« 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 […]

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 […]

  We’ve taken a break from this format for a few weeks, but we’re back with some of our favorite writing from the month of October. Going forward, we will […]

The 2016 Brexit referendum was called to decide a seemingly simple question: Should Britain remain part of the European Union, or leave it? Running on a memorable slogan, the Leave […]

Boris Johnson’s decision to “prorogue” parliament has set off a fresh wave of Brexit controversy. In the TLS, Philip Salmon explains some notable historical examples of past prorogations. Salmon notes […]

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. […]

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 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. As […]

This is a student post, in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Democracy Initiative.   Over the past few weeks, two of the world’s largest democracies, India and Indonesia, both […]

  This is the third review in our book forum on Sophia Rosenfeld’s Democracy and Truth: A Short History.   In Democracy and Truth: A Short History, Sophia Rosenfeld tackles the […]

Italy voted for the European Parliament on Sunday, and out of the 28 countries that took part in this election, its polls were open the longest. Fears of a further […]

Slowly but steadily, European politics is Europeanizing. While the last round of European elections seemed addled by disputes over the size of bananas and the color of passports, as the […]

L’examen des résultats en France est compliqué à mener, si l’on veut sortir de l’instantané médiatique pour prendre un peu de recul dans le temps.   Le mouvement Europe-Ecologie Les […]

Review of Le Retour des populismes : L’État du monde 2019, edited by Bertrand Badie and Dominique Vidal (La Découverte, 2018).   The populism industry is booming. According to numbers assembled […]

Bernard E. Harcourt is a critical theorist, professor of law and political science at Columbia University, and practicing death penalty attorney. He has written extensively on the relationship between neoliberal […]

After what Le Monde has called “Eight months of hostilities” between France and Italy, the Quai d’Orsay recalled its ambassador from Rome. The stated reason was a meeting this week held between Luigi Di […]

In the attempt to hold myself to my new year’s resolution of posting here rather than in long Twitter threads, I want to flesh out my reaction to a provocative […]

I have a short piece out in Dissent exploring the implications of the gilets jaunes movement for La France insoumise and left populism in general. Part of my motivation to write this was an observation that […]

  Over the last several years I’ve tried to resist comparisons between Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Bernie Sanders, mostly because these comparisons tend to posit a simplistic notion of “left-wing populism” […]

  It has become commonplace to diagnose European politics with a populist disease, even as the meaning of populism is often left vague and contested. Evidence to this effect is […]

  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 […]

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 […]

I have a long article in the new issue of Dissent examining the potential future of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise. When I first thought to do a piece on LFI, not […]

(Read in English) Lecture de Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018)   La philosophe belge Chantal Mouffe demeure paradoxalement plus familière au monde anglo-américain qu’à un public français. Espérons que […]

(Lire en français) Review of Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018)   Though the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe remains far better known in the Anglo-American world than in France, this […]

  Le réédition du livre du sociologue Alain Touraine sur les événements de mai-juin 1968 nous donne l’occasion de revenir sur son analyse du « mouvement de mai » et son contexte […]

  I have a review out today of Eric Fassin’s pamphlet against left populism (and by extension against Jean-Luc Mélenchon), written last spring during the French presidential election campaign but […]

“When France sneezes, Europe catches cold”: in these days, Count Metternich’s famous quip could arguably be extended to nearly all European democracies, whose precarious health reverberates on the whole Continent. […]

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 the journal Le […]

  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. Il est notamment […]

  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 […]

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 […]

Today marks the official launch of the Tocqueville21 site, so what could be more fitting than to begin with a quote from Tocqueville himself: Among the new things that attracted […]