The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

By Daniel Gordon

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser-known ideas on colonies, prisons, and minorities. The Introduction by Daniel Gordon discusses the process by which Tocqueville was canonized during the Cold War and the need to reassess the place of Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of post-Marxist social theory. Each of the contributors compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject to those of other major social theorists, including Bourdieu, Dahl, Du Bois, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Marx.

This comprehensive volume is based on the idea that Tocqueville was not merely a “founder” or “precursor” whose ideas have been absorbed into modern social science. The broad questions that Tocqueville raised, his comparative vision, and his unique vocabulary and style can inspire deeper thinking in the social sciences today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089772

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The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville

Edited by

Daniel Gordon

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

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© 2019 Daniel Gordon editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-975-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-975-X (Hbk)

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Tocqueville and the Sociological Conversation

Daniel Gordon

A Note on References to Democracy in America

Part 1 RELIGION AND IMMATERIAL INTERESTS

Chapter 1 Tocqueville on Religion

Raymond Hain

Chapter 2 Unmasking Religion: Marx’s Stance, Tocqueville’s Alternative

Peter Baehr

Part 2 LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND SOCIAL THEORY

Chapter 3 Tocqueville Mortal and Immortal: Power and Style

Judith Adler

Chapter 4 Tocqueville and Linguistic Innovation

Daniel Gordon

Part 3 GLOBALISM AND EMPIRE

Chapter 5 Noble Comparisons

Andreas Hess

Chapter 6 Tocqueville and Lévi-Strauss: Democratic Revolution at Bookends of Empire

Andrew R. Dausch

Part 4 INEQUALITIES INSIDE DEMOCRACY

Chapter 7 The Tenacious Color-Line: Tocqueville’s Thought in a Post–Du Boisian World

Patrick H. Breen

Chapter 8 The Whole Moral and Intellectual State of a People: Tocqueville on Men, Women, and Mores in the United States and Europe

Jean Elisabeth Pedersen

Part 5 CITIZENSHIP, PARTICIPATION, AND PUNISHMENT

Chapter 9 The Dynamics of Political Equality in Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Beyond

Peter Breiner

Chapter 10 Tocqueville and Beaumont on the US Penitentiary System

Chris Barker

Part 6 AN UNFINISHED PROJECT

Chapter 11 Tocqueville on the French Revolution

Patrice Higonnet and Daniel Gordon

Notes on Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION: TOCQUEVILLE AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL CONVERSATION

Daniel Gordon

In America, I saw the freest, most enlightened men living in the happiest circumstances to be found anywhere in the world, yet it seemed to me that their features were habitually veiled by a sort of cloud. They struck me as grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.

Tocqueville (2004, 625)

An Anguished Life

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was born into an aristocratic family with strong political connections. He served as a representative in the French Chamber of Deputies starting in 1839 and was briefly Minister of Foreign of Affairs in 1849. As an author, he attained instant fame after publishing the first part of Democracy in America in 1835 (the second part appeared in 1840). In 1838, he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and, in 1841, to the even more prestigious French Academy whose 40 members were, in principle, the greatest living writers in the French language, known as the immortals. In spite of these achievements, his was an anguished life. He was tormented by the depressing fluctuations of his country between revolution and Bonapartism, and by his own political ineffectiveness. Yet, it was not a failed life. Although he was unable to modify the course of history, he succeeded in articulating a new set of terms for the comprehension of political regimes and how they change.

The existential problem at the heart of Tocqueville’s identity was that he was a democratically inclined aristocrat in an era of revolutionary hatred for aristocracy. He would embrace equality but would never disown aristocracy. He would support democratic causes, but he would also worry about the disappearance of noble persons like himself, persons with a sense of historical pride and a desire to rise above the level of the common culture. In our current ideological climate, we tend to divide the world into the haves and the have-nots based on privileges associated with class and race. It is not easy to comprehend how a white European nobleman, born with wealth and easy access to positions of authority, could suffer from the anxiety of oppression. But Tocqueville’s aristocratic family was devastated during the French Revolution. Painful memories of injustice, committed in the name of equality, colored his entire life. The threat of becoming extinct inside the democratic society whose emergence he accepted was forever on his mind.

