Tocquevilliana

Collective Beliefs, and a forum on Degenerations of Democracy (2022).   The new issue of The Tocqueville Review is now available online on Muse or UTP (Vol. 45, No. 2) The Tocqueville […]

Comprendre la ‘laïcité à la française’ : malentendus, mythes et réalités. Le nouveau numéro de La revue Tocqueville, publié en automne 2023, est désormais disponible en ligne. (Vol. 44, No. 2) […]

 Civil Institutions and Democratic Life in the United States In Honor of Olivier Zunz. Published in the fall of 2022, the latest issue of The Tocqueville Review is now available online. (Vol. […]

  Of all the great political thinkers, few were as attentive to means of communication as Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the many things that amazed the young French diplomat […]

In the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Sonenscher has reviewed the final volume of Tocqueville’s Œuvres Complètes: Quite a few people, setting out for their first visit to, say, China from […]

At the end of Volume I of Democracy in America, in a section entitled “On Republican Institutions in the United States: What Are the Chances of Their Survival,” Alexis de […]

On June 3, 2021, Gallimard published volumes 1, 2, and 3 of Tome XVII of the Complete Works of Tocqueville.   With the addition of these three volumes of Tocqueville’s […]

  “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 […]

What does individualism mean under quarantine? “Social distancing” demands civic isolation. And yet, cooperating with this isolation for the good of public health requires personal sacrifice. One of the ironies […]

A 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 […]

Last 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 […]

Tocquevillians recently suffered a major loss: Melvin Richter, the great historian of political thought, died a little over a week ago. Mel was the kindest of men, and intellectually generous […]

Judging 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 […]

This 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 […]

On 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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

In 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 […]

We’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 […]

There’s been a lot to do as we put together for the launch of this blog, so forgive me if these thoughts on the legacy of Martin Luther King in […]