Empire's Law: Alexis de Tocqueville on Colonialism and the State of Exception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract.In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liberalism. This article advances this debate by reconstructing Tocqueville's theory of martial law, a dimension of his work that has been frequently overlooked. In a series of letters, notes and parliamentary reports on Algeria, Tocqueville criticized of the use of martial law in governing French citizens and defended its use against native Algerians. Tocqueville's writings on Algeria make it clear that he treated the rule of law not as a natural right held by all people but rather as a technique of government that was appropriate in communities already united by social ties. Résumé.Récemment, l'interprétation de la défense du colonialisme par Alexis de Tocqueville est devenue l'objet d'un débat important. Certains auteurs discernent une tension entre les principes centraux de la philosophie politique de Tocqueville et sa promotion enthousiaste de la conquête et la colonisation de l'Algérie par la France. D'autres ont conclu que la contradiction apparente s'explique lorsqu'on regarde de près les nuances de ses écrits sur la logique interne du libéralisme. Cet article contribue à ce débat en reconstruisant la théorie de la loi martiale de Tocqueville – une dimension de son oeuvre trop souvent négligée. Dans une série de lettres, notes et rapports parlementaires sur l'Algérie, Tocqueville a critiqué l'usage de la loi martiale dans le gouvernement des citoyens français, mais l'a défendu contre les indigènes. Ses écrits sur l'Algérie démontrent que Tocqueville considérait l'État de droit non comme un droit naturel inhérent à la personne, mais plutôt comme une technique de gouvernement s'appliquant principalement aux communautés déjà unies par des liens sociaux.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".