Tocqueville was the first author to apply the adjective exceptional to America, but the compliment—if he meant it as a compliment—was a backhanded one, referring narrowly to circumstances that “concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical pursuits.” Certainly, he had nothing in mind comparable to the notion of “American exceptionalism” that...
267 search results for: Tocqueville
L’Ancien Régime Book II
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of ...
The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern France), the Near East became the Middle...
Schools Then and Now
The present agitation around Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, reminds me of the many similar debates I have witnessed in this country during the last four decades. At almost regular intervals the mediocrity of our system of education, from grade school to university, is demonstrated, denounced, deplored, and pilloried. Committees are...
The Cosmopolitan Temptation
The two books reviewed here provide a contrast both in style and in substance. Whereas Thomas Molnar treats Utopians and historical optimists with exuberant contempt, Michael Ignatieff bewails the fact that nations and nationalism have not yet disappeared. Molnar is proud of his relentless realism, in which politics are related to man’s fallen state; Ignatieff,...
The Iron Rod of American ‘Liberalism’
From the November 1988 issue of Chronicles. In America, as in Britain, institutions, movements, political phenomena, historic events and geographic features have been given names and labels that bewilder and startle the rest of the world: the German “Westwall” of World War II became the “Siegfried Line” (in World War I that lay in northern...
Karl Bodmer’s America
To see America through the paintings of Karl Bodmer (1809-93) is a rare experience. Last summer and fall, thousands of Americans shared in this experience by visiting an exhibition of Bodmer’s works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibition, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the 1832-34 North American expedition of...
America: From Village to Empire—October 2004
PERSPECTIVE The Call of Bloodby Thomas Fleming Old Europe versus the New World Order. VIEWS There Once Was a New Englandby John WillsonTimothy Dwight’s New England catechism. Tocqueville’s America and America Todayby Claude PolinLiberty, Equality, Materialism. NEWS H.R. 3313 and the Imperial Judiciaryby William J. QuirkA welcome constitutional crisis. What? Are You Crazy?by B.K. EakmanThe...
Law and/or Order
All civilization rests upon the executioner. Despite our feelings of revulsion, “He is the horror and bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears.” Joseph de Maistre’s insight has alarmed most readers—among them not a few Catholic...
NATO’s Dark Age
You have seen them on the evening news, the long weary lines of Christian refugees: Serbs streaming from the Krajina, Bosnia, Kosovo; Russians from Chechnya, Dagestan, and Kazakhstan. These are not the victims of some short and bitter war that strews exiles across the map of Europe for several years until they can make their...
Time
“I wanna go back and do it all over But I can’t go back I know I wanna go back ’cause I’m feeling so much older But I can’t go back I know” —Popular song by Eddie Money (1986, CBS Inc.) Mostly we take space for granted so long as we have enough of it....
Thoughts on July 4, 2006
In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, when I was at college and graduate school, the moral and social validity of meritocracy was beginning to be challenged by the schools and in the press. Aristocracy of blood, a final casualty of World War II, was the one thing worse than aristocracy of intellect and talent. ...
Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each “philosopher” had his own system and...
The Dean of Western Historians
It is usually difficult to choose only one author who is essential to the study of a particular subject. When it comes to the history of the frontier West, however, the choice is easy. Ray Allen Billington stands alone above all. He is the sine qua non of any course on frontier history. When reading...
Shepherd in a Strange Land
“I’m a pastor, not a scholar,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 2011, said when I interviewed him earlier last year for Catholic World Report about his new book. “A bishop’s job is helping people get to heaven, not to Washington.” In fact, since the death of Francis Cardinal George...
Dedicated to the Proposition
Every moviegoer remembers the sign: “Keep your change. Tipping is un-American.” It is on the cash register of the roadside diner that is the setting for The Petrified Forest. It is a strange expression. We don’t say “un-French” (and hardly ever say “un-English”), and when we do, we mean only that something is not typical...
