Books/Livres

** This is the first in a series of four reviews of Samuel Moyn’s new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. Each day this week […]

Kathryn Sikkink, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press, 2020) Kathryn Sikkink, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, is one of the […]

  Review of Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (Yale, 2021).   The ongoing pandemic is the worst crisis the United States has endured since World War II. Over […]

Greg Conti offers a response to his reviewers in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.    It was a pleasure for me to read the commentaries by David Ragazzoni and Arthur […]

This is the fourth and final review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.   Review of Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation and Democracy in Victorian Britain by […]

This is the third review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.   Review of Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation and Democracy in Victorian Britain by Gregory Conti (Cambridge […]

Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) Simone Weil is considered today among the foremost twentieth-century French intellectuals, on par […]

    Review of J.H. Elliot, Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (Yale University Press).   Are the United Kingdom and Scotland barreling toward a crisis over Scottish independence of […]

  Review essay on Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France, The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France (Cornell University Press, 2021)   En 1976, dans un […]

  Review of Bruno Amable & Stefano Palombarini, The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the origins of France’s Political Crisis  (Verso, 2021)   Depending on one’s perspective, social democracy’s divorce with […]

Critique 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 […]

  Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X met only once, a chance encounter at the US Capitol on March 26, 1964. The two men were at the Capitol to […]

  Review of Robert Schuett, Hans Kelsen’s Political Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)   “Make no mistake, Hans Kelsen is my favourite political philosopher…In the theory and practice of international […]

Did American democracy survive the presidency of Donald Trump? The question seems sure to occupy historians, commentators and the public during the administration of Joe Biden and beyond. If nothing […]

Ceci est la seconde critique de livre parue dans notre mini-forum sur The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville (2019), édité par Daniel Gordon. Dans l’abondante littérature consacrée à Tocqueville, […]

This is the first of two reviews in our mini-forum on The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville (2019), edited by Daniel Gordon.    More than two centuries after birth, Alexis […]

Danielle 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 […]

Review of William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, eds., Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture (Fordham University Press, 2020).   Among its many intellectual repercussions, the current crisis in global […]

In this post, Emile Chabal responds to reviews of his book—France (Polity, 2020), a short history of the country since 1940—by Art Goldhammer and Emmanuel Jousse.    Writing the history […]

  Ceci est notre deuxième recension du dernier ouvrage d’Emile Chabal, une courte histoire de la France depuis 1940: France (Polity, 2020).   Pour un lecteur français, l’essai d’Emile Chabal suscite […]

  Review The Puzzle of Prison Order by David Skarbek (Oxford University Press 2020)   The Puzzle of Prison Order is a book about prison governance but reads like a story […]

This is the first of two reviews of Emile Chabal’s brief history of France since 1940: France (Polity, 2020).   Emile Chabal’s splendid new book is entitled simply France, without further […]

Represented in governments across Europe and at the vanguard of the founding of the European project, Christian Democracy was one of the most important postwar political ideologies. Yet surprisingly few […]

  The 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. […]

Review of Stephen Harrigan, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas (University of Texas Press, 2019)   Years ago, I was onboard a flight from Los Angeles to Dallas. As […]

This is the first post in our review forum of  Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019).   With […]

When we first started Tocqueville 21 in early 2018, Wendy Brown was one of the very first people we reached out to for insights into our contemporary democratic world. Her […]

With the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013, Thomas Piketty became perhaps the world’s best-known chronicler and theorist of global inequality. His latest book, Capital and Ideology, […]

William Selinger offers a response to his reviewers in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.    It is a pleasure to respond to Georgios Varouxakis and Lucia Rubinelli’s commentaries on Parliamentarism: […]

  This is the second review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.    Review of Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber by William Selinger (Cambridge University Press, 2019).   Historians of political thought […]

This is the first review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.      Review of Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber by William Selinger (Cambridge University Press, 2019).   William Selinger’s book […]

This is the launch of a joint book forum on “Parliamentary Thinking.”   William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (Cambridge University Press, 2019)   Gregory Conti, Parliament the Mirror of […]

En 2016, l’historien américain James Kloppenberg a publié Toward Democracy, un livre qui, en près de 1000 pages, évoque de manière quasi-exhaustive l’évolution de la pensée démocratique des deux côtés […]

In 2016, the American historian James Kloppenberg published Toward Democracy, a book which, in just short of 1,000 pages, provides a nearly comprehensive history of the evolution of democratic thought […]

