Tocqueville and His America

August 8, 2011
Like proud parents with a precocious child, Americans in the early republic eagerly displayed their newborn nation to foreign visitors, including young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States for nine months in the early 1830s. Kaledin, an MIT professor, explores the motives behind de Tocqueville's journey and the writing of his canonical and controversial Democracy in America. Rather than being a book of our origins, Kaledin shows that Democracy in America was intended as a warning to the French, depicting a society rife with corruption, brutal prejudice, religious fervor, and greed. As an aristocrat in a society where the middle classes were becoming dominant, de Tocqueville felt displaced and irrelevant. In America, he saw the dark horizon his own country would face if it continued to follow the path of capitalism. Eschewing narrative and chronology for a thematic approach, the book is too scattershot to appeal to a general audience. Specialists will find few surprises here, and will be frustrated by Kaledin's disorganized and anecdotal presentation.

September 15, 2011

After a long period of neglect, Tocqueville's Democracy in America has come back into vogue again over recent decades, referenced by writers as varied as libertarian Christopher Lasch, sociologist Robert N. Bellah, and arch-conservative Paul Rahe. Tocqueville is a complex thinker whose views of democracy's viability darkened considerably between the writing of the first and the second volume of Democracy in America (1835, 1840): his pronouncements can be shanghaied to support almost any view of American culture and political life, from liberal to conservative, optimistic to pessimistic. Thus this nuanced study of his thought is welcome. Kaledin (history, emeritus, MIT) has undertaken a deep reading of Tocqueville's writings on America, fleshing out the familiar utterances of Volume 1 with a detailed look at Tocqueville's actual travel notes from his American jaunt (many reservations about American culture) and then moving to the second volume (grave concerns for the present health and future prospects of democracy). VERDICT This exceptional study will be read with great interest by all students of Tocqueville and by many who can learn from him if they care about America's future.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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