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Alexis de Tocqueville

A cold fish in deep water

Hugh Brogan
Profile, 448pp, £30,

Malcolm Deas

Wednesday, 6th December 2006

The first man we met was a représentant du peuple with the silly badge in his button-hole: it was Tocqueville, the writer on America. I appealed to him and told him what had happened: it was no joking matter, they kept people in prison without any sort of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries and shot them. Tocqueville did not even ask who we were: he very politely bowed himself off, delivering himself of the following banality: ‘The legislative authority has no right to interfere with the executive.’

What matters are the two books. It is not so much that in them Tocqueville got everything right — Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books a couple of years ago provided such a devastating list of what he had got wrong about America, and the reasons why, that his latest translator felt obliged to write in apologetically to point out that he had at least got some things right, and likewise many of the theses of The Ancien Régime have had to be revised — but he was the first to make both of their themes unavoidable subjects of speculation for anyone wishing to understand the modern world. His arguments are rarely as clear or as convincing as his magisterial style makes you think, but he was effectively the first to raise some questions, about America and democracy generally, about the French and all revolutions, that have been debated ever since. One is bound to be curious about someone with such a good eye for grand subjects, and it is not Brogan’s fault that he is a bit of a disappointment.

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