“A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke Hugh Brogan has lived a long time—since the late 50’s, when he was reading history at St. John’s College, Cambridge—with the subject of this biography. Across the decades, though his affection for Alexis de Tocqueville has not lessened, his skepticism in regard...
266 search results for: Tocqueville
Letters From Tocqueville
“I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served many writers as text for the printer.”...
Letters From Tocqueville
From the September 1986 issue of Chronicles. “I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served...
Tocqueville’s America and America Today
At the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing, the French Revolution still loomed over minds and, with it, memories of a bloodbath and of a new kind of tyranny. The American Revolution seemed to offer grounds for rosier hopes about democracy. Convinced that there was no turning back to the old days, Tocqueville set about...
Tocqueville, Santayana, and Donald Trump
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...
L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
This is a call for reading and comments for a discussion of Tocqueville's masterful analysis of the French monarchy and the French Revolution. Since Tocqueville is so clear and explicit in his argument, I intend only to present the briefest of introductions to each section. I hope that, in addition ...
How We Got Here
It’s very well indeed to find an author of Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s distinction and intelligence bidding us to a discussion of democracy. We need to have such a discussion. And if you really want to know why we need to have it, consider the tenor of national conversation during the presidential campaign. Take, for instance,...
American Manners
“Nothing, at first sight, seems less important than the external formalities of human behavior,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, “yet there is nothing to which men attach more importance. They can get used to anything except living in a society which does not share their manners. The influence of the social and...
Three Against the World
In the political writings of Alexis de Tocque-ville (1805-1859), Francis Lie-ber (1798-1872), and Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), we find insights, opinions, and warnings of great current applicability, especially with regard to international affairs. The task Professor David Clinton sets himself in this excellent study is not, however, primarily to draw conclusions concerning the present but to...
Sleepwalking in the Nanny State
In Purchasing Submission, legal expert Philip Hamburger documents the power of the federal government to control and coerce by the granting and withholding of federal funds.
Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
The Tyranny of Cancel Culture and Its Attack on the Soul
The bullets of cancel culture have been flying fast and furious in recent weeks and it seems a new public figure falls almost every day. While many in “woke” society would suggest that cancel culture warfare is being waged for a just cause—to promote whatever their latest politically correct cause may be—many others increasingly disapprove....
Traveler’s Tales
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
Francophobia on the Right
Several years ago in Paris I was surprised to find young pamphleteers outside the Hotel de Ville (or “Chateau Chirac” as an acquaintance would say) shouting out, “Down with the bearded, sold-out socialists!” When I told friends at home, they seemed incredulous. After Reagan bombed Libya I remember that the people of England and West...
An Aristocracy of Warriors
In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
Books in Brief
Open Every Door: Mary Mottley-Mme. Marie de Tocqueville, by Sheila Le Sueur, translated by Claudine Martin-Yurth (Mesa, AZ: Dandelion Books, 340 pp., $26.95). Alexis de Tocqueville’s wife was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman. His biographers have never written more than a couple of sentences about her. This is regrettable because Mary was an extraordinary woman, because...
Trouble in the City
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” —C.S. Lewis Recently named Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, Jean Bethke Elshtain has a keen eye that sees through the haze of fashionable ideologies....
Freedom of Opinion and Democracy
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that...
Public Opinion at the End of an Age
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each
Why Americans Shouldn’t Vote
Everyone is sure the American political system is broken, but no one wants to blame the people in charge. James Fallows has his nifty little book blaming the press; Howard Kurtz blames our talk show culture; Frontline and The Center for Public Integrity point to our corrupt campaign finance system; conservatives tout their all-purpose reform,...
How Do You Spell ‘Individualism’?
A popular belief about the founding era is that America was a society of atomistic individuals. All that Americans demanded, according to myth, was that their life and property be protected by government; the remainder of their affairs was to be their own concern, Barry Alan Shain, in his new book The Myth of American...
The Mark of the Beast
One aspect of America that most impressed Alexis de Tocqueville was how individuals could often accomplish what the most “energetic centralized administration” could not. This ability was well demonstrated, according to Tocqueville, in how efficiently America dealt with crime and criminals: A state police does not exist, and passports are unknown. The criminal police of...
How Do You Spell ‘Individualism’?
From the August 1995 issue of Chronicles. A popular belief about the founding era is that America was a society of atomistic individuals. All that Americans demanded, according to myth, was that their life and property be protected by government; the remainder of their affairs was to be their own concern, Barry Alan Shain, in...
The Italian Revolution
The more I learn of Italy, the less I know. Several years ago I thought I understood the essentials of the Italian political scene, that I was a Tocqueville in reverse. But ignorance was Tocqueville’s great advantage, too, and it is always easier to make out the forest when you are willing to ignore the...
