Le Club

In 2016 I traveled around France interviewing participants in the events of May and June 1968 for a book I was preparing, May Made Me, an oral history of the […]

Almost two years ago, on a February day in 2020, three men chased Ahmaud Arbery through a coastal Georgia suburb with pick-up trucks and guns and killed him. Arbery was […]

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 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 […]

The authors of this essay are members of the “DeRadicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate” research project funded by the European Research Council.   Recent mass shootings in […]

James Baldwin’s paternal grandmother was born into slavery. The preceding generations had lived and died in it. Chronology is not causation, but the writer’s attraction to the radical current can […]

Revolutions are materialist events in their essence. The explosive outgrowth of specific circumstances in specific places at specific times, the product of a specific history and a specific society, they […]

Aux États-Unis, d’intenses débats sur le budget sont en cours et seront en partie déterminants pour l’image projetée par la présidence Biden. Une comparaison récurrente est établie entre le président […]

  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 […]

Review of Judith G. Coffin, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell University Press, 2020)   “What today, in our society, endangers our Republic, our ability to live together?” […]

We do not usually number Quentin Crisp, queer icon and media quipster, among the theorists of liberal democracy, or indeed among the serious thinkers of anything. Like his predecessor and […]

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 […]

  (This is a cross-post from John Ganz’s Substack, UNPOPULAR FRONT, and is Part III of his series on the crises of the Third Republic. You can subscribe to his […]

The latest issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville is out, featuring a special series on “How Neoliberalism Reinvented Democracy.” Below is series guest editor Daniel Zamora Vargas’s introduction, which outlines the […]

  On 6 January 2021, a mob of demonstrators broke into and ransacked the US Capitol. Five people, including one police officer, died during the violence. The demonstrators had gathered […]

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 week, a group of French scholars and writers published a “Manifesto of 100 Intellectuals,” which accused various scholars and journalists in France of complicity in terrorism, and called for […]

During The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville‘s recent conference on the notion of Well-Being, economist Eloi Laurent gave a presentation entitled “Human Well-being and the Biosphere: Connecting the Circles,” in which […]

The Covid-19 epidemic has me feeling stuck. I’m held in place by confinement, border closures and quarantines, and held in time by the deferral, or cancellation, of the future—a year’s […]

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 […]

Alors que les manifestations et les révoltes se multiplient au niveau mondial depuis deux ans, notre stagiaire Justin Saint-Loubert-Bié a interviewé Alain Bertho, professeur d’anthropologie à l’Université de Paris 8 […]

Review of Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (William Morrow, 2020).   Can rats drive? So asks Matthew Crawford, the playfully self-styled “philosopher-mechanic” […]

  James Burnham’s revival is well underway across the American Right. Although few of his works are still in print today, the neoconservative commentator and American Cold Warrior is certainly […]

Dans un article pour AOC, le contributeur du blog Dick Howard discute la politique à l’approche des élections américaines et demande, comment en sommes-nous arrivés là?     Photo credit: […]

In our societies, the Good and the True are ultimate values. They are ideals we strive for and the primary standards by which we judge people and claims. There are […]

  Is it still I that burns there all alone? Unrecognizable? memories denied? O life, o life: being outside. And I in flames—no one is left—unknown. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Komm […]

Justine Lacroix, Jean-Yves Pranchère et Anton Jäger ont eu l’amabilité de partager quelques-unes de leurs réflexions critiques à propos de mon livre Slow Démocratie, paru à l’automne 2019.   Le […]

Ceci est le second texte dans notre échange sur Slow Démocratie, par David Djaïz (Editions Allary, 2019).    Few will remember the “Slow Science” movement. In 2011, a group of academics […]

For several years, observers have noted that many Chinese intellectuals who identified as “new left” critics of the PRC’s market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s have since then not […]

Ceci est le premier texte dans notre échange sur Slow Démocratie, par David Djaïz (Editions Allary, 2019).    Le livre de David Djaïz dresse un tableau clair et pédagogique de la […]

