Review: Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (Mariner Books)    “The world must be made safe for democracy.” That was American president […]

  L’ère Maudite. En 1999, J.M Coetzee écrit : « Robert Musil qualifiait l’époque à laquelle il vivait d’ ‘ère maudite’ ; ses meilleures énergies étaient consacrées à essayer de […]

Review: Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal:What Would a Fair Society Look Like? In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, a book frequently described as the 20th century’s greatest […]

Vincent Duclert, historien, chercheur titulaire et ancien directeur du Centre Raymond Aron (CESPRA, EHESS-CNRS)   Raymond Aron est décédé le 17 octobre 1983 à 16h30, dans la voiture de l’Express […]

Review: Louisa Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, (Riverhead Books, 2022)   When the United Kingdom turned control of Hong Kong over to the Peoples’ Republic of China […]

On Wednesday October 4th, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies will be hosting a presentation by Professor Andrew Jainchill (Queen’s University Ontario) titled Popular and Municipal Magistrates at the Head […]

From the Social and Political Psychology Lab Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece — The recent Greek election results exhibited an almost unprecedented – and quite unforeseen […]

Tocqueville 21 · Justice, Freedom, and the Nature of Democracy with Alexis Carré Welcome back to the Tocqueville 21 Podcast! Today, I’m happy to present you with the second half […]

Review: Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin Press, 2023)   Martin Wolf, the veteran chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, lauded by global business folk and a […]

Ivan Krastev has an interesting article in today’s FT (paywalled) in which he reflects on what he takes to be an overdramatization of the stakes of elections and/or reforms in […]

The future of the pension reform bill remains in suspense for another week, until the Conseil Constitutionnel renders its decision on the provisions of the law itself as well as […]

On Monday February 13th, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies will be hosting a presentation by Professor Christopher Heckstroth (University of Cambridge) titled The Democratic Prince: A Realist Theory of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

** 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 […]

  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, […]

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 […]

** 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 […]

** 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 […]

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, […]

  French politics   French politics has been unusually present in the US media of late: in Jacobin, Harrison Stetler reports on Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s presidential candidacy, which so […]

  Chantal Mouffe is a democratic theorist whose work as been cited as an inspiration for radical political movements across the globe, and who has elicited controversy for her advoacy […]

  Review of Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters (Yale, 2021).   The ongoing pandemic is the worst crisis the United States has endured since World War II. Over […]

The authors of this essay are members of the “DeRadicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate” research project funded by the European Research Council.   Recent mass shootings in […]

These are difficult days for the political commentator. The normal political thrust and jab has been overshadowed by the universal preoccupation with the pandemic. Commentary on Covid is best left […]

Did American democracy survive the presidency of Donald Trump? The question seems sure to occupy historians, commentators and the public during the administration of Joe Biden and beyond. If nothing […]

We do not usually number Quentin Crisp, queer icon and media quipster, among the theorists of liberal democracy, or indeed among the serious thinkers of anything. Like his predecessor and […]

Danielle Charette and Atman Mehta interviewed Aaron Tugendhaft about his new book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Their conversation covered the […]

  “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 […]

The latest issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville is out, featuring a special series on “How Neoliberalism Reinvented Democracy.” Below is series guest editor Daniel Zamora Vargas’s introduction, which outlines the […]

  On 6 January 2021, a mob of demonstrators broke into and ransacked the US Capitol. Five people, including one police officer, died during the violence. The demonstrators had gathered […]

Back in the fall of 2020, as the post-summer threats of Covid-19 were doing little to assuage the anxieties of the upcoming American presidential election, I received a message from […]

  Review The Puzzle of Prison Order by David Skarbek (Oxford University Press 2020)   The Puzzle of Prison Order is a book about prison governance but reads like a story […]

En France, encore une fois, l’on débat de la laïcité. Comme Patrick Weil nous rappelle, la laïcité c’est d’abord du droit, qui protège la liberté de conscience de chacun.e, et […]

The Covid-19 epidemic has me feeling stuck. I’m held in place by confinement, border closures and quarantines, and held in time by the deferral, or cancellation, of the future—a year’s […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Pierre Manent is a philosopher who summons us to the pursuit of truth and the practice of politics. Since the beginning of his career in the late 1970s, these two […]

  In a 1972 speech at the Chicago Public Library, the novelist Saul Bellow described the Westside branch where he borrowed books as a boy. The regulars at the Humbolt […]

Sur le film What is democracy ? d’Astra Taylor (Zeitgeist Films, 2018)   Les mots doivent garder leur sens, surtout lorsqu’ils portent les valeurs de toute une époque. « What is […]

Danielle Charette and Robert Stone sat down this week with Josiah Ober, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor of classics and political science at Stanford University. They discussed Professor Ober’s latest book, Demopolis (Cambridge, […]

I review three excellent and thought-provoking new books on democracy for The American Prospect.   Photo Credit: Natalie Maynor, League of Women Voters, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.