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Tocqueville 21 · Democracy in the United States and the 2022 Midterms with Pascale Siegel Season’s Greetings, and welcome back to the Tocqueville 21 Podcast. Today we discuss US politics, […]

Emmanuel Macron is back in the United States for his second state visit. This time there will be no presidential arm-wrestling or lint-picking, and the speculation will not focus on […]

As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, their turkey and mashed potatoes are normally accompanied by much-anticipated football games. American football, that is. But this Thursday, the game that the rest of the […]

Review: David A. Hollinger, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022) Although it comprises fewer than 200 pages, David A. Hollinger’s […]

Review: Moisé Naím, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century (St. Martin’s Press)   Less than a week before the recent mid-term elections in […]

In our ABC interviews, we ask an author of a newly published book only three questions: about themselves and their intellectual trajectory (A = Author), about the book’s thesis (B […]

** This is the author’s response to a series of four reviews of William Novak’s recently published book New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. 1. The Limitless […]

** This is the fourth in a series of four reviews of William Novak’s recently published book New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. 1. The Limitless Possibilities […]

** This is the third in a series of four reviews of William Novak’s recently published book New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. 1. The Limitless Possibilities […]

** Ceci est la deuxième critique du livre New Democracy par William Novak. Elle est la seule en français. Les autres sont rédigées en anglais. This is the second in […]

** This is the first in a series of four reviews of William Novak’s recently published book New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State. Each day this week […]

After months of pessimism, the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections were received by Democrats as an extraordinary moment of hope. The much prophesied ‘red wave’, which had appeared so vast […]

Tocqueville 21 · China and the CCP with Adam Ni When it comes to the media and industry commentary surrounding Chinese politics, “Complexity is not a compelling narrative”. This is […]

Four years ago, the founder of Tocqueville 21, Editor Emeritus Jacob Hamburger, mused on the 2018 midterm elections and the evaporation of a much-anticipated blue wave.    It would seem […]

In tomorrow’s midterm elections, I will vote in person for the first time since 2008. For the past decade and a half, I lived abroad in several countries in Africa […]

Why are  we talking so much about Germany? Yes, there’s the German perspective on the Ukraine war – and the Zeitenwende, a “sea change”, with a fundamental altering of Germany’s […]

Review: Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press), and Bénédicte Savoy, Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, translated […]

In our ABC interviews, we ask an author of a newly published book only three questions: about themselves and their intellectual trajectory (A = Author), about the book’s thesis (B […]

Emmanuel Macron staked out a claim to the political center without ever calling it that. “Ni droite ni gauche” pointed to a centrist position but avoided any suggestion that it […]

Revue de Presse «  Une nation qui ne demande à son gouvernement que le maintien de l’ordre est déjà esclave au fond du cœur ; elle est esclave de son bien-être […]

  Philosophe, enseignant à Sciences Po, fondateur du Think Tank GenerationLibre, Gaspard Koenig est un intellectuel engagé qui a écrit une quinzaine d’ouvrages. Il est notamment l’auteur de Liber, un […]

  On Friday, October 14th, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies will be hosting a book launch for Professor Umut Korkut’s (Glasgow Caledonian University) new co-edited volume with Professor James […]

Elon Musk’s newfound sympathy with Putin’s war aims and his alleged contact with the Russian dictator; Kanye West’s antisemitic outburst; Musk’s warm welcome of West back to Twitter.—All of these […]

  Revue de Presse: « C’était tous les jours tempête. » Voici une expression qui saisit bien l’actualité internationale du mois passé, et que l’on doit à l’écrivain Jérôme Garcin.   Premier […]

A book review of Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris From the Belle Epoque Through Revolution and War (St. Martin’s Press, 2022). Paris is “full of Russians […]

Cette interview ABC est la quatrième — mais la première publiée en français — sur notre site. D’autres interviews dans cette série comprennent The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, […]

  Winter is coming, certes. Mais cette semaine en Europe, et depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine, tout semble prendre feu. Dans l’Est, Vladimir Poutine renouvelle son assaut contre l’Ukraine en annonçant […]

The 2022 presidential election marked the end of France’s old party system. The former mainstream parties of the right and the left garnered less than 10 percent of the vote […]

There are few genealogies of “property-owning democracy.”[1] This is a remarkable fact. In Britain and the United States competing visions of the idea have exerted a profound influence over both […]

Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Andrew Preston (eds.), Rethinking American Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021) Late in the year 1906, a senior official in the British Foreign Office […]

This is the third of T21’s ABC short interview. Earlier ABC interviews include Christina B. Carroll on The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850-1900 and Ester da Costa Meyer […]

This is a book review of Kati Marton’s The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Many can plausibly claim to have had a hand in […]

This is a book review of Marcel Gauchet’s Robespierre: The Man Who Divides us the Most (Princeton University Press, 2022) The name Robespierre still haunts the memory of the French […]

