Tagged: de Tocqueville

Analects of the Core: Tocqueville on complacent legislators

Today’s analect relates to CC203’s study of the foundation of social sciences: Propitious circumstances and good laws might succeed in drawing to the legislature of a democratic people men very superior to those who are returned by the Americans to Congress ; but nothing will ever prevent the men of slender abilities who sit there […]

Michel Houellebecq invokes de Tocqueville

Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, […]