Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has been called by Harvey Mansfield the “best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." What can a 200-year-old book teach us about democracy in America today? Join Jeremy Jennings, author of Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America; Olivier Zunz, author of The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville; and Catherine Zuckert of the University of Notre Dame, for a discussion of Tocqueville’s masterpiece and its lessons for modern Americans. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Jeremy Jennings is professor of political theory at the King’s College London. He is the author of Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth Century, coeditor of The Cambridge History of French Thought, and his most recent book is Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America.
Catherine Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a visiting professor at Arizona State University’s School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership. She is the author and coauthor (with Michael Zuckert) of many works on political theory, including Natural Right and the American Imagination, Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, and most recently Machiavelli's Politics. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of The Review of Politics.
Olivier Zunz is the James Madison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia. He is the editor of several volumes of Tocqueville’s writings, including Democracy in America and Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, as well as a compendium of Tocqueville’s letters in Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America. Zunz previously served as the president of The Tocqueville Society and his most recent book is The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II
- Jeremy Jennings, Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America
- Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville
- Catherine Zuckert, “The Saving Minimum? Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in America—Then and Now,” American Political Thought
- Michael Oakeshott, “The Masses in Representative Democracy”
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