TOCQUEVILLE'S PIG'S BREAKFAST IN AMERICA

'The emotional and moral restraint of the American people...'

This was the wishful thinking of a democratic atheist revolutionary.

This is what he thought of America in a more sober moment, a real Pig's Breakfast:

'...in a word a society possessing no roots, no memories, no prejudices, no routine, no common ideas, no national character.' AT to Chabrol, See Clark, p. 61.

People think that colonists were long united against Britain prior to 1776. They were not. They were disunited, and usually at one another's throats over land or religion or trade, and more.

Colonial America "displayed the problems of England, Scotland, and Ireland in a more acute form." Clark, Ch 3 sec III. 

The unrest, disorder, and fragmentation inherent in the place did not improve with time and every increasing immigration of impoverished heterodox, later including even Catholic and Jewish disparate populations, developments unthinkable at colonial foundings.

They think that winning the American colonial Civil War resulted in an end to all manner of violent and wide ranging religious social and economic unrest. It did not. 

See, for example, T P Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion; Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution; J C D Clark, The Language of Liberty, Ch 3, Secs III, V especially.

Whigs read Tocqueville and then read ideas only becoming current by around 1830 back into 18th Century. 

R R Palmer had written at great length about a democratic revolution, all of which I read, but he couldn't figure out why they had not used that word! Clark explained why. See Our Shadowed Present, p. 230

riday, May 3, 2019

CLARK ON R R PALMER FLINTSTONES HISTORY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQin6KDobhI

This was Clark's term, not mine.

Schroeder makes a similar point, re Palmer.

The Problem of Postmodern Presentism
Clark called Palmer's account
Parochial Presentism.

He gives a similar treatment to Lynn Hunt's notion of human rights, a nice purgative!