Tocqueville and Property-Owning Democracy
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 […]
MoreThere 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 […]
More**This is the author’s response to a series of four reviews – two in French and two in English – of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Last week, we […]
More**This is the last of four reviews of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Last week, we published the first review: “Voyage dans les arcanes de la pensée Tocquevillienne” […]
More** Cette recension est la troisième d’une série de quatre critiques de la nouvelle biographie d’Alexis de Tocqueville de l’historien Olivier Zunz. La semaine dernière nous avons publié la recension […]
More** This is the second of four reviews of Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy. Yesterday, we published the first review: “Voyage dans les arcanes de la pensée Tocquevillienne” […]
MoreAt Notre Dame, where I teach history and serve as provost, students use Pell grants to offset tuition payments. Biologists pay for microscopes through Indirect costs from National Institute of […]
MoreFirst 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 […]
MoreRevue de presse du 14 février 2022 La France, L’Energie Le nucléaire fait son grand retour en France avec l’annonce par le Président Macron de la construction de six […]
MoreIn a wonderful contribution to the newest issue of The Tocqueville Review / La Revue Tocqueville (Vol. 42, No. 2, 2021), David A. Bell writes about Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections […]
MoreTo start off this week, two columns in The Week by Samuel Goldman. First, Goldman urges those following developments in American higher education to reflect on the “institutional distinctives” […]
MoreOn June 3, 2021, Gallimard published volumes 1, 2, and 3 of Tome XVII of the Complete Works of Tocqueville. With the addition of these three volumes of Tocqueville’s […]
MoreRegister here for a virtual conversation with Art Goldhammer on the Epistemology of Democracy: Authority, Anti-Elitism, and the Media. The event begins at 6:00 pm CDT today, April 20th, 2021, […]
MoreDid 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 […]
MoreCeci est la seconde critique de livre parue dans notre mini-forum sur The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville (2019), édité par Daniel Gordon. Dans l’abondante littérature consacrée à Tocqueville, […]
More“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 […]
MoreBack 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 […]
MoreWe held our first editorial meeting the morning after the attack on the US Capitol. This is a blog dedicated to exploring twentieth-first century democracy, and while much about the […]
MoreIn addition to my ongoing column on the 2020 elections in L’Humanité, I have a new piece up in Jacobin on the Supreme Court’s, inspired by Tocqueville’s chapter on l’esprit légiste. Here’s a […]
MoreSi Alexis de Tocqueville rendait à nouveau visite aux Etats-Unis aujourd’hui, il serait inquiet pour le sort de leur démocratie, avancent Aurelian Craiutu, contributeur à La revue Tocqueville, et Sheldon […]
MoreChaque lundi avant le 3 novembre, je publie une tribune dans l’Humanité sur l’élection présidentielle aux États-Unis. Chaque tribune sera republiée ici le mercredi, avec l’accord du journal. Voici le premier […]
MoreEditor’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, […]
MoreNous 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 […]
MoreThis 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 […]
MoreThis 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 […]
MoreWe’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 […]
MoreWhat 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 […]
MoreSuite 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 […]
MoreA 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 […]
MoreIn 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 […]
MoreThe 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. […]
MoreLa 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 […]
MoreLast 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 […]
MoreTo 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 […]
MoreWhen 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 […]
MoreWith 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, […]
MoreWilliam 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: […]
MoreThis 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 […]
MoreThis 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 […]
MoreNote 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 […]
MoreEn 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 […]
MoreJudging 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 […]
MoreThe 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 […]
MoreIn April 2019, Arthur Goldhammer delivered the following speech to the University of Chicago Democracy Initiative and Social Sciences Collegiate Division. We are grateful for his permission to reprint […]
MoreThis is only a mini-installment in our ongoing series on close-reading Tocqueville, but it’s a good example of why we do it in the first place. On Twitter, Ivanka Trump […]
MoreEn 2016, l’historien américain James Kloppenberg a publié Toward Democracy, un livre qui, en près de 1000 pages, évoque de manière quasi-exhaustive l’évolution de la pensée démocratique des deux côtés […]
MoreOn a few occasions since we’ve been doing this blog (see here, here, and here) I’ve attempted to read Tocqueville against the interpretation of his work that has long been […]
MoreIn 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 […]
MoreThe 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 […]
