De Tocqueville Identity

A unified nation cannot endure peacefully without the glue of a national identity. While a dictator can dominate his or her people with the use of military force, one ruled in such a way succumbs to political change and revolution far more frequently than one held together by the pseudo-familial bond of a shared identity. As such, both Alexis de Tocqueville and Frantz Fanon concern themselves with the topic national identity, both in colonial period Algeria and abroad. For Fanon, this comes with the focus of how the colonized peoples can create and rebuild a national identity after many years under foreign rule. In direct contrast, de Tocqueville aims to manipulate the multiple identities present in Algeria during the 1830s to best allow
In his iconic text on the United States, de Tocqueville writes that “once it is established, we can consider it as the fundamental source of most of the laws, customs, and ideas which regulate the conduct of nations; whatever it does not produce, it modifies” (Democracy in America 58). Even more so, the national identity of the United States leads to a unity in not only customs and ideas, but also the very method of thought: “almost all the inhabitants move in the same direction and are guided according to the same rules…. they possess, without ever having gone to the trouble of defining the rules, a certain philosophical methodology common to all of them” (Democracy in America 493). Fanon agrees with de Tocqueville’s analysis that the identity of the people proves powerful enough to not only influence what they think, but even how they think. Through the domination of the colonizers, the colonized subjects have their identity reduced to just that, colonized subjects. “After one or two centuries of exploitation the national cultural landscape has radically shriveled. It has become and inventory of behavioral patterns, traditional costumes, and miscellaneous customs” (Fanon 172). Once methodically broken down, a hatred for colonial ideals becomes the replacement for the original culture. “The dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality… the
De Tocqueville critiques the behavior of the French colonists in Algeria, stating “In place of an administration [the colonists] had destroyed root and branch, they imagined they would substitute French administration in the districts that we occupied… [but] after having destroyed their government, we did not give them another” (Writings on Empire and Slavery 18). Because of the tribal and semi-nomadic natures of the people of Algeria at the time of French colonization, a bureaucracy similar to that in France did not provide any services to the colonized people. He continues stating that instead of attempting to completely overhaul the system, “we should for a time have bent to their ways, preserved the political delimitaztions, taken on the fallen government’s officials, accepted its tradition and guarded its practices” (Writings on Empire and Slavery 19). The culture and identity of the people dictates the way that power must be exercised over them. Similarly for Fanon, “The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people… no leader, whatever his worth, can replace the will of the people” (Fanon 143-144). While Fanon puts a more democratizing spin on this concept than de Tocqueville, they both clearly believe that any ruling must be done in