For a cultural History of Democracy. Paper presented at the Inaugural Conference of the International Society for Cultural History. Ghent 27-31 August 2008: "Orientation".

Gabriella Valera For a Cultural History of Democracy Alexis de Tocqueville showed that, in addition to the political observation and analysis of the democratic society, a special inquiry into the particular qualities of the “Democratic Man” was necessary. Tocqueville wrote in a time when the secularisation process didn’t yet undermine the “private” fundament of Ethics related to the scheme of private and individual virtues. Burckhardt’s cultural history, Weber’s cultural analysis were soon demonstrating that those Individuals, provided with private virtues, didn’t experience the very status of a powerful Subject, deprived as they were from capabilities and powers in front of the unique Mighty Subject “Modern State”. A Cultural History of Democracy faces first of all the History of the “Modern” and “Contemporary Subject”: the characters of the “Democratic Man” (virtues or vices according to Tocqueville) have to be considered, according this new perspective as subjective attributes in terms of a relationship between rights and values by reducing both rights and values under the descriptive and heuristic category of “Capability”. A Cultural History of Democracy is not a pure History of democratic thinking or democratic institutions. It refreshes the relation between Cultural and Political History.