Navigating Interstitial Spaces Essays -- Democracy American Tocquevill

Navigating Interstitial SpacesThe law permits the Americans to do what they please. Alexis de Tocqueville, commonwealth in AmericaThe protection of virtue, I submit, requires an understanding of interstitial spacesspaces where formalist adherence to rules and laws does not suffice to adequately promote virtue. Recognition of these spaces spawned agent morality and Aristotles practical scholarship. Fascination with these spaces fueled Alexis de Tocquevilles inquiry into American religious, familial and political mores in Democracy in America. Though Americas formal, codified laws of the 1830s granted dangerous freedom to the individual, Americans managed to navigate interstitial spaces with busy virtue. This discussion will briefly connect threads from Aristotles Ethics, Platos Republic, and Pericles funeral oration to preface a more extensive examination of Tocquevilles on the alert study of the institutions which reinforced virtue within Americas interstitial spaces. The con clusion will examine and evaluate the doctrine of ego-interest rightly dumb as the sole guarantor of virtue in the United States. Aristotle, one of the forefathers of agent morality, understood that universal and formalist rules alone could not sustain virtue. Practical wisdom, a truth-attaining intellectual quality concerned with doing and with the things that are good for human beings allows the moral agent to operate virtuously in a context-specific way. It is not possible, Aristotle writes, without practical wisdom to be really good morally. Obedience to fixed rules cannot govern action to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way. In order to cultiv... ...ticipation correlate directly with the correct practice of self-interest rightly understood and we accept both Michael Sandels thesis about the rise of the voluntarist self and Robert Putnams thesis describing the decline of American social and political capitalt hen a gloomy picture emerges about the sustainability of virtue in the men of enlightened self-interest alone. Without guidance in a wide expanse of interstitial space, it is easy to slip through the cracks. Words Cited Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Mitchell, Joshua. The Fragility of Freedom. Plato. The Republic.Putnam. Bowling Alone.Sandel, Michael. Democracys Discontents.Thucydides. The History of thte Peloponnesian War. Pericles Funeral Oration.Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America.