Tocqueville's6/25/2023 ![]() Tocqueville thought a lot about the presidency of Andrew Jackson, whom he viewed as a vacuous populist. ![]() Reading Tocqueville on elections and American democracy was a reminder that little of our current moment is new. But though Tocqueville was at times prescient, the ways in which he missed the mark can be just as interesting. Cross-century interactions seem equally valuable - and Tocqueville, I think, would agree. I have written about the importance of engaging with strangers from different generations. Reading Tocqueville’s leisurely, distanced perspectives on the same subject roughly two hundred years earlier was both disorienting and calming. Like many of my peers, I spent most of last week compulsively reloading various news sites and anxiously monitoring every development in American democracy. ![]() Tocqueville prized the conversations he had as a stranger in a strange land: “The stranger often learns by the hearth of his host important truths, that the latter would perhaps conceal from a friend with the stranger you ease the burden of a forced silence you are not afraid of his indiscretion because he is passing through.” French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around the United States in the mid-19th century, meeting with prisoners and politicians alike, and writing observations about American culture and governance that would become his two-volume work “Democracy in America.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |