From there, they crossed the Carolinas into Virginia, visited Washington, and returned to New York to embark for home with a trunkful of notes and American histories.
Tocqueville’s epic journey extended from New York City through the virgin forests of Michigan to Lake Superior, from Montreal through New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee by coach, steamboat, and even on foot through snow-choked woods, until he and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, boarded a steamer for New Orleans.
Volume 1 mines nine months of indefatigable travel that began in May 1831 in Newport, Rhode Island-“an array of houses no bigger than chicken coops”-when the aristocratic French lawyer was still two months shy of his 26th birthday.
What’s missing in volume 2 of Democracy is concrete, illustrative detail. Alexis de Tocqueville in 1850 (RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, NY) Reading the two books together makes Tocqueville’s argument-and its urgent timeliness-snap into focus with the clarity of revelation. The falloff, I think, stems from the author’s failure to make plain a key step in his argument between the two tomes-an omission he righted two decades later with the publication of The Old Regime and the French Revolution in 1856. Readers don’t fully credit Tocqueville with being the seer he was for the same reason that, though volume 1 of Democracy in America set cash registers jingling as merrily as Santa’s sleigh bells at its 1835 publication, volume 2, five years later, met a much cooler reception. It is implicitly, and should be explicitly, at the center of our upcoming presidential election. What they have missed is his startling clairvoyance about how democracy in America could evolve into what he called “democratic despotism.” That transformation has been in process for decades now, and reversing it is the principal political challenge of our own moment in history. True, readers have seen clearly what makes his account of American exceptionalism so luminously accurate, and they have grasped the profundity of his critique of American democracy’s shortcomings. Alexis de Tocqueville was a more prophetic observer of American democracy than even his most ardent admirers appreciate.
0 kommentar(er)
