Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #617241 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This magisterial biography, selected by the Economist on its U.K. publication as one of the best 100 books of 2006, serves up all the interesting personal details (constant health struggles, an unsuitable marriage to a woman of lesser means) in the life of Tocqueville (1805–1859), the man who most influenced America and its self-perception. But the heart of the book is Tocqueville's travels in the United States and the writing of Democracy in America. Tocqueville both appreciated, and was discomfited by, American egalitarianism. Raised in a Catholic environment, the French aristocrat "could not see the logic" of Protestantism. (His visit to a Shaker settlement was especially unnerving.) British historian Brogan is not uncritical: he notes that Tocqueville never understood that democracy relies "principally on elections to control majorities," rather than on a system of legislative and judicial checks and balances. Brogan's greatest contribution may be his reading of the second volume of Democracy in America as autobiography, arguing that Tocqueville wrote it in part to justify his own break with the expectations of his elite family and social circle. All in all, this is an engrossing and erudite account. 16 b&w illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Joseph J. Ellis

Alexis de Tocqueville is a towering figure in 19th-century political thought, on a par with Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill and more prophetic than either of them. It is therefore a bit confounding to realize that, despite all the books and essays about Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America, there was no full-scale biography in English of the man himself.

Now there is. Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville is a magisterial account, 50 years in the making, that follows the precocious French nobleman through the swirling history of post-revolutionary France, the rutted roads of backwoods America, the bewildering comings and goings of different royalist and republican French governments, all the way to Tocqueville's somewhat controversial final hours in 1859, when the question of his religious convictions at the end remains blurry. If this is not the definitive life, it is only because no such thing is possible. It is surely the authoritative life for our time.

Brogan's style is Boswellian, meaning that he places himself alongside Alexis -- as he calls him -- then quotes from Tocqueville's letters and journals as part of an ongoing dialogue designed to reveal how the master's mind worked. This is a somewhat dangerous approach, but Brogan is impeccable in his citation of sources. He argues that the most important event in Tocqueville's life occurred before he was born: the French Revolution, where Tocqueville's grandfather was guillotined along with several relatives. Tocqueville's famous doctrine "the tyranny of the majority," which Brogan finds somewhat overstated in Democracy in America, probably had its origins in those horrific mob scenes during the Terror.

Brogan argues, convincingly, that part of Tocqueville's personality was forever rooted in the old aristocratic world that his mind told him was dying. That internal contradiction proved an invaluable intellectual asset when he visited the United States in 1831-32 and began to draft Democracy in America, for it gave his analysis of the genuinely new political chemistry congealing in America a dramatic edge. What Jefferson had called "self-evident" was for Tocqueville a historically unprecedented development destined to topple all the monarchies of Europe and the kind of aristocratic society that had shaped him. This is a potent theme, one that made me think of the overripe ironies of Henry Adams in his famous The Education of Henry Adams, embracing his irrelevancy in the modern world that was aborning. Tocqueville's temperament was less melodramatic than Adams's, but he did recognize that he was a victim of his greatest prophecy, that the triumph of democracy meant the end of his world.

American readers will find the chapters on Tocqueville's nine-month sojourn in the United States and his subsequent crafting of the two-volume Democracy in America the most important pages. Brogan builds on the pioneering scholarship of George W. Pierson on Tocqueville's American tour and James T. Schleifer's impeccable detective work on the crafting and drafting of Democracy. Brogan is especially good on the influences on Tocqueville's thinking before his exposure to America, chiefly about the burden that feudalism imposed on France and the advantages the United States enjoyed in lacking such a burden. Tocqueville struck gold because he already knew what he was looking for.

Previous European commentators on the American experiment -- chiefly English observers such as Frances Trollope, who described her 1827 visit in Domestic Manners of the Americans -- had emphasized the semi-civilized conditions of the United States, the bad roads and bad food, the tobacco-spitting on the floor, the crass materialism and the conspicuous commercialism of American society. Tocqueville was at pains to acknowledge that all these accusations were true but that something new and exciting was brewing in this provincial outpost of Western civilization -- something rooted in a deep-felt sense of equality that was destined to destroy all the class assumptions of European society. This was Tocqueville's central insight, and although he had others -- the likely war between North and South over slavery, the dominance of corporate power during the Gilded Age, the eventual confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War -- the hegemonic power of the democratic ethos was his most prescient prediction. More than any other man of the century in Europe, he knew where history was headed.

My own attention wavered toward the end as Brogan described the incessant flutterings of French politics in the 1840s and '50s. We lose sight of Tocqueville for pages at a time, though I would concede that Brogan's decision to write biography on this epic scale virtually forces him to provide the political context of Tocqueville's latter years. The pace of the story picks up when Brogan gets to Tocqueville's last work, The Old Regime and the Revolution, another classic that shared two characteristically Tocquevillian assumptions: first, a heartfelt nostalgia for the lost aristocratic world and, second, a sociological way of thinking that rooted all political change in the underlying mores and values of a nation's culture.

