Since the turn of the millennium, three prominent biographies of Tocqueville have appeared in the English language: Hugh Brogan’s Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution (2006), Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022), and now Jeremy Jennings’s intimate, engaging, and admiring portrait of Tocqueville, Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America.
Jennings’s journey through Tocqueville’s life and work is detailed and delicate. The purpose of his book is simple; its premise, arresting. It follows Tocqueville’s journeys to America, Canada, England, Ireland, Algeria, Germany, Italy, and uses them to illuminate Democracy in America and L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution. In this way, travel serves as the medium and context to understanding Tocqueville’s writings.
Travel and travel writing were central to Tocqueville’s life. But they were never a mere distraction or ordinary form of repose. Rather, as Jennings convincingly shows, travel and travel writing nourished Tocqueville’s imagination and augmented his desire to look beyond the mere appearance of place. They fostered the curiosity and openness of spirit that were central to an investigative mind that through its creative and broad philosophical sweep helped to understand a rapidly changing world. In short, travel was central to Tocqueville’s reflections on democracy. It shaped Tocqueville’s liberalism: his passionate commitment to liberty was a commitment concordant with a cosmopolitanism nourished by a curiosity that itself was stimulated by travel.
The great strength of this book is to show how travel was central to Tocqueville’s wide intellectual horizons and how it broadened them further. He observed different peoples and groups: America’s prison population, her degraded slaves and indigenous peoples, an oppressed Catholic majority in Ireland, exploited workers and the poor in Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and Paris, and Berber and Kabyle populations in Algeria. He conversed and corresponded with President Andrew Jackson and former President John Quincy Adams, John Stuart Mill, Lord Radnor, the Duke and Duchess of Argyle, Francis Lieber, Christian von Bunsen, Charles de Grandmaison, and Léon von Thun-Hohenstein. He visited many types of places: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, New York, Boston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, London, Bonn. All these experiences fed an insatiable curiosity and added to Tocqueville’s knowledge of his world and age, the age of democracy.
Jennings’s Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America treats its subject matter with the kind of reverence one finds in the very best biographies. The reader becomes Jennings’s privileged travel companion and is gracefully guided through Tocqueville’s life.
But is having a feeling for how Tocqueville navigated his world instructive to thinking about our own? In this, Jennings’s biography is wanting. He clearly conveys to his reader how Tocqueville’s travels arose from a mental attitude that was curious and infused with a generosity of spirit. The underlying suggestion, in this age of populism, insularity, and narrow nationalism, is that in Tocqueville we may find an orientation of thought—to say nothing of ideas—that might serve as the instructive contrast to populism’s closing of the mind. Jennings has a serious point to make, but he never quite makes it.
Given Americans’ preoccupation with a Frenchman who, at the age of 29, published one of the most insightful works ever written on the United States, Tocqueville has acquired the reputation as “the man who understood democracy,” to quote Olivier Zunz. The extent to which this is so was made clear in 2016. Following Trump’s first election, a flurry of articles seeking to make sense of this new American populism drew inspiration from Tocqueville. And Jennings’s book underscores this American preoccupation with Tocqueville. Where Jennings engages in twenty-first-century debates about Tocqueville, as in his critique of Gary Wills’s 2004 New York Review of Books article “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America,” it is to show that Tocqueville understood America all too well. Jennings makes the case.
But he also fails to make it in a crucial respect. The reader is never made knowledgeable about the intellectual scaffolding that was so critical to Tocqueville’s understanding of America. The intellectual prism through which he viewed America is never seriously analysed, and the French intellectual context to Tocqueville’s initial reflections on America is absent. That context was critical to shaping Tocqueville’s intellectual preoccupations and the intellectual and conceptual prism through which he studied America. Nor is the reader told how France’s intellectual, political, cultural, and social context affected the reception of Democracy in America. The result is curious for a biography. A book on America written by a Frenchman for the French—a people who since 1789 experienced seismic upheavals and needed, in Tocqueville’s words, to be “educated” about democracy—ends up in Jennings’s account being a book on America written by a Frenchman for Americans. In neglecting the incredibly rich intellectual context of Tocqueville’s writings, Jennings ends up giving a narrowed reading of him, exclusively shaped by American preoccupations and debates. The “man that understood democracy” is, in Jennings’s treatment, idolized and idealized, a sage who was right on nearly all counts. And a sage we would do well to study carefully in these turbulent times.
Jennings’s loving treatment of Tocqueville comes perilously close to nostalgia for the man and his work. Is this the kind of treatment of Tocqueville needed today? The new science of politics Tocqueville is so famously credited for and one that may be instructive to our times emerges ex nihilo, in Jennings’s account—though not just his. Curiously the Tocqueville Jennings so carefully describes, the young Frenchman who observed and analyzed the places and people of his age, becomes a transhistorical figure who spoke timeless universal truths. Is it credible to conclude that a person in their mid-twenties devised without any intellectual resources an entirely new science of politics? What was the role played by Jean-Baptiste Say’s understanding of political economy—or as he would have preferred, “social economy,” his science of society—in the shaping of Tocqueville’s “new science”? Might there not be some clue here to Tocqueville’s science of politics? We are never told. What did Tocqueville learn in reading Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Pascal, Plato, and Rousseau? What did his science of politics owe to these thinkers? How did their critiques of democracy shape his own? What was the role played by François Guizot’s cours d’histoire moderne (1828) in establishing the methodology and approach Tocqueville employed in his study of ancien régime France? What was the intellectual context of the concepts he deployed? Was his analysis of “associations” novel or free of controversy—a term widely used by romantic socialists, particularly Saint-Simonians, and liberals who did not share Tocqueville’s aristocratic biases? And what of “individualism” or “despotism”?
Why do these questions matter? For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries political scientists have turned to Tocqueville in their reflections on democracy. The “truths” they established about democracy—“truths” now challenged more than ever—were forged in a context in which few reflected seriously, or in depth, on the rich intellectual context in which Tocqueville made sense of his world. Yet it is precisely in that intellectual universe where insights to make sense of our world might—or might not—be found. Despite this shortcoming, Jennings’s treatment of Tocqueville, devoted and admiring, yields a rich and sympathetic portrait that is an absolute pleasure to read
