Volume 54, Number 18 · November 22, 2007
Tocqueville: The Flaws of Genius
By Alan Ryan
Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life
by Hugh Brogan
Yale University Press, 724 pp., $35.00
Hugh Brogan has taken almost forty-five years to write Alexis de Tocqueville. He began work as a graduate student and finished the book in retirement. The cause was not a bad case of writer's block, but something just as familiar to biographers. The Tocqueville family archives were for many years closed to everyone except the editors of Tocqueville's Oeuvres complètes; so although Brogan was elected to a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1963, with the intention of writing the book we now have, his research was blocked. In 1972, he published a useful short study[1] ; but only in 2000 could he finally engage with the family papers now housed in the archives of the département of the Manche.
Review, 5355 words
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