BOOKS
483
TOCQUEVILLE'S HISTORY
TOCQUEVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY. By Andre Jardin. Translated from
the French by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $35.00.
This excellent biography could scarcely come at a more propi–
tious time. This year marks the sesquicentennial of
Democracy in America,
following the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the event that above all
others dominated Tocqueville's consciousness. Finally, the book caps a half–
century of unbroken Tocqueville prosperity as a major intellectual force in
modern history.
Tocquevi lle's has been a curious history. He rose overnight to fame
when Part One of
Democracy
was published in 1835; not, as Jardin notes,
without help from powerful friends such as Chateaubriand and Royer-Col–
lard, but fame nonetheless. Tocqueville's reputation survived, possibly grew
somewhat, with the printing of Part Two in 1840, but the reviews were
more mixed, in some cases sharply critical of what one reviewer, Villemain
(who had gone all out with enthusiasm for Part One), referred to as "an
abuse of the philosophical method," withal a greater reliance upon intuition
and extrapolation than upon concrete history and observation. Villemain and
others objected also to the mood of foreboding and pessimism that highlighted
so much of Part Two. Even so, Tocquevi lle's stature remained large for at
least a decade after his death in 1859.
The fall of Tocquevi lle as an intellectual force seems to have com–
menced in the 1870s; and after Bryce's
American Commonwealth
appeared
in 1888, to dominate its field for a full generation, the Tocquevi lle eclipse
was complete. Occasionally a Dicey in England, an Arthur Hadley or
Woodrow Wilson in this country, would lament the passing ofTocqueville as
a significant influence. But during most of the 1930s Tocqueville's fall was
still manifest on both sides of the Atlantic. In seven years of an undergradu–
ate and graduate education at Berkeley in the 1930s, I did not once hear his
name.
Before the 1930s ended, the second rise of Tocqueville was under
way. George Pierson's epochal
Tocqueville and Beaumont in America
came
off the press in 1938 to immediate app lause. In England a year later,
J.
P.
