Book publishers, and therefore the reading public, catch up only after a considerable delay with those writers who have become relevant for a generation. Thus we are still fingering the brittle pages of Hegel and Marx when the second half-century has begun to hear the limpid voices of Tocqueville and Proudhon. To be sure, the former are also historians who explore what is “beneath the surface,” but their ideological bias makes them as monotonous as the editorials in a progressive paper; whereas Tocqueville, with his nimble feet and right instincts, is never touched by ponderous scientism, is never glued to history; he remains the unideological free man, engage only in the highest sense: through his concern for Western Christendom.
He writes, as John A. Lukacs, the editor of The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (Doubleday Anchor, $1.25), rightly remarks, not “objective” but “exhortatory history”; he is, of course, as passionate an observer as Hegel and Marx and, like them, bent upon finding the mechanism of historical change; in fact, he has Thucydides’ concern for the causes of great events, and Herodotus’ avidity to travel and collect data. But his refreshing quality is that he does not use history as an instrument of class-war, nor as a detour for philosophical theses: he is a gentleman scholar, member of a civil society whose destinies he envisages with anxiety, but whose freedom of choice, and therefore open future, he refuses to question. He exhorts by giving us ground for faith and courage.
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