Robespierre and Democracy: Four Perspectives It is just over two hundred and twenty eight years since Maximilien Robespierre fell from power. And yet Robespierre still has the capacity to incite […]

This is the second ABCs short interview at T21. Our first was earlier this month with Christina B. Carroll about her new book The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, […]

A review of George Makari’s Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia (W.W. Norton and Company, 2021).   The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “xenophobia” as a “fear and hatred of […]

** The past two weeks, we have published four reviews of Olivier Zunz’s new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville—two in French, two in English—followed by a response by Zunz. The […]

**This is the author’s response to a series of four reviews – two in French and two in English – of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Last week, we […]

**This is the last of four reviews of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Last week, we published the first review: “Voyage dans les arcanes de la pensée Tocquevillienne” […]

** Cette recension est la troisième d’une série de quatre critiques de la nouvelle biographie d’Alexis de Tocqueville de l’historien Olivier Zunz. La semaine dernière nous avons publié la recension […]

** This is the second of four reviews of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Yesterday, we published the first review: “Voyage dans les arcanes de la pensée Tocquevillienne” […]

** Cette recension est la première d’une série de quatre critiques—deux en français, deux en anglais—de la nouvelle biographie de Alexis de Tocqueville de l’historien Olivier Zunz, suivi par la […]

At Notre Dame, where I teach history and serve as provost, students use Pell grants to offset tuition payments. Biologists pay for microscopes through Indirect costs from National Institute of […]

A book review of Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019.) As World War II ended, European colonial empires of the 19th […]

This is the first in what we hope will be a long series of very short interviews with authors about their books. We ask each author only three questions: about […]

  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 […]

The president finally reacted to the results of Sunday’s election. His speech was short and largely devoid of content. Although the posture was confident, the prescriptions were vague: “Ma seule […]

I’ve published an article in The American Prospect on the legislative elections.

Historien, spécialiste de l’histoire politique et intellectuelle de la France contemporaine, professeur émérite des universités à l’Institut d’études politique de Paris, Michel Winock a écrit une quarantaine d’ouvrages. Il est […]

Although the definitive results are not yet in, one thing is already clear: President Macron has suffered a major defeat, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon has fallen considerably short of the goal […]

Yesterday I wrote that a) la NUPES would not win a majority in the legislature but b) would win enough votes to deprive Macron of an absolute majority, and that […]

Raymond Geuss Does Not Think Like a Liberal.   Reading Raymond Geuss’s Philosophy and Real Politics a couple years ago was like a breath of fresh air. Geuss was writing […]

The rise of la NUPES has sharpened the generational divide in French politics.  Le Monde reports that an IPSOS-Sopra Steria poll conducted before the first round shows Macron’s Ensemble! taking […]

The first round of the legislative elections yielded inconclusive results. The so-called “presidential” party, now named Ensemble!, could end up with a slim majority, but then again it may not. […]

Elon Musk loves twitter. He is a committed twitter user. He loves it so much that he is trying to own it.   What he is not, I would contend, […]

No, I’m not referring to the Boston Celtics. By “green machine” I mean the coalition of forces responsible for several important votes in the European Parliament today. MEPs rejected several […]

This year’s legislative campaign, which will culminate on Sunday in the first of two electoral rounds, is perhaps the strangest I have witnessed in more than half a century of […]

When you’re wrong, it’s best to fess up. I said that la NUPES would be lucky to get 100 seats. Current projections have the Mélenchonistas gaining 195-230 seats! Macron’s Ensemble […]

A chaque nouveau quinquennat, on observe la même tendance : entrés à l’Elysée avec une cote de popularité élevée, les présidents subissent tous des périodes de forte désaffection. Le taux […]

Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at Fifty, a special edition Published in the spring of 2022, the latest edition of The Tocqueville Review is now available online. (Vol. 43, No. 1) L’édition la […]

Biopolitics! At the “Monument aux Mères Françaises” Some reflections on a natalist installation   Wandering through Paris a couple of weeks ago, I came across a small park just off […]

I’m in France for the first time in 2 1/2 years. I’ve spoken to many people in the past week who have tried to convince me that I’m underestimating the […]

Last week marked 100 days of all-out war in Ukraine. As markets fluctuate and inflation looms large, academics, journalists and thought leaders are slowly beginning to realize: we have reached […]

  Tribune « La Révolution a fondé une société, elle cherche encore son gouvernement. » Le journaliste Prévost-Paradol composa cette phrase en 1868, et dans l’attente des prochaines élections législatives, celle-ci n’a guère […]

Emmanuel Macron is firmly at the controls of the aircraft, but its destination remains unclear. After three weeks of flying in circles, the pilot-in-chief settled on a new government but […]

Par Danielle Charette et Atman Mehta. Traduction par Justin Saint-Loubert Bie.   Nous nous sommes entretenus avec Aaron Tugendhaft à propos de son livre, La destruction des idoles : D’Abraham […]