The Necessity of Christianity
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
The Way of All Flesh
The Confidence Trap is a book that, in spite of its many penetrating insights, peripheral as well as central to its thesis, on further examination is less striking and original than it promised to be. Runciman begins with an introductory chapter about Alexis de Tocqueville’s early contribution to understanding how democratic nations cope with crises...
The American “Civil War” and the Tower of Babel
The whole truth about Lincoln’s war to prevent 11 American states from forming a federation of their own cannot be understood unless it is seen as an extension of a brutal process of centralization that had been going on in Europe since the 13th century. Medieval Christian civilization contributed to political philosophy by introducing a...
The American Dream
The presidential campaign that began the day after the previous one ended nearly four years ago seems increasingly like a dream. I suppose it is part of the American Dream—this belief that, of all the allures and temptations the world has to offer, the greatest is the presidency of the United States; the highest calling,...
Unconstitutional
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” —Thomas Jefferson Not long ago Time magazine celebrated America with a special issue. Among the ornaments of this production was an essay...
Deconstructing the 1619 Project
Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), one of the five most important books on American slavery that have appeared in the last 50 years. The previous owner had inserted a series of newspaper clippings of book...
A Transformational President
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, portrays Andrew Jackson as one of America’s transformational presidents, including him in the company of Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. He highlights the crucial events that took place during the 17th president’s two terms in office (1829-37), maintaining that three of those incidents effectively define him. The first (and foremost)...
Slavery as a Political Construct
The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History by David North and Thomas Mackaman Mehring Books Inc. 378 pp., $24.95 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project by Peter W. Wood Encounter Books 272 pp., $28.99 Imagine a country in which the major newspaper of its most populous city launches...
A Republic Not Kept
This book might have been called “Forgotten Figures in Real American History”—a social and intellectual reality, tradition, and political-economic program whose life ended, effectively, in 1861, though many dedicated public and literary men (including most of the contributors to this journal) have devoted—or rather sacrificed—themselves to resuscitating it, or at least to keeping its memory...
Imagining the Permanent Things
“I see the imminent death of 20,000 men, / That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, / Go to their graves like beds . . . ” —Shakespeare, Hamlet This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Modern Age, the flagship journal of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, edited now for almost half...
Go East, Young Man
We shall soon be celebrating the cardinal date of the second Christian millennium, the fall of New Rome, otherwise known as Constantinople in 1453. For a thousand years after the collapse of the Western empire. New Rome had stood, a living museum of Greek culture and Roman law, the last organic link with the origins...
The Price of Empire Globalism and Its Consequences
I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy” or “nation-building” or “exporting capitalism,” or...
Outdated
Albert and David Maysles’s classic documentary Grey Gardens provided a disturbing snapshot of 1970’s American upper-class life, replete with mentally ill dowagers, feral cats, and a crumbling estate. In early 1971, the Maysles brothers started filming the daily activities of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” the...
The Price of Empire Globalism and Its Consequences
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy”...
Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.
Inescapable Horizons
Weighing in at more than 500 dense and provocative pages, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) was clearly not intended for the general reader; at just over 100 pages. The Ethics of Authenticity is much more accessible. While not a fully “polished” work, this slim volume is so full of valuable insights I...
Reflections on Chronicles
The March issue (“Against Ideology”) was a brilliantly perceptive one, notably as it stresses the utmost importance, for any true conservative, of defending loyalties to local mores and traditions, small hometowns and family farms, regional cultures—things that have passed the test of time and matter most to real people. With such ideas I could not...
Defense of the American Vision
Gordon Wood shows how far we have drifted from the Founding Fathers' vision of a polity that would limit arbitrary power in order that the government might serve the people rather than tyrannize them.
Inescapable Horizons
Weighing in at more than 500 dense and provocative pages, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) was clearly not intended for the general reader; at just over 100 pages. The Ethics of Authenticity is much more accessible. While not a fully “polished” work, this slim volume is so full of valuable insights I...
A 28th Amendment
How different this country would be if we had a 28th Amendment which read: “An amendment approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution.” Three-fourths of the states, if they desired, would then be able to change the Constitution without the...
Revolution and the American Mind
“The world has never had a good definition of liberty.” —Abraham Lincoln Food lines lengthen in Moscow; show trials continue in Beijing; bicycles replace motor vehicles in Havana. As the Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall crumble, so does the standing of Mao and Che, even on college campuses. The closing of this millennium may not...
Great Nations Need Great Citizens
A nation’s wealth and status is like starlight—what you see is not what is, but what was. Just as the light we see from a distant star started its journey thousands of years ago, so is the nation’s current success due principally to past actions. Great nations have great momentum; past investments in education and...
Democracy and Infanticide
Among democratic peoples, . . . the thread of time is broken at every moment, and the trace of the generations fades. You easily forget those who preceded you, and you have no idea about those who will follow you. Only those closest to you are of interest. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America During...