The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.

• Author: Gregg, Samuel

* The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville By Olivier Zunz Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. viii, 443, $35 hardcover.

For those who care about freedom, these are difficult times. Whether it has been the extension of state power courtesy of COVID or the sense that economic liberty is under siege across the globe, those who genuinely care about the growth and maintenance of free societies seem to be a small tribe indeed. These days, collectivists of the left and right abound.

Such circumstances, however, are not new. Those whom the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called "true friends of liberty" are never numerous. There have always been libertines (those who separate freedom from a concern for moral truth) as well as those anxious to radically curtail freedom in the name of authority or an ever-leveling equality. Few are those who have held fast to Lord Acton's dictum: "Liberty [is] not ... the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought."

Preserving liberty in this sense is difficult at the best of times, but perhaps especially complicated in conditions of modern democracy. That at least is how Tocqueville understood the problem, or so Olivier Zunz, author of a new biography, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville, argues.

A distinguished Tocqueville scholar, whose work includes editing the Library of America edition of Democracy in America, Zunz has made his book very much a work of biography. Some of the most important Tocqueville biographies penned in more recent decades, such as Andre Jardin's Tocqueville: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1988), Hugh Brogan's Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press 2007), and Jean-Louis Benoit's Tocqueville (Paris: Tempus Perrin 2013), have made Tocqueville's ideas their centerpiece. With Zunz, the balance shifts toward Tocqueville as a person.

Ideas--especially ideas about democracy--were central to Tocqueville's life. But although Zunz pays attention to Tocqueville's major works in which this theme is discussed, he generally explores Tocqueville's reflections on democracy and its meaning for liberty and liberal politics through the type of lens more typical of classical biographies: family life, interactions with friends and foes, correspondence, and so forth. The effect is to bring out the many tensions inside and surrounding...