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There should be no surprise about Macron’s dismissal of Édouard Philippe: any prime minister who is more popular than his president is ripe for sacking. And it is doubtful that […]

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 […]

  Readers of The Tocqueville Review/ La Revue Tocqueville may recognize Dick Howard, an American political theorist who often discusses US politics on French media, as the author of a […]

Yes, the Greens did very well in yesterday’s Covid-delayed second round of municipal elections. They captured some major prizes: Lyon, Marseille, Strasbourg, and, most surprisingly, Bordeaux. They retained Grenoble. They […]

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 […]

  The latest issue of The Point asks, “What is the Nation For?” Tom Meany’s response? It depends. Throughout history, the idea of the “nation” has confronted sovereign power, international economic competition, […]

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 […]

L’« euphorie » de la mondialisation est derrière nous. Après quatre décennies d’exaltation d’un monde plus ouvert, prospère, interdépendant et interconnecté – une terre plate, une planète sans frontières – […]

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 […]

De simples réformes cosmétiques concernant les méthodes et la légitimité de la police aux États-Unis ne pourront jamais faire face à l’ampleur du problème de la violence policière, selon Jocelyn […]

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. […]

A movie star and a reality-TV buffoon have won the presidency of the United States in recent years. Is it conceivable that the mantle of Charles de Gaulle will devolve […]

Marilynne Robinson fears Americans are plagued by a sense of scarcity. Her latest piece in the New York Review of Books asks if Americans used to be more optimistic because […]

There are now numerous Covid rescue plans on the table for European leaders to consider. There is no need to run them down here because Prof. David Cameron of Yale […]

In a recording for the Talking Intellectual History series at the University of St Andrews, Ryan Patrick Hanley and I discussed his new work on François de Salignac de la […]

The pandemic has presented Emmanuel Macron with an opportunity. He can now reimagine his presidency without appearing to have been forced into retreat by the Gilets Jaunes and opponents of […]

  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. […]

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 […]

It took a pandemic, but Germany’s Angela Merkel has at last agreed with French president Emmanuel Macron that a fiscal response to the crisis is necessary, that it will be […]

La Poste est immortalisée dans le premier article de la Constitution américaine, et Tocqueville a même parcouru une partie de son voyage à travers l’Amérique dans une calèche postale. Mais […]

These are difficult days for political commentators. Politics-as-usual has given way to quarrels over the Covid-19 response. Commentators can choose one of two courses: concentrate on the errors, inevitably plentiful […]

  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 […]

  Does Joe Biden have a political ideology? Bernie Sanders has been likened to European socialists, while Donald Trump has similarities with Europe’s populist right. But, when it comes to […]

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 […]

I reflect on the corona crisis and the concomitant “Rebirth of Tragedy” at The Public Seminar. And I summarize France’s just-announced deconfinement policy for The American Prospect.

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 […]

La présente pandémie n’est pas une crise pour l’Inde—au contraire, elle représente trois crises distinctes mais interconnectées, selon Mathieu Ferry, Govindan Venkatasubramanian, Isabelle Guérin et Marine Al Dahdah. D’abord, la […]

This entry was a finalist in our inaugural Blogging Democracy Contest. University of Chicago undergraduates were asked, “Does climate crisis demand a new social contract?” Below is Samuel Clark’s reply. […]

This entry was a finalist in our inaugural Blogging Democracy Contest. University of Chicago undergraduates were asked, “Does climate crisis demand a new social contract?” Below is Caleb Weis’s reply. […]

This entry was a finalist in our inaugural Blogging Democracy Contest. University of Chicago undergraduates were asked, “Does climate crisis demand a new social contract?” Below is Goksu Zeybek’s reply.  […]

This entry was a finalist in our inaugural Blogging Democracy Contest. University of Chicago undergraduates were asked, “Does climate crisis demand a new social contract?” Below is Kendall Chappell’s reply.  […]

This is the winning entry in our inaugural Blogging Democracy Contest. University of Chicago undergraduates were asked, “Does climate crisis demand a new social contract?” Below is David Liu’s reply. […]

We’re proud to announce the winners of our first-ever “Blogging Democracy” Contest. In partnership with the Democracy Initiative and Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, we, […]

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 […]

    As William Davies declares in the London Review of Books, “we are all Durkheimians now.” In the age of Covid-19, we are all looking to averages and aggregates to […]

Like I assume many are feeling these days, I’ve been somewhat at a loss to write about the Covid-19 crisis and what it might mean for contemporary democratic societies. This […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Le coronavirus est-il la fin de la mondialisation ? C’est la question à laquelle s’adressent Henry Farrell et Abraham Newman dans Foreign Affairs. Dans l’économie mondialisée, grâce aux chaînes logistiques conçues pour fournir […]

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 […]

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 […]

  Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, appears in English this month, and the press will no doubt have more to say about Piketty’s call for a 90 percent inheritance tax […]

