Letters

By Our Readers, Daniel Lazare & Russell Jacoby

This article appeared in the June 14, 2004 edition of The Nation.

May 26, 2004

Link to original article.

'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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About Daniel Lazare

Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso).He is currently at work on a book about the politics of Christianity, Judaism and Islam for Pantheon. more...

About Russell Jacoby

Russell Jacoby, a professor of history at UCLA, is the author of The Last Intellectuals, Dialectic of Defeat and other works. His new book, Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, has just been published by Columbia University Press. more...
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