Lecture de Cynthia Fleury, Le Soin est un Humanisme (Tracts Gallimard, 2019).   Philosophe et psychanalyste, titulaire de la Chaire « Philosophie » à l’hôpital Sainte-Anne, Cynthia Fleury publiait en avril 2019 […]

Danielle 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). […]

Review of The Political Thought of the Civil War, edited by Alan Levine, Thomas W. Merrill, and James R. Stoner, Jr. (University of Kansas Press, 2018).   Americans tend to forget […]

  In 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 […]

This is the follow-up to our book forum on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History.   Is it odd to begin by saying that I am thrilled with the […]

  Ceci est le quatrième compte-rendu de notre table ronde sur Democracy and Truth : A Short History par Sophia Rosenfeld.   À bien des égards, Democracy and Truth : A Short […]

  This is the third review in our book forum on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History.   In Democracy and Truth: A Short History, Sophia Rosenfeld tackles the […]

Ceci est le deuxième compte-rendu de notre table ronde sur Democracy and Truth : A Short History par Sophia Rosenfeld.   Où que l’on pose le regard, le paysage politique […]

  This is the first review in our book forum on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History.   A short history of the relation between democracy and truth from […]

This 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 […]

This is the third of three reviews in our series on Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (Polity, 2017).   Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism is an […]

  This is the second of three reviews in our series on Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (Polity, 2017). One of the most surprising and satisfying aspects […]

This is the first of three reviews in our series on Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (Polity, 2017).   Axel Honneth’s The Idea of Socialism seeks a […]

Review of Le Retour des populismes : L’État du monde 2019, edited by Bertrand Badie and Dominique Vidal (La Découverte, 2018).   The populism industry is booming. According to numbers assembled […]

Review 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 […]

Danielle 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, […]

Review 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, […]

  Review of Elie Baranets, Comment perdre une guerre : Une théorie du contournement démocratique (CNRS Editions, 2017)   In November 1968, Daniel Ellsberg wrote a review of a book-length debate with […]

  Is a republican politics—in the sense of the French République—possible in the United States? Much has been said about Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal and the November 2016 New […]

First, let me express my gratitude to Tocqueville 21 and The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville for hosting this symposium and for the sharp and constructive remarks of the respondents. My […]

  What is there left to say about Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal? Few serious books about American politics in recent years have prompted such an impressive volume […]

  After the 2016 election Democrats were left to ponder: what went wrong and what was to be done? Of the many interventions that followed, perhaps none generated as much […]

  Lilla swings hard. On almost every page of this essay we learn that as far as American politics goes, someone has done or is doing something they shouldn’t; someone […]

I 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 […]

A roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018)   Donald Trump is President of the United States, and when he has not been threatening immigrants and ethnic minorities […]

This article is Samuel Moyn’s response to the roundtable exchange on his new book, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018).   In our interesting moment, Not Enough offers nothing like a definitive […]

This review is the third in our roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018).   Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World provides an engaged, […]

This review is the second in our roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018).   To appreciate Samuel Moyn’s new book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal […]

Cet article est le premier dans notre échange sur Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018).    Les droits humains nous obligent-ils à « bénir » un capitalisme dérégulé et inégalitaire, selon la […]

This review is the fourth in our roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018).   No one has done more than Samuel Moyn to reinvigorate the historical analysis […]

(Read in English) Lecture de Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018)   La philosophe belge Chantal Mouffe demeure paradoxalement plus familière au monde anglo-américain qu’à un public français. Espérons que […]

(Lire en français) Review of Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018)   Though the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe remains far better known in the Anglo-American world than in France, this […]

Albert Memmi, Tunisie, An I (CNRS Éditions, 2017). Albert Memmi, Portraits (CNRS Éditions, 2015). Albert Memmi, Penser à vif: de la colonization à la laïcité (Non Lieu, 2017). The Albert […]

Axel Honneth et  Jacques Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement. A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, édité par Katia Genel et Jean-Philippe Deranty (Columbia University Press, 2017) […]

Editor’s note: The following post by Vincent Lloyd is based on the arguments in his new book out this month from Columbia University Press, In Defense of Charisma.   1. Charisma is […]

  Danielle 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 […]

Guest contributor Michael C. Behrent teaches modern European history at Appalachian State University (North Carolina). After recently publishing a review of Marcel Gauchet’s L’Avènement de la démocratie series for Dissent, Michael had […]

Samuel Walker is an American engaged in graduate studies of philosophy and international relations at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he also works as an editor and translator. — […]

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is a Visiting Presidential Fellow in the Religion Department at Yale University. He is writing a book for Columbia University Press, tentatively entitled The Other Intellectuals: Raymond Aron […]