Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction
Harvey C. Mansfield
Language: English
Pages: 136
ISBN: 0195175395
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever since, this book has been the best source for every serious attempt to understand America and democracy itself. Yet Tocqueville himself remains a mystery behind the elegance of his style.
Now one of our leading authorities on Tocqueville explains him in this splendid new entry in Oxford's acclaimed Very Short Introduction series. Harvey Mansfield addresses his subject as a thinker, clearly and incisively exploring Tocqueville's writings--not only his masterpiece, but also his secret Recollections, intended for posterity alone, and his unfinished work on his native France, The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville was a liberal, Mansfield writes, but not of the usual sort. The many elements of his life found expression in his thought: his aristocratic ancestry, his ventures in politics, his voyages abroad, his hopes and fears for America, and his disappointment with France. All his writings show a passion for political liberty and insistence on human greatness. Perhaps most important, he saw liberty not in theories, but in the practice of self-government in America. Ever an opponent of abstraction, he offered an analysis that forces us to consider what we actually do in our politics--suggesting that theory itself may be an enemy of freedom. And that, Mansfield writes, makes him a vitally important thinker for today.
Translator of an authoritative edition of Democracy in America, Harvey Mansfield here offers the fruit of decades of research and reflection in a clear, insightful, and marvelously compact introduction.
Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to The Social Contract, 1749-1762 (Ideas in Context)
Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics
Alienation (New Directions in Critical Theory)
Indignantly he exclaims that in slavery we see “the order of nature reversed.” Yet in another sense of nature, it was all too natural for Europeans to enslave a different race they perceived as inferior—it was understandable. The order of nature is for the best, but the best is not achieved automatically; indeed it faces obstacles from the pride natural to humans. Liberal theory believes it has conquered pride in the state of nature, and it aligns the order of nature (natural law) with the most.
Coming of modern democracy that made a world “altogether new,” before the United States came to be. Tocqueville’s political science is shown in his depiction of freedom as practiced in America, an actual society, rather than in principles that precede practice. That is why his writing fascinates and convinces his readers with evidence, observation, and examples. Yet his analysis, often apparently spontaneous, even disorderly, does not wander from one point to another; every discussion has its.
Political experience was being jailed for two days as a protesting deputy by Louis Napoleon. Tocqueville seemed to understand the love of distinction as essentially political—the activity of ruling—rather than literary in the sense of displaying talent and intelligence for the sake of popular esteem. Yet he thought he was “more worthy in thought than in action,” and he was surely right about that. As a politician he lacked the common touch, and he knew it. He confessed (privately, in his.
Own, to be “restive and insatiable.” He despised “all the goods of this world,” yet to escape the “grievous numbness” that comes over the soul when it tries to contemplate itself, he sought those goods. The principal good was of course honor, the “natural taste” he had for “great actions and great virtues”; all the others were subordinate, merely means to honor. Consciously, deliberately, purposefully, Tocqueville wished and acted to distinguish himself in life, at the same time disdaining honor.
America was not the only destination for Tocqueville. He had traveled to Sicily in 1827, resulting in his first writing. After his American trip he went to England in 1833 and to England and Ireland in 1835, eager to observe the progress of democracy in the most liberal country of Europe, interested in the decentralized administration of government that he had found in America, and seeking to study the difference between the English aristocracy and the French. He also went to Switzerland (1836).