Alistair Cooke: A Tocqueville for Our Time?

Abstract

As citizens of this world, especially Europeans, watched United States grow from a mere British colony to one of dominant nations in world, a pattern of conversation developed among them about meaning of this new colossus of New World. A question emerges: is inevitable or inimitable? (Rose 1). The question is easier to ask than to answer. This essay is a partial effort to shape an answer to that question. The means to that end will be a review of some of European comments on on way to placing Alistair Cooke's journalism in context of that commentary.Let us be certain, however, before proceeding to analysis of question, that we understand meaning of question. Bo sides of question are amply represented in American historiography and in European writing about America. The one stresses uniqueness of America, that no nation or people on earth can be compared with unique experience of Americans. The other stresses that is forerunner of what European, even world society will be tomorrow. Can both of these be true at same time? They are clearly contradictory, but are they mutually exclusive? A contradiction may contain logically exclusive elements but still speak truth-such is definition of a paradox. Some observers have suggested this as an interpretive paradigm, that for those who would see whole they must take it by its parts. Those parts are contradictory and result of their being held together, if at all, in contrapuntal relation, yields a conclusion that is a contrapuntal society, inhabited by a people of paradox (Kammen 9). Most Americans, and, indeed, most European observers of American people seem content to live with that paradox. The differences between them are more of tendency than tenet, of disposition than dogma. For example, even such a passionate observer of as Simone de Beauvoir believes that, in end, if you you must learn to love sorrowfully (248).At this point one must ask a subsidiary question to main one under review: given obvious fact that history of any nation is unique, how is it that United States came to be seen as forerunner of world change, sign society for world (Neuhaus 72-73, 184). To be seen as laboratory for humankind's future possibilities is a great burden. As J. Martin Evans notes, no other modern nation has had to bear as great a weight of idealism as this (16).The one view--America as model for world development--Ss a creation of European wishful thinking. Right from beginning of discoveries of America, there was belief that was not so much a new Garden of Eden as a place of new beginning for Europe to repair damages of first fall in original Garden. As John Locke remarked, beginning, everything was America (140), In Thomas More's Utopia we see first mature reflection on New World in literature of Old World. The genius of More's work was that by 116 one need not merely speculate about an imagined Atlantis southwest of Europe. was there, and could be traveled to, and settled in (Slavin 136-64). Nevertheless, Utopean account of Raphael Hythloday was theoretical in that land of utopians did not in fact exist in the America.When Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1830s he could put theories behind him and offered Europe a real glimpse of a working democracy, arguably only one in world at time. Everything was available for world scrutiny, from government to economics to attitudes of people. Americans welcomed this scrutiny because they wanted to show world that their beloved nation offered a workable model of thing Europeans wanted--a society equal and free. Tocqueville believed that democracy (in all affective meanings of word) was way of future, and that United States was worthy of examination because it was experiencing first what Europe must experience later on. …