Tocquevilliana

  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 […]