De Tocqueville. By Cheryl B. Welch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 294p. $21.95.

Abstract

It is a testimony to his greatness as an author that Tocqueville has emerged in a new light with each of the more significant events of the twentieth century: the New Deal, the Cold War, the Post-War years. In the last decade, in particular, American scholars of all political persuasions have seen in Tocqueville a point of departure for their consideration of the rudiments of robust democracy and the associational life it seems to require. Democracy perhaps being the only genuine alternative for the future, American scholars have tried to learn from Tocqueville what might be necessary to make it thrive, in places where the political alternatives have been exhausted and the rhetoric, but not yet the substance, of democracy now prevails. In a race to establish democracy before the rhetoric of democracy becomes a hollow caricature, Tocqueville studies have had an urgency about them that the study of other canonical figures in the history of modern political thought—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc—simply have not. We shall see, of course, whether the Post-War years were merely a hiatus and whether we more properly live in an Inter-War period, perhaps in perpetuity. We shall see, as well, whether the recent military confrontations in Afghanistan are able to be contained under the category of politics rather than of religion. Whatever the future holds, however, we can be sure that the writings of Tocqueville will not be exhausted by the events whose outlines we cannot yet foresee. Tocqueville had a great deal to say about war and, most readers may be surprised to discover, a few very interesting and provocative things to say about Islam as well. But these matters, as I say, must wait for the future.