{"id":28,"date":"2019-12-18T20:32:21","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T20:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/?p=28"},"modified":"2020-02-29T17:18:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-29T17:18:14","slug":"tocqueville-capital-what-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/2019\/12\/18\/tocqueville-capital-what-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Tocqueville Capital \u2013 What is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the blog series Tocqueville Capital, which will connect the writings of a Frenchman who spent 9 months in America during the early 1800s to more current works in a variety of fields. Alexis De Tocqueville journeyed here as a means of gathering information from the just decades-old U.S. government, which offered a new experiment of indirect democracy in its constitution, albeit one that, at that time, did not include all those born in its lands as full citizens.\u00a0 Coming from France, recovering from the French Revolution and its aftermath, he sought to discern the transferable pieces of this new form of government for his native land.\u00a0 Many other sources have covered his history and the general context for Democracy in America,<\/em> which is not my purpose in this series, so I have linked to a reasonable-length summary on this credible site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although some historic writings keep their importance because of the ideas or information that they convey about the time in which they were written, Tocqueville\u2019s work provides even more reasons to care about his writing today.\u00a0 The book itself has come out in dozens of editions – 67 by a count of Google Scholar, as of the writing of this post.\u00a0 Moreover, the application of his work continues.\u00a0 To this day, researchers continue to test many of his observations about the nature and function of democracy as well as human behavior, specifically within America but also with relevance to other countries as well.\u00a0 Books and articles of the very present-day add to the sizeable list of 20,000+ works – 23249 by a count of Google Scholar, as of this post – that connect the value of his ideas to our current society.\u00a0 His ideas have become a form of intellectual capital for our continued work in a variety of fields \u2013 from political science to communication to organizational psychology and others.<\/p>\n

This series will explore the ways in which Tocqueville\u2019s intellectual capital impacts our current understanding of the world.\u00a0 Each month the posts will explore an aspect of his work as it relates to a specific book or article.\u00a0 Readers might be surprised at all of the relevant connections that exist!\u00a0 The first full post will focus on the work of Robert Putnam, a Neo-Tocquevillean \u2013 yes, that\u2019s a term \u2013 who has done extensive research and applied work on the topic of social capital.<\/p>\n

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\"Profile<\/a>About the Tocqueville Capital blogger (Dr. Robin Lauermann):\u00a0 I currently serve as a Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations, which hosts this blog site. I have specific expertise in two sub-fields.\u00a0 Within American politics, I teach and research on topics related to political institutions, public policy, and political behavior, with special consideration as to how they impact the functioning of our political system.\u00a0 Within Comparative Politics, I look at many of the same themes, but within the regional areas of Latin America and Europe.\u00a0 Above all, my passion and work focus on empowering people \u2013 students, colleagues, and citizens \u2013 to be able to better understand our political system in order to navigate it and evaluate it constructively.\u00a0 I teach a First Year Seminar grounded in Tocqueville\u2019s work and integrate his writing into other courses.\u00a0 My research on representative democracy also draws heavily on his work.\u00a0 With this series, I hope to share the ways in which ideas can spread across time and fields, building our common good.<\/p>\n

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Welcome to the blog series Tocqueville Capital, which will connect the writings of a Frenchman who spent 9 months in America during the early 1800s to more current works in a variety of fields. Alexis De Tocqueville journeyed here as a means of gathering information from the just decades-old U.S. government, which offered a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11814],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tocqueville-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.messiah.edu\/politicsinternationalrelations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}