Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life

Front Cover
Princeton University Press, 2001 - 650 pages

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.

 

Contents

MODERN THEORY AND MODERN POWER
13
Theoria THE THEORETICAL JOURNEY
34
DISCOVERING DEMOCRACY
59
SELF AND STRUCTURE
76
DOUBT AND DISCONNECTION
102
THE THEORY OF WHAT IS GREAT
113
MYTH AND POLITICAL IMPRESSIONISM
132
THE SPECTACLE OF AMERICA
149
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CULTURE
304
DESPOTISM AND UTOPIA
339
OLD NEW WORLD NEW OLD WORLD
365
TOCQUEVILLEAN DEMOCRACY
374
THE PENITENTIARY TEMPTATION
383
SECOND JOURNEY TO AMERICA
407
THE POLITICAL EDUCATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE
409
Souvenirs RECOLLECTIONS INTRANQUILLITY
428

SOCIAL CONTRACT VERSUS POLITICAL CULTURE
171
THE CULTURE OF THE POLITICAL THE RITUALS
202
FEUDAL AMERICA
229
MAJORITY RULE OR MAJORITY POLITICS
241
CENTRALIZATION AND DISSOLUTION
260
THE IMAGE OF DEMOCRACY
275
TRAGIC HERO POPULAR MASK
289
Souvenirs SOCIALISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE POLITICAL
456
The Old Regime and the Revolution Mythistoricus et theoreticus
498
The Old Regime MODERNIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF LOSS
531
POSTDEMOCRACY
561
NOTES
573
INDEX
641
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2001)

Sheldon S. Wolin is Emeritus Professor of Politics, Princeton University. He also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. His most famous book, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, influenced a generation of political theorists.

Bibliographic information