For Tocqueville, his great-grandfather, Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, was a symbol of democracy’s penchant for destroying its liberal elite. Malesherbes was one of the leading political figures during the last decades of the absolute monarchy. In the 1750s, as an official in charge of government censorship of the press, he secretly assisted with the publication of Diderot’s Encyclopedia, the central work of the French Enlightenment. As president of the Cour des Aides, a judicial body dealing with taxation disputes, he issued, in 1775, a widely circulated protest against what he called royal tyranny. Malesherbes contributed to the formation of a critical political language, a language that swelled into revolutionary declarations in 1789. Yet, in 1792, with Louis XVI in prison and facing trial, this former opponent of the royal bureaucracy chivalrously volunteered to serve as the king’s legal counsel. For this, and for his aristocratic birth, he was executed by the Jacobins in April 1794, after being forced to watch his daughter mount the scaffold.

Tocqueville, who venerated his great-grandfather, left a handwritten note in his archives:

As to the question of why I should have felt more obliged than others to speak out and write these things, my answer is clear and precise. I am the grandson [sic] of M. de M[alesherbes]. No one is ignorant of the fact that M. de M[alesherbes], after defending the people before King Louis XVI, defended King Louis XVI before the people. I have not forgotten and will never forget these two exemplary actions. (Cited by Jaume 2013, 298; see also Jardin 1989, 36)

Tocqueville’s preoccupation with the Revolution provided a basis of complexity and tragedy in all of his writings. When he published Democracy in America, the painful memory of 1789 and its aftermath was evident in the frequency with which he alluded to the French Revolution in this work about North America (discussed in Chapter 11 of this volume). The French Revolution, in fact, raised the principal problem he addressed in Democracy: Is it possible to reap the benefits of an egalitarian social order while bypassing the violence associated with the founding of this order? Is a nonrevolutionary democracy possible? In America, he found a yes answer. The great advantage of the Americans is to have come to democracy without having to endure democratic revolution (Tocqueville 2004, 589). Near the end of his life, when he published The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, he addressed the same problem from the other end: What were the sources of radical revolution in the Ancien Régime, and why in France did revolutionary hatreds outlive the causes that gave rise to them?

The memory of revolution was formative, but revolution was more than a memory. The political instability that preceded Tocqueville’s birth continued during his lifetime; it exerted an awful pressure on him. He struggled not only to comprehend the past but also to manage the vicissitudes of his era. In 1815, Napoleon’s rule ended; the Bourbon monarchy was restored. In 1830 came the July Revolution, sometimes known as the Second French Revolution; it implemented a parliamentary system in which only the wealthiest were allowed to hold office. Karl Marx described this regime as the rule of bankers, stock exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron works and forests, [and] a section of the landed proprietors (Marx [1850] 1895, 33). Tocqueville, an aspiring politician, was one of those landed proprietors. Though he considered a regime insipid in which neither the aristocracy nor the people but primarily money ruled, he stood for election, successfully, in La Manche, the area in which his family owned a castle. From 1839 to 1848 he held a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.

Tocqueville was a left-of-center deputy who found French domestic politics to be uninspiring and corrupt. He tended to focus on foreign affairs. He authored a report in 1839 recommending the abolition of slavery throughout the French colonies. Tocqueville’s opposition to slavery, and his equally powerful apprehension that racism would long outlive the abolition of slavery, were already evident in the last chapter of volume 1 of Democracy in America, entitled Some Considerations concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States: When I look at the United States today, it is clear that in one part of the country [the North] the legal barrier between the two races is tending to decrease, but not the barrier of mores. Slavery is receding; the prejudice to which it gave rise remains unaltered ([1835] 2004, 395).

