Tocqueville on American Character: Why Tocqueville's Brilliant Exploration of the American Spirit is as Vital and Important Today as It Was Nearly Two Hundred Years Ago

by Michael A. Ledeen

In 1831, Alexis De Tocqueville, a twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat, spent nine months travelling across the United States. From the East Coast to the frontier, from the Canadian border to New Orleans, Tocqueville observed the American people and the revolutionary country they'd created. His celebrated Democracy in America, the most quoted work on America ever written, presented the new Americans with a degree of understanding no one had accomplished before or has since. Astonished at the pace of daily life and stimulated by people at all levels of society, Tocqueville recognized that Americans were driven by a series of internal simultaneously religious and materialistic; individualistic and yet deeply involved in community affairs; isolationist and interventionist; pragmatic and ideological.

Noted author Michael Ledeen takes a fresh look at Tocqueville's insights into our national psyche and asks whether Americans' national character, which Tocqueville believed to be wholly admirable, has fallen into moral decay and religious indifference.

Michael Ledeen's sparkling new exploration has some surprising answers and provides a lively new look at a time when character is at the center of our national debate.

Genres: Nonfiction, Social Commentary

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2000

About the author

Michael Arthur Ledeen was an American scholar and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He was a consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for 20 years, and also held the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was very close to Italian politician Antonio Martino. Ledeen was also noted to have done work for Italian intelligence agency SISMI, having received over $100,000 in payment to offshore bank accounts for services including but not limited to training Italian intelligence operatives. Ledeen denied these allegations but admitted that he did do work for SISMI and was paid for it.

Reviews

[Gus Breymann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fact that Ledeen describes Alexis de Tocqueville's opinions in the present tense disregards the possibility that American character may have evolved since the historian and sociologist toured the U. S. in the early 1830s.

[Kenneth Tubman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book.

Makes me feel proud to be an American!

Now I can thumb my nose at the rest of the world that thinks we are a greedy, aggressive, and haughty people.

We have saved a lot of lives and protected many nations including all of Europe from being taken over as dictatorships (Hitler, Stalin, etc.).

We as an immigrant nation have been at the forefront as inventors, rules of law, and protectors of freedoms. Many nations owe us gratitude for the advancement of democracy, freedom, and ingenuity.

[Patrick Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is historical analysis, so I didn't read it for pleasure. It is just so important to comprehend the thesis of deTocqueville, who has never been well translated. Ledeen does fantastic job in explaining deTocqueville, and BTW, it is an EASY read.

I will read more from Ledeen, possibly Machiavelli next. Machiavelli too is often quoted by many, who seem to me mediocre analysts.