Tocqueville: A Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.54 (631 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0801860679 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 558 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-09-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
César González Rouco said Delightful surprise. This is a wonderful biography. I knew that Tocqueville was a great thinker, but I thought that his life would be boring (are thoughts worth being told? Yes, this book indeed proves it). However, the author manages to narrate Tocqueville's life and times in such a way that I cou
Jardin also offers an illuminating critical analysis of Democracy in America, arguing that the concerns for just government that inform this famous work dominated Tocqueville's thought throughout his life."His scholarship is meticulous, his judgment careful and fair, his style plain and clear Jardin has put all students of Tocqueville deep in his debt More than any of his contemporaries--more than Marx, more than Mill, much more than Mazzini, Comte or Proudhon--Tocqueville is the man for the late twentieth century. " Tocqueville: A Biography is a book of considerable importance, primarily because of its comprehensive treatment of both Tocqueville's public life and his private life--including many details necessarily absent from the two previous biographical essays."--John Lukacs, The New YorkerIn this first major biography of the author of Democracy in America, André Jardin traces Alexis de Tocqueville's eventful life from his birth in 1805 to aristocratic parents in
egalitarian experiment; in his analyses of rampant individualism, tyranny of the majority, creeping bureaucracy and alienation within a consumerist society, he seems very much our contemporary. . Jardin delineates his subject as a sickly, sensitive child, short-tempered husband of a middle-class Englishwoman, indefatigable traveler, ambitious politician and, above all, as a moralist who felt that only a spiritual force could lift the masses above petty, selfish interests to create a true democracy. This magisterial and absorbing biography is by a French historian who is general editor of Tocqueville's collected works. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Alexis de Tocqueville was an aristocrat, a severe prison reformer, a colonialist who applied the lessons of Canada to French rule in Algeria. He was also, in his classic Democracy in America , a farsighted observer of the U.S