Obligatory caveats aside, Brogan's achievement here is monumental. He wears his learning lightly, the analysis conveys a distilled wisdom that is blessedly bereft of academic jargon, the prose is engaging (with a conversational voice that invites the reader into an ongoing dialogue), and the posture toward Tocqueville is appreciative but never mindlessly celebratory. This is a book virtually certain to win some major prizes.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
The subject of essayist Joseph Epstein's brief Alexis de Tocqueville (2006) here receives the complete examination from British historian Brogan. His theme is de Tocqueville's intellectual distancing from his family's political pedigree, which was landed, noble, and instinctually royalist, and de Tocqueville's diffident approach to the democratic trajectory of the age. During de Tocqueville's lifetime (1805-59), France's six regime changes supplied a surplus of political turbulence for an observer of de Tocqueville's acuity, and his major writings, such as Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution, naturally structure Brogan's account. However, readers who gravitate more toward the active rather than the cerebral aspects of an intellectual's life won't be disappointed. De Tocqueville was emotionally expressive, a traveler, a magistrate, a significant politician in the revolution of 1848, and foreign minister of the Second Republic, all of which Brogan draws upon to illustrate the man's character and dramatize his experiences. This biography is most significant for the way it integrates de Tocqueville's daily life with the development of his political thought. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A Life of the Mind
A detailed overview of the life of a remarkable observer of the human/political condition in both France and America. The British professor, Hugh Brogran, has spent a good deal of his long academic career studying Tocqueville. His close attention and careful work in the archives bears abundant fruit in this biography.

Not for most casual readers, but very rewarding for those with an interest in democracy in the early United States, French politics after Napoleon, and of the social/literary life of a liberal noble in the decades after the fall of the Ancient Regime. But above all, a book for Brian Lamb of C-SPAN.

Excellent Biography; 4.5 Stars
This very enjoyable book is an excellent study of the very interesting French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville. Known best for his analysis of contemporary America, de Tocqueville is a notable figure in the history of political thought and a key source for the history of 19th century America. Brogan's Tocqueville is an essentially conservative figure. The descendent of relatively liberal aristocrats under the Ancien Regime, a number of whom were executed during the Terror, Tocqueville grew up in a legitimist household that detested the Bonapartist state and feared the radicalism that led to the Terror. Tocqueville, however, was too intelligent and preceptive to be a dogmatic Throne and Altar conservative. Following his famous trip to the USA in the early 1830s, he published Democracy in America, a case study in how a liberal society dedicated to political equality, property rights, and respect for law could produce lasting stability. Brogan points out well that Democracy in America, while about American democracy, was inspired by concerns about the role of democracy in France. At the same time, while Democracy affirmed a liberal vision, Brogan is careful to point out that it was a somewhat conservative version of liberalism and that Tocqueville did not really understand important aspects of American democracy. He didn't really understand the role of Congress and appears to have been completely clueless about the crucial role of the party system in providing stability.
Tocqueville's failure to understand crucial aspects of the American democratic system would prove to be hindrance in Tocqueville's political career. Brogan devotes much of the book to a thoughtful description of Tocqueville the politician. More than anything else, his political career shows his essential conservatism. At times, his fear of unrest led him to support distinctly illiberal policies. Like many of his contemporaries, Tocqueville doesn't seem to understand the changes being brought about by the industrialization of Europe and to his last days, he had a fear of urban unrest and the nascent working class.
Brogan shows very well that his last great work, the very interesting Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, should be interpreted in good measure as a critique of the Second Empire. Tocqueville's contemporary preoccupations clearly influenced the themes of his last major work.
Tocqueville is often compared with Montesquieu and this is quite apt. Its clear from Brogan's account that Tocqueville's version of liberalism and democracy was one in the tradition of classical 18th century republicanism. He would definitely have preferred a society with democratic elements but also with institutions that allowed a powerful voice for a principled elite. This vision, shared by people like John Adams and even James Madison in his early constitutional proposals, essentially evaporated in the early years of the American democracy. Tocqueville was pursuing something that had really become anachronistic in his own time.
Brogan writes affectionately but objectively about Tocqueville. This book is written very well with a nice combination of the primary narrative and enough background information to be informative but not over power the narrative.

de Tocqueville from A to Z
He seems the unlikeliest person to write an incisive study of American democracy: a rather spoiled son of a French aristocrat of the ancien regime, and one who suffered from a sense of futility in his own life. But the amazing truth is the Alexis de Tocqueville was exactly the best qualified man to do exactly that. Scholarly, intelligent, a precise writer, de Tocqueville was the one to write an immortal study of American life that would become in time a classic. Best of all, he wrote his work not in his study, but after an intense journey through America itself in the early 1830s.
Hugh Brogan's biography is an excellent study of this young author, and probably the very best modern biography. He uses de Tocquevilles' letters and other contemporary writings to illuminate the life and thought of the young aristocrat. And aristocrat he was, his father having stoutly stood by the French crown through its many vicissitudes (and nearly executed by the Jacobins for this). Young Alexis himself clung to the aristocracy until the turbulent days of the July Monarchy, when the Bourbons were unseated by the Orleanists. After this, the young writer lost much of his loyalty to the crown.
Brogan's book is well written, and covers the political scene in France during de Tocqueville's time quite thoroughly. It is simply a book not to be missed about the world of this very talented young man, who proved to be so influential in studies about America and democracy in general.