James Poulos wants you to consider how to be, freely, with the help of Alexis de Tocqueville. Not how to become “free”; he suggests, instead, thinking in terms of adverbs: how you and your neighbors are and how we all might be. Most of us are not doing so well at being, and only practicing the art of freedom can ameliorate what he calls the “constitutive craziness” of American life.
The book is not, despite its subtitle, a self-help book or a how-to manual. On the contrary, Poulos thinks the American obsession with the “self,” with “performing our autonomy,” is a big part of our problem. The volume is instead a discursive and personal meditation on how Tocqueville’s Democracy in America illuminates our predicament. Tocqueville can help us see that, notwithstanding our current preoccupation with inequality and with our differences, what defines us is in fact our remarkable equality and interchangeability. To gain this perspective requires widening the historical lens and seeing our moment as part of the “Great Transition” from an age of aristocracy that is gone but not forgotten to an age of democracy that we have not yet fully entered. This historically anomalous equality and state of constant change is at the root of Americans’ unceasing anxiety, our “competitive conformity,” and our complicated relationship to money, sex, faith, play, love, and death — all of which have chapters devoted to them.
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