Alexis de Tocqueville /
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) occupies an eminent position in that small circle of nineteenth-century thinkers considered indispensable to an understanding of our modern condition. Born of aristocratic parents who barely survived the Terror of 1793, he became the century's most clear-eyed a...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York : Toronto : New York :
Twayne Publishers ; Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; Maxwell Macmillan International,
©1994.
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| Series: | Twayne's world authors series ;
TWAS 848. Twayne's world authors series. French literature |
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| Summary: | Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) occupies an eminent position in that small circle of nineteenth-century thinkers considered indispensable to an understanding of our modern condition. Born of aristocratic parents who barely survived the Terror of 1793, he became the century's most clear-eyed analyst of the new kind of democratic equality that was then emerging. Best known as the author of Democracy in America (1835, 1840), one of the greatest works in the literature of political science and philosophy, he also wrote one of the enduring classics of history, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), perhaps the most influential single work on its subject. In addition, he wrote a penetrating, posthumously published memoir, the Recollections, and, in a series of essays and official reports, some of the most incisive analyses of the social problems facing the new world that was then coming into being problems ranging from slavery to imperialism to pauperism and crime. All the while he pursued an active public career as a lawyer and judge, a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1839 to 1849, a member of the Constituent Assembly after the Revolution of 1848, and France's Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1849. In this thoughtful exploration of Tocqueville's life and work, Matthew Mancini situates his writings in the context of the turbulent social and political world of the nineteenth century. He considers all of Tocqueville's major and many of his minor works, always in light of the social, political, economic, and intellectual context that produced them. After a succinct and cogent biographical chapter in which Tocqueville is seen defining and coming to terms with modernity, Mancini provides a two-chapter explication of Democracy and America, followed by analyses of Tocqueville's writings on socially marginal groups, slavery, race, imperialism, and revolution. He discusses the incompatibility of Tocqueville's views on equality, race, and slavery with those on the subject of French imperialism. He examines Tocqueville's judgments on revolution, on the emergence of democracy in France and America, and on the complex relation between democracy and despotism. Tocqueville is presented in this book as a classic "modern" figure - someone who recognized and tried to formulate for the first time questions about liberty, democracy, revolution, and culture in such a way as to allow us to recognize them as our questions. It is intended to help all readers, be they experts or neophytes, to understand Tocqueville's relevance for us, who inherited the world he did so much to explain, even as it was being shaped. |
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| Physical Description: | xiv, 163 pages ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-155) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0805743057 9780805743050 |