Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
Visions of Politics
By Alan Ryan
Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life
by Sheldon S. Wolin
Princeton University Press, 650 pp., $35.00
Sheldon Wolin's Tocqueville Between Two Worlds has been many years in gestation. It is long, densely written, and difficult. It rests on an immense range of reading in Tocqueville and his commentators; and it tackles large subjects. The largest is nothing less than whether freedom is possible in the modern world. The book is an extended dialogue between Wolin and Tocqueville, but it is just as obviously an extended dialogue between Wolin and himself. It raises uncomfortable questions—about the authority of intellectuals to pronounce on political issues, about the compatibility of high culture and democratic equality, about the possibility of securing disinterested political leadership in the absence of an aristocratic caste—and it provides no answers. Indeed, it ends with the disgusted and despairing observation that in contemporary America, 'democracy is perpetuated as philanthropic gesture, contemptuously institutionalized as welfare, and denigrated as populism.'
Review, 4803 words
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