¹University of Washington

^*Thanks to K. Anthony Appiah, Lawrie Balfour, Charles Beitz, Jillian Cutler, Patrick Deneen, Eddie Glaude, George Kateb, Stephen Macedo, Benjamin McKean, Susan McWilliams, the late Wilson Carey McWilliams, Jennifer Pitts, Andrew Polsky, Melvin Rogers, Nicholas Tampio, Cornel West, Keith Whittington, Alex Zakaras, and several anonymous reviewers for Polity for help, encouragement, and advice. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2006 meeting of the New England Political Science Association.

Abstract

American individualist ideology facilitates structural injustice. Through an analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville on individualism, gender domination, and white supremacy in the United States, this essay explains why. The peculiar social cognition of the American individualist desensitizes him to structural injustice. To preserve his faith that his fate lies entirely in his own hands, he blinds himself to the ways social structure constrains personal freedom and independence; the individualist also construes the unjust benefits of social privilege (like those accompanying whiteness and maleness in Jacksonian America) as products of personal ingenuity and character. Democracy in America (1835/40) thus illuminates the elective affinity between American individualism and structural injustice.