Conversations with Tocqueville - by Aurelian Craiutu & Sheldon Gellar (Hardcover)

About the Book

In this book, the collected writers argue that Tocquevillian analytics can be used to understand developments in non-Western as well as Western societies and can be updated to address such issues as globalization, ethnicity, and New World-Old World and East-West dynamics. This...

Book Synopsis

In this book, the collected writers argue that Tocquevillian analytics can be used to understand developments in non-Western as well as Western societies and can be updated to address such issues as globalization, ethnicity, and New World-Old World and East-West dynamics. This cross-disciplinary book brings together fourteen authors from three continents whose reflections on the prospects for democracy invite us to reconsider the virtues and limitations of democratic institutions and principles across the world.

Review Quotes

Conversations with Tocqueville is a masterly demonstration that Tocqueville's analysis of democracy remains not only relevant in the twenty-first century, but essential. Tocqueville wrote of democracy in America to instruct democracies everywhere, and fittingly the essays of this volume ably adapt Tocqueville's central themes and questions to a variety of nations and circumstances. It is a rich and thoughtful collection informed by Tocqueville's capacious hopes for, and fears about, democracy, and will be of benefit to anyone interested in our diverse democratic future.

Conversations with Tocqueville is a stimulating book, full of powerful and provocative ideas. Aurelian Craiutu and Sheldon Gellar have produced a first-rate collection that significantly enhances our understanding of Tocqueville as a social scientist and shows how his mode of analysis, faithfully recast in the form of Tocquevillian analytics, can be used to uncover and assess the rich diversity of contemporary efforts to achieve democracy in different regions of the world. A masterful blend of political theory and comparative analysis.

Compellingly coherent...an audacious engagement with Tocqueville's notion of democracy and its semantic frontiers.

In the introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville famously observed that a great 'democratic revolution' was in the process of radically transforming the entire civilized world. That 'revolution' might bring with it liberty or new and unprecedented forms of despotism, but it would surely bring an end-sooner in some cases, later in others-to all the 'old regimes' in the world. This splendid collection deepens our understanding of Tocqueville's thought and allows us to better understand the 'democratic revolution' as it has unfolded over the last century and a half from Paris and Moscow to Tokyo and beyond. It will be of interest to students of political theory and comparative politics and to thoughtful citizens as such.

The variety of methodological and ideological perspectives mirrors Tocqueville's own multifaceted approach.Such a reactualization of Tocqueville's analytics, especially in light of today's global economic and financial crisis, can both prompt a broad audience to reconsider its perspectives on the challenges currently facing democracy, and challenge any scholars still hanging on to the pernicious ideal of a value-free social science.

About the Author

Aurelian Craiutu is associate professor of political science at Indiana University and author of Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, Le Centre introuvable, and In Praise of Moderation.

Sheldon Gellar is a research associate at Indiana University's Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and author of Democracy in Senegal: Tocquevillian Analytics in Africa, Structural Changes and Colonial Dependency: Senegal 1885-1945, and Senegal: An African Nation Between Islam and the West.