Alexis de Tocqueville may be the most influential political
thinker in American history. He also led an unusually active and
ambitious career in French politics. In this magisterial book, one
of America's most important contemporary theorists draws on decades
of research and thought to present the first work that fully
connects Tocqueville's political and theoretical lives. In doing
so, Sheldon Wolin presents sweeping new interpretations of
Tocqueville's major works and of his place in intellectual history.
As he traces the origins and impact of Tocqueville's ideas, Wolin
also offers a profound commentary on the general trajectory of
Western political life over the past two hundred years.
Wolin proceeds by examining Tocqueville's key writings in light
of his experiences in the troubled world of French politics. He
portrays "Democracy in America," for example, as a theory of
discovery that emerged from Tocqueville's contrasting experiences
of America and of France's constitutional monarchy. He shows us how
Tocqueville used Recollections to reexamine his political
commitments in light of the revolutions of 1848 and the threat of
socialism. He portrays "The Old Regime and the French Revolution"
as a work of theoretical history designed to throw light on the
Bonapartist despotism he saw around him. Throughout, Wolin
highlights the tensions between Tocqueville's ideas and his
activities as a politician, arguing that--despite his limited
political success--Tocqueville was ''perhaps the last influential
theorist who can be said to have truly cared about political
life.''
In the course of the book, Wolin also shows that Tocqueville
struggled with many of the forces that constrain politics today,
including the relentless advance of capitalism, of science and
technology, and of state bureaucracy. He concludes that
Tocqueville's insights and anxieties about the impotence of
politics in a ''postaristocratic'' era speak directly to the
challenges of our own ''postdemocratic'' age. A monumental new
study of Tocqueville, this is also a rich and provocative work
about the past, the present, and the future of democratic life in
America and abroad.
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