In the incubatory dark of social media, nonsense is propagating. In March 2022, shortly after Vladimir Putin’s renewed assault on Ukraine, noted IR theorist John Mearsheimer benefited from a […]
MoreTocqueville in Review – July 4th. Subscribe to the Tocqueville 21 Newsletter on Substack to receive Tocqueville in Review directly in your inbox! Dear Readers, This week was an […]
MoreTocqueville 21 Call for Applications – Editorial Board Tocqueville 21, a bilingual online journal covering history, democracy, and transatlantic affairs in the 21st century, is recruiting! We aim to add […]
MoreFour years ago, the founder of Tocqueville 21, Editor Emeritus Jacob Hamburger, mused on the 2018 midterm elections and the evaporation of a much-anticipated blue wave. It would seem […]
MorePar Danielle Charette et Atman Mehta. Traduction par Justin Saint-Loubert Bie. Nous nous sommes entretenus avec Aaron Tugendhaft à propos de son livre, La destruction des idoles : D’Abraham […]
MoreCritique du livre Les statues de la discorde de Jacqueline Lalouette, Paris, Passés / Composés, 2021. Aux États-Unis, le vandalisme de statues évoquant l’esclavage s’est développé depuis la mort de […]
MoreI have a new article up today at Jewish Currents about the Sarah Halimi case. You can read the article for more background on the 2017 killing of an elderly Jewish […]
MoreDanielle Charette and Atman Mehta interviewed Aaron Tugendhaft about his new book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Their conversation covered the […]
More“We just cannot get a break.” Surely that is the universal sentiment of the past year. Yet in trying to rationalize a catastrophic year, there is something we can […]
MoreDoes militaristic foreign policy give carte blanche to civil strife at home? After the recent Capitol riots, the idea that “you reap what you sow” has circulated in the US […]
MoreWe held our first editorial meeting the morning after the attack on the US Capitol. This is a blog dedicated to exploring twentieth-first century democracy, and while much about the […]
MoreEn cette nouvelle année 2021, Tocqueville 21 est fier d’annoncer sa nouvelle équipe éditoriale. Ces talentueux écrivains, rédacteurs et intellectuels se joindront aux co-rédacteurs-en-chef actuels Jacob Hamburger et Danielle Charette. […]
MoreAs we enter 2021, Tocqueville 21 is proud to announce its new editorial team. These talented writers, editors, and scholars, who will be joining current co-editors Jacob Hamburger and Danielle […]
MoreL’Humanité m’a demandé une chronique encore sur le résultat de l’élection du 3 novembre. Retrouvez ci-dessous l’article publié le 9 novembre dans le journal. Joe Biden sera président. Les […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Je republie le cinquième article, publié le 2 novembre, aujourd’hui, le jour de l’élection. […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Chaque tribune sera republiée ici le mercredi. Voici le quatrième article, publié le 26 octobre. […]
MoreIn addition to my ongoing column on the 2020 elections in L’Humanité, I have a new piece up in Jacobin on the Supreme Court’s, inspired by Tocqueville’s chapter on l’esprit légiste. Here’s a […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Chaque tribune sera republiée ici le mercredi. Voici le troisième article, publié le 19 octobre. […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Chaque tribune sera republiée ici le mercredi. Voici le deuxième article, publié le 12 octobre. […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Chaque tribune sera republiée ici le mercredi, avec l’accord du journal. Voici le premier […]
MoreSuite à la publication de mon dernier post sur les manifestations Black Lives Matter aux États-Unis, Christophe Deroubaix, journaliste à l’Humanité, m’a interrogé sur les luttes sociales et antiracistes, sur […]
MoreA few months ago, after we ran a series of reflections on mass protests in 2019, I wrote a post on why the United States had not seen the kind […]
MoreIn a recording for the Talking Intellectual History series at the University of St Andrews, Ryan Patrick Hanley and I discussed his new work on François de Salignac de la […]
MoreThe release of Booksellers, now available for virtual screening, coincides with a nostalgia many of us feel for those days when we could freely browse the stacks. D. W. […]
MoreLast week I had the opportunity to interview the intellectual historian and Renaissance scholar James Hankins about his new book Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University […]
MoreJust after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee earlier this month, Joe Biden publicly endorsed lowering Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to 60. Despite the extraordinary health crisis that has coincided […]
MoreLike I assume many are feeling these days, I’ve been somewhat at a loss to write about the Covid-19 crisis and what it might mean for contemporary democratic societies. This […]
MoreJudging by the various mass protest movements that have erupted around the world in recent years (see the rest of our series on global revolt here), there have been no […]
MoreThe journal Political Theory has been experimenting with retrospective online “Guides” on key articles and themes over the course of the journal’s history. I worked with the editors on a “Guide” highlighting […]
MoreJacobin asked me to write a short article in response to the Florida Supreme Court’s decision that a 2018 constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated people does not apply […]
MoreI’ve been holding off on writing about the current strikes because the New York Times was kind enough to ask me to write an opinion piece on the subject, which just […]
MoreThis is only a mini-installment in our ongoing series on close-reading Tocqueville, but it’s a good example of why we do it in the first place. On Twitter, Ivanka Trump […]
