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Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville
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Cheryl B. Welch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006, xxvii + 428 pp., $29.99 paperback.
W ILL
M ORRISEY
HILLSDALE COLLEGE
will.morrisey@hillsdale.edu
A companion he is. He offers readers his friendship, and
increasing numbers have taken him up. Cheryl B. Welch calls the “revival of
interest” in Tocqueville’s writings “one of the most surprising intellectual turns
of the twentieth century” (1), and it must have been when it began, shortly
after the Second World War in the United States, later elsewhere. In the first half
of the century Tocqueville resembled the brilliant but eccentric elderly uncle at
the family picnic—fascinating to talk to, but living in the past, specifically, in
the previous century, when liberal democracy advanced with confidence, its
continued progress assured. Nod politely at the kindly old gent, give him a few
minutes of your time; after some decent interval, hand him off to your brotherin-law.
The new tyrannies of the twentieth century mocked the liberalism of
the nineteenth; the founder of one coined the ominous neologism, ‘totalitarian,’
to describe this enterprise. In ‘geopolitical’ terms (another neologism for
the times), Tocqueville also seemed to have been mistaken. He had expected
America and Russia to divide the world, but Germany had proved the real
problem, twice (thrice if you were French). No surprise, really: wasn’t
Tocqueville’s prediction founded on rather vague, unscientific thinking to
begin with? Marxism, race science, or positivism, themselves products of
German scientific rigor, although contradicting each other, at least offered
more precision than these French-all-too-French ruminations, combining
memorable aperçus with glittering generalizations.
Yet, then, there it was. By mid-century, the American republic
and the Russian despotism did each hold the destinies of half the world in its
hands. The unscientific French statesman and man of letters, a titled aristocrat
no less, had surpassed the empirical, scientific projectors in the practice of their
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