Skirmish in a war of the worlds

In this careful study of a famously subtle and complex thinker, Sheldon S. Wolin renders a masterful exploration of Alexis de Tocqueville's entire oeuvre . However, given Wolin's own commitments as a political theorist, he is ultimately dissatisfied with Tocqueville's response to modern democracy.

Tocqueville has been accorded renewed attention in our time of mass politics, political apathy and interventionist government. On the left, he is praised as a defender of community and civic involvement who warns of a looming industrial aristocracy and the bourgeois or commercial passion for individual material wellbeing at the expense of care for common things. This is Tocqueville the theorist of democratic citizenship. On the right, he is admired for his rejection of "big government" and unmitigated egalitarianism and for his defence of decentralised administration and private initiative. This is Tocqueville the defender of liberty, the teacher of moderation against the totalising tendencies of democracy.

Wolin's study is a "certain kind of biography", one that is both theoretical and political, and therefore it is more searching than work typically accommodated by the sometimes jejune divide between liberal and conservative Tocqueville commentators. This is achieved, in particular, because Wolin analyses all of Tocqueville's writings and many of his private letters and manuscripts, not only the much-studied Democracy in America . Tocqueville is located in the landscape of modern political theory by judging his thought as it developed and by interweaving many analytic themes, rather than by pursuing a discrete thesis throughout. One example of the many themes Wolin explores is the difficulty Tocqueville faced while struggling simultaneously for a life of thought and books and one of action and tangible political accomplishment. Wolin's profound meditations on this problem expand on his long-standing concern with the interaction of biography, political commitment and the production of political theory. This aspect of the book is heartening for scholars who have recognised similar struggles and interactions in themselves.

The dominant theme for his evaluation of Tocqueville emerges from Wolin's own position as a political theorist of "participatory democracy", an idea first associated with the so-called "new left" of the 1960s. As an amalgam of the Rousseauean idea of the "general will" and a quasi-Marxian theory of class conflict, participatory democrats criticise modern liberal constitutionalism, representation, capitalism and some types of rights as limitations on the scope of political activity, and therefore on the ability and interest citizens have in deliberating on and realising their common aims. From this perspective, Wolin finds much to admire in Tocqueville's famous treatment of political life in the New England township in the first volume of Democracy . However, as Wolin's book goes on he becomes increasingly dissatisfied with Tocqueville. This is because Tocqueville, as both a theorist and practical politician, attempted to moderate modern democracy in general, and the radical movements of mid-19th century France in particular, with theoretical appeals to religion, history, cultural and political deference and individual liberty.

Tocqueville never accepted that class revolution - democratic or socialist, incipient or imminent - was a legitimate political goal, rather than the undoing of society in toto . According to Tocqueville, when everyday people "participated" in this way, it was not truly politics but social dissolution - rapine, destruction and, finally, violence. Here, Wolin condemns Tocqueville as insensitive to - in fact as reneging on - the reformist possibilities of the participatory democracy he had earlier defended. Indeed, at every turn the reader finds that, for Wolin, Tocqueville was never enough of a participatory democrat: he tried to moderate and educate the democratic movement instead of encouraging it.

In this way, Wolin expertly uses Tocqueville to raise the fundamental question of what should be considered a political issue resolvable by democratic argument and deliberation, and then argues more contentiously that Tocqueville helped infect liberal theory with an anti-democratic bias that endures to limit the scope of American politics. Today, most people would probably follow Wolin in rejecting a major Tocquevillean presumption: common people lack the interest and ability to understand and deliberate about politics with the consistency required to maintain a stable and free society. However, most people would also probably agree with Tocqueville (against Wolin) that property rights and some form of market economy are expressions of liberty that should remain beyond political revision. At the very least, Wolin suggests that these and other things dear to modern liberal theory would be up for discussion in a properly participatory democracy.

Tocqueville did indeed live and theorise between the two worlds of Wolin's title. While Tocqueville accepted the modern democratic world of equality as inevitable, providential and probably more just than its predecessor, he never doubted that the lost hierarchical world of interconnection and interdependence was more stable, nurturing and sublime. Whether the vestiges of the old world could be used to moderate the fearsome potential of the new one was the problem of Tocqueville's life. Wolin helps us understand this problem and those worlds with the sophistication and subtlety of a scholar steeped in the canon of western political thought.

Ultimately, however, sympathy for Wolin's criticism of Tocqueville depends on the extent to which one favours Wolin's participatory democracy. Those who remain sceptical of Wolin's theoretical commitments are likely to find a good deal more to be admired in Tocqueville just as he is.

Johnathan O'Neill is lecturer in American studies, Institute of United States Studies, University of London.