Tocqueville’s reflections on racial inequality (see Chapter 7) will surprise those who know only of his reputation for discerning traces of equality everywhere. He did consider equality to be the dominant political value and moral passion of modern times. Yet, characteristic of his sociological thinking is a tendency to hedge every broad generalization with a countervailing one (see Chapter 3 on his sense of irony). He was sensitive to the existence of historical residues in modern societies. Near the beginning of Democracy, he wrote, American society, if I may put it this way, is like a painting that is democratic on the surface but from time to time allows the old aristocratic colors to peep through ([1835] 2004, 51). For him slavery was even more than a residue; it was a basic feature and an outright contradiction in American society. Thus, he recognized the need for the sociological observer to shift perspectives to attain a full picture of reality. America exemplifies something more than an immense and consummate democracy. There is more than one way to look at the peoples that inhabit the New World, he wrote in the beginning of his chapter on the Three Races (365).

As a deputy, Tocqueville also advocated the colonization of Algeria (see Chapters 5 and 6). Considering his extensive criticism of the European treatment of Native Americans, developed at length in the chapter on the Three Races, his support for the domination, as he called it, of Algeria appears to be a contradiction. Traces of his liberalism, however, are evident in his rejection of the top-down and centralized mode of government in Algeria, and in his criticism of specific injustices committed against natives. Tocqueville was heavily invested in colonial matters and the study of non-Western cultures. He read the Koran and classical Hindu texts. His effort to attain global understanding was not only a result of his wish to see France remain a world power. It was also a product of his effort to comprehend the degree to which each world religion, and the civilizations associated with it, were capable of blending with democracy. Every religion has an affinity with some political opinion (Tocqueville 2004, 332). He ultimately came to the view that certain religions are not a natural fit with democracy. His colonial ideology rested on religious, rather than racial, grounds.

Although Tocqueville was a global thinker, his primary concern remained the constitution of France—its failure to fulfill the revolutionary promise of liberty and equality in a stable regime. The July Monarchy had swung too far to the right, in his judgment. In October 1847, Tocqueville composed a manifesto in which he described the abuse of property rights. It was legitimate to champion property rights, he suggested, when property was conceived as the basis of many other rights (Tocqueville 2016, 11). Property could be understood as a metaphor for all the important rights, including political liberty, that are necessary for the full development of the individual. But in France, property had become the last vestige of a destroyed aristocratic world, and it stands alone, an isolated privilege (11). He predicted that property, having become a tool of exclusion, a prerequisite for active citizenship, would soon become a great battlefield (11). In January 1848, he delivered his impassioned we are presently sleeping on a volcano speech to the Chamber of Deputies. Can you not hear the endless refrain [from the poor], that those above them are incapable and unworthy of governing; that the present division of the goods of this world is unjust; and that the basis of property is unfair? (12)

Tocqueville was not surprised that the Revolution of 1848 occurred, but he was shocked by the violence of the June uprisings in Paris. Since he was not associated with the conservative forces of the July Monarchy, he was elected, in the new regime of universal male suffrage, to the Constituent Assembly. Yet, he was moving rapidly to the right. His disaffection with the Revolution of 1848 was complete when Napoleon’s nephew, Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, won a landslide election for the presidency in December 1848. Three years later, this mediocre simulacrum of the first emperor of France overthrew the republic through a coup d’état. A popular referendum confirmed his power and he became the second emperor of France in 1852.

For Tocqueville, it was a repetition of the whole cycle of the Revolution of 1789. Radical claims for equality led first to extreme violence and then to centralization and one-person rule. And now the French Revolution has begun anew, for it remains the same revolution as before, he observed in his Recollections (2016, 48). In a letter of 1852 to Francis Lieber, he wrote, In the name of the sovereignty of the nation all public liberties have been destroyed, and the formalities of popular election have been used solely to establish a despotism more absolute than any previously seen in France (2016, 270). Tocqueville accounted his political career a failure. He had long suffered from the thought that the qualities that had made him a successful writer disabled him from becoming a charismatic leader. "I wrongly believed that I would be as successful on the podium as I had been with my book [Democracy in America]. The writer’s skill is more of a hindrance than a help to the orator, however […] I also learned that I had none of the skills necessary to rally and lead large numbers of people" (2016, 59).