MoreLe second volume de La Démocratie en Amérique traite des mœurs démocratiques, ce par quoi Tocqueville entend le sens large qu’avait le latin mores : « tout l’état moral et intellectuel d’un […]
MoreIn an interview last week, Acting Director of USCIS Ken Cuccinelli was asked whether a new Trump Administration rule that would deny green cards to foreigners likely to become a […]
MoreWe’ve decided to experiment with a new feature on the blog called “close-reading Tocqueville.” The premise is simple: we’ll periodically select one chapter from Tocqueville’s corpus and comment on what […]
MoreWelcome 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 always, […]
MoreDanielle Charette and Matthew Jackson interviewed Dick Howard about his career on the New Left and his latest book, Les Ombres de l’Amérique: De Kennedy à Trump (Éditions François Bourin, 2018). […]
MoreJohn Michael Colón’s excellent essay on democratic socialism and the contemporary American left centers around George Orwell’s Animal Farm. As Colón writes, the book is mainly known as a warning […]
MoreThe SAT was back in the news last week, thanks to the College Board’s introduction of something called an “adversity score.” Admissions officers will now see a number, between […]
MoreBelow is the video from Art’s talk at the University of Chicago last week, entitled “Reading Tocqueville, Translating Tocqueville.” Art was joined by Jim Sparrow, Manon Garcia, Jennifer Pitts, Eric […]
MoreAbove is the video of a talk I gave at the University of Chicago on April 17 at the invitation of Prof. James Sparrow. The text is below, for anyone […]
MoreOur very own Art Goldhammer will be giving two talks at the University of Chicago next week, which any Tocqueville 21 readers in the area will not want to miss. […]
MoreThe New York Times recently ran an entertaining—if somewhat unnerving—piece on Silicon Valley’s fascination with Stoicism. A number of prominent tech entrepreneurs claim to follow the philosophy of self-mastery taught by […]
MoreEwa 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 […]
MoreThis is the second article in Tocqueville 21’s series on prisons, police, and democracy. When Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont arrived in America in 1831, they did so […]
MoreThere’s something strange, almost perverse, in the idea that prisons and police have anything to do with democracy at all. Of course, every country that calls itself a democracy patrols […]
MoreDavid 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. […]
MoreDanielle 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, […]
MoreJacob 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 […]
MoreStephen Sawyer’s post in January on the democratic paradoxes of the administrative state got me thinking, somewhat tangentially, about the Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. Like many non-lawyers, I first came […]
MoreThis article is adapted from Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840-1880, by Stephen W. Sawyer (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Perhaps no one in […]
MoreLast month, Samuel Moyn declared in The Chronicle of Higher Education that law schools might be bad for democracy. He seems to have struck a nerve. Moyn, a prominent human […]
MoreFrance is finally on the verge of a national mobilization capable of bringing the country to its knees: the gilets jaunes movement, which began primarily as a revolt against diesel taxes […]
MoreUntil watching Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, it had been a long while since I’d given Mister Rogers much thought. If he came up at all in […]
MoreA 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 […]
MoreWhen French and American scholars and journalists attempt to discuss the role of religion in their respective democracies, it is often apparent that in more senses than one, they […]
MoreIn a recent post, I began to address Tocqueville’s Cold War legacy, specifically the narrative in which Tocqueville became an authority that could be invoked in the service of […]
MoreThe 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 […]
MoreI’ve been on the road quite a bit over the last few weeks and haven’t had much time to post, so I’m coming to this a little late, but there’s […]
MoreThis past February, the Times Literary Supplement published a translation of Edith Wharton’s lecture, “France and Its Allies at War: The Witnesses Speak.” It’s a curious little speech, […]
MoreFilm review: Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig; The Florida Project, written by Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch, directed by Sean Baker Tocqueville’s observations on raising girls in the United […]
MoreIn 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 […]
MorePatrick 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 […]
MoreDanielle Charette is a PhD Student with the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where she studies political theory. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in […]
More(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 […]
More(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. […]
MoreThere’s been a lot to do as we put together for the launch of this blog, so forgive me if these thoughts on the legacy of Martin Luther King in […]
MoreToday 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 […]
More(Lire en français) In the inaugural issue of The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville nearly forty years ago, Raymond Aron declared proudly that the work of Alexis de Tocqueville had […]
More(Read in English) Dans le premier numéro de The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville publié il y a près de quarante ans, Raymond Aron se félicitait de la « redécouverte » de […]
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