Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Yet another book on Tocqueville!"This was the opening line of Delba Winthrop's review of Sheldon Wolin's Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life in 2002.In the twenty or so years intervening, the books on Tocqueville just keep on coming, covering pretty well any and every aspect of Tocqueville along the way.Many books on Tocqueville, such as Larry Siedentop's Tocqueville in the Past Masters series, or Harvey Mansfield's Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction, provide a brief introduction and overview of him as a political philosopher.Some, such as Jon Elster's, Alexis De Tocqueville: The First Social Scientist, make the case for Tocqueville's methodological contribution to our understanding of social and political life.It is not uncommon, as Lucien Jaume does in Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty, to extrapolate on the more classical and aristocratic vision that informs Tocqueville's interest and understanding of liberty.But by far most books on Tocqueville, like Wolin's Tocqueville between Two Worlds, focus on his understanding of America and of democracy, and more often than not they approach the topic through Tocqueville's life as well as his writings.Apart from the numerous collections of essays such as Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America, edited by Ken Masugi, Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy, edited by Ewa Atanassow and Richard Boyd, and The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, edited by Cheryle Welch, among the more notable books that take this focus and approach, are Alan Ryan's On Tocqueville: Democracy and America, James Schleifer's The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", followed up by his Chicago Companion to Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Hebert Danoff, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of
Source: The European Legacy
Author: Wayne Cristaudo
Institution: Charles Darwin University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4394881534