The week after Donald Trump was elected, Barack Obama held a press conference in which he called the then-President-elect “pragmatic.” Did Obama see in Trump the same flexibility and realism for […]

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse—now appearing on Sundays—where we recap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. […]

As 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 […]

This is a student post, in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Democracy Initiative.   Trump’s failure to release his tax returns during the 2016 election shattered a presidential norm dating […]

This is a student post, in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Democracy Initiative.   In 1913, Woodrow Wilson held the White House’s first press conference. In 1914, the White […]

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 […]

Cet article apparaîtra dans le prochain numéro de The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville, Vol. XXXX, n°1 (2019).   Dans le système de la liberté naturelle, le souverain n’a que trois […]

David 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. […]

Jacob 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 […]

Review of Kamel Daoud, Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010-2016 (Other Press, 2018) Translated by Elisabeth Zerofsky I’m a latecomer to the Affaire Daoud. I overlooked the fawning coverage that Kamel Daoud’s novel, […]

The 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 […]

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a common narrative to explain the state of American democracy has been the story of “norm erosion.” The premise of this narrative is […]

What is there left to say about Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal? Few serious books about American politics in recent years have prompted such an impressive volume of […]

After the 2016 election Democrats were left to ponder: what went wrong and what was to be done? Of the many interventions that followed, perhaps none generated as much debate […]

American democracy is in crisis, and if the latest headlines are to be believed, the cause of this crisis is a breakdown of civility, which can refer to anything from […]

A roundtable exchange on Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Harvard University Press, 2018)   Donald Trump is President of the United States, and when he has not been threatening immigrants and ethnic minorities […]

Alexandria 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 […]

In 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 […]

Patrick Weil is a historian of immigration and citizenship law, a senior research fellow at the CNRS and the University of Paris 1, and a visiting professor at Yale Law […]

  Directeur 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 […]

  Jean-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 […]

Since 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 […]