Book Review

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Democracy in America (1835, 1840) reverberates through United States political culture with more vibrancy than at any time since its original appearance. Newspapers and news magazines have abundantly applied Alexis de Tocqueville's observations to our latest election crisis. As soon as this new volume, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, was published, Mansfield was immediately rewarded with an appearance on National Public Radio. Beyond its additional testimony to a cultural hero's iconic status, what does the prodigious effort involved in producing a new translation add to the fund of Tocqueville scholarship? This is the first new version to appear in thirty-five years and the third since 1945. The editors' aim was to make theirs the most literal of all renderings. Only in deference to 165 years of tradition did they exclude the French particle from their title (De la démocratie en Amérique—On, or Concerning, Democracy in America). The translators are implacably true to their word. This version even replicates the original French word order as closely as possible. A more quotable Tocqueville is consciously sacrificed in the name of accuracy, but the reader can be assured that this is as close to the original as we are likely to get. Very rarely, such devotion to fidelity produces jarring history. We learn, for example, that Virginia's success as a settlement was assured by the timely arrival of "farmers and industrialists" (industriels is more aptly translated as mechanics or artisans).	1
More serious is the editors' decision to use the Gallimard Pléiade edition of Democratie (1992) but without including the Pléiade's collection of Tocqueville's marginal notes and early drafts. Mansfield and Winthrop claim that they did not wish to risk "interpreting what Tocqueville meant from what he decided not to say." The net result is to deprive English-only readers of a treasure trove of Tocquevillean meditations. Many of Tocqueville's preparatory notes contain striking formulations of his ideas, and scholars are deprived of seeing how concepts were endlessly reworked for the sake of intellectual clarity and aesthetic elegance.	2
This brings us to the extensive introduction. One must make due allowance for the fact that the editors are not historians. In discussing Tocqueville on slavery, they leave the reader entirely unaware that his analysis was wrong in one important respect. American economic historians have come to regard slavery as a rational economic system for the slaveholders. On the other hand, a major advantage of having scholars of government as editors means that this introduction is more thoroughly embedded in the tradition of Western political thought than previous ones have been. In part, this reflects Tocqueville's general ascendancy to a higher position in the European canon, but Mansfield and Winthrop also give Tocqueville's ideas their own scholarly twist. Their Tocqueville is vastly more soulful than previous editors ever imagined. Tocqueville is a liberal with a restless soul, anxious for the survival of great spiritual values and wary of the rationalist optimism of fellow liberals and democrats. If John Stuart Mill and the baron de Montesquieu remain major presences, there is now less of James Madison and Karl Marx, more of Blaise Pascal and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.	. . .