciation of natural law.<\/p>\n
He advised the audience to take notice of the rhetoric of universal rights in the current political discourse and punctuated the end of his expansive lecture when he asked it be \u201can agenda setting\u00a0 for future meetings of the Tocqueville program\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Sara Morano \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
Embedded in Alexis de Tocqueville\u2019s prolific work, Democracy in America<\/em>, is a lofty promise.\u00a0 According to Professor James Ceasar,\u00a0 \u201cA new political science for a new age\u201d is what Tocqueville set out to create when in 1835 he published the first volume of Democracy in America<\/em>; an astonishingly rich collection of observations, analysis and predictions on American political life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}