MoreOn a few occasions since we’ve been doing this blog (see here, here, and here) I’ve attempted to read Tocqueville against the interpretation of his work that has long been […]
MoreJudith Shklar has a provocative little essay called “Why Teach Political Theory?” Crafting the response she might give to “some imaginary dean,” Shklar emphasizes that a liberal education is […]
MoreIt’s been a while since I’ve written anything about French politics, but seeing as my day job is now working in immigration law, I can’t help but comment briefly on […]
MoreIn an interview last week, Acting Director of USCIS Ken Cuccinelli was asked whether a new Trump Administration rule that would deny green cards to foreigners likely to become a […]
MoreWe’ve decided to experiment with a new feature on the blog called “close-reading Tocqueville.” The premise is simple: we’ll periodically select one chapter from Tocqueville’s corpus and comment on what […]
MoreDanielle Charette and Matthew Jackson interviewed Dick Howard about his career on the New Left and his latest book, Les Ombres de l’Amérique: De Kennedy à Trump (Éditions François Bourin, 2018). […]
MoreIn a 1972 speech at the Chicago Public Library, the novelist Saul Bellow described the Westside branch where he borrowed books as a boy. The regulars at the Humbolt […]
MoreAs Donald Trump prepares, at the last minute, an over-the-top military parade for the Fourth of July—and as I prepare to take a few days off for the holiday—I thought […]
MoreJohn Michael Colón’s excellent essay on democratic socialism and the contemporary American left centers around George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As Colón writes, the book is mainly known as a warning […]
MoreThis is the launch of our book forum for Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press 2019). Populist and “post-truth” politics have a long pedigree. Pamphlets […]
MoreThe SAT was back in the news last week, thanks to the College Board’s introduction of something called an “adversity score.” Admissions officers will now see a number, between […]
MoreI was at first surprised that Bernie Sanders’s recent proposal to allow formerly and currently incarcerated people to vote was as controversial as it was. One of my takeaways from […]
MoreOur very own Art Goldhammer will be giving two talks at the University of Chicago next week, which any Tocqueville 21 readers in the area will not want to miss. […]
MoreOne thing that’s long struck me as an American about French politics is the formation of relatively durable cliques, or familles politiques, around certain high-profile politicians: sometimes presidents, but perhaps […]
MoreThe New York Times recently ran an entertaining—if somewhat unnerving—piece on Silicon Valley’s fascination with Stoicism. A number of prominent tech entrepreneurs claim to follow the philosophy of self-mastery taught by […]
MoreIn 2017, Benoît Hamon was in a bind. He had beaten Manuel Valls in the Socialist Party primary running as a radical, promising France’s left-wing voters that he would reverse […]
MoreReview of Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Harvard University Press, 2018) Readers imagining the history of the American news media might think of […]
MoreThere’s something strange, almost perverse, in the idea that prisons and police have anything to do with democracy at all. Of course, every country that calls itself a democracy patrols […]
MoreDanielle Charette and Robert Stone sat down this week with Josiah Ober, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of classics and political science at Stanford University. They discussed Professor Ober’s latest book, Demopolis (Cambridge, […]
MoreStephen Sawyer’s post in January on the democratic paradoxes of the administrative state got me thinking, somewhat tangentially, about the Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. Like many non-lawyers, I first came […]
MoreAfter what Le Monde has called “Eight months of hostilities” between France and Italy, the Quai d’Orsay recalled its ambassador from Rome. The stated reason was a meeting this week held between Luigi Di […]
MoreAfter a number of comments and conversations since my last post on the so-called “nationalist” left in Europe, I have two quick thoughts I want to add. First, some people have […]
MoreIn the attempt to hold myself to my new year’s resolution of posting here rather than in long Twitter threads, I want to flesh out my reaction to a provocative […]
MoreI have a short piece out in Dissent exploring the implications of the gilets jaunes movement for La France insoumise and left populism in general. Part of my motivation to write this was an observation that […]
MoreLast month, Samuel Moyn declared in The Chronicle of Higher Education that law schools might be bad for democracy. He seems to have struck a nerve. Moyn, a prominent human […]
MoreMédiapart has given all of us France-watchers a fantastic New Year’s gift, revealing today in an interview with Alexandre Benalla that the disgraced former security consultant for Emmanuel Macron […]
MoreReview of Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010-2016 (Other Press, 2018) Translated by Elisabeth Zerofsky I’m a latecomer to the Affaire Daoud. I overlooked the fawning coverage that Kamel Daoud’s novel, […]
MoreTocqueville 21 is very excited to announce that Danielle Charette will be joining us as co-editor of the blog, focusing on books, culture, and the arts. Danielle is a doctoral […]
MoreOne stray observation that I think has been lost in some of the discussion of the gilets jaunes movement. Now that the fuel tax increases have been cancelled and […]
MoreOver the last several years I’ve tried to resist comparisons between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Bernie Sanders, mostly because these comparisons tend to posit a simplistic notion of “left-wing populism” […]
