Two new biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville are reviewed in The New York Times. The sense of the review is that each of them complicates the standard notion of Tocqueville: he was “an unlikely student of democracy and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness.”

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to read these sometime soon. I’ve always had only a fairly general familiarity with Tocqueville and would like to know more about him.

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville’s first volume, published at the end of 1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of “a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence.”

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.

The complete review by Christopher Caldwell in The New York Times: “Even God Quotes Tocqueville”