Reading Tocqueville: From Oracle to Actor (review)

How relevant is Alexis de Tocqueville, the political actor, a century and a half after his death? What happened to his version of the politics of his time between then and now? This collection of essays attempts to do several things: it uses Tocqueville as a prism through which to observe some of his lesser-studied views on our contemporary controversial issues of (post-)colonialism, Europe, and the place of religion in society; equally prominent is an assessment of the historiography of Tocquevillian studies — several chapters are drawn like magnets to reception and interpretation of his reflections on democracy, both analytical and prophetic, on both sides of the Atlantic. The authors do less well when it comes to reassessing this complex thinker in his own political context, even though there are two chapters noting his views on Algeria and on slavery. More space should have been devoted to clarifying how 'the solutions he provided were not always consistent with each other because of changing audiences and circumstances' (p. 3). Indeed, there could have been contributions that looked at the more neglected body of his published and unpublished works and at his political experiences (in England and Ireland, for instance), since the existence of profound contradictions within Tocqueville's work, hitherto seen as a 'problem' and now considered to be 'one of the most important puzzles' (p. 3) of his work, can be read more meaningfully in the historical context of his time. Perhaps the editors were over-ambitious in striving to include a multifaceted approach: some background is offered to the historical context of his political career that could, for instance, explain his colonial views of Algeria, but the book provides little new insight into Tocqueville the politician. Much more attention is paid to the promotion of him as a thinker by twentieth-century French intellectuals of the classic right or liberal tradition such as Aron, who saw him as a counterweight to Marxism: hardly an innovative revelation. The final chapters explore how his ideas can be brought to bear on some of today's pressing problems, and on two questions in particular: the relationship between religion and democracy, and the European Union — 'unpleasantly suspended between its elitist conception and its democratic future' (p. 7) — whose sheer size poses a problem for a sense of citizenship. While the aim is to explore Tocqueville as orator and oracle through different perspectives and methodologies without necessarily coming to a single, clear conclusion, the contributors do succeed in their aim of giving an insight into the wealth of his legacy. The essay on what Tocqueville would have thought of the institutions of the European Union is a little simplistic: Tocqueville was a product of his time, the early nineteenth century; comparing the twenty-first century's expanded European Union to the North American federalism that he witnessed is too speculative. There is a useful bibliography, but with some gaps: even including the religious and ethnic dimensions of his work, gender is hardly mentioned. Nonetheless, the reader is offered plenty of scope to discover Tocqueville's limitations as well as those of his critics.