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Jun 05, 2017dennismmiller rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
A minor aristocrat pursuing a career in the civil service, in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in search of the future. He had become convinced that the inexorable tide of history was pushing towards the elimination of all distinctions between persons - something he did not regard as an unalloyed good. In the United States during the presidency of frontiersman Andrew Jackson he found the ideal of the classless society which somehow managed to avoid anarchy. His examination of the peculiarities of the American Constitution, culture, and character that made this possible demonstrates remarkable insight and holds far-reaching implications. It is difficult to refrain from reading Tocqueville with a jaundiced eye, noting the failing of those qualities he admired in the American experiment and the widening of the faults. It is no longer possible to say that the American people feel responsible for making their laws and therefore respect them, that universal religiosity detoxifies individualism by inspiring a commitment to the common good, or that debates in the US Senate "would bring glory to the greatest parliamentary debates of Europe." Instead, it seems that we have travelled further into an age "where nothing is consistent, where virtue is without genius, genius without honor, where the love of order is joined to an inclination for tyranny and the holy worship of liberty to a disdain for the law, where conscience casts a dim light upon human actions and where nothing any longer seems to be prohibited or permitted, honest or shameful, true or false". Indeed, nothing seems to threaten the continuing ascendancy of those "who strive, in the name of progress, to turn men into materialistic beings and who want to discover the expedient while paying scant attention to fairness, knowledge far removed from beliefs, and prosperity which has nothing to do with virtue." Nothing, unless the same strengths Tocqueville identified nearly two hundred years ago can somehow be given new life.