Il est toujours difficile, au cœur d’un moment important, de faire la part de l’événement et de ce qui est appelé à durer, des circonstances accidentelles et des virages définitifs. […]

Greece handled the coronavirus crisis “so well, so far” according to CNN journalist Nic Robertson. The country’s strict lockdown ended on 5 May 2020, after fifty days with schools and […]

  Liberal democracy is an oxymoron. Or rather, it’s a site of confrontation between contradictory discourses, between the universalist aspirations of philosophy and the partisanship of historiography. So insinuates Michel […]

Just 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 […]

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 […]

A l’heure où l’épidémie de Covid-19 place l’Italie du nord (Lombardie) comme l’un des épicentres majeurs de la pandémie mondiale avec le plus fort nombre de victimes à ce jour, […]

To conclude our book forum on In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019), we spoke with Wendy Brown about some of the key questions […]

This is the fourth 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).   Wendy Brown’s latest […]

This is the third 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).   I am grateful […]

This is the second 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).   Wendy Brown’s In […]

Americans have made a kind of civic cult out of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Perhaps it was hoped that praising to the skies one Frenchman’s opinion of our […]

Pour les universités, le plus grand événement politique de ce début de siècle [1] est, par l’étendue de ses conséquences, la loi LRU d’août 2007, qui reste attachée au nom […]

“Time,” writes Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, “stumbles and has accidents and can therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room.” Something of this […]

Cet article a été publié pour la première fois sur ce blog le 29 août 2019. Nous le republions dans le cadre de notre série sur les révoltes autour du […]

  Meritocracy is out of fashion. It is critiqued by those concerned with social mobility and for its threat to academic excellence. For all of the hand-wringing, though, there hasn’t […]

« Comment le mouvement des gilets jaunes a impacté ma vie ?  Il a simplement tout changé », répond un jeune homme vêtu d’un gilet jaune. Avant même de répondre, une larme coule sur […]

Depuis la formation du Grand Liban, décision mandataire française en 1920, puis la proclamation de la République libanaise en 1926 et l’obtention de son indépendance en 1943, le pays n’a […]

Hong Kong’s protest movement has now been developing for more than half a year. In its early stages, the movement brought success for the protesters, in the form of massive […]

The ideas of equality and egalitarianism make hard demands in the context of higher education. While modern participants in higher education generally believe in the equality of persons, or even […]

La campagne pour l’investiture démocrate à la présidentielle américaine d’Elizabeth Warren est incontestablement la sensation politique de l’année à gauche. Deux de ses propositions jugées « radicales » par les commentateurs conservateurs […]

This is a commentary in our special forum on the Academy and Democracy, jointly hosted with the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. We asked contributors whether higher education […]

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 […]

We live in a neoliberal age. For ideological reasons bound up in the epic struggle against totalitarianisms both left and right, a bold experiment in hyper-liberalism took root in the […]

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 […]

The 2016 Brexit referendum was called to decide a seemingly simple question: Should Britain remain part of the European Union, or leave it? Running on a memorable slogan, the Leave […]

Pierre Manent is a philosopher who summons us to the pursuit of truth and the practice of politics. Since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, these two […]

Selfa Chew’s book Uprooting Community tells the relatively unfamiliar story of Mexico’s participation in the displacement and internment of ethnic Japanese during the Second World War, and the experience of people of […]

  Le second volume de La Démocratie en Amérique traite des mœurs démocratiques, ce par quoi Tocqueville entend le sens large qu’avait le latin mores : « tout l’état moral et intellectuel d’un […]

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 […]

  Au fil des mois, le mouvement social algérien Hirak et ses revendications se sont transformés. Nous assistons à une accélération de l’histoire en Algérie. Mais, pour que cette accélération […]

