Experiencing Democracy in America
This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Over the 2023–24 academic year, three teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in spring 2024. See the other course showcase posts on the HumanitiesX website, including those from spring 2022 and 2023.
The Course
In spring 2024, “Experiencing Democracy in America” was taught for the first time at DePaul. The course was part of the HumanitiesX Collaborative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and taught by David Lay Williams (Political Science) and Matthew W. Maguire (History and Catholic Studies).
The course integrated experiential learning with a humanities seminar. In the seminar portion of the course, the students spent the term working through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, debating in our twice weekly seminars the rich multiplicity of arguments found within it, written in the 1830s by a French visitor to the new democracy to alert Europe to democracy’s inevitable spread throughout the world.
Students juxtaposed Tocqueville both to historical sources (excerpts from the autobiographies of Blackhawk and Harriet Jacobs), and contemporary scholarship by prominent Tocqueville scholars. They also participated in contemporary American democracy through different kinds of public meetings and engaging in volunteer activities, experiences that allowed them to draw their own conclusions about American democracy in action, above all in contemporary Chicago.
All this work prepared the students to play a substantial and ongoing role in organizing a public event with our community partner, the Alliance Française de Chicago, which the students visited the first week of classes to enjoy making and eating crepes, which familiarized students with the public partner in an informal and friendly setting. The public event brought together panelists from diverse perspectives to speak with the audience about Tocqueville, and about the challenges and possibilities of democracy in the twenty-first century.
As a final seminar project, each student wrote a final paper addressed to what they had learned from Tocqueville and from their own civic participation, exploring how Tocqueville’s arguments had variously enriched, refined, developed, or complicated their understanding of democracy in the contemporary world.
The Project
The students’ careful reading of Tocqueville and their direct, diverse experiences of democracy today led to the final common project of the HumanitiesX course: a public event addressing Tocqueville and the challenges of contemporary democracy at the Alliance Française de Chicago.
With Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous book Democracy in America as a shared point of departure, the students grappled with the personal, social and cultural implications of American democracy, the unique dilemmas and injustices connected to America’s racial history, American materialism and democracy, among several other themes and questions. The conversation among students in seminar was very much about their own questions; students were required to submit discussion questions before each seminar, and students themselves choose the suggested student questions that they wished to discuss in class.
To understand our own democracy better, each student was also asked to attend a civic meeting, as well as to volunteer for a local organization. Several of our students attended City Council meetings in Chicago; others attended similar meetings in other cities, from Minneapolis to San Antonio. They reported back to the entire seminar about these meetings, and what they suggested about the workings of contemporary American democracy at a local level.
As volunteers, our students worked in everything from food pantries to community gardens, from centers for helping immigrants to organizations running voting registration drives for prisoners. Many students spoke eloquently in class and in their final papers about how volunteering deepened and challenged their understanding of Tocqueville and his account of how Americans engage with their fellow citizens.
Guided by our community partner, the Alliance Française de Chicago, students were involved in publicizing, organizing, and giving shape to the public event. In it, Tocqueville scholar and community organizer Robert T. Gannett, scholar of Tocqueville and contemporary politics Jenifer Forestal, and filmmaker Lucas Roxo formed a panel to address the legacy of Tocqueville and what we might learn from him about contemporary democracy.
The main event space at the Alliance Française was full, with one hundred thirty people engaged in questions and debate about Tocqueville and the condition of contemporary democracy in France, America, and around the world.
The Team
Faculty Fellows
Matthew W. Maguire is a European intellectual historian, and teaches in DePaul’s Departments of History and Catholic Studies. He teaches seminars on early modern and modern intellectual history, as well as courses on the history of Christianity and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Conversion of Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville, among other works. His recent research involves the relationship of autonomy and freedom.
David Lay Williams teaches in the Political Science department at DePaul, and is a political theorist. He teaches courses on ancient and modern political thought. His research has focused primarily upon modern political thought. His forthcoming book, The Greatest of All Plagues, addresses how inequality shaped political philosophy from Plato to Marx.
Student Fellows
Camille Perry joined the HumanitiesX cohort as a senior in the Combined BA/MA program, pursuing Sociology and Critical Ethnic Studies respectively. Camille is also in DePaul’s Honors Program, and presented their senior thesis on the impact of different colonialisms on Black American and Native American imagery in media. They recently wrote an article for HumanitiesX examining the role of the humanities in building coalition and community for DePaul student organizations.
Fiona Reed joined HumanitiesX as a third year undergraduate, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, alongside minors in Sociology and Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies. She is also an Interfaith Scholar with DePaul’s Division of Mission & Ministry. Fiona recently wrote an article for HumanitiesX highlighting some of the ways DePaul students are incorporating the university’s Vincentian mission into their studies, employment, and advocacy work.
Community Fellow
Aimée Laberge served as the Events Director of the Alliance Française de Chicago through Spring 2024. She organized over 750 events at the Alliance before retiring, and “Experiencing Democracy in America” was her final Alliance event.
Lessons Learned and Next Steps
1. Having students experience American democracy while reading an incisive and venerable book about democracy clearly works!
As the seminar moved forward, it was clear that attending civic meetings and volunteering gave Tocqueville’s arguments and observations a striking freshness and vivacity for our students — and in a way that simply reading the book for a class would very likely not have done. Similarly, students were able to participate in American democratic life with much greater theoretical insight and comparative precision as a result of reading Tocqueville, and talking about his ideas with other students.
2. Experiential learning combined with seminars in the humanities requires maintaining a dynamic equilibrium among the different parts of the course.
It took the fellows as well as the students some time to learn how to balance rich and lively seminar discussion about Tocqueville with reports about civic meetings and volunteering experiences, as well as the planning for the event at the Alliance Française. Both the event and the seminar were by every account a success; getting there involved a distinctive kind of flexibility among all participants, not least a willingness to shift priorities from week to week, in order that all the different parts of the seminar could receive the attention they deserved.
3. Asking the students to generate questions and prompt discussions is a great idea — and one that requires particularly active instructors and students.
The intellectual energy in the seminar coming from the students was remarkable; for that very reason, the faculty needed to be sure that different kinds of questions were posed, that different views received a full hearing, and that connecting themes among various questions were brought forth to the whole group. A classroom where the students shape the discussion in some ways asks for more effort and ingenuity from students and instructors alike.
Next Steps
This course has inspired the instructors not only to think about how best to offer this particular seminar again, but to think more broadly about how foundational texts and experiential learning can come together in new interdisciplinary courses, and even a series of interdisciplinary courses. They are presently applying for a substantial grant that would fund a program bringing together careful examination of primary texts, small class sizes, team-teaching, and community engagement that would exploit the rich humanistic resources of Chicago for the purposes of enriching the undergraduate experience at DePaul.