MoreFrance is finally on the verge of a national mobilization capable of bringing the country to its knees: the gilets jaunes movement, which began primarily as a revolt against diesel taxes […]
MoreThe Point Magazine was kind enough to invite me to participate in a series of reflections on the 2018 midterms. My thoughts on voting after moving from Paris to Chicago […]
MoreThe evolution of photography seems to correspond with our modern capacity for sympathy. Someone in a Facetime conversation feels more present than a news clip from a month ago, […]
MoreHearing the news of the raids on the offices of La France insoumise and the home of Jean-Luc Mélenchon last week, one might have had some sympathy for the left-wing party […]
MoreSince the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a common narrative to explain the state of American democracy has been the story of “norm erosion.” The premise of this narrative […]
MoreTo mark the sixtieth birthday of France’s Fifth Republic, I recently went and flipped through a chapter I had been meaning to come back to in Raymond Aron’s Démocratie et […]
MoreUntil watching Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, it had been a long while since I’d given Mister Rogers much thought. If he came up at all in […]
MoreOne of the most frequent criticisms on the French left of La France insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (a criticism I have addressed in other writing) is that the “populist” movement and […]
MoreI haven’t had much time to post lately, and so I’m sharing a review I wrote of last year’s winners of the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes that I’ve had in […]
MoreI have a long article in the new issue of Dissent examining the potential future of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise. When I first thought to do a piece on LFI, not […]
MoreAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez this week became the Democratic nominee and presumptive winner in the NY14 congressional race. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—a left-wing organization whose membership […]
MoreThe events of Mai 68, of course, stretched beyond the month of May 1968 itself. But as we’re winding down our reflections on this fiftieth anniversary of these events, we thought we’d […]
MoreThis is a friendly reminder to our readers in Paris that Tocqueville 21 is hosting a discussion on the contemporary legacy of Mai 68 this Friday at the Bar Commun […]
MoreIn France, Mai 68 is an “event”—or rather, a series of événements, the temporality itself having occupied quite a bit of philosophical discussion over the years. In any case, having a single month that […]
MoreGilles Texier est doctorant en histoire et enseignant à l’Université de Paris 1. Membre du Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, il a été impliqué dans le mouvement étudiant sur le site de […]
MoreIn a recent post, I began to address Tocqueville’s Cold War legacy, specifically the narrative in which Tocqueville became an authority that could be invoked in the service of […]
MoreThe new online magazine AOC (analyse, opinion, critique—nothing to do with wine or other protected labels), started off a series today on the role of environmental thinking in the major political […]
MoreI’ve been on the road quite a bit over the last few weeks and haven’t had much time to post, so I’m coming to this a little late, but there’s […]
MoreI have a review out today of Eric Fassin’s pamphlet against left populism (and by extension against Jean-Luc Mélenchon), written last spring during the French presidential election campaign but […]
MoreThis past February, the Times Literary Supplement published a translation of Edith Wharton’s lecture, “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak.” It’s a curious little speech, […]
MoreThis week, rail workers and civil servants in France staged a massive demonstration against Emmanuel Macron’s planned reform of the national rail service, coordinated with plans for an ongoing […]
MorePatrick Weil, whom we recently featured on this blog, has a fascinating interview in a recent issue of Marianne on laïcité and the way it has been approached by Emmanuel Macron and the […]
MoreFilm review: Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig; The Florida Project, written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, directed by Sean Baker Tocqueville’s observations on raising girls in the United […]
MoreGilles Perret has a new documentary out this week based on footage of Jean-Luc Mélenchon during his 2017 presidential campaign. The film, L’insoumis, has been predictably praised to high heavens as […]
MoreThere has been so much said about the tragedy of what happened last week in Parkland, Florida, as well as about the insanity of America’s gun culture, the grip of […]
MoreIn the midst of our series on elites and democracy in France, I thought I’d take a slight détour américain by way of Tocqueville. A recent column about American elites in […]
MoreThis month, the Tocqueville 21 Blog will be featuring a series of articles and interviews on the subject of elitism and democracy in contemporary France. All democracies have to […]
MoreDanielle Charette is a PhD Student with the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where she studies political theory. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in […]
MoreWhen I logged on to Facebook last night, the first thing I found in my feed was a theater invitation from Jean-Luc Mélenchon. At the Théâtre de Ménilmontant this […]
MoreThis week’s Canard enchaîné reports that Emmanuel Macron—along with Richard Ferrand, the president of the parliamentary group of La République en marche—are struggling to control the left-leaning members of the governing majority who […]
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