DeTocqueville and the French Translated by Beth G Raps

by Francoise Melonio

Overview

With his lifelong examination of the relation between freedom and equality in modern societies, Alexis de Tocqueville is the most widely shared icon of Franco-American political culure. Until now, his American readers have not been in a position to recognize the extent to which, even when his ostensible subject was America, Tocqueville was engaging in hotly contested debates about French society and politics.

Francoise Melonio's Tocqueville and the French allows for a clearer understanding of Tocqueville's writings by supplying their missing French context, from the time he wrote Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution to the present. With its contextualization and interpretation of his workds Tocqueville and the French will compel the attention of historians, sociologists, political scientists, and concerned citizens for whom Tocqueville remains perhaps the single most important interpreter of American society and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813917788
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	03/29/1998
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Francoise Melonio is Professor of French Literature at the University of Nanterre in Paris and teaches the history of ideas at the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales. Beth G. Raps is a freelance translator living in Tallahassee, Florida. Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Editorial Reviews

Originally published in France in 1993, this book describes Alexis de Tocqueville's relationship with his own people, the French. As a political philosopher and French historian, Tocqueville is best known to Americans from his opinions and observations of the United States made in his classic study, Democracy in America. Mlonio, a leading member of the Tocqueville National Commission, investigates Tocqueville's dialog with the French on their way to democracy. She traces Tocqueville's influence in France from the 1800s up to the present, showing his struggle with the relationship between freedom and equality in modern societies. Other books seem to focus on Tocqueville's ideas about the United States (Joshua Mitchell's The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future, Univ. of Chicago, 1996) or about his ideas as a whole (Pierre Manent's Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). This book uniquely focuses on Tocqueville in relation to France. Recommended for larger academic libraries.Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll., Wheeling

Library Journal

Challenging conventional notions of a linear progression towards democracy in France, M<'e>lonio (French literature, U. of Nanterre) maintains that the country's troublesome dialogue with Tocqueville mirrors its long and turbulent transition to democracy. She examines societal opposition to ancien r<'e>gime resurgences through 1880, and delineates the French invention of an indigenous democratic model that owes little to Tocqueville or America. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Francoise Melonio's "Tocqueville and the French" is surely destined to become a classic in Tocquevillean scholarship. It situates Tocqueville's thought, with much vigor and precision, in the context of French political and intellectual life. -- Francois Furet

Francois Furet