'TENDENTIOUS' ON TOCQUEVILLE
Port Jefferson, NY
Daniel Lazare's review/essay on Tocqueville ["L'Amérique, Mon Amour," April 26] is tendentious. No doubt any review of an important book has to be selective. But it is curious that Lazare doesn't seem to recognize that Tocqueville is writing neither as a historian nor as a political scientist (and still less as a travel writer, as Lazare at one point suggests in another put-down) but as an engaged political philosopher. It is not "L'Amérique, Mon Amour" that concerns Tocqueville but democracy--which for Tocqueville is a problem rather than a solution.
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