T21

I’ve been quiet for so long that some of you must have concluded that this blog had ceased to exist. The political situation here in the US has been so […]

Represented in governments across Europe and at the vanguard of the founding of the European project, Christian Democracy was one of the most important postwar political ideologies. Yet surprisingly few […]

Alors que les manifestations et les révoltes se multiplient au niveau mondial depuis deux ans, notre stagiaire Justin Saint-Loubert-Bié a interviewé Alain Bertho, professeur d’anthropologie à l’Université de Paris 8 […]

In a review for the Point, Scott Spillman discusses Men on Horseback by the Princeton historian David Bell. Bell’s book is a study in the modern phenomenon of charisma, which Max Weber called “the great revolutionary […]

Review of Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (William Morrow, 2020).   Can rats drive? So asks Matthew Crawford, the playfully self-styled “philosopher-mechanic” […]

To honor the life and work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we are republishing the article she wrote in 1993 for The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, 1993, Vol. XIV n°1 (pp.125- […]

  James Burnham’s revival is well underway across the American Right. Although few of his works are still in print today, the neoconservative commentator and American Cold Warrior is certainly […]

Note de l’éditeur : Correspondant du journal Le Temps aux Etats-Unis, le jeune Georges Clemenceau nous dépeint une Amérique étrangement familière. La Guerre de Sécession est terminée mais la politique n’a […]

Editor’s note: Patrick Weil and Thomas Macé’s new edition of the young Georges Clemenceau’s writings from America, Georges Clemenceau : Lettres d’Amérique, features a preface written by Bruce Ackerman. This preface, […]

Note de l’éditeur : Correspondant du journal Le Temps aux Etats-Unis, le jeune Georges Clemenceau nous dépeint une Amérique étrangement familière. La Guerre de Sécession est terminée mais la politique n’a […]

Note de l’éditeur : ce texte de Patrick Weil est adapté de l’introduction de Georges Clemenceau : Lettres d’Amérique. Tous les sources en anglais ont été préservées dans leur langue d’origine. […]

Nous revenons la semaine prochaine de notre pause estivale avec une série de publications à l’occasion de la parution de Georges Clemenceau : Lettres d’Amérique. Cette collection d’écrits du jeune […]

Dans un article pour AOC, le contributeur du blog Dick Howard discute la politique à l’approche des élections américaines et demande, comment en sommes-nous arrivés là?     Photo credit: […]

We’re taking a few weeks off from the blog starting this week. See you back in September!   In the meantime, in lieu of our Revue de Presse, please enjoy […]

This entry was the co-winner in our spring-summer Blogging Democracy Contest. We asked University of Chicago undergraduates whether Tocqueville was right to describe national elections as moments of great “agitation.” Below is Deven Mukkamala’s […]

This entry was the co-winner in our spring-summer Blogging Democracy Contest. We asked University of Chicago undergraduates whether Tocqueville was right to describe national elections as moments of great “agitation.” Below is Carissa Kumar’s […]

We’re proud to announce the winners of Tocqueville 21’s second Blogging Democracy contest! Over the course of the spring and summer, students in the Division of the Social Sciences at […]

In our societies, the Good and the True are ultimate values. They are ideals we strive for and the primary standards by which we judge people and claims. There are […]

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 […]

European summits are odd affairs, in which the high and mighty are reduced to pulling all-nighters, like second-year students obliged to endure a college bull session–which by some accounts these […]

H-Diplo brings together a roundtable featuring four reviews of Iain Stewart’s book, Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century. Aron is often characterized as a “Cold War liberal,” but Stewart adds nuance […]

  Is it still I that burns there all alone? Unrecognizable? memories denied? O life, o life: being outside. And I in flames—no one is left—unknown. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Komm […]

Our apologies to anyone who has recently tried to contact us through the email address contact@tocqueville21.com. We have been unable to access this account for some time now, but we […]

La course au vaccin Covid-19 engendre-t-elle un nationalisme malsain ? Dans un article pour Politico, Elizabeth Ralph explore la manière dont les scientifiques en Allemagne, en Chine, au Royaume-Uni, en […]

Emmanuel Macron’s self-reinvention did not get very far. The just-appointed Castex government is as unexciting as the new prime minister himself. After Philippe, Castaner and Belloubet were shown the door. […]

Suite à la publication de mon dernier post sur les manifestations Black Lives Matter aux États-Unis, Christophe Deroubaix, journaliste à l’Humanité, m’a interrogé sur les luttes sociales et antiracistes, sur […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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

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

“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 […]

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 ») […]

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 […]