Vigilante Justice: A Case Study
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
Pulling the Wool Over Their Eyes: A Straussian Memoir
You may be taken aback by the first part of my title, but do not be. Wool, after all, is that which warms us. In the Ice Age, pulling wool over the eyes was tantamount to survival. That sense lingers in the phrase “pull the wool over your eyes”—or their eyes, as we say, referring...
To Russia, With Respect
Does anyone in the media read Alexis de Tocqueville? Many will have gone to college, and some have encountered a reading list that includes Democracy in America. It is the best book ever written on America, and because of its time the best that ever will be written. Tocqueville makes this astonishing forecast: There are...
There Once Was a New England
A few years ago, I was talking about Timothy Dwight to an audience of people old enough to appreciate both his Christian orthodoxy and his old-fashioned patriotism. When I mentioned Dwight’s passion for farming and his devotion to agriculture as a way of life, a man from Dwight’s adopted state of Connecticut informed me that there...
When Censorship’s the Game, Despotism Is the Goal
We’re only a few months beyond the turn of the calendar and already I have a candidate for the word of the year: Censorship. Examples are proliferating at such a fast rate that it seems like a game of whac-a-mole just to keep up with all of them. A few of the most recent include:...
The 1620 Project
In a speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth, the great orator Daniel Webster lauded these refugees as the authors of American “civil and religious liberty.” A few decades later, French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “Puritanism was not only a religious doctrine, but also at several points it...
Ancien Régime: Final Thoughts II
Tocqueville has offered many insights into the origins and legacy of the French Revolution. In conclusion, perhaps, we should consider three of his main points. I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church; II He sees the FR ...
Ancien Régime III, 1-3
Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of ...
L’Ancien Régime Book II
In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of the Bourbons and the...
Maistre in the Dock
In September 2010, Émile Perreau-Saussine, age 37, was rushed to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, U.K., with chest pains. The junior physician on staff misdiagnosed his condition and thus failed to prevent his death hours later of a massive heart attack. This tragic incident is much more than a sad commentary on the quality of socialized healthcare...
Universities and Students of South America
By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students...
The Tyranny of Democratic Politics
In his classic history of the Lombard Communes—the finally doomed medieval republics of Northern Italy—W.F. Butler suggests that the creative and individualistic nature of the Italian people favored a rich cultural life over a stable political one. This could explain why modern Italy, historically a politically dysfunctional country, is nevertheless a civilized and delightful one. ...
Understanding Jihad’s Resurgence
Jihad is both an ideology and a global process. It has triumphed in Afghanistan in both forms, and its adherents everywhere will feel emboldened by what they see as a sure sign of Allah’s sanction. If a poorly armed jihadist force could endure for two decades, struggling against the mightiest infidel force the world has...
The Continuing Revolution
In his critical work about the bicentenaire of the French Revolution, Le Grand Déclassement, French historian Pierre Chaunu explores the first stages of the unraveling of the glorification of France as a revolutionary nation conceived in 1789. By the time Chaunu’s book was published in 1989, however, the official celebrations had been both scaled back...
Liberalism: Collectivist and Conservative
I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the same of his colleagues. I was told,...
Liberalism: Collectivist and Conservative
From the July 1989 issue of Chronicles. I never exchanged a word with Richard Weaver. I knew him because he was a figure at the University of Chicago. I heard that he was a teacher who expected his students to meet a high standard of intellectual probity and rigor; I think that he expected the...
When a Giant Crosses Your Path
The story of one man’s intellectual and personal friendship with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, stretching across the last decades of the 20th century, and the lessons it might impart for us today.
Our Classical Roots
On January 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his state legislator, Colonel Charles Yancey. As we might expect, Jefferson’s letter contains reflections of general interest on many topics, ranging in this case from the dangers of a large public debt and paper money to the advantages of beer over whiskey. Near the end...