« Demain le ciel sera plus bleu », annonçait Kyriakos Mitsotákis au soir des élections nationales en Grèce, où son parti, Nea Dimokratia [Nouvelle Démocratie] rassembla 39,8% des votes, emportant […]

There is no obvious “right” answer to Venezuela’s current crisis; there are however many wrong ones. Among the most assertive responses is the current domestically-led and US-backed effort to oust […]

“Dear Gerhard, … Your letter contains a number of uncontroversial claims—uncontroversial because they are quite simply wrong. I’ll begin with them so we can move on to the issues worth […]

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 […]

Despite their emphasis on anarchy and debauchery, Harmony Korine’s films about poverty are actually not very fun to watch. In fact, the director of Gummo (1997) and Spring Breakers (2012) has […]

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 […]

At first glance, it looks like not much changed in the Austrian elections to the European Parliament compared to 2014. The center-right ÖVP came in first place again, though with […]

  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 […]

  In the wake of the Brexit referendum, the socialist Red-Green Alliance and the far-right anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party appeared on camera together, issuing a common call for Denmark to […]

Italy voted for the European Parliament on Sunday, and out of the 28 countries that took part in this election, its polls were open the longest. Fears of a further […]

For anyone in the UK (even pro-Europeans), voting in the European elections on Thursday the 23rd felt a little surreal.  Depending on which side of the divide you stood, you […]

The EP election results in Hungary are an expression of three axes of current Hungarian political life. First, there is the tacit acceptance, if not clear-eyed approval, among many segments […]

Slowly but steadily, European politics is Europeanizing. While the last round of European elections seemed addled by disputes over the size of bananas and the color of passports, as the […]

L’examen des résultats en France est compliqué à mener, si l’on veut sortir de l’instantané médiatique pour prendre un peu de recul dans le temps.   Le mouvement Europe-Ecologie Les […]

  What should we make of the Dutch elections for the European Parliament? Much of the coverage before the results came in framed the election as a face-off between the […]

L’affaire « Vincent Lambert » relance les débats en France autour de la prise en charge de la fin de vie et du droit à mourir dans la dignité. En état végétatif […]

Slovakia, my home country, made global headlines in March with the election of our next president: Zuzana Čaputová, a liberal lawyer known for her environmental activism. Compared to worrisome developments […]

This week’s elections for the European Parliament may be the most consequential in the continent’s history. On the one hand, right-wing parties and other anti-establishment “populist” movements may be poised […]

Adopté par l’Assemblée nationale le 10 mai dernier, le projet de loi pour la conservation et la restauration de la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris et instituant une souscription nationale à […]

Sur le film What is democracy ? d’Astra Taylor (Zeitgeist Films, 2018)   Les mots doivent garder leur sens, surtout lorsqu’ils portent les valeurs de toute une époque. « What is […]

Cet article apparaîtra dans le prochain numéro de The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXX, n°1 (2019).   Dans le système de la liberté naturelle, le souverain n’a que trois […]

On 9 April 2019, a district court in Hong Kong found nine participants in the 2014 Umbrella Movement guilty of several charges of causing, conspiring and inciting a public nuisance. […]

Le président de la République a donné une conférence de presse le jeudi 25 avril afin de « répondre aux Français » ou plus exactement, aux « Gilets jaunes » […]

Tocqueville 21 is very happy to announce some new additions to our team. Thanks to generous support from the College at the University of Chicago, we have three excellent undergraduate […]

Compte rendu de J’Veux du Soleil !, un film de François Ruffin et Gilles Perret   Déjà rompus à l’exercice du documentaire, François Ruffin (Merci patron !) et Gilles Perret (entre autres, […]

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 […]

Après la loi de 2009, dite réforme pénitentiaire, et celle de 2014, dite réforme pénale, le parlement français a voté le 19 février 2019 la loi de réforme pour la […]

When we imagine the mythic origins of democracy, we often picture a gathering of diverse people, with diverse interests, collectively deciding how to live together. Ultimately, as the word’s etymology […]