AlexisdeTocqueville.com Blog

Just a quick notation here:

One can now access the (new) Alexis de Tocqueville Twitter page at:

Alexis de Tocqueville Twitter Page
https://twitter.com/Tocqueville2day

Don’t worry, we won’t be using this to tell you someone is eating a hamburger, or loves to walk in the rain…

But it seems like many organizations are doing it and Tocqueville may as well.

“Going on Twitter,” as one curmudgeonly journalist put it recently, “means you’re surrendering.”

So, that’s it: We surrender…

Tocquevillians simply must read James Wood’s intelligent tour de force of recent Tocqueville works in the May 17 New Yorker.

(A review of “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” Leo Damrosch; “Parrot & Olivier in America,” by Peter Carey; and some of Tocqueville’s own oeuvre.)

More to come on this review and on the underlying books, but a brief observation ab initio:

There is no shortage of persons or commentators seeking to “recreate” what they deem to be the secret of Tocqueville’s success — the physical journey he took across America with Beaumont early in the 19th Century. Everyone from C-Span to modern-day French literary critics have done it.

While there’s nothing wrong with this, one has to think that the persons undertaking these junkets misunderstand Tocqueville’s contribution to human insight fundamentally. Or rather, let us say, they fail to grasp the full meaning of Tocqueville’s writing.

Tocqueville didn’t mean to write a mere travelogue — any more in Democracy in America than in his similar reports on Algeria, the events of 1848, Switzerland, and the French Revolution… so rich, each of them, with the fire of the “new science” of ideopolitique, as one observer has called it.

Woods seems to appreciate this, and it lifts his commentary on these works to a level the works themselves do not achieve. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are captured on Google Earth. Or, to paraphrase (and perfect) Tip O’Neill’s oft-quoted but wrong-headed solepsism:

“All politics is ideas.” More to come, but in the meantime, an appreciative round of snaps, and about 2.85 cheers, for Mr. Woods.

An interesting recent discussion of Tocqueville and the free press — Richard Reeves vs. Roger Ailes view of same — recently in, of all places, TV Week:

http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/2010/05/roger-ailes-and-fox-news-traitors-or-patriots.php

Always worth remembering, of course, that Tocqueville took both the Left and Right of his day with grains and grains of salt, generally occupying the back bench.

Even if it is true that politics and the press are reduced to professional wrestling, perhaps there is an option other than rooting for either of the chair-throwing mouth-foamers.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tocqueville/>

If you’re a true aficionado of Tocqueville, you’ll want to join the new English-language discussion group of his works and ideas at Yahoo —

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tocqueville/>

Thank you for your interest, and welcome to the Alexis de Tocqueville blog.

As first the United States and then its major trading partners have sunk into the throes of the worst asset-price depression since the 1930s, the question naturally suggests itself, why is there relatively little discussion of political reform in the West, or, for that matter, China, India, and Japan?

Here we are talking about “change,” not between left and right, but of the system itself — the way representative government works.

Is this simply a natural reflection of the fact that when economies are weak and wars raging, people tend to focus on these immediate concerns first, and deal with seemingly less urgent matters later?

Or is this very formulation a suggestion that in the eyes of many in the global electorate, politics in general simply doesn’t work? A sad or even cynical echo of the nostrum that “if there is no solution, there is no problem,” perhaps.

/ Nick Urstadt /

For a fundamental misunderstanding of Tocqueville’s thought, it’s hard to improve on the recent comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the significance of his party’s majority and mandate from 2008 (or, critics would say, lack of the latter.)

But Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard has taken a good stab at it recently in The Wall Street Journal, confusing public opinion polls — what a person says when interrupted at home to ask a fleeting opinion on an issue he or she recognizes they have almost no impact on — with the considered “general will” of the public if and when it is committing an act of sovereignty — such as, alas, in our system, happens only once every 2-6 years in representative elections.

Tocqueville’s sensitive, nuanced, complicated system of thought always provides boilerplate for both Right and Left when cited in the Cliffnotes version. 2010, as the United States enters the final stages of debate on an inevitable health-care plan (of some sort) promises to bring more of same.

But while it’s both sad and laughable when this is done by someone as mindless as a member of the elected aristocracy in the House or Senate… it’s even a little sadder and more pathetic coming from Mr. Barnes, whose generally intelligent reports and commentaries have graced American Democracy for more than three decades.

/ Beaumont /

We’re moving to a new url in 2010 — www.alexisdetocqueville.com.

(How cool is that?)

You should be able to access the 2008-2009 entries at the old URL, but if you’re having any trouble finding what you seek, please drop our administrator an email —

AlexisdeTocqueville…Rocketmail.com.

(You know what replaces the three dots — thanks.)

Sincerely,
Nick Urstadt