"At a time when the forces of administrative despotism are on the march and Winfreyesque rhetoric passes for moral leadership and intellectual sophistication, Brian Danoff and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., have assembled a compelling collection of timely essays on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, that liberal thinker of the first rank who endeavored to see f̀urther than the parties' without any pretense to post-partisanship, who understood that more democracy is not always the answer to every problem of democracy, and who concerned himself with educating democratic peoples so that they may live together as free citizens rather than exist independently as dependent subjects. This fine collection situates Tocqueville within the history of ideas, ancient and modern, and examines the significance of his observations, predictions, and prescriptions as they pertain to a wide variety of topics with contemporary relevance. The chapters in this volume articulate the proper relationship between political theory, political science, and political practice, emphasizing the necessity for genuine republican statesmanship while honestly wondering about its chances given the trajectory of late modern America."--Travis D. Smith. Concordia University, Montreal.

Tocqueville on America after 1840 provides access to Tocqueville's views on American politics from 1840 to 1859, revealing his shift in thinking and growing disenchantment with America.

With his lifelong examination of the relation between freedom and equality in modern societies, Alexis de Tocqueville is the most widely shared icon of Franco-American political culure. Until now, his American readers have not been in a position to recognize the extent to which, even when his ostensible subject was America, Tocqueville was engaging in hotly contested debates about French society and politics. Francoise Melonio's Tocqueville and the French allows for a clearer understanding of Tocqueville's writings by supplying their missing French context, from the time he wrote Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution to the present. With its contextualization and interpretation of his workds Tocqueville and the French will compel the attention of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and concerned citizens for whom Tocqueville remains perhaps the single most important interpreter of American society and culture.

In 1989, the Cold War abruptly ended and it seemed as if the world was at last safe for democracy. But a spirit of uneasiness, discontent, and world-weariness soon arose and has persisted in Europe, in America, and elsewhere for two decades. To discern the meaning of this malaise we must investigate the nature of liberal democracy, says the author of this provocative book, and he undertakes to do so through a detailed investigation of the thinking of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Paul A. Rahe argues that these political thinkers anticipated the modern liberal republic's propensity to drift in the direction of “soft despotism”—a condition that arises within a democracy when paternalistic state power expands and gradually undermines the spirit of self-government. Such an eventuality, feared by Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, has now become a reality throughout the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. So Rahe asserts, and he explains what must be done to reverse this unfortunate trend.

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

Revisionist analysis of the role of strong leadership in democracies, drawing primarily upon the work of Alexis de Tocqueville.

It is impossible fully to understand the American experience apart from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Moreover, it is impossible fully to appreciate Tocqueville by assuming that he brought to his visitation to America, or to the writing of his great work, a fixed philosophical doctrine. James T. Schleifer documents where, when, and under what influences Tocqueville wrote different sections of his work. In doing so, Schleifer discloses the mental processes through which Tocqueville passed in reflecting on his experiences in America and transforming these reflections into the most original and revealing book ever written about Americans. For the first time the evolution of a number of Tocqueville's central themes--democracy, individualism, centralization, despotism--emerges into clear relief. As Russell B. Nye has observed, "Schleifer's study is a model of intellectual history, an account of the intertwining of a man, a set of ideas, and the final product, a book." The Liberty Fund second edition includes a new preface by the author and an epilogue, "The Problem of the Two Democracies." James T. Schleifer is Professor of History and Director of the Gill Library at the College of New Rochelle