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A Tocqueville for our time (MIT)

Almost two centuries after he traveled around the United States studying its
people and government, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville remains one of
the most influential of all commentators on American politics. Tocqueville’s
two-volume masterwork, _Democracy in America_, published in 1835 and 1840,
retains “the uncanny glamour of scripture, cited by all who wish to say
something about democracy and its prospects or America and its destiny,”
writes MIT emeritus historian Arthur Kaledin in a new book about Tocqueville.

And because Tocqueville often related the strengths of the U.S. government to
the optimism and vitality of the country’s culture — “Every day in America is
new,” he wrote — citing him allows Americans a double dose of self-flattery:
The country’s government works because of the qualities of the people.

But was Tocqueville as sanguine about American democracy as the popular image
of his work suggests? Almost certainly not, Kaledin asserts in his book,
_Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon_, published this fall by Yale
University Press.

“Tocqueville from the start also saw cultural and social tendencies that he
thought would weaken American democracy,” Kaledin says. In his view,
Tocqueville, while indeed recognizing real strengths in ...

MIT