I’ve been on an island with poor Internet since last Friday, so I’ve had to catch up on all the hot takes about Emmanuel Macron’s nomination of Elisabeth Borne to […]

A word with a long history in leftist movements has recently resurfaced in French political discourse: “hegemony.” It has been primarily used in connection with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, thanks to […]

Despite the failure of the French left to advance a candidate to the second round of the presidential election for the second consecutive time, the political figure dominating the press […]

A book review of Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (W.W. Norton & Co., 2021)   1965 marked the highpoint for […]

Tocqueville 21: First of all, congratulations on the launch of Le Monde in English! The editors, contributors, and readers at Tocqueville 21 all know Le Monde well. In my own […]

  Justin Saint-Loubert-Bie, a former intern for Tocqueville 21, sat down with Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass to discuss their new book, Half-Earth Socialism (Verso: April 2022). In the publication, […]

On Easter Sunday one hundred years ago, on the margins of a major international economic conference in Genoa, the foreign ministers of Bolshevik Russia and the new German “Weimar” Republic […]

  The French Left’s “Historic” Unity The deal has been made. Days after Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Olivier Faure embraced one another at the May Day march in Paris, their parties […]

Elsewhere on this site you’ll find an excellent set of reviews of Martin Conway’s Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. Of the immediate postwar period Conway writes: But Communism no longer […]

This is the introduction to our forum on Martin Conway’s new book Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. 1. Embedded Democracy – Chris Bickerton 2. Comprendre les démocraties européennes après la […]

** This post is Martin Conway’s response to our forum on his new book, Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968.  You can read the previous reviews here:  1. Embedded Democracy – […]

** This is the third in a series of three reviews of Martin Conway’s new book Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. Conway’s response will be published tomorrow. You can read […]

There can be no doubt that February 24, 2022 will enter into the annals of caesura-creating dates alongside such perennials as September 1, 1939, December 7, 1941, November 9, 1989 […]

** This is the second in a series of three reviews of Martin Conway’s new book Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. 1. Embedded Democracy – Chris Bickerton 3. The Pre-History […]

L’unité fait la force, as the saying goes. Has Jean-Luc Mélenchon achieved the impossible, unifying the fractious French left as never before? Has he single-handedly revived the hope of a […]

** This is the first in a series of three reviews of Martin Conway’s new book Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968. 2. Comprendre les démocraties européennes après la Seconde Guerre […]

Revue de presse du 2 mai 2022 Suite à la victoire d’Emmanuel Macron à la présidentielle, l’attention se tourne vers les législatives du 12 juin. La question de l’abstentionnisme, qui […]

Review: The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Thought Between Germany and the United States, by Matthew Specter (Stanford University Press, 2022)   Open any textbook on International Relations today, and […]

The dust has barely settled from the presidential election, but the legislative campaign is in full flood, with rumors swirling everywhere in the accelerating currents. Macron has “put a target […]

May 1, 18h30 (CET) The Case of Ourika Zoom REGISTER HERE The extended CCDS community is invited to the talk “The Case of Ourika: Children, the French Slave Trade and […]

There is no such thing as one-party democracy. Alternation in power must exist as a possibility. While Emmanuel Macron’s decisive victory on Sunday was unequivocally a victory for French democracy, […]

To debrief the second round of the French presidential elections, Tocqueville 21 has invited a distinguished set of academics, journalists, and commentators on French politics to provide their thoughts on […]

Here’s my article on the election results in The New Republic. Here are a few additional thoughts. The republican front, said to have collapsed, still exists and remains fairly robust. […]

The winner of the 2022 French presidential election will soon be known, with many commentators comparing its historic character to the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum.   From […]

In politics, they say, a week is a long time. Had I written this post a week or two ago, I would likely have entitled it “On the Brink” rather […]

I sum up the debate for The New Republic.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is calling on voters to elect him prime minister by filling the National Assembly with Unbowed deputies. Marion Maréchal, Guillaume Peltier, and Nicolas Bay–all ex-Le Penist turncoats–are calling […]

The much-awaited debate will take place tomorrow. The candidates have haggled over every aspect. By common agreement the studio will be kept at a chilly 19° C. to guard against […]

Une évaluation honnête de n’importe quelle campagne électorale mettrait en avant l’importance des images et des impressions. Pour cette saison en 2022, c’est d’autant plus vrai. Le deuxième représente avant […]

France Insoumise voters were asked to express their preference for the second round on the party Web site. 215,292 did so, and 37.65% said they would cast a blank protest […]

Tocqueville 21 · Post-Covid and Green Economics with Charles Dumas Welcome back to the Tocqueville 21 Podcast!  As the war in Ukraine and the French elections have drawn most media […]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is entitled to a little crowing. He outran his polls and improved his position slightly compared with 2017. But in negotiations with the Greens and Socialists over a […]

Athens put Socrates to death for leading its youth astray, and ever since some who aspire to the title “philosopher” have sought to demonstrate their worthiness to be Socrates’ successors […]