ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Democracy’s Guide
Joseph Epstein
====
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction
What would Count Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859),
were he alive…
Chapter One
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born
in Paris on July…
Chapter Two
Tradition would have had Alexis de Tocqueville, as an
aristocrat,…
Chapter Three
Tocqueville and Beaumont left for North America on
April 2,…
Chapter Four
Toward the end of his visit to America, Alexis de…
Chapter Five
The book, published in January 1835, was a smashing
success,…
Chapter Six
In the introduction to Democracy in America, Toc-
queville provided a…
Chapter Seven
Even before the reviews were in on his second vol-
ume,…
Chapter Eight
Tocqueville won his first official claim to powers of
prophecy…
Chapter Nine
Tocqueville spoke of his pleasure in being free of
the…
Chapter Ten
In 1850, because of a serious breakdown in his
health—a…
Chapter Eleven
On an August afternoon in Cherbourg in 1850, out
for…
Epilogue
In his three books, several notebooks, and hundreds
of letters,…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Joseph Epstein
Other Books in the Eminent Lives Series
=====
Joseph Epstein
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide Hardcover – Deckle Edge, 1 November 2006
by MR Joseph Epstein (Author)
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Part of: Eminent Lives (13 books)
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Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first foreigners to recognize and trumpet the grandness of the American project. His two-volume classic, Democracy in America, published in 1835, not only offered a vivid account of what was then a new nation but famously predicted what that nation would become. His startling prescience, as well as the endurance of his political ideas, has firmly established Tocqueville's place in American history; his chronicle of our infancy is a fixture on every American history syllabus. Nearly all of his clairvoyant predictions about American political life, from the influence of Evangelical Christianity to the advent of our "consumer society," have come true--and on the schedule he set.
Yet in his own time, Tocqueville had little evidence for the truth of his ideas. Introspective, sickly, prone to self-doubt, he was an unlikely visionary. Joseph Epstein, America's most versatile essayist, proves an ideal guide to his predecessor. In wry, elegant prose, he engages Tocqueville's intellectual contributions, illuminates the development of his thought, and provides a referendum on his various prophecies. (His record was far from perfect--he thought the federal government would wither away as the states rose in power.) Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide is an altogether human portrait of the Frenchman who would become an American icon.
About the Author
Joseph Epstein is the author of, among other books, Snobbery: The American Version, Fabulous Small Jews (a collection of stories), Envy, and Friendship: An Exposé. He was the editor of The American Scholar between 1974 and 1997, and for many years taught in the English Department at Northwestern University. His essays and stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Commentary, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines.
Product details
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers (1 November 2006)
Language : English
Hardcover : 224 pages
Dimensions : 12.7 x 3.18 x 18.42 cmCustomer Reviews:
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Clay Garner
5.0 out of 5 stars ''Without morality freedom cannot reign, and without faith there is no morality.'' - TocquevilleReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 14 January 2017
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“Without morality freedom cannot reign, and without faith there is no morality.”
Freedom, or Liberty, as Tocqueville wrote about it, was his goal and his passion.
He adds: “I would rather doubt my sanity than God’s justice.”
''Such comments are in no way perfunctory, the polite obeisance of a man invoking the deity as a matter of good form. The religious question, the role of God in the affairs of men and women, was never for very long out of Tocqueville’s mind.''
Why was the American revolution successful and the French Revolution horrible? This paradox dominates Tocqueville and his writing. His working out an answer, in three books, gives fascinating insights. Or as the epigraph says -
''Intelligence is the power of seeing things in the past, present, and future as they have been, are, and will be.''
—GEORGE SANTAYANA
Chapter One - Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born in Paris on July…
Chapter Two - Tradition would have had Alexis de Tocqueville, as an aristocrat,…
Chapter Three - Tocqueville and Beaumont left for North America on April 2,…
Chapter Four - Toward the end of his visit to America, Alexis de…
Chapter Five - The book, published in January 1835, was a smashing success,…
Chapter Six - In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville provided a…
Chapter Seven - Even before the reviews were in on his second volume,…
Chapter Eight - Tocqueville won his first official claim to powers of prophecy…
Chapter Nine - Tocqueville spoke of his pleasure in being free of the…
Chapter Ten - In 1850, because of a serious breakdown in his health—a…
Chapter Eleven - On an August afternoon in Cherbourg in 1850, out for…
Equality and Liberty serve as Tocqueville's key ideas. How can both be applied? Will one always destroy the other?
''“Liberty,” for Tocqueville, is at the very heart of the matter—it is all and everything. Centralization is ever to be feared, for it not only places power in the hands of fewer and fewer people but divests people of the right and then the very ability to manage their own affairs, rendering them vulnerable to tyranny, revolution, or both.''
“The most important care of good government,” Tocqueville wrote in one of his notebooks, “should be to get people used little by little to managing without it”—without government itself, that is.''
Tocqueville wrote three important books, ''Democracy in America'', ''Recollections'', and ''The Old Regime and the Revolution''. Each one is special. Democracy is famous. Nevertheless, Epstein shows here, that Recollections, relating Tocqueville's peronal memories of the 1848 revolution, also deserves praise.
Tocqueville's last, The old regime and the revolution, was new to me. This is the result of arduous research into the causes of the original French Revolution.
