{"title":"Cancel Tocqueville?","authors":"T. Masoud","doi":"10.1353/jod.2022.0031","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Does Alexis de Tocqueville—the author of the nineteenth-century classic Democracy in America—still matter? Why should any of us today pay heed to a long-dead French aristocrat and his travelogue of a longdead version of America? Tocqueville (1805–59) is often invoked for his supposedly deep insights into our country (a few of which, like the line that “America is great because she is good,” he never ventured), and for observations that feel like they could have been written yesterday. Who has not spent a few minutes marveling at Tocqueville’s evergreen depiction of a U.S. presidential election season, or at his uncanny prediction that the United States and Russia would one day inherit the world? (Admittedly, that latter prognostication probably does not impress the way it did during and right after the Cold War, and might seem positively bizarre to a Zoomer who knows Russia, if he knows it at all, as the home of a tinpot dictator.) But, regardless of whether bits of Tocqueville still resonate, can there be any doubt that the whites-only settler-colonial project that he toured for nine and a half months in 1831 and 1832 is a far cry from the multicultural, multiracial, raucously democratic, global superpower we call the United States almost two centuries later? Could a young person today be forgiven for wondering what we can possibly glean, aside from a few nuggets of historical interest, about democracy in America from Democracy in America?","PeriodicalId":48227,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Democracy","volume":"33 1","pages":"172 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Democracy","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2022.0031","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Does Alexis de Tocqueville—the author of the nineteenth-century classic Democracy in America—still matter? Why should any of us today pay heed to a long-dead French aristocrat and his travelogue of a longdead version of America? Tocqueville (1805–59) is often invoked for his supposedly deep insights into our country (a few of which, like the line that “America is great because she is good,” he never ventured), and for observations that feel like they could have been written yesterday. Who has not spent a few minutes marveling at Tocqueville’s evergreen depiction of a U.S. presidential election season, or at his uncanny prediction that the United States and Russia would one day inherit the world? (Admittedly, that latter prognostication probably does not impress the way it did during and right after the Cold War, and might seem positively bizarre to a Zoomer who knows Russia, if he knows it at all, as the home of a tinpot dictator.) But, regardless of whether bits of Tocqueville still resonate, can there be any doubt that the whites-only settler-colonial project that he toured for nine and a half months in 1831 and 1832 is a far cry from the multicultural, multiracial, raucously democratic, global superpower we call the United States almost two centuries later? Could a young person today be forgiven for wondering what we can possibly glean, aside from a few nuggets of historical interest, about democracy in America from Democracy in America?
期刊介绍:
Since its inception in 1990, the Journal of Democracy has become an influential international forum for scholarly analysis and competing democratic viewpoints. Its articles have been cited in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and widely reprinted in many languages. Focusing exclusively on democracy, the Journal monitors and analyzes democratic regimes and movements in scores of countries around the world. Each issue features a unique blend of scholarly analysis, reports from democratic activists, updates on news and elections, and reviews of important recent books.