Democracy in America.
By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop
University of Chicago Press. 722 pp. $35 cloth
Political philosophers (and husband and wife) Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop have given us a major work of scholarship: the first accurate translation of Alexis de Tocque ville’s nineteenth“ century masterpiece De mo cracy in America. In their rewarding introduction, the translators observe that Democracy in America “is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.” That is exactly right, and this edition is a perfect opportunity to discover or rediscover why. Ranging from the Puritans and New England town meetings to political economy and American sex relations, Tocqueville’s magnum opus is a kaleidoscope of history, social theory, and philosophy that remains as strikingly relevant today as when it was written. The liberal son of the dying ancien régime famously explores the dangers threatening liberty in democratic regimes: a consuming thirst for equality; a social atomism in which lonely individuals find themselves overpowered by external forces; the emergence of a “mild” despotism in which the Nanny State robs men and women of their dignity as if they were mewling infants; majorities flattening social distinctions; and a general lowering of human excellence. Tocqueville be lieved America was able to keep many of those dangers in check through a robust spirit of civic association and a vibrant religious life, a recipe still in order today. The translation is relentlessly literal and consistent, reproducing for the first time in English the unusual single“sentence paragraphs with which Tocqueville sprinkles his narrative. As Mansfield and Winthrop put it, “a book as great as Tocqueville’s should inspire a certain reverence in the translator.” The new edition also includes an extensive scholarly apparatus, providing the textual references to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other think ers that Tocqueville, typically French, left allusive.
