released 7/1/2008

Hugh Brogan, Research Professor of History at the University of Essex and author of a recent biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, discusses the insightful Frenchman who visited the United States in the nineteenth century and went on to write a penetrating review of American society. In this interview, Brogan explains what Tocqueville thought of liberty and equality in America, and especially what these ideas meant to Tocqueville with respect to French political and cultural history. He also describes Tocqueville’s observations concerning a free society’s relationship to a central government. This interview is followed by a conversation with English professor Daniel Ritchie, who reflects on the relationship between individualism and equality as the democratic displacement of social place. The link that Tocqueville saw between democracy and a kind of self-indulgent abandonment of communal public life concerned him, for Tocqueville greatly admired the ability of Americans to associate with each other to accomplish shared goals. Ritchie highlights a number of Tocqueville’s observations of the ways in which Americans accomplished this kind of association.

26 minutes

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