More Tocqueville: James Wood Weighs In

In the New Yorker, Wood immerses himself in two new books about Alexis de Tocqueville and the enduring significance of the Frenchman’s American travels.

Unlike some other European visitors (Charles Dickens and Fanny Trollope, and, more recently, Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy come to mind), he reserves serious judgment for mortal American sins, not venial ones. His anguish and scorn are provoked not by tobacco-chewing or unreal dentistry but by slavery and the extermination of the Indians. He often teeters on the edge of disdain—as when he notes the poor calibre of American politicians, or the people’s “immense opinion of themselves”—only to find the hospitality of explanation more interesting than the solitude of dismissal. To most non-Americans, American patriotic self-regard can be hard to take (an entire country seemingly innocent of the idea that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel), but Tocqueville is interested in the rationality of American pride, which he sensibly locates in the success, against all odds, of the young democracy.

We noted earlier that Tocqueville might also have been a bad traveler.

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