The interactions between metropolitan France and its former colonies have been complex, often hegemonically skewed, and typically strained. Still, an… - Dominick LaCapra

Rhetoric engages the dialectic of recognition among speakers, of which certain forms of persuasion are only the monological variants. It also fosters the awareness that a dialogical relation to the past encounters the problem of coming to terms with “transference” in the psychoanalytic sense of a repetition/displacement of the “object” of study in one’s own discourse about it—a problem that is circumvented or repressed both in the idea of full empathetic communion with the past and in the idea of a totally objective representation of it.

Contemporary sociocultural history was in part motivated by a justifiable revolt against an abstracted history of ideas. But it has often tended simply to reverse the latter’s assumptions (through reductionism) and to replicate its documentary treatment of artifacts (as symptoms of society or economy rather than mind). It has also replicated an all-too-prevalent social reaction to intellectual history’s objects of study (both artifacts and artists or intellectuals).

Tocqueville certainly wants to be meticulous in his research and accurate in his facts. He makes pointed reference to all the archives he has visited and is manifestly concerned about establishing his narrative and analytic authority. But he is also preoccupied with the problem of proximity and distance in his relation to his subject matter. And he does at times question himself, change voices, and make explicit but modulated use of irony, parody, and other rhetorical devices. Tocqueville thus enacts one form of dialogic exchange with the past, a form in some instances so pronounced that it may disconcert more conventional historians who might otherwise find congenial his methodology, his balanced and often mellifluous style, and his basic conception of historical discourse. He also manifests a tension between a desire for objectivity and an involvement or implication in the events he treats. At certain times his voice is explicitly normative and performative, particularly with reference to his desire to give his defence of liberty implications for the present and future.