Books
Tocqueville's Discovery of America
The Montreal Review, March 2010
"Tocqueville's Discovery of America" by Leo Damrosch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pages, $27.00)
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New book on Tocqueville's life and writings. In "Tocqueville's Discovery of America" ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pages, $27.00 ) Leo Damrosch,
Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, explores the life of the great French aristocrat who wrote the classic in political genre "Democracy in America."
Today, Tocqueville is popular with his insights on the 19th century's American political constitution and social habits. His amazing observations (he was 26-year-old in 1831-32 when he travelled in the New World) and his interpretation of American "moral" individualism are a central point in the modern American national narrative. Perhaps, Tocqueville is the most quoted author in subjects concerning democracy in America today, although, as Damrosch maintain, his analysis was not always correct.
Damrosch writes that Toqueville borrowed the popular idea of tyranny of the majority from a Bostonian, Jared Sparks, the biographer of George Washington and president of Harvard University. Sparks later argued that Tocqueville distorted and simplified his words which were - any majority that actually passed oppressive laws would "certainly be changed at the next election." Instead Tocqueville concluded, in an aristocratic manner, that the opinion of majority turned into real politics endangers the rights of the minorities.
In his book, Damrosch discovers the life of the young Tocqueville in order to connect the character and biography of the man with his literary work.
In a review of Damrosch's book, Sean Wilentz from The American Prospect writes: "Damrosch is lucid in describing the most compelling of Tocqueville's formulations and how they arose out of his peculiar situation. Early on, Tocqueville rejected the idea dear to the Constitution's framers and mourned by later patricians that disinterested civic virtue would animate the new republic. In its place, Tocqueville said, the Americans had found a way for individual interest (understood in the French, intérêt, as including everything that matters to an individual) to take the place of virtue, to make, he wrote, "a sort of refined and intelligent egotism" into "the pivot on which the whole machine turns." Interest properly understood required no grand sacrifices of station or treasure, but it did require a fundamental sense that individual well-being actually required foresight, small daily compromises, and acts of cooperation, lest disorder turn into chaos. Interest could provide no spirituality, but it could provide ethics and ethical habits that, even if based in utility, could reinforce morality and enhance political stability..." (The American Prospect, March 19, 2010)
Leo Damrosch writes that Tocqueville "was not just a great listener; he was a man in motion, and it is no accident that he found his way to his masterpiece by traveling. Beaumont (Tocqueville's companion in America) especially admired the energy with which his friend pursued his quest. "Repose was contrary to his nature, and even when his body wasn't moving, his intelligence was always at work.The slightest loss of time was unpleasant to him.." He was interested in everything, and tireless in acquiring knowledge. He once told Beaumont, "You are always on fire, but you catch fire for only one thing at a time, with no curiosity or interest for everything else... I have an ardent and insatiable curiosity that constantly pulls me off my path to the right or the left." 
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Related articles: "State and Liberty: Democracy in America"
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Tocqueville's Democracy in America is now available in a bilingual French/English edition. The edition consists of hundreds of previously unpublished variants, texts, travel notes and correspondence. The four English volume translation can be downloaded free at The Online Library of Liberty. |
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