328
PARTISAN REVIEW
By the time Chick is set in contest with his own death, Ravelstein is
dead, and can't help his old friend. Instead, his manner of dying, his
ideas, and his student, the rose-of-the-world, come to Chick's aid. It's
Rosamund's love for Chick, and her faith in love, that enable her to sur–
mount the bureaucracy of the health care system and Chick's virtual
indifference to the outcome of his struggle-and death itself.
Ravelstein is a political philosopher. He exhibits in grand gesture and
entertaining voluptuousness how the philosophical life should be lived.
Chick is at pains to make clear that he's not a philosopher, although he's
read the texts. What he is is a writer. The difference between the two,
the difference between Ravelstein and Chick, is subtly, amply illustrated
in the novel, with Keynes as point of reference, through all those parts
of the book that show us Ravelstein and Chick in dialogue. This differ–
ence takes on an ambiguous though more emphatic quality after Ravel–
stein's death, because whatever his devotion to ideas, Chick's sensibility,
the dynamic of his being, is finally more visceral, more sensuous, more
intellect and less intellectualism, less purposeful than Ravelstein's. It's
not that he survives death because of the force of Eros even as lived idea
so much as that he has things
to
do, that he's propelled by a distinctly
Conradian discipline, at once fanciful and practical. He's a writer. Even
Keynes doesn't bring him closer
to
a prose Ravelstein would like for
himself; he writes neither biography nor memoir but a novel-an espe–
cially suggestive and entertaining one.
Igor Webb
The Ultimate Tocqueville
DEMOCRACY
IN
AMERICA. By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated, edited,
and with an introduction by Harvey
C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.
University of Chicago Press.
$28.00.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE'S
Democracy in America
belongs to the com–
pany of the hundred or so great works of Western social thought that
preceded the rise of the social sciences and that still command wide and
serious readership. Social scientists have divided this legacy and found
different ways to live on its income. Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
