Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon

Like proud parents with a precocious child, Americans in the early republic eagerly displayed their newborn nation to foreign visitors, including young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States for nine months in the early 1830s. Kaledin, an MIT professor, explores the motives behind de Tocqueville's journey and the writing of his canonical and controversial Democracy in America. Rather than being a book of our origins, Kaledin shows that Democracy in America was intended as a warning to the French, depicting a society rife with corruption, brutal prejudice, religious fervor, and greed. As an aristocrat in a society where the middle classes were becoming dominant, de Tocqueville felt displaced and irrelevant. In America, he saw the dark horizon his own country would face if it continued to follow the path of capitalism. Eschewing narrative and chronology for a thematic approach, the book is too scattershot to appeal to a general audience. Specialists will find few surprises here, and will be frustrated by Kaledin's disorganized and anecdotal presentation. (Aug.)