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something higher. We are meant to be reminded that Plato, Machiavelli,
or Tocqueville breathed a more rarified air than we; that they achieved
insights more profound than can be combed from the sumptuous inter–
pretative traditions in which they have been wrapped; and that, as with
all powerful and original thinkers, they sometimes expressed themselves
in odd and difficult ways. The goal of a translation, according to this
way of thinking, is to present a text in which the authentic difficulties
remain, not smoothed away by the translator.
This is not to say that Mansfield and Winthrop have indulged in the
snide sorts of difficulty championed by Judith Butler and other contem–
porary "theorists" who claim that to write clearly is to concede to the
mind-control of the capitalist state. Bad writing and helpless obscurity
pretending to be deliberate choice is epidemic in the academy and, with
that in view, it is crucial to observe that the difficulties posed by Mans–
field and Winthrop arise from altogether different sources. Their Toc–
queville is difficult because they leave the reader in the perplexity of the
original author's thought, in a vocabulary slightly askew from contem–
porary American English, and organized on the page in Tocqueville's jit–
tery sentences and short paragraphs. Tocqueville himself never intends
to be obscure, and Mansfield and Winthrop have not made him so. But
they have allowed him to be more foreign than his previous translators
have, and made him occasionally reach for a different word than a
native speaker would.
The result is a
Democracy in America
that seems at once a little less
accessible and a lot more intellectually and philosophically textured.
The fate of classics is often to lie dead on the page to be served up to
unwilling undergraduate readers and all-too-eager scholarly specialists.
Mansfield and Winthrop are offering an excellent opportunity to read
what has seemed a thoroughly familiar book with fresh eyes. Their own
agenda-or at least, one suspects, Mansfield's agenda-may be to pro–
mote deeper respect for the republican vision of America's Founding
Fathers. The tendency to underrate the complexity and force of the
Founders' ideas pervades academic political science; and Tocqueville,
who read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers with respect and
deep critical understanding, can bring us back into fruitful conversation
with that tradition.
But Mansfield and Winthrop leave this as an unspoken implication.
Their translation may be an attempt to claim Tocqueville as the legacy
that belongs foremost to political philosophy, but the other social sci–
ences still have their claims. For anthropologists, Tocqueville provides an
extraordinary example of how to integrate historical research, textual
