In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Conversations with Tocqueville: The Global Democratic Revolution in the Twenty-First Century
  • Brian Danoff
Craiutu, Aurelian, and Sheldon Gellar, eds. Conversations with Tocqueville: The Global Democratic Revolution in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Pp. 337. ISBN: 978-0-7391-2302-7

This superb volume advances the claim that Alexis de Tocqueville's writings provide us with an excellent theoretical framework for understanding democracy today—not only in the United States and Europe, but also in non-Western countries. The editors maintain that while it would be a mistake to view Tocqueville as an unerring prophet, one can use Tocqueville's methodology to shed considerable light on the processes of democratization (as well as the obstacles to democratization) in various nations around the globe. In Part I of the book, Sheldon Gellar argues that whereas political scientists such as Samuel Huntington view free and fair national elections as the key marker of democracy, "Tocquevillian analytics"—with its attention to diverse variables such as mores, legal structures, history, physical geography, and local politics— provides us with a much more complex and valuable set of tools for analyzing democracy within different countries. Also in Part I, Aurelian Craiutu defends Tocqueville against those who accuse him of being inattentive to economic issues as well as those who accuse him of only paying attention to empirical evidence which confirmed what he already believed. In addition to refuting these charges, Craiutu also argues that Tocqueville provides us with a model of an engaged social scientist who seeks to teach and inspire his fellow citizens.

The chapters in Part II of the book each apply Tocquevillian analytics to a specific country or region of the world. In her chapter on the United States, Barbara Allen argues that while Tocqueville rightly noted the political importance of civil society groups, he failed to see or to anticipate that African-Americans, like whites, could create voluntary associations that would enable them to learn "the art of being free" and simultaneously empower them to challenge racial injustice. Charles A. Reilly explores a number of fascinating parallels between Tocqueville's analysis of the challenges faced by Ireland in 1835 (including poverty and inequality), on the one hand, and the challenges faced by Guatemala in the twenty-first century, on the other. In their chapter on Latin America, Gustavo Gordillo de Anda and Krister Andersson argue that while there is some hope that the nations of that region can sustain democratic governments, the risk of "authoritarian restoration" always looms large, for reasons that resonate with Tocqueville's analysis of why the French Revolution eventually resulted in democratic despotism.

In a particularly provocative chapter, Frederic Fransen reminds us that Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in an effort to educate his fellow Europeans about how they might maintain freedom in the modern era of equality. However, in Fransen's view, the nations of Western Europe have in recent decades spurned Tocqueville's advice on such matters as religion and local self-government. Fransen fears that by [End Page 188] largely abandoning religion, and by allowing power to be centralized within European Union institutions, the peoples of Europe may be putting both political and private freedom at risk. In his chapter on Russia, Peter Rutland also calls attention to the importance of religion. According to Rutland, Tocquevillian analytics can help us see the link between the low level of religiosity in Russian society, on the one hand, and the low level of respect for the rule of law in Russia, on the other. Like Rutland, James S. Wunsch, Tun Myint, and Jianxun Wang each use Tocquevillian analytics in order to assess the prospects for democracy in parts of the world (respectively, Africa, Burma, and China) where democratization has generally not yet taken hold. In the book's final chapter, Reiji Matsumoto uses Tocqueville's ideas to illuminate key aspects of the history of modernization and democratization in Japan, starting with the Meiji era.

The editors as well as the contributors to the volume are all associated (or formerly associated) with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. While not technically a Festschrift, this volume's deft...

pdf

Share