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, […]

Until last week, the impending municipal elections in France were distinguished only by the eagerness of candidates across France to dissociate themselves from any of the political parties, affiliation with […]

Le Pacte vert d’Ursula Von der Leyen n’est rien qu’un éco-blanchiment, écrivent Yanis Varoufakis and David Adler dans un article pour The Guardian. Les sommes sont insuffisantes. L’importance du capital […]

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 William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (Cambridge University Press, 2019).   Historians of political […]

This is the first review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.      Review of William Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber (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 […]

  I staffed the polls as a volunteer Election Officer because I wanted to see democracy in action. Instead, I got an intimate understanding of one of its greatest failures. […]

  Whatever you believe, you’re probably wrong about inequality. At least that’s what Jonathan Rothwell thinks. In an article for Foreign Policy, he argues that globalization and corporations are not […]

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 […]

Note de l’éditeur : Après la sortie de son article sur le soulèvement au Liban, Farès Sassine nous a fait suivre ce message reçu de Stéphane Malsagne, professeur de l’histoire […]

  En Avril 2019, Arthur Goldhammer a prononcé ce discours aux étudiants de l’Université de Chicago. Nous sommes reconnaissants de sa permission de publier ses remarques dans notre forum sur […]

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 […]

  The journal Political Theory has been experimenting with retrospective online “Guides” on key articles and themes over the course of the journal’s history. I worked with the editors on a “Guide” highlighting […]

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 […]

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 […]

La revue Dissent consacre son dernier numéro à la question de « la démocratie et le barbarisme », réinterprétant la fameuse phrase de Rosa Luxembourg (« socialisme ou barbarisme ») […]

“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 […]

At last, there is some movement in the strike talks. The government has proposed eliminating the âge pivot for retirements until 2027 instead of 2022 as originally proposed, but this […]

« 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 2010s ended much as they had began: just as 2011 was the year of the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, and Occupy Wall Street, 2019 may well be remembered as […]

  Writing for the Age of Revolutions, Blake Smith returns to Emile Durkeim’s famous argument that the French Revolution displayed a religious “effervescence.” With Durkheim in mind, Smith revisits historian […]

Happy New Year to faithful readers of this blog. President Macron delivered his New Year’s address to the French a couple of hours ago, and it seems that he has […]

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 […]

This strike is now longer than that of ’95, with no end yet in sight. Although Parisian tempers are fraying, public support for the strike remains high, yet the government […]

Another day of significant mobilization with no end in sight, as people wonder if their Christmas travel plans will have to be changed and merchants are smarting over the hit […]

Emmanuel Macron se veut un président « progressiste » et « modernisateur ». Dans un entretien pour l’Atlantico, Luc Rouban et David Sessions (qui a écrit pour Tocqueville 21 sur l’oeuvre […]

Emmanuel Macron appears to have lost Laurent Berger. This is the French political equivalent of a bad Groundhog Day: we are in for at least six more weeks of winter […]

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 […]

I’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 […]

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 […]

Both sides have reason to be satisfied with the mobilization of Dec. 5. The unions are pleased that the strike received broad support. The number of demonstrators was large, though […]

  In April 2019, Arthur Goldhammer delivered the following speech to the University of Chicago Democracy Initiative and Social Sciences Collegiate Division. We are grateful for his permission to reprint […]

This poll was called to my attention by a reader, Frédéric Lefebvre-Naré. It purports to show that while 75% of the French believe that pension reform is necessary, 64% do […]

The crisis of liberalism lies in its inability to explain modern phenomena, Katrina Forrester argues in The Guardian. Attempting to understand the turbulent politics of recent years, liberals often point […]

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 […]

The union mobilization scheduled for Dec. 5 to protest the government’s intention to reform France’s pension system (yet again!) is shaping up as the Mother of All Battles for the […]

Steven Erlanger, formerly the Times correspondent in Paris, now based in London, published an extraordinary scoop the other day. Somehow he got on the record this admonition from Angela Merkel […]

Over the next two months, Tocqueville 21 will be coordinating with the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog to co-publish commentaries in our special forum on the Academy and Democracy. We […]

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 […]

  Bienvenue à notre première Revue de Presse 100% en français. Comme d’habitude, nous avons sélectionné des articles de la presse francophone et anglophone sur la politique et la culture […]

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 […]

Just 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 […]

Yesterday I had harsh words for Emmanuel Macron. Today I must pay respect: à tout seigneur, tout honneur. About yesterday’s post a friend commented, “Yes, but there is no alternative.” And […]

It will be difficult, I anticipate, to strike the right tone with this post. I do not want to suggest that the continued influx of immigrants from very poor countries […]

  We’ve taken a break from this format for a few weeks, but we’re back with some of our favorite writing from the month of October. Going forward, we will […]

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 […]

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 […]