Tocqueville: Frenchman for all Seasons?

Abstract

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2000. xciii, 722 pp. $35.00 U.S. (cloth). Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, translated by Gerald Bevan, with an Introduction by Isaac Kramnick and Notes by Jeff Seliger. New York, N.Y., Penguin, 2003. lii, 896 pp. $10.00 U.S. (paper). Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, Vol.One, edited and with an introduction and critical apparatus by Francois Furet and Francoise Melonio; translated by Alan S. Kahan. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1998. xi, 451 pp. $32.50 U.S. (cloth). Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, by Sheldon Wolin. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001. viii, 650 pp. $35.00 U.S. (cloth). The Tocqueville Reader A Life in Letters and Politics, edited by Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan. Malden, MA, Oxford, Melbourne, and Berlin, Blackwell Publishing, 2002. xviii, 358 pp. $24.95 U.S. (paper). Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, edited and translated by Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xxxviii, 277 pp. $47.00 U.S. (cloth), $21.95 U.S. (paper). Now that Marx is said to have become part of history, academics, intellectuals, pundits, politicians, and journalists around the world are paying increasing attention to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. The French aristocrat's Democracy in America had enjoyed enormous popularity--especially the first volume, published in the United States in 1838, in which Jacksonian Americans could see themselves as a vital, egalitarian, God-fearing people in the vanguard of the inevitable progress of liberty and equality and as a model for the (civilized) world. (The second volume, which appeared in 1840, engendered less interest, in part because it was not as readable--more theoretical and also less flattering, paying more attention to the downside of the democratic revolution than the first volume.) By 1848--the annus mirabilis which also saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto--Democracy had gone through twelve editions. But after the Civil War Americans turned to other commentators that seemed more appropriate for addressing new concerns such as industrialization--excepting the contrarian Henry Adams who professed great admiration for Tocqueville, perhaps because he was out of step with the temper of his rimes. Not until 1888 did his fellow Americans find a worthy successor to Tocqueville with the publication of James Bryce's The American Commonwealth which was less visionary and more pragmatic than Democracy in America, more Anglo Saxon and less Gallic (as they would have put it), and for those reasons now virtually forgotten. (1) The historians of the following generation, notably Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard, likewise felt little need for Tocqueville, perhaps because his emphasis on went counter to their belief that American history was driven by conflict. Reigning supreme for two generations, the Progressive historians were not eclipsed until the rise of Nazi Germany, World War II, and especially the Cold War, which led Americans to reconsider their identity as separate from Europe and defined by a consensus vis-a-vis totalitarianism. Tocqueville, they discovered, proved particularly useful in this enterprise. It was fortuitous that historian George Wilson Pierson had already prepared the groundwork with his path-breaking Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938). A revised edition of the classic Henry Reeve/Francis Bowen translation by Phillips Bradley, which appeared in 1945, (2) became the preferred source for a number of interpretations of American history taking Tocqueville as their inspiration--notably David Riesman, whose famous Lonely Crowd (1950) (3) bears an allusive Tocquevillian title, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), and Marvin Meyers' The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957)--are representative texts of the new school. …