A melancholy tone is present throughout Tocqueville’s work and was perhaps a part of his nature. As a young man he was drawn to the aphorisms of Pascal who said that the greatness of human beings consists in their ability to know their wretchedness. Tocqueville’s sense of the fragility of our condition was compounded by the sociological concepts that he developed, concepts that tended to highlight how a positive value or institution easily morphs into something destructive. But that quality of always being on the verge of heartbreak, which characterizes his voice, only enhances his place in the sociological conversation. In contrast to his contemporary, Auguste Comte, who coined the word sociology and presented himself as a prophet of a new scientific era, Tocqueville did not offer a secular theology that can solve all problems. Tocqueville savored irony and did not purport to be free of all contradictions. His work is not a system to be accepted or rejected in full. His writings are an intellectual goldmine for the student or scholar who is open to drawing inspiration from older and nonacademic sources.

Why Tocqueville Today?

If academic disciplines make steady progress, why dwell on a thinker of the nineteenth century? Let us begin with the mission of the Anthem Companions to Sociology:

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

When we view Tocqueville in the development of history and social science, one answer to our question quickly comes to mind. Why Tocqueville today? Because he was one of the founders of sociological thought. The term founder is a venerable way of highlighting the importance of a thinker from long ago. Tocqueville can be described aptly as a founder of numerous social-scientific methods and theories, such as the following:

• comparative sociology

• historical sociology

• the use of sociological concepts as ideal types

• that argument that social egalitarianism and state centralization are intimately linked

• the analysis of religion on a nontheological basis, that is, on the basis of religion’s role in supporting or undermining governmental institutions

This is only a partial list. But the best way to appreciate Tocqueville is not to make the list longer. For something is problematic in the idea of a founder: it implies that the meaning of an author’s work is confirmed after the work, in the body of more recent and improved scholarship generated in the modern academy. Above every distant founder of an academic doctrine hangs a shadow of condescension: the assumption that what the founder established has been perfected by others—by us, the professors of the world. Tocqueville, the founder, was ahead of his time, but not, of course, ahead of ours.

Let us take one example that figures importantly in the image of Tocqueville as a founder. Commentators have frequently claimed that Tocqueville wielded abstractions, such as aristocracy and democracy, in a manner that aligns with Max Weber’s use of ideal types. For Weber, ideal types are constructs, or classifications, which highlight the common elements among a number of phenomena. The ideal types thus facilitate generalization and comparison. As Weber noted, because the actual nature of regimes and of periods of history is never clear-cut, the ideal types we use always simplify reality to some degree. Thus, Weber contributed to the elaboration of a number of valuable concepts, while also acknowledging the cognitive limits of these categories. A very sophisticated achievement indeed. Hence, when commentators praise Tocqueville for using ideal types before Weber, is not the implication that the German academic sociologist, not the French aristocrat, offers a more advanced methodology? And if that is the case, why do we need to know Tocqueville?

In a critical article about Tocqueville scholarship called The Invention of Tocqueville, Roland Lardinois (2000) cites numerous scholars who hail Tocqueville for anticipating Weber on this one point, the use of ideal types. Lardinois is correct to question this approach to canonization. For what we really need to know is not whether Tocqueville conceived of something approximating ideal types before Weber; we need to know how Tocqueville deployed general concepts in creative ways that are different from the thinking of Weber and his heirs. What matters is not whether Tocqueville was a precursor to later sociologists but rather the sound of his unique voice in the conversation of modern social thinkers.

If we stick to the topic of ideal types, and lay Tocqueville’s language over Weber’s, as a piece of tracing paper, we find that the lines do not coincide. These differences—substantive as well as methodological—constitute Tocqueville’s irreplaceable contribution. For example, Tocqueville’s central innovation is the concept of democracy. He used this term more often than any author before him, and he used it in novel ways to foreground the equality of conditions and the passion for equality in the modern world. In contrast, for Weber, the concepts of democracy and equality were not central in his vision of modernity. Rationality rather than fluidity is at the heart of Weber’s image of our time. For all his differences with Marx about the origins and nature of capitalism, Weber had far more use for capitalism than for democracy as an ideal type. Tocqueville is unique in his insistence that democracy is the basic framework of modern history. While others have agreed with him, no one has provided such a wide-ranging account of the variety of political institutions, social relationships, artistic forms, and psychological passions that are emblems of the democratic ideal.

