America after Tocqueville: Democracy against Difference.

By Harvey Mitchell. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. [xii], 324. $65.00, ISBN 0-521-81246-1.)

Harvey Mitchell offers this volume as a companion piece to his previous book about Alexis de Tocqueville, Individual Choice and the Structures of History (New York, 1996). When that earlier work was subjected to a rather supercilious review by Hugh Brogan in the Journal of American History, Mitchell responded with a furious letter--but surprisingly, he now appears to have taken Brogan's major criticism to heart in preparing America after Tocqueville. (Brogan's review appeared in Vol. 83 [March 1997], p. 1386; Mitchell's reply is in Vol. 85 [September 1998], p. 773.) Brogan accused Mitchell of "guild egoism"--that is, of writing solely for a tiny group of specialists--and he also characterized Mitchell's style as "commonplace academic verbiage." Although the present book shows only a slight improvement in style (Mitchell still makes recourse to solecisms such as "more transparent than real" [p. 286] and perplexing metaphors like America as a "beckoning sentinel" [p. 89]), Brogan's other criticism no longer sticks, for America after Tocqueville should appeal to an audience wider than the guild of Tocqueville specialists. In it, Mitchell deftly employs his encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure byways of Tocqueville's work, plus exhaustive reading in recent political theory, to evaluate the current state of democratic practices and institutions in the United States.

Mitchell's earlier study was a more narrowly focused effort to assess Tocqueville's accomplishments as a historian (which is why Brogan's critique was at once accurate and misguided). By contrast, in his new book Mitchell "trie[s] to find the right distance between our own time and Tocqueville's" (p. 276) by probing three recurrent themes. The first examines how America's egalitarian promise has often been at odds with its political arrangements. Second is the danger presented to democratic politics by capitalist economic development. And finally, Mitchell discusses the new kinds of boundaries that arise out of the very processes of democracy in a political culture ostensibly devoted to embracing "difference." Pursuing these three themes from a standpoint "between our own time and Tocqueville's" makes for a complex and sometimes confusing book, but one that nevertheless stands at the front rank of works about Tocqueville's legacy published over the last decade.

Particularly intelligent and useful is Part III, "American Democracy on Trial," which surveys the most important recent (and many older) works of political theory with the goal of evaluating the roles played by politics, economy, and culture in "maintaining American democracy" (chap. 8). Part II, "Beginnings and Democracy," is equally impressive, but it is less a debate with contemporary theorists than it is a tour de force of intellectual history. Here Mitchell elucidates Tocqueville's encounter with early racial thought about Native Americans (chap. 4), the origins of republican politics in the New England township (chap. 5), and the implications of the Constitution of 1787, especially its protection of property in humans (chap. 6).

Mitchell's investigations will serve as enduring reference points for subsequent studies, both as explorations of Tocqueville's ruminations on America and a means of demonstrating his continuing relevance to current discourse about the meaning and future of democracy.

MATTHEW MANCINI

Saint Louis University