Jacobin 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 […]
MoreEn 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 […]
MoreJust a brief announcement that in case you missed Bill Novak and Steve Sawyer’s manifesto for “Neodemocracy” here at Tocqueville 21, you can also read it on the excellent Law […]
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 […]
MoreIn 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 […]
MoreWe’re taking a break this week from our Revue de Presse, and may be reevaluating the format. A bientôt !
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 […]
MoreSelfa 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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
MoreBelow is the video from Art’s talk at the University of Chicago last week, entitled “Reading Tocqueville, Translating Tocqueville.” Art was joined by Jim Sparrow, Manon Garcia, Jennifer Pitts, Eric […]
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 […]
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 […]
MoreJoël Charbit est docteur en sociologie de l’université Lille 1 et chercheur associé au CLERSE (UMR 8019). Ses travaux portent sur la participation des personnes détenues au gouvernement des prisons […]
MoreBernard E. Harcourt is a critical theorist, professor of law and political science at Columbia University, and practicing death penalty attorney. He has written extensively on the relationship between neoliberal […]
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 […]
MoreDavid Runciman s’est rendu à l’Université de Chicago en février 2019 pour y donner une conférence sur la notion d’ « artificialité » chez Hobbes et présenter son dernier livre, How Democracy Ends. […]
MoreJacob Hamburger and Danielle Charette sat down with David Runciman at the University of Chicago, just after his Political Theory Workshop presentation, where he connected ideas of artificiality and corporatism […]
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 […]
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 […]
MoreImage by Police92 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexandre_Benalla.jpg) Médiapart has given all of us France-watchers a fantastic New Year’s gift, revealing today in an interview with Alexandre Benalla that the […]
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 […]
MoreImage by (vincent desjardins) via Flickr (CC by 2.0 ; https://www.flickr.com/photos/endymion120/5015462019) One stray observation that I think has been lost in some of the discussion of the gilets jaunes movement. […]
MoreImage by Mark Dillman via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez_July_2018.jpg) Over the last several years I’ve tried to resist comparisons between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and […]
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 […]
MoreImage by MathieuMD via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Luc_Mélenchon_2017.jpg) Hearing the news of the raids on the offices of La France insoumise and the home of Jean-Luc Mélenchon last week, one […]
MoreImage by the Executive Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a common narrative to explain the […]
MoreImage by Jack Downey via United States Office of War Information (Public Domain ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crowds_of_French_patriots_line_the_Champs_Elysees-edit2.jpg) To mark the sixtieth birthday of France’s Fifth Republic, I recently went and flipped through a […]
MoreImage by Megan Janetsky via Cronkite News (CC BY-SA 3.0 ; https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2017/06/12/trump-presidency-adds-urgency-to-lgbt-advocates-rally-in-washington/) Is a republican politics—in the sense of the French République—possible in the United States? Much has been said about Mark […]
MoreImage by Rivdumat via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Groupe_France_Insoumise_à_l%27Assemblée_Nationale_2017.jpg) One of the most frequent criticisms on the French left of La France insoumise […]
MoreImages by @freudethugues via Twitter (Public Domain ; https://twitter.com/fhollande_2022/status/1028724998960308224) and Tim D. via Foursquare (https://foursquare.com/v/the-obamas-first-kiss-boulder/502bbe68e4b0e3a4cbc71557?openPhotoId=5bddc09360255e002c3953ec) There have been rumors that François Hollande is contemplating a return to politics reported in French media over […]
MoreImage by Heinrich Hoffman via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H25217,_Henry_Philippe_Petain_und_Adolf_Hitler.jpg) I haven’t had much time to post lately, and so I’m sharing a review I wrote […]
MoreImage by Alisdaire Hickson via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0 ; https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/32343915050) A roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018) Donald Trump is President of the United States, and when he […]
MoreImage by MathieuMD via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meeting_Mélenchon_Toulouse_-_2017-04-16_-_Jean-Luc_Mélenchon_-_02.jpg) I 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 […]
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 […]
MoreWhen French and American scholars and journalists attempt to discuss the role of religion in their respective democracies, it is often apparent that in more senses than one, they are […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
MoreMarcel Gauchet is a philosopher and historian. He is an emeritus director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and editor in chief of the journal Le […]
MoreMarcel Gauchet est philosophe et historien, directeur d’études émerite à l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales et rédacteur en chef de la revue Le débat. Il est notamment […]
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 […]
MoreDirecteur de recherches au CNRS et professeur de philosophie à l’Ecole normale supérieure, Jean-Claude Monod est l’auteur de Qu’est-ce qu’un chef en démocratie?, une réflexion sur le charisme et l’autorité dans la […]
MoreJean-Claude Monod is a research director at the CNRS and professor of philosophy at the Ecole normale supérieure. In Qu’est-ce qu’un chef en démocratie? [What is a leader in a democracy?], he […]
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 […]
MoreSince its original publication in 2015, Wendy Brown’s book Undoing the Demos has become a standard reference for those seeking to understand the relationship between neoliberalism and democracy. Brown’s central […]
MoreThere’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 […]
MoreNow that this site is up and running, a few quick updates on what’s coming. Art and I will of course be posting on French, American, and global democracy on […]
More(Lire en français) In the inaugural issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville nearly forty years ago, Raymond Aron declared proudly that the work of Alexis de Tocqueville had […]
More(Read in English) Dans le premier numéro de The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville publié il y a près de quarante ans, Raymond Aron se félicitait de la « redécouverte » de […]
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