| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Barbara Allen. Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2005. Pp. xix, 393. Cloth $80.00, paper $25.95.
Alexis de Tocqueville set out to discover the earliest roots of liberty's seeming abundance in America, how expressions of it evolved, and why it was as likely to wither under certain conditions as it was to find new beginnings and thrive. He was one of the first to point out that the promise of liberty in a democracy is not fulfilled when it is regarded only as an electoral exercise. He thought of democracy as an opportunity to enlarge participation and deliberation with the goal of sorting out the separate spheres of private and public life, yet keeping them linked together without damaging one or the other. In their democracy, Americans showed that they were far removed from the apathy marking life in the French communes. Tocqueville saw in the New England townships "activity ... information and the spirit of innovation ... a ... society [which is] always at work" bent on achieving through government "the welfare of a people." Americans were "ardent sectarians and daring innovators." They were uniquely able to combine "the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty" (Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley [1945], Vol. I, p. 95, n. 50; p. 45, italics his).	1
Tocqueville pondered the chances for the survival of liberty and political life in an exuberantly democratic America and contrasted it with a hesitant France. Americans, he insisted, prized equality above liberty, endowed it with mythic power that drew circles around individual conscience, and subjected it to the stress of achieving and losing material success in a world of relentless competition that marketed public opinion as readily as it extolled the value of consumer goods. In the process individuals became willing captives of the great siren of equality, which never loses it charms but ultimately never satisfies. Barbara Allen tries to get to the bottom of the connections among the elusive character of equality, the power of public opinion to keep it in a state of constant expectation, and the American thirst for material and technological abundance. She is, however, more interested in another thorny problem, captured in Tocqueville's own admission that the invocations to liberty were played out as a necessary fiction, that answered "to the dreams of fancy and the unrestrained experiment of innovators" (Democracy in America, vol. I, p. 37).	. . .

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