Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
The Divided Liberal
By Robert O. Paxton
Tocqueville: A Biography
by André Jardin, translated by Lydia Davis, with Robert Hemenway
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 550 pp., $30.00
Tocqueville and the Two Democracies
by Jean-Claude Lamberti, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press, 323 pp., $50.00
The appearance in Paris of the first authoritative biography (by André Jardin) and the first French doctorat d'état (by Jean-Claude Lamberti) devoted to Alexis de Tocqueville 125 years after their subject's death points to two paradoxes: that they come so late and that so little of the previous Tocqueville scholarship has been French. There has been no shortage of material. Tocqueville, as Jardin shows us, was keenly conscious of his place in posterity. His papers at the chateau de Tocqueville fill some 110 cartons; they are supplemented by the travel diaries and drafts of Democracy in America gathered at Yale for the preparation of George W. Pierson's classic Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938). The only previous French biography was the work of a conservative essayist, Antoine Rédier (1925). Serious European scholarship on Tocqueville was begun by the English-based German refugee J.-P. Mayer, who wrote a brief but perceptive biography in 1939,[1] and who began publishing the collected works in 1951 under the direction of Raymond Aron, now nearly complete at volume eighteen.
Review, 3380 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |