I recently decided to download Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville from “Project Gutenberg”:http://promo.net/pg/index.html to read on my Palm T3 in spare moments so I was intrigued to stumble across L’Amérique, Mon Amour – a summary of de Toqueville’s thought and life which reveals him to be a rather conservative democratic thinker (he opposed the extension of suffrage in France for example) and suggests that he is mainly popular in the US because he is so enamoured of the American way.
9 May 2004
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Sounds like a shallow reading of de Tocqueville to me. Democracy in America is also a subtle but brilliant critique of American public life. It describes US civil society as constant chit-chat, with little being remembered from one day to the next, and such obsessive devotion to the media that there’s little room left for anything permanent or profound to be produced.
Comment by Will Davies — 9 May 2004 @ 10:54 pm