Virtue’s Aristocrat

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, by Hugh Brogan (Yale, 736 pp., $35)

THIRTY years ago, in surveying the history of Tocqueville scholarship, the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that in seven years as an undergraduate and graduate student in social sciences at Berkeley in the 1930s he “did not once hear the name Tocqueville in class or seminar.” But the calamitous history of the world in that decade was already leading academe to revise its low estimate of the French thinker: By 1940 important studies of Tocqueville, essay-length and book-length, had been published by G. W. Pierson, J. P. Mayer, and Albert Salomon. From the 1950s through the 1970s, such leading figures as Nisbet, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Raymond Aron, and John Lukacs persistently drew on and demonstrated Tocqueville’s genius and relevance to our calamitous age. Lukacs’s publication in 1959 of Tocqueville’s “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau was a particularly vital addition to the Tocqueville corpus in English, movingly revealing his hatred of “scientific” racism.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, by Hugh Brogan (Yale, 736 pp., $35)

THIRTY years ago, in surveying the history of Tocqueville scholarship, the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet noted that in seven years as an undergraduate and graduate student in social sciences at Berkeley in the 1930s he “did not once hear the name Tocqueville in class or seminar.” But the calamitous history of the world in that decade was already leading academe to revise its low estimate of the French thinker: By 1940 important studies of Tocqueville, essay-length and book-length, had been published by G. W. Pierson, J. P. Mayer, and Albert Salomon. From the 1950s through the 1970s, such leading figures as Nisbet, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Raymond Aron, and John Lukacs persistently drew on and demonstrated Tocqueville’s genius and relevance to our calamitous age. Lukacs’s publication in 1959 of Tocqueville’s “The European Revolution” and Correspondence with Gobineau was a particularly vital addition to the Tocqueville corpus in English, movingly revealing his hatred of “scientific” racism.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).