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tocqueville’s dilemmas, and ours Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours sovereignty, nationalism, globalization ewa atanassow prince ton university press princet on & oxford Copyright © 2022 by Prince ton University Press Prince ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press . princeton . edu Published by Prince ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press . princeton . edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 9780691191102 ISBN (e- book) 9780691228464 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Bridget Flannery- McCoy & Alena Chekanov Production Editorial: Ali Parrington Jacket Design: Heather Hansen Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Kate Hensley & Charlotte Coyne Copyeditor: Isabella Ritchie This book has been composed in Arno Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my parents who tried to hold together an impossible world. To my daughter hoping she might succeed. contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 (Popu lar) Sovereignty and Constitutionalism 20 2 Nationalism and Democracy 62 3 Whither Globalization? 105 Conclusion: Sustaining Liberal Democracy 149 Notes 179 Bibliography 223 Index 247 vii preface this book rec ords my long journey in the com pany of Alexis de Tocqueville. It began on an after noon in the mid-1990s in Poland, at a street bookseller in downtown Kraków where I first chanced on Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution in the brand- new Polish edition put out by the Stefan Batory Foundation. I had recently graduated with a master’s degree from Jagiellonian Uni- versity’s Institute of Psy cholo gy and was on a quest for new vistas. What made me look for those in The Old Regime, I no longer re- member, but I do recall being dazzled by the bright light that Toc- queville’s account of eighteenth- century France shone on the to- talitarian experience that my part of the world had been through for much of the closing c entury. My intellectual path, which had originated in communist Bul- garia and taken shape in Poland in the early years of the postcom- munist transition, took me next to KU Leuven in Belgium where I first experienced life in Western Eu rope, and had a chance to grapple with Tocqueville in academic En glish. This paved the way for my greatest educational adventure: doctoral studies at the Uni- versity of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Though I had spent time in the West, moving to the United States came as a shock: from the pace of daily life to its intensely participatory university culture, this country was unlike anything I had known. And amid the strangeness of Amer i ca, the uncompromising spirit of the University of Chicago seemed stranger still. It was only when I reached for Tocqueville’s Democracy in Amer i ca that this unfamil- iar experience began to make sense, much in the way Eastern ix