Modern social science prides itself on its methodological sophistication and self-consciousness. We are particularly proud of our awareness of the limits of knowledge, and we tend to assume that all thinkers before the twentieth century had excessive confidence in their sources of truth. Weber’s ideal types are a badge of the modern academic’s commitment to recognizing subjectivity as a factor in social science. Yet, we must be open to the possibility that, even at this methodological level, Tocqueville, immersed as he was in a powerful stream of French literary humanism and philosophical skepticism reaching back to the Renaissance, loses nothing in sophistication compared to Weber or, for that matter, to the postmodernists (see Chapter 4). When it comes to thinking about language, its power to represent and to distort reality, and when it comes to thinking about thinking itself, Tocqueville was exquisitely articulate. He exposed his own subjectivity by combining first-person narratives with highly analytical generalizations. He merged social science and literature. Very few in the canon of social theory have done that.

One might round out this discussion by affirming that Tocqueville is best thought of as a classic rather than as a founder. That certainly gets at the point that his ideas have not been superseded by later social theorists. As a literary term, however, classic suggests that an author’s work is best understood through close reading. But as Peter Baehr observes, in social science, the text is not the end unit of comprehension. The sociological text is the medium through which an object, society, is viewed (Baehr 2017, 139). This is not to deny that a work of pure fiction can change how we view society. But when any text inflects our view of the social world, it does so by modifying the concepts with which we previously framed society. In other words, the ideas in a socially referential text influence us by gaining an advantage over competing social ideas, which generally come from other texts. I have spoken of the need to hear Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of social theory. One could also speak of the need to evaluate his writings in an explicitly intertextual way.

Thus, while I have rejected the teleological conception of Tocqueville as someone who founded or anticipated the ideas of others, I do not wish to say that our only duty is to understand Tocqueville on his own terms. In spite of being a historian, I certainly do not wish to suggest that we should limit our inquiry to his context. There is a large amount of scholarship that is biographical, or that compares Tocqueville to other thinkers of his time, or thinkers before him. Such scholarship is informative and often thoughtful. But given the very large number of major social theorists who come after Tocqueville and who rivet the attention of students, professors, and political activists today—thinkers such as Du Bois, Foucault, and Bourdieu, to name a few—the historical approach simply cannot explain convincingly why Tocqueville still matters. We need to attend closely to Tocqueville’s voice, but we must also speak for him, which is to say that we must establish with precision how his ideas relate to the ideas of other recent and influential thinkers. We must construct imaginary sociological conversations, with Tocqueville’s voice in them. That is what the present volume does—and I believe no other recent volume on Tocqueville does the same.

What Is Unique about This Volume?

If we examine how Tocqueville came to be regarded as a great sociologist to begin with, we find that the conversational method I have advocated was vital in his initial canonization. Tocqueville was an acclaimed writer during his lifetime. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he was forgotten. With the professionalization of social science in the universities, he came to be seen as an amateur. Around 1900, social scientists cited him only to inventory his alleged mistakes (Mélonio 1998, 4). The academic disciplines fragmented his object of study into many separate fields. Tocqueville was viewed as too philosophical or literary (Mélonio 1998, 170 and 184) to count as a social scientist. By World War II, he was forgotten. Even, in the early 1950s, when Tocqueville’s complete works began to be compiled in French under the direction of J. P. Mayer, the editors of the individual volumes did not construe Tocqueville as a great thinker. Georges Lefebvre’s (1952) introduction to the Ancien Régime was miles away from the level of appreciation that François Furet (1981) would later bestow on the work. And the introduction to Democracy by the socialist Harold Laski (1961) is particularly condescending in its conclusions.

The turning point was Raymond Aron’s Main Currents of Sociological Thought (two volumes, first published in French in 1964). In the first volume of Main Currents, Aron put Tocqueville in conversation with Montesquieu, Comte, and, above all, Marx, who was, of course, not just another thinker of the nineteenth century but an enormous influence on social science in the 1960s. Aron itemized the key differences between the German and French thinkers. Marx gave priority to the economic reality of capitalism, while Tocqueville gave priority to the political reality of democracy. Marx, who believed in a linear scheme of universal history, considered all political regimes under capitalism to be essentially the same, while Tocqueville, a comparative thinker, believed that the democratic species of regime is capable of assuming profoundly different forms (as in France versus America). Marx viewed revolutions as a consequence of economic immiseration, while Tocqueville considered revolutionary indignation to be a byproduct of improving conditions. Marx had an apocalyptic vision of history and regarded the future as predetermined, while Tocqueville envisioned room for chance and for human agency (Aron [1964] 1965, 183–84, 211, 231).

