In the incubatory dark of social media, nonsense is propagating. In March 2022, shortly after Vladimir Putin’s renewed assault on Ukraine, noted IR theorist John Mearsheimer benefited from a […]

On Thursday September 21st, the Center for Critical Democracy Studies will be hosting a presentation by Professor Alan Kahan (Université de Versailles) titled The Three Pillars and Four Fears of […]

Review: Michael Walzer, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (Yale University Press)   Michael Walzer is among America’s most distinguished political philosophers.  Throughout his long career, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Lucien Jaume is a philosopher, political scientist and professor at Sciences Po who has contributed to the rediscovery of the French liberal tradition. The author of numerous books on the […]

First off, an exciting conclusion to an exciting series: Samuel Moyn of Yale has been giving the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford on the theme of “The Cold War and the […]

  Much has been written about President Emmanuel Macron’s introduction of the passe sanitaire in restaurants, shopping centres and cultural venues in France. This controversial move has put the spotlight […]

James Baldwin’s paternal grandmother was born into slavery. The preceding generations had lived and died in it. Chronology is not causation, but the writer’s attraction to the radical current can […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

  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 […]

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 […]

  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, […]

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: […]

  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 […]

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 […]

In 2016, the American historian James Kloppenberg published Toward Democracy, a book which, in just short of 1,000 pages, provides a nearly comprehensive history of the evolution of democratic thought […]

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

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

Ewa Atanassow teaches political theory at Bard College Berlin. Her latest book, co-edited with Tocqueville Review Editorial Board member Alan Kahan, is Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts (Bloomsbury, 2018). Ewa […]

  Is a republican politics—in the sense of the French République—possible in the United States? Much has been said about Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal and the November 2016 New […]

First, let me express my gratitude to Tocqueville 21 and The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville for hosting this symposium and for the sharp and constructive remarks of the respondents. My […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  Lilla swings hard. On almost every page of this essay we learn that as far as American politics goes, someone has done or is doing something they shouldn’t; someone […]

Editor’s note: this post is based on a paper given at the American University of Paris’s conference on the fiftieth anniversary of Mai ’68 this past June. To see all […]

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 […]

This is Joan Wallach Scott’s reply to her four reviewers in our critical exchange on her book Sex and Secularism. To see the four reviews, follow the link here.   I […]

This is the first of four reviews of Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism. To see the other reviews as well as Scott’s reply, follow the link here.   Sex and […]

The new online magazine AOC (analyse, opinion, critique—nothing to do with wine or other protected labels), started off a series today on the role of environmental thinking in the major political […]

(From 2018) Marcel Gauchet is a philosopher and historian. He is an emeritus director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and editor in chief of […]

  (Article datant de 2018.) Marcel Gauchet est philosophe et historien, directeur d’études émerite à l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales et rédacteur en chef de la revue Le débat. […]