The life and troubled times of the 'greatest political thinker'

globeandmail.com: The life and troubled times of the 'greatest political thinker'

Like many historians, Brogan is primarily concerned to locate his protagonist in historical context, and, as too often with historians, that means reducing him to that context. His great claim is to have integrated Tocqueville's works with his life, but this leads him to read them too autobiographically. Too often his Tocqueville emerges as the well-meaning victim of aristocratic prejudices and nostalgia, hampered by too dour a view of democracy and of the salvific power of state intervention. If not a Colonel (Tocqueville was never a soldier), he was a Count Blimp, albeit not one wholly immune to mind-broadening.