''“Without doubt,” Tocqueville writes, “the universal discredit into which all religious beliefs fell at the end of the last century exercised the greatest influence on the whole of our Revolution; it marked its character. Nothing did more to give its features that terrible expression which we have seen.”
''As he had noted in Democracy in America, “despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot”—and that comment includes, of course, the despotism of the majority. The result of the cumulative attack on the church in France was that political religion filled the place left by actual religion. Perfection, which Christianity makes plain is not available in this life, under the religion of politics becomes a possibility.''
''The French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote, “became a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without a life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”
''Under this new religion without God, men had only themselves to fall back on, and fall back on themselves they did; under the new dispensation, the state, not God, would make man. In other words, left to themselves, with only the appetite for equality and the concomitant destruction of all rank, men lost their anchor, their balance, their orientation.''
''Formerly, religion acted as an obstacle to unbounded perfectionism. Marx may have been right in saying that religion was the opiate of the people. But the religion of politics can provide an even stronger, more dangerous drug. It could be as murderous as traditional religion, as witness the Terror; it could be still more murderous, as witness the Nazis and Soviet and Chinese communism. But for Tocqueville, the immediate result of the ascendancy of the religion of politics was the loss of love for liberty.'' (173)
Tocqueville nails it yet again!
Epstein's writing is smooth and clear. This serves as an intellectual biography, nevertheless, Tocqueville's personality, melancholy and aloof, comes across. Epstein is sympathetic without worship.
Epstein connects many of Tocqueville's insights to present American culture. Fascinating!
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J. Grattan
3.0 out of 5 stars Nice overview of a most unique individual (3.5*s)Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 22 March 2010
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This short work is not so much of an attempt to chronicle de Tocqueville's life and works, as it is an attempt to understand his mind, character, and personality. How can it be that this obscure, aristocratic Frenchmen, in his late twenties, could produce perhaps the most insightful book ever written on democracy and without doubt the most read and quoted? Born in 1805 during Napoleon's reign, the French Revolution and its connection to aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, and dictatorship was, according to the author, the most significant event in de Tocqueville's life. Beyond the family nightmare of his parents being only days away from being guillotined, the Revolution reverberated throughout French society for decades. De Tocqueville, given his fixation on fundamental ideas, sought to understand for himself and his fellow Frenchmen what underlay the social and political developments of his time, including the experiment in democracy in the US that so fascinated Europeans.
As the author notes, de Tocqueville has resisted definitive classification through the years in terms of his profession, his political leanings, and his ranking as a profound philosopher. The biggest debate concerns his being a conservative or a liberal. The contention that he was a Christian conservative is countered by the crisis in religious belief that he underwent in his late teens that affected him the rest of his life and the fact that he was no lover of monarchy or aristocracy, seeing the spread of equality and democracy, not without their own shortcomings, as inevitable. Perhaps de Tocqueville was not of the intellectual stature of a Marx or Stuart Mill, but he was a keen observer and organizer of political and social phenomena, able to offer profound, often prophetic, insights concerning their bases.
Curiously, de Tocqueville longed to be a politician and was finally elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1840, where he served for eight years with little impact. He was not socially adept; he was a poor speaker and was unwilling to join political coalitions. Furthermore, he was an intellectual elitist, preferring to remain aloof from the less high-minded. It is interesting that he maintained close friendships with several men during his entire lifetime, including his collaborator in his journey to America, Gustave de Beaumont. His other foray into politics was a short term as the minister of foreign affairs in 1849 under the regime of Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, before the dissolving of the Chamber and the complete seizure of governmental powers.
There is no doubt that de Tocqueville was a most complex individual. His ambition is in little doubt as he made every effort to produce a stylish DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that did make his reputation, although the benefits were largely personal, not material. He was a profoundly pessimistic man, perhaps bordering on clinical depression. His political insights were more troubling to him than liberating. He did have other real worries, as he was rather sickly over a good bit of his life and died at the age of fifty-three of tuberculosis. His premature death prevented him from completing his comprehensive study of the French Revolution, THE OLD REGIME AND THE REVOLUTION.
This book is a nice overview of Tocqueville, focusing on his broad intellectual inclinations and pointing to his uniqueness. It provides at best a cursory look at his ideas, with the frequent repetition of his concerns about the rise of equality and the average man in political society, at the costs of limiting liberty and settling for widespread mediocrity. The book is very readable, but there is an absence of a table of contents, index, or notes. The bibliography is very limited. Hugh Brogan's biography remains the fullest treatment of de Tocqueville.
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Old dog
5.0 out of 5 stars Epstein Gets De Tocqueville right.Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 14 January 2015
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epstein as always is warm hearted conservative, with a lively literary style. He reminds you of how vital de Tocqueville is.
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Mary A. Alcorn
5.0 out of 5 stars Another Interesting Tocqueville BiographyReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 10 July 2014
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Beautifully written biography of this outstanding Frenchman.
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David George Moore
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant biography of a brilliant observer of American lifeReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 27 December 2009
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I have spent quite a bit of time reading Tocqueville. It truly is one of the seminal works for understanding America. Epstein does a brilliant job in this short, but satisfying biography.
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