110 Book Reviews

generalise them into abstractions. This makes for an eminently readable study. For the student of early modern history it will prove an invaluable handbook.

University of Southampton Greg Walker

NOTES

1. S. Sharma, The Embarrassment of Riches: an interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987).

The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, Roger Boesche (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 288 pp., $32.95, H.C.

Tocqueville once wrote that it is the ‘true spirit of the age’ that one must study in order to understand the historical evolution of the age itself. In this book, Roger Boesche attempts to pursue asimilar methodin reconstructingTocqueville’s own political thought (p. 19). He begins with the salutary observation that Tocqueville, who has too often been viewed as a detached fount of Apollonian rationality dispensing morsels of wisdom indiscriminately to all petitioners, was in fact very much the product of his own quite restless generation.

He spends most of Part One comparing Tocqueville’s mai du siecle with that ofwriters, journalists and social theorists of his age, and situating it in a broader context informed also by the painting, music and social history of the period. Later in the book, moreover, while locating Tocqueville within his immediate milieu, the author also emphasizes, rightly, the importance of both the classical political tradition and the French moral tradition in providing him with key terms and concepts for his own analysis. In short, although the study is a synchronic one, with little treatment of Tocqueville’s intellectual development over time, its frames of reference for understanding the subject are capacious.

The chief problem with the book, in fact, is that it may have tippedthe delicate balance of text and context too far toward the latter. We end up with relatively little sense of what was distinctive of Tocqueville’s approach to individual or social reality. In a fine conclusion, for example, Boesche emphasizes the ambivalence and uncertainties that inform Tocqueville’s political understanding. He shrewdly observes that ‘none of the classical harmony of Plato or the modern harmony of Marx’ are to be found in his thought (p. 264). But in the body of the text, this lesson tends to be lost in the pursuit of social context. Most notably, Boesche has almost certainly exaggerated the blame Tocqueville ascribed for the social problems of his time to its dominant class, the bourgeoisie. On two occasions, he cites a passage in which Tocqueville sees the bourgeoisie as thesource ofthe materialism of all other classes of his time and of the general obsession with material security which Tocqueville felt was conducive to an as yet unfulfilled kind of despotism (pp. 102, 237).

But in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, written in the shadow of the very despotism he so clearly wanted to account for, Tocqueville offers a morenuancedview. It was his own aristocracy who, beginning with the fateful abdication at the Estates General of 1484-85, slowly made themselves a caste and thereby prepared the way for absolutism. It was the monarchy ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that hastened this process by means of a deliberate process of dividing the social classes from each other. It was the pre-revolutionary peasantry, no less than the townsmen, who found themselves appealing

Book Reviews 111

to the central government for solutions to the most trivial of problems. Thus, it is misleading at best to suggest that Tocqueville, who took history seriously, regarded the bourgeoisie of the July Monarchy as uniquely accountable for the emergence of Napoleon III, or for the new species of despotism that he saw foreshadowed in it.

Moreover, in overemphasizing the importance of class analysis in Tocqueville’s political thought, Boesche simultaneously underplays the place of national character in his intellectual enterprise. Tocqueville’s injunction about the ‘spirit of an age’ included an interest in the ‘spirit of a people’, an interest which he also shared with contemporaries, but which he tried to elevate to an art. One of the reasons for the enduring appeal of Democracy in America, surely, is his attempt to transcend ephemeral class relations and penetrate to some of the shared characteristics of Americans as a whole. Toward the end of Volume One, one finds a passage that is emblematic in this connection: ‘The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. As the same causes are continually in operation throughout the country, they ultimately impart an irresistible impulse to the national character. The American, taken as a chance specimen of his countrymen, must then be a man of singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, fond of adventure and, above all, of novelty. The same bent is manifest in all that he does: he introduces it into his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, and his domestic occupations; he bears it with him in the depths of the backwoods as well as in the business of the city.” The pluralistic approach to national identity that underlies this analysis is an equally authentic part ofTocqueville’s liberalism, and one that makes too few appearances in the present work.

These objections aside, however, Boesche’s book is at least solid if not definitive. The author has clearly mastered the now voluminous published writings of Tocqueville, as well as the relevant scholarship. His judgments are usually ripe and sober, his material well organized, his writing clear and free of pretence. He provides many nuanced and useful judgments on Tocqueville’s views of subjects ranging from feudalism (pp. 118-19) to free enterprise (p. 137). Above all, he makes it abundantly clear that it would be a mistake to describe Tocqueville, as Ian Hacking once did, as in any sense a one- dimensional mind.

Canisius College, Buffalo, NY Henry C. Clark

NOTES

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy inAmerica, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols (New York: Knopf, 1945), Vol. 1, pp. 443-4.

I.,‘idbe d’BgalitC en France au XVIIIe &le, Andre Delaporte (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), xii+ 355 pp., 150 FF, paper.

In his celebrated study of the ancien rPgime, Alexis de Tocqueville observed how, amidst the remnants of France’s feudal past, a will to social equality came to dominate French politics in the late eighteenth century. If contemporary scholars are less inclined than Tocqueville was to attribute this will to equality to mans basic nature, the rise of neo- Tocquevillian analyses of eighteenth-century French politics-not to mention to the approaching Revolutionary bicentennial-makes especially timely a re-consideration of the dialectic between a society still structured upon inherited rank and the visions of an