Aurelian Craiutu

The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840

Tocquevilles Democracy in America offered the image of an accomplished and successful democratic regime. Although Tocqueville never wrote a third volume, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends after 1840. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? The paper answers these questions by examining Tocquevilles unduly neglected correspondence with his American friends. It seeks to reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy in America might have looked like if it had ever been written. In these letters, Tocqueville addressed important topics such as the instability of the market and the immaturity of American democracy, issues that did not loom large in the two published volumes. The paper shows that in the last years of his life Tocqueville became very disenchanted with American political life and reassessed some of his previous views of American democracy. I, who am half Yankee. Tocqueville (1986, 185)

French liberalism and the aristocratic sources of liberty

One of the most remarkable trends of the last decades (in both Europe and the United States) has been the renewed interest in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, and François Guizot that has allowed us to rediscover the richness of French political thought during the first half of the 19th century. Both the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy provided an open arena for vigorous political debates between the ultraconservative partisans of the Old Regime (who wanted to undo the legacy of the Revolution), the supporters of constitutional monarchy and representative government (who tried to ‘‘end’’ the French Revolution by constitutionalizing the newly gained liberties), and those who sought to continue the legacy of the Revolution by radicalizing it. These debates led to the publication of many original political works that are analyzed in the two books reviewed here. One of the leading European historians of political thought today, Lucien Jaume is an inveterate and erudite historical contextualist who has successfully carved out an original method and agenda which are different from those of Pierre Rosanvallon, Reinhard Koselleck, and Quentin Skinner. Jaume’s approach can only be partly associated with the Cambridge and the Begriffsgeschichte schools, for unlike Skinner and Koselleck, he is also strongly interested in the philosophical and legal-constitutional ramifications of concepts and ideas. Jaume believes that, in order to gain insights into an author’s thought and world, we must seek to understand the author in question by starting from what the latter tells us and by examining the manner and context in which he wrote, the doctrines to which the author responded as well as those which he criticized or rejected. In one of Lucien Jaume’s previous books, L’individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (1997), Tocqueville did not occupy a significant place, and he was regarded as a mere continuator of a tradition of thought initiated by Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Jaume’s latest book, Tocqueville. Les sources aristocratiques de la liberté, that won the French Academy’s prestigious Prix Guizot in 2008, offers an intellectual biography of Tocqueville which will undoubtedly be required reading for any serious interpreter of Democracy in America (one hopes that an English edition will follow soon). Addressed primarily to a French audience, Jaume’s erudite book defies categorization and is anything but a simple biography of Tocqueville. It does not make for an easy read (none of Jaume’s books do!) and it solicits the attention of the reader much more than other similar books on this topic. Those interested in Tocqueville’s life and career will then have to turn to André Jardin’s and Hugh Brogan’s biographies rather than to Jaume’s account. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that Tocqueville was an author that never fully revealed himself and was very keen on preserving his own independence of mind. He used various strategies of concealment and sometimes even seemed to contradict himself. Moreover, Tocqueville had a complex agenda and was not an impartial observer, as he liked to describe himself in his correspondence. In America, he saw much more than America. As Jaume reminds us, the latter was above all a coded mirror, an anamorphosis. Tocqueville vicariously used the lessons of the New World to show his compatriots, especially his fellow aristocrats, that it was possible History of European Ideas 35 (2009) 385–390

A history of modern political thought in East Central Europe: volume I: negotiating modernity in the ‘long nineteenth century’

Every now and then, it is acceptable not to be moderate when making a claim about a recently published book. A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is one such example. This f...

A Tale of Two Moderates

Within the span of fifteen years, from 1789 to 1804, France made the transition from one type of absolute power to another. The country tried four constitutions (1791, 1793, 1795, and 1799) and rejected all of them. Engaged in a costly war against foreign powers and struggling to come to terms with the painful legacy of the Terror, France ended up accepting the man*Napoleon Bonaparte*who promised to save it from ruin and restore it to its former glory. The ten years that marked the transition from the fall of the Old Regime to 18 Brumaire were also a period of great intellectual effervescence that witnessed the publication of many important political writings, such as Jacques Necker’s Essay on the True Principles of Executive Power in Great States (1792), and On the French Revolution (1796), and Joseph de Maistre’s Considerations on France (1796). Moderation had few friends during and after the revolution in the Frenchspeaking world. One such island of moderation was the so-called Coppet group that took its name from the town where its members met, on the north side of the Lake Leman, near Geneva, in Switzerland, ‘un singulier pays, on y parle français, on y pense à l’anglaise’, as Schlegel once said. Situated at the intersection of three cultures, Coppet was a cosmopolitan place, marked by a spirit of openness and toleration. As Simone Balayé remarked, the identity and profile of the Coppet group as a whole were ‘absorbed in the aura of its best known members’, above all Germaine de Staël, the famous daughter of Jacques Necker and one of the greatest writers of her time, whose influence crossed national borders, cultures, and EMMANUELLE PAULET-GRANDGUILLOT, Libéralisme et démocratie. De Sismondi à Constant, à partir du ‘Contrat social’ (1801 1806). Préface de Betrand Binoche. Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 2010. 504 pp. CHF 102.50 cloth. ISBN: 978-2051021678.

Guizot's elitist theory of representative government

Abstract In nineteenth‐century Europe, democracy was not embraced with the same enthusiasm it now enjoys. Conservative critics questioned central democratic normative principles, while liberals tried to correct the limitations of actual democratic practice. While accepting the inevitability of democracy, nineteenth‐century liberals often resisted the idea that universal suffrage guaranteed the wisdom of the peoples choices. Nothing better illustrates this difficult apprenticeship of democracy than the writings of François Guizot, whose political thought focuses on the relationship between liberalism and democracy.