For the most part, Aron presented these contrasts in a neutral spirit, but the effect was to level the playing field between Marx, who was already an eminence in European social theory, and Tocqueville, whom Aron correctly described as under neglect (183). In Aron’s discussion of the currents of sociology, Marx, instead of being the alleged progenitor of modern social science as a whole (as he was for Laski and Lefebvre), stood as the founder of just one sociological tradition, and Tocqueville stood as the founder of a competing and equally viable one. Aron, moreover, ended his volume by expressing a judgment in favor of Tocqueville. In the last chapter, he carefully compared Marx and Tocqueville as analysts of the French Revolution of 1848. Aron claimed that Marx managed to make sense of this revolution, which was inspired by democratic ideas but yielded an emperor, only by conceding that the machine of the state had acquired a kind of autonomy in relation to society—these are Aron’s words for describing Marx’s detour from his own economic determinism. Aron noted that this is a formula contradictory to his [Marx’s] general theory of the state as a mere expression of the ruling class (257–58). According to Aron, the Russian Revolution of 1917 later provided more proof of the autonomy of the political order in relation to social conflicts (158–59). In other words, the Marxist theory that politics is explicable primarily by economic factors failed to account for the most important events of modern times, but Tocqueville’s political sociology was up to the task.

The impact of such analysis upon the intellectual scene in the late twentieth century was profound. We must remember that during the Cold War, Marxism was not only the leading intellectual doctrine of the other side, the Soviet Union, but was also enthralling to the West’s Leftist intelligentsia. By putting Tocqueville directly into conversation with Marx, Aron made Tocqueville an iconic alternative to the orientation of Leftist social science during the Cold War. François Furet (1981) portrayed Tocqueville in the same vein, as the prime alternative to Marxist scholarship on the French Revolution. This duality between Marx’s economic sociology and Tocqueville’s political sociology remains suggestive, but it is not adequate for the full comprehension of Tocqueville or for the long-term preservation of Tocqueville’s reputation.

Marx continues to be influential in the social sciences. But today, a broad range of post-Marxist social theorists also plays a large role in shaping our perceptions of the social world. The challenge, then, is to put Tocqueville into explicit dialogue again, with both Marxism and post-Marxism, in a manner that speaks to the concerns and debates of our time. If one examines the index of any given scholarly book on Tocqueville published since the end of the Cold War, however, one is hard-pressed to find discussions of this kind. A typical monograph or anthology on Tocqueville contains few, if any, references to major theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There is thus a need to approach Tocqueville by examining Tocqueville face-to-face with some of the thinkers who matter most in our post–Cold War conversation.

For the present volume, each author was invited to do exactly that. Marx remains important in our intellectual universe, but it is cultural Marxism, rather than economic determinism, which is especially influential today. Peter Baehr contrasts Marx and Tocqueville in terms of their sociological rhetoric, particularly the condescending practice of unmasking illusion, which was central for Marx and played no role for Tocqueville.

Why Tocqueville never completed a projected history of the French Revolution is the subject of the chapter coauthored by Patrice Higonnet and myself. We also reassess the alleged superiority of Tocqueville’s history of revolution in France over Marx’s history.

Religion was a particularly important topic to Tocqueville—every Tocqueville scholar knows this. But how does his conceptualization of religion as a support for democracy look when viewed through the lens of the recent sociological debate about whether or not society is becoming increasingly secular? Raymond Hain addresses this question.

Tocqueville wrote about the actual and proper role of women in democracy, and he compared the status of women in America to their status in France. Jean Elisabeth Pedersen considers how Tocqueville’s claims resonate, or do not resonate, in women’s history, gender theory, and the comparative study of democratic political cultures.

Patrick H. Breen focuses on how Tocqueville’s reflections on racism and black–white relations in the North and South measure up when compared to the ideas of Du Bois