Quoth the Raven
For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country. In this spasm, as in past...
Academia Abroad
Many alumni of a junior year abroad summarize their experience as “enjoyable,” “enlightening,” or even “empowering.” Others rely on their senses in recalling the niceties of life in another country: they remember the smell of warm bread wafting from a pâtisserie, the sight of a bustling and colorful Saturday-morning market, the sound of high-pitched horns...
Remembering Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European history began with the outbreak of World...
Immigration and Citizenship: Ancient Lessons for the American People
Americans have been debating immigration since the Founding era. Congress passed the first Naturalization Law in 1790, which it amended and fine-tuned in 1795, 1798, and 1802. These acts experimented with different residency requirements before naturalization. From the start, children of U.S. citizens were citizens, even if born abroad. For the Founders, where citizenship was...
Remembering Moynihan
From the December 2015 issue of Chronicles. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European...
The Swiss Dream
Swiss people are sovereign in a way the people of France, Britain, Germany and the United States are not.
A Federalist Agenda
After eight years in power, conservatives are down in the mouth. The right feels as out in the cold as it was during the wilderness period, fifteen years ago; and this time it does not even have much of a communist menace to fall back upon. Establishment Republicanism, as personified by George Bush, is in...
Defending Civilization
Allow me to begin with a personal recollection. I first came to know the city of Chicago and the region of the Great Lakes almost 50 years ago, in 1949, when I was 23 years old. Nothing then destined me for a literary career. I am a writer who developed late. Having regrettably neglected my...
The Dictator of the World
“E avanti a lui, tremava tutta Roma!” —Victorien Sardou, Luigi Illica, and Guiseppe Giacosa, Tosca At the time of its publication in 1984, John Lukacs’s Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century was recognized by discerning critics as a highly significant work combining a fresh originality, at once topical and...
Entrepreneurs and Bureaucrats
Despite his Viennese birth, Peter Drucker enjoys a reputation as a leading American social analyst, particularly on industrial and economic issues. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker interprets U.S. management theory and practice within the framework of the free market economy and the open society, as he seeks to define entrepreneurship as “a craft” essential for...
Americans Don’t Die!
Americans do not believe in death. At least, they live as if they will never die. This has been the case from colonial times. It is a consequence of seemingly limitless opportunity and a drive for upward mobility, denied to generations of Europeans. Indentured servants, laborers, persecuted minorities, and peasants tilling the soil of the...
Think More, Communicate Less
For as long as democracy has existed in the modern world, universal education and rapid mass communication have been highly regarded in democratic societies. An educated people, democrats have assumed, is a people capable of informing and governing itself. And a society in close and regular communication with its own citizens, and with foreign societies,...
Freedom Is Slavery
“Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery.” —Cicero In a recent and provocative essay, Paul Gottfried described Eugene D. Genovese as a “hero of paleoconservative intellectuals.” No doubt this declaration qualified as news in some circles, for the distinguished historian of the American South has always worked within the Marxist tradition. Or...
Devil Take the Hindmost
“High on a throne of royal state . . . Satan exalted sat, by merit raised To that bad eminence.” —Paradise Lost Hell is a meritocracy. Yet in America the meritocratic ideal is universally applauded. Everyone agrees—or pretends to agree—that the angel of justice smiles upon the triumph of merit. Indeed, the hopes enshrined in...
Remembering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ours is an age of politicization. No matter the problem, real or imagined, proposed solutions are always couched in the language of politics. No subject can be discussed without constant reference to its political ramifications. Whatever position a political leader may adopt with respect to a current “issue,” it must be judged not by its relevance...
Back Again
I had intended, as always, to keep in touch during my brief sojourn in Rome, but the vagaries of my hotel’s WiFi (which healed itself near the end), the usual weariness that attends the noontime devil of winebibbers, were exacerbated by an injured knee-cum-inflamed tendon that made